JACOBITE FIDELITY.
The verdict was partly the result of the evidence of his elder brother George. The Jacobites never forgave this witness; George, however, was readily forgiven by John, who acknowledged the reluctant but inevitable truthfulness by which he suffered. When the horrible sentence—half-hanging, disembowelling, quartering, and burning of entrails was pronounced, the young lad never blenched. He bowed to the judges and left the bar. On the following Sunday, all the emotional and fashionable part of London crowded into the chapel of Newgate, to hear the Rev. Mr. Skerrit preach the young Jacobite’s condemned sermon. At the end of the service, Matthews was double ironed and cast into the ‘Condemned Hole.’ Language has not terms to adequately describe the horrors, which indeed are unutterable, of that worse than Hell. Nothing at which nature is abhorrent was ever wanting there, to aggravate the sufferings of the condemned.
It is certain that this Jacobite youth might at least have saved his life if he would have given up the name of the writer of the pamphlet, which was known to himself alone. He did, indeed, name two persons who were beyond reach of capture. One of these was Lewis, the active but prudent Jacobite agent, the Roman Catholic bookseller in Covent Garden. The police broke into the house, which was empty. Its owner was in safe asylum, in Wales, and his whereabout was not known until after his death. While Lewis was seeking refuge in Wales, a barrister named Browster died. Matthews is supposed to have named him as connected with the ‘Vox Populi;’ but there was no dealing with a dead man. The youth had done what a youth so circumstanced might be pardoned for doing, as the thought came upon him that life was a sweet thing, especially to the young, but he refused to give any real information to the Government; and it was resolved that he should die, and that the intervening period of life should be made as intolerable as possible.
A POLITICAL VICTIM.
Order was given, by ‘brief authority,’ that he should not be allowed to see his mother, even for a minute’s leave-taking before death. The brave boy was, however, too much for ‘brief authority.’ That he might live to be hanged, it was necessary to take him up from the bottom of the fetid pit in which he lay, to breathe the less putrid air of the press-yard. On one of these occasions, when he knew the heartbroken widow was lingering about the prison-walls, he got to a window which looked into the street, saw her waiting in hope and anguish, and called to her, his arms extended through the bars, to come near. They had but a minute, each to look in the face of the other, yet it was long enough for him to bid the speechless gazing mother to take comfort, to be of good cheer, for that her son was fearless and happy. He was then pulled down by the turnkeys, who had probably been bribed to allow the short interview which had taken place.
On the night before execution, the prisoners who were to suffer the next day generally held frightful revelry with friends and other prisoners, whose lease of life was longer by a week or two. The young Jacobite captive spent that last night alone with his brother George, the Rev. Mr. Skerrit, the ordinary pro tem. (Paul Lorraine being dead) occasionally looking in upon them. The two brothers prayed and comforted each other, and when the morning came, the younger, who was to suffer death, was the calmer of the two.
THREE MORE TO TYBURN.
Three men traversed that morning the painful way from Newgate to Tyburn. It was a dreary, wet, November morning, but the streets were crowded, and from the windows were thrust faces of sympathisers with one of those three doomed men. The young printer was ignominiously drawn on a sledge, as one guilty of High Treason. A petty larceny rascal, a blind man named Moore, who had stolen some mean coverlet from his shabby lodgings, followed in a cart. A saucy highwayman, named Constable, went to be hanged in prouder state: he rode in a coach, as became a gentleman of the road. The sauciness, however, had left him. The blind thief rolled his sightless orbs, as if he would fain see if the horrid reality was in truth before him. The young Jacobite was calm and composed. One account of them quaintly states that ‘they were all as sorrowful as the circumstances warranted.’
A LAST REQUEST.
When the condemned three had been transferred into the cart beneath the gallows, Matthews placed a written paper in the hands of someone near him. The Sheriff, supposing it to be a speech, forbade it to be read, and snatched it away, that it might not be printed. It proved to be merely some directions by the young Christian Jacobite, that such remains as there might be of him after the sentence was executed, might be buried in St. Botolph’s, Aldersgate.