Read Ebook: Half-hours with the Highwaymen - Vol 1 Picturesque Biographies and Traditions of the Knights of the Road by Harper Charles G Charles George Hardy Paul Illustrator

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Ebook has 864 lines and 84337 words, and 18 pages

The "Execution Bell," St. Sepulchre 155

The Road near Chester, 1675 200

Caxton Gibbet 202

Miles's Irons 211

The "True Protracture" of Captain Hind 274

"Here now thou seest me as a Butcher's Boy" 276

Captain Hind, the Cavalier Hero 284

"Next; here am I presented to thy view" 284

"Stand and Deliver! next in order comes" 287

"Behold! at last, the saddest sight of all" 301

Execution of the Golden Farmer 329

HALF-HOURS

WITH THE

HIGHWAYMEN

INTRODUCTORY

THE GENERAL DECLENSION FROM OUTLAW TO HIGHWAYMAN, AND THENCE TO FOOTPAD, THIEF, AND BURGLAR--GAMALIEL RATSEY--THOMAS DUN, OF DUNSTABLE

Half-hours! In the days when the highwaymen flourished, and made travel perilous for law-abiding persons, a five-minutes' interview with one of these "Knights of the Road," who were but rarely knightly in their manners, would have been more than sufficient. Travellers, who had been violently abused, threatened, and robbed, did not observe that atmosphere of romance about the highwaymen, with which, not only modern times, but their own age, enwrapped them. The highwaymen have ever been accounted romantic, as we shall see in these ensuing pages; from the more or less mythical Robin Hood, down to the Carolean age of Captain Hind, Swiftnicks, and Du Vall, whose exploits were followed with interest and sympathy by their contemporaries. From a lengthy study of these things, one fact rises prominently above all others: it is the fact that the highwayman's only ceased to be a romantic figure when he stopped and robbed one's self, under the usual circumstances of coarse vituperation and personal indignity. On all other occasions, although he commonly practised after nightfall, he paradoxically moved in a rosy atmosphere, in company with the knightly figures of ancient chivalry .

We shall see in these pages the fine flower and the gradual declension of the highwaymen: shall trace the mythical and the almost wholly imaginary figures to the time when, under Charles the First and the Commonwealth, it was difficult to tell where the Cavalier ended and the highwayman began; and shall thence come, by way of the disbanded troopers, who turned highway robbers in William the Third's reign, to that curious age when there was an even chance that the armed and mounted man who bade you "Stand and deliver!" was a baronet, or a footman out of place, turned gentleman of the road to support the vices he had learned of his masters.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, to its close--the era of Maclaine and Sixteen String Jack, the art of highway robbery becomes less idealised. There is more police-court about it, and less hazy glamour. Beau Brocade is a fine figure, well-dressed and splendidly mounted, on the heath, but in the dock at Bow Street, and later at the Old Bailey, he never showed to advantage, Sixteen String Jack excepted, with his pea-green coat and his bouquet, as big as a cabbage. And as the eighteenth century closed and gave place to the nineteenth, the mounted highwayman gradually disappeared, and the footpad, a miserable, muddy, cowardly figure, for whom no one ever had a good word, is seen in his dark lurk, in the wayside ditch, not often courageous enough to work alone, and generally found in couples, ready perhaps with the suffocating pitch-plasters that so terrified the wayfarers of that time.

The footpad never had the slightest inkling of romance, and was always brutal, whether he clapped that pitch-plaster over your mouth, or terrified you, or finished off his examination of your pockets by knocking you down and jumping on your body. A far cry, indeed, from the generous days of Captain Hind, or Claude Du Vall.

No one would ever contemplate a work on "Half-Hours with the Footpads." It would be to introduce the reader into the very worst of society, and the least entertaining; and so we come by degrees to the present era of the housebreakers and the newspaper records, where you may seek romance if you will.

The history of the highwaymen is a lengthy emergence from ancient fables and marvellous rustic folklore, to more settled records. It is not peculiar in that gradual development. Such is the evolution of all history. But that of the highwaymen begins with the giants and the heroes, continued down through the legendary period of Robin Hood, to the times of the Civil War in England, between King Charles and his Parliament, when highway robbers cloaked their villainies with Royalist partisanship, to the less romantic eighteenth century, and finally ended, early in the nineteenth century, with all the glamour and tinselled things of the past, in squalid, commonplace circumstances. The highwaymen begin in the dimness of antiquity, continue very largely as heroic myths throughout the middle ages, become philanthropic and chivalric figures in succeeding eras, and later are seen to be mere masquerading footmen, brave only in their masters' fine clothes, seeking money wherewith to gamble and to live dissolute lives. They end, sordid, mud-splashed figures, from which romance shrinks; in no detail distinguishable from such vermin as the footpads, who on dark nights robbed women and children, and defenceless old men, for coppers in solitary lanes, and fled in terror from the robust.

When the profession of highwayman became extinct, those of pickpocket, card-sharper, and burglar were greatly reinforced. Some severe censors of modern times declare that the Joint Stock and Limited Liability Acts were passed in the interest of the classes in whose veins the highwayman blood flowed, and whose instincts could not, in the altered conditions of life, find expression on the road. As company promoters of the Whitaker Wright and Jabez Balfour type, it has been said, these providential enactments enabled them to satisfy their natural leanings. And so the old world journeys down the ringing grooves of change, even as Tennyson desired it should do, though perhaps not on the exact lines of his thoughts.

There are no heroes in these days; or, at the most of it, the hero of to-day, beslavered with overmuch praise, is discovered to-morrow to be a greatly overrated person, not so heroic as ourselves, if the truth were known and every one had his due.

The very last hero in the records of these allied criminal enterprises was Charles Peace, the burglar, who was hanged February 25th, 1879, for the murder , of Mr. Dyson, at Banner Cross, near Sheffield, on November 29th, 1876.

Until his arrest on the night of November 17th, 1878, in the act of committing a burglary at St. John's Park, Blackheath, he was a respected villa resident, who had a liking for art, a great fondness for music, and, in general, cultivated tastes. There was no reason, except such reason or such elements of chance, as may be found in the busy conduct of his trade, why he should ever have been caught. He burgled as cleverly as he lived; and had too much sense to work in company. Keeping his own counsel, and working alone, he was quite sure no pal would betray him.

His impudent assurance is well displayed in the authentic and well-known anecdote of his offering a choice cigar from among some he had looted, to a tradesman well acquainted with him. He entered the Peckham chemist's shop, made a purchase, passed the time o' day, and offered him his cigar-case. The shopkeeper took one, and later smoked it with great satisfaction.

When next Peace entered the shop, the shopkeeper said: "That was a fine cigar, sir, you gave me the other day."

"Do you?" rejoined the man, with a laugh at the absurdity of such a statement from a customer so apparently respectable as Peace; "I wish, then, you would steal me some more."

"I will!" said Peace; and he did. He had the effrontery to again burgle the place whence his original supply had come.

"Here," he said in a day or two, giving the shopkeeper a box full, "are the cigars I promised to steal for you." The delighted recipient thought how exquisitely his customer's kindness and humour blended.

There is nothing neater in all the history of highwaymen than this anecdote, twinkling brightly amid the matter-of-fact records of a degenerate day.

There is plentiful evidence that when Captain Alexander Smith in 1719-20 wrote and published his work upon the highwaymen and other evil-doers, he based his book upon the many chapbooks and broadsides then in existence. Many of them may even now be found by those who do not mind searching for them, but whether they will repay the trouble is quite another matter. He includes in his gallery even Robin Hood and Sir John Falstaff; and, not concerned to point out their legendary or merely literary character, gives an exact biography of each.

Several editions of Smith exist; some in three, others in two volumes. The title-pages vary largely, but all are extremely lengthy, and so curious that it is well worth while to reproduce one as on the next page.

A Compleat

HISTORY

of the

LIVES AND ROBBERIES

Wherein their most Secret and Barbarous Murders, Unparalell'd Robberies, Notorious Thefts, and Unheard of Cheats, are set in a true Light, and Expos'd to publick View, for the common Benefit of Mankind.

The Fifth Edition with the Addition of near Two Hundred Robberies lately committed.

In Two Volumes.

Captain Alexander Smith took an immense delight in his villains. You cannot fail to perceive, if you read his book, that his only contempt was for a bungler in the art. Royalist to the heart's core of him, he expends his most loving labours upon the freebooters who displayed his own political bias, and there can be little doubt that, while they did the robbing, it is the eloquence of Smith himself that supplies the embittered harangues, which the victims of Captain Hind, of Stafford, and of many another in his pages are supposed to endure. Nay, Smith enriches the career of many a Royalist highwayman with incidents those gallant fellows were entire strangers to; and himself robs prominent Puritans, who in actual life were assuredly never "held up" on the road.

The convention of disapproval of his heroes' villainies sits very lightly upon Alexander Smith. He pays that merest homage to virtue, but then starts rollicking through the biographies of the highwaymen with an unmistakable gusto. His table of comparative sinfulness is an oddity in itself. He says, ".... we have given them Precedency according as they excelled one another in Villainy. In their general Character the Reader will find the most unaccountable Relations of irregular Actions as ever were heard; penn'd all from their own Mouths, not borrow'd from the Account given of Malefactors by any of the Ordinaries of Newgate...."

He then continues, not very convincingly: "If we have here and there brought in some of these wicked Offenders venting a prophane Oath or curse, which is dash'd" "it is to paint them in their proper Colours; whose Words are always so odious, detestable, and foul, that some would be apt to conclude that Nature spoil'd them in the Making, by setting their Mouths at the wrong end of their Bodies."

Sir John Falstaff strangely comes first in this Valhalla. Who ever, loving the Shakespearian Falstaff, would have expected him to be exalted on this particularly bad eminence, over the heads of the several atrocious murderers Smith does not scruple to include in his pages?

Johnson, Smith's copyist of twenty years later, like his precursor, boggles at no marvellous tale. They knew the temper of their times and worked in accord with it. Why be a critic in an uncritical age?

That little work is typical. Gamaliel Ratsey--whether a real or imaginary person I dare not say--appears by this publication to have been "a famous thiefe in England, executed at Bedford the 26 of March last past, 1605." Probably there was a Gamaliel Ratsey, highwayman, hanged then and there; but the adventures related of him are almost certainly inventions: well invented, but told without the slightest scintilla of literary merit. Yet this ragbag stuff has figured in reprints of "old English literature." So much the worse, then, for Old English literature, if this be representative; or, more likely so much the worse for the critical ability of those who considered it worth disinterring on those grounds. It is not "literature," and not representative of what old England could then produce in literature; but it is valuable as one of the origins of the highwaymen legends.

Gamaliel Ratsey, according to this publication, was born at Market Deeping, in Lincolnshire, the son of a respected local gentleman, one Richard Ratsey, who held a position in the service of a greater gentleman: an esquire, probably, in the train of a nobleman. His only son, Gamaliel, received a good education, but was of a roving disposition and went over to Ireland and joined the army of occupation there, under the Earl of Essex. He so distinguished himself, early in those operations, that he was made sergeant. Soon after the death of Queen Elizabeth, he returned to England with the Earl of Devonshire, and went home to Market Deeping. At the not far distant town of Spalding he began his filching career, by making use of the good terms he enjoyed with the landlady of an inn to steal a bag containing ?40 in gold, which had been entrusted to her keeping by a farmer attending the market. To convince Ratsey how trusted a person she was, she foolishly showed where she had placed the bag; and as soon as her back was turned he had taken it from the cupboard where it lay, and made off.

When the farmer returned and wanted his money, there was the very deuce to pay. He and the landlady went off to the nearest justice and swore an information against Gamaliel, who was arrested and thrown into prison, but not before he had found time to return home and bury the bag in the garden. In confidence he told his mother where it was hid, his mother told his sister, his sister told her husband, her husband told his friends, and so at last the confession reached the ears of the justices. Gamaliel would undoubtedly have been hanged on that occasion, only he broke prison and escaped, clad only in his shirt.

A Cambridge scholar, robbed in similar manner, was bidden deliver a learned thesis. We find almost exactly parallel stories in Smith and Johnson. In those pages it is Sir Josselin Denville and his numerous band of robbers, who, meeting a Benedictine monk in a wood, make him preach a sermon in praise of thieving. Captain Dudley, a hundred years or so later, is represented demanding a sermon from a clergyman.

More shadowy even than Robin Hood, is "Thomas Dun." We may be in some reasonable doubt as to the validity of many incidents and biographies in the pages of Smith and Johnson, but there is no possible doubt whatever that the "Life of Thomas Dun" is what one of our own eighteenth-century highwaymen and cutpurses would have called a "flam." There was never a Thomas Dun, highwayman, bandit, and murderer, as depicted in those classic pages; but the fact that he was a myth does not prevent those painstaking authors from presenting us with a very exact narrative of his deeds.

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