On Thursday morning, Sir Thomas Denman read in a newspaper that Job Cox was appointed for execution on the following Tuesday. Yet the judge had sat upon the Privy Council wherein the postman’s fate had been determined: Cox was not to die, but to be transported for the term of his natural life. At Newgate, nevertheless, a warrant bearing the black seal of Recorder Newman Knowlys had arrived on the preceding evening; the prisoner had been bidden to prepare for death. An executive decree had altered his punishment; the instrument delivered to the gaol commanded the contrary.
The affair had begun with a letter entrusted to Cox’s own delivery. On the 18th of March 1833, Mr. Foreman, of 101 Grafton Street, Dublin, posted to his brother H. Foreman, in Queen Street, Clerkenwell, a packet containing a ten-pound bank note. It never reached its destination. The Post Office inquiry established that Cox, a letter carrier of the General Post Office, had signed the register upon taking charge of the mail; the note subsequently reappeared in the hands of Mr. Lott, a licensed victualler in Lambeth, who had taken it from Cox and given him the change. Pelham records that further depredations were suspected and that Cox was taken into custody; he details no other convictions within this chapter.
The Bow Street police register, in its transcript of proceedings for the 15th of April, notes initially that Cox was remanded for further examination touching a letter containing a ten-pound note. Beneath the date of the 29th of April, two entries bear his name: the first concerns Foreman’s packet and records his committal to Newgate for trial; the second relates to a five-pound letter, naming Richard Chinn in the column of injured parties, with the marginal notation “detained.” These records attest the charges and their preliminary stages, yet prove no conviction in Chinn’s case. Pelham, recounting solely the Foreman matter, leaves the issue of this second indictment undisclosed.
At the May Sessions of the Old Bailey, Cox was tried and convicted of the felony concerning the ten-pound note. On the 20th of May 1833, sentence of death was pronounced upon him, pursuant to the statute which then rendered the theft of letters a capital offence. Pelham records neither the pleadings nor the defence; he notes merely the administrative regulation which supervened upon the verdict: the Recorder of London was bound to lay the cases of the condemned before the King and his Privy Council.
Pelham connects this relation to his broader strictures upon Knowlys. He recalls earlier the case of Hunton, convicted of forgery, wherein the Recorder had delayed communicating the outcome of his report to the King, prolonging the anguish and uncertainty of several prisoners. That proceeding is distinct from Cox’s, nor does the volume provide here the particulars of Hunton’s process; yet it illuminates the contemporary estimation of an office upon which depended the faithful transmission of the royal pleasure.
Cox’s case was presented with the remainder. The Privy Council commuted the capital sentence to transportation for life, to be preceded by solitary confinement and hard labour. Newman Knowlys, Recorder of London, had assisted at the board; yet, upon his return, he caused the prisoner to be informed that his execution was ordered. Cox, who had placed his hopes in the intercession of his friends, received the intelligence with profound consternation. The Ordinary of the prison attended him to administer those spiritual consolations customarily reserved for those appointed to die.
Knowlys’s warrant arrived at Newgate on Wednesday evening at half-past six o’clock. The prison authorities warned Cox and apprised the Sheriffs. On Thursday morning, Denman discovered in a public print the notification of the execution, appointed for the following Tuesday. Pelham reproduces the notice from an article bearing the date of Sunday the 23rd of June; he provides no further precision as to the exact day of this reading. The judge supposed at first that the paragraph rested upon false intelligence, well knowing that the Council had doomed no man to death, and that Cox was to be transported for life.
Denman spoke of the matter to an Under-Sheriff, who confirmed the receipt of the warrant and the preparations already undertaken at Newgate. The judge directed him to examine the books of the Secretary of State. An inspection of Mr. Capper’s registers confirmed the commutation. Lord Melbourne, apprised of the fatal error which had reached the gaol, caused a countermand to be dispatched. The chronicle omits the signatory of this instrument, noting only that it was directed to stay the warrant under the black seal bearing the signature of “Newman Knowlys.” Cox had been warned of his impending death twenty-two hours prior. Pelham observes that the countermand brought him entire relief, without recording his words.
The error was subsequently laid before the Common Hall of the City of London. On the 24th of June, after hearing Knowlys, the assembly adopted unanimously a resolution expressing its “horror and regret” that, while the King had graciously spared the prisoner's life, Cox had nearly been sacrificed through the Recorder's warrant. The resolution conceded, as the most charitable construction, that the mischance arose from mental infirmity incident to advanced years; it declared, nevertheless, that Knowlys ought to retire from a station whose functions he was no longer competent to discharge.
The Recorder was present and was received with deep murmurs of disapprobation. The Court of Aldermen subsequently accepted his resignation. Knowlys pleaded his advanced age, declining health, and the effects of severe bodily affliction; he recalled more than forty-seven years of public service to the Corporation, upwards of thirty of which had been spent as Common Serjeant and Recorder. The Honourable C. Ewan Law, son to Lord Ellenborough, was chosen in his room.
Pelham subjoins that the practice of submitting the Recorder’s report to the Sovereign was subsequently discontinued, and that capital punishment for the larceny of letters gave place to transportation. He assigns no dates here to these statutory reforms, nor does he demonstrate that they were directly occasioned by Knowlys’s lapse. The narrative rests upon a sequence more immediate and severe: a sentence commuted, a contrary warrant issued, and the timely collation of the records before the fatal day. For Cox, twenty-two hours divided the notice of the scaffold from the countermand; for the City, the fault became a question of public faith in that high magistracy charged with transmitting the mercy of the Crown.