Within the walls of Newgate Prison, Mrs. Maycock’s little boy remained constantly beside John Stanley, regularly falling asleep in his arms, according to the chronicle. His mother had perished by Stanley’s own hand; the capital sentence was now to tear the child from his father. This tableau marks the close of the path trodden by a former officer who, having cast aside several posts, slew the woman by whom he had fathered this son.
John was the son of an army officer. His mother was the sister of a Mr. Palmer, of Duce Hill, in Essex. The chronicler affirms that when the boy was but five years of age, his father made him parry and thrust with a sword, pricking him himself and encouraging fellow officers to play with him in like manner, so that he might never dread the cold point. The chronicler condemns this manner of rearing, discerning therein the fountainhead of his later ruin.
Young Stanley subsequently served under his father in the army across Spain and Portugal. The chronicle relates that he endured hardships there, yet after engagements took pleasure in trampling the bodies of the slain left upon the field. It thus links the swordsmanship of his childhood to a military existence wherein violence lingered even in the wake of combat. His father brought him back to England, where the elder officer was himself committed to Newgate after wounding a near kinsman of Lord Newbury with his sword, according to the record.
Afterwards released and dispatched to Ireland, the officer took his son along and secured him an ensign’s commission in a regiment. There the young man fell in with extravagant companions, among whom, says the chronicler, were persons of high quality. Some of these associates continued to visit and succour him when he was himself later confined in Newgate. Yet the lavish expenditures into which this company drew him led him to sell his commission for ready coin, causing his father keen sorrow and distress. The narrative portrays a son capable of obtaining advancement through family influence, yet abandoning that career to sustain the dissolute lifestyle to which he had grown attached.
Having returned to London, he rejected the assistance his father urged him to solicit from General Stanhope, a former patron of the family. He chose rather to subsist upon the bounty of his friends, gaming, and the favours of women. He accompanied a young Yorkshire squire through Flanders and Holland, where he could converse knowingly on fortifications; in Paris, he acquired great skill in the art of fencing. The chronicle connects this mastery with his readiness to pick quarrels, though such a causal link remains the narrator’s own interpretation.
Among the women whose company he kept, he formed an attachment to Mrs. Maycock, whose husband had been a tradesman of substantial means on Ludgate Hill. She bore him several children, and the chronicle notes that he loved one of them, a little boy, with particular fondness. The chronicler asserts that Stanley had lived with her for a time as though she were his lawful wife, and had even prevailed upon his mother to visit her under that title. In later days, he deemed Maycock’s commerce with other men a betrayal, even as he indulged in other amours himself. This reproof illustrates above all the inequity of conduct charged against him: he claimed for himself a liberty he could ill brook in the woman he claimed to love.
A suitable commission in the service of the Royal African Company was intended to afford him a fresh start. His father had obtained it; Stanley had received a handsome sum to defray the charges of the voyage and appeared well pleased, raising better hopes in his family. Yet as he was upon the point of embarking, Maycock arrived at Portsmouth with their child. According to the account, she obtained half of the company’s advance. Stanley returned to London with the remainder, avoiding his father’s house. Learning that his son had abandoned the voyage, the elder Stanley was overwhelmed with grief and died shortly thereafter. The chronicle lays this death to sorrow, without adducing medical evidence. It adds that upon receiving the tidings, Stanley was seized with anguish and fury; companions reportedly believed that this blow unsettled him permanently.
At his trial, witnesses recounted his fits of rage, followed by entreaties for forgiveness, as well as an incident at Underhill’s where he reportedly attempted to wound himself after lamenting his squandered opportunities to master Latin. The source does not record how the jury weighed these testimonies.
The account thereafter depicts a man of straitened means who invited himself to dinner and would provoke quarrels at table, going so far as to draw his sword. When Maycock took to frequenting a house in the Old Bailey, some surmised she was receiving other men there; the chronicler himself notes that this was suspected, perhaps justly, yet the phrasing offers no certainty. One night, Stanley caught sight of her in Fleet Street in company with a man and a woman. He stepped up; she knew him, and they walked together to her lodgings in the Old Bailey. The source records a recriminatory dispute over the miseries they had mutually inflicted: she reproached him with having seduced her and dragged her into a wretched existence; he upbraided her for thwarting his voyage to the coast of Africa and squandering large sums, while throwing her relations with other men in her face.
Stanley maintained that during this altercation, Maycock dashed a cup of beer in his face. After an exchange of bitter words, he drew his sword and struck her in the breast, dealing a deep wound; he then pressed a handkerchief to the gash. He was quickly overpowered and conveyed to the watchhouse, thence to prison. The chronicle notes that he showed little contrition at that moment, jesting and affecting a bold indifference, before his transfer to Newgate.
In prison, he spoke incessantly of his amorous conquests and the attentions he claimed to have received from gentlewomen of quality. The chronicle suspects that he feigned a greater distraction of mind than was real in order to sway his trial, though it brings no proof. In court, he carried himself in a manner deemed singular by the author; upon hearing his sentence of death, he took snuff and affected airs that incensed the onlookers. Once condemned, he laid wagers that he would never be hanged, hinting at other escapes from the gallows. When all prospect of deliverance vanished, the chronicle notes a marked change in his bearing.
His friends offered to raise a substantial sum and exert their interest, yet were at last obliged to inform him that nothing could preserve his life. The child remained by his side; when Stanley learned of the death of Maycock’s brother, he is said to have voiced his misery, declaring himself the most wretched of men. A few days before the execution, he remarked to a friend that he now regarded it as false valour to evade the stroke of the law by self-murder. He avowed contrition for his former vaunting words and professing to find composure in his resolve not to shun the sentence.
Following a sermon on the Sunday preceding his execution, he expressed regret that he had not set fire to the house wherein Maycock had died. Rebuked for such an utterance, he reportedly acknowledged it to be wicked, attributing it to flights of fancy that at times transported him beyond himself.
To Tyburn he was conveyed in a mourning coach. He turned pale, complained of sickness, and begged to be supported. He desired to be unbound that he might pray upon his knees; a favour granted only with difficulty, says the chronicle. He prayed with great fervour, and when the cap was pulled over his eyes, he appeared to weep bitterly. Before his end, he requested that his body should not be withheld from his friends, that they might give him Christian burial. On the 23rd of December, 1722, he was executed in the twenty-fifth year of his age, as the original notice phrases it. The infant he left behind had lost first his mother, and then his father. The chronicle concludes by censuring Stanley’s ungoverned passions and mourning the gifts he might have turned to nobler purpose.