In this desperate career of vice and folly, it was the fate of Price, the preceptor of Barrington, to be first detected in the act of picking the pocket of a gentleman of high rank, for which he was tried, convicted, and in a very short period sentenced to transportation, for the term of seven years, to America.
Barrington, naturally alarmed at the fate of his iniquitous preceptor, without loss of time converted all his movable property into cash, and taking horse, made as precipitate a journey to Dublin as he possibly could.
On his arrival there, he lived rather in a private and retired manner, only lurking in the darkest evenings about the playhouses, where he occasionally picked up a few guineas or a watch. But he was soon weary of the sameness, and disgusted with the obscurity of a life of comparative retirement, such as that he led in the Irish capital; so that when the spring and the fine weather that accompanied it returned, he embarked on board the Dorset yacht, which was then on the point of sailing with the duke of Leinster for Parkgate; and before the expiration of a week, he found himself for the first time of his life on English ground.
With Sir Alexander Schomberg, who commanded the Dorset yacht, there were three other persons embarked, and of some distinction, from whence it appeared that the connection which our adventurer formed with them had considerable effect afterwards in the course of the long succession of transactions in which he was engaged. A young captain was one of the three who was most conspicuous, and, as it will appear, a striking, though an innocent cause of Barrington’s success in his projects of depredation.
It did not require so much sagacity and penetration as Barrington at the time certainly possessed, to penetrate into the character of this young gentleman, and to predict the good consequences that might follow an intimacy with a young man of his rank, disposition, and family. Actuated by a sordid sense of the utility of such a connection to one in his circumstances, the adventurer employed all those base arts of flattery and insinuation of which he had been long a perfect master, to ingratiate himself with this gentleman; and in this design he succeeded to the utmost extent of his wishes. Barrington formed an artful tale, which he told as his own story, the purport of which was, that his father was a man of a noble family in Ireland, and illustrious in England, to which country he himself now came to study law in one of the inns of court, more, however, to avoid the ill-natured severity of a harsh, unrelenting step-mother, which rendered his paternal mansion in a great measure intolerable to him, than from any predilection for the profession to which he intended to apply himself, but the exercise of which the ample fortune that he was heir to would render unnecessary.
The story took as well as could be desired by the inventor of it, and it was settled between him and his new friend that he should, on his arrival in town, enter himself of the Middle Temple, where Mr. H——n had some relations and a numerous acquaintance, to whom, he said, he should be happy to introduce a gentleman so eminently distinguished by his talents and his accomplishments, as well as by his fortune and birth, as Mr. Barrington was.
It was also further agreed on between them, that they should travel together to London; and they accordingly the next day took a post-chaise at Parkgate, and continuing their journey by easy stages through Chester, Nantwich, and Coventry, where they stopped two or three days, arrived by the end of the week at the Bath coffee-house in Piccadilly, which, on the recommendation of the captain, who had been several times before in the metropolis, was fixed upon as their head-quarters for the remaining part of the summer.
But the expensive manner in which he lived with Mr. H——n, and those to whose acquaintance that gentleman introduced him, all of them gay, sprightly young fellows, who had money at command, in less than a month reduced the funds which Barrington had brought with him from Ireland to about twenty guineas, which to him, who had been now for some years accustomed to live like a man of affluent fortune, seemed to afford a very inconsiderable resource: he therefore resolutely determined to procure a supply of money by some means or other. One evening, while he was deliberating with himself on the choice of expedients to recruit his finances, he was interrupted in his meditations on the subject by the arrival of a party of his friends with the captain, who proposed to accompany them to Ranelagh, where they had agreed to meet some of their acquaintance, and to spend the evening. Their proposal was, without much hesitation, acceded to by Barrington, and they, without further loss of time, ordered coaches to set them down at that celebrated place of amusement.
Walking in the middle of the gay scenes that surrounded him, he chanced to espy the two other companions of his voyage in the Dorset packet, to whom he only made a slight bow of recognition; and in less than a quarter of an hour afterwards he saw the duke of Leinster engaged deeply in conversation with two ladies and a knight of the Bath, who, it afterwards turned out, was Sir William Draper; and near these he placed himself, quitting for a short time the company to which he belonged. While he was stationed there, an opportunity, which he considered a fair one, offered itself of making a good booty, and he availed himself of it: he picked the duke’s pocket of above eighty pounds, Sir William’s of five and thirty guineas, and one of the ladies of her watch, with all which he got off undiscovered by the parties, and joined the captain and his party as if nothing had happened out of the ordinary and common routine of affairs in such places of public recreation as Ranelagh.
A degree of fatality, rather unfortunate for Barrington, it seems, occurred during the perpetration of the robbery just related; that is to say, he was observed in the very act by one of the persons who came with him in the Dorset yacht from Ireland to Parkgate; and this man, who was also a practitioner in the same trade of infamy, lost no time in communicating what he saw to Barrington himself, and that in a manner not by any means calculated to conceal his triumph on the occasion: in fact, this gentleman’s affairs being pressing, he made very little ceremony of informing Mr. Barrington that, unless he was willing to give him a share of the plunder, he should communicate to the parties robbed, without delay, the particulars of what he had seen. The consequences of a proposal of this nature presenting a disagreeable alternative, Mr. Barrington, as it may be imagined, naturally chose the least of two evils, and, under pretence of being attacked with a sudden complaint, immediately retired with his new acquaintance to town, and putting up at the Golden Cross inn, at Charing-cross, the booty acquired at Ranelagh was in some sense divided, the new intruder contenting himself with taking the lady’s watch, chain, &c., which were of gold, and a ten pound note, leaving all the rest of the money and the bank-papers with Mr. Barrington, who, he probably conceived, had run the greatest risk to obtain them at first.