side, which was a more likely thing to kill him than that little cane, indeed the smallest that ever I saw". King James II was solicited strongly to grant Francis a royal pardon, on the basis of his previously blameless life, but, despite his low opinion of Dangerfield, he said that it would be wrong to let his murderer go unpunished, and Francis was duly executed on 24 July 1685. Sir John Bramston in a contemptuous epitaph wrote that Dangerfield deserved no pity: "he had been a highway thief, a cheat, a little rogue.. but there is an end of him". The Narrative- aftermath In 1684 Sir William Williams, later Solicitor General, who as Speaker of the House of Commons had authorised the publication of Dangerfield's Narrative in 1680, was heavily fined for a libel on James II and another on Lord Peterborough as a result. James, with more magnanimity than he usually showed to political opponents, reduced both fines, and later restored Williams to royal favour and appointed him Solicitor General. In fiction He is the subject, and perhaps the author, of Don Tomazo, or The Juvenile Rambles of Thomas Dangerfield (1680), a comic, self-consciously literary novel that presents Dangerfield as a clever and resourceful rogue. It is reprinted in Spiro Peterson's The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled and Other Criminal Fiction of Seventeenth-Century England (1961) and in Paul Salzman's Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction (1991). Notes References 1650s births 1685 deaths People from Waltham Abbey, Essex 17th-century English criminals English counterfeiters English murder victims People murdered in England Murder in 1685