as fast as they earned it. He was of a saving disposition, and after
some time amassed sufficient to keep him in comfort during the rest
of his life. Unfortunately there is little dependence to be placed
upon the honesty of the world, as Tracey found, for the person to whom
he had entrusted his savings embezzled them; and so our highwayman's
intention to retire was upset, and he was reduced to going once more
upon the road. His hand seems by this time to have lost its cunning, or
else he had the very worst luck, for he was soon taken, in an attempt
to rob the Duke of Buckingham; and, after being brought to trial at
Winchester, was executed there in 1634, aged thirty-eight.
NED WICKS
The famous Edward Wicks—more famous as "Ned," one of the favourites
of the romancing Harrison Ainsworth—was born in 1684, and was the son
of an innkeeper at Coventry. His father had him properly grounded in
reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, with the ambition of seeing him
a clerk, but the youthful Edward shunned the desk, and for a few
months filled the post of exciseman. The excisemen of that day were
looked upon with that suspicion and hatred with which tax-gatherers,
tithe-collectors, landlords, people who render accounts for payment,
and the like vermin, have ever been regarded from the earliest times,
and ever will be by all right-minded folk; and Edward soon quitted
the unpopular post of gauger, not only because of its unpopularity,
but for reasons not altogether unconnected with an inability to make
his accounts balance. His reasons for the change are, however, put
in a different light by Smith, who, with sardonic humour, says: "Not
thinking that a post sufficient to cheat Her Majesty's subjects, he
was resolved to impose upon 'em more by taking all they had on the
highway." Or, in milder fashion, according to Johnson, "he chose
rather to gather contributions for himself than for the King." For
"King" read "Queen," for Wicks practised in the reign of Queen Anne.
The first two interviews he held with travellers upon the highway
were successful, but the third brought him misfortune, for he was
apprehended near Croydon, and sent to prison in the Marshalsea, a
doleful hold, at that time said to be "a lively representation of the
Iron Age, since nothing but gingling of keys and rattling of shackles
and bolts and grates are here to be heard."
His third attempt would no doubt have remained also his last, had it
not been for the exertions of his friends, who, during the interval
between his arrest and the trial at Sessions, got at the prosecutor
and bribed him with sixty guineas, to fail in identifying him. As
the prosecutor had been robbed of only thirty shillings, he profited
largely by the transaction and was doubtless sorry it could not be
often repeated.
Wicks was accordingly acquitted, on the failure of this suborned
prosecutor to swear to him; and was immediately on the road again; this
time in partnership with a certain Joe Johnson, alias Saunders. Near
Colnbrook they held up a stage-coach containing four gentlemen, one of
whom discharged a blunderbuss at the luckless Joe, who received seven
or eight bullets, and was thus wounded so severely that he was easily
seized: the more easily in that Wicks instantly made off, with the
speed of the wind. The "chivalry" of the highwaymen, of which we read
so much in novels, was an elusive thing, and was apt to be altogether
missing in the stress of danger. The highwayman who would stand by a
wounded comrade was a very rare bird: so rare, indeed, that we are
inclined to doubt his existence.
Joe Johnson, committed to prison, was charged by one Woolley with an
earlier robbery, of a silver watch and some money, and was found guilty
and hanged at Tyburn, February 7th, 1704, aged twenty-two.
The fate of the companion whom he had so basely deserted in the moment
of his greatest need did not warn Wicks from his perilous career, and
we are assured that he "pursued his wicked courses with a great deal of
pleasure and satisfaction." One day he overtook the Duke of Marlborough
at St. Albans, but His Grace had too large a retinue for it to be safe
to venture an attack, and so the great Churchill escaped, for once in a
way.
Then, riding on towards Cheshunt, he found his way to a little cottage
in a bye-road, where he discovered a poor old woman, bitterly weeping.
She told him she was a poor widow, with no money to pay her rent, and
expected the landlord every moment to come and seize what few goods she
had.
Wicks bade her rest contented, and he would make things easy; and,
pulling off the richly laced clothes he wore, and putting on an old
coat the woman lent him, he awaited the arrival of the hard-hearted
landlord; who presently came and demanded payment. Ned thereupon,
rising out of the chimney-corner with a short pipe in his mouth, said,
"I understand, sir, that my sister here, poor woman, is behindhand for
rent, and that you design to seize her goods, but as she is a desolate
widow and hath not wherewithal to pay you at present, I hope you will
take so much pity and compassion on her mean circumstances as not to be
too severe: pray let me persuade you to have a little forbearance."
Said the landlord, "Don't talk to me of forbearance; I'll not pity
people to ruin myself. I'll have my money. I want my rent, and if I am
not paid now, I'll seize her goods forthwith, and turn her out of my
house."
When Ned found that no entreaties or persuasions would prevail, he
said, "Come, come, let's see a receipt in full, and I'll pay it."
Accordingly the receipt was given, and the rent paid, and the landlord
made ready to go.
But Wicks warned him of the dangers of the roads. "'Tis drawing towards
night, sir, and there are many robbers about. I would advise you to
stay here till to-morrow, and go in the morning."
"No, no!" exclaimed the landlord impatiently, "I'll go now. I can go
seven miles before dark. I don't care what robbing there is abroad.
Besides, I am not afraid of being robbed by any one man, be he whom he
may."
So, taking his horse, away he rode, and Wicks, hastily re-assuming his
fine clothes, quietly after him, at a cautious interval.
Taking a circuitous course and putting his mare to a hand-gallop, Wicks
was already waiting the landlord at the edge of a dark pond on a lonely
stretch of road, when the old man rode by. In that situation, as the
shades of night were falling, he robbed him of the rent and of as much
beside, which he later kept for his honest brokerage, after making the
widow a present of the original amount. Hastening back to the cottage,
he had already resumed the rustic clothes and was seated in the chimney
corner, when a knocking came at the door. It was the landlord returning
to tell the story of his woes. He said he had been robbed by a rogue in
a lace coat, who swore a thousand oaths at him.
"I told you how unsafe it was," said Wicks, from his corner; "but you
would not take my advice."
The landlord begged leave to stay the night, and went the following
morning upon his way.
The obvious criticism of this is that, having already been robbed, his
best and safest course would have been to make haste on his way home,
the remainder of the journey, without turning back.
Ned Wicks one day met Lord Mohun on the road between Windsor and
Colnbrook, attended by only a groom and a footman. He commanded his
lordship to "stand and deliver!" for he was in great want of money, and
money he would have, before they parted company. Lord Mohun, a noted
bully and rustler of that age, proposed that, if the highwayman was so
insistent, they should fight for it, and Wicks very readily accepted
this proposal; whereupon, my lord, seeing him busily preparing his
pistols for the engagement, began to back out of the bargain. Wicks,
perceiving this, said contemptuously: "All the world knows me to be
a man, and such a man am I that, although your lordship could, in a
cowardly manner, murder Mumford the actor, and Captain Cout, I am by no
means afraid of you. Therefore, since you will not fight, I order you
to down with your gold, or expect no quarter!"
Thus meeting with more than his match, Lord Mohun fell into a
passionate fit of swearing. "My lord," said Wicks, when he could get a
word in edgeways, "I perceive you swear perfectly well, _extempore_:
come, I'll give your honour a fair chance for your money, and that is,
he that swears best of us two shall keep his own, and the money of he
who loses as well."
My lord, an expert in this line, through long cursing over losses at
cards, eagerly agreed to this new bargain, and threw down a purse of
fifty guineas. Wicks staked a like sum, and the competition started.
After a quarter of an hour's prodigious swearing on both sides, it was
left to his lordship's groom to declare the winner.
He said: "Why, my lord, your honour swears as well as ever I heard
any Person of Quality in my life; but, indeed, to give the Strange
Gentleman his due, he has done better than yourself, and has won the
wager, even if it were for a thousand pounds."
After a few successful years of constant attention to his profession,
Wicks was at last executed at Warwick, on August 29th, 1719, aged
twenty-nine.
DICK TURPIN
Richard Turpin, the hero of half a hundred plays, and of many hundred
ballads and chap-book histories, now demands our attention. His name
stands out, far and away above that of any other of the high-toby
fraternity. Not Claude Du Vall himself owns half his celebrity,
nor Hind, nor Whitney, nor Sixteen-String Jack. Ballad-mongers,
playwrights of the old penny-gaff order, and novelists, with Harrison
Ainsworth at their head, have ever united to do him honour and have
conspired—innocently as a rule—to deprive another and a worthier
highwayman of his due, in order to confer it upon "Dick." The familiar
"Dick" itself shows us how the great public long ago took Turpin to
its ample bosom, and cherished him, but the student of these things
smiles a little sourly as he traces the quite unheroic doings of this
exceptionally mean and skulking scoundrel, and fails all the time to
note anything of a dashing nature in his very busy but altogether
sordid career.
Turpin never rode that famous Ride to York upon Black Bess: another
and an earlier than he by some sixty years—the bold and daring
Nevison—performed that ride, as we have already shown; and the
chivalry, the courtesy, and consideration, generally so much in
evidence in the plays and the stories, are by no means found in the
many contemporary reports of his doings.
Richard Turpin was born on September 21st, 1705, at the village
of Hempstead, in Essex. There are those who find a fanciful
appropriateness in the fact, that a man, whose wife was to become a
"hempen widow," should have been born at a place so significantly
named. Those who are curious enough to seek it, may duly find the
record of the future highwayman's baptism in the parish register, and
will find the baptism of an elder sister, Maria, recorded nearly three
years and a half earlier, April 28th, 1702.
The Reverend William Sworder, vicar of Hempstead, who performed the
baptism, and thereafter made an entry of it in his register, was
evidently proud of his acquaintance with the language of the ancients,
and less pleased with his native tongue, for his entries are generally
in Latin: and thus we find the infant Dick and his parents figuring,
"_Richardus, filius Johannis et Mariae Turpin._"
[Illustration: TURPIN'S BAPTISMAL REGISTER OF HEMPSTEAD.]
John Turpin at that time kept the inn that even now, somewhat altered
perhaps in detail, looks across the road to the circle of pollard trees
known as "Turpin's Ring," and thence up to the steep church-path. It
was then, it appears, known as the "Bell," but at times is referred to
as the "Royal Oak," and is now certainly the "Crown." Such are the
difficulties that beset the path of the historian. Nor has this mere
nomenclature of the ancestral roof-tree been the only difficulty. Were
there not seven cities that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer? In
like manner at least one other place, Thaxted, is said to have been
Turpin's native home; but with the register as witness we can flatly
disprove this, and give the honour of producing the famous person to
Hempstead.
The youthful Turpin was apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel, and
soon afterwards set up in business for himself at Waltham Abbey, at the
same time marrying at East Ham a girl named Hester Palmer, whose father
is said to have kept the "Rose and Crown" inn at Bull Beggar's Hole,
Clay Hill, Enfield.
As a butcher, he introduced a novel method of business by which, except
for the absurd and obstinate old-fashioned prejudices that stood in his
way, he might soon have made a handsome competence. This method was
simply that of taking your cattle wherever they might best be found,
without the tiresome and expensive formality of buying and paying for
them. It might conceivably have succeeded, too, except that he worked
on too Napoleonic a scale, and stole a herd. It was a herd belonging to
one "Farmer Giles," of Plaistow, and unfortunately it was traced to his
door, and he had to fly. More restrained accounts, on the other hand,
tell us it was only two oxen that were taken.
The Plaistow-Waltham Abbey affair rendered Turpin's situation extremely
perilous, and he retired north-east in the Rodings district, generally
called in those times "the Hundreds of Essex"—to "Suson," say old
accounts, by which Seward-stone is meant.
But although a comparatively safe retreat, it was exceedingly dull,
and nothing offered, either in the way of the excitements he now
thirsted for, or by way of making a living. He was reduced to the
at once mean and dangerous occupation of robbing the smugglers who
then infested this, and indeed almost every other, country district.
It was mean, because they, very like himself, warred with law and
order; and dangerous, because although he might only attack solitary
"freetraders," there was that strong fellow-feeling among smugglers
that made them most ferociously resent interference with their kind.
Turpin probably ran greater risks in meddling with them than he
encountered at any other period in his career.
Sometimes he would rob them without any beating about the bush: at
others he would make pretence of being a "riding-officer," _i.e._ a
mounted Revenue officer, and would seize their goods "in the King's
name."
But that line of business could not last long. Writers on Turpin
generally say he wearied of it: but the truth is, he was afraid of
the smugglers' vengeance, which, history tells us, could take fearful
forms, scarcely credible in a Christian country, did we not know, by
the irrefragible evidence of courts of justice, and by the terrible
murders by smugglers in Hampshire, duly expiated in 1749, to what
lengths those desperate men could go.
He turned again, therefore, to the neighbourhood of Waltham, and, with
a few chosen spirits, haunted Epping Forest. There they established
themselves chiefly as deer-stealers, and soon formed an excellent
illicit connection with unscrupulous dealers in game in London, to whom
they consigned many a cartload of venison, which generally travelled
up to town covered over with an innocent-looking layer of cabbages,
potatoes, or turnips.
[Illustration: TURPIN AND HIS GANG IN THEIR CAVE IN EPPING FOREST.]
But the prices they obtained for these supplies did not, in their
opinion, pay them sufficiently for the work they did, or the risks they
ran, and they then determined to throw in their lot with a notorious
band of housebreakers and miscellaneous evil-doers, dreaded in Essex
and in the eastern suburbs of London as "Gregory's Gang." The earliest
of their exploits in this new class of venture was the robbing of Mr.
Strype, who kept a chandler's shop at Watford, a district hitherto
unaffected by them. They cleared the house of everything of any value,
without offering Mr. Strype any violence (which was thought to be very
good of them) and so disappeared; to reappear always unexpectedly in
widely-sundered districts.
Nothing came amiss to them. In one night they robbed both Chingford
and Barking churches, but found little worth their while; and then, in
a manner most baffling to the authorities of those times, would for
a time disband themselves and work separately, or some of them would
lie entirely by for a while. An odd one or two would even be taken and
hanged, which rendered it more than ever desirable for their surviving
brethren to make themselves scarce for a time. But want of money was
not long in bringing such generally spendthrift and improvident rogues
back again to the calling they had chosen. Several among them were
already too well and too unfavourably known as deer-stealers to the
verderers of Epping Forest for their reappearance in those glades to
be safe, but Turpin, among others, ventured. Mr. Mason, one of the
chief of these verderers, rangers, or keepers, was especially active
in putting down this poaching, and the gang vowed they would repay him
for it. But more immediate schemes claimed their attention. First among
these was a plan for robbing a farmhouse at Rippleside, near Barking.
There would seem to have been eight or nine of them on this occasion.
After their manner, they knocked at the door at night, and when,
properly afraid of strangers coming after dark, the people refused to
open, they rushed forward in a body and broke the door in. Having
bound the farmer, his wife, his son-in-law, and the servant-maid, they
ransacked the house, and stole £700.
"This will do!" exclaimed Turpin, captaining the band; adding
regretfully, "if it were always so!"
The attack then made by the gang upon the house of Mr. Mason, the
vigilant keeper of Epping Forest, was probably determined upon in
the first instance from a desire rather to be revenged upon him for
interfering with their earlier deer-stealing operations, than from the
idea of plunder. Turpin was not present on this occasion, for although
he had intended to take part in the act of vengeance, he was at the
time in London, squandering his share of the Rippleside robbery, and in
too advanced a state of intoxication to meet his accomplices as he had
arranged to do.
Rust, Rose, and Fielder were the three concerned in the affair, and
it clearly shows the spirit in which they entered upon it, when it
is said that, before starting, they bound themselves by oath not to
leave anything in the house undamaged. An oath would not necessarily
be of any sacred quality of irrevocability with scoundrels of this or
any other type, but when the compact fitted in with their own earnest
inclinations, there was no difficulty in adhering to it.
Fielder gained admission to the house by scaling the garden wall and
breaking in at the back door, then admitting the other two by the front
entrance. Mason was upstairs, sitting with his aged father in his
bedroom, when the three suddenly burst in upon them, and, seizing them,
bound them hand and foot. They asked the old man if he knew them: he
said he did not, and they then carried him downstairs and laid him,
helplessly tied up, under the kitchen dresser. Mason, the keeper,
had a sack forced over his head and tied round his waist; his little
daughter, terrified at what she heard, slipping hurriedly out of bed
and out of doors, and hiding in a pigstye.
The revengeful three then entered upon the work of wanton destruction
upon which they had come. They first demolished a heavy fourpost
bedstead, and then, each armed with a post, systematically visited
every room in the house and battered everything to pieces. Carpets,
curtains, bedclothing, and linen, and everything that could not be
broken, were cut to shreds. Money had not been expected, but in
smashing a china punch-bowl that stood somewhat out of the way, on a
high shelf, down fell a shower of a hundred and twenty-two guineas,
with which they went off, doubly satisfied with revenge and this
unlooked-for plunder. They hastened up to London and joined Turpin at
the Bun-House in the Rope Fields, and shared their booty fairly with
him, although he had not been present to earn his portion—an unusual
support of that generally misleading proverb, "There is honour among
thieves."
From 1732 and onwards a solitary inn, on the then desolate, remote, and
often flooded Hackney Marshes was greatly frequented by Turpin on his
way to and from Epping and London. This inn, the "White House" by name,
then kept by one Beresford, was the resort of sportsmen interested in
cock-fighting. Turpin was known there as a private gentleman. The house
was demolished and entirely rebuilt in 1900; but another at Tyler's
Ferry, Temple Mills, also a white-faced house, remains, and claims a
similar association.
On January 11th, 1735, Turpin and five of his companions, Ned Rust,
George Gregory, Fielder, Rose, and Wheeler, went boldly to the house
of a Mr. Saunders, a rich farmer at Charlton, Kent, between seven and
eight o'clock in the evening, and, having knocked at the door, asked if
Mr. Saunders were at home. When they learned that he was within, they
rushed immediately into the house and found the farmer, with his wife
and some friends, playing at cards. They told the company they would
not be injured if they remained quiet, and then proceeded to ransack
the house. First seizing a trifle in the way of a silver snuff-box that
lay on the card-table, they left a part of their gang to stand guard
over the party, while the rest took Mr. Saunders and forced him to
act the part of guide, to discover the whereabouts of his valuables.
They broke open some escritoires and cupboards, and stole about £100,
exclusive of a quantity of plate. Meanwhile, the maid-servant had
retreated into her room upstairs and bolted the door, and was calling
"Thieves!" at the top of her voice, out of window. But the marauders
presently found their way upstairs, broke open the door and secured
and silenced her: not, apparently, doing her any considerable injury:
and then at leisure thoroughly searched every corner of the house,
and gleaned everything of a portable nature that was worth taking.
There was no hurry. They discovered some relics of the late Christmas
festivities in the larder, in the shape of mince-pies, and sat down
impudently, with the master of the house and his friends, to partake
of them. One of the gang, by careful foraging, had found a bottle of
brandy, and broached it at the table, hospitably offering some to Mr.
Saunders and his friends, and assuring them, with a quaint humour, that
they were as welcome as could be to it. Mrs. Saunders did not, however,
see the humour of it, and was fainting from terror; and so they mixed
her some brandy-and-water, to revive her.
At length, having taken everything possible, and thoroughly enjoyed
themselves, they made off, declaring that if any of the family gave
the least alarm within two hours, or if they dared to advertise the
marks on the stolen plate, they would infallibly return at some future
period, and murder them.
It was afterwards ascertained that they then retired to a public-house
in Woolwich, near by, where the robbery had been planned, and soon
afterwards crossed the river and resorted to an empty house in
Ratcliffe Highway, where they deposited the plunder until they had
found a purchaser ready to buy without asking any inconvenient
questions.