At the very foot of the stake, Barbara Spencer still steadfastly refused to name those who had instructed her in the art of counterfeiting coin. She declared that a man and a woman, who had long since abandoned that unlawful trade and were now living in honest repute, had taught her the mystery. She would not be brought to inform against them, even though their blood might, by her own reckoning, have purchased her own life. Though she had bitterly complained to the last extremity of having been betrayed by Mrs. Miles, her former confederate, she would not answer treachery with treachery. In London, she affirmed, great numbers plied the selfsame fraud, and ought to take solemn warning from her wretched end.
The chronicler sets this final resolution at the close of an existence marked by chastisement and rupture. Before recounting Barbara’s fate, the author explains that the coining of false money was regarded as an assault upon the King’s sovereignty. The value of coin, he observes, depends upon its weight and the purity of its metal as ordained by public authority; to fashion a baser piece intended for circulation was nothing less than to usurp that authority. Under William and Mary, Parliament reinforced the statutes against coining, clipping, and lightening the currency, as well as the possession and trade of instruments for its manufacture. Another act, passed in the reign of Queen Anne, made this severity permanent. The chronicler reminds the reader that those convicted of high treason in this kind risked the capital penalty, and that royal clemency was exceedingly rare.
Barbara was the daughter of poor parents and was bred by her mother in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate. The old chronicler ascribes much of the impetuous temper he imputes to the young woman to maternal indulgence. While yet a child, following a domestic quarrel, Barbara asked to be put out to an apprenticeship; she was placed with a mantua-maker who had known her from her infancy. There she tarried about two years. A few sharp words exchanged with her mistress were sufficient, according to the chronicle, to induce her to quit her place and return to her mother, who had by then opened a brandy-shop.
Upon her return, the mother hired a servant-maid, for Barbara refused to set her hand to domestic drudgery. The young woman soon fell into strife with the maid; the mother took the servant’s part, whereupon Barbara flounced from the house. A reconciliation subsequently permitted her return, her mother then keeping an alehouse in the parish of Cripplegate. This domestic peace endured somewhat longer, yet the chronicle portrays it as merely the prelude to a more fatal breach.
One day, Barbara took it into her head to see the malefactors die at Tyburn. Her mother barred the door against her, telling her there was far too much work within for her to gad abroad. The dispute grew exceedingly vehement; the mother struck her, declaring that she would be her ruin and the death of her. Barbara departed notwithstanding. The man who squired her then conducted her to a house near St. Giles’s Pound. There, having related her grievance, she vowed she would never cross her mother’s threshold again. Those present confirmed her in this rash purpose. Shortly thereafter, she was admitted to the dark secrets of that dwelling and was tasked with putting off false coin.
This trade at first pleased her well, since it afforded her that very independence she had sought through so many desertions. But she was presently discovered, carried to Newgate, found guilty, and mulcted in a fine. It was in this affair that she made the acquaintance of Mrs. Miles, who advanced her the money to discharge her penalty. Thus, she who had succoured Barbara in her first distress became thereafter the principal witness against her.
In the indictment that brought her to the gallows, the evidence would scarcely have sufficed without the testimony of this same Miles, the chronicler affirms. This circumstance gave their altered footing the bitter hue of treason in Barbara’s eyes. She harboured her resentment against her former associate even unto her final moments. Her mother, the chronicle relates, had herself suffered death at Tyburn before midsummer. Barbara professed to have attended her to the place of execution without ever dreaming she was destined so soon to follow her thither. She stoutly maintained that her mother had been unjustly dealt with, though the record nowhere specifies the crime laid to her charge.
Under sentence, Barbara could not bring herself to believe that the doom of the stake would be executed upon her. Nor would she allow that coining was a sin in the sight of God. Her temper, described by the chronicler as impatient and mutable, hindered her from preserving that settled gravity expected of a condemned felon. He records that she declared she could not assume a sorrowful countenance, though protesting that her heart was as deeply touched as those whose repentance made a greater outward show. The chronicler looked askance at these protestations, leaving it to the divine judgment to determine the sincerity of souls.
As the fatal day drew near, the terror of the flames supplanted her former boldness. She then confessed her guilt more unreservedly than she had ever done before. Yet she would not deliver up her two instructors. She described them as reclaimed from their evil ways, and vowed she would not purchase her life at the cost of their blood. This silence did not wash away her misdeeds; it stands only as proof of her unshakeable refusal to redeem her neck by turning informer. The chronicle does not suggest that any offer of a pardon was made her in exchange for these names. Nothing is known of the identity of this pair, nor of their exact part in the fraud, nor whether the magistrates ever succeeded in discovering them by other means.
The penalty ordained by law for women convicted of high or petty treason was the stake, the chronicle reminds us. Barbara beheld the faggots and brushwood piled ready for the kindling, and professed how grievous she found such a death to contemplate. The rabble pressed hard upon her; the narrative records that the mob pelted her with stones and dirt, which threw her to the ground and bruised her sorely. She forgave those who had so used her, and prayed with great fervour. These incidents, standing side by side in the chronicler’s closing lines, do not paint the picture of a tranquil conversion: the selfsame page exhibits her still unable to banish Miles from her bitter thoughts, and yet pronouncing words of Christian forgiveness amidst the uproar of the scaffold.
Barbara perished at about twenty-four years of age, on the fifth of July, 1721, the selfsame day as Robert Perkins, according to the reference in the chronicle. The history concludes upon the figure of a condemned woman who had at first denied that her practice was evil, then acknowledged her guilt as the torment approached, yet carried to the fire the names of those who had taught her the craft. Her dying warning was directed to other coiners of false money. The chronicle, for its part, had already set forth the law as the shield and bulwark of the King’s coin; it also reveals a woman whose final resolve could no longer revoke either her crime or her doom.