Though drunkenness in itself is a shocking and beastly crime, yet in its
consequences it is also often so bloody and inhuman that one would
wonder persons of understanding should indulge themselves in a sin at
once so odious and so fatal both to body and soul. The instances of
persons who have committed murders when drunk, and those accompanied
with circumstances of such barbarity as even those persons themselves
could not have heard without trembling, are so many and so well known to
all of any reading, or who have made any reflection, that I need not
dwell longer than the bare narration of this malefactor's misfortunes
will detain me, to warn against a vice which makes them always monsters
and often murderers.
Luke Nunney, of whom we are to speak, was a young fellow of some parts,
and of a tolerable education, his father, at the time of his death,
being a shoemaker in tolerable circumstances, and very careful in the
bringing up of his children. He was more particularly zealous in
affording them due notions of religion, and took abundance of pains
himself to inculcate them in their tender years, which at first had so
good an effect upon this Luke that his whole thoughts ran upon finding
out that method of worship in which he was most likely to please God.
Sometimes, though his parents were at the Church of England, he slipped
to a Presbyterian Meeting-house, where he was so much affected with the
preacher's vehemency in prayer and his plain and pious method of
preaching that he often regretted not being bred up in that way, and the
loss his parents sustained by their not having a relish for religion
ungraced with exterior ornaments. These were his thoughts, and his
practice was suitable to them, until the misfortunes of his father
obliged him to break up the house, and put Luke out to work at another
place.
The men where Nunney went to work were lewd and profligate fellows,
always talking idly or lewdly, relating stories of what had passed in
the country before they came up to work in London, the intrigues they
had had with vicious women, and such loose and unprofitable discourses.
This quickly destroyed the former good inclinations of Luke, who first
began to waver in religion, and as he had quitted the Church of England
to turn to the Dissenters, so now he had some thoughts of leaving them
for the Quakers; but after going often to their meetings he professed he
thought their behaviour so ridiculous and absurd as not to deserve the
name either of religion or Divine worship.
His instability of mind pressed him also to go out into the world, for
it appeared to him a great evil that while all the rest of his
companions were continually discoursing of their adventures, he should
have none to mention of his own. Some of them, also, having slightingly
called him Cockney and reproaching him with never having been seven
miles from London, he remembered that his father had some near relations
in the west of England, so he took a sudden resolution of going down
thither to work at his trade. Full of these notions he went over one
evening pretty late with his brother to Southwark, and meeting there
with an acquaintance who would needs make him drink, they stayed pretty
long at the house, insomuch that Luke got very drunk, and being always
quarrelsome when he had liquor, insulted and abused everybody in the
room. As he was quarrelling particularly with one James Young, William
Bramston who stood by, came up and desired him to be quiet, advised him
to go home with his company, and not stay and make a disturbance where
nobody had a mind to quarrel but himself. Without making any reply Luke
struck him a blow on the face. Bramston thereupon held up his fist as if
he would have struck him, but did not. However Nunney struck him again
and pushed him forwards, upon which Bramston reeled, cried out he was
stabbed and a dead man, that Nunney was the person who gave him the
wound, and Luke thereupon (drunk as he was) attempted to run away.
Upon this he was apprehended, committed prisoner to Newgate, and the
next sessions, on the evidence of such of his companions as were
present, he was convicted and received sentence of death. He behaved
himself from that time as a person who had as little desire as hopes of
continuing in the world, enquired diligently both of the Ordinary and of
the man who was under sentence with him, how he should prepare himself
for his latter end, coming constantly to chapel, and praying regularly
at all times. Yet at the place of execution he declared himself a
Papist. He added, that at the time the murder was committed he had no
knife nor could he imagine how it was done, being so drunk that he knew
nothing that had happened until the morning, when he found himself in
custody. He was about twenty years of age at the time of his suffering
on the 25th of May, 1723.