In the interim, Davidson, who had not yet come out, leaned with his back against a dresser in the lodge, and continued with his hands clasped, praying in the most fervent manner, and calling with unfeigned and unreserved piety for the intervention of the Redeemer. Brunt and Ings, however, persevered in the same hardihood that they had manifested throughout, and continued venting their thoughts in unreserved ejaculations.
A humane individual who stood by remonstrated with Brunt again, and besought him to ask pardon of God.
Brunt, with a fierce and savage air, surveyed his adviser contemptuously, and exclaimed, “What have I done? I have done nothing! What should I ask pardon for?” The stranger rejoined, “So you say, Brunt; but if you have ever injured any man, or done any thing which your conscience tells you is wrong, ask pardon of God, penitently and sincerely, and you will, I have no doubt, obtain mercy.”—Brunt replied, “I die with a perfectly clear conscience. I have made my peace with God, and I never injured no man.” The stranger proceeded, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” Brunt surveyed his humane adviser again, and muttered, “My mind is made up.”
“Well done, Brunt!” exclaimed Ings, and was again proceeding to sing,
“Oh give me death or liberty,”
when he was summoned to the scaffold. He turned to Brunt, and, with a smile on his countenance, shook hands with him, and prepared to go. While the hatch was opening, he exclaimed, with a loud voice, “Remember me to King George the IVth; God bless him, and may he have a long reign.” He now recollected that he had some clothes left behind, which he requested might be given to his wife. The wretched man had thrown off the clothes in which he had been tried, and had put on an old butcher’s jacket, determining, as he said, “that Jack Ketch should have no coat of his.”
While he stood on the edge of the steps, at the door of the gaol, he said to Davis, one of the turnkeys, “Well, Mr. Davis, I am going to find out this great secret,” and then springing upon the scaffold, exclaimed, “Good-bye! Gentlemen. Here goes the remains of an unfortunate man.”
He rushed to the platform, upon which he leaped and bounded in the most frantic manner. Then turning himself round towards Smithfield, and facing the very coffin that was soon to receive his mutilated body, he raised his pinioned hands, in the best way he could, and leaning forward with savage energy, roared out three distinct cheers to the people, in a voice of the most frightful and discordant hoarseness. But these unnatural yells of desperation, which were evidently nothing but the ravings of a disordered mind, or the ebullitions of an assumed courage, struck the majority of the vast multitude who heard them with horror.
Turning his face towards Ludgate-hill, he bowed, and cried out, “This is going to be the last remains of James Ings,” and shouted out part of the song in which the words Death or Liberty are introduced. He laughed upon looking at the coffins, and said, turning his back to them, “I’ll turn my back upon death!—Is this the gallows they always use? Those coffins are for us, I suppose.”