Thomas Wilson was executed at Tyburn on the 26th of July, 1722, being then about twenty years of age. Prior to his execution, he had delivered to the public a written confession wherein he acknowledged sundry robberies and implored forgiveness for his crimes. Yet, while standing in the cart moments before his death, he cautioned the assembled spectators against believing him responsible for a robbery laid to the charge of one Phelps, of whose arrest he had just received intelligence. This lingering vacillation between confession and denial marks the close of his history: Wilson had pleaded guilty to several indictments, yet he reserved his final utterance to contest a single, particular affair.
He was born near London, of parents by no means destitute, who bestowed upon him such schooling as their circumstances allowed. In his childhood, he preferred vagrancy and petty pilfering to the instruction they sought to give him. His parents rebuked and corrected him when he robbed orchards—misdemeanours that other households might have overlooked as mere boyish pranks. Wilson found such restraint intolerable. He quitted the paternal roof and roved for a time, subsisting upon similar shifts. Upon his return, his parents, who had hitherto shown him great tenderness, received him with marked coolness; he thereupon resolved to sever all ties with them entirely.
At the age of thirteen, he took to the sea without their consent. Wilson made but a single voyage to the Baltic, yet the chronicle portrays him as an unruly seaman, who was whipped fourteen times, suspended by the heels, and beaten on six separate occasions for his infractions aboard. This unsparing discipline gave him a hearty disgust for the service. Returning to England, he repaired to his family and made his submission, after the sullen manner of his temper, promising a readier obedience for the future. His parents bound him to a sawyer near Fleet Ditch. There he laboured for four years with honesty and a tolerable degree of contentment, until the longing for an unfettered life once more gained the mastery over him.
He abandoned his master to embark upon a merchantman bound for the Straits. While the vessel lay waiting for her lading, he fell into a sickness which the chronicler ascribes to the fierce heat of the climate and an intemperate indulgence in wine and fruit. He likewise fell into dissolute company and returned to England in an extremely languishing condition, the captain having brought him home out of pure charity. The author observes that his native air wrought an almost miraculous restoration; he supposes further that Wilson was cured of those distempers contracted in his commerce with Spanish women, though he refrains from specifying their precise nature.
Shortly thereafter, Wilson conceived a passion for an industrious young woman of reputed honesty, whom he prevailed upon to marry him. Her kindred, well acquainted with his disorderly courses, withdrew her from his company, unwilling that she should be dragged down in his ruin. The chronicler then depicts a man who bore this separation with heavy melancholy, betaking himself to those companions who were presently to enlist him in their crimes. He asserts that Wilson was thenceforth seldom sober, imputing his excesses to the bereavement of his wife and the bitter remorse he felt for his own conduct. This psychological portrait remains the narrator’s own; the facts he subsequently details are those of the robberies charged upon the confederacy Wilson joined.
These men were notorious for the barbarity with which they fell upon travellers. They relied not primarily upon pistols to intimidate wayfarers, but upon heavy bludgeons heavily loaded with lead at the head. Concealed behind a hedge, they would strike down a passing traveller, then leap forth to strip and bind him fast. The chronicle places these assaults upon the thoroughfares leading to the villages of pleasure surrounding London. It exhibits a violence deliberate and calculated to disable the victim before an alarm could be raised or pursuit commenced.
Upon the Bow road, the gang fell in with a footman. They struck him down without the least warning. Stunned by his fall and terrified by his assailants, he offered no resistance while they stripped him of his money and watch, his hat, peruke, waistcoat, and a pair of silver buckles. One of the footpads observed a ring upon his finger, which the footman piteously entreated them to leave him, protesting it had been the gift of his mistress. The first ruffian seemed inclined to relent. Wilson thereupon seized the servant’s hand and tore the ring from it, taunting the wretch the while upon the provenance of his jewel. The record preserves neither the footman’s name nor the value of the ring; it merely reveals how little supplications availed whenever an object had once caught Wilson’s eye.
Some days later, being in liquor, Wilson resolved to venture out alone, that he might not be compelled to divide his booty. He had walked scarce half an hour when he overtook a man carrying upon the end of a stick a parcel of small glazed pots. Wilson felled him with his loaded cudgel and seized the bundle. Yet, seeking to rifle his victim more thoroughly, he lost his footing and tumbled backward into the ditch. The traveller seized the moment to scramble up and make his escape. Wilson, having recovered himself, made for a house of resort frequented by his associates and opened his prize. He found within four pots, each holding a pound of snuff, and four gallipots of perfumed pomatum. The booty sorely disappointed the thief, who had looked for richer spoil; as for the victim, he had made good his flight.
Upon another night, Wilson and an associate espied a Mr. Cowell near Islington. His comrade was bent on attacking him, but Wilson, fearing the gentleman might know his face, earnestly begged him to desist. His fellow brushed his fears aside. They rifled Cowell of his hat, his wig, and about a shilling in money. Wilson was shortly apprehended; his accomplice, receiving timely intelligence of the capture, fled into Holland. At the following sessions, Wilson stood indicted for this assault and for several other robberies of a like nature. He pleaded guilty to every indictment, declaring he looked for no favour, seeing he had done so little good among men.
Under sentence of death, he applied his mind to religion, offering to make such disclosures as lay in his power for the service of justice or of the public. He drew up a written paper, which he delivered at Tyburn with much solemnity. In this document, he recounted first a robbery committed upon the road between Highgate and Hornsey. He and his companion had chanced upon a man and a woman enquiring the way to Upper Holloway. The two rogues drank off two pints of ale to hearten their courage, dogging the couple until they robbed them of two shillings and some halfpence, together with the woman’s apron, hat, and coloured handkerchief. Wilson affirmed that they dismissed them without rough usage, though they had at first debated whether to use them ill. His comrade had fled to Holland after Wilson’s arrest; the latter declared he would not have impeached him, but that his friends were residing in that country.
Wilson likewise related a robbery committed near a barn upon the church path to Pancras: a hat, a knotted peruke, a cane, and the wares borne by a wayfarer. They had received intelligence that their victim carried a considerable sum of money; yet the man proved fleeter of foot than Wilson, who was heavy with drink and subsequently rejoiced that he had himself made his escape. In this same writing, he confessed to stripping two men near Copenhagen House of their coats and waistcoats, and to committing sundry street robberies in the vicinity of Lincoln’s Inn. He implored pardon of God and man for these misdeeds, as well as for having discharged a pistol before Justice Perry at the adversary of a friend; he added that it was a great relief to his conscience that he had not killed the man.
The paper contained, lastly, particulars touching his associates. Three of the most notorious, Wilson said, had escaped into Holland before his apprehension; two others lay in Newgate for lesser offences; while a final accomplice, whom he steadfastly refused to name, had retired into Warwickshire, where he was married and now led an honest and industrious life. These disclosures were addressed to the public, yet Wilson was by no means minded to deliver up every man whose company he had kept. He protested that he would not have informed against his partner who had gone into Holland, and he preserved the anonymity of the man settled in Warwickshire.
In the cart, on the day of his execution, Wilson showed a greater firmness of countenance than his fellow-sufferers, standing up repeatedly to be viewed by the concourse. He exhorted them to lend no credit to any apocryphal accounts that might be cried about, seeing he had already delivered his own paper for the public satisfaction. He then stated he had learned that one Phelps had been committed to Newgate for a robbery mentioned in his paper. He solemnly declared that he had never known Phelps, nor had he ever been concerned in the robbery for which that man stood committed. This tardy denial stands recorded in the selfsame chronicle alongside his plea of guilty to the indictments at the sessions and the robberies he had himself committed to paper. Wilson then adjusted the halter about his neck and died, resolute, on the 26th of July, 1722, aged about twenty years.