The parish of Wandsworth extends up to Putney Heath, to which we come up-hill past the singularly-named “Tibbets’ Corner.” Research has failed to discover who or what was Tibbets, after whom or which the Corner was named; but a familiarity with the old-time character of the neighbourhood suggests that “Tibbets” is merely a corruption of “Gibbets,” which were at one time the chiefest features of the landscape in these parts.
JERRY ABERSHAWE
Putney Heath was the scene of the notorious Jerry Abershawe’s exploits in highway robbery. Where Veitch’s nurseries now stand, at the corner of Stag Lane, in Putney Bottom, just before you come to the Beverley Brook, formerly stood the “Bald-faced Stag,” or “Half-way House,” at one time a notorious house of call for this youthful but daring desperado, who with numerous lesser lights infested the neighbourhood, in the latter half of last century, lurking in the remotenesses of Coombe Wood, and plundering unhappy wayfarers.
There is a story told of this lawless and picturesque figure to the effect that on a dark and inclement night of November, after having stopped every passenger along the road, he was suddenly taken ill and compelled to retire to the shelter of this public-house, standing lonely upon the roadside. His comrades—“pals,” he would, doubtless, have called them—sent for a doctor, and a Dr. William Roots attended. He was bled, and the doctor was about to return home, when his patient, with a great appearance of earnestness, said, “You had better, sir, have some one to go back with you, as it is a very dark and lonesome journey.” This, however, the doctor declined, remarking that “he had not the least fear, even should he meet with Abershawe himself,” little thinking to whom he was speaking. This story was a favourite with Abershawe: it afforded him a reliable criterion of his unholy prowess.
THE “GREEN MAN,” PUTNEY HEATH.
Louis Jeremiah Avershawe—to give him his proper name—was born in 1773, and ended his career with a hempen cravat round his neck on August 3, 1795. He was tried at Croydon Assizes, on July 30, for the murder of David Price, an officer sent to apprehend him in Southwark, whom he had shot; wounding at the same time another officer with a second pistol. A flaw in the indictment acquitted him on the first count, but he was convicted on the charge of feloniously shooting at one Barnaby Taylor. With all his crimes, he was no coward, for, as a contemporary account of his trial says, “When Mr. Baron Penryn put on the black cap, the prisoner, regardless of his sad situation, at the same time put on his own hat, observing the judge with contemptuous looks while he was passing the awful sentence of the law.”
He was executed on Kennington Common. Arriving at the gallows, he kicked off his boots and died unshod, to disprove the letter, if not the spirit, of an old warning of his mother’s, that he was a bad lad and would die in his shoes. His body was subsequently hanged in chains in Putney Bottom, the scene of his exploits; and the satisfaction with which the passers-by beheld his tattered skeleton, swinging in its iron cage from the gibbet, may well be imagined; although it was not unlikely that, before they had reached the streets of Kingston, or the High Street of Putney, some surviving member of the malefactor’s fraternity would exact his unauthorized tolls.
GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD
Imagine how palpitating with incertitude the breasts of eighteenth-century travellers must have been when once the oil-lit streets of the towns were left behind. The stage-coach passengers sat glum and nervous,—each suspecting his fellow,—with their money in their boots, their watches in the lining of their hats, and other light valuables secreted in unlikely parts of their persons, in the fond hope that the fine fellow, mounted on a mettlesome horse, and bristling with weapons, who would presently bring the coach to a stop in some gloomy bend of the road, might be either too unpractised or in too great a hurry to think of those very obvious hiding-places. Rarely, at one time, did the mails or the stages escape the highwayman’s unwelcome attentions, for, during a lengthy period, the wide, unenclosed waste lands in the neighbourhood of London were the nocturnal resorts of all who desired to better their fortunes at the expense of whoever happened to be travelling upon these lonely roads after nightfall. All the ruined gamesters and unconventional or reckless ne’er-do-wells who could manage to buy, hire, or steal a horse, took to the exciting occupation of highway robbery. This diversion promised at once to be remunerative, and satisfying to the Englishman’s sporting instincts, and if the end of it was identical with a rope’s end and a morning dance upon nothing, why, the sportsman was unlucky,—and so an end. For although death was the penalty for highway robbery, yet the pursuit of it does not seem to have been looked upon as so very disgraceful; and the bold gentlemen (!) who, well-armed and not ill-horsed, lurked upon Putney Heath or Barnes Common, or any other of the many wildernesses that surrounded London in the midst of last century, were accounted somewhat romantic, even by the contemporaries whose pockets they occasionally lightened.
THE ROMANCE OF ROBBERY
Believe me, these rascals who hung by the dark roadside, and, disguised in black crÊpe or velvet masks, cried hoarsely in the ears of travellers, “Stand and deliver!” were not the social pariahs they would be to-day, could they revisit their suburban haunts. These fellows robbed the mails “with the utmost regularity and dispatch,” and despoiled every one who was not sufficiently well armed to withstand them, without distinction of class or sex. “Purses,” says one, who recounts his memories of these times, “rings, watches, snuff-boxes, passed from their owners to the attentive highwayman, almost as soon as the muzzle of his pistol obtruded through the window”; and when at last the poor fellow was lagged, and languished in the stone jug of Newgate, the ladies whom he had relieved, with much politeness, of their money and jewels came and condoled with him, and flaunted their handkerchiefs out of window as he passed one fatal morning to Tyburn in a tumbril, seated on his coffin, with the chaplain beside him, preaching of kingdom-come.
Jerry Abershawe was a hero of this stamp, only he did not make his last appearance on so fashionable a stage as Tyburn. Croydon was the scene of his trial, and Wandsworth, as we have seen, was the place of his taking off.
Two other highwaymen—William Brown and Joseph Witlock—who were both hanged at Tyburn in 1773, for house-breaking, haunted the neighbourhood of Putney Heath and Kingston, and robbed solitary pedestrians or children. They were not of the fine flower of their profession, as one may judge from the evidence given at their trial, by which it appeared that they laid in wait for topers in wayside taverns, and robbed them upon their coming out in a more or less helpless state. Two convivial fellows whom they had seen carousing in the “Green Man” they waited for, and having tied their hands behind their backs, relieved them of some twenty guineas, together with such small odds and ends as knives and tobacco-boxes. A little way further on, upon this occasion, they chanced upon a baker’s boy, and disdaining not even the merest trifles, they “persuaded” him to hand over a few halfpence and a silver buckle he was carrying in a bag.
THE WINDMILL, WIMBLEDON COMMON.
THE DUELLO
But Putney Heath and the adjoining Wimbledon Common were not notorious only for highwaymen and footpads: they were the favourite meeting-grounds of belligerent gentlemen with an exaggerated and altogether mistaken idea of honour, who faced one another armed with swords or pistols, and fought duels at an early hour of the morning, when courage was apt to be insufficiently warmed. Their notions of honour and “satisfaction” were, possibly, somewhat ridiculous, but it seems to me that a man who would get up at an unearthly hour of the morning, perhaps in the coldest of weather, to shoot at a fellow-creature, or to be shot at by him,—to be run through the body with a rapier, or else to run his opponent through some vital part,—must have been either singularly courageous or peculiarly vindictive.
To either (or both) of these categories, then, must have belonged my Lord Chandos and Colonel Compton, who were among the earliest to be “out” upon this spot. The affair took place in 1652, and was fought with swords, the Colonel being run through the body in a trice. In later times one of the most extraordinary duels of the eighteenth century took place on Wimbledon Common, between the Duke of York and Colonel Lennox, afterwards Duke of Richmond and Viceroy of Ireland. It seems that the Duke of York, with his brother the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV.), was insulted one night at Vauxhall by two gentlemen and a lady, all three masked, whose identity, although shrewdly suspected, could not be certainly ascertained at the time. They were, as a matter of fact, Lady Charlotte Lennox, who had some grievance against the Prince, and her two brothers, the Duke of Grafton and Lieutenant-Colonel Lennox. Now, the latter being Lieutenant-Colonel of the Coldstream Guards, of which regiment the Duke of York was full Colonel, was thus in a position of considerable delicacy when his commanding officer took the first opportunity that offered of putting an affront upon him on parade; for if he challenged and killed a Royal Duke in a duel, the severest penalties would no doubt be inflicted upon him,[1] but if, on the other hand, he pocketed the insult, his “honour” was indelibly stained. Colonel Lennox took what he thought the best course, and challenged the Duke of York to a hostile meeting, which duly came off in a dell near where that well-known landmark, the Wimbledon Common windmill, now stands. The seconds were Lord Rawdon and the Earl of Winchilsea, and the weapons chosen were pistols. On the word “Fire!” being given, only the Colonel’s pistol was discharged: the Duke not having pulled the trigger, and the Colonel not being desirous of another shot, honour was declared to have been satisfied; the only damage done, according to a contemporary account, being the loss of a curl from his Royal Highness’s head. An historian of the duello, however, throws unkind doubts upon this story, and insinuates that the seconds, mindful no less of their own safety than that of the Duke of York, took very good care that the pistols were primed without bullets.
WILLIAM PITT.
VICARIOUS DUELLING
In 1798 Mr. Pitt and Mr. George Tierney, M.P. for Southwark, had a bloodless set-to, and two other political antagonists—Lord Castlereagh and the jocular George Canning—fought, without a scratch, in 1809. In the same year Lord Paget and Captain Cadogan had a “hostile meeting” here, and exchanged shots without effect, the cause being, not politics this time, but that much more fruitful origin of discord—a woman. Lord Paget, himself a married man, had eloped with Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the wife of his friend Henry Wellesley, and the lady’s brother (one would have thought the injured husband should have given battle) decided to avenge the outraged honour of his family. So, as related, the combatants faced one another and fired. The Captain’s bullet went wide: my lord’s pistol merely flashed, and he, with a spark of right feeling, declined to shoot again at a man whose family he had wronged. Mr. Henry Wellesley, though apparently pusillanimous, was a more formidable, if less romantic, antagonist. That gentleman brought an action for crim. con. against Lord Paget, and salved his wounded feelings effectually with a verdict carrying damages to the tune of £20,000.
One of the very few serious encounters that took place here happened to be also the last. This was the duel between General Lorenzo Moore and Mr. Miles Stapylton, fought with pistols on February 13, 1832. The General wounded the civilian, who was seen to fall to the ground by the passengers in the Godalming coach, which happened to be passing at the time. Some of them came to his assistance, conveyed him off in a carriage, and desired the General to consider himself under arrest. General Moore was ignominiously marched off by a police-constable (so unromantic had the times grown!), and was charged at Kingston. His antagonist, however, becoming better, the man of war was released on bail, and no more was ever heard of the affair.
PITT
Mr. Pitt, “the Great Commoner,” who fought here without a scratch, was, if not upon his “native heath” (for he was born at Hayes, in Kent), at least within sight of his home. In fact, he practically went forth to do battle at the very gates of Bowling Green House, where he lived—and died, broken-hearted at Napoleon’s successes, in later years. The house still stands, altered, ’tis true, but not rebuilt; and the trees that shade its lawn and make beautiful its rearward gardens have in their ranks some that grew here when Pitt was resident under this roof. To call him “master” here were to use the wrong expression, for the private conduct, and the in-comings and out-goings of this great man, who made continental alliances and whose political ascendancy set vast armies in motion all over Europe, were very fully ordered by his eccentric and imperious niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept his bachelor household, acted as a secretary, and filled by her own appointment the post of candid friend and adviser. If Pitt endured uncomplainingly all this frank criticism under his own roof-tree, the fact says much for the natural sweetness of his temper; if he followed the advice of his volatile and irresponsible niece, then he must have been weak-minded indeed. But the things that she did and said, and he endured, are written by Lady Hester herself, and no less reliable witness could be cited than she of her uncle’s domestic life.
The “Telegraph” inn, that stands so short a distance from Bowling Green House, marks the site of one of the old Admiralty telegraph-towers that were placed in a line between London and Portsmouth, and whence signals were transmitted by semaphores before the introduction of the electric telegraph. Here it was that the anxious politicians gathered while Pitt lay a-dying up the road in January 1806, in his forty-seventh year, struck down by an attack of gout brought on by news of Austerlitz. He received the “heavy news” while at Bath, sent in haste by courier; and shortly afterwards he journeyed home to Putney, whence he was never fated to go, only to his grave. It was on January 12 that he arrived at Bowling Green House, and the first thing that met his gaze when he entered was the map of Europe, hanging in the hall. The sight of it struck the dying man like the thrust of a dagger, for of what use were political divisions and boundaries, now that Napoleon was master? “Roll up that map,” he exclaimed; “it will not be wanted these ten years!” On January 23 he was dead, and his last words, “My country, how I leave my country!” show the mental agonies of his passing.
Thus died the greatest statesman of the eighteenth century, and the most precocious in our annals. His opponents held it truth that he died of port wine; his colleagues and his admirers of our own times say his wounded patriotism dealt him the fatal blow; and this last, with some modification, seems the correct view. Port he drank in prodigious quantities: in his childhood it saved his life, and it probably enabled a weakly constitution to hold out for forty-seven years. But save for the coloration of his face, which in later days had a port-wine complexion, his appearance showed nothing of the viveur. He was tall, angular, and emaciated, and his features were cast in a most irregular mould. His nose was long and tip-tilted, his face thin and spare, and his upper lip, according to George III. (who certainly should have been an excellent judge of obstinacy, seeing that he was perhaps the most self-willed and unreasonable man of his time), was “d——d long and obstinate.” But Pitt’s unprepossessing and even mean appearance was redeemed by the fire and brilliancy of his eyes, and the dignity and lofty bearing he assumed in public transfigured the awkward figure that was so severely commented upon in private life.
