On December 22, 1725, at Tyburn, three men condemned for widely divergent crimes perished upon the same day: John Austin, a gardener turned highway robber; John Foster, implicated in a housebreaking; and Richard Scurrier, a hackney-coachman turned thief. The chronicle gathers their lives without conflating them. Austin had long enjoyed an unblemished reputation before a sudden assault; Foster maintained he had been betrayed by an assurance of protection; Scurrier had already escaped from confinement once before the theft of a firkin of butter brought him to the gallows.
Austin was born of honest parents. Trained to the trade of gardening, he set up as a master on his own account and, in the estimation of his neighbours, passed for a man of sober and orderly conduct. In early November 1725, at about seven o’clock in the morning, he fell upon a passer-by in the fields near Stepney. He knocked him down with a short, round, and heavy staff, and stripped him of his coat. The evidence appeared sufficiently plain to the jury to outweigh the witnesses whom Austin called in support of his character. He was found guilty and received sentence of death. A report was subsequently laid before the King, and the order was given for his execution. The witnesses of his former life had defended his good name, yet the court held fast to the violent assault as established by the proofs.
In the days immediately following his conviction, Austin denied having committed the robbery in the manner alleged by the prosecution. He acknowledged striking the man, but protested that the latter had first assailed him with an iron bar. He clung to this version of events for a time; then, as the day of execution drew near, he admitted it was false and confessed to the robbery. When interrogated as to what motive could have driven him to attack a fellow creature when he was not in want, he replied that he lived comfortably and had an industrious wife. He declared he had been troubled in his mind for some time past, and had taken from his home the stick his wife used in her work as a silk-throwster. By his own account, a sudden impulse had moved him to strike the traveller down.
The chronicler does not portray Austin as an habitual offender in great villainies. He records only that he drank to excess on rare occasions, and that his deepest regret was having laboured on Sundays to dress his goods for the Monday market. Under sentence, Austin attended chapel service every day, prayed in his cell, and showed himself genuinely penitent. He maintained unto his dying breath that the Stepney robbery was both the first and the last crime he had ever committed. He was about thirty-seven years of age when he died.
Foster, likewise aged about thirty-seven, came of a poor family. His father had striven to give him such education as lay within his means, and subsequently sent him to sea under a man he accounted respectable. Foster spent some seven years in the seafaring life. Touching these years, the chronicle recounts the misfortune that befell the captain who employed him: captured by the French, he was plundered and cast adrift at sea with thirty-five men. He made Newfoundland with great hardship; running short of victuals, he went ashore with eighteen seamen and seized some sheep and hogs. Shortly thereafter, the crew captured a French vessel laden with provisions and carrying a bag of seven hundred pistoles. The captain permitted the craft to proceed with provisions, then paid the owner of the cattle the full price demanded, adding a gift besides. The chronicler presents this conduct as an example of integrity that Foster failed to emulate. Upon his return to England, Foster received his wages and fell into company described by the account as dissolute. He took to drinking and women, and subsequently had a hand in breaking into the house of Captain Tolson. The thieves carried off linen and other goods of great value.
Following his arrest, Foster asserted that he had been promised his life if he provided information. He maintained he had made the required disclosures and deemed it a gross injustice that the promise had not been kept. The chronicle does not name the person said to have made this overture. At the trial, the evidence was judged overwhelming, and the jury found him guilty after a brief deliberation. Thus the bargain whose terms Foster claimed to have accepted afforded him no protection against condemnation.
Under sentence of death, he wept when the ministers delivered their exhortations, calling himself a grievous sinner. He feared that even divine mercy could not reach him. Those who instructed him replied that despair was itself a hazard to his hope, and exhorted him to lean upon the promises of the Scriptures. Having meditated upon the passages cited to him and upon the nature of true repentance, he grew, according to the chronicle, more composed. On the day of his execution, he received the sacrament. He declared that he forgave the man who had wronged him, expressly naming the individual who had buoyed him with hopes of life and thereby, he believed, endangered his salvation. He submitted to the sentence without having obtained the clemency he claimed to expect.
Richard Scurrier was the son of a blacksmith of Kingston-upon-Thames, bearing the same name. He followed his father’s trade for a time, then parted from his family and came up to London. There he drove a hackney-coach. He confessed himself that this calling had brought him into extravagant company and a course of disorderly living. The chronicle does not state whether he took to thieving of his own accord or was seduced into it by others. It notes only that he began with a petty larceny, which was detected immediately.
At the following sessions, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a punishment which the court, in consideration of his youth, mitigated to a private whipping. Before the stroke could be administered, Scurrier joined with several other prisoners, forced the outer gate of the prison just as the turnkey was entering, and made his escape. He was not long in finding another opportunity to steal. In a cheesemonger’s shop, he espied a small firkin of butter and attempted to walk off with it. He was seized in the act and committed back to gaol.
Scurrier initially believed the theft too trifling to cost him his life. He was consequently all the more terrified when sentence of death was passed upon him. On the first day after receiving his sentence, grief and terror threw him into utter consternation. Once calmed and instructed by those who visited him, he acknowledged, according to the source, the justice of his punishment and the wickedness of his disordered life. In the chapel, he conducted himself with decency and prayed as well as his slender education allowed. The source lays stress upon his tender years, noting that the lad was scarce eighteen when he died alongside Austin and Foster.
The chronicle depicts Austin and Foster at the close of very different working lives: the one an independent gardener of unblemished repute, the other a seaman before falling into burglary. Scurrier, the youngest, had already experienced a mitigated first conviction followed by an escape, before the theft of a firkin of butter brought upon him the capital sentence. In closing, the author also names two other convicts, Hamp and Bird, as having been executed with them on December 22, 1725. Austin and Foster were both men of mature years; Scurrier was scarcely eighteen. Three distinct paths, three felonies recorded by the law, and a single morning at Tyburn.