hand at the Old Bailey for stealing a silver cup, coming along the road
from Acton, he demanded his money; but the reverend doctor having not a
farthing about him, O'Brian was for taking his gown. At this our divine
was much dissatisfied; but, perceiving his enemy would plunder him,
quoth he: 'Pray, sir, let me have a chance for my gown'; so, pulling
a pack of cards out of his pocket, he further said: 'We'll have, if
you please, one game of all-fours for it, and if you win it, take it
and wear it.' This challenge was readily accepted by the footpad; but,
being more cunning than his antagonist at slipping and palming the
cards, he won the game, and the doctor went contentedly home without
his canonicals."
On one memorable occasion, O'Brian happened, in his lurkings upon the
road, to stop a man who proved to be an acrobat, and who, when Patrick
bade him "stand and deliver!" instantly jumped over his head. The
ignorant and superstitious Irishman thought he had chanced upon the
devil himself, come to sport with him before his time, and while he was
trembling and crossing himself, the acrobat, rolling along the road in
a series of somersaults and cartwheels, got clear away.
These adventures appear to have been mere tentative experiments, for we
learn that O'Brian then deserted from the army and commenced highwayman
in earnest. He one day stopped the carriage of none other than Nell
Gwynne and addressed her thus: "Madam, I am a gentleman. I have done a
great many signal services to the fair sex, and have, in return, been
all my life maintained by them. Now, as I know you to be a charitable
woman, I make bold to ask you for a little money; though I never had
the honour of serving you in particular. However, if any opportunity
shall ever fall in my way, you may depend upon it I will not be
ungrateful."
Nell, we are told, made this mercenary knight-errant a present of ten
guineas.
It was the same with O'Brian as with every other wicked man, says
Smith; he was eager to lead others into the evil path himself had
chosen. In particular, he induced a young man named Wilt to become a
highwayman; and Wilt was unfortunate enough to be apprehended in his
first experiment and to be hanged for it.
O'Brian was also arrested, and hanged at Gloucester. After his body
had swung the usual time, it was cut down and his friends were allowed
to carry it off. When it was taken indoors, it was observed to move
slightly, strange to say; upon which a surgeon was hurriedly called;
and, what with being bled and his limbs being exercised, O'Brian was
presently restored to life.
This marvellous recovery was kept a strict secret for a time, and
it was hoped the experience would have a salutary effect, the more
especially as his friends were willing to contribute towards his
support in some retired employment. He agreed to reform his life, and,
indeed, while the memory of the bitterness of death was fresh upon him,
kept his promise; but as that dreadful impression wore off by degrees,
he returned to his former ways. Abandoning an honest life, he procured
a horse (Smith says he purchased one, but we may be allowed our doubts
upon that matter) "and other necessaries": _i.e._ pistols, powder and
ball, and sword, and again visited the road.
This was about one year after his execution and supposed death, and
the travelling public of the districts he had principally affected had
long grown tired of congratulating themselves upon his disappearance,
and were quite accustomed to thinking of him as a memory. It was,
therefore, a bad shock to the gentleman whom he had last robbed, and
for plundering whom he had been, to all appearance, satisfactorily
turned off, when he was the first person to be stopped by O'Brian in
this second series of his adventures.
His consternation, we are told, and may readily believe, was great.
"Wher—why?" he asked, with chattering teeth, "I ther—thought you had
been hanged a twelvemonth ago."
"So I was," rejoined O'Brian, "and therefore you ought to imagine
that what you see now is only my ghost. However, lest you should be
so uncivil as to hang my ghost too, I think the best way is to secure
you." So saying, he discharged a pistol through the gentleman's head,
and, alighting from his horse, in a fury hewed the body to pieces with
his hanger.
Later, he committed a fearful atrocity in Wiltshire, which, although
fully detailed in contemporary literature, cannot be set forth here.
He carried off at the same time no less a sum of money than £2,500;
but was fortunately brought to justice after a further two years of
miscellaneous plundering, chiefly through the evidence of an accomplice
lying under sentence of death in Bedford gaol. He was taken at his
lodgings in Little Suffolk Street, by the Haymarket, and then sent down
to Salisbury, to be tried for his Wiltshire enormity. Once lodged in
gaol there, he confessed a series of crimes, for which he was executed
on April 30th, 1689, aged thirty-one.
JACK BIRD
Jack Bird was humbly born and as humbly educated. When it is added
that he was born in the second half of the seventeenth century, it
will rightly be supposed that his education did not include any of the
sciences, and that it probably did not go far beyond teaching him to
write his own name. He had no use for even that small accomplishment,
for he was apprenticed to a baker, and before his indentures were
expired had run away and 'listed for a soldier in the foot-guards;
being almost immediately sent out to the Low Countries. He served under
the Duke of Monmouth at the siege of Maestricht, but found too many
masters in the army, and so deserted and made his way to Amsterdam,
where he commenced a new career by stealing a piece of silk. He was
detected in the act, taken before a magistrate, and condemned to a
term of hard labour in the "rasp-house," where he was set to rasping
log-wood, and to other severe drudgeries, for the term of twelve
months. Unaccustomed to such hard labour, Jack fainted at his tasks,
but the labour-master set it down to laziness, and to cure it, chained
him in the bottom of an empty cistern by one foot, and caused a number
of taps to be turned on, so that the cistern began rapidly to fill and
the prisoner to be obliged, as the cistern was deeper than his own
height, to work vigorously at a pump fixed in it, lest the water should
gain upon, and drown, him. An hour's experience of this ingenious
punishment rendered him quite anxious to return to the labour that had
before been too much for him.
At the end of his term of bondage he hastened to take leave of Holland
and the Hollanders, who had proved themselves such connoisseurs in
quaint punishments. In England, justice certainly was more severe, and
hanged men who stole quite trivial things, but it did not make people
perform such hard labour, and Jack was one of those who would rather
die than work. There are many of his kind even now.
Although hard labour was distasteful to our hero, he was by no means
satisfied to live as humbly as he had been born, and his thoughts
turned lightly to the road, as a likely place on which to pick up a
good living without over-exertion. There was the choice of footpad or
highwayman, and of course he chose the higher branch of the profession;
for a footpad had to pad the hoof and be content, after all, with
robbing the comparatively poor; while a highwayman could cut a fine
figure on horseback, plunder the best, and be at little personal
fatigue in doing so. Many foolish fellows, commencing highwayman, would
hire, or even purchase, a horse; not so Jack Bird. "Thorough" was his
motto, and he began business by stealing the mount he fancied. At the
same time he took excellent good care to go fully armed, for we read
that he provided himself with six good pistols and a broadsword. In
this fortified condition, and in the dress of a gentleman, he opened
his campaign. His first few attempts were highly successful, but
he soon learned, in a painful adventure on the Dover Road, between
Gravesend and Chatham, that fortune is fickle. There he encountered
one Joseph Pinnis, a pilot, who was returning from London, where he
had received ten or twelve pounds for piloting a Dutch ship up-river.
He had been so unfortunate as to lose both hands during an engagement
in the Dutch war, some years earlier, and it seemed to our callous
highwayman an easy task to rob him.
Summoned to "Stand and deliver!" the pilot replied, "You see, sir, that
I have never a hand, so cannot take my money out of my pocket. Be so
kind, therefore, as to take the trouble to search me."
The highwayman, without the slightest misgiving, complied with this
very reasonable request, and securing the pilot's purse, began to
examine its contents, when he found himself suddenly seized around the
waist by the traveller, who appeared to have enormous strength in his
arms, even though he had no hands. He succeeded in overthrowing the
highwayman, and falling upon him, beat him fearfully about the face
with his metal-shod wrists.
Presently some other travellers approached, and, asking the cause of
the struggle, Pinnis told them: asking them to take a hand and give the
ruffian a further drubbing, and adding that he was almost out of breath
with what he had done already.
The travellers then, informed of the whole affair, conducted Bird in
custody to a magistrate, who committed him to Maidstone gaol, where he
was tried and condemned to death, but was afterwards, for some reason
that has escaped the historian, pardoned and set at liberty, to work
more outrages upon unarmed and inoffensive folk.
At first, however, the danger and indignity he had passed through,
of being so completely vanquished by a handless man, whom he had at
first foolishly despised, quite put him out of conceit with himself
and the road, and he resolved to abandon an employment which had at
first promised so well, only to turn out so ill. But work—real work—was
uncongenial as ever, and as he had to exist somehow, it happened that
the road called him successfully again, after all.
The first person he encountered in his new series of adventures was a
Welsh drover, who proved to be a muscular man, and the very devil of
a fellow with that nasty weapon, the quarter-staff. "Once bit, twice
shy," murmured Jack, withdrawing swiftly out of reach. "If a villain
of a sailor without hands can overthrow me, I shall not venture my
carcase within reach of one that has hands, for fear of something
worse." So, he pulled a pistol from the armoury he carried in his belt,
and from a safe distance shot the drover through the head. He then
searched the body and found, to his disgust, only eighteenpence. But
he summoned what philosophy he could over this disappointment, and,
cynically remarking that "'Tis a price worth killing a man for, any
time," rode off without the least remorse.
On another occasion he met the original "Poor Robin," the
almanac-writer and humorous prognosticator; and as he did not disdain
to exact contributions from the poor, as well as the rich (although
"Poor Robin" probably was by no means so poor as his name would imply),
he desired the calendar-maker to halt and surrender. As this was the
first time Poor Robin had heard such language, and as he had received
no hint of this occasion from the stars, he stood and stared, as if
himself had been planet-struck.
"Come now," said Jack, "this is no child's play: I am in earnest."
Robin pleaded the poverty to which, he said, his nickname bore witness.
"That," returned Bird, "is a miserable, threadbare excuse, and will not
save your bacon."
"But," pleaded the almanac-maker, "as author of those calendars that
yearly come out in my name, I have canonised a great many gentlemen
of your profession; look in them for their names, and let this be my
protection."
But all in vain; Bird ransacked his pockets, and from them extracted
fifteen shillings, took a new hat from his head, and requested him, as
he had now given him cause, to canonise him also.
"Ay!" exclaimed Poor Robin grimly, "that will I, when you have suffered
martyrdom at Tyburn, which will not be long hence."
"Poor Robin's" publications, it may be said, in this connection, are
well worth examination. In an age when Lilly, Perkins, and a host of
others issued prophetic almanacs, divining future events from the
stars, and were extensively believed in, "Poor Robin's" almanac, year
by year, made much fun out of those pretensions; fun that sometimes
reads curiously modern. Seventeenth-century humour is, as a rule, as
flat to the modern taste as champagne opened and left to stand, but
much of "Poor Robin's" wit and humour still sparkles. While Perkins,
with a provoking solemnity, would give a chronological table of events
from the Year One and would proceed by degrees from "Adam, created 1,
B.C., 3962," and would continue by way of "Methuselah, born 687, B.C.,
2306," to "The Tyrant Oliver began his government, December 16th,
1653"; "Poor Robin" would devote his attention largely to the days
when highwaymen were hanged, and would draw farcical conclusions from
planetary dispositions. Thus we find him saying:
"Now the effects of the conjunction of Saturn and Mars will much
operate: such conjunctions are always attended with remarkable
accidents. There was one in the year 1672, and the German Princess
rode up Holborn Hill; another in 1673, and Du Vail visited the
three-legged tenement at Hyde Park Corner. I might instance in divers
other examples, but these shall suffice."
The so-called "German Princess" was an adventuress, really a native of
Canterbury, and a daughter of one of the choristers in the Cathedral
there, named Moders. She was hanged at Tyburn, in 1678 (not in 1672),
and so was Du Vall (not at Hyde Park Corner, and not in 1673).
In his burlesque monthly forecasts of the weather and public events, he
evidently reflects upon his serious contemporaries, whose predictions
would occasionally go wrong, and who, like our modern "Old Moore,"
would in consequence grow less cocksure and more cautious, and would
then more or less cleverly tell readers to "expect" something or other,
together with such eminently safe remarks for February and March as,
"Wind and rainstorms are to be looked for by the farmer."
In February 1664, for example, "Poor Robin," in burlesque of this kind
of thing, warns his readers to "expect some showers of rain, either
this month or the next, or the next after that, or else we shall have a
very dry spring.... The twenty-seventh day of this month died Cardinal
Mazarine, and if you would know the reason why he died, then, I answer,
it was because he could live no longer."
Under June, he declares that, "If the frost nips the fruit trees, there
will be no apples." In July, "Fleas will grow troublesome, and will
lie with you without leave," and elsewhere we find that "Tyburn shall
be a great eye-sore to Highway men and cut-purses," and that "The
leafless tree betwixt London and Paddington will this month bear fruit,
but it will be only Medlers, and they are stark naught until they are
rotten." The which extracts fully illustrate the allusions in the short
life of Jack Bird.
Made bold by a long series of successes, Bird procured a good horse
and determined never again to stoop to robbing for mere shillings. A
meeting with the Earl of ——, rolling along in his carriage, accompanied
by his chaplain, and attended by two servants, gave him his first
opportunity of putting this excellent determination into practice.
"You must stop, my lord!" exclaimed Bird, threatening him with one
pistol, and the coachman with the other.
"The devil I must!" said his lordship; "who the——"—here the chaplain
gave a loud cough, and the word was lost in the throaty rasp he
produced—"what the——" ("ahem!" from the chaplain) "are you then,
fellow, that you bid me pull up on the roadway for you, you——?"
"An honest collector of tolls, your lordship," said Bird: "your purse
this instant!"
"So! that is the way of it?" replied his lordship. "I am very little
anxious about the small sum I have about me, but I intend you shall
fight for it."
Bird then flew into a passion, and swore terribly, after the low
fashion then proverbially prevalent among our soldiers in the Low
Countries. He waved his pistols excitedly.
"Don't lose your temper," said my lord. "When I said 'fight,' I meant
boxing, and not shooting, and I will fight you fairly for all the money
I have, against nothing."
"That is an honourable challenge, my lord," replied Bird, "provided
none of your servants be near us."
His lordship then commanded them to withdraw to a distance. The
chaplain, however, could not endure the thought of the Earl fighting
while he was but an idle spectator, and requested the honour of being
his patron's champion.
Matters were arranged: the divine stripped off his gown, and in another
half a minute the scene resounded with the thuds and grunts of the
combatants, as they planted blows home on each other's faces and
bodies. In less than a quarter of an hour the chaplain was knocked out
of time, with only breath enough remaining to exclaim, "I'll fight no
more!" Bird was unquestioned victor. "Now, my lord," said he, turning
to the carriage, "if it please your lordship, I will take a turn with
you."
"Not I!" earnestly replied the Earl, "for if you can beat my chaplain,
you will surely beat me, for we have tried it out before." So saying,
he handed the highwayman the sum of twenty guineas he was carrying.
[Illustration: JACK BIRD FIGHTS THE CHAPLAIN.]
Bird's career was closed by a foolish act. He, in company with a woman,
knocked down and robbed a man in Drury Lane. The woman was seized on
the spot, but Bird escaped. Going, however, to visit her in prison,
he himself was arrested; and, being found guilty, he was executed at
Tyburn, March 12th, 1690, aged forty-two.
WILL OGDEN, JACK BRADSHAW, AND TOM REYNOLDS
Will Ogden, who was born in Walnut Tree Alley, Tooley Street,
Southwark, now claims our attention. He was a waterman by trade and
a highwayman by inclination, so that he presently exchanged the
river for the road. But he did not blossom out all at once as a
fully-equipped highwayman. He passed a kind of transition period of
about two years in the plundering of ships lying in the Pool, between
Southwark and Billingsgate, and in the rifling of waterside shops. In
these activities he was associated with one Tom Reynolds, a native of
Cross Key Alley, Barnaby Street, and admiral of a sludge-barge. Being
apprehended in the burglary of a watch-maker's shop, they were lodged
in Newgate, and tried and convicted at the Old Bailey; but received a
pardon, on what grounds does not appear.
This ended their burgling experiences, and they then agreed to go upon
the road, in the humbler, padding form of the highwayman's trade.
Early in their experiences, Ogden one evening met a parson walking
home by the light of the moon, and approached him in the character of
a distressed seaman walking the highway to the nearest port, where he
might chance to get a ship. His dismal story excited the compassion of
the parson, who gave him sixpence and passed on.
He had not proceeded far when Ogden, who had hurried round in advance
of him by a side lane, approached him again, and renewed his story.
"You are the most impudent beggar I ever met," exclaimed the parson;
but Ogden told him he was in very great want, and that the sixpence he
had received would not carry him very far. The parson then gave him
half-a-crown, which Ogden gratefully accepted, adding: "These are very
sad times, and there's horrid robbing abroad; so, if you have any more
money about you, you may as well let me have it, as another who don't
deserve it so much, and may perhaps even ill-use you, and, binding you
hand and foot, make you lie in the cold all night. If you'll give me
your money, I'll take care of you, and conduct you safely home."
An offer of this kind, so delicately and yet so significantly framed,
had only to be made to be accepted by any prudent man, who did not feel
himself equal to knocking that impudent humorist on the head; and so
the parson made a virtue of necessity, and, as cheerfully as he could,
handed him all his money; about forty shillings.
Ogden then remarked, "I see you have a watch, sir; you may as well let
me have that too." Whereupon the watch also changed hands.
As they were thus plodding along two or three men, accomplices of the
ingenious Ogden, came out of the wayside bushes; but Ogden calling out
their pass-words, "The moon shines bright," they let them proceed. A
little further on, the same incident was repeated, by which the parson
could clearly see that, had he not met with the gentle and persuasive
Ogden, he might in all likelihood have fallen into far worse hands, and
have been ill-used and tied up, even as he had been warned.
The clergyman was at last brought safely to his own door, and so
greatly appreciated this safe-conduct—though at the loss of some forty
shillings and a watch—that he invited Ogden in; but that person was
as cautious as ingenious, and declined. He thought the clergyman was
laying a trap for him; but he said he had no objection to taking a
drink outside. The good parson then brought a bottle of wine, and,
drinking to Ogden, gave him the bottle and the glass to help himself,
upon which he ran off with both.
A little later, Ogden met a well-known dandy of that time, Beau
Medlicott by name. He commanded the Beau to stand and empty his
pockets, but instead of doing so, he drew his sword and made some
half-hearted passes with it. Ogden thereupon drew his pistols, and the
Beau was obliged to yield to superior armament. But Ogden might have
left that fashionable person alone, for he had little about him. Like
the more or less famous music-hall character, "La-di-da," of whom he
must surely have been the ancestor, he was scarcely worth robbing. Of
what was that music-hall celebrity possessed?
He'd a penny papah collah round his throat, la-di-da;
A penny papah flowah in his coat, la-di-da;
In his mouth a penny pick, in his hand a penny stick,
And a penny in his pocket, la-di-da, la-di-da,
And a penny in his pocket, la-di-da!
The contents of Beau Medlicott's pockets were pitiful enough to draw
tears of rage from any self-respecting highwayman: consisting only of
two half-crowns; and one of them was a brass counterfeit!
Ogden very rightly gave that cheap toff a good thrashing.
Reynolds does not appear in the stories just narrated; but in addition
to another ally, Bradshaw by name, said to have been a grandson of that
Serjeant Bradshaw who was one of the regicides, he now appears lurking
in the woods on Shooter's Hill, one night in 1714, for whatever fortune
might be pleased to send them. It was poor sport that evening, for only
a servant-girl, one Cecilia Fowley, came along the road, carrying her
box; but these low-down footpads despised nothing, and were ready to
rob any one.
It was not worth the while of the three, they thought, to rush out
of their lurking-place for the sake of one servant-girl, and so they
deputed Bradshaw for the job. He accordingly sprang into the road,
seized the box, and broke it into fragments. It contained the girl's
clothes, "and fifteen shillings, being all her wages for three months'
service." (Servants were cheap then, it seems.)
Turning over these things, Bradshaw turned out a hammer, which the girl
seized, and suddenly dealt him a blow with it upon the temple, followed
by another with the claw of the hammer upon his neck, which tore his
throat open. He fell down in the road, and died there.
At that moment, up came a gentleman, to whom the girl narrated the
circumstances. He searched the dead man's pockets, and found in them a
large sum of money and a whistle. Putting the whistle to his mouth, he
blew upon it—a rash enough thing to do—and thereupon Ogden and Reynolds
leapt out from the wayside coverts. Finding, however, that something
disastrous had happened, and that it was a stranger who had whistled
them, they fled.
Odgen and Reynolds at a later date met a tallyman, who was a well-known
trader in St. Giles, and demanded his money. "Money!" he exclaimed; he
was merely a poor man, who had the greatest difficulty in earning his
daily bread.