THE YOUNGER SONS—JUDGE POPHAM—SHAKESPEAREAN HIGHWAYMEN—THE "CAVALIER" BRIGANDS—A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS TRACT

No doubt many of the "highwaymen's" escapades in the times of Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth were the coltish pranks of high-spirited young men of family, or the freaks of university students. To assume a disguise, to buckle on a sword, and then take to the highway, singly or in bands, would be just the kind of adventure to tickle the fancy of such youths, and the danger that lay behind it all was really rather an appetising spice than a discouragement. The tradition of Henry the Fifth, when yet Prince of Wales, robbing on Gad's Hill for pastime, was still current, and Shakespeare had just revived it, and invested the doings of the Prince and Falstaff and their merry men with the glamour of the stage, which even then set the fashion.

Such a young man, according to Aubrey, was John Popham, afterwards Sir John, and Chief Justice of the King's Bench. "In his youthful days," says Aubrey, "he was a stout and skilful man at sword and buckler as any in that age, and wild enough in his recreations, consorting with profligate companions, and even at times wont to take a purse with them."

This wild fellow became, as a member of Parliament and a judge, an extremely severe personage in dealing with the class of people with whom we thus learn him to have associated. Partly his work was the Act of 1589, which prescribed banishment (or, as later times phrased it, "transportation") "into such parts beyond the seas as shall be at any time hereafter for that purpose assigned."

Shakespeare's highwaymen are, as a rule, gentlemen. Such were the outlaws who in the Two Gentlemen of Verona waylaid Valentine and Speed in the forest. They had been banished from Verona and Mantua merely for such trivial and essentially gentlemanly peccadilloes as an attempt to abduct an heiress, and stabbing another gentleman to the heart. Too bad!

They found Valentine so presentable a young man that, finding he had no property to lose, they immediately proposed to make him their captain. They were prepared to do him homage, and be ruled by him. "But if thou scorn our courtesy, thou diest."

Making the best of circumstances—being rather prepared to captain a band of desperadoes than lose his life, Valentine consented, with one proviso:

To which the outlaws indignantly reply that they "detest such vile, base practices."

The doings of Falstaff and Prince Hal in their highway robbery exploits on Gad's Hill are classic farce, with elements of probability, although Sir John Fastolf, the original Falstaff, was introduced by Shakespeare without the slightest warranty: the real Sir John having been no dissolute, cowardly old man, but a brave and stern soldier, who had warred nobly for King and country for forty years.

The point of view from which the gentlemen highwaymen regarded themselves is admirably set forth in the play of Sir John Oldcastle, produced in 1600. The stage is generally regarded as the mirror of life, and thus, when "Sir John À Wrotham" is made to introduce himself to the audience, by frankly acknowledging he was, "in plain terms, a thief; yet, let me tell you, too, an honest thief," we doubtless have the real mental attitude of the "collectors"—as they were pleased to fancifully style themselves—set forth. He goes on to declare himself, in the good old Robin Hood vein, to be "one that will take it where it may be spared, and spend it freely in good fellowship." A modern company-promoter, of the Whitaker Wright type, might say as much, but even if true, it would not be held an excuse.

The same outlook upon life is observed in The Cashiered Soldier, a tract published in 1643. It represents that warrior out of work exclaiming:

Again, Bishop Earle, in his Microcosmography, shows us how the highwaymen were recruited. Speaking of the sorrows of younger sons, and narrating the shifts to which they were often reduced, he says: "Others take a more crooked path, through the King's highway, where at length the vizard is plucked off, and they strike fair for Tyburne."

The biographies of highwaymen given later in these pages, fully illustrate the position of affairs in the succeeding age, and show that the country swarmed with highway robbers after the conclusion of the Civil War between King and Parliament. Many of them were impoverished cavaliers, but the most prominent were only pretended gentlemen, who used any Royalist sympathies they may have had in giving a specious excuse for their misdeeds. Captain Hind is typical of these plundering fellows in the era of the Commonwealth. So many were they, and so formidable, travelling, as they often did, in bands, that it became the business of the troops, at the conclusion of the war, to hunt out all such associated brigands.

On September 17th, 1649, General Fairfax issued a proclamation addressed to the commanders of "every respective regiment of horse," urging them to activity in the apprehension of all robbers, and promising high rewards for everyone captured. To this a Royalist print, the Man in the Moon, sarcastically rejoined that the "House of Robbers"—by which the House of Commons was meant—had voted for the next six months a reward of £10 for the taking of every burglar or highway-robber, "the State's officers exempted."

The proclamation, however, had its due effect, for on December 24th, no fewer than twenty-eight malefactors, principally of the classes specified, were all gibbeted together at Tyburn. Among them was "one Captain Reynolds, who was of the King's party in Cornwall, at the disbanding of the Lord Hopton's army at Truro.... His carriage was very bold, and, as he was going to be turned off, he cried: 'God bless King Charles: Vive le Roi.'"

But they were generally defiant at the last, whether Royalists or mere purse-takers; whether of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Conscience, which makes cowards of all, did not awake and begin to unnerve these candidates for Jack Ketch until the very opening of the nineteenth century.

Thus, in the olden times we find the condemned highwaymen nearly always nursing the grievance of their doom, and speaking of Justice and her emissaries as their "enemies"; as witness Thomas Hill, executed July 19th, 1694. Was he penitent at Tyburn? Not at all. His last words were, "God bless all my friends, and let all my enemies be hanged as I am"; and, adds his biographer "other reflecting and abusive Expressions."

Although it might well seem, after an extensive course of reading in the thoughts and deeds of those times, that the country was entirely populated by two classes: the scoundrels who were always trying to evade Justice, and the officers of the law, continually occupied in tracing them, an unobtrusive residuum of well-intentioned and well-conducted people existed. We do not, it is true, hear much of them, which is only to be expected; but they existed, nevertheless, and were often as anxious to save sinners as any modern tract-distributor.

A curious seventeenth-century four-page leaflet in the British Museum, styled A Terrible and Seasonable Warning, shows something of the well-meaning forces, as well as a good deal of the superstition, of the time, in an account of how a young man named Abraham Joiner, aged between seventeen and eighteen, described as a ballast-man, of Shakesby's Walk, near Shadwell church, was saved at the last moment from becoming a footpad or a highwayman. It is nothing more nor less than a seventeenth-century ancestor—and a very badly printed one—of the modern religious tracts produced nowadays by the million, in a rather hopeless endeavour to save hurrying sinners, often too anxiously wondering how they are to live in this world, without troubling about the next.

The young man began to keep bad company, and in especial that of one Ann Turner, who said she must have money, and he must by some means get it for her. Abraham went home in a desperate frame of mind. He thought of the several ways (none of them honest ones) in which money in a sufficiency might suddenly be obtained; and frightened his mother by saying he must and would get some, even though he asked the devil to help him to it.

"In this Humour," we learn, "he went out to the Cock and Lyon in King Street, where there came into A Room to him a Person in a Dark-colour'd Habit, and ask'd him what made him so Melancholly? If he wanted Money, he cou'd help him to it, and bid him meet him the next Night, which he at first told him he wou'd do; but afterwards suspecting it might be the Devil, he told him he cou'd not meet him at the time, then bid him meet him on Sunday, behind Stepney church, which he consented to do, and, going away, gave him a Pistole in gold (a coin, not a firearm) after which the Young Man grew uneasy in his Mind, and going home show'd his Brother, who advis'd him to throw the Money away, assuring him it could be none but the Devil, which very much terrified the young man, so that he threw the Money away, and was taken with a sudden trembling, and falling on his knees, besought God to forgive him.

"In this condition, Mr. Constable, the Minister of the Parish, was sent for, and Mr. Symons, who Pray'd by him till the time was over when he had promis'd to meet the Person he had seen, and Mr. Constable and the other Divines us'd many Prayers and exhortations with him, and at length so comforted him that 'tis hoped the Devil will have no further Power over him, if he takes this timely Warning of the Mercies of God."

Then follow "Some of the Prayers." The first page shows a very respectable-looking devil and a very greatly terrified young man; also some black-cassocked clergymen on their knees, very earnestly praying.

A curious broadsheet tract of about a century and a half later, entitled Wild Robert, may be fitly noticed here. Like the earlier tract, it was a purely religious publication; but the time had gone by for supernatural terrors to be invoked. Poetry, of sorts, is brought to bear, instead:

THE EXECUTION OF WILD ROBERT.

Being a Warning to all Parents.

The price of this improving publication was one halfpenny, and no one, observing the dramatic picture with which it begins, or reading the verses, will be disposed to think value for money was not given. Let us hope the parents of that age duly profited by the advice given!