We will now press on to the Heath, for our friends the highwaymen are anxiously awaiting us. Right away from the seventeenth century this spot bore a bad repute, when one of the most daring exploits was performed on its gloomy expanse. This was no less a feat than the plundering of that warlike general, Fairfax, by Moll Cutpurse. The most capable soldier of the age robbed by a woman highwayman, if you will be pleased to excuse the Irishry of the expression! But, indeed, the Roaring Girl, as her contemporaries called her, was the best man among the whole of that daring crew, and to her courage, her cunning, and her ready wit she owed the successful career that was hers. She wore the breeches in no metaphorical sense, but through all her career habited herself in man’s garments. Only when she had amassed a fortune and had retired from “the road” did she don the skirt.

It is sad to think that the greatest of all the brotherhood who made Hounslow Heath and highway robbery synonymous terms was cut off in the full tide of his success. At least, it seems so to us, although the travellers of the period doubtless felt a certain satisfaction when Du Vall was executed, on January 21, 1670. He was but twenty-seven years of age, and already had become a star of the first magnitude. He was, in fact, a master of the whole art and mystery of robbing upon the road, and to this he brought the most perfect courtesy. Violence had no part in the methods of this artist, and he would have scorned, we may be sure, the ruffianly and even murderous acts of a later generation of the craft, which not only despoiled travellers of their goods, but rendered the Heath dangerous to life and limb. His chief exploit is classic, and is set forth so eloquently, and with such an engaging profusion of capital letters, in a contemporary pamphlet, that one cannot do better than quote it:—

“He, with his Squadron, overtakes a Coach which they had set over Night, having Intelligence of a Booty of four hundred Pounds in it. In the Coach was a Knight, his Lady, and only one Serving-maid, who, perceiving five Horsemen making up to them, presently imagined that they were beset; and they were confirmed in this Apprehension by seeing them whisper to one another, and ride backwards and forwards. The Lady, to shew that she was not afraid, takes a Flageolet out of her pocket and plays. Du Vall takes the Hint, plays also, and excellently well, upon a Flageolet of his own, and in this Posture he rides up to the Coachside. ‘Sir,’ says he to the Person in the Coach, ‘your Lady plays excellently, and I doubt not but that she dances as well. Will you please to walk out of the Coach and let me have the Honour to dance one Currant with her upon the Heath?’ ‘Sir,’ said the Person in the Coach, ‘I dare not deny anything to one of your Quality and good Mind. You seem a Gentleman, and your Request is very reasonable.’ Which said, the Lacquey opens the Boot, out comes the knight, Du Vall leaps lightly off his horse and hands the Lady out of the Coach. They danced, and here it was that Du Vall performed Marvels; the best Masters in London, except those that are French, not being able to shew such footing as he did in his great French Riding Boots. The Dancing being over (there being no violins, Du Vall sung the Currant himself) he waits on the Lady to her coach. As the knight was going in, says Du Vall to him, ‘Sir, you have forgot to pay the Musick.’ ‘No, I have not,’ replies the knight, and, putting his Hand under the Seat of the Coach, pulls out a hundred Pounds in a Bag, and delivers it to him, which Du Vall took with a very good grace, and courteously answered, ‘Sir, you are liberal, and shall have no cause to repent your being so; this Liberality of yours shall excuse you the other Three Hundred Pounds,’ and giving the Word, that if he met with any more of the Crew he might pass undisturbed, he civilly takes his leave of him. He manifested his agility of body by lightly dismounting off his horse, and with Ease and Freedom getting up again when he took his Leave; his excellent Deportment by his incomparable Dancing and his graceful manner of taking the hundred Pounds.”

When this hero had gone the inevitable way of his fellows, he was buried with great pomp and circumstance in the church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, with a set of eulogistic verses for his epitaph. Unfortunately, the old church was destroyed by fire and the epitaph with it.

Mr. Nuthall, the Earl of Chatham’s solicitor, too, who had been to Bath to confer with his gouty and irascible client, was stopped in his carriage as it was going towards London across this dreaded wilderness. The highwaymen fired at him, and he died of fright. Two other notable murders by highwaymen took place here—in 1798 and 1802—and bear witness to the degeneracy of the craft. The first was Mr. Mellish, who was fired upon and killed as he was returning from a run with the King’s hounds. A Mr. Steele was the other victim, and his assailants, Haggarty and Holloway, who had planned the crime at the “Turk’s Head,” Dyot Street, Holborn, it is satisfactory to be able to add, were hanged. The execution took place at the Old Bailey, when twenty-eight persons among the crowds who had come to see the sight were crushed to death. Up to the year 1800, the Heath was a most famous place for gibbets. “The road,” as a writer of the period says, “was literally lined with gibbets on which the carcases of malefactors hung in irons, blackening in the sun.” Du Vall had a successor in Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe, collecting tithes in rather a promiscuous way, by turning highwayman in 1752. His career was a short one, for one of the first travellers he bade “Stand!” on the Heath shot him through the body, from which he died a few days later, at the house of a friend, from “inflammation of the bowels,” as the contemporary report, jealous for the reputation of the dignified clergy, put it.

Shall I weary you by recounting more of these highway crimes? There was Dr. Shelton, a surgeon, who flourished in the early thirties of last century, and, deserting lancet and scalpel, took to the road and that not more lethal weapon, the horse-pistol; though, to be sure, it was more for show than use, for not Du Vall himself could have been more courteous.

That the poet who wrote of Bagshot Heath as a place “where ruined gamblers oft repay their loss” might with perfect propriety have substituted “Hounslow” will be readily seen when we mention Parsons, nearly contemporary with Shelton, who robbed at Hounslow that he might gamble in London. Parsons was the son of a “Bart. of the B.K.,” as the Tichborne Claimant would have phrased it; an Eton boy, at one time an officer both in the Army and Navy, and the husband of a beautiful heiress. He made an edifying end at Tyburn.

Then there was Barkwith, a mere novice, whose first sally led to a like exit. He was the son of a Cambridgeshire squire, and manager to a Lincoln’s Inn solicitor. He had “borrowed” trust moneys wherewith to satisfy some debts of honour; and so the hour of four o’clock in the afternoon of a November day found him on the Heath, with a pistol in his hand and his heart in his mouth, “holding up” a coach. The booty was but a miserable handful of silver; but, being captured, he died for it, all the same. Let us trust he did “the young gentlemen who belong to Inns of Court” an injustice when, in his dying speech and confession, he warned his hearers against them as “the most wicked of any.”

Then there was Dare-devil Simms—“Gentleman Harry,” as his friends called him—a midshipman who came up from deserting his ship in the West Country. First borrowing a saddle and bridle, and then stealing a horse, he commenced his career by robbing a post-chaise and the Bristol Mail, and coming to London, soon became a noted figure on this stage. One night he relieved a Mr. Sleep of his purse. The despoiled traveller bewailed his loss bitterly, but Harry comforted him with the assurance that he would have been robbed in any case; if not by himself, certainly by one or other of the two who were waiting for him down the road. “But if you meet them,” said he, “sing out ‘Thomas!’ and they will let you pass.” The unfortunate man went on his way calling “Thomas!” to every one he met, and narrowly escaped being severely handled by some gentlemen who conceived themselves insulted.

Presently Tyburn claimed Gentleman Harry also, and a career which had been begun by transportation, and continued through such stirring adventures as being sold for a slave, becoming a sailor and a privateersman, was finally extinguished by the halter. A short life and a merry.

Strawkins, Simpson, and Wilson, too, helped to keep up the stirring story of the road. They intercepted the Bristol Mail and left the postboy, bound with ropes, at the bottom of a ditch on the outskirts of Colnbrook. They were tracked down by the Post Office, and, Wilson turning King’s evidence, the first two were hanged. The Mail was then given an escort of Dragoons, but highway robbery had too strong a spice of adventure for one of these fine fellows to resist it. He accordingly pillaged the Bath Stage, and suffered the appointed end in due course.

This catalogue of mine does not close until 1820, in which year four confederates plundered the Bristol Mail. They had booked the inside seats, and during their journey through the night forced open the strong boxes placed under the seats, decamped with their contents, and were never heard of again.

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