Episode Details

Send us your Feedback

William Colthouse is a well-educated Yorkshire man with firm religious principles and even firmer political convictions; it is these convictions that first drag him into the orbit of criminality. As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, his outspoken Jacobite sympathies land him inside Newgate, where the company he keeps teaches him a new and darker set of skills.

What emerges from this true crime account is a figure caught between conscience and temptation: a man who knows the difference between right and wrong yet finds the lure of easy money irresistible once honest labour loses its shine. His story is shaped by political loyalties, family bonds, and a restlessness that refuses to be tamed by ordinary work.

The roads of Georgian England are waiting, and for a man like Colthouse, every choice narrows the path ahead.

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Hereditary rights: in the early eighteenth century this phrase was politically explosive. It referred to the belief that the crown passed by divine bloodline alone, and that Parliament had no authority to redirect the succession. For Jacobites like Colthouse, hereditary right meant the exiled Stuart line still held the only legitimate claim to the throne; to say so aloud under the new Hanoverian king was sedition.

Jacobite: from the Latin 'Jacobus' for James, a Jacobite was a supporter of the deposed Stuart dynasty, particularly James II and his descendants. In the reign of George I, professing Jacobite sympathies was not merely unfashionable; it was dangerous enough to land a man in prison.

Seditious words: today sedition feels like a term from dusty law textbooks, but in Georgian England it was a potent weapon. Speaking against the king or the Protestant succession could be prosecuted as a crime in itself; no riot or rebellion required. Words alone could put you in chains.

Journeyman: not a traveller, though the word hints at journeys. A journeyman was a skilled worker who had completed his apprenticeship but did not yet run his own shop. He worked for a master, hired by the day; the word comes from the French 'journee,' meaning a day's work. In Colthouse's case, he worked as a journeyman joiner: a qualified carpenter labouring for wages rather than profit.

Expeditions on the road: a polite euphemism for highway robbery. The phrase lends a gentleman's gloss to what was in reality armed theft on the king's highways. Authors of the period sometimes deployed this sort of language with a wink, as though robbing travellers were a kind of sporting venture.

Gridiron: a flat cooking grate made of iron bars set over a fire, used for grilling meat. That soldiers would press a man's face onto one that was red-hot gives a visceral sense of the casual brutality of alehouse brawls in this era; the scar Colthouse carried from it would later be mistaken for evidence of an entirely different crime.

Condemnation: today we condemn ideas or behaviour, but in the criminal courts of the eighteenth century the word had a literal and lethal meaning. To lie under condemnation was to have received a death sentence and to be waiting, usually in the condemned cells of Newgate, for the appointed day.

Temporal concerns: in Colthouse's farewell letter, temporal does not mean 'temporary.' It means worldly; of this earthly life as opposed to the spiritual. A man about to leave the world is expected to shed temporal concerns and fix his thoughts on the eternal; that Colthouse could not do so entirely makes his letter all the more human.

About This Series

Lives of the M