But Carrick little regarded this good advice, or the kind overtures made him by his brother.  No sooner had he procured his liberty but he returned to his old profession, and committed a multitude of robberies on Finchley Common, Hounslow and Bagshot Heaths, spending all the money he got on women of the town, at the gaming table, and in fine clothes, which last was the thing in which he seemed most to delight.  But money not coming in very quick by these methods, he with Molony, Carrol and some others of his countrymen, began to rob in the streets, and by that means got great sums of money.  They continued this practice for a long space of time with safety, but being one night out in Little Queen Street, by Lincoln’s Inn Fields, between one and two in the morning they stopped a chair in which was the Hon. William Young, Esq., from whom they took a gold watch, valued at L50, a sword, and forty guineas in money.  Carrick thrust his pistol into the chair, Carrol watched at a distance, while Molony, perceiving the gentleman hesitate a little in delivering, said with a stern voice, Your money, sir!  Do you trifle? It was a very short time after the commission of this robbery that both he and his companion Molony were taken, Carrol making a timely escape to his native kingdom.  While James Carrick remained in Newgate, his behaviour was equally singular and indecent, for he affected to pass his time with the same gaiety in his last moments as he had spent it in the former part of his days.

Throngs of people, as it is but too much the custom, came to see him in Newgate, to whom, as if he had intended that they should not lose their curiosity, he told all the adventures of his life, with the same air and gaiety as if he had been relating them at some gaming ordinaries.  This being told about town, drew still greater heaps of company upon him, which he received with the same pleasantness; by which means he daily increased them, and by that means the gain of the keepers at Newgate, who took money to show him.  Upon this he said to them merrily one day:  You pay, good folks, for seeing me now, but if you had suspended your curiosity ’till I went to Tyburn, you might have seen me for nothing. This was the manner in which he talked and lived even to the last, conversing until the time of his death with certain loose women who had been his former favourites, and whom no persuasions could engage him to banish from his presence while he yet had eyes, and could behold them in his sight.

At the place of execution, where it often happens that the most daring offenders drop that resolution on which they foolishly value themselves, Carrick failed not in the least.  He gave himself genteel airs (as Mr. Purney, the then Ordinary, phrases it) in placing the rope about his neck, smiled and bowed to everybody he knew round him, and continued playing a hundred little tricks of the same odd nature, until the very instant the cart drove away, declaring himself to be a Roman Catholic, and that he was persuaded he had made his peace with God in his own way.  In this temper he finished his life at Tyburn, on the 18th of July, 1722, being then about twenty-seven years of age.