Volume IV
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who aimed at the Destruction of the Nation. Executed at Portsmouth, 10th of March, 1777 painter, at Titchfield, whence he procured the familiar title of "John the Painter." During a residence of some years in America he imbibed principals destructive to the interests of this country. Transported with party zeal, he formed the desperate resolution of committing a most atrocious crime, which he, in some degree, effected. About four o'clock in the afternoon of the 7th of December, 1776, a fire broke out in the roundhouse of Portsmouth Dock, which entirely consumed that building. The fire was wholly attributed to accident; but on the 5th of January three men, who were employed in the hemp-house, found a tin machine, somewhat resembling a tea-canister, and near the same spot a wooden box containing various kinds of com- bustibles. This circumstance being communicated to the commissioner of the dock, and circulated among the public, several vague and indefinite suspicions fell upon Hill, who had been lurking about the dockyard, whose surname was not known, but who had been distinguished by the appellation of " John the Painter." In consequence of advertisements in the newspapers, offering a reward of fifty pounds for apprehending him, he was secured at Odiham. On the 17th of February the prisoner was examined at Sir John Fielding's office, Bow Street, where John Baldwin, who exercised the trade of a painter in different parts of America, attended, by the direction of Lord Temple. The prisoner's discourse with Baldwin operated very materially towards his conviction, as it was brought in corroboration of a variety of evidence on the trial. He said he had taken a view of most of the dockyards and fortifications about England, with the number of ships in the navy, and observed their weight of metal and their number of men, and had been to France two or three times to inform Silas Dean, the American, of his dis- coveries; and that Dean gave him bills to the amount of three hundred pounds and letters of recommendation to a merchant in the City, which he had burned, lest they should lead to a discovery. He informed Baldwin that he had in- structed a tinman's apprentice at Canterbury to make him a tin canister, which he carried to Portsmouth, where he hired a lodging at one Mrs Boxall's, and tried his preparations for setting fire to the dockyard. After recounting the manner of preparing matches and combustibles he said that on the 6th of the preceding December he got into the hemp-house, and having placed a candle in a wooden box, and a tin canister over it, and sprinkled turpentine over some of the hemp, he proceeded to the rope-house, where he placed a bottle of turpentine among a quantity of loose hemp, which he sprinkled with turpentine, and having laid matches, made of paper painted over with powdered charcoal and gunpowder diluted with water, and other combustibles about the place, he returned to his lodgings. These matches were so contrived as to con- tinue burning for twenty-four hours, so that by cutting them into proper lengths he provided for his escape, knowing the precise time when the fire would reach the combustibles. He had hired lodgings in other two houses, to which he intended to set fire, that the engines might not be all em- ployed together in quenching the conflagration at the dock. On the 7th he again went to the hemp-house, intending to set it on fire, which he, however, was unable to effect, owing to a halfpennyworth of common house matches that he had bought not being sufficiently dry. This disappoint- ment, he said, rendered him exceedingly uneasy, and he went from the hemp-house to the rope-house and set fire to the matches he had placed there. He said his uneasiness was increased because he could not return to his lodging, where he had left a bundle containing an Ovid's Metamorphoses, a treatise on war and making fireworks, a Justin, a pistol and a French passport, in which his real name was inserted. When he had set fire to the rope-house he proceeded toward London, deeply regretting his failure in attempting to fire the other building, and was strongly inclined to fire into the windows of the woman who had sold him the bad matches. He jumped into a cart, and gave the woman who drove it sixpence, to induce her to drive quickly, and when he had passed the sentinels observed the fire to have made rapid progress. He went to Bristol and, a short time after his arrival there, set fire to several houses, which were all burning with great rapidity at one time, and the flames were not extingruished till damage was sustained to the amount of fifteen thousand pounds. He also set fire to combustibles that he had placed among a number of oil barrels upon the quay, but, happily, without effect. He related to Baldwin a great number of other circumstances, which were con- firmed by a variety of evidence on his trial, which came on on Thursday, 6th of March, 1777, at Winchester Castle, when witnesses were produced from different parts of the country, who proved the whole of his confession to Baldwin to be true. The jury, after a clear and impartial charge from Baron Hotham, in an instant agreed upon their verdict-" Guilty." The learned judge then proceeded to pass the sentence of the law upon the prisoner. He told him that his crime was of a nature so enormous that it was not in the power of words to aggravate it. His offence was of such a nature that it might not only have proved fatal to every person present, but have involved the whole British nation in ruin. On the morning after his condemnation he said he was by birth a Scotsman, and had left Scotland in order to embark for America, where he had resided the greater part of his life. The diabolical scheme of setting fire to the dockyards and the shipping, he said, originated in his own wicked mind on the very breaking out of the rebellion in America; and he had no peace until he proceeded to put it in practice. He was hanged at Portsmouth, in sight of the ruins which he had occasioned. |