for witnesses to identify her. Sophia was found guilty and sentenced to death. She pleaded her belly, but was found "Not with Quick Child" , that is not pregnant. An Equally Sensational Execution On 27 February 1787, Sophia Pringle was executed before huge crowds, who witnessed her acute distress, fainting, and raving, forcing her to be seated in a chair on the scaffold. 4 Despite this, she is reported to have addressed spectators "in a very animated manner, conjuring them to take warning by her sad example and to pursue the paths of virtue...; [and] cautioned the youthful part of her own sex against improper and vicious connexions". 5 There was a deal of outrage that such a young woman had been executed while the shadowy figure of her lover had gone unpunished. It was suggested that she had been offered a pardon should she impeach her "accomplice" but she refused, saying his life was dearer to her than her own. One report stated that he was so affected by her execution "that he hath ever since been forcibly chained down to the floor from a Delirium occasioned through agony and despair, in one of the dreary mansions, allotted for the confinement of the insane, in the outskirts of London". 6 No evidence has been found so far of the offer of a pardon to Pringle if she would denounce her lover. But further feeling of this sort appears in a poem by the Reverend William Cole published two years