1752: James Lowry, despotical nautical

On this date in 1752 the tyrannous Scottish sea captain James Lowrey or Lowry was hanged at London’s execution dock for beating a crew member to death.

Lowr(e)y came to public notice in 1751 after the return to English shores of his merchantman, the Molly, from a run to Jamaica: ten of his ex-crew subscribed a public advertisement accusing him of murdering their mate on board, to which Lowry replied with advertisements accusing those accusers of mutiny.

Right away the British public knew it had a page-turner on its hands.

The captain had become unreasonably enraged with Kennith Hossack for lagging in his duties as he recovered from an illness, and upon a purported accusation of theft he had the mariner tied up and personally battered him about the head using a doubled-over rope as his cudgel, on Christmas Eve no less. Hossack at last dropped dead, at which point the heartless captain slapped his man and denounced him for “shamming Abraham” (i.e., feigning injury to skip work). Lowry evidently really had it in for Hossack, for the first mate explained that “I don’t know that he ever came upon deck twice in a week without beating him: my heart has bled for him many and many a time.” In the mate’s opinion, these beatings were always for no adequate reason.*

That’s a remark from the Admiralty Trial of Captain Lowry, where his former seamen developed the picture of an intolerably Queeg-like commander liable to take bitter umbrage if his men managed an illicit extra ration of sugar or rum, a guy who carried around a beating-cane with its own name (“the Royal Oak Foremast”) just in case he felt like doling out a disciplinary bludgeon. Three days after Hossack’s death, he came to blows with the second mate; two days after that, a fed-up crew “took the command from him” and ran the ship themselves, although they did not forcibly confine him.

Once the ship put in at Lisbon for repairs on the return journey, Lowry lodged a piracy complaint against his crew, but despite the incredibly serious charges and countercharges, everybody sailed on together for home thereafter, each party perhaps silently calculating the odds that the other would dare to press the case further as against getting on about their lives. Lowry does not appear to have made himself scarce until his former comrades went public with their claims, although once they did so he incriminatingly avoided the thief-takers and the small private reward set upon his capture for a few weeks.

On March 25, 1752, the brute was carried from Newgate Prison to the Execution Dock on the Thames, in a cart surmounted by a silver oar emblematic of the Admiralty. There he was hanged, and his body afterwards put in irons and displayed in infamy down the river at Blackwall.


Lowry pictured as part of a “Scotch Triumvirate” of Caledonian evildoers, along with the Scottish officer William Cranstoun, blamed for seducing Mary Blandy to the gallows, and the more mysterious “Major James MacDonald” whose papers suggest involvement in the South Sea Bubble 32 years prior (?). I’m in good company with my confusion on this MacDonald fellow, as the British Museum can’t identify him either. Check out britishtars.com for a fascinating exposition on the iconographic detail of the Lowry images in this post; we have also featured in this narrative several additional links to that same site’s various posts about the events on the Molly.

We have revisited a few times in these pages the intense commercial bustle among publishers of crime ephemera — in England as well as Ireland. Naturally this headline-grabbing execution excited plenty of competitive hawking.

Two examples appear below; the first of them is by a pair of publishers named Harris and Scott; the second, by Parker and Corbett, who at this time had the deal to publish the Ordinary of Newgate’s accounts. Harris and Scott were first to the market here, in an environment where rapidity counted for a lot; the Ordinary wanted to be sure the public knew that his “official” (according to him) version would be soon forthcoming, so he burdened the pages of London newspapers and even his own Ordinary’s Account of ‘regular’ Tyburn criminals with adverts to that effect.


This image from the London General Advertiser of March 26, 1752, one of several papers to carry the notice. For more on the relationship between publishers and crime in this era, see Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London by Richard Ward

Read on below to enjoy both.

* In fact, one nugget from this case is that an adequate reason for corporal punishment at sea might sit at a much higher threshold than we commonly assume today. Although the Royal Navy was (in)famous for the discipline of the lash, multiple experienced sailors testified at this trial that they never knew floggings or beatings to occur on merchant vessels.

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1751: William Parsons, Grub Street fodder

We return for this post to a hanging we have previously attended, an uncommonly interesting February 11, 1751 dectuple execution at Tyburn.

Hulking pugilist turned Hogarth allegory James Field was one featured attraction in this batch; the other was the Eton-educated, dissolute son of a baronet, one William Parsons.


This is considerably higher society than a baronet, but we don’t need much excuse hereabouts for a Barry Lyndon tribute.

In the broadest strokes he was the sort of parasitic failson whom the more common stock have long loved to detest, his dissipation having seen him first disinherited, then sent abroad with the Royal Navy (he washed out), then rescuing his situation with a favorable marriage and an army appointment before “the extravagant manner in which he lived, and the loss of large sums of money in gambling, compelled him to throw up his commission, and to return … to his country, a beggar and a vagabond.”

Sentenced by a lenient court to the hard New World frontier of Maryland, Parsons leveraged his family’s good name to escape almost immediately from the drudgery of indentured servitude and risked a return to the mother country where he took to the roads to espouse the classic profession of the embarrassed gentleman, and made men stand and deliver.

It sufficed in the end to recognize him returned from transportation to secure his condemnation, at which Parsons excites the loathing of contemporaries and posterity alike by making bold to beg mercy of his judge “in regard to the family to which I belong, who never had a blot in their escutcheon.” Escutcheon this.

In the scheme of things, his career of self-destruction makes the man nothing but a minor malefactor. However, at least for a season his precipitation — because nine Britons in ten would have looked with envy on his situation even as a disinherited ensign or for that matter as a man with the pull to self-parole from penal transportation — made for the sort of morality play ideally suited to the mass print culture burgeoning in the gallows’ shade.

As we have previously noted in an Irish context, the scrabbling biographers of the latest doomed criminal themselves forever arrived at loggerheads, their rival pamphlets chasing preeminence in authority and rapidity before yesterday’s outrage could be displaced in the public memory by tomorrow’s.

The institutional voice of this racket was of course the Ordinary of Newgate, who by this point had for decades been gobbling up publishing residuals thanks to his didactic and ever more embroidered Ordinary’s Accounts. His entry for February 11, 1751 is a fine exemplar of the genre, running to 19 pages of which the last two are taken up with revenue-pumping advertisements.* With apologies to James Field, the Parsons narrative entirely overawes that of his nine fellow-sufferers, with six full pages devoted to lovingly reminiscing this one man’s tragedy.

Among those lines, we find our divine has relaxed his focus on the salvation of his patients long enough to throw an elbow in the direction of the independent hustlers who will be contesting the marketplace against the Ordinary’s own forthcoming Parsons biography.

N. B. If a certain independent Teacher, or any one else intends to print a Life of Parsons write by himself, take Care left he has imposed upon your Credulity, as he has done to all that had any Thing to do with him.

The “teacher” referenced here is probably Grub Street hack Christopher Smart, who had abandoned a praelectorship at Pembroke College for the charms of movable type … but it’s likely the Ordinary merely selected this allusion because his happened to be the flashiest brand at that moment among the scabrous-broadsheet set, like a present-day critic might metonymize media with the name of Rupert Murdoch.** Richard Ward has argued in his Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London that this moment occurs amid an “explosion in printed crime reporting in London in the years 1748-55 … created in large part by [publishers’] efforts to generate and sustain public interest in crime.”

The Rev. John Taylor would indeed like any self-respecting scribe collect a second purse on his prose by recycling his Ordinary’s Account version (prepended with the trial transcript) into a distinct standalone publication — “The Trial and Remarkable Life of William Parsons” &c., which Taylor authenticates on the title plate with the notation, “Publish’d by the Minister who attended him while under Sentence of Death, and at the Place of Execution”.

We have nothing like an exhaustive catalogue of the print ephemera swarming Old Blighty in those days, but at least one rival publisher attempted to “impose upon the Credulity” of Parsons gawkers. Francis Stamper’s† “Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of William Parsons, Esq.” claims to have been “Written by Himself [i.e., Parsons], and Corrected (with Additions) at his own Request by a Gentleman.” It runs upwards of 60 picaresque pages.

In a like vein is “A Genuine, Impartial, and Authentick Account of the Life of William Parsons, Esq.” &c. promulgated by Thomas Parker, a regular haunt of the Old Bailey crime blotter; however, close readers might notice that Parker is also one of the publishers of the Ordinary’s Accounts‡ and for that reason his edition is presumably more commercially congenial to that clergyman. Parker promises besides the expected biography a trove of correspondence to and from Parsons in the dungeons — we might well suspect whose hand has procured it — a good deal of which is taken up in Parsons imposing pleas for intercession upon a friendly earl, on his prosecutor, and upon his family to pull whatever strings they might.

* One of those ads hyped publication of “A COMPLEAT HISTORY OF JAMES MACLEAN, The GENTLEMAN HIGHWAYMAN”; that man had just hanged four months previous. This volume went abroad under the imprimatur of Charles Corbett, who shared with Thomas Parker the contract to publish the Ordinary’s Accounts.

** A satirical poem called “Old Woman’s Dunciad”, itself a travesty of Pope’s “Dunciad”, was in those weeks burning up the London bestseller lists. Smart is targeted for satire in the poem but was also suspected to be the author. In fact, it was the work of another knight of the low literature called William Kenrick — but both Kenrick and Smart intentionally muddied the authorship lurking behind the pen name “Mary Midnight”, which both men employed. (For context on the dizzying 1750-1751 publishing scene, see Christopher Smart: Clown of God.)

† Stamper was a collaborator of William Kenrick’s (see preceding footnote).

‡ Look for it on the first page of the Ordinary’s Account: “Printed for, and sold by T. PARKER, in Jewin-street, and C. CORBETT, over-against St. Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet-street, the only authorised Printers of the Dying Speeches.” This notice is to be found repeatedly in Ordinary’s Accounts of the period; moreover, Corbett and Parker sometimes advertise their potboilers in those same accounts, in language that makes explicit their alliance with the Ordinary. For example, we have this from the March 23, 1752 Account:

In a Few Days will be Published, The Only Genuine and Authentic NARRATIVE OF THE PROCEEDINGS Of the Late Capt. LOWREY, Both before and after he became Commander of the Ship MOLLY: As the same was delivered by himself, in Manuscript, into the Hands of the Rev. Mr. TAYLOR, Ordinary of NEWGATE, some short Time before his Execution.

Printed only for T. PARKER, in JEWIN-STREET, AND C. CORBETT, in FLEET-STREET.

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1726: James Stephens and Patrick Barnel, broadsided

On this date in 1726, two men hanged on Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green.

We meet these men, as we often do in this period, through the cheap hang-day publications that were hurried to press to sell for the occasion, and since in this instance we have two such brochures for the same event, it is a handy occasion to turn our gaze upon these ubiquitous ephemera.

Then as now, publishing was a perilous hustle forever beckoning its practitioners to shady expedients further to enhancing narrow margins.

Public executions — especially those of particularly notorious offenders — were pretty much the clickbait of broadside printers, and this one weird trick they could resort to was hawking rival pages each purporting to be the “last words and confession” of the poor sap on the gallows. Competition for access to a condemned fellow was intense, and where there could be the least question as to authenticity (for formulaic plausibilities could easily be hung around the handful of publicly discoverable facts) printers made free to use these solemn partings to take astonishingly vituperative shots at their commercial rivals* — a sure irreverence entirely in keeping with the carnivalesque orgies for which public hangings became infamous. Here a huckster whose main purpose is to use a dying man’s last passion to retaliate a rival scribbler’s previous libel, there a future gallows-bird relieving a gawker’s pocket of the penny he meant to waste on the tabloid.

Well might we latter-day ghouls thank these unprincipled pushers: their scandalous documents, be they ever so compromised and artless, constitute a rare and precious glimpse into the criminal class of the early modern world.

We are indebted in this instance to James Kelly’s fascinating Gallows Speeches From Eighteenth-Century Ireland, a book we have previously cited, for the two rival, contradictory, and mutually recriminatory broadsides recounting this execution. As Kelly’s own introduction notes, the mere existence of multiple competing reports — which we here humbly present for the reader’s discretion — does underscore “that public demand could sustain this volume of publication in individual instances.” And that fact alone would surely make the list of 26 secrets to make it as a printer in the the 18th century.


The True Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of
Mr. James Stevens and Account of Patrick Barnwell

who are to be executed at St. Stephen’s Green, on Wednesday the 25th Inst. May, 1726, being condemn’d for feloniously taking from Mr. Philip Kennersly of Dame-street, a Glas-case, Value 50l.

GOOD PEOPLE

If it were not usual for Men of every Degree, in my unfortunate Circumstances to make a Kind of Declaration at their Death of their past Behaviour, I shou’d not, as at this Day, nor even should the above mention’d Considerations move me to make this, my Only and Last, were I not sensible of the many Villanous [sic] Falsities, which might be publish’d concerning my unhappy Fate, by Persons of the vilest Characters themselves; such as one Hoy in Pembroke-Court, who publish’d a scandalous and wicked Paper on the last poor Wretches that suffer’d, under the name of G.F. or George Faulkner, a Person known to have no Being in this Kingdom, this long Time past, altho’ make his Tool and Screen for scandalizing the Chiefest of our Just and Good Governours, as vilely as the poor undone Wretches: Beside him, there is another as notorious for the like Villainy, living at the Rein Deer in Montrath-Street, unworthy, and noted for the above named wicked Practice. On these Considerations only, then I say, I the unhappy and unfortunate James Stephens, have thought fit to tender to Richard Dickson of Dame Street, Printer, THIS, for Publication, as he thinks proper.

FIRST, Then, since I see it is the Will of the most High God, whose Name be for ever Blessed, That in this World I should be brought from my Former happy, to this Wretched state, I submit, beseching [sic] humbly for his most Gracious mercy and Forgiveness for my manifold Transgressions in the Follies of my youth, and misspent Time, which began in the City of London, where I first Drew my Breath, being an entire Stranger here, of Creditable and Honest Parents, who Bred me Tenderly and well, till I was able to go Apprentice, which Time I serv’d to an Image-maker, after I had done with him, I Work’d for my self, and growing worth money, after I had spent some of my untainted Youth, in the Service abroad, belonging to the Ordnance, I set up to keep Hire-Horses, for the Court, in Nature of the great Mr. Blount, in the Parish of St. James, having Licenc’d coaches, and dealing for upwards of 500l, a year, till many Misfortunes comming [sic] on me, I was oblidg’d to leave my Native Country, and on a Woful [sic] Day, I came for Ireland with some small matter of Money, about a year since, where I follow’d making Images, till I came acquainted with the vile Woman Eleanour Fenly, who to save her Life at Tryal falsly [sic] said she was my Wife, Poverty forceing me to keep first with her, she pretending to have Friends who would make my Fortune, which alas! they have, it being her Brother, Fernando Fenly, and his Accomplice who swore my Life away, in declaring That about the 25th of March, last I have a Box of Goods, which were Mr. Kennersly’s, afterwards found in his Custody, and that I paid him 2 Shillings for carryage from the Sun Inn, in Francis Street, to Ross, which I vow all False, nor was I e’er Guilty of what was sworn, tho’ for it I must dye, having no Friend to appear for me, yet with the Constancy of a Christian who can accuse himself, of no great Crimes I go to meet my Fate, Dying in Charity with the World.

But this I further for my Innocency declare, I ne’er had Intention to rob Mr. Kennersly, nor e’er sold any of his Goods, but going into the Country with the Aforemention’d Eleanor Fenly to her Brother’s in Loghreagh, where he lives well; she came in Company with one Byrn, a Fellow [I] did not like and who resolv’d I suppose to do us an Injury, upon which I quarrel’d, and happening to be damag’d by some People in Caterlogh. I resolv’d to get Justice of which, being by ’em suspected, they got me apprehended on Suspicion of an idle Person, and Nell Fenly getting some Toys to sell there, she was discover’d at that time, on which her Brother made the Examination aforesaid, against me, which caused me to be transmitted and tryed upon it, to save his own Life; she as I before said, escaping by alledging she was my Wife &c. I may likewise add, that had not my Fellow Sufferer hop’d to have sav’d his Life, he cou’d have clear’d me, for which I pray God forgive him, And now Dear Christians, I have nought to say, but heartily beg that some of you, who shall see me dye, out of mere Pity to my unhappy State, (an entire and poor Stranger) will cover me with Earth, an Hindrance to those Men whose Business it is, to keep forlorn Wretches from their Graves, for private Practice o’er their mangled Bodies. I now conclude begging your Prayers to God for my Forgiveness, being about 37 Years of Age, A Protestant Member of the Church of England.

James Stephens.

PATRICK BARNEL Who is to dye with Mr. Stephens, on the Persuasion of some Friends has declin’d making further Confession, than to his Ghostly Father, which he desires so might be forth, lest any imprudent Person should pretend he had made any Speech, giving no further Account of himself, than that he was pritty [sic] well educated, and when young, that he serv’d Major Arthur, to whom he owns great obligation, that after he left him, he went to serve a Weaver, whose Business he after, follow’d, dating his Misfortunes to begin in being concern’d in Mr. Kenerslys Robbery; to whom he afterwards gave up several Things in hopes to save his Life. He Dies a Roman Catholick, begging the Prayers of All good Christians.

Mr. Gray having by Gracious Mercy, obtained a Reprieve, ’tis hop’d no notice will be taken of the absurd Pieces, design’d and publish’d, by the said Hoy in Pembroke Court, or under any feign’d Name whatever, which is notoriously known to be intended by Hoy, who surely will cheat the Publick with some scandalous and lying Paper, intitled a Speech to the abovenamed unfortunate Men, in prejudice and defamation to the Printer hereof, who unwittingly gall’d hiim, in saying th’other Day, He look’d like Death, when a Person affirm’d to his Face, in the open street, he said he was a MOLLY, (term well known for Sodomite) a charge so bold, that it might be wished, before he strives to taint another’s, he’d clear his own Character, from that Aspersion, if so it may be term’d.

Printed by Richard Dickson, and Gwyn Needham in Dames-Street.


The Last Speech, Confession and Dying Words, of
Patrick Barnel, and James Stephens

who are to be executed at St. Stephens Green, this present Wednesday, the 25th of this Inst. May, 1726. For the Robbery of Mr. Kinnersly in Dames-Street.

The Speech of James Stephens.

Good People,

I James Stephens, was born at Cheswick, about five Miles from London: my Parents put me to a free School to learn to write, where I had the Character of an unlucky Boy. At 14 Years of Age, I was entertained by the celebrated Jonathan Wilde, under whom I arrived to such Dexterity in Picking Pockets and Impudence in bare-fac’d Robberies, that I robb’d on a Play Night in Drury Lane Edward Martin, Esq, of 75 Guineas and a Gold Watch. My honest Master for the sake of a Reward of ten Pounds for the Discovery of the Persons who committed the Robbery, made Oath that I was the Person.

But I having Timely notice of it, fled to France, where I with some others Rob’d and Murder’d Mr. Lock, and the English Gentlemen in his Company, then I took Shipping at Calais, and landed at Cork, where Information in a little Time was given against Me, for several Robberies; this obliged me to come to Dublin, where I most impudently perform’d that unparalleled Roguery of Stealing a Glass Case with Rings, Silver Spoons, Snuff-Boxes, &c. to the Value of Seventy Pounds from Mr. Kinnersly Goldsmith in Dame Street. I heartily and sincerely repent of my horrid Crimes, and desire the Prayers of all my Fellow Christians. I dye an unworthy Member of the Church of England.

James Stephens.

The Speech of PATRICK BARNWELL

Good Cristians, [sic]

I Patrick Barnel was born in the County of Dublin of Poor, but Honest Parents; their mean Circumstances was in a great Measure, the Cause of my Present Misfortune, for they could not give me any Education, and I was often obliged to take away from the little Children of the same Town their Victuals to satisfie my Hunger, when I was a Boy, I stole several little Things, and escaped without Punishment.

I was induced to commit great Rogueries; I became acquainted with a Gang of Tories who kept their Rendevouz [sic] in the County of Kerry with whom I committed such Cruel and Barbarous Actions, that we were all Obliged to disperse and shift every one for himself, it was my Fate to come to this City where I had not been above Six Months, before I introduced into the Company of my ellow-Sufferer, who was the Head of a Gang of about a Dozen, having no Manner of Subsisting myself.

I committed several petty Thefts with him and others, and at last that most notorious one for which I now die, I cannot deny that I am guilty, but having a true sence of my Crimes, I repent of them, and I desire your Prayers for my soul, I die a Member of the Church of Rome in which I was bred, and the Lord have mercy on my poor Soul.

N.B. On Sunday last, one Dickson a Printer who publishes Papers under the Name of G Needham, came to us in Newgate, and we not thinking him a proper Person to make any thing publick from us. We desire the publick be aware buying any Speech of ours from him, for whatever is printed by him is an Imposition of the Town, and can only be excused by his saying, He is a poor Boy, and must endeavour to better his miserable Circumstances, and maintain himself and his little Family. He had already advertised, that he has the Speech of one who is not to die.

Dublin: Printed by G.F. in Castle Street.

* The emoluments available for intermediating the sentiments of the hanged become quite obvious through the lucrative quasi-monopoly the Ordinary of Newgate was able to establish around his privileged access to London’s condemned.

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