The window of the back parlour had been left open. When morning came, Nicholas Fenwick’s house was discovered stripped of its silver plate, linen, laces, and pieces of the tea service. The window bore no mark of violence. Fenwick suspected those living beneath his roof; yet he could not then prove that any one of them had taken part in the theft. A public advertisement offering a reward for the recovery of the plate was soon to direct the inquiry straight to Joshua Cornwall.
Born in the market town of Brigg, in Lincolnshire, Cornwall was, according to the original account, the son of honest parents in a condition to provide him with an education. The chronicler attributes a great share of his subsequent ruin to the indulgence of his mother, and thereafter to that of his master during his apprenticeship; he passes judgment, too, upon the youth’s temper and habits. These moral strictures belong entirely to him. He relates that Cornwall was wont to spend his hours with companions of his own age, rode out on horseback to visit acquaintances, and gave himself over to diversions. Following the mother’s death, the father resolved to break these idle habits and place him in the way of earning a livelihood: he bound him apprentice to a baker in Hull. The chronicle depicts this master as a friend of the family, so lenient toward the lad that he treated him with paternal affection rather than with the discipline customary toward apprentices. Cornwall, it is said, resumed his excursions and neglected his labour. Later, he came up to London, where he entered several households in the capacity of a footman.
The chronicle observes that he discharged his duties well, and thereby secured a place with Nicholas Fenwick, a gentleman of fortune. In this house, numerous pieces of silver plate were set out upon a sideboard. Cornwall knew the premises and performed his service there. The writer remarks that this display of abundance excited his cupidity and suggested the theft; he assigns no date to the inception of the design. Cornwall allied himself with Thomas Rivers, a companion depicted in the narrative as a person of ill repute, to contrive the robbery.
Rivers came one day to Cornwall’s lodgings to reconnoitre the house and deliberate with him upon the manner of entering it. At their final conference, Cornwall stated that further confederates would be required. Rivers thereupon enlisted Girst. At the appointed hour, the latter arrived in Rivers’s company; Cornwall, clad only in his shirt, unbolted the door to them.
Upon the sideboard stood a silver candlestick holding a lighted candle. Its gleam served them to seize the remainder of the plate. The men laid the whole upon a carpet, then turned upon Fenwick’s bureau. From it they drew linen, a lady’s lace, a tea service, and two silver boxes. The articles were bundled together and carried away to Rivers’s lodgings in Vinegar Yard, off Drury Lane.
Fenwick’s wife, having heard a disturbance for some little time, had awakened her husband. But silence returning, the pair fell asleep once more. In the morning, a servant came up to inform them of the burglary, directing their attention to the open window in the back parlour. Observing no trace of forcible entry, he surmised that someone within the house might have left it so. Cornwall and a maidservant fell under suspicion, but Fenwick had no evidence whereon to apprehend them. He chose instead to advertise the loss of his plate.
Part of the spoil had been carried to a pawnbroker. The advertisement reached him; he identified the goods and declared that Rivers had pledged them with him. A warrant was thereupon granted to search Rivers’s lodgings. The officers found there a note addressed to Thomas Rivers, glover, in Guy’s Court, Vinegar Yard. The missive requested Rivers to meet the writer at seven o’clock the following morning at the Postern Spring, near Tower Hill, and bore the signature of Joshua Cornwall.
This paper transformed what had been mere suspicion arising from the mode of entry into a written chain binding Fenwick’s footman to the man who had delivered part of the plate to the pawnbroker. Cornwall was taken into custody. Girst offered himself as a witness for the Crown. A few days later, the case came before the Sessions. Rivers and Cornwall stood indicted for having burglariously broken and entered the dwelling-house of Nicholas Fenwick and stolen several goods therefrom, on the 8th of September, 1730.
The indictment set forth the value of the spoil: the silver plate was valued at eighty-five pounds and nineteen shillings; the linen shirts at twenty pounds; other articles had likewise vanished. The jury deemed the evidence sufficient against Rivers and brought him in guilty. As to Cornwall, the matter proved more intricate. He was a servant in the very house where the theft had been committed. The jurors hesitated whether he could in law be convicted of burglary for entering the house of his own master; they accordingly returned a special verdict, referring the point of law to the determination of the judges.
The judges took the question raised by the verdict into consideration. They held unanimously that the crime was, in its nature, capable of being construed as burglary, notwithstanding these circumstances. At the following Sessions of the Old Bailey, Cornwall was acquainted with their opinion and received sentence of death.
Rivers had already been found guilty by the jury. The notice does not trace his subsequent fate, nor does it confound it with that of Cornwall. It follows the condemned servant thenceforth to the scaffold. Under the weight of his sentence, he exhibited, according to the chronicler, deep contrition. He protested that he had not committed many of the heinous crimes commonly laid to the charge of men brought to such an end.
Before his death, Cornwall spoke in vindication of the young woman who had served alongside him at Fenwick’s. He declared that she was entirely innocent of the wrong done to her master, and that there had been between them nothing more than a simple acquaintance, without carnal commerce or any solicitation thereto. This declaration answered an insinuation upon which the text offers no further details. The note discovered in Rivers’s lodging had bound the two men to the robbery; upon the threshold of eternity, Cornwall sought to clear the name of his fellow-servant from the affair.
On the 23rd of December, 1730, in the twenty-second year of his age, he was executed. The narrative concludes upon his defence of the young woman and the composure with which, according to the chronicler, he met his death.