On June 15, 1724, Peter Curtis went to his death presenting himself as a man who had balked at fire. A woman had urged him to rob the plate from the house where he was employed, and to lay a torch to the premises so that the missing valuables might be thought swallowed by the flames. Curtis declared he had refused to burn the dwelling. Yet he had carried off a great quantity of silverware, which sufficed to lead the inquiry to his door and bring about his condemnation. At the foot of the gallows, he proclaimed to the gathered crowd that those who had devised the burning of the house and its inhabitants had escaped all reckoning, whilst he alone died for the theft.
Curtis, otherwise known as Friend, was born in the country to honest, industrious parents. They secured him an apprenticeship with an anchor-smith, hoping to open to him a future more prosperous than they themselves had dared expect. Peter conceived an aversion to the craft from the very outset. He went to sea once or twice with his master, then seized the first opportunity to run away. He yearned to live in pleasure and could not endure whatever bore the mark of drudgery. In later years, he confessed that Providence had hindered him from finding in that roving life the ease he had promised himself; it had proved far more grievous to him than the trade he had cast aside.
He entered the service of several gentlemen, preserving for years a respectable character. When he resolved to return to the sea, he chose the post of trumpeter over his old artisanal trade, having learned the instrument under a former master. He took ship aboard the Salisbury during the expedition of Sir George Byng toward the Straits of Messina, where the Spanish fleet was engaged and destroyed. Curtis escaped unscathed, though men were killed and others maimed upon his deck. Later, he served in a regiment of dragoons and laid aside fourscore pounds. He might have turned this sum toward a new beginning; the chronicler relates that he was turned from it by a woman with whom he took up lodgings, living for a time as though in lawful wedlock.
Curtis had also bound himself for a heavy debt contracted by a comrade, who left him alone to bear the charge. The creditor, learning he was preparing to go to sea, resolved to stay him. Unable to secure his arrest by ordinary civil process for debt, he concocted, according to the relation, a trumped-up criminal charge. Curtis was committed to the Poultry Compter. A magistrate at length discharged him, yet the creditor caused him instantly to be retaken upon an action for the debt. Confinement, scarcity of victuals, and the absence of any prospect plunged him into despair. The chronicle attributes a decisive influence to the prisoners he encountered in that place of detention: it was there that Curtis supposedly came to believe a man might enrich himself by taking the goods of others.
Having come to an agreement with his creditor, he gained his freedom and found employment with Mr. Fluellen Aspley, a china-man of repute near the Stocks Market. The woman who had formerly lived with him continued to importune him to rob his employer. She averred that, through her acquaintances in the country, she could readily dispose of a thousand pounds’ worth of chinaware. Curtis hesitated; he asked how such a thing could be brought off without awakening suspicion. She answered that he must rely upon her, explaining that once he had let her boy into the shop and delivered the wares into his hands, he might set the house on fire, that the goods might be supposed consumed in the conflagration.
The thought of burning the house appeared so frightful to him that he rejected that part of the plot. He consented, however, to steal a large quantity of plate and delivered it into the woman’s hands. When she attempted to offer it for sale, she was apprehended and the theft came to light. The authorities at first possessed no direct proof against Curtis; he was accordingly discharged, though he remained under suspicion. Mr. Aspley himself interceded on his behalf. Shortly thereafter, fresh evidence pointed to Curtis as the principal author of the felony. He was arrested anew, brought to trial at the following sessions, and condemned.
Under sentence of death, Curtis at first made a great show of devotion. He prayed with fervor, made broad confession of his sins, and performed all that might, in the chronicler’s view, persuade onlookers that his repentance was unfeigned. The narrator, however, ultimately judged this demeanor to be mere artifice. Curtis and other condemned malefactors clung to the hope of a reprieve or an escape. They had filed through their irons and prepared an outbreak which, according to the record, was to be effected at the peril of the turnkeys’ lives. The plot was discovered on the Saturday preceding the execution. When Curtis perceived that his hope of pardon was utterly extinguished, the chronicle describes him as truly contrite at last, though little time remained before the end.
Before the multitude, he appeared remarkably composed and of good cheer. He addressed the crowd, recurring to the design of arson proposed by his companion. He declared that those who had devised the burning of the house and the people therein walked free, whilst he was to die though he had never consented to that wickedness. This assertion was his own; it altered nothing of the sentence pronounced against him for the theft of the plate. Nor did it reveal the names of the persons he glanced at, nor their subsequent fate before the law.
He was likewise questioned concerning a portmanteau and some fourteen hundred pounds said to have been concealed. Curtis did not deny having hidden them. He stated they lay upon Finchley Common, and that he had taken for an ambassador’s the coat of arms thereon, which bore a spread eagle. He was also known to wear a diamond ring. As to where he had procured it, he avoided any direct answer and seemed vexed that he should be pressed upon the matter at the very point of death. The chronicle thus preserves the particulars he let fall, without establishing to whom the goods belonged or by what means they had been obtained.
Curtis died at about thirty years of age. His history links a capital conviction for theft to a sequence of choices made under the instigation of others: the creditor’s machination to cast him into gaol, his mistress’s importunities to rob Aspley, and the attempted prison-break ascribed to him by the chronicler. He was not indicted for setting fire to the house; he consistently maintained he had refused the deed. Yet he was condemned for the theft he had indeed committed, and of which fresh proofs, by the narrative’s account, had established his guilt. His dying speech did not wipe away the felony, but gave vent to his bitterness against those whom he deemed the contrivers of a far darker crime.