Half-hours with the Highwaymen - Vol 1 / Picturesque Biographies and Traditions of the "Knights of the Road"

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

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

O, there was never a life like the robber's,

So careless, and gay, and free.

And its end? why, a cheer from the crowd below,

And a leap from the leafless tree.

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 (who themselves, if the truth of it were told, would probably be disclosed as a rather sordid crew).

The thrilling romance—or the side-splitting humorous circumstances, as the case might be—of one's acquaintance or next-door neighbour being plundered, threatened with death at the pistol-muzzle, and then, with his very coat stripped off his back, being bidden make haste away, is obvious enough, and the highwayman who did all the threatening and the plundering is easily seen to be at once a hero and a humorist; but when he met yourself in the darkling lane, and had your purse, your coat, and your gold watch, and d——d you because you did not carry more wealth, and so make it better worth the while of a gentleman like himself to be out upon the roads at such unconscionable hours—why, then he was a rogue of the most debased description, and the occasion was not so much humorous as tragical; while, as for Romance: what sickly cant is this? Where are the patrol? What are the peace-officers doing, to earn their pay? Is this a civilised country?

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 FOOTPADS.

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 (not in the way of his business), of Mr. Dyson, at Banner Cross, near Sheffield, on November 29th, 1876.

There can be no doubt that "Charley," as the police themselves almost affectionately called him, would in a more favourable era have been a highwayman. He had the instincts for the career, and was undoubtedly courageous enough, resourceful enough, and sufficiently equipped with what passed for wit and humour to have shone with no dim light, even in such days as those of Hind and Du Vall. He was not a hero, and the age insisted that he should ply a less respected craft than that of the highwayman, but he could have risen to such an occasion on the road, and perhaps because the public dimly saw as much, he figures in the imagination less as the armed midnight burglar he was, ready in cold blood to shoot down any one who stood in his way, than as a wonderfully daring and skilful adventurer, whose known exploits and whose legendary doings—for legends have accumulated around his well-known and ascertained career—can stir the pulse and heat the imagination. He was well-equipped even in the accident of his name. The heathen gods themselves might have laughed in their heavens—for humour was appreciated among the Olympians—at the sardonic jest of one named Peace prowling at dead of night, armed with a six-chambered revolver, ready and willing to slay those who should bar his path. And then how fine his gauge of the average intelligence, which even nowadays does not often range beyond that primitive conception of the typical burglar, in which he is pictured in the ankle-jacks, the breeches, the velveteen coat, and the moleskin cap of Bill Sikes. He saw that was the mental picture the British public cherished of gentlemen of his trade, and he took his cue therefrom, posing as an independent gentleman. It mattered little that his physiognomy actually reproduced the Bill Sikes head and face, with remarkable closeness; he dressed well, talked well, lived in nicely furnished houses in respectable neighbourhoods, and—last and clinching sign of respectability—he kept a horse and trap.

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."

"Yes," replied Peace, "they are good. I can't afford to buy, so I steal them."

"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 (though necessarily not a truthful) 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
of the most Notorious
Highway-Men, Foot-Pads, Shop-Lifts,
and Cheats of both Sexes, in and about
London and Westminster, and all Parts of
Great Britain, for above an Hundred Years
past, continu'd to the present Time.
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.

To which is prefix'd,
The Thieves New Canting-Dictionary,
Explaining the most mysterious Words,
New Terms, Significant Phrases, and Proper
Idioms, used at this present Time by
our Modern Thieves.

By Capt. ALEX. SMITH.

The Fifth Edition (adorn'd with Cuts) with the Addition of near Two Hundred Robberies lately committed.

In Two Volumes.

London. Printed for Sam. Briscoe, and sold by A. Dodd at the Peacock without Temple-Bar, 1719.

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 (in the mere narration of pen, ink, and the printed page) 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" (much is left to the imagination in a ——) "it is to paint them in their proper Colours; whose Words are always so odious, detestable, and foul, that some (as little acquainted with a God as they) 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?

There were poets before Homer, but by all accounts they were a sorry lot; and there were biographers of highwaymen before Alexander Smith, but for the most part their works are deadly dull. They had excellent materials, but did not know how to handle them. Shakespeare alone, in the scenes on Gad's Hill with Falstaff and Prince Hal and the men in buckram, knew the way, and all London laughed with him at those merry adventures; but such tiresome productions as the Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey, published in 1605, continued to appear.

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.

His further adventures with Snell and Shorthose, two companions of like inclination, are in themselves amusing when reduced to less stilted language than that of the Life. Curiously enough, one of these incidents is concerned with the robbing of an actor, whom Ratsey bids deliver his money first, and a scene from Hamlet afterwards. So it was not from any want of acquaintance with the best models that the unnamed author of Ratsey's life failed to put life into his narrative. The incident is treated in as dead and wooden a manner as the rest.

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 (? Joscelin) 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.

The curious "moral reflection" prefaced to Thomas Dun's entirely apocryphal adventures is itself worth reproducing. It says: "A man who is not forced from necessity or a desire of pleasure to become dishonest, but follows his natural dispositions in robbing and maltreating others, will generally be found to be destitute of every humane and generous principle. So will it be found with this character—a person of mean extraction—who was born in Bedfordshire, and who, even in childhood, was noted for his pilfering propensity and the cruelty of his disposition."

He lived, it seems, in the time of Henry the First, "and so many were his atrocities," writes Johnson, "that we can only find limits for the recital of a few." The limits were perhaps more accurately determined by Johnson's own powers of invention.

Johnson did not, of course, invent Thomas Dun. He is the child of the ages. Equally with Robin Hood, every generation, until the decay of folklore, added some new touch to him, and Johnson did but reduce him to print, add a little more, and shape him out of the somewhat formless but threatening figure he presented.

There is this much basis for him: that, on the site of the town of Dunstable, and for some distance along the Holyhead Road in that direction, there extended, from Saxon times until the reign of Henry the First, a dense thicket of scrub woods, overgrowing the ancient ruins of the Roman station of DurocobrivÆ. From the time of the Norman conquest the neighbourhood had been infested with robbers, and it was to drive them out and establish some sort of order that the king had clearings made in the woods that afforded such safe harbourage for outlaws. Under Royal encouragement a new town was founded, and in 1131 given, with the rights of market, to a priory that had been founded in the meanwhile. The King himself had a residence at "Dunstaplia," as the town was named, i.e. the "hill-staple" or market, and his successors were often there. The wool market was the most important at Dunstable; the monks long maintaining great flocks of sheep on the adjacent downs.

The robbers became only a memory, but a memory that never faded. It merely took on another form, and in the course of time the name of the town itself was twisted into an allusion to them and to their leader. It needed the collusion of gross ignorance and wild legend to effect so much, but the thing was done; and for centuries Dunstable was, and perhaps even now is, locally said to owe its name to "Dun's Stable," a hollow in the chalk downs, pointed out as having been the place where "Dun," the entirely imaginary leader of the outlaws, stabled his horse. If you doubt this there is the town seal to convince the sceptical, showing as it does what is said to be a horseshoe (a shoe of Dun's horse!), but is really intended for a staple or hasp.

The legendary Dun was a kind of bogey to the children of the neighbourhood, and in Johnson's pages is a most blood-thirsty creature. There we read that his first exploit was on the highway to Bedford, where he met a waggon full of corn, going to market, drawn by a fine team of horses. He accosted the waggoner, and in the midst of conversation stabbed him to the heart with a dagger. He buried the body, and drove the waggon off to the town, where he sold the corn and the waggon as well, and then disappeared!

Dun had a great animosity to lawyers (or, rather, the authors of the legends worked into them their own dislike of the legal profession, and it is curious to note how this runs, like a thread, throughout all the fabric of highwaymen stories), and, hearing that some were to dine at a certain inn at Bedford, went hurriedly into the house about an hour before the appointed time, and desired the landlord to hasten with the dinner, and to provide for ten or twelve. The company soon arrived, and while the lawyers thought Dun a servant of the inn, the innkeeper thought him an attendant of the lawyers. He bustled about, and on the bill being called for, collected the amount, and walked off with it. The company, tired of waiting for him to return with their change, rang the bell for it, and then discovered him to be an impostor. And the hats and cloaks and the silver spoons had gone too.

Dun became such a terror, that the sheriff of Bedford assembled a considerable force to attack him and his band. But Dun, finding his own men to equal, if not actually to outnumber, those sent against him, assumed the offensive, and, furiously attacking the sheriff's expedition, routed it and took eleven prisoners, whom he hanged upon trees in the woods, by way of a hint how rash a thing it was to interfere with him. Removing the prisoners' clothing, they dressed themselves in it, and forming a plan to rob the castle of a neighbouring nobleman, appeared before it in the uniform of the sheriff's men and demanded admission, "to search for Dun." Failing to find him, they requested all the keys of the place, to make a narrower search, and so looted many costly articles. Upon a complaint being lodged with the sheriff, the ruse was belatedly discovered.

It would be wearisome to follow all the fables that tell of Dun's twenty years' bloodstained progress to the scaffold. There is this much to be said in commendation of the popular legends of bandits: that when they are shown to be really bad, without redeeming traits, the legends duly see to it that justice is satisfied. And so with Dun, who is made to end disastrously at Bedford, even without the advantage of a formal trial. "When two executioners approached him he warned them of their danger if they should lay hands on him," and when they insisted upon doing so he struggled with them so successfully that he flung them nine times upon the scaffold, before his strength gave way. The crowds who gloated horribly over executions at Tyburn and elsewhere never had so great a treat as pictured in this fictitious scene: but this was merely the appetiser, the anchovies, so to speak, before the more solid course. Better was to follow.

The original executioners having been put out of action by Dun's violence, reinforcements were brought to bear, and did their business very effectually. "His hands were first chopped off at the wrist; then his arms at the elbows; next, about an inch from the shoulders; his feet below the ankles; his legs at the knees; and his thighs about five inches from the trunk. The horrible scene was then concluded by severing his head from the body, and consuming it to ashes. The other portions were set up in the principal places of Bedfordshire."

This by no means pretty ending, when told to children, terrified them more than all the terrific deeds attributed to Dun himself, and often woke them at night, screaming.

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