Therefore having first melted them, they threw them away; but being a little fearful of robbing in company, he took to his old method of robbing by himself in the streets.  But the first attempt he made to do this was in the old Artillery Ground,[43] where he snatched a woman’s pocket; and she crying out raised the neighbourhood.  They pursued him, and after wounding two or three persons desperately, he was taken and committed to his old mansions in Newgate, and being tried at the next sessions was found guilty and from that time could not enjoy the least hopes of life.  But he continued still very obdurate, being so hardened by a continual series of villainous actions that he seemed to have no idea whatsoever of religion, penitence or atoning by prayers, for the numerous villainies he had committed.

At the place of execution he said nothing to the people, only that he was sorry he had not stayed in Carolina, because if he had, he should never have come to be hanged, and so finished his life in the same stupid manner in which he had lived.  He was near forty years of age at the time he suffered, which was on the 27th of June, 1720.

FOOTNOTES: 

   [43] This was the exercising ground of the Train Bands and the
        Honourable Artillery Company.  It was on the west side of
        Finsbury Square.

The History of the WALTHAM BLACKS and their transactions to the death of RICHARD PARVIN, EDWARD ELLIOT, ROBERT KINGSHELL, HENRY MARSHALL, JOHN PINK and EDWARD PINK, and JAMES ANSELL alias PHILLIPS, at Tyburn, whose lives are also included

Such is the unaccountable folly which reigns in too great a part of the human species, that by their own ill-deeds, they make such laws necessary for the security of men’s persons and properties, as by their severity, unless necessity compelled them, would appear cruel and inhuman, and doubtless those laws which we esteem barbarous in other nations, and even some which appear so though anciently practised in our own, had their rise from the same cause.

I am led to this observation from the folly which certain persons were guilty of in making small insurrections for the sake only of getting a few deer, and going on, because they found the leniency of the laws could not punish them at present, until they grew to that height as to ride in armed troops, blacked and disguised, in order the more to terrify those whom they assaulted, and wherever they were denied what they thought proper to demand, whether venison, wine, money, or other necessaries for their debauched feasts, would by letter threaten plunder and destroying with fire and sword, whomever they thought proper.

These villainies being carried on with a high hand for some time in the years 1722 and 1723, their insolence grew at last so intolerable as to oblige the Legislature to make a new law against all who thus went armed and disguised, and associated themselves together by the name of Blacks, or entered into any other confederacies to support and assist one another in doing injuries and violences to the persons and properties of the king’s subjects.