HIGHWAYMEN’S INNS

There is no doubt that, in a certain sense, all inns were anciently hand-in-glove with the highwaymen. No hostelry so respectable that it could safely give warranty for its ostlers without-doors and its servants within. Mine host might be above suspicion, but not all his dependants; and the gentlemen of the high toby commonly learnt from the staffs of the inns what manner of guests lay there, what their saddle-bags or valises held, and whither they were bound. No wealthy traveller, coming to his inn overnight in those far-distant times, with pistols fully loaded and primed, dared set forth again without narrowly examining his weapons, whose charges, he would be not unlikely to discover, had mysteriously been drawn since his arrival, and perhaps his sword fixed by some unknown agency immovably in its scabbard. You figure such an one, too hurried at his starting to look closely into his equipment, come unexpectedly in the presence of a highwayman, and, his armoury thus raided, falling an easy prey.

These dangers of the wayside inns, and even of the greater and more responsible hostelries in considerable towns, were so well known that literature, from the time of Queen Elizabeth until that of the earlier Georges, is full of them. Indeed, that singular person, John Clavel, worthless and dissolute sprig of an ancient and respectable landed family in Dorsetshire, especially recounts them in his very serious pamphlet, the Recantation of an Ill-led Life, written from his prison-cell in the King’s Bench in 1627, and printed in the following year. He inscribes himself “Gentleman” on his title-page, and in his “discouerie of the High-way Law,” written in verse, proceeds to “round upon” his late confederates in the spirit of the sneak. All this was in the hope of a pardon, which he apparently obtained, for he was at liberty, and still renouncing his former evil courses, in 1634.

One of the important heads of his pamphlet, addressed to travellers, is “How a Traveller should carry himself at his inn.” His advice reads nowadays like that supererogatory kind generally known as “teaching your grandmother to suck eggs”; but when we consider closely that in those times knowledge was not widely diffused, and that to most people a journey was a rare and toilsome experience, to be undertaken only at long intervals and long afterwards talked of, John Clavel’s directions to wayfarers may have been really valuable. His pamphlet must, for some reason or another, have been largely purchased, for three editions of it are known.Thus he warns the traveller come to his inn:

But the classic and most outstanding literary reference to these dark features of old-time innkeeping is found in Shakespeare, in the First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The scene is Rochester: an inn yard. Enter a carrier, with a lantern in his hand, in the hours before daybreak.

There was never any lack of evidence as to the complicity of innkeepers in the doings of highwaymen. When John Nevison and his associates were tried at York in 1684, for highway robbery, their headquarters were stated, on oath, to have been at the “Talbot,” Newark, where the landlord was “supposed” to be cognisant of their business, and the ostler was known to have been in their pay. Nevison, it should be said, was the man who really did ride horseback to York in one day. He achieved the feat, and established the celebrated alibi by it, in 1676, before Turpin (who never did anything of the kind) was born. But at last, in 1684, the end came. He was arrested at the still existing “Three Houses” inn, at Sandal, near Wakefield, and being found guilty, was executed on Knavesmire, York, on May 4th, in that year.

THE “THREE HOUSES INN,” SANDAL.

A rather startling sidelight on these old-time aspects of inns was the discovery, in 1903, of an ancient and long unsuspected staircase at the “Bush,” Farnham. In the course of extensive repairs the builders came upon a staircase that had once led up among the rafters of the oldest part of the house; and it was presumed by those learned in the history of that picturesque Surrey town that, by connivance of the landlord at some distant period, it was used by highwaymen as a hiding-place when hard pressed. Near by the stairway a number of old coins were found, but most of them were so worn and obliterated, that it was an impossibility to read the date or any other part of the inscription.

THE “CROWN” INN, HEMPSTEAD.

The most famous highwayman of all time—famous in a quite arbitrary and irrational way, for he was at the bottom, rather than at the head of his profession—is Dick Turpin, who was born at Hempstead, in Essex, in 1705, at the “Crown” inn, his father being landlord of that hostelry, which still faces the road, and looks on to the lane that winds up to the village church. There is much that is appropriate, if you do but consider it, in one who is to be a highwayman and finally to be hanged, being born in a place called Hempstead; but this by the way. The ring of old trees planted on an ancient circular earthwork beside the lane opposite his birthplace (and seen in the illustration) is known locally as Turpin’s Ring.

The youthful Turpin began his career as apprentice to a Whitechapel butcher, and while still serving his indentures started his course of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow farmer. Fleeing from justice, he joined a band of smugglers and sheep-stealers who had their head-quarters in Epping Forest, and their store-house in a cave in the neighbourhood of Chingford; a spot now occupied by a singularly commonplace modern beer-house, like a brick box, named from this romantic circumstance, “Turpin’s Cave.”

A reward of fifty guineas was offered for the arrest of this precious gang, but it was not until the amount was doubled that things grew dangerous, and the unholy brotherhood was broken up. Turpin then took to scouring the roads singly, until he met with Tom King, with whom he entered into a partnership that lasted until he accidentally shot King dead when aiming at a police-officer who was endeavouring to arrest both, at the “Red Lion,” Whitechapel, in 1737.

“TURPIN’S CAVE,” NEAR CHINGFORD.

His partner dead, Turpin, finding London too hot to hold him, removed quietly to Welton, a Yorkshire village ten miles from Beverley, where he set up as a gentleman horse-dealer, Palmer by name. He had not long been domiciled in those parts before the farmers and others began to lose their horses in a most unaccountable way, and so they might have continued to lose and not discover the hand that spoiled them, but for the coarse and brutal nature that was Turpin’s undoing. Returning from a shooting excursion in which he had apparently not succeeded in shooting anything, the self-styled “Palmer” wantonly shot one of his neighbours’ fowls. The neighbour remonstrated with him and probably suggested that it required a good shot to bring down game but that the domestic rooster was an easy mark for a poor sportsman, whereupon the “gentlemanly horse-dealer” threatened to serve him in the same way.

THE “GREEN DRAGON,” WELTON.

One did not, even in 1739, threaten people with impunity and shot-guns. Something unpleasant generally resulted; and “Palmer” was accordingly arrested at the “Green Dragon” inn, Welton, on a charge of brawling; being afterwards haled before the magistrates assembled at Petty Sessions at Beverley, where, as he could produce no friends to speak on his behalf, he was put back for further inquiries. Those inquiries resulted in his being charged with stealing a black mare, blind of an eye, off Heckington Common. In fiction—and especially in fiction as practised by Harrison Ainsworth—Turpin at this point would in some way have sprung upon the back of Black Bess, come ready to hand from nowhere in particular, and would have been carried off triumphantly from the midst of his “enemies”; but these things do not happen in real life, and he was, instead, lodged in York Castle. Thence he wrote from his dungeon cell a letter to his brother at Hempstead, imploring him in some way to cook him up a character. This letter was not prepaid, and the brother, not recognising the handwriting, refused to pay the sixpence for it demanded by the Post Office.

THE “THREE MAGPIES,” SIPSON GREEN.

See now from what trivial incidents great issues hang. The village postmaster chanced to be identical with the schoolmaster who had taught Turpin to write. He was a man of public spirit, and travelled to York and identified the prisoner there as the man who had been “wanted” for many crimes. It was on April 17th, 1739, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, that Dick Turpin was hanged on Knavesmire, York, and since then he has become very much of a hero: perhaps the sorriest, the most sordid and absolutely commonplace scoundrel that was ever raised on so undeserved a pedestal.

No district was more affected by highwaymen in the old days than Hounslow Heath, and the fork of the roads, where the two great highways to Bath and Exeter set out upon their several courses at the west end of what was once Hounslow village and is now Hounslow town, used in those brave old days to be decorated with a permanent gibbet, rarely without its scarecrow occupant, in the shape of some tattered robber, strung up as a warning to his fellows. Prominent amongst many stories that belong to this stretch of country is that of the murder of Mr. Mellish, brother of the then Member of Parliament for Grimsby, on a night in 1798, when returning from a day’s hunting with the King’s Buckhounds in Windsor Forest. The carriage in which his party were seated was passing the lonely old beerhouse called the “Old Magpies,” at Sipson Green, at half-past eight, when it was attacked by three footpads. One held the horses’ heads, while the other two guarded the windows, firing a shot through them, to terrify the occupants. No resistance was offered to the demand for money, and purses and bank-notes were handed over, as a matter of course. Then the carriage was allowed to proceed, a parting shot being fired after it. That shot struck the unfortunate Mr. Mellish in the forehead, and he died shortly after being removed to an upper room in an adjoining inn, still standing, the “Three Magpies.” The older and more humble inn, heavily thatched and with a beetle-browed and sinister look, where the footpads had been drinking before the attack, makes a picture, in the melodramatic sort, on the Bath Road, even to-day.

THE “OLD MAGPIES.”

A very curious and authentic relic of those old times is found in that secluded little inn, the “Green Man,” a most innocent-looking, white, plaster-faced house that seems a very bower of rustic simplicity and guilelessness, standing at Hatton—“Hatton-in-the-Hinterland” as one feels tempted to style it—a rural hamlet, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” tucked away in the beautiful orchard country between the angle formed by those branching Bath and Exeter roads westward of Hounslow town. It is to-day, as I have said, a beautiful district of orchards, where the pink and white of the apple-blossom delights the eye in spring, and the daffodil grows. There is an old rustic pound at Hatton, and in front of the “Green Man” an idyllic pond where ducks quack and dive; and everything seems as pure and unspotted from the world as those white Aylesbury ducks themselves would appear to be. But Hatton is a Place with a Past, and the “Green Man” not so green as you might suppose. For here spread the lonely and sinister Heath, in days gone by, and at the “Green Man” the highwaymen of the district, who all cherished the most magnificent thirsts, and would not readily barter them away, foregathered in the intervals between offering wayfarers an unwelcome choice between rendering money or life. Sometimes the Bow Street runners—so called, in the contrariwise spirit, because they never by any chance ran, unless it might be away—would, daring very much indeed, poke inquisitive noses into the “Green Man,” but they never found any one more suspicious there than a drunken carter. For why? Because in the little parlour on the left-hand side as you enter, there is a veritable highwayman’s hiding-hole at the back of the old-fashioned grate, filling what was once an old-world chimney-corner. Into this snug, not to say over-warm and possibly sooty place, one of the starlight conveyers of property upon the Heath could creep on emergency and wait until danger passed off.

THE “GREEN MAN,” HATTON.

THE HIGHWAYMAN’S HIDING-HOLE.

That Putney Heath was a favourite resort of the gentry of the horse-pistol and crape mask is a mere commonplace to the student of these byways of history, and, however little it may be suspected by those who look in casually at the “Green Man” that stands on the crest of Putney Hill, where the Heath and the Portsmouth Road begin, that house was in the old days rightly suspect. About it—and no doubt also in it—lurked that bright and shining light of the craft, Jerry Avershawe, that bold spirit who, after making his name a name of dread, and Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common places to be avoided by all travellers with money and valuables to lose, died on the scaffold at Kennington in 1795, in his twenty-second year.

Footpads, too, frequented the “Green Man”: despicable fellows, who were to highwaymen what “German silver” and “American cloth” are to the real articles. The footpads waited for revellers who had taken too much liquor and were zig-zagging their unsteady way home, before they dared attack. A curious little incident in this sort was enacted in 1773 at the “Green Man.” Two convivial fellows drinking there had been watched by two footpads named William Brown and Joseph Witlock. When the two jolly topers came forth and corkscrewed a devious course home-along, Messrs. Brown and Witlock set upon them and secured the highly desirable booty of twenty guineas and some snuff-boxes and pen-knives. It was ill gleaning for any other of the fraternity, after thoroughgoing practitioners like these had gone over the pockets of the lieges. The smallest involuntary contributions were gratefully received, and they condescended even to relieve a baker’s boy of his little all, which was little indeed: consisting of a silver buckle and some halfpence. It is rather satisfactory, after all this, to learn that Messrs. Brown and Witlock were hanged.

The “Green Man” still keeps a stout, bolt-studded door, and the house, seen across the road from where the large old-fashioned pound for strayed horses, donkeys, and cattle stands on the Heath, presents a charming scene.

The “Spaniards” inn, that picturesque and picturesquely situated old house, built about 1630, in what was then an extremely lonely situation on the roadside between Hampstead and Highgate, stands actually in the parish of Finchley. It occupies the site of a lodge-entrance into what was once the Bishop of London’s great rural park of Finchley, where there stood until quite modern times a toll-gate that took tribute of all wayfarers. The odd little toll-house itself is still a feature of the scene, and may be noted on the left hand of the illustration.

How the “Spaniards” derived its name is rather a matter of conjecture than of ascertained, sheer, cold-drawn fact. If the generally received version be correct, the name should be spelled with an apostrophe “s,” to denote a single individual; for, according to that story, the original lodge was taken over by a Spaniard about 1620, and converted into a place of entertainment for Londoners, who even then had begun to frequent Hampstead and the Heath. The fact that the Spanish Ambassador, Gondomar, retiring from the danger of plague in the infected air of London, resided at neighbouring Highgate, 1620-22, may possibly have some bearing upon the question.

THE “GREEN MAN,” PUTNEY.

It becomes a little difficult to believe in the “Spaniards” being so early a place of popular resort; but, shaming the incredulous, there stands the old house, visibly old, undoubtedly large and designed for the conduct of a considerable business, and still comparatively lonely. It is also one of those very few houses, out of an incredibly large number, which really can make out a good claim to have been frequented by Dick Turpin. This spot was well within the “Turpin Country,” so to speak, as one speaks of literary landmarks; it was included in his “sphere of influence,” as they say in international politics; or simply (as a policeman might put it) was “on his beat.” Turpin has so taken hold of the imagination that you find legends of him in the most impossible places, but his real centre of activity, before he fled into Yorkshire, was Epping Forest, and a radius of twenty miles from Chingford just about covers his province.

It is only in modern times that the “Spaniards” has been anxious to claim Turpin. In that hero’s period, and when highwaymen still haunted dark roads and were hand-in-glove with many innkeepers, the “Spaniards” was no doubt just as anxious to disclaim any such association. Thus we do not find, in any memoirs of former landlords, “Turpin as I knew Him,” or anything of that kind. It is a pity, for we are in such a case reduced to accept legends, and Heaven and the inquirer into these things alone know what lies these legends tell. At the “Spaniards,” however, we accept the tradition that mine host, throughout a long series of years, had an excellent understanding with the whole fraternity of road-agents, and with Turpin in particular.

THE “SPANIARDS,” HAMPSTEAD HEATH.

It is not necessary to this general belief to place one’s faith in the truth of the stable attached to the house having been that of Black Bess, because we know that famous mare to have been entirely the figment of Harrison Ainsworth’s imagination; and the quaint old tower-like garden-house seen on the right hand of the accompanying picture of the inn is itself so picturesquely suggestive of headlong flights and pursuits that, whether Turpin did hide in it, or not, it is obviously demanded by all the canons of the picturesque that he should be made to do so—and accordingly he is. Thus we read: “This outhouse was a favourite resting-place for Turpin, and many a time on the late return of the marauder has it served as a bedroom. The underground passages that led to the inn itself have been filled up, years ago. Formerly, here Dick was safe enough. Were the two doors attacked by unpleasant visitors, he dived through the secret trap-door into the underground apartment, there to await the departure of the raging officers, or to betake himself to the inn, if that were clear of attack.”

Oh! those “secret passages” and “underground apartments”! Do we not meet them (in legend) everywhere? And have they not invariably been “filled up” long ago?

Forty-one years after Turpin had been hanged we find the “Spaniards” in touch with actual, unquestionable history. June, 1780, was the time of the “No Popery Riots” in London, when Newgate was fired by the mob, and half a million pounds’ worth of damage was done to business houses and private residences. The Earl of Mansfield’s town house, in Bloomsbury Square, was destroyed, and the mob, pleased with their handiwork there, determined to complete their revenge on the obnoxious judge by treating his country mansion at Caen Wood in the same manner.

Caen Wood still stands hard by the “Spaniards,” which you must pass in order to come to it from London. Here the landlord stood, with the tollbar behind him, like another Horatius in the gate, and met the rioters as they came with pikes and “No Popery” flags, and torches and firelocks, streaming along the road. They were an unsuspicious mob, and a thirsty, and when mine host invited them to partake of his best, free of charge, and even to wallow in it, if they would, they did not stop to ask the motive of such extraordinary generosity, but took him at his word and sat boozing there until the detachment of Horse Guards, sent up in response to the mounted messenger despatched by the landlord, had time to dispose themselves in the Caen Wood grounds, and so to overawe their undisciplined force.

A very great deal of the “Spaniards’” picturesqueness is due to the rustic setting of narrow lane and tall elms that frames it in, but that story of the resourceful landlord and his artful way with those London furies gives the house and the scenery a final dramatic touch. You fancy, if you stroll that way some June evening, that you see him, in old-fashioned dress—buckled shoes, worsted stockings, knee-breeches, scrubby wig—standing in the roadway, tankard in one hand, churchwarden pipe in the other, with assumed joviality confronting a rabble in equal parts drunk and mad. You see the banner, “No Popery!” you hear the curses and—without the aid of imagination, for the “Spaniards” is a going concern—smell the drink. And presently you hear the gallop of the Horse Guards and the rattle and jingle of their accoutrements.

But you must not by any means come here on Easter Monday or any other occasion of popular holiday, for amidst such wholesale merry-making imagination becomes atrophied, and the ghosts of historic drama will not condescend to share the stage with twentieth-century comedy.

Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.