In the early hours of Wednesday, 19 November 1828, four men broke into Grove Cottage, the residence of the Reverend William Warrington, at West Moulsey in Surrey. They gained entry through an upper-storey window by means of a ladder left by chance in the neighbouring garden. That garden belonged to a magistrate, Mr Jeffs, whose grounds adjoined those of the Warringtons. The cords used to bind the inmates had likewise been purloined from his premises. The thieves carried off money, jewels, silver plate, and subsequently a horse and phaeton. The matter was not cleared up in the days that followed; it brought William Banks to trial only after the lapse of several months.
Between one and two o’clock in the morning, Mrs Warrington was writing in her bedchamber. Her husband lay asleep in the same room. She heard men forcing a first-floor window—that which opened upon the staircase and the passage leading to their chamber. The four strangers ascended toward her. When she raised the alarm, her husband had barely time to leap from his bed and seize a loaded pistol kept upon the mantelpiece. He discharged it at the first intruder who entered, but missed his mark.
This man in turn drew a pistol from beneath his coat. The powder failed to ignite at the first attempt; at the second, the priming flashed in the pan without the piece going off. Mrs Warrington fell upon her knees and implored the intruders to spare her husband’s life, bidding them take whatever property the house contained. The men did not withdraw. They pinioned the couple with their hands behind their backs, threatening their lives should they cry out.
The two maidservants, the sole other inhabitants of the house, were likewise bound. The four men conducted them down into a vaulted cellar beneath the dwelling and locked them within, with scarce sufficient clothing to protect them from the cold. They then returned above stairs to ransack the Warringtons’ chamber, forcing open desks and drawers, and turning the household effects upside down. They carried off some thirty pounds in ready money, together with jewellery and valuable plate.
The first to effect an escape was one of the maidservants. After several hours, she succeeded in disengaging one hand and breaking through the cellar door. A second door at the head of the stairs still barred her progress; having forced this obstacle, she reached the Warringtons, who remained bound fast in their chamber. She delivered them, and then released the other servant. The neighbours were raised. Mr Warrington discovered that his stable horse, valued at eighty guineas, and his phaeton were likewise gone. The conveyance had evidently served to bear away the plunder.
Mr Cooke, a constable of Kingston, set out upon the track of the horse and vehicle. He traced them by a circuitous route toward Walton Bridge, and thence through sundry byways as far as Knightsbridge. Two of the robbers were pursued along this portion of the road, yet the scent did not lead to an apprehension. The carriage and horse were recovered in London; the men who had entered Grove Cottage remained unknown.
Mr Warrington likewise laid an information of the robbery at Bow Street. Ellis, Ruthven, and Bishop received instructions to investigate and pursue the depredators. The officers who came to examine the premises noted certain particulars that suggested two hypotheses. The forcing of the chests and drawers appeared to them clumsy, as though the perpetrators lacked experience. They also discovered that six slugs had been extracted from Mr Warrington’s pistol, which had stood upon the mantelpiece for several days. This circumstance prompted the suspicion that the burglary had been facilitated or prepared by someone within the household. The familiarity with which one of the intruders had addressed a servant as “Fanny” strengthened their suspicions against her; the fact that she had been the first to free herself likewise told in their inquiries.
This servant was taken into custody. After a few days’ detention, the officers declared themselves unable to produce positive proof against her, and she was set at liberty. Suspicion did not constitute legal proof, and the narrative nowhere records that she took part in the robbery. For months the police pursued their investigations without succeeding in identifying the perpetrators of the burglary or recovering a certain trail from the tracks of the phaeton.
In July 1829, the silence was broken by Barnett, then under sentence of transportation for life for a burglary committed at the house of Mr Colebatch in Thames Street. Anxious to escape this doom, he offered to impeach the members of a confederacy subsequently styled the “Moulsey Gang,” upon condition of obtaining his liberty. His proposal was accepted. He named Banks and four other men: John Smith, William Johnson, James Taylor, and William Potts, otherwise Emery. This revelation reopened the Warrington file, though it emanated from a convict seeking to purchase his own enlargement.
Officer Cragg of Bow Street was charged with apprehending Banks. He learned that the fugitive had repeatedly declared he would never be taken alive. Cragg assumed the garb of a butcher and hunted for him several days before coming upon his trace. At the moment of arrest, Banks made no resistance. Pelham records that he exclaimed: “I am a dead man.” A loaded pistol was found upon his person; he wore, moreover, a coat that the investigation traced to an earlier burglary committed at the house of Mr Campion, at Waltham Cross.
The other men were apprehended about the same time. Potts had pawned a pair of shoes stolen from Campion. Upon their examination before the Bow Street magistrates, Banks’s complicity in both burglaries was, according to the account, established. This branch of the inquiry must not be confounded with the indictment that subsequently led to trial: the record relates Banks’s conviction for the burglary at Grove Cottage, while it reports no verdict against his associates in respect of that dwelling.
Mr and Mrs Warrington identified Banks as one of the men who had entered their house. They added, however, that he had exhibited a degree of humanity and had opposed the violence of his confederates. This testimony on their part neither unfastened the cords with which they had been bound nor restored the property carried off; it formed an integral part of their identification. The evidence against the other men was not deemed sufficiently conclusive to commit them upon this charge. Banks alone was prosecuted for the burglary of the Warringtons.
At his trial at the Surrey Assizes, he was found guilty and received sentence of death. Following his condemnation, the chronicle portrays him rejecting the consolations of the chaplain and declaring that he entertained no belief in an afterlife. He avowed that the only circumstance attending his execution that gave him concern was the physical pain it would inflict upon him. This demeanour, as recorded by Pelham, wrought no change in the sentence. Banks was hanged at Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 11 January 1830.
The inquiry had begun with a ladder borrowed from a neighbouring garden and had long been halted before unproven suspicions. It culminated in Banks when Barnett surrendered the names of the men he accused, and when the Warringtons recognized one of their number. The record preserves, too, their reservation touching his conduct during the outrage. The ladder, the cords, the horse, and the carriage had enabled the intruders to cross the threshold of the house; the testimony of witnesses, however, brought only a single man to the condemnation recorded by Pelham.