Mr. Clark’s coach had scarcely quitted St. Paul’s for the Inner Temple when several men began to dog its path. At the foot of Water Lane, two of them brought the carriage to a stand. Clark looked out through the door and recognized those who had accosted him. A third thrust his hand into his pocket; another held a cocked pistol to his breast. The watch and money vanished in a matter of moments. The robbery, dated February 28, 1728, in the indictment, was to bring Peter Levee, John Featherby, Stephen Barnham, and Thomas Vaux to a common verdict.
The chronicler attaches these men to the same company, yet assigns to each a disparate course. Peter Levee had been bound apprentice to a silk weaver. Gaming and the frequenting of alehouses had brought him, even in his childhood, to the Compter prison, whence he advanced to shop-lifting and larcenies through open windows. He was several times apprehended and corrected; an unpaid fine kept him four years within Newgate. Upon his enlargement, the source recounts, he returned to thieving through London and upon the turnpikes of the neighbouring villages.
John Featherby had received greater instruction and was intended for the trade of a coach-painter, whereto his mother apprenticed him following his father’s death. The chronicle describes him as rough and clamorous, a demeanour it attributes to his vanity to pass for the captain of his gang. It nonetheless names him as one of the most active hands in their depredations. Stephen Burnet, whose true name was said to be Barnham and who went by the alias of Barnet, was the youngest among them. According to the narrative, he had from his earliest years trailed after Jonathan Wild and Blueskin, and was wont to convey goods from beneath the counters of substantial shops. His family endeavoured to place him in several callings; yet nothing could wean him from his thefts.
Ere they were taken for the assault upon Clark’s carriage, these three men had joined company with Thomas Vaux. The record says little of his youth, but presents him as a chimney-sweeper and an occasional thief, of a brutal carriage even within the gaol. Together, they roved the night in quest of money through street robberies and thefts. Barnham and two other associates, by the relation of the chronicle, squandered one hundred and twenty pounds in three weeks upon taverns, gaming, and women.
An earlier robbery demonstrates the singular boldness with which Barnham treated offers of reward. With Levee and Featherby, he had rifled Mr. Brown, in Dean’s Court hard by St. Paul’s Church, of a gold watch and thirteen guineas. Brown caused an advertisement to be published, offering five guineas to whosoever should restore the timepiece. Barnham thereupon wrote to him, appointing a field near Sadler’s Wells where he was to come with the promised sum. He appeared alone, decently apparelled, received the five guineas, and surrendered the watch. As Brown turned to depart, Barnham drew a cocked pistol. He told him he might well have robbed him anew, but that he was a man of his word. The account adds that Levee and Featherby lay in wait nearby, prepared to fire had Brown brought officers or raised an alarm.
Barnham had previously slipped through the net of justice upon another indictment. Tried at the Kingston Assizes for a felony committed in Surrey, he was acquitted for want of sufficient evidence and straightway resumed his trade. Some three months before his final apprehension, he reappeared in Little Britain, where he was born, bearing a silver spoon and fifteen shillings which he boasted were the fruit of that day’s exploits. He scrambled up a lamppost and declared to the neighbours who gathered to exhort him to mended ways that, within three months, he would do that which would see him hanged. He was mistaken only in the precise spot and the manner of his end.
In the matter of the Water Lane assault, Clark’s deposition furnished the earliest description of the violence. Having set forth in his carriage, he observed three or four men following his vehicle from a toy-shop at the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Upon reaching the lane, Barnham and Vaux barred his passage. Levee mounted the steps and tore into his breeches pocket, carrying off his effects, while Featherby kept a pistol leveled at his person. The booty comprised a silver watch valued at four pounds, a diamond ring, three pounds and eleven shillings in silver coin, and fourteen guineas.
The confessions of Levee and Barnham were read before the court. They owned the robbery and impeached Featherby and Vaux as their accomplices. Alderman Sir William Billers deposed that these confessions had been delivered freely, without promise or menace. Mary Vaux, who had at first excused herself from giving evidence against her husband, affirmed that she had seen the other prisoners commit the robbery and confirmed that Levee had entered the coach. This deposition corroborated, through an eyewitness on the ground, the distribution of parts set forth in the two confessions.
Thomas Wood, who was charged with the capture of Featherby and a man named Cable in a house in Blue Boar’s Head Alley, reported that both snapped their pistols at him, though neither piece discharged. The chronicle does not record whether Cable was prosecuted in the affair. The four prisoners were found guilty, the jury not even withdrawing from the bar. The written confessions of the two culprits, the testimony of Clark, and the deposition of Mary Vaux formed the substance of the proof recorded in this relation.
Once sentenced to die, they demeaned themselves in very different fashions. The text observes that Levee alone appeared truly penitent; he begged pardon for his misbehaviour at his trial and attended devoutly upon the chapel prayers, save when his comrades pulled or jostled him. Featherby, for his part, ceased not to disturb divine service, throwing missiles, laughing, and striking those who stood near him. The keepers were obliged to confine him with the others in the old condemned hold, heavily ironed and stapled to the floor, for three or four days. They were not released until they had promised to conduct themselves with decency.
Upon the arrival of the death warrant, the chronicle relates that Featherby feigned an emotion far livelier than his previous carriage had promised. He prayed with great fervor and professed his hope in divine mercy. Barnham gave over his insolence in the chapel, yet spent his hours in the cell composing a canting song in praise of his companions’ exploits. He petitioned that it be annexed to the printed paper of their dying speeches; the request was denied, as his verses tended only to embolden their confederates to further robberies. Vaux showed himself somewhat more civil after his time in irons, though remaining, by the chronicler’s account, hardened and obstinate. The same source notes that Featherby delivered to the Ordinary a paper wherein he confessed his offences, lamented the grief he had brought upon his mother, and begged that his wicked courses might not be imputed to his relations.
Peter Levee was twenty-four years of age; Featherby was of about the same years, Barnham near nineteen, and Vaux twenty-three. All four were executed at Tyburn on November 11, 1728, in company with nine other malefactors. Their fellowship could not be measured by a single act alone: at Clark’s coach, the depositions parted each man’s gestures, whilst the two confessions bound all four to the violent encounter. Later, within the prison walls, they gave four distinct answers to their doom—contrition, riot, a rejected canting song, and stubbornness—before being conducted to the very same end.