The dwelling of Sarah Pickard had been barred and bolted at eleven of the clock at night. By five the following morning, it was found forced open; in the courtyard lay a stout, short-bladed knife and an auger. These implements, presently recognised as the property of Joseph Kemp, opened one of the prosecutions that would conduct him directly to the scaffold.
The narrator of the *Lives* sets forth his moral lesson from the outset: before recounting Kemp’s downward path, he casts the blame for the first ruin of men upon women whom he brands as abandoned creatures. Yet the dying declaration of the condemned man, subjoined at the close of the account, shifts much of this responsibility upon his own choices, while petitioning that mercy be shown to his surviving wife.
Kemp was born in Holborn of indigent parents, who placed him in the parish charity school. He was subsequently bound apprentice to a glazier, where he served out his articles, according to the chronicle, bearing the reputation of an honest youth. In the interval, his parents had improved their lot through honest toil. When he sought to set up in trade on his own account, they advanced him threescore pounds to establish his shop. Yet Kemp had already cast his eyes upon a woman with whom he became infatuated and whom he resolved to marry, well aware though he was that she already lived with two other men whom she called husbands.
The woman accepted Kemp’s proposal of marriage, the source representing him as the one most capable of maintaining her in idleness. The young glazier’s business soon went to decay; undone and destitute, he beheld his wife return, so the chronicler affirms, to her thievish practices. She was detected and committed to Newgate, where she lay in peril of a protracted confinement. Kemp, who remained passionately attached to her, carried to her prison every penny he could lay hands upon. He lamented bitterly, the record notes, his inability to procure larger sums. Flung into a fury, the woman reviled him, bidding him break open houses, rob passengers upon the highway, or attempt any desperate venture that might furnish her with coin. He ended by yielding, and provided himself with the instruments of housebreaking. The chronicle does not name the first dwellings he entered, nor the owners of the plate he carried to her; it states merely that the plunder, turned into ready money, proved sufficient to purchase her enlargement from Newgate. The source adds that she straightway squandered what he brought her upon other men; yet such motives reflect the moralising construction of the chronicler and are corroborated by no independent testimony.
Her enlargement put no stop to the larcenies of this first wife. She was soon apprehended anew for her own thefts, convicted, and sentenced to transportation beyond the seas. The place of her banishment is nowhere recorded. Kemp, for his part, took up with a fresh companion. By the time he married her, his credit was exhausted, his character ruined, and he possessed no lawful means of livelihood. His first wife being still alive, the chronicle brands this second union as unlawful; it affords neither the name of this second wife nor any parish register of the ceremony. The narrative merely records that Kemp thenceforth abandoned himself entirely to housebreaking, committing burglaries in great number.
He was shortly apprehended and lodged in Newgate under several indictments. At the following sessions of the Old Bailey, he was arraigned for feloniously breaking into the house of Sarah Pickard, and taking thence six-and-thirty gold and stone rings, three silver watches, sundry pieces of plate, and diverse other valuables. Mrs Pickard deposed that her house had been made fast until eleven at night, and that she discovered it broken open at five the next morning. In the courtyard, a kinsman of the prisoner, likewise named Kemp, came upon a short blade and an auger; these tools he identified as belonging to the accused.
This relative swore that the prisoner had previously shown him the knife. Joanna Kemp and Jonathan Auskins confirmed the statement. Constable Samuel Gerrard testified that, upon searching Joseph Kemp’s premises in company with the two former witnesses, they discovered numerous articles belonging to Mrs Pickard. In their presence, the accused confessed to having committed the burglary entirely alone, without the counsel or assistance of any other person. This admission expressly excluded all confederacy; yet the chronicler had previously averred that he carried the stolen plate to his first wife. The legal proceedings extant make no mention of that woman having been indicted for this particular robbery.
Kemp urged little in his defence. The jury found him guilty without hesitation. He was likewise convicted upon two further indictments: the one for breaking into the house of James Wood, the other for an entry into that of Mary Paget, whence plate of substantial value had been carried off. The proof in these two matters, the source records, was furnished by John Knap, an accomplice who had turned evidence to save his own neck. Kemp’s latter wife was likewise indicted and tried alongside him, but the jury brought in her acquittal. The text preserves neither her Christian name nor the particulars of the charge preferred against her.
Under sentence of death, Kemp was seized with an indisposition which deprived him of the greater part of that period granted by the law for the spiritual preparation of convicts. The chronicler relates that he grew so hard of hearing as to be scarcely capable of receiving instruction. Notwithstanding this infirmity, the source attributes to him a deep sense of his impending doom, great anguish over his past life, and unfeigned penitence for having neglected his duty toward God and his neighbour. As his final hour drew nigh, he gathered some measure of fortitude, and appeared at the place of execution with the outward demeanor of a contrite sinner, according to the observer.
Two days previously, on the 22nd of August 1729, he had subscribed at Newgate a dying speech intended for the public. Therein he recalled that his parents had reared him in honesty and bound him to a glazier. He censured his master for failing to exercise sufficient care over his conduct, and attributed his first marriage and subsequent ruin to his blind attachment to a wife who could not be content with the honest gains of his trade, and who had urged him to commit felonious acts. Yet he acknowledged that his second wife had been a good woman, who had striven to help him subsist without resort to robbery, though he had neglected her counsel. He prayed that his aged parents might not be overwhelmed with grief at his ignominious end, sought forgiveness of all whom he had injured, and besought pardon likewise for those whose testimony, as he alleged, had helped to hasten his undoing.
This paper casts a very different light upon the earlier narrative of the chronicler. Kemp expressly petitioned that no blame should fall upon his wife: he insisted that whatever faults she had committed had been done at his instigation, portraying her as being of herself inclined to virtue. The source does not make clear whether this petition regarded solely his latter wife, acquitted at the bar, or was intended to answer the reproaches cast upon the first. The two portraits of women preserved in the account cannot therefore be confounded into a single figure, nor accepted as unvarnished fact.
On the morning of execution, his wife mounted the cart and bade him farewell with a tenderness that the chronicler records as remarkable. Joseph Kemp suffered on the 24th of August 1729, being then in the four-and-twentieth year of his age. His guilt was established in three distinct causes—those of Pickard, Wood, and Paget; his surviving wife, tried by his side, was cleared. Beyond the judicial verdict, the chronicle leaves two contradictory accounts of domestic guilt: that of the narrator, who charges the first marriage with launching Kemp into crime, and that of Kemp himself, who pleads that his wife be spared, while confessing he turned a deaf ear to the virtuous counsel of his second.