After passing the night in the open fields of Hounslow Heath, three men stopped the chaise of Samuel Sells. At their trial, the traveller testified that he had surrendered a larger sum under the menace of a cudgel; the prisoners contested the amount and denied all threats. All three were condemned for this assault.
Each of the three had served an apprenticeship to a trade and had married; Timms and Perry subsequently served in the First Regiment of Foot Guards, whereas Brown had come to London from Oxford. The original account traces their respective paths before uniting them upon the highway.
Timms was born to indigent parents in a countryside the chronicle leaves unspecified. His kindred gathered with great difficulty the funds requisite to bind him apprentice to a chair-carver. In that trade he laboured honestly, set up for himself, and married. The chronicle records that he then maintained a reputation for piety and honour. When employment failed, he removed to London, where he supported himself for a time by his craft before enlisting in the First Regiment of Foot Guards. Even as a soldier, he continued as far as possible to ply his trade as an artisan.
The chronicler relates that he took to drink and fell into company that led him toward dishonest means of procuring money. In particular, mention is made of a woman who had formerly served an influential lawyer of the City. According to the account, she had forged receipts in the names of sundry merchants, retaining the monies she ought to have remitted to her master. Upon discovering the fraud, the gentleman dismissed her, yet promised his assistance provided she kept him informed of her lodgings. She subsequently passed herself off as the secretly wedded wife of two of the lawyer’s clerks, obtained valuable merchandise on credit, and, upon discovery, was committed to Bridewell. She escaped thence by winning the confidence of a keeper’s servant and took lodgings in the very house where Timms worked.
The chronicle sets this narrative prior to Timms’s departure with Perry and Brown for the road across Hounslow Heath. No part is ascribed to this woman in the robbery of Sells. The three men arrived there by diverse roads: a trade grown precarious for Timms, military service and an injury for Perry, and removal to London for Brown.
Perry had lost his parents in his youth; he arrived in London destitute of money, employment, and even apparel. He was bound apprentice to a glass-grinder and served him, according to the author, with honesty and fidelity. Having completed his term, he married and laboured diligently for about a year. He then enlisted in the First Regiment of Foot Guards, serving with them through the peace of Utrecht and in Flanders, and afterwards remained stationed in London with the same corps.
His final year, the chronicle continues, proved far more disorderly than those preceding. At Windsor, where he was quartered, a dog bit him in the leg. He possessed slender means and no friend upon the spot to assist him. Upon returning to London, he could not regain his employment in the glass trade: his former masters conceived a disgust for his coarse behaviour and refused to engage him. The chronicle attributes to Timms the first proposal of turning to the highway; Perry, who had hitherto entertained no such design, gave his assent.
Brown hailed from Oxford. His parents had provided for his schooling, then placed him as an apprentice to a glass-grinder. At the end of his term, he worked as a journeyman, married, and for a season preserved an unblemished name. He eventually settled in London, where, by his own account, he frequented the company of Timms and Perry. The chronicle confesses itself unable to fix the commencement of their acquaintance. Brown is said to have related that the three men drank heavily together and spent their last penny; only then, by his telling, did they resolve to rob upon the road. He could not say which of them had first broached the scheme.
On May 3, they accordingly set out with the design of robbing on Hounslow Heath. They passed the night in the open air. Upon their first encounter, an old man declared he had no money, and they suffered him to go his way. Sells presently approached from Windsor in a chaise, being an innkeeper in that town. The footpads brought him to a halt and demanded his effects. The first sum he delivered appearing insufficient to the men, he gave them an additional ten shillings. Having received this, they withdrew.
At the trial, Sells swore that the booty had been of far greater value. He deposed that one of the men had held a staff over him, swearing bitter oaths that he would dispatch him should he resist. Timms, Perry, and Brown all contested this version, even after sentence of death had been pronounced upon them. They acknowledged having carried sticks, but averred they had kept them within their bosoms or beneath their garments without making use of them. There remained, therefore, a divergence between the traveller’s deposition and the prisoners’ defence, not as to the stopping of the chaise, but regarding the sums taken and the threats employed.
Brown offered a more circumstantial narrative of the surrender. Sells, he claimed, had given him seventeen shillings in two instalments; then, when the robbers demanded more, the innkeeper declared he had but eighteen pence left wherewith to make his way back to town, and entreated that this small change might be left him. Brown asserted that they consented and offered him no ill treatment. This sum and this final request did not entirely accord with the amounts recorded earlier in the text. The chronicler thus sets side by side the traveller’s accusation, the joint defence of the three prisoners, and Brown’s distinct deposition.
Timms and Perry left no declaration so detailed as that of Brown. Both denied unto their death the use of threats and the brandishing of cudgels. These denials stood in stark contradiction to Sells’s oath, whilst Brown’s account differed as to the reckoning. The court nevertheless convicted all three men for this single robbery, without the printed text detailing the legal reasoning of the bench.
They were not alone in awaiting the determination of their fate. During the same sessions, Alexander Jones, John Platt, Mary Reynolds, Silvia Sherlock, and Anne Senior were likewise condemned for diverse felonies. The convicts clung to the hope of a reprieve or pardon. When the death warrant was communicated to the three men, they were struck with surprise, as the chronicler remarks, and thereupon redoubled their diligence in the religious devotions prescribed for the condemned. It was the solitary affair of Sells that bound the fates of Timms, Perry, and Brown together.
On August 11, 1727, the three men were conveyed in the same cart to Tyburn. Their demeanour was described as solemn and becoming; the public devotions concluded with the singing of a psalm. They suffered on the same day for this single highway robbery, though their years were disparate: Timms was about eight-and-twenty, Perry bordered upon forty, and Brown had not yet attained his four-and-twentieth year. The chronicle here offers no conclusion to the life of the woman who had fled from Bridewell, nor does it impute to her any direct share in their fatal conviction.
Sells’s chaise and the seventeen shillings of Brown’s relation form the narrow pivot of the case; around that single instant, the printed sheet gathers three lives that had traversed divergent courses before converging upon the heath. A parish master, a dog’s bite, service in the Foot Guards, an escape from Bridewell: all these episodes precede the lone assault for which they were tried together. The men were executed as accomplices in the robbery, whilst the sum carried off and the violence employed remained diversely told to the very end.