Shaw was duly convicted, sentenced, and executed at Leith Walk in November, 1721, with the full approval of public opinion. Yet the innocence which he still maintained on the scaffold came out clearly the following year. The tenant who came into occupation of Shaw's flat found there a paper which had slipped down an opening near the chimney. It was a letter written by Catherine Shaw, as was positively affirmed by experts in handwriting, and it was addressed to her father, upbraiding him for his barbarity. She was so hopeless of marrying him whom she loved, so determined not to accept the man her father would have forced upon her, that she had decided to put an end to the existence which had become a burden to her. "My death," she went on, "I lay to your charge. When you read this, consider yourself as the inhuman wretch that plunged the knife into the bosom of the unhappy Catherine Shaw!"
This letter, on which there was much comment, came at last into the hands of the authorities, who, having satisfied themselves that it was authentic, ordered the body of Shaw to be taken down from the gibbet where it still hung in chains and to be decently interred. As a further but somewhat empty reparation of his honour, a pair of colours was waved over his grave.
[Illustration: THE PRESS-GANG AT WORK (p. 64).]
A still more curious story is that of a sailmaker who many years ago went to spend Christmas with his mother near Deal. On his way he spent a night at an inn at Deal, and shared a bed with the landlady's uncle, the boatswain of an Indiaman, who had just come ashore. In the morning the uncle was missing, the bed was saturated with blood, and the young sailmaker had disappeared. The bloodstains were soon traced through the house, and beyond, as far as the pier-head. It was naturally concluded that the boatswain had been murdered and his body thrown into the sea. A hue-and-cry was at once set up for the young man, who was arrested the same evening in his mother's house.
He was taken red-handed, with ample proofs of his guilt upon him. His clothes were stained with blood; in his pockets were a knife and a strange silver coin, both of which were sworn to most positively as the property of the missing boatswain. The evidence was so conclusive that no credence could be given to the prisoner's defence, which was ingenious but most improbable. His story was that he woke in the night and asked the boatswain the way to the garden, that he could not open the back door, and borrowed his companion's clasp-knife to lift the latch. When he returned to bed the boatswain was gone; why or where he had no idea.