same evening he robbed a mounted postman of his mail-bags--having first
ascertained that the postman was unarmed. And here Hudson came to the
end of his tether. The postman gave the alarm, and the robber was
arrested in Newcastle the following day, some of the property lost from
the mail-bags still in his possession. At his trial the following week
at Durham Assizes he did not attempt to make any defence, but after
conviction, by confessing where the booty was hid, he made what
reparation lay in his power. Poor wretch! He had not even the posthumous
satisfaction of going down to posterity as a bold, bad man, a hero of
the road. Not for him was it to emulate Jack Shepherd or Dick Turpin; he
was of feebler clay, unfitted to excel in evil-doing.
After the barbarous fashion of the day, they hanged his body in chains
on the scene of his poor, feebly-executed crimes; and there, on
Gateshead Fell, through many a dreary winter's night, fringed with
loathly icicles, lashed by rains, battered by hail, dangled that
pitiful, shrunken figure, creaking dolefully, as it swung to and fro in
the bitter blasts that come howling in from a storm-tossed North Sea.
And far from acting as the warning intended to others, so little was
this gruesome thing a "terror to evil-doers," that the vicinity of the
gibbet actually became a place noted for the frequency of crimes of
violence.
There have been others, of course, who might perhaps be recognised as
Border highwaymen, though not many of them could claim to have achieved
even moderate notoriety. Drummond, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1730,
certainly began his infamous career in the north, but that was quite a
petty beginning, and--at least after his return from transportation to
the Virginian Plantations--his chief haunts were Hounslow or Bagshot
Heaths, or other places in the neighbourhood of London.
But at least there was one Border highwayman--or is "footpad" here the
more correct term?--who, if the story is true, may surely claim to have
been the most picturesque and romantic of criminals. In this instance
the malefactor was a woman, not a man, and her name was Grizel Cochrane,
member of (or at least sprung from) a noble family, which later produced
one of the most famous seamen in the annals of naval history. Her story
is very well known, and it may therefore be sufficient to say here that
her father, having been concerned in one of the many political
conspiracies which in those days were judged to merit death, lay in
prison under sentence, and that, to save his life, the brave lady,
disguised as a man, on two separate occasions, on Tweedmouth moor,
robbed the mail by which her father's death warrant was being conveyed
from London to Edinburgh. Thus she twice prevented the sentence from
being carried out, and eventually the prisoner was pardoned.
The greater number of highway robberies in the Border, however, were
accomplished without the aid of a horse or the disguise of a crape mask.
The Border highwayman, as a rule, was no picturesque Claude Duval, no
chivalrous villain of romance who would tread a measure in the moonlight
with the lady whose coach he had plundered, thereafter returning her
jewels in recompense for the favour of the dance. He was much more often
of the squalid type--in a word, a footpad--frequently a member of some
wandering gipsy gang, who, attending country fair or tryst, had little
difficulty in ascertaining which one of the many farmers present it
would be easiest and most profitable to rob as he steered his more or
less devious course homeward in the evening across the waste. What the
farmer had that day been paid for his cattle or sheep he usually carried
with him, probably in the form of gold; for in those days there were of
course no country agencies of banks in which the money might be safely
deposited. Not unusually, too, the farmer had swallowed enough liquor to
make him reckless of consequences; and the loneliness of the
country-side, and the absence of decent roads, too often combined with
the condition of the farmer to make him an easy prey to some little band
of miscreants who had dogged him from the fair.
Frequently, too, these robbers were in league with the keepers of low
roadside public-houses, where passengers on their homeward way were
encouraged--nothing loth, as a rule--to halt and refresh steed and
rider, and possibly whilst they drank their pistols were tampered with.
Who does not remember the meeting of Harry Bertram and Dandie Dinmont in
such a place? And who has not read in the author's notes to _Guy
Mannering_, Sir Walter's account of the visit to Mump's Ha' of Fighting
Charlie of Liddesdale, and what befell him thereafter? In spite of a
head that the potations pressed on him by an over-kind landlady had
caused to hum like an angry hive of bees, Charlie had sense enough,
after he had travelled a few miles on his homeward way, to examine his
pistols. Finding that the charges had been drawn and tow substituted,
Charlie, now considerably sobered, carefully reloaded them, a precaution
which certainly saved his money, and possibly his life as well, for he
was presently attacked by a party of armed men, who, however, fled on
finding that "the tow was out."
Mump's Ha' was in Cumberland, near Gilsland. In olden days it was a
place of most evil repute, but one may question if in ill name it could
take precedence of a similar establishment which in the days of our
great-grandfathers stood on Soutra Hill, on the Lauder road. Travellers
had need to give this place a wide berth, for it was a veritable
den--indeed "Lowrie's Den" was the name by which it was known, and
feared, by every respectable person. Many a bloody, drunken fight took
place there, many were the evil deeds done and the robberies committed;
not even was murder unknown in its immediate vicinity.
Well for us that in our day we know of such places only by ancient
repute. When we talk regretfully of "the good old days," we are apt to
leave out of the reckoning those Mump's Ha's and Lowrie's Dens of our
forefathers' times; we forget to add to the burden of a journey such
items as indifferent roads and highway robbers, and the possibility of
reaching one's destination minus purse, watch, or rings. From an
encounter with highwaymen, few passengers emerged with flying colours,
having had the best of the deal. Not to many persons was such fortune
given as fell to the lot of a country lass near Kelso one winter's
evening. She had little enough to lose in the way of money or valuables,
and it was "bogles," more than the fear of footpads that disturbed her
mind as she stumped along that muddy road in the gathering gloom.
Consequently, after one terrified shriek, it was almost a relief to her
to find that the two figures which bounced out on her from the
blackness, demanding her money, were flesh and blood like herself, and
not denizens of another world. Five or six shillings was all that the
poor lass possessed, but they took that paltry sum. Only, when she pled
hard that they should leave her at least a trifle to take to her mother,
who was very poor, one of the footpads relented, and with a gruff, "Hey,
then!" thrust three coins back into her not unwilling hand. With a
mixture of joy and fear the girl fled into the darkness, but as she ran,
she thought she heard a shout, and soon, to her consternation, she made
certain that hurrying footsteps were coming up behind her. In dire
terror now, she left the road, and crept into some bushes in an adjacent
hollow. There, with thumping heart, she cowered whilst two men ran
past, and presently, whilst she still lay hid, they returned, vowing
loud vengeance on some person who had "done" them. It was long ere the
poor girl dared leave her shelter, late ere she got home to tell her
tale to an anxious mother. But when the three rescued shillings were
produced, the cause of the robbers' anger was not far to seek; they were
not shillings that came this time from the depths of a capacious pocket,
but three golden guineas.
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
When the skipper of some small coastal trading craft is able to retire
from leading a sea-faring life, it is usually within close range of the
briny, tarry whiffs that with every breeze come puffing from the harbour
of some little port out of which he has formerly traded that he sets up
his shore-going abode. There, when he has paid off for the last time,
and everything, so to speak, is coiled down and made ship-shape, he
settles within easy hail of old cronies like himself; and if he should
chance to be one of those who have lived all their days with only their
ship for wife, then he not unnaturally falls easily into the habit of
dropping, of an evening, into the snug, well-lit bar-parlour of the
"Goat and Compasses" or the "Mariner's Friend," or some such house of
entertainment, with its glowing fire and warm, seductive, tobacco-and
grog-scented atmosphere, there to wile away the time swopping yarns with
old friends. Sometimes, if opportunity offer, he is not averse from a
mild game of cards for moderate points; and usually he takes, or at
least in old days he used to take, his liquor hot--and strong.
Captain Alexander Craes was one of those retired merchant skippers; but
he had not, like the majority of his fellows, settled near the
sea-coast. It was Kelso that had drawn him like a loadstone. An
inland-bred man, in his boyhood he had run away to sea, and the sea,
that had irresistibly woed his youthful fancy, had no whit fulfilled his
boyish dreams. It was not always blue, he found; the ship was not always
running before a spanking breeze; more kicks than ha'pence, more
rope's-endings than blessings, came his way during the first few years
of his sailor life. Perhaps it was because he had been ashamed to go
back and own himself beaten, or perhaps it was his native Border
dourness that had caused him to stick to it; but at any rate he did
stick to it--though, like most sailors, he growled, and even swore
sometimes, that he hated the life. And now, in the winter of 1784-5,
here he was in Kelso, stout, weather-beaten, grey-headed, over fifty,
living within earshot of the deep voice of flooded Tweed roaring and
fretting over the barrier with which the devil, at bidding of Michael
Scott the Wizard, long syne dammed its course. Many a time when the
captain's little vessel, close hauled, had been threshing through
leaden-grey seas under hurrying, leaden-grey skies and bitter snow
squalls, with a foul wind persistently pounding at her day after day, he
had thought, as some more than ordinarily angry puff whitened the water
to windward and broke him off his course, with the weather leech of his
close-reefed topsail shivering, how pleasant it must be to be a
landsman, to go where he pleased in spite of wind or weather. Ah! they
were the happy ones, those lucky landsmen, who could always do as they
chose, blow high, blow low.
Well, here he was at last, drinking in all a landsman's pleasures,
enjoying his privileges--and not too old yet, he told himself with
self-conscious chuckle, to raise a pleasant flutter of expectation in
the hearts of Kelso's widows and maidens. Not that he was a marrying
man, he would sometimes protest; far from it, indeed. Yet they did say
that the landlord of a rival inn was heard to remark that "the cauptain
gaed ower aften to Lucky G----'s howf. It wasna hardlys decent, an' her
man no deid a twalmonth." Maybe, however, the good widow's brand of
whisky was more grateful to the captain's palate, or the company
assembled in her snug parlour lightsomer, or at least less dour, than
was to be found at the rival inn, where the landlord was an elder of the
kirk and most stern opponent of all lightness and frivolity. Whatever
the cause, however, it is certain that the captain did acquire the habit
of dropping in very frequently at the widow's, where he was always a
welcome guest. And it was from a merry evening there that, with a
"tumbler" or two inside his ample waistcoat, he set out for home one
black February night when a gusty wind drove thin sleety rain rattling
against the window panes of the quiet little town, and emptied the
silent, moss-grown streets very effectively.
An hour or two later, it might be, two men, Adam Hislop and William
Wallace, were noisily steering a somewhat devious and uncertain course
homeward, when one of them tripped over a bulky object huddled on the
ground, and with an astonished curse fell heavily.
"What the de'il's that? Guide us, it's a man! Some puir body the waur o'
his drink, ah'm thinkin'. Haud up, maister! Losh! it's the cauptain," he
cried, as with the not very efficient aid of his friend he tried to
raise the prostrate man. But there was more than drink the matter here.
"There's bluid on him!" cried one who had been vainly essaying to clap a
battered hat on to the head of the form that lay unconscious in the mud.
A hard task it was presently, when his senses began to return, to get
the wounded sailor unsteadily on his legs; a harder to get him home. The
captain could give but a poor account of how he came to be lying there;
thickly and indistinctly he tried to explain that he had laid a course
for his own moorings, and had been keeping a bright look-out, when
suddenly he had been brought up all standing, and he thought he must
have run bows on into some other craft, for he remembered no more than
getting a crack over his figurehead. Morning was treading on the heels
of night before Hislop and Wallace had got the damaged man home and had
left him safely stowed in bed, and themselves were peacefully snoring,
unconscious of coming trouble.
A day or two passed quietly, and the damaged man already was little the
worse of his adventure. Then, however, the rumour quickly spread that
not only had the Captain been assaulted, but that he had been robbed.
Gossip flew from tongue to tongue, and folk began to look askance on
Wallace and Hislop, muttering that "they aye kenned what was to be the
outcome"; for who, thought they, but Wallace and Hislop could have been
the robbers? They had found him lying, the worse of liquor, having
damaged his head in falling, and they had robbed him, either then or
when they undressed him in his room, believing that he would have no
recollection of what money he had carried that night, nor, indeed, much
of the events of the entire evening. It was all quite plain, said those
amateur detectives. They wondered what the fiscal was thinking of that
he had not clapped the two in jail lang syne. So it fell out that,
almost before they realised their danger, the two men were at Jedburgh,
being tried on a capital charge.
The evidence brought against them was for the most part of no great
account, and the old sea captain was unable to say that either man had
assaulted him, or, indeed, that he had any clear recollection of
anything that had happened after he left the inn. They might have got
off--indeed they _would_ have got off--but for one unfortunate
circumstance, which in the eyes of the jury completely damned them. In
possession of one of them was found a guinea, which the captain had no
hesitation in identifying as a peculiarly-marked coin which he had
carried about with him for many years. That was enough for the jury.
They and counsel for the prosecution would credit no explanation.
The story told by Hislop and Wallace was that on the night of the
assault they had been drinking and playing cards in a public-house in
Kelso; that late in the evening a soldier had come in and had joined in
the game, losing a considerable sum; that in consequence of his losses
he had produced a guinea, and had asked if any of the company could
change it. Hislop had given change, and the guinea found in his
possession was that which he had got from the soldier. "A story that
would not for a moment hold water," said counsel, when the unfortunate
men failed to produce evidence in support of their story; and the judge,
in his summing up, agreeing with the opinion of counsel for the
prosecution, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, and both men were
condemned to be hanged.
On May 17, 1785, this sentence was carried out. But here arose
circumstances which caused the credulous--and in those days most people
were credulous--first to doubt, and finally to believe implicitly in the
innocence of the convicted men. From first to last Wallace and Hislop
had both most strongly protested that they were entirely guiltless.
That, of course, went for nothing. But when, on the day of execution,
the ropes which were used to hang the poor creatures both broke; when
the man who ran to fetch sounder hemp fell as he hurried, and broke his
leg, then the credulous and fickle public began to imagine that
Providence was intervening to save men falsely convicted. Then, too, the
tale spread abroad among a simple-minded people how a girl, sick unto
death, had said to her mother that when Hislop's time came she would be
in heaven with him; and it was told that as Hislop's body, after
execution, was carried into that same tenement, in a room of which the
sick girl lay, her spirit fled. Judgment, also, was said to have fallen
on a woman who occupied a room in that house, and who had violently and
excitedly objected to the body of a hanged man being brought to defile
any abode which sheltered her. That same evening the body of her own
son, found drowned in Tweed, was carried over that threshold across
which she had tried to prevent them from bringing the corpse of Hislop.
All these events tended to swing round public opinion, and those who
formerly had been most satisfied of their guilt, now most strenuously
protested their entire belief in the innocence of the hanged men. The
years slipped away, however, and there had arisen nothing either to
confirm or to dissipate this belief; only the story remained fresh in
the minds of Border folk, and the horror of the last scene grew rather
than lessened with repeated telling.
But there is a belief--not always borne out by facts--that "murder will
out"; a faith that, "though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they
grind exceeding small." Ten years had passed, and the spring of 1795 was
at hand, when it chanced one day that a citizen of Newcastle, homeward
bound from Morpeth, had reached a point on the road near Gosforth; here,
without word or challenge, a footpad, springing on to the road, fired a
pistol at the postillion of the postchaise, knocking off the man's cap
and injuring his face. The frightened horses plunged, and dashed off
madly with the vehicle, leaving in the footpad's possession no booty of
greater value, however, than the postillion's cap.
Later in the same day the same footpad fired, without effect, on two
mounted men, who galloped off and gave the alarm, and a well-armed band
setting out from Gosforth soon captured the robber, still with the
incriminating postillion's cap in his possession. He was a man named
Hall, a soldier belonging to the 6th Regiment of Foot, of which a
detachment was then stationed in the district. And he was in uniform,
though, as a measure of precaution, and not to make himself too
conspicuous, he wore his tunic turned inside out--a disguise that one
would pronounce to be something of the simplest.
There was, of course, no possible defence--indeed, he owned up, and at
the next assizes was condemned to death. And here the link with the fate
of Wallace and Hislop came in. As he lay awaiting execution, Hall
confessed that it was he, that February night in 1785, who had stunned
and robbed Captain Craes. He had seen the old sailor making his not very
steady way homewards, and had followed him, and at the loneliest part of
the street, where no house showed a light, he came up behind and tripped
him; and as the captain essayed to get again on his feet, Hall had
struck him a violent blow on the head with a cudgel, stunning him. The
man told, too, how a little later he had gone into a public-house to get
a drink, and that there he found some men playing at cards; he had
joined them, and had lost money, and one of the men (Hislop, as he
afterwards understood) had changed for him a guinea which he had a
little time before taken from the pocket of the man he had stunned.
Thus were Wallace and Hislop added to the long list of the victims of
circumstantial evidence.
ILLICIT DISTILLING AND SMUGGLING
From about the close of the seventeenth until well on in the nineteenth
century, smuggling was carried on to a large extent in the Border
counties of England and Scotland, not only as regards the evasion of
customs duties on imported articles, but as well in the form of illicit
distillation.
In the good old times, better than half-way through the eighteenth
century, cargoes consisting of ankers of French brandy, bales of lace,
cases of tobacco, boxes of tea, and what not, were "run" almost nightly
on certain parts of the coasts of Berwick, Northumberland, and Galloway,
borne inland by long strings of pack-horses, and securely hid away in
some snug retreat, perhaps far up among the Border hills. Few of the
inhabitants but looked with lenient eye on the doings of the
"free-traders"; few, very few, deemed it any crime to take advantage of
their opportunities for getting liquor, tea, and tobacco at a cheaper
rate than they could buy the same articles after they had paid toll to
the King. Smuggled goods, too, were thought to possess quality and
flavour better than any belonging to those that had come ashore in
legitimate fashion; the smuggler's touch, perhaps, in this respect was--
"... sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath";
it imparted to the brandy, apparently, a vague, unnameable something
that tickled the palate of the drinker, to the tobacco an extra aroma
that was grateful to the nostrils of those who smoked it. Nay, the very
term "smuggled" raised the standard of those goods in the estimation of
some very honest folk, and caused them to smack their lips in
anticipation. Perhaps this superstition as to the supreme quality of
things smuggled is not even yet wholly dead. Who has not met the hoary
waterside ruffian, who, whispering low,--or at least as low as a throat
rendered husky by much gin _can_ whisper,--intimates that he can put the
"Captain" (he'd promote you to be "Admiral" on the spot if he thought
that thereby he might flatter you into buying) on to the "lay" of some
cigars--"smuggled," he breathes from behind a black and horny paw, whose
condition alone would taint the finest Havanna that ever graced the lips
of king or duke--the like of which may be found in no tobacconist's
establishment in the United Kingdom. There have been young men, greatly
daring, who have been known to traffic with this hoary ruffian, and who
have lived to be sadder and wiser men. Of the flavour of those weeds the
writer cannot speak, but the reek is as the reek which belches from the
Pit of Tophet. However, in the eighteenth century our forefathers, for a
variety of reasons, greatly preferred the smuggled goods, and many a
squire or wealthy landowner, many a magistrate even, found it by no
means to his disadvantage if on occasion he should be a little blind; a
still tongue might not unlikely be rewarded by the mysterious arrival of
an anker of good French brandy, or by something in the silk, or lace, or
tea line for the ladies of his household. People saw no harm in such
doings in those good old days; defrauding the revenue was fair game. And
if a "gauger" lost his life in some one or other of the bloody
encounters that frequently took place between the smugglers and the
revenue officers, why, so much the worse for the "gauger." He was an
unnecessarily officious sort of a person, who had better have kept out
of the way. In fact, popular sentiment was entirely with the smugglers,
who by the bulk of the population were regarded with the greatest
admiration. Smuggling, indeed, was so much a recognised trade or
profession that there was actually a fixed rate at which smuggled goods
were conveyed from place to place; for instance, for tea or tobacco from
the Solway to Edinburgh the tariff was fifteen shillings per box or
bale. A man, therefore, owning three or four horses could, with luck,
make a very tidy profit on the carriage, for each horse would carry two
packages, and the distances were not great. There was certainly a good
sporting chance of the convoy being captured in transit, but the
smugglers were daring, determined men, and the possibility of a brush
with the preventive officers merely added zest to the affair.