The Virginia Gazette

Yesterday morning John M'Cloud, for the murder of Mr. Stoddart, late keeper of Clerkenwell Bridewell, was executed at Tyburn, pursuant to his sentence. He was a young man, by trade a glazier, not quite twenty years of age, of an honest and open countenance, about five feet six or seven inches high, and his behaviour was exemplary, devout, and penitent. He was attended under the gallows by the Ordinary of Newgate, another Clergyman, and a Methodist teacher, with whom he joined very fervently in prayer and singing of hymns. A few minutes before he was turned off he spoke the sentiments of his mind to the Ordinary, who delivered them to the spectators to the following effect:

'That the unhappy young man who in a few minutes was going to launch into an awful eternity acknowledged his guilt, and the justice of his sentence. That during his (the Ordinary's) attendance on him in Newgate, since his condemnation, he had all the reason in the world to believe his repentance to be sincere and unfeigned, which he made no doubt but heaven would accept of. That he had been brought up in the paths of virtue and religion by his relations, from which, by the influence of bad company, he had unhappily and too fatally deviated. That he had been out several times with his associate (not yet taken) with an intent to rob, but had never made an attack upon any person, until that very night on which they met with Mr. Stoddart; and in regard to which of them gave him his death's wound, he acknowledged his pulling out a knife, with a design to give it to his partner, but that his mind was in such confusion, and so greatly agitated, that he declares, on the word of a dying man, that he cannot be positive whether himself or his companion killed the deceased. And that, finally, he exhorted the spectators to take warning by him, a melancholy and unhappy victim before them, cut off for his crimes in the very bloom of life, and carefully to guard against the first solicitations of vice and villainy.'

After hanging the usual time his body was cut down, and carried to Surgeons Hall, in the Old Bailey, for dissection.