[Illustration:  STEPHEN GARDINER MAKING HIS DYING SPEECH AT TYBURN

This plate gives an excellent representation of an execution.  The condemned man is in his shroud; the hangman is adjusting the knot, and at a signal the cart will drive away; nearby is the sheriff in his state carriage; and gazing on is a curious, morbid crowd of spectators.

(From the Newgate Calendar)]

At the time of his trial at Kingston he behaved himself very insolently and audaciously; but when sentence had been passed upon him, most of that unruly temper was lost, and he began to think seriously of preparing for another world.  He confessed that his sins were many, and that judgment against him was just, meekly accepting his death as the due rewards of his deeds.  He was the example of seriousness and penitence to the other twelve malefactors who suffered with him, being about thirty-seven years of age at the time of his decease.

John Pugh, otherwise Blueskin, was born at Morpeth near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  His father was a carrier in tolerable business and circumstance, who put him to be a servant in a silver-spinner’s in Moorfields, where he soon learnt all sorts of wickedness, beginning with defrauding his master and doing any other little tricks of that kind, as opportunity would give him leave.  We are told of him what perhaps can be hardly said of any other criminal who hath died in the same way for many years past, that though he was but twenty-two years of age, he had spent twelve of them in cheating, pilfering, and robbing.  At last he fell into the gang that brought him to his death, for a robbery committed by several of them in the county of Surrey.  Pugh, though so young a fellow, was so unaccountably stupid and wicked that though he made a large and particular confession of his guilt, yet it was done in such a manner as plainly showed his crimes made no just impression upon his heart; all he said, being in the language of the Kingston Ordinary, the sleepy apprehensions of unawakened ignorance, in which condition he continued to the last.

William Frost, a cripple, was the son of a pin-maker in Christ Church parish, Southwark, and as to his education, my account says it was in hereditary ignorance.  He had wrought, it seems, while a boy at his father’s trade of pin-making, but since he was thirteen or fourteen had addicted himself to that preparative trade to the gallows, shoeblacking.  While he continued in this most honourable profession, abundance of opportunities offered for robbing in the night season, and we must do him the justice to say that they were not offered in vain.  Thus by degrees he came on to robbing on the road and in the streets until he was apprehended, and upon the evidence of his companion was convicted.