But to return to Swift.  When they came to Tyburn, and the minister had performed his last office towards them, this criminal made a shift in a faint tone to cry out, Good People, I die as innocent of the crime for which I suffer, as the child unborn; which Barton, with a loud voice, confirmed saying, I am the man who robbed the person for which this man dies; he was not concerned with me, but one Capell and another were companions with me therein. Swift, at the time of his execution, was about twenty-seven years of age, or a little over.

The lives of EDWARD BURNWORTH, alias FRAZIER, WILLIAM BLEWIT, THOMAS BERRY, EMANUEL DICKENSON, WILLIAM MARJORAM, JOHN HIGGS, etc., Robbers, Footpads, Housebreakers and Murderers

As society intends the preservation of every man’s person and property from the injuries which might be offered unto him from others, so those who in contempt of its laws go on to injure the one, and either by force or fraud to take away the other are, in the greatest proprieties of speech, enemies of mankind; and as such are reasonably rooted out, and destroyed by every government under heaven.  In some parts of Europe, certain outlaws, Banditti, or whatever other appellation you’ll please to bestow on them, have endeavoured to preserve themselves by force from the punishments which should have been executed upon them by justice, and finding mankind, from a spirit of self preservation, were become their enemies, they exerted themselves the utmost they were capable of in order to render their bodies so formidable as still to carry on their ravages with impunity, and in open defiance of the laws made against them.  But an attempt of this sort was scarce ever heard of in Britain, even in the most early times, when, as in all other governments the hands of the Law wanted strength most; so that from the days of Robin Hood and Little John to those of the criminals of whom we are now writing, there was never any scheme formed for an open resistance of Justice, and carrying on a direct war against the lives and properties of mankind.

Edward Burnworth, alias Frazier, was the extraordinary person who framed this project for bringing rapine into method, and bounding even the practice of licentiousness with some kind of order.  It may seem reasonable therefore, to begin his life preferable to the rest, and in so doing we must inform our readers that his father was by trade a painter, though so low in his circumstances as to be able to afford his son but a very mean education.  However, he gave him as much as would have been sufficient for him in that trade to which he bound him apprentice, viz., to a buckle-maker in Grub Street, where for some time Edward lived honestly and much in favour with his master.  But his father dying and his unhappy mother being reduced thereby into very narrow circumstances, restraint grew uneasy to him, and the weight of a parent’s authority being now lost with him, he began to associate himself with those loose incorrigible vagrants, who frequent the ring at Moorfields, and from idleness and debauchery, go on in a very swift progression to robbery and picking of pockets.