Two Highwaymen, Two Confessions
On 5th August 1723, William Duce and James Butler were executed at Tyburn after being convicted of a series of violent highway robberies. Their final confessions, recorded by the Ordinary of Newgate, read almost like the memoirs of professional criminals, detailing robberies across London and the Home Counties and exposing the brutal world of eighteenth-century highwaymen.
William Duce was just twenty-four years old, born near Wolverhampton. He blamed the turning point in his life on a lengthy imprisonment for debt. During more than fifteen months in Newgate he fell in with hardened criminals, and upon his release quickly joined them in a succession of robberies. Speaking candidly before his execution, Duce listed offence after offence—from Chelsea Fields and St James’s Park to Tower Hill, Tottenham Court Road and Hampstead Road—naming only places, while deliberately refusing to identify several former accomplices because, he believed, they had abandoned crime and deserved the chance to reform.
Duce was particularly bitter towards John Dyer, the King’s evidence whose testimony helped secure the convictions. He described Dyer as the man who had “occasioned” his downfall, accusing him not only of betraying the gang but of keeping stolen money for himself. Yet despite this resentment, Duce’s final letter forgave Dyer completely, urging him to repent and abandon his criminal life before it ended in the same way.
James Butler’s story was even more extraordinary. Born in Soho, he had travelled the world as a sailor, serving aboard Royal Navy ships and merchant vessels, visiting Boston, New York, Martinique, Jamaica and France before drifting into London’s criminal underworld. His confession described an escalating catalogue of robberies alongside Duce, Dyer and Joseph Rice before joining an even more violent gang operating in Hampshire. There, armed robberies became increasingly savage, with innocent victims being shot simply to prevent identification. Butler admitted witnessing acts of shocking cruelty and confessed that one victim was shot twice after begging for mercy.
The pair had originally been convicted at the Old Bailey for robbing John Holmes near Chelsea on 27 April 1723, and for robbing coachman John Monk on the Hampstead Road a few days later. Butler pleaded guilty to both offences, while Duce denied involvement, unsuccessfully attempting to become a Crown witness after Dyer had already accepted that role. The evidence of victims, informers and investigators ultimately persuaded the jury, and both men were sentenced to death.
Unlike many condemned prisoners, neither man spent his final hours proclaiming complete innocence. Both acknowledged lives that had spiralled into organised crime, and Butler concluded his confession with the simple words: “I desire that Mercy of God which I refused to Man.” Their stories remain among the most revealing Ordinary’s Accounts of the eighteenth century, illustrating how debt, poverty, bad company and repeated opportunities for violence could transform ordinary young men into notorious highway robbers before ending at Tyburn.
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