John Smith maintained that he had sought only to terrify Sarah Thompson, not to take her life. He was threatening her with a pistol hard by the Hermitage, towards Wapping, when certain passers-by endeavoured to tear her from his grasp; the piece discharged and killed Matthew Walden, who had run in among those who sought to intervene. The Newgate account paints no portrait of premeditated murder, but rather of a man who had taken up a weapon to enforce his will, and whose violence struck down a third party.
Smith was an old soldier. The author knew nothing of his family or parentage, yet portrays him as having served with good repute in a foot regiment throughout Queen Anne’s wars in Flanders. His captain held him in esteem, sharing, according to the chronicle, his appetite for daring enterprises. At the front, the foraging for provisions frequently provoked skirmishes between the two armies; it was amid such hazards that Smith performed those deeds which the chronicler styles “singular exploits.”
On one occasion, the captain returned to camp after the French had overpowered his detachment; the troopers had abandoned their loads of forage. Smith received orders to take his master’s horse to graze in the open field lying between the hostile encampments. Presently, he descried a lad leading two horses near the French works. Trusting that his yellow livery and wretched Walloon tongue might suffer him to pass for a Frenchman, he tethered his captain’s horse and advanced on foot. The lad took him for one of his own side, answering his inquiries as to the hour and the identity of his master.
Smith bided his time until the swell of the ground once more hid them from the view of the French pickets. Thereupon he seized the boy, thrust into his mouth a gag he had made ready, pinioned his hands behind his back, and made off on horseback with the choicer of the beasts. An alarm was raised and shots were sent after him, yet he gained his camp unscathed. This incident—the capture of a child and the theft of a horse—is related in the notice as a proof of his intrepidity; it reveals as well the narrative’s propensity to lend a picturesque air to any deed wherein a bold criminal distinguishes himself.
Nor was Smith always left to measure such perils alone. At another time, while he and his captain were abroad on a foraging party, an officer of their troop, who bore a hundred pistoles about him, fell in a skirmish. Night was descending, and both armies lay awaiting reinforcements; none could venture out to recover the corpse without risking discovery. Smith offered to fetch the gold, provided he were granted half the spoil. His captain consented. Smith crawled two hundred yards upon his belly, rifled the pockets of the dead man, and crept back neither perceived nor suspected.
Following the reduction of the forces, Smith went to sea, serving under Admiral Byng at the action off Cape Passaro, near Messina. The note annexed to the original account recalls Byng’s expedition against the Spanish fleet in 1718, though it fixes no date for Smith’s discharge from the service. Discharged upon his return from the Mediterranean, he repaired to London. Having squandered his prize-money, he fell to petty thefts to replenish his purse. The author imputes this downward course chiefly to his consorting with a man named Woolford, who was subsequently hanged. Smith attended his execution, and afterwards took up with his widow.
The catastrophe arose from an earlier connection. Sarah Thompson had quitted Smith to dwell with another man. The chronicle relates this separation purely through the injuries she is said to have done him, allowing Sarah herself no voice. Encountering her near Wapping, Smith, instead of passing on, clapped a pistol to her breast, heaping curses and violent threats upon her. Several bystanders ran to her rescue, striving to tear her from his clutches and avert a slaughter.
In the scuffle, Smith fired. Matthew Walden was struck and perished upon the spot. The gathering crowd closed in upon the marksman and pinioned him. The text notes that the fact was deemed clearly proven at his trial, though it affords no details of the depositions or the legal arguments advanced. Smith was found guilty at the ensuing sessions of the Old Bailey. Whatever he might argue regarding his intent toward Sarah, he could not undo the dead man whom his weapon had left among those who came to her aid.
In the condemned hold, Smith bore himself with resolution, professing repentance for his vices as well as for the final act that brought him to his doom. He admonished his visitors to beware the “snares” of abandoned women—words derived both from the moralising tone of the chronicle and from his own dying paper, which cast an undue share of the blame upon the female sex. Yet in the letter he delivered at the place of execution, he confessed he had used his lawful wife exceedingly ill, declaring she had been far too good for him. He explained that he had first abandoned her because of his debts and his departure for the sea. Touching Sarah, he protested he had harboured no design to murder her, declaring he had mastered his passion when the loaded pistol touched her breast; in his own version of the fray, he had merely flung a candlestick at her. This detail, brought forward as a token of his restraint, was plainly part of his own special pleading.
Smith confessed, moreover, to having committed sundry thefts aboard ship, though he denied having ever stolen upon dry land. This denial stands in flat contradiction to the printed notice, which recounts robberies committed after his return to London; the document preserved from the foot of the scaffold is thus by no means a complete confession of his career. Lastly, he besought all men not to cast his crimes in the teeth of his wife and children, whom he pronounced wholly innocent. This belated solicitude brings to light the family he had left behind, without lessening the gulf between his words of contrition and the felonies ascribed to him by the chronicler.
John Smith was executed at Tyburn on the 8th of February, 1722, being about forty years of age. A life begun under the colours, amid a war wherein audacity was commended by one's superiors, came to an end in a street brawl where a man lost his life in a quarrel to which he was an utter stranger. The original account lays heavy stress on evil company and women; yet the plainest truth of the matter remains unmistakable: Smith leveled a pistol at Sarah Thompson, pulled the trigger when others sought to interpose, and Matthew Walden died of the shot.