‘NOT SO WICKED AS TO COMMIT SACRILEGE:’

A THEFT AT CHRISTMAS 1721 FROM THE CHAPEL OF

ST NICHOLAS WITHOUT, FRANCIS STREET, DUBLIN

SEÁN DONNELLY

1
 ‘NOT SO WICKED AS TO COMMIT SACRILEGE:’
A THEFT AT CHRISTMAS 1721 FROM THE CHAPEL OF ST. NICHOLAS
WITHOUT, FRANCIS STREET, DUBLIN
SEÁN DONNELLY
By 1720, in spite of the Penal Laws then in force, the Catholic chapel in St Francis
Street, Dublin, serving St Nicholas Without, the mensal parish of the Catholic
archbishops of Dublin from 1615 to 1733 and again from 1756 to 1797, was a
purpose-built and substantial building. 1 For example, a Dublin newspaper reported
in March 1729 that a controversial regular priest had been recently denounced in
‘all the Romish chapels ... especially that great one in Saint Francis Street ...’.2
Previously, at Christmas 1721, St Nicholas’s had been the target of a robbery which
led to the hanging of a local man, twenty-one year-old Henry Watts, in St Stephen’s
Green, on 2 November 1723. Watts admitted in his last speech that he was no
innocent, but denied the robbery, insisting that, whatever about theft, he would
never have consciously committed sacrilege:

I was born in Mass-Lane in St. Francis-Street, of poor but honest

Parents, who tenderly brought me up in the love and fear of God, and
gave me as good Education as ever a poor Lad in the Parish could have.
But on 28th December 1721 I took one Elizabeth Williams Daughters up
for an Assault, and at the same time the Chapple of St. Francis was
Robb’d of a Plate Box and Cup, and the said Williams having Received
the said Robbery, said she had that in her pocket wou’d Hang me; and
went and made Oath against me that I was the Person that gave her the
above named Goods; upon which I was Apprehended, and soon after I
was Try’d and found Guilty for the same; but the Court finding what sort
of Persons they were, granted me Transportation, accordingly I was
set on Board, but the Captain finding me Sickly set me on shore again;
then I went to Limrick where I followed my trade, which is Weaveing,
and by it I got honest Bread; but Mr. Hawkins hearing I was there, sent
an Order and Committal on me; and there I was try'd for escape, and was
acquitted. Then I came to Dublin in order to take Shipping and go to
England, but Seeing one Conely I call’d to him, brought him in to an
Alehouse and spent thirteen pence on him, and then to requite my
kindness, he took me Prisoner, and in the scuffel I cut his Cheek, being
then Committed was lately Try’d and found Guilty, and now must die in
a shameful manner tho’ undeserved, for you may be sure (tho’ Wicked
2
 enough) I would not be so Wicked as to commit Sacrelidge, for as I am a
dyeing Man I am Innocent of the Fact for which I Dye, and also of the
Escape, for ’twas the Captain that set me a shore. 3

Custom required that condemned criminals die a ‘good’ death through admitting
their guilt, and most did so, hoping for forgiveness this side of the grave and divine
mercy the other. To clear their consciences, some among the condemned owned up
to crimes for which others had suffered. Others admitted that they deserved to die
for crimes they had got away with, but insisted that they were, ironically, innocent
of the one for which they were to die. 4 Watts ostensibly ‘died hard’, but his anxiety
that he should not be thought guilty of sacrilege sounds genuine. Thirteen years
later, it emerged that he had not robbed St Nicholas’s Without, indeed, and could
have saved himself had not blood been thicker than water. The culprit had been his
older brother, ‘Denis Watch alias Watson’, who admitted to the crime when he was
hanged in Stephen’s Green on 31 July 1736 at the age of thirty-six:

I drew my first Breath in Mass-Lane in St. Francis Street, my Father (so

I heard) was a very honest Man, but to my sorrow, I cannot say that of
my Mother, for she was counted a great Receiver, by which means my
Brother (who suffer’d the like as I do now some Years ago thro’ my
means, as I shall relate hereafter) and I, seeing her giving Money plenty
to Thieves, encourag’d us to follow the same pernicious practice, I being
free about the Chappel afforsaid, watched my oppertunity till at last I
stole the Chalice, and all the Plate belonging to the Altar; nay, I threw
the Consecrated Bread into the Privy, and then brought said Plate to
Elizabeth Williams, alias Queen of the Sluts. My Brother hearing the
Chapple was Robb’d went in quest of me and found me at the said
Williams’s drinking merrily, upon the same he beat me and said
Williams, she thro’ spite return’d said Plate, and swore my Brother
brought it her, for which Fact he was Transported, and returning
contrary to Law, he was soon after Executed for the same.

I continued in my former Vices, till a length I was Transported also, and

the present occasion of my Death is for returning from the same (but I
must confes I have Robb’d Esq, Waters House since my returne) which I
was induced to do, through a temptation of getting a Legacy in Money
which I heard (whilst I was abroad) was left me by my Mother, and
deposited for me in the Hands of a Clergyman in this City. Landing in
Ireland I went to Kilkenny I committed a Robbery there and was
3
 Confin’d for the same, but I broke the Gaol and came to Dublin. I found
when I came here that there was some colour for the Report of the
Legacy, for an application to him, I obtain’d since small supplys from
him at several times, but cou’d never be satisfied of the certainty of the
Sum left for me, which I impute to the improbability the Gentleman had
of ever seeing me, tho’ I am well satisfied of his Usage to me since my
condemnation, that I here acknowledge his goodness to me, and hope for
his Prayers. 5

Though giving conflicting accounts of their mother, the Watts/Watson brothers

agreed on blaming their fate, wholly or partly, on Elizabeth Williams, a neighbour
in Francis Street. Convicted men often blamed their downfall on women – the
‘Adam Defence’, after the first man – literally – to use it: ‘The woman whom thou
gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat ...’ (Gen. iii, 12). The
‘Adam defence’ usually concluded a list of the stages through which the
condemned man passed on his way to the gallows.6 Thirty-year-old Valentine Kelly
from Co. Kildare, for example, hanged on 13 March 1725, ruefully acknowledged
hearing as a spectator at previous hangings the type of warning he now delivered:

but I being void of Grace, not having the Consideration in me to

remember what many Persons said, that I myself saw Die at this Fatal
Tree; flung myself into the Company of loose Idle Women, in whose
Company I took so much delight, that whatever I cou'd get I spent on them. 7

Particularly vehement was ‘John Mac-Gurran, alias Cockels’, also thirty, hanged
for burglary on 27 September 1727:

but this Caution I give to all young Men, for their one sakes, let them
shun all bad Company, if they have any regard to the Words of a dyeing
Man, let them shun all bad Company, especially the Company of Harlots,
for they are the thing the Devil beats his Hooks with, to draw poor
unthinking Man to Destruction, all which I find to be true when it is too
late.8

James Hamilton from Kilmore, Co. Down, a pedlar executed for murder at
Downpatrick on 17 April 1714, was more resigned. He had been sober and
industrious since setting up in business three years previously, ‘till being puff'd up
with the little stock I had, I begun to be very saucy, and proud, and was so vain as
to go to dancing and pushing Schools ...’. 9 (A ‘pushing school’ was a brothel.)
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An occasional criminal claimed that a particular woman had inveigled him into
crime, or forced him into it through her excessive demands. Sometimes a man
turned to crime, having lost his ‘place’ and ‘character’ through a woman’s false
accusations. 10 Even the majority of the seven women whose last speeches have
survived and been published also claimed that other women had contributed to their
fate. Most admitted they were thieves and, if not prostitutes, at least promiscuous.
They fell into this way of life through marrying or becoming involved with
unscrupulous men. Later, bawds and fences – usually women and sometimes the
same person – encouraged or pressured them into prostitution and thievery. Others
claimed that women, often fellow servants, encouraged them to steal and then
betrayed them, sometimes to the extent of giving perjured evidence in court. 11

Apparently Elizabeth Williams was at least ‘a running broker’ – a fence, or receiver

of stolen property – but she could also have been a bawd or prostitute. The two
trades often went together: prostitution was an integral part of urban crime, with
clients stealing goods to trade for sex. Georgian Dublin’s most successful bawd,
Mrs McClean, brought a dowry of £5,100 to her marriage in 1798. She had grown
rich on the stolen goods of the apprentices, shop assistants and clerks who
frequented her ‘houses’ in Eustace Street and Barrack Street, and the ‘house’ she
opened in Sandymount during the summer.12 Combining the trades of prostitute
and fence would have multiplied the ways in which an unscrupulous woman could
control and manipulate clients; and the Watts/ Watson brothers portray Elizabeth
Williams as utterly unscrupulous. Her malign influence is attested to further in the
last speech of twenty-one-year-old William Cuneen from Co. Donegal who, with a
‘Francis Mc.Cabe’ from Co. Cavan, aged twenty-three, was hanged on 14 May
1726:

I Was born in the North in the County of Dunegal, my father Dy'd when
I was Young, and my Mother being left poor was oblig’d to come here to
Dublin at 14 Years of Age, I came after and got an acquaintance with
those who have proved my ruin; in Seven Years I have committed 80
Roberies, of which Mr. Delamain's is the last; and for this I am
condemn'd to Dye, I confess I deserve Death, and desire all who hear me,
to avoid and shun all concerns with B...Y W... ms the Q––n of the S––ts
in St. Francis-Street, the Ruin and Destruction of thousands. I beg you
would Testify Repentance to the World, and grant me your Prayers for
my Soul. 13

5
The words elided can only be ‘Betty Williams the Queen of the Sluts’, and Denis
Watts/Watson also called Williams the ‘Queen of the Sluts’, which suggests that she
commonly went under that title, and that the term was not just a one-off insult.
Nowadays, ‘slut’ is normally understood in a moral sense, and the term ‘Queen of
Sluts’ usually means mean a rampantly promiscuous woman, or one who creates
such an impression. The pop star Britney Spears, for instance, is frequently called
the ‘Queen of Sluts’ because of her raunchy performances, and in literature an
occasional woman uses the term of herself. 14 Meaning a ‘woman of loose morals’,
‘slut’ is attested from c.1400. William Wycherly used it thus in his poem, Hero and
Leander in Burlesque (London, 1669), p. 33:

In the next place the Queen of Sluts alone is,

With dainty fine Hober-de-Hoy Adonis.

The term also seems to have symbolised sexual licence in the song, ‘An Invitation
to Lubberland; Sung to the tune of Billy and Molly or The Journey-man Shoemaker
by Daniel Cooper’ (London, 1685). This song is an ancestor of one Burl Ives made
famous, ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’. In ‘Lubberland’, the buildings are made
of food, rivers run with wine and brandy, custards grow on bushes, and wild and
domestic animals beg to be killed and eaten: all appetites are catered to, including
gambling and sex:

The king of Knaves, and Queen of Sluts

Reign there in peace and quiet;
You need not fear to starve your guts,
There is such store of dyet. 15

The term could also be used playfully, and in letters from London in the early
1700s, Jonathan Swift teased Stella and Vanessa, as ‘sluts’, and the synonymous
‘queans’.16

But ‘slut’ was also used of ‘a dirty, slovenly, or untidy woman’, which is the
meaning in ‘sluts’ corner’, an unswept spot, ‘sluts’ wool’, fluff under bed, and
‘sluts’ hole’, a cupboard or drawer where everything is dumped. ‘Joan, queen of
Sluts’ symbolises a generic female servant in a satirical poem on the Restoration
astrologer Jack Adams. 17 The word also had the rare meaning ‘a kitchen maid’, ‘a
drudge’, as Samuel Pepys also used it in his diary for 21 February 1664: ‘Our little
girl Su is a most admirable slut, and pleases us mightily ...’. 18 Olivia Elder from

6
Co. Derry also used the term of herself in a poem dated 20 October 1769, in which
she regretted that housework kept her from writing:

But to return from these digressions,

Were I to tell of my professions,
Of Cook, Slut ..., Butter, Laundry Maid,
Of ricks and huswifery my trade
You’d hear I was the perfect ape
Of Proteus, god of changing shape. 19

The most quoted reference in which ‘slut’ in the sense of ‘slattern’ is juxtaposed
with ‘queen’ comes from The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Shakespeare has
Falstaff say of Mab, Queen of the Fairies (v. 5. 52): ‘Our radiant queen hates sluts
and sluttery’. In The Riddle of the Sands (London, 1904) Erskine Childers, clearly
echoing Shakespeare, describes a yacht, anchored among working boats in the
Flemish port of Memelsdorf, as being as ‘radiant as a queen among sluts ...’. 20 The
term could also be used in an affectionate way of an easy-going woman whose
domestic habits fell below the expected standards of the day. Writing from Paris on
25 July 1784 Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, then American minister to
France and later second president of the United States, applied the term ‘the Queen
of Sluts’ to the wax-modeller Patience Wright, a Quaker of untidy dress and direct
manners.21 An American essayist of 1836 also described an easy-going, untidy
childhood neighbour very affectionately as ‘this queen of sluts’.22

‘Slattern’ is also the meaning of ‘Queen of Sluts’ in a number of songs, mainly

Scottish, in which a man castigates his wife’s lack of domestic skills. 23 ‘Queen of
Sluts’ is also a dance tune, a reel, played in Northumberland, south of the border, on
the bellows-blown small-pipes, the only English bagpipe with an uninterrupted
playing tradition. The tune was published in the 1950s, and though common in
traditional music throughout Ireland, Scotland and England, this particular title is
peculiar to Northumberland. 24 More than likely, this version of the tune and its title
originated in a manuscript of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Tunes in such
collections sometimes had titles that were bawdy, obscene or double-meaning, and
editors/publishers normally discarded or changed these where they recognised their
meanings, which occasionally they did not. Since this cannot have been the case
with the reel ‘Queen of Sluts’, the decision to publish the tune with an unaltered
title was unusually broadminded for the 1950s in England.

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As a title for a woman, ‘Queen of (the) Sluts’ seems to have been of a type with the
much better-attested male one, ‘King of the Beggars’. A beggar king to be found in
most societies from Classical times onward, and he could be described as a
constitutional monarch in that he normally owed his crown to election or
acclamation. He was usually a man whose fellow beggars looked up to: he could
adjudicate disputes and enforce his authority; he was clever and more than usually
successful in his calling; and was seen as a worthy representative of his community
with official authorities. Most major cities would have their King of the Beggars
down to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, when the lord
deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, visited Kilkenny in 1637, the city
corporation’s expenses included a shilling paid on 18 September ‘to the Captaine of
the beggars’. 25 A late example of the title comes from nineteenth-century Cork,
when the artist, Stephen O’Driscoll, painted the King of the Beggars then reigning
in the city. 26

But the most famous Dublin King of the Beggars, at least of those we know of,
would have been Patrick Corrigan, ‘alias Hackball’, who reigned from the 1720s to
the 1770s. In The Cries of Dublin (1760), Hugh Douglas Hamilton depicted ‘His
Lowness Prince Hackball’ in a four-wheel chariot with solid wheels, carrying the
small trumpet he blew to announce his presence. Normally, one or two young boys
towed or pushed his chariot, but occasionally a small pony or two large dogs
provided the locomotive power. Contemporary newspapers reported Hackball’s
doings, particularly his efforts to avoid incarceration in the ‘house of correction’.
Several political pamphlets were attributed to ‘His Majesty King Hackball’, and
though he was not the author, they exacerbated the animus of the city authorities
towards him. 27 Incidentally, a hint at his social standing outside his own circle
occurs in the record of his marriage to ‘Allice Lynch’ in Mary’s Lane Chapel on 17
August 1731, when the witnesses included Dr John Fitzpatrick, a leading Dublin
physician of his day.28

The marriage of a previous King of the Beggars, this time to a ‘Queen of (the)
Sluts’, almost certainly in Dublin, is mentioned in ‘A brief Chronology of Other
Things’, a table recording various odd and facetious events and the number of years
since they occurred, printed in Poor Robin 1694: An almanack of the old and new
fashion, or an ephemeris jestingly solid and jocosiously serious ... The two and
thirtieth impression (London, 1694). The entry, on sig. A.4, reads: ‘Since the King
of Beggars was married to the Queen of Sluts at Lowzy-Hill near Beggars-Bush,
being most splendidly attended by a ragged Regiment of Mumpers ––– 4.’29
‘Mumper’ was one of the terms for ‘beggar’ in ‘the canting tongue’, the language
8
of beggars and thieves, which is remarkably well-attested for a supposedly secret
language.

Where this wedding took place is not said; like Dublin, several cities and towns had
a place called Beggars Bush just outside their municipal boundary, and an
occasional tree so designated survived in England into the twentieth century. But
‘Lowzy-Hill near Beggars-Bush’ implies Dublin, since the former name, with Lazy
Hill, is a well-attested corruption of Lazars Hill, the old name of Townsend Street,
which is a mile or two west of Beggars Bush in more or less a direct line. 30
Compare forms such as ‘Louseyhill’, ‘Louzy Hill’, and ‘Lowsyhill’, on
seventeenth-century maps. 31 The original name derived from the lazaretto or leper
hospital that once stood in the area,32 and though Townsend Street is attested from
1674, Lazy/ Lousy Hill remained in use well into the eighteenth century.

Though Hackball cannot have been the groom in 1690, just possibly Elizabeth
Williams was the bride. A hint in this direction is that Henry Watts claimed his
troubles began when, at about eighteen years of age, ‘on 28th December 1721 I
took one Elizabeth Williams Daughters up for an Assault ...’. The assault was
serious enough for him to report, which would suggest that the assailants were
roughly his own age or older, and had been born in the early 1700s. If Elizabeth
Willliams was then of childbearing age, she could have been the Queen of Sluts
married in 1690. Be that as it may, however Williams achieved her sovereignty,
she seems to have been the only ‘Queen of (the) Sluts’ so far discovered whose
name has been recorded. Apparently content in her sovereignty, if not revelling in
it, she is unlikely to have had many pretenders to her throne.

9
1Conchubhar Ó Fearghail, ‘The evolution of Catholic parishes in Dublin from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries’, in F.H.A. Aallen and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Dublin City and County: from Prehistory to the Present.
Studies in honour of J.H. Andrews (Dublin, 1992), pp 230–1.
2 Patrick Fagan, Dublin’s Turbulent Priest: Cornelius Nary, 1658–1738 (Dublin, 1991), p. 109.
3James Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches from eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2001)., pp 156, 158. Spacing of
words, erratic in the original, has been regularised, and an occasional minor slip in transcription has been corrected
through comparison with the reproduction of the original on p. 157.
4 ibid., pp 90, 92, 94, 191, 216.
5 ibid., pp 265–6.
6 ibid., pp 50, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 126, 153, 154, 173.
7 ibid., p. 161.
8 ibid., p. 219.
9 ibid., p. 111.
10 ibid., pp 109, 190, 192, 203, 206.
11 ibid., pp 37, 149, 150, 151, 197.

Dr Diarmuid Ó Gráda, ‘Pursuing the frail abbess: the location of brothels in Georgian Dublin’, Dublin Historical
12

Record lx, 1 (Spring 2007), 54, 55, 58.

13 Kelly, Gallows speeches, p. 201.
14 Paul Forster, Final Charge to Endzone of Chaos (New York, 2002), p. 442.
15 John Ashton (ed.), Humour, wit and satire of the seventeenth century (London, 1883), p. 35.

W.E.H. Lecky et al. (ed.), The prose works of Jonathan Swift D.D.: with a biographical introduction ... (12 vols.,
16

London, 1897–1908), II. pp 36, 74, 133.

17James Caulfield, Characters of remarkable persons from the reign of Edward the Third to the Revolution ...new
edition, (2 vols., London, 1794–5), II, p 170.
18 R.C. Latham and W. Mathews (eds), The diary of Samuel Pepys (11 vols., London 1970–83), V, p. 55.
19 Andrew Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English from eighteenth-century Ireland (Cork, 1998), p. 345.
20 Penguin pbk. ed. (London, 1957), p. 218.
21Charles Francis Adams (ed.), Letters of Mrs Adams, wife of John Adams, with an introductory memoir ... (2nd ed.,
2 vols., Boston, 1840) II, p. 33.
22John Oldbug [pseud.], The Puritan: a series of essays, critical, moral, miscellaneous I (Boston and Philadelphia,
1836), p. 136.

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23‘The Queen of Sluts’ is the title of a song in Robert Chambers (ed.), The Scottish songs (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1829)
II, p. 454, and in George Lyman Kittredge (ed.), The English and Scottish popular ballads (Boston, 1884), p. 301.
For the occurrence of the term in various other songs, see Thomas Hudson, Comic songs (London, 1818), p. 28, and
John Rayson, Miscellaneous poems and ballads, chiefly in the dialects of Cumberland and the English and Scottish
Borders (London, 1858), p. 52.
24W.J. Stafford and A. Hall (eds.), Charlton Memorial Tune Book (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1956; rep. 1974), p. 15.
The tune was recorded by the Scottish accordion player Brian McNeill on his 1997 LP ‘Monksgate’, reissued some
years ago as a CD (Greentrax CDTRAX062). Irish musicians call this tune the ‘Clock in the Steeple’ (Francis
O’Neill, The dance music of Ireland (Chicago, 1907), p. 55), while ‘Jumping Geordie’, ‘Kilwinning's Steeple’, ‘The
Pope’s Toe’, ‘The Prince of Wales’s Fancy’ and ‘The Templeglantine Reel’, are further Irish and Scottish titles for it.

Alan J. Fletcher, Drama and the performing arts in pre-Cromwellian Ireland: a repertory of sources and
25

documents from the earliest times to c.1642 (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 372.

26 W.G. Strickland, A dictionary of Irish artists (2 vols., Dublin 1913; rep. Shannon, 1969) II, p. 188.
27T.C. Barnard, Anne Crookshank, Desmond Fitzgerald, William Laffan, et al. (eds. ), The Cries of Dublin: drawn
from the life by Hugh Douglas Hamilton (Dublin, 2003), pp 98, 150–9. See also Carpenter, Verse from eighteenth-
century Ireland, p. 373 (n. 29).
28 Fagan, Dublin’s Turbulent Priest, p. 198.
29 Early English Books Online @http://eebo.chadywick.com.
30The area is ‘Lazy Hill’ on Bernard de Gomme’s map (1673), ‘Lazers Hill’ on Charles Brookings’ map (1728), and
‘Lazer Hill’ on John Roque’s map (1756).
31Y.M. Goblet (ed.), A topographical index of the parishes and townlands of Ireland in Sir William Petty’s Mss
barony maps (c.1655–9) ... and HIBERNIAE DELINEATIO (c.1672) (Dublin, 1632), p.302.

32 Maria Kelly, The Great Dying: the Black Death in Dublin (Stroud, 2003), p. 112.

11