Mr. Nanny, a Welsh gentleman, told me he had heard that Ch. Deacon was set at liberty; but such a world of false reports have gone about him that I can only wish this may prove true.
And on the 3rd of January following, writing to his wife, he remarks:—
I was taken ill so that I could not go into Southwark to enquire after Charles Deacon as I thought of, nor have I had any opportunity since, nor can I learn anything of the truth or falsehood of the report of his going abroad.
The report was unfortunately but too true, for the Gentleman’s Magazine (v. xix., p. 41) records that on the 11th January Charles Deacon, with William Brettargh, also of the Manchester regiment, were conveyed from the new gaol, Southwark, to Gravesend, for transportation during life.
With the expatriation of this hapless youth may be said to have closed the darkest and most sorrowful page in Manchester’s annals. In that sanguinary chronicle of ruthless savagery there was perhaps no more melancholy episode than the misfortunes of the nonjuring divine of Fennel Street, who lost three of his sons in the Pretender’s cause. Thomas Theodorus, the eldest, as already stated, was executed, and his head fixed on the Manchester Exchange; Robert Renatus died in prison while awaiting trial, and Charles Clement, as we have seen, was sent beyond seas. The father passed into his rest on the 16th February, 1753. He lies in the north-east corner of St. Ann’s Churchyard, where his raised altar-tomb may still be seen with an inscription setting forth that he was “the greatest of sinners and most unworthy of primitive bishops.”
There is a tradition current that the heads of Thomas Deacon and Tom Syddal, after being exposed for some time on the Exchange, were one night surreptitiously removed by Mr. Hall, a son of Dr. Richard Edward Hall, who resided in a large house at the top of King Street, and that they were secretly buried in the garden behind his residence. This garden with the rookery in it, which reached down to the present Chancery Lane, existed within the recollection of the present generation, and it is said that on the death of Mr. Hall’s last surviving sister, Miss Frances Hall, in 1828, the grim relics of mortality were by her expressed desire exhumed and buried in St. Ann’s Churchyard. It was to Dr. Hall, the father, whilst paying his addresses to the lady whom he afterwards married, that Byrom sent the following epigram:—
A lady’s love is like a candle snuff,
That’s quite extinguished by a gentle puff;
But, with a hearty blast or two, the dame,