This unfortunate person was the son of honest and reputable people of Lancaster, who took care to give him a very good education, sufficient to have fitted him for any trade whatever.  Afterwards they bound him out apprentice to a wine-cooper, to whom he served out his time very carefully and honestly, and appeared in his temper and disposition to be a civil, good-natured young man.  For some time after his coming out of his time, he followed his trade of a wine-cooper, but being pressed on board a man-of-war, during the French War in the late Queen’s time, he behaved himself so well on board that he acquired the goodwill of all his officers, attained to the degree of a midshipman, and was afterwards gunner’s mate, receiving also a title to five pound per annum, out of the Pension Chest at Chatham.

After this he came to London, married a wife and was a housekeeper in town; and for his better support got himself into the Horse Guards, where he served with reputation, until some small time before his death, when some clothes of value being taken away, and he being strongly suspected on that score was dismissed the service, whereby he fell into great difficulties for want of money.

It seems that for many months before his death he had frequented the house of one Mr. Marlow, and was indebted to him for a considerable sum of money, but one day he came and discharged it, having for that purpose changed a twenty pound bank-note at a brewer’s not far distant.  But the Bristol mail happening about that time to be robbed, and the bank-note, after various circulations, being discovered to be one of those taken out of it, Houghton was thereupon seized and committed, being at the next sessions brought to his trial at the Old Bailey for the fact, when the course of the evidence appeared against him as follows.  He was arraigned on an indictment for dealing from Stephen Crouches, on the King’s highway, after putting him in fear, a sorrel gelding value five pounds, the property of Thomas Ostwich, a mail value four pounds, and fifty leather bags, value five pounds, the property of our Sovereign Lord the King, on the first of March, 1730.

Stephen Crouches deposed that on the day laid in the indictment, he was going with the Bristol and Gloucester mail, being near Knightsbridge, a man of the prisoner’s size, who spoke like him, came out of the gateway and bid him stand; that he laid the horse to the farther side of a field, commanded him to show him the Bristol bag, which he took and went off with the horse, leaving this evidence bound with his hands behind him, threatening to murder him in case he made the least noise.

Daniel Burton deposed that the prisoner Houghton had more than once proposed to him the robbing of the Bristol mail, and upon his refusing to be concerned in it, would then have had him rob their landlady, Mrs. Marlow, which when her husband came to know, he turned him out of doors.