Executed at St Stephen’s Green on Wednesday, May 27th, 1730 at 38 minutes past three o’clock in the afternoon.

The famous historian of eighteenth century Ireland, W E H Lecky, in his account of the spate of abductions of heiresses in that time, explains how many people ascribed them to sectarian enmity, yet he finds little evidence of that. But there were certainly many varieties of abduction, and whatever their nature, they were brutal and cruel. At its worst, an abduction could be like this one, as described by Lecky:

On a Sunday in the June of 1756, the Rev. John Armstrong was celebrating divine service in the Protestant church in the town of Tipperary, Susannah Grove being among the congregation. In the midst of the service Henry Grady, accompanied by a body of men armed with blunderbusses, pistols, and other weapons, called out to the congregation that anyone who stirred would be shot, struck the clergyman on the arm with a hanger and… hastening to the pew where Susannah was sitting, dragged her out…

But we are not dealing with this variety in Kimberly’s story, and, as Lecky points out, the Kimberly case is unusual because he was a Protestant, pointing out that ‘Among the few persons who were executed for abduction in Ireland was an attorney named Kimberly, at a time when no-one but a professing Protestant could be enrolled in that profession.’

Here then, we have a case of a lawyer and a Protestant being hanged for an offence for which few were hanged. What was so heinous about this particular abduction? Or did Kimberly have powerful enemies?

His own account of the events of the abduction of Bridget Reading (not Rending, as the London printer had it) is expectedly, full of bad luck stories and of his being an innocent dupe. Making sense of Kimberly’s own garbled and complicated account of what happened, there emerges a bare outline of a plausible story: he was a lawyer and so would have appeared to be hardly a ‘heavy’ when it came to applying some pressure on the intended abduction and forced marriage of your Bridget Reading, for that is what lies at the heart of this story. Kimberly was contacted by an unscrupulous adventurer called Braddock Mead, with an assignment of visiting the nurse who had the guardianship of Bridget. Now, Kimberly argued that the old couple who had Bridget in care were also after her inheritance, and he said that he was told ‘there was a considerable sum of money due to her… she never having received a penny from her father, who was an ill man’.