Nathaniel Hawes refused to plead until his fine suit of clothes was returned to him. It had been stripped from him following his arrest for the robbery upon Finchley Common. He declared that he would not appear at the sessions house as anything less than a gentleman. The bench replied that it was not within its power to restore it to him. Hawes persisted in his refusal.
Sometime prior, he had contrived to escape from prison through an aperture that another captive had prepared. At that hour, he was merely a prisoner suspected of having despoiled two travellers in a chaise, a carriage journeying from Hampstead. He had scrutinized the walls of the New Prison and judged them far too stout for any attempt of his own. Yet the woman confined in the selfsame room with him, arrested for shoplifting, perceived an egress where the two men could imagine none.
Hawes gave himself out to be the son of a wealthy Norfolk grazier who had died when he was but a year old, alleging that he had been defrauded of the greater part of his patrimony. This account originated solely from his own lips; the chronicle does not establish its veracity. Those charged with his upbringing bound him apprentice to an upholsterer. He remained there some four years, before falling into company with young men of lavish expenditure. He began purloining coin from his master’s till, continuing long undetected. A theft of greater magnitude brought about his apprehension, trial, and conviction. Because of his tender years, the court took pity upon him and granted him a pardon.
Such clemency put no end to his thieving. Hawes took to the road again with companions who passed their days in drink, gaming, wenching, and idleness, according to the stern portrait drawn by the chronicle. He distinguished himself by his daring and allied himself chiefly with Richard James. Together, they assaulted travellers upon the Oxford Road; the narrative imputes to them brutal usage of those whom they despoiled. Hawes persuaded himself that this reputation rendered him a hero. That very boldness, which had so often served him well, henceforth nourished an image of himself far grander than the perils to which he exposed others.
He would stop travellers single-handed or fall upon a coach filled with gentlemen. He was equally ready to target the wagons lumbering in convoy along the Oxford Road toward London. The chronicle describes him as capable of undertaking enterprises that no common jail would succeed in halting. Yet it was merely a suspicion concerning two men in a chaise that brought him to the New Prison. There he was locked away alongside another man and an elegantly attired woman, detained for shoplifting. Hawes examined the premises: no passage appeared to him practicable.
The woman inquired of them whether they possessed the resolution to attempt an escape, should she discover the means to effect it. Hawes replied that he would hazard anything to regain his liberty; the other man likewise professed himself ready the moment an opportunity presented itself. She bade them scrape together what was needed to maintain a fire. They laid aside a single shilling and expended the remainder upon wood, coal, and strong liquor. So long as the turnkeys made their rounds, the woman appeared utterly disconsolate; the two men dissembled after her fashion, as though they were already awaiting the gallows.
When the hour came to lock them in for the night, she begged in a feeble voice for some tool resembling a poker. An attendant consented, in exchange for twopence, to fetch her an old iron bar that had been wrenched from a window during repairs. The doors were bolted fast. When the keepers had departed, she drew forth from her garments two small bags of tools she had kept concealed. She pointed out to them a great stone set into the angle of the wall and instructed them how to loosen the iron fastenings that secured it. The fire now served a purpose other than that of warming the captives. During the night, they breached a passage above them; it opened upon the street, yet remained at a perilous height.
The woman then produced a cord four yards in length, drawn from the waist of her petticoat, bound one end to the iron bar, and cast the other over the wall. The three prisoners stood at last before a way out. The two men, sensible of what they owed to her who had contrived the design, first assisted her over the wall. She gained the other side before them; they then descended in their turn. The deliverance had been entirely the work of the woman detained for shoplifting, not of Hawes, who had at first pronounced any such trial impossible.
He was not long in returning to his depredations. Upon Finchley Common, he stopped Richard Hall and took from him about four shillings. He carried off his horse as well, hoping to employ it in quest of another that might compensate for the lean pickings of his booty. He was soon tracked, apprehended, found guilty, and condemned to die. The flippancy he had displayed following his arrest then gave place to a fresh exhibition: Hawes proclaimed that he would win, by his boldness even unto death, a greater renown than that of any highwayman executed these seven years past.
At the bar, the indictment was read to him, but Hawes persisted in his refusal to plead. The judge admonished him that the law put no man to death unheard, nor without positive proof; twelve men were to weigh that evidence, and the court itself stood, as he affirmed, as counsel for the prisoner. To be tried, Hawes was bound to answer “Not Guilty” to the indictment.
Hawes retorted that the court, once a seat of justice, had become a place of injustice. He declared he doubted not that the judges would one day receive a heavier sentence than that pronounced against himself. He protested that he feared not death and wished to quit the world with the same fortitude he had displayed upon the highway. His companions jested among themselves: perchance he refused to plead because they had denied him a handsome coat wherein to be hanged. Hawes warmly defended himself against the taunt. He maintained that he sought only to preserve to the end the reputation of the most daring of all gentlemen of the road.
The court directed the clerk to read the sentence reserved for such culprits as obstinately stood mute. Hawes endured the press of weights laid upon his breast for upwards of seven minutes, and then at last submitted to that justice which he perceived to be inevitable. He did not perish under the press. Yet the injuries he sustained thereby caused him such grievous torment that he could scarcely perform the devotions he desired to offer for his past life. In the brief space that remained to him, the posture of bravado availed him no longer as a shield.
Hawes made a candid confession of such crimes as he could recall to mind. He likewise endeavoured to clear certain persons then imprisoned or suspected on account of robberies committed by himself or his gang. In particular, he named a footman held in the Poultry Compter and the son of a man of whom he spoke in connection with an inn. He declared he knew no ill of the young man; instead of accusing him, he desired that his own death might serve him as a solemn warning. Upon the eve of his execution, Hawes received the sacrament. The outward tokens of devotion that he exhibited stood in stark contrast to the repute of violent courage he had laboured to fashion.
He was executed at Tyburn on September 22, 1721, in his twentieth year. The chronicle relates that he left behind a wife, who subsequently died of grief following his execution.