Was a native of Hampshire. His relations were respectable tradesmen. He has left a wife and four children. Ings was a butcher at Portsmouth, and at the time of his marriage had a handsome property, consisting of several houses, and some money in the funds.
Trade growing bad at the termination of the war, and his property having decreased, some of his tenements were sold, and he came up to London about eighteen months ago, with a little ready money, produced by the sale of a house, and opened a butcher’s-shop at the west-end of the town. He could, however, get no business, and in a few months gave up the shop, and, with a few pounds he had left, he opened a coffee-shop in Whitechapel.
Business becoming dull there, he was involved in great distress, and at last was compelled to pawn his watch to enable him to send his wife and children down to Portsmouth to her friends, to prevent their starving in London.
At the coffee-house in Whitechapel he sold, besides coffee, political pamphlets, with which he was supplied by Carlile, of Fleet-street. Having given up the shop, and finding that there was no prospect of supporting himself and his family with credit, he gave himself up to despair. He had read the different Deistical publications during the time he sold political pamphlets, and, from being a churchman, he became a confirmed Deist.
He was a most affectionate husband and father; and his desperate situation, no doubt, was a principal cause of his joining the Cato-street plot.
Edwards, Adams, Thistlewood, and Brunt, had frequently visited Ings during the time he kept the coffee and political-pamphlet shop, and when he was in more desperate circumstances, he became a fitter companion for persons engaged in such an atrocious crime as the one for which he suffered the sentence of the law.
For some weeks before the Cato-street discovery, Ings was in the utmost distress, quite pennyless, and the money he was supplied with to subsist upon was given him by George Edwards. Ings was also supplied with money by the same person to take an apartment, where arms and ammunition could be safely placed. He took a room in the house where Brunt lodged, and thither the greater part of the ammunition and arms was conveyed by Edwards, Adams, and himself; indeed, it was the depôt of the conspirators.
The following Letters were written by Ings in Newgate, the night before his execution:
TO HIS WIFE.