The letter did not sue for pardon. It asked for a saw.
Daniel Dawson was writing to his wife from the condemned cell. A small back-saw, he told her, sufficiently fine to cut through an iron bar; sods of turf to conceal its passage; a stout length of cord, knotted at intervals, which an accomplice might fling over the gaol wall. He had calculated the precise hour at which the turnkeys would unlock the gates and the delay before his absence could be discovered. In the narrative of Camden Pelham, published in 1887, this letter represents the final stratagem of a man whose conviction had already barred nearly every avenue of hope.
The offence that brought him to this pass did not begin with violence against a fellow man. Dawson moved in the orbit of racehorses and betting rings. Pelham portrays him first as an informant to petty gamblers, worming out of stable-boys and yard-hands intelligence which his patrons hoped might turn to profit. Having scraped together a modest purse, he began wagering on his own account. The chronicler passes severe judgment upon his breeding and his associates; this social portrait belongs to Pelham alone, not to an indictment we can scrutinise today. The central allegation related by his text is far simpler: in order to win, Dawson resolved to disable the opposing horses from running.
Pelham places in April 1811 the day when Dawson brought a large quantity of arsenic in solution to a watering trough. Two horses, belonging to Lord Foley and Sir F. Standish, were to drink from it. The preparation was of such virulence that its effect was not merely to slacken their pace: the beasts died. This outcome transformed an act of sabotage into a fatal poisoning. The text describes neither the creatures nor their agonies; nor does it name the precise locality, the hour, or the wagers laid. It records only the essential chain of facts: a shared trough, a poison, two noble owners of bloodstock, and a mortality exceeding what Dawson himself claimed to have contemplated.
Suspicion fell upon Dawson and his confederate, Cecil Bishop. According to Pelham, Bishop made a full confession, further accusing Dawson of having poisoned, in 1809, a horse belonging to a Mr Adams at Royston. He furnished additional particulars which, in the compiler’s estimation, forged a compelling chain of evidence. These words reflect Pelham’s own appraisal; the chapter reproduces neither the confession nor the depositions said to have corroborated it. Bishop was admitted as King’s evidence. The judicial proceedings that followed, as the volume relates them, strictly divide two charges which a summary might easily confound.
At the Lent Assizes in Cambridge, Dawson was brought up as a principal in the 1811 poisoning. Pelham states that while the bill of indictment charged him as a principal, the evidence showed him to have been merely an accessary; upon this point of law, he was acquitted. He remained detained, however, upon another indictment for poisoning horses in 1809. In August 1812, he was arraigned before the assizes upon this second bill. This time, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. The chronicler records neither the witnesses examined at this trial nor the weight the jury attached to Bishop’s testimony. It is impossible, therefore, to reconstruct the debates beyond this bare succession of charge, acquittal, renewed prosecution, and capital conviction.
For a brief season, Dawson clung to the hope of royal clemency. Pelham links this expectation to certain communications received by Lord Foley, who consented to support his petition for mercy. The chronicle reveals neither the substance of these entreaties nor the precise motive for his lordship’s intervention. The suit proved fruitless. It was then that the cord and the saw entered the narrative. The letter addressed to his wife set forth a minute plan: concealing the tool in turf, conveying it into his cell, severing a single bar, and joining an accomplice who was to hold a line on the other side of the wall. Dawson selected a rainy night and even specified the knots intended to assist his climb.
The execution of the design hinged entirely upon the saw reaching him. The turnkey detected the letter in the hands of Dawson’s wife. Pelham explains that the gaoler’s suspicions had been aroused by the uncommon distress marking their parting embrace. This circumstance belongs to the compiler’s chronicle; no other testimony survives to illuminate what passed between the spouses or what measure of the plot was known to the woman. Yet the letter remains sufficient proof of the scheme Dawson sought to set on foot; its seizure prevents the historian from treating the escape as anything more than an abortive design. The gates were never cleared; the wall was never scaled.
His stratagem having miscarried, Pelham records that Dawson meditated self-destruction. From this he was dissuaded by the chaplain. The condemned man thereafter resigned himself to his fate, never ceasing to deny that he had ever intended to destroy the horses. He maintained to the last that his sole design was to prevent them from winning. This line of defence does not dispute the administration of the poison as recorded by Pelham; it rests entirely upon the question of malice prepense and the gulf between the intended sabotage and the fatal issue. The animals died. The record preserves this distinction without supplying the depositions that would allow us to test its veracity.
The prisoner’s final days are cast by Pelham into a scene of devout edification. Dawson prayed, cast himself upon divine mercy, ate a hearty breakfast on the morning of his execution, and received the sacrament. He bound about his neck a black ribbon a yard in length, which he requested might be delivered to his wife. The book omits the exact date of the hanging. It states only that at noon, upon a market day, Dawson was led out upon the drop atop Cambridge Castle before an immense concourse of people. He met his death without a struggle.
The account ends abruptly, without returning to the trough of April 1811 or to the poisoned horses. It leaves us the record of a two-stage prosecution—the first terminating in an acquittal, the second in a capital conviction—together with an intercepted letter that never matured into an escape. Pelham closes his volume upon the convict’s end; the judicial rolls and original depositions remain absent from our inquiry. The last iron bar Dawson dreamed of sawing through was not the only division in his history: between the indictment of 1811 and the conviction for the misdeeds of 1809, the source preserves two distinct causes which the reader must keep apart.