Upon Hounslow Heath, two travellers seated in a chaise were stripped of five guineas, eight shillings, and a watch. The mounted highwayman who brought them to a stand vanished with his booty, which he pledged the following morning for a pound and a half. Thus the timepiece passed from a gentleman’s pocket to a pawnbroker’s counter; the man who parted with it had already crossed the Atlantic and assumed another name to resume living at the expense of others, according to the career chronicled by Borrow.
The son of a baronet, born in London in 1717 and bred at Eton, Parsons was first sent out as a midshipman aboard the Drake, bound for Jamaica. A period of shore leave allowed him to renew his addresses to the daughter of a physician at Bishop’s Waltham, whom he resolved to marry in order to lay hands upon her estate. His uncle packed him back off to sea, first to Jamaica, then to Newfoundland. Later, Parsons entered the service of the Royal African Company upon the Gambia, but fell out with the governor and returned to England. This succession of departures brought him neither wealth nor independence; it served only to breed fresh expectations toward the kinsmen he had already disappointed.
While dwelling beneath his uncle’s roof, he got a servant-maid with child and was turned out of doors. He drifted as far as London with three halfpence to subsist on for four days. A coachman permitted him to sleep in a hayloft; an old acquaintance procured him a lodging and food. His father subsequently consented to see him again, yet bestowed upon him no more than five shillings. Parsons then learned that an aunt had bequeathed a sum of money to his brother. He immediately raised loans upon the promise of this legacy, passing it off as his own.
His family thereafter secured him an ensign’s commission in Cholmondeley’s regiment. He married a young gentlewoman whose father had lately died, and whose fortune restored him to easy circumstances. The pair took fine houses, maintaining coach, horses, and liveried servants far beyond their means. It was then that he fell in with one Doctor N., a gamester and familiar of the gaming-houses, who won his confidence and drew him into his play. Debts mounted swiftly; before long, his extravagant establishment and his creditors pressed upon him more heavily than his new military station could sustain.
Sent with his regiment to Flanders, Parsons continued to raise monies by way of annuities and mortgages. Pressed by military creditors, he sold his commission to satisfy their demands. Doctor N. accompanied him back to England. Pursued by debt, Parsons was unable to live with his wife; he took a chamber in Gough Square under the style of Captain Brown, giving himself out to be an unmarried man. He courted his landlord’s daughter, abandoned her, and the young woman was subsequently cast into Newgate for debt. The chronicle presents this episode as the hour in which his frauds began to fall directly upon those who had sought to succour him.
He went so far as to contrive a sham marriage ceremony to plunder a jeweller. In a tavern, he bespake a parson and demanded both plain gold hoops and diamond rings, intended, he declared, for his bride-to-be. When the goldsmith produced the jewels, Parsons drew forth a bill and demanded change. At the very last moment, he announced that he would settle the reckoning after the ceremony. The woman left the chamber upon the pretext of a sudden indisposition; Parsons stepped out in his turn, leaving his hat behind to avert suspicion, and vanished with his accomplice. The clergyman and the jeweller were left alone to pay the score he had run up.
The sea once more appeared to offer him a fresh start. In 1745, he took ship as captain of marines aboard a privateer. After a French prize had been carried into Cork, he fell sick and was left ashore when the vessel put out again. Being destitute of funds, he drew bills of exchange upon London merchants. He then quitted Ireland aboard a captured French craft, reached Plymouth, and made his way back to London. The promised payments were never met; Parsons’s returns seemed to keep pace with the ships he could board and the credits he could open.
He was presently apprehended for a fraud and sentenced to transportation. The narrative relates that after seven months’ confinement, he was transported to Maryland, landing at Annapolis on the 30th of November 1749. Borrow describes him as living as a “common slave” for some seven weeks following his transportation; the chronicle does not specify the indenture or legal condition under which he was sold in Virginia. A gentleman of rank, moved by his plight, received him into his house; Parsons presently rode off upon his benefactor’s horse. Upon the highway, he first robbed a horseman, and next a woman and her companion travelling in a chaise. He then crossed the Potomac, sold his horse, and took ship for England.
At Whitehaven, his return furnished him with another opening. He forged a letter announcing his father’s demise and claimed he had come to take possession of a great estate. A merchant advanced him seventy pounds upon a bill drawn on a London banker. Parsons squandered the money on fine clothes and in the haunts he had frequented before his exile. When his funds ran low, he turned from fraudulent paper to pistols and the open road.
Borrow next places a robbery upon Hounslow Heath under the date of August 1748. This mark in time accords ill with the chronicle that had just seen Parsons sentenced to transportation, transported to Maryland in November 1749, and thence brought back to Whitehaven. The text offers no explanation for this reversal and affords no means of correcting it without recourse to other records. The stolen watch was pawned the very next morning; later, Fuller, who had formerly prosecuted Parsons, recognized him upon the road in company with Best.
Fuller and Best bid him keep his distance; Parsons nonetheless persisted in dogging them as far as Hounslow, where a third horseman joined their company. The two gentlemen alighted from their chaise, demanded that he surrender or be taken, and conveyed him into a room at the inn. Parsons surrendered his loaded pistols to them. The landlord, who kept the Rose and Crown, recognized in him the description of a highwayman cried upon the road. A constable searched his pockets and drew forth a powder-horn and leaden balls. The text does not state that Fuller and Best were the victims of the chaise robbery: Fuller is expressly set down as Parsons’s former prosecutor in an affair of fraud.
Brought before the justice, Parsons pleaded the respectability of his house and sued for mercy. He was committed to Newgate. Borrow relates that he clung to the hope of a reprieve until the very last hour. The title of a contemporary tract preserved at the Huntington Library clarifies what this compilation leaves in shadow: Parsons was executed at Tyburn on the 11th of February 1751 for returning from transportation. His return to England, after so many departures hailed as new beginnings, proved the cause of his undoing. At the inn, he had yielded his loaded pistols to the two men who had known him again; before the magistrate, he had nothing left to produce but his family’s name.