I do not think, if the highwaymen were with us again, that they would be treated by their victims with the extraordinary lenience shown them in those (in that respect) easy-going seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was commonly sufficient for a "knight of the road" who had been good enough to refrain from abuse or personal violence to say at parting, "God bless you," and then to shake hands with his victim, for that victim to go his way and never think of laying an information. And that is one of the reasons why the high-toby trade flourished so bravely in times when to be convicted of highway robbery meant death. The law, in fact, overreached itself, and the awful extremity of the penalty, so far from discouraging highwaymen, really encouraged their kind; for those were, after all, not the heartless periods we are taught to think them, and comparatively few were prepared to swear away the life of a fellow-creature in revenge for the loss of guineas or jewellery. Had the penalty been less tragic there would have been more informations.

But it was in the years following the Civil War, ending with the execution of Charles the First, that the roads in general, and Maidenhead Thicket in particular, attained their greatest notoriety. The whole country, indeed, swarmed with the adventurers who had attached themselves to the fortunes of the Cavalier party, and with gentlemen ruined in the cause of the King; their property sequestrated by Parliament and their persons subject to arrest. When the fighting was done, many of them became brigands and preyed upon honest men. If their victims chanced to be of the opposite faction, well and good; but it really mattered little to them of whom they levied unlawful tribute upon the road, and in short, the broken Cavaliers turned highwaymen, of whom we read in the classic pages of Smith and Johnson, were no favourable advertisement of their defeated party. Captain Alexander Smith, to whose diligence we owe the accounts of these seventeenth-century highwaymen, was himself of Royalist sympathies: the fact peeps out from almost every page of his work; but he had not the wit to see that the careers of his sorry heroes, as told by him, show them in general to be bullies, ready at a moment's notice, with a gush of cant, to justify their acts, fully as revolting as any of the cant that ever proceeded from what we are taught to believe was the canting party. They were a scoundrelly crew, whose highway work was but an incident, and that a comparatively venial one, in lives compact of almost incredible viciousness.

A prominent figure was that of Philip Stafford, a desperate fellow who, born about 1622, and originally the son of a gentleman-farmer in the neighbourhood of Newbury, had seen some fighting for the King, and, like many another highwayman of that period, was known as "captain." Maidenhead Thicket was a favourite lurk of his. Here it was he met a clergyman, shot his horse, robbed him of forty guineas, and bound him to a tree.

We read that Stafford soon grew successful in his profession and amassed a considerable sum of money; and then thought it well to retreat to a village in the north of England, and live there in a retired and frugal manner. It does not seem a characteristic resolution for a highwayman to take. The quiet life, it might be supposed, would not suit such an one. But such is the story told of him.

The more to avoid suspicion, he assumed the appearance of sanctity, and attended the village church and the parish meetings, and soon acquired great popularity as a speaker among the simple country people. After he had continued there about a year the minister died, and we are expected to believe the fantastic story that Stafford was elected in his stead, and that he "acquitted himself to the entire satisfaction" of the people; until, indeed, he went off with the plate.

He then, tired of the simple life, resumed his evil courses. Near Reading he waylaid a farmer, jogging home from market, and, worming himself into the unsuspecting man's confidence, found he had with him £33, the price of two loads of wheat just sold. He relieved the unfortunate man of that sum; but this was his last exploit. According to Johnson, he had scarcely taken leave of the farmer when two gentlemen, well mounted, came up, and, being informed of what had happened, rode after Stafford, and, in the space of an hour, overtook and dismounted him, seized the money, and carried him before a Justice of the Peace, who committed him to prison. At the ensuing Assizes he was tried and condemned. During his imprisonment he lived in a sumptuous manner, and, after the lax customs of the time, was even visited by many of his own profession, who formed a plan for his escape. But rumours of this being noised about, the day of execution was changed, and the scheme for his rescue was foiled.

He made the customary brave show at that last scene. Dressed in "a fine light suit of clothes, with a nosegay in his breast," he at first appeared perfectly unconcerned, and seems to have been the first of a long line of bold fellows who, given a last drink at a tavern on the way, promised to pay for it when they returned: an excellent jest. But, arriving at the place of execution at Reading, looking wistfully around, and seeking to prolong the preliminaries, in hope of that promised rescue, he faltered and trembled when the looked-for friends made no appearance. Presenting the sheriff with a paper containing a short account of his adventures, he was duly hanged.

"By his particular desire," the sheriff had him buried under the tower of St. Mary's Church.