As the sentence of the law drew him inexorably closer to Tyburn, John Winship kept to himself the tales his interlocutors so eagerly sought to hear. Curious visitors pressed him regarding his confederates and his exploits; he steadfastly refused to surrender a single name. The chronicle likewise records an assault upon a French gentleman along the Hampstead road, though it nowhere states that Winship was ever convicted of the deed. Yet his silence could no longer shield him from the fatal judgment pronounced for the robbery of Mr. Lowther.
The chronicle records his birth in the parish of St. Paul, Covent Garden, within a family of reasonably comfortable means. His parents afforded him an education superior to that which his station appeared to warrant, and treated him with great indulgence. This sheltered youth stood in sharp contrast to the ruin that ensued. Toward the age of fourteen, John was bound apprentice to a carpenter. He took pleasure in the craft, and his master treated him, the record relates, as handsomely as one could have wished. But the lad lacked application. He had contracted a habit of idle wandering even before entering the workshop; once bound to the trade, he proved incapable of throwing it off. The narrative moralizes at length upon this youthful indolence, yet in Winship’s actual life, the rupture was precipitated by an expense that soon grew impossible to sustain.
The chronicle fixes this turning point in a neighboring street. Returning from work one evening, John observed a young woman standing before a doorway. He was then some seventeen years old. On the following evening, he found an occasion to address her; their meetings soon became a daily habit, and his expenses far too burdensome for a carpenter’s wages.
He abandoned the trade, seeking his bread by driving carriages and resorting to other shifts. The pittance he earned was insufficient to defray the charges the chronicle associates with these amorous pursuits. None of the expedient paths he tried could cover his mounting disbursements. He therefore took to the highway, turning footpad and robber to squander in the evening whatever he had taken by day. The young carpenter had renounced his trade, assayed other callings, and finally embraced robbery upon the road; the chronicle depicts this unrelenting cycle of expenditures as the slippery slope that delivered him into the hands of organized gangs.
The chronicle maintains that he remained exceedingly reserved, even after his condemnation, whenever he was urged to speak of his crimes. It relates, however, that he was reputed to have taken part in the robbery of a French gentleman upon the road to Hampstead.
The traveler was riding in a chaise—a carriage drawn by two horses—with his postilion mounted on the seat. At nightfall, three men attacked the conveyance. Pistol shots were exchanged, and the combat raged until the gentleman’s ammunition was wholly spent. The traveler then drew his sword, determined to sell his life dearly. The assailants, the chronicle recounts, had well-nigh despaired of securing their booty when one of them crept stealthily behind the carriage. There, without a sound, he cut a square opening through the back panel, thrust both arms into the interior, and seized the traveler firmly by the shoulders. His companions were thus able to close in, disarm, and rifle him. They carried off one hundred and twenty pistoles, ripped the lace from his clothes, and stripped the postilion of his money. Fire and powder had not decided the fray; it was through the blind rear panel that the three men finally subdued their prey.
The chronicle associates this assault with Winship, without specifying which of the three footpads he might have been. It observes that he had belonged to diverse gangs, and that his physical agility rendered him a prized and welcome recruit among them. This tale of violence circulated around a man who obstinately refused to detail his robberies to the visitors who thronged his cell.
The chronicle also evokes several gangs and an agile-limbed rogue known as Clean-Limbed Tom, whose true name, it notes, was never discovered. To him is attributed a very different career: having once been trained by an apothecary, he roamed the countryside as a quack doctor and mountebank. Journeying toward Chester, where he intended to hawk his nostrums, he encountered at an inn a London wholesaler returning from the collection of considerable debts. Having entertained him the preceding evening, Tom secured an invitation to breakfast with him the following morning. While his companion partook of ale and buttered toast, Tom slipped a violent purgative into the dish, feigning for his own part to drink only wine mingled with bitters. He then offered to walk alongside the merchant’s horse, boasting that he could easily keep pace with its trot. After some two miles, the medicine operated with great violence; the merchant dismounted to relieve himself, whereupon Tom vaulted into the saddle. He rode off with both horse and portmanteau, skirted Chester, halted at a village three miles farther on, and subsequently made his way to Portpatrick, crossing thence to Dublin laden with coin, a gold watch, and other valuables. This adventure belongs entirely to Tom, who the chronicle says was later slain in a duel at Kilkenny; it is by no means ascribed to Winship.
On May 25, 1721, between Pancras Church and the Halfway House, John halted the carriage of Mr. Lowther, taking from him a silver watch and a purse containing ten guineas. He was apprehended shortly thereafter, as the thief-takers were already scouring the town for him on account of other robberies. At the Old Bailey, the prosecutor bore witness against him and one of his former confederates turned evidence voluntarily; these two testimonies procured his conviction for the robbery of Lowther. The chronicle adds, with some caution, that he had already once been condemned and pardoned, though it furnishes no details regarding that earlier trial.
The sentence placed him in an agony of a different nature. John expressed bitter sorrow at the wretched condition to which his sins had brought him, manifesting an ardent desire to preserve his life, even were it to be spent in perpetual transportation beyond the seas. Winship professed that his primary longing to live was to spare the grief of his aged mother, who he feared would lose her reason under the weight of her son’s ignominy. He thus found himself torn between a fate already sealed and the thought of the loved ones he must leave behind.
In the prison chapel, visitors observed the young man and clamored to hear the history of his adventures. His handsome countenance drew the eyes of strangers; their questions harped incessantly on his comrades, his haunts, and his highway robberies. John denied them all satisfaction. He likewise informed the Ordinary that he held himself under no obligation to reveal matters that might endanger the lives of other men; the chronicler notes his visible distress whenever such queries were pressed upon him. Among these, an inquiry conveyed by a person of some rank recalled a man dressed in a particular garb, who had been seen watering his horse before a church door while the congregation was engaged in divine service. John replied, according to the chronicler, that the guilt of a crime depended neither upon the hour nor the place, and steadfastly refused to say whether he had been the man. The chronicle portrays him as penitent and devout. He was executed at Tyburn alongside Matthew Clark, in the twenty-second year of his age. He left behind a wife, who, the text records, died shortly thereafter of a broken heart.