At Whitefriars, Martin Bellamy caught sight of a long rope lying across the bed in the chamber wherein his pursuers had run him to ground. He made it as fast as he was able, then swung down into the street. The men set to watch the house perceived him only when he had gained lead enough to slip from their grasp. Yet this escape bought him but a brief reprieve: another arrest, a sum of gold delivered to Jonathan Wild, and, later, a confession yielded up to a collector of news would form the successive stages of his ruin.
Bellamy was a tailor by trade. The chronicle allows that he long maintained a fair repute and commendable skill in his calling; it relates that he had wed a woman whose kindred were honest folk, though her family grew incensed at his loose conduct. When first he was taken on suspicion of an offence and carried to Bridewell, his brother-in-law came thither inquiring where the prosecutor dwelt, feigning a desire to compound the matter. Instead, he sought out the complainant and urged him to pursue Bellamy with the utmost rigour of the law. The chronicler conjectures that the brother-in-law hoped thereby to rid his sister of an ill husband. Bellamy, transported with fury at this proceeding, refused ever to cohabit with his wife again and thenceforth pursued his wife’s relations with unrelenting rancour.
The memorial draws a large share of its narrative from an account said to have been prepared by Bellamy under sentence, or penned by another from his dictation. Therein the condemned man recited the thefts committed by his gang, and the chronicler held that he recounted them with unseemly complacency. He first described a manner of shoplifting: three or four companions would enter together into the shop of a toyman or a dealer in plate; one would fall to cheapening an article whilst the others passed the goods softly from hand to hand. Another contrivance consisted in wrenching up a shop window with an iron instrument to snatch whatever lay exposed within. When the room stood unattended, one of the company might pull off his shoes, creep through the aperture, and hand the plunder out into the street.
Bellamy was likewise an adept at counterfeiting hands. He frequented the house of Jonathan Wild, a figure depicted in the notice as an agent of paramount sway in the London underworld, and had made himself master of Wild’s handwriting as well as his credit with a servant named Wildgoose. He forged a note in Wild’s name, carried it to Wildgoose, and received the demanded sum in return. When Wild and his correspondent met some days thereafter, the cheat was discovered. Learning from Wildgoose’s description who had thus imposed upon him, Wild dispatched his myrmidons in search of Bellamy.
They came upon him in a house in Whitefriars and surrounded him. The rope enabled him to elude their watch and reach the ground; they gave over the chase on perceiving what a distance he had gained upon them. A short while later, however, they took him unawares in a brandy-shop in Chancery Lane, seized him, and conveyed him by coach to the Elephant and Castle inn in Fleet Street. They sent word to Wild. Though he was already abed, Wild returned answer that he would take Bellamy’s parole, and that he might repair to him without fear upon his rising the following morning.
Bellamy did not fail to attend. The pair walked together to the Baptist’s Head tavern in the Old Bailey, where they drank a bottle. The prisoner then put five guineas into Wild’s hand in satisfaction of the injury done him. Thereupon Wild promised of his own motion to pardon the offence and to obtain Wildgoose’s forgiveness, provided Bellamy would enter into an obligation to pay him ten guineas more. To this Bellamy consented. The chronicle thus displays a truce purchased between two rogues, compounded by a debt and a bond rather than by a prolonged pursuit. Bellamy thereafter returned to his former courses without further hindrance from Wild.
The gang presently hit upon another method for entering shops: they stole the small keys used to secure the pins of the window-shutters, thereby enabling themselves to unfasten closed casements. One night, the men gained entrance to a silversmith’s shop in Russell Court and were preparing to carry off a showcase, when a man who slept upon the premises awoke, leveled a blunderbuss at them, and advised them to be gone. He added that he was loath to shed their blood. Disconcerted, they withdrew and made no attempt to force the passage.
This check did not deter them from making another attempt that very night at a neighbouring toyshop. A servant-maid sat by the hearth. She set up a cry at first; the thieves silenced her, then carried away the showcase and the boxes it contained. On another night, at a toyshop in St. Swithin’s Alley, they wrenched off the padlock but failed to effect an entrance. They then fell to hewing the heavy piece of timber that sustained the shutters. When this gave way, the shutters fell with a great clatter into the yard. Persuaded that the noise must have alarmed the neighbourhood, the men scattered. Having waited and perceived that no one stirred and the watch did not pass, they returned, broke in, and took the choicest goods.
The chronicler forbears to rehearse the long catalogue of robberies that Bellamy had himself recorded. He passes next to the apprehension that led to his conviction: Bellamy was then cohabiting with Amy Fowles, who passed for his wife and had borne him several children. He was taken following a burglary in the dwelling of Mr. Holliday, in Bishopsgate Street. At the ensuing sessions of the Old Bailey, he was found guilty upon evidence which the chronicle terms full and clear. The memorial specifies neither the inventory of the stolen goods nor the manner in which the burglary was discovered.
Once lodged in Newgate, Bellamy entered into a treaty with a justice of the peace to impeach his confederates. The Royal Proclamation published a short time before encouraged such discoveries and promised bounties to the earliest informants. But before any compact could be concluded, a collector of news for the daily prints waited upon the prisoner, making him believe he was sent by persons of consequence. Bellamy disclosed to him the several robberies in which he avowed he had taken part. The news-writer, or some hand in his employ, turned these disclosures into paragraphs and caused them to be published the very next morning.
This publication forewarned the persons impeached and enabled them, according to the chronicle, to make their escape. It likewise stripped Bellamy, the author affirms, of every hope of royal mercy and prevented his discovery from serving the public interest. The chronicler goes so far as to conjecture that this disclosure contributed indirectly to a murder, and that Bellamy might have been preserved had his confession been turned to better purpose; yet these remain his speculations, not established facts of the narrative. What he records with exactitude is that the promised confession was turned to account by a writer in quest of copy, and that its precipitate appearance in print wrought mischief the condemned man could no longer repair.
Bellamy carried himself with insolence at his trial, according to the chronicler, and maintained a jaunty demeanor throughout part of his confinement. As his execution drew near, he was obliged to summon all his fortitude to read the paper he had prepared. Therein he acknowledged his transgressions against the laws of God and his country, declared he met his sentence without rancour, and exhorted the spectators to take heed of their own paths. He did not rehearse before the multitude the minute recital of his robberies which he had committed to the news-gatherer; his speech at the tree turned solely upon his guilt, repentance, and the hope of pardon.
Martin Bellamy was executed on the 27th of March, 1728, being about twenty-eight years of age. From the tailor who had once earned an honest livelihood to the convict boasting of his knaveries, his history closes upon a confidence betrayed into the wrong hands: the very secret that might, in the view of prisoner and magistrate, have served to break a gang became, beneath the quill of a paragrapher, a public warning to those it named.