Was a native of Hampshire. His relations were respectable tradesmen. He
has left a wife and four children. Ings was a butcher at Portsmouth,
and at the time of his marriage had a handsome property, consisting of
several houses, and some money in the funds.
Trade growing bad at the termination of the war, and his property
having decreased, some of his tenements were sold, and he came up to
London about eighteen months ago, with a little ready money, produced
by the sale of a house, and opened a butcher’s-shop at the west-end
of the town. He could, however, get no business, and in a few months
gave up the shop, and, with a few pounds he had left, he opened a
coffee-shop in Whitechapel.
Business becoming dull there, he was involved in great distress, and at
last was compelled to pawn his watch to enable him to send his wife and
children down to Portsmouth to her friends, to prevent their starving
in London.
At the coffee-house in Whitechapel he sold, besides coffee, political
pamphlets, with which he was supplied by Carlile, of Fleet-street.
Having given up the shop, and finding that there was no prospect of
supporting himself and his family with credit, he gave himself up to
despair. He had read the different Deistical publications during the
time he sold political pamphlets, and, from being a churchman, he
became a confirmed Deist.
He was a most affectionate husband and father; and his desperate
situation, no doubt, was a principal cause of his joining the
Cato-street plot.
Edwards, Adams, Thistlewood, and Brunt, had frequently visited Ings
during the time he kept the coffee and political-pamphlet shop,
and when he was in more desperate circumstances, he became a fitter
companion for persons engaged in such an atrocious crime as the one for
which he suffered the sentence of the law.
For some weeks before the Cato-street discovery, Ings was in the utmost
distress, quite pennyless, and the money he was supplied with to
subsist upon was given him by George Edwards. Ings was also supplied
with money by the same person to take an apartment, where arms and
ammunition could be safely placed. He took a room in the house where
Brunt lodged, and thither the greater part of the ammunition and arms
was conveyed by Edwards, Adams, and himself; indeed, it was the depôt
of the conspirators.
The following Letters were written by Ings in Newgate, the night before
his execution: