THE ROADS OUT OF LONDON
I.—THE DOVER ROAD
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say which road out of
London was the most infested with highwaymen, in all these centuries.
Where all were extremely dangerous for honest men, the bad eminence
of any particular one is disputable. All the great highways were
bordered by lonely wastes and commons until well on into the nineteenth
century, and it is not saying too much to declare that the era of the
highwaymen did not really end until that of railways had begun. Edmund
Burke, who died in 1797, might see fit to declare that the age of the
highwaymen was done, and that the age of cheats had succeeded, but he
was a little too sanguine, or too despondent, whichever way you feel
inclined to look at it. To take Wiltshire alone: one man was hanged at
Fisherton gaol, Salisbury, in 1806, for highway robbery, one in 1816,
two in 1817, and two in 1824; while in 1839, when the law had become
less ferocious, three others were each sentenced to fifteen years'
transportation for a most determined highway robbery at Gore Cross, on
Salisbury Plain, on the evening of October 21st, in that year.
Gad's Hill, on the Dover Road, had from the earliest times a peculiar
prominence in these matters, and even obtained its name from the rogues
who lurked there. But, indeed, it is not going beyond the strictest
bounds of truth to say that _all_ the hills on the Dover Road were of
evil repute. There were the cut-throats and footpads who lurked in the
wayside trees and rushed out from the leafy coverts of Shooter's Hill,
with terrifying cries. They were not politeful, those footpads, and the
title of "gentlemen of the road," which was accorded those exquisite
thieves, Claude Du Vall and Captain Hind, must needs be withheld from
them. We read in the entertaining and instructive diary of Samuel Pepys
how on April 11th, 1661, with a lady, he rode along the Dover Road,
"under the man that hangs upon Shooter's Hill, and a filthy sight it is
to see how his flesh is shrunk to his bones."
Six men were hanged here, and their bodies exposed on gibbets, in times
not so very remote, for robbery with murder upon the highway. The
remains of four of them decorated the summit of the hill, while the
other two swung gracefully from tall posts beside the Eltham Road. The
Bull Inn, which stands on the crest of Shooter's Hill, was in coaching
times the first post-house at which travellers stopped and changed
horses on their way from London to Dover. The Bull has been rebuilt of
recent years, but tradition says (and tradition is not always such a
liar as some folk would have us believe) that Dick Turpin frequented
the road, and that it was at the old Bull he held the landlady over the
fire, in order to make her confess where she had hoarded her money. The
incident borrows a certain picturesqueness from lapse of time, but,
on the whole, it is not to be regretted that the days of barbecued
landladies are past.
The usual stories of highway encounters give the courage to the
highwaymen and abject cowardice to their victims, but the positions
were reversed in an affray that took place on this particularly bad
eminence in 1773. A Colonel Craige and his servant were attacked about
ten o'clock one Sunday night by two well-mounted highwaymen, who,
on the Colonel declaring he would not be robbed, immediately fired
and shot the servant's horse in the shoulder. On this the servant
discharged a pistol, and, as a contemporary account has it, "The
assailants rode off with great precipitation." That they rode off with
nothing else shows how effectually the Colonel and his man, by firmly
grasping the nettle, danger, plucked the flower, safety.
Don Juan was equally bold and successful. He was stopped with "Damn
your eyes! Your money or your life!" by a party of footpads. He did
not comprehend the language: but the meaning of their actions was plain
enough:
Juan yet quickly understood their gesture;
And, being somewhat choleric and sudden,
Drew forth a pocket pistol from his vesture,
And fired it into one assailant's pudding—
Who fell, as rolls an ox o'er in his pasture,
And roar'd out, as he writhed his native mud in,
Unto his nearest follower or henchman,
"O Jack! I'm floor'd by that 'ere bloody Frenchman!"
On which Jack and his train set off at speed;
And Juan's suite, late scatter'd at a distance,
Came up, all marvelling at such a deed,
And offering, as usual, late assistance.
Juan, who saw the moon's late minion bleed
As if his veins would pour out his existence,
Stood, calling out for bandages and lint,
And wish'd he'd been less hasty with his flint.
"Perhaps," thought he, "it is the country's wont
To welcome foreigners in this way; now
I recollect some innkeepers who don't
Differ, except in robbing with a bow
In lieu of a bare blade and brazen front.
But what is to be done? I can't allow
The fellow to lie groaning on the road:
So take him up; I'll help you with the load."
But ere they could perform this pious duty,
The dying man cried, "Hold! I've got my gruel;
Oh, for a glass of max! We've miss'd our booty;
Let me die where I am!" And as the fuel
Of life shrunk in his heart, and thick and sooty
The drops fell from his death-wound, and he drew ill
His breath, he from his swelling throat untied
A kerchief, crying "Give Sal that!"—and died.
But not all travellers went armed, nor were all robbers so timorous.
Robberies on Shooter's Hill continued without intermission, and at the
very close of 1797—the year in which Burke, the statesman, died, who
had some years earlier declared the age of the highwaymen to be past—a
rather daring one was committed. It was on the Sunday evening, December
30th, and may be found reported in the _Times_ of January 2nd, 1798. It
was about six o'clock when highwaymen stopped a postchaise on Shooter's
Hill, in which were two lawyers, named Harrison and Lockhart, and a
midshipman of H.M.S. _Venerable_. They were travelling to London from
Sheerness. The highwaymen took the lawyers' purses and watches. "The
man on Mr. Harrison's side treated him with much personal violence, by
forcing his pistol into his mouth, on opening the chaise-door." The men
did not ask the midshipman for money, but took his trunk, containing
all his clothes. No one for a moment thought of so foolish a thing as
resisting.
But Gad's Hill was the very worst spot on the Dover Road, and had
a very bad record for robbery and murders. When Shakespeare made
Gad's Hill the scene of that famous highway robbery, when Prince
Hal, Falstaff, Poins, and all the rest of them robbed the merchants,
the franklins, and the flea-bitten carriers who were journeying from
Rochester, he only made it so because of the ill repute the locality
already possessed. The place is not romantic to-day, and it is
somewhat difficult to realise that here, where Charles Dickens's
hideous house of Gad's Hill Place stands, the valorous Falstaff, brave
amid so many confederates, bade the travellers stand, and added insult
to injury by calling them "gorbellied knaves" and "caterpillars."
[Illustration: FALSTAFF ON GAD'S HILL.
"_How the rogue roared!_"]
There is, indeed, a beautiful view from the southern slope of the hill,
looking down upon Strood and Rochester; but to see Gad's Hill as it
was of old, we should have to sweep away Gad's Hill Place, and the
rows of mean cottages that now form quite a hamlet here. The hedges
and enclosures, too, did not exist until modern times, but, instead
of them, dense woods and dark hiding-places came close up to, and
overshadowed, the highway, which was always full of ruts and liquid
mud. These facts will give some idea of how terrible the hill could
be of nights, when the rogues who hid in the shadows sprang forth and
relieved travellers of their gold. The Danish Ambassador was set upon
and plundered here in 1656, and it is quite evident that the knights of
the road who despoiled him were no illiterate rogues, because they sent
him a very whimsical letter of explanation, in which they said that:
"The same necessity that enforc't ye Tartars to breake ye wall of China
compelled them to wait upon him at Gad's Hill." Once in a way, however,
travellers were more than equal for these gentry, as we may well see in
these extracts from Gravesend registers: "1586, September 29th daye,
was a thiefe yt. was slayen, buryed"; and again, "1590, Marche the
27th daie, was a theefe yt. was at Gad's Hill wounded to deathe, called
Robert Writs, buried."
It would be an easy matter to write a long chapter on Gad's Hill
and its terrors. We will conclude with a mention of the Duke of
Würtemberg's adventure. He and his suite were travelling along the
road, when a man with a drawn sword ran after them. The Duke promptly
told the coachman to drive as fast as he could; not, as he naïvely
added, because he was afraid of one man, but he didn't know how many
others there might be. The Prince evidently had that discretion whose
lack has been the death of many a bold, but ill-advised, fellow.
Shakespeare's scenes in _Henry the Fourth_, in which the travellers are
robbed and Falstaff afterwards fooled, were greatly appreciated in his
own day, because such happenings to wayfarers were the merest ordinary
incidents of travel, not only in the time of Henry the Fourth, but in
that of Elizabeth. The play touched life in one of its most familiar
experiences.
II.—THE BATH ROAD
The Bath Road was not far inferior to the old highway to Dover in
records of highway robbery, although they are chiefly of a later date
than the Gad's Hill encounters; but the records of St. Mary Abbot's
Church, Kensington, afford us an interesting peep into a time when the
boundary of that now metropolitan borough, towards Knightsbridge, was
very dangerous to honest folk. Thus we read, in the burial register,
November 29th, 1687, of the interment of "Thomas Ridge, of Portsmouth,
who was killed by thieves, almost at Knightsbridge."
This was no mere chance case. Some years earlier, John Evelyn recorded
in his diary the ill-repute of the road at this point, and says
robberies took place even while the road was full of coaches and
travellers. The innkeepers of Knightsbridge shared the disfavour in
which these first reaches of the Bath Road were held. When the Duke of
Buckingham and the Earl of Rochester quarrelled, in the time of Charles
the Second, and agreed to fight a duel, the Duke and his second lay at
an inn at Knightsbridge, the night before the encounter, in order to
avoid any suspicion of their intentions and any possible interruption.
Much to their surprise, they found themselves in some danger of being
arrested, not on any charge of breaking the King's peace over the
approaching duel, but on the altogether unexpected suspicion of being
highwaymen, who purposed skulking at an inn for the night, the better
to waylay travellers. "But this," remarks the Duke, in his _Memoirs_,
"I suppose, the people of the house were used to, and so took no notice
of us, but liked us the better."
And so the neighbourhood remained, very little changed for the better,
until the nineteenth century dawned.
It seems, looking upon the closeness of modern Knightsbridge to the
very centre of things, almost the language of extravagance to say as
much, but the literature of the ensuing periods fully supports the
truth of it. Thus writes Lady Cowper, in her diary, October 1715: "I
was at Kensington, where I intended to stay as long as the camp was in
Hyde Park, the roads being so secure by it, that we might come from
London at any time in the night without danger, which I did very often."
In 1736, Lord Hervey wrote from Kensington: "The road between this
place and London is grown so infamously bad that we live here in
the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle
of the ocean; and all the Londoners tell us there is between them
and us a great impassable gulf of mud." Impassable roads—through
which, nevertheless, some wayfarers certainly did manage to pass—and
highwaymen may always be bracketed together. Thus in April 1740, only
four years after Lord Hervey had written that doleful letter—and we
may be quite sure the roads had not improved during the interval—the
_Gentleman's Magazine_ recorded that, "The Bristol Mail from London
was robbed a little beyond Knightsbridge by a man on foot, who took
the Bath and Bristol bags, and, mounting the postboy's horse, rode off
towards London."
On June 3rd, 1752, a professional thief-taker named Norton was
instructed to repair to Knightsbridge, to see if he could apprehend a
man who had on two or three occasions stopped and robbed the Devizes
chaise. He proceeded in a chaise to a lonely inn, known as the "Halfway
House"—half-way between Knightsbridge and Kensington—and as the vehicle
approached, a man stopped it by threats from a pistol. Out jumped
Norton and seized the man, a certain William Belchier, who was hanged,
a little later.
On July 1st, 1774, William Hawke was executed for a robbery here, and
two others, for a like offence, on November 30th following. Three
highwaymen were thus accounted for, at short intervals, but others,
equally daring, were evidently left, for on the 27th of the next month,
a Mr. Jackson, of the Court of Requests at Westminster, was attacked at
Kensington Gore, by four men on foot. He shot one, and the others fled.
A Mr. Walker, a London police-magistrate, writing in 1835, said: "At
Kensington, within the memory of man, on Sunday evenings a bell used
to be rung at intervals, to muster the people returning to town. As
soon as a band was assembled, sufficiently numerous to ensure mutual
protection, it set off; and so on, till all had passed."
Such are the memories that belong to the very beginning of this road;
but they cluster most thickly, of course, around Hounslow Heath,
on which Du Vall very largely practised, in the reign of Charles
the Second. Du Vall is important enough to require a full biography
elsewhere in these pages, and we pass on to others, who merely, so to
say, stride across the stage, and so disappear.
Hounslow Heath no longer exists as a heath. Enclosure Acts and
cultivation have, during the last hundred years, wrought a remarkable
change upon the scene, and smiling market-gardens now spread for miles
where once existed nothing more than a waste of furze-bushes, swampy
gravel-pits, in which tall grasses and bulrushes grew, and grassy
hillocks. This home of snipe and frogs, and haunt of the peewit, was
not without its highwaymen by day, and at night it swarmed with them.
There was excellent reason why it should be so particularly favoured.
Through its whole length ran, not only the Bath Road, from Hounslow
town to Colnbrook and Slough, but the Exeter Road, on to Staines. Both
roads were largely travelled to and from the West of England, and the
Bath Road was, in addition, the road to Windsor; and was from that
circumstance travelled by some of the wealthiest and most important
people, who sorely tempted the daring spirits of the age. At a time
when it was possible for a band of conspirators to assemble in Sutton
Lane, near Gunnersbury, for the purpose of waylaying and assassinating
William the Third, on his way from Richmond Park to Kensington Palace
(February 10th, 1696), it was nothing out of the way for noblemen,
returning from a visit to the King at Windsor Castle, to be stopped
and robbed in their carriage when crossing Hounslow Heath. Masked
robbers made no difficulty about endeavouring to halt Lord Ossulston's
carriage here, one day in 1698; and it was merely by good fortune that
he escaped with the loss of two of his horses, shot dead. The Duke of
St. Albans was also attacked; but, with the aid of the gentlemen with
him, beat off his assailants. The Duke of Northumberland, as Macaulay
tells us, was not so fortunate, and fell into the hands of these
audacious ruffians; with what result we do not learn.
[Illustration: EXCHANGE OF COMPLIMENTS.]
A silent reminder of those times still stands beside the Bath Road at
Gunnersbury, on the right-hand side of the way as you go from London,
and between the modern church of St. James, and Gunnersbury Lane. This
is an isolated square brick building, now covered with a tin roof, and
quite commonplace in appearance. It has windows looking up and down
the road, and large doors facing it. Until a few years ago, it had an
old pantile roof, whose striking red colour was the only remarkable
feature the building ever possessed. The neighbourhood has long been
largely built over, but it still stands in what remains of the once
wide-spreading Gunnersbury orchards. Local traditions still survive
which tell us that this was a building erected in the time of George
the Second, or Third, for the purpose of sheltering the horse-patrol
that guarded the road when the King passed this way, travelling between
London and Windsor.
Hounslow Heath would seem often to have been the training-ground on
which young and inexperienced highwaymen first tried their luck.
Graduating here, they would with confidence take the road in distant
shires. For example, we have the careers of Messrs. John and William
Hawkins, Wright, Sympson, and Wilson, whose doings are set forth at
great length by the last of that brotherhood in crime, Ralph Wilson,
who turned King's evidence and so saved himself from the gallows,
and at the same time firmly fixed the noose round the necks of his
surviving confederates. The story of the transactions of this firm was
told by Wilson in a pamphlet published at the modest price of sixpence,
in 1722, shortly after John Hawkins and George Sympson had been turned
off.
Hawkins was the son of a small farmer at Staines. At fourteen years of
age he went into domestic service, then left it to become employed in
the tap at the "Red Lion," Hounslow. From that situation he rose to be
a butler to a knight; one Sir Dennis "Dulry," according to the rough
and ill-spelled tract (perhaps really Daltry), but was dismissed on
what would seem to have been the well-founded suspicion that he had
taken a hand in a robbery of his master's plate, shortly after entering
his service. 'Twas a way they had in the eighteenth century, which
nobody will deny.
It may be shrewdly suspected that employment in the tap of the "Red
Lion" at Hounslow had gone a good way towards inclining John Hawkins
toward the road; for, not only would he be brought into contact with
gamesters, but talk of how the bold highwaymen on the neighbouring
heath netted handsome sums formed, doubtless, the staple conversation
of the place. The only wonder is that John Hawkins first went into
service, and did not immediately go padding on the road. He must
have been a singularly youthful butler, for even when he got his
_congé_, and turned his attention to stopping the coaches, he was but
twenty-four years of age. His initial enterprise was carried through
single-handed, and his gains totalled the not despicable sum of £11.
But he returned to the town only to gamble with his plunder, and in
that way soon managed to dissipate it. Finding his solitary career
on the heath a little hazardous, in consequence of meeting a rare
succession of exceptionally brave travellers who did not scruple to
loose off their pistols at a single adventurer, he sought the moral and
physical support of companions of his own vocation.
It became a syndicate of five; himself, Eyles, Comerford, Reeves, and
Lennard. For two years they dared much in their speciality of robbing
stage-coaches and postboys carrying the mail-bags: those being the days
before mail-coaches, when the bags (or often enough merely a small
wallet, the post being then a comparatively small affair) were carried
on horseback. In proportion to their daring, their takings increased,
but they were always lost in the usual dissipations that give such
a monotony to all accounts of highwaymen taking their ease after
business hours.
Lennard at last got into trouble and was arrested, and when Hawkins and
a recruit to the gang named Woldridge attempted a rescue, they too were
seized. Three others were arrested, and appear, with Lennard, to have
been hanged. Hawkins and Woldridge were discharged.
A new confederacy was then planned, but soon broke up, upon a member
named Pocock, who had been flung into gaol, turning informer. Another,
who acted as treasurer, at the same time absconding with their little
earnings, the rest were reduced to poverty and to cursing the appalling
lack of honesty in mankind.
Hawkins, desperately endeavouring to woo capricious fortune at the
gaming-tables by staking his last coins, then met one Ralph Wilson, at
that time clerk to a barrister of the Middle Temple. He, too, fell from
respectability through gambling, and agreed to turn highwayman with
the new association Hawkins contemplated forming: "The New Highways
Exploitation Company," it might well have been named. John Hawkins's
brother William joined, and George Sympson, and one Wright, among
others.
The sphere of operations was widened, and business was carried on
with the greatest energy: the Cirencester stage, and those for and
from Gloucester, Worcester, Oxford, and Bristol, being all plundered
one morning. The next day they would be speaking to the Colchester
and Ipswich stages, and on the next would be again in some totally
different direction.
In midst of this busy time, Wilson succeeded to some small property in
Yorkshire, and left to claim it, and shortly afterwards William Hawkins
and Wright were arrested in the exercise of their adopted trade, and
William Hawkins, to save himself, impeached the others and earned his
liberty by that treachery. Wright might have done so; but he was one
of those rare chivalrous characters who oftener live in the pages of
novels than in real life, and he held his peace, for the sake of the
traitor Hawkins's wife and children. He died in his chivalry, too,
for he was convicted and hanged; while William Hawkins went free, and
presently crossed to Holland with his brother and the brotherhood's
money. They returned when this had all gone; and met Ralph Wilson in
London, whither he had returned, after disposing of his inheritance in
Yorkshire for £350. He had already lost all this in gambling when his
old friends found him. He, the Hawkins brothers, and George Sympson
then set about plans for robbing the Harwich mail, in April, 1722;
but as that mail, they declared, was "as uncertain as the wind," they
decided they could not afford the time to wait on the road for it; and
agreed to turn their attention to the Bristol postboys, or their mail,
instead.
[Illustration: JOHN HAWKINS AND GEORGE SYMPSON ROBBING THE BRISTOL
MAIL.]
They fixed upon Hounslow Heath as the most suitable spot for the
job, April 16th and 18th. "The meaning of taking the mail twice,"
explains Wilson, in his "Full and Impartial Account," "was to get
the halves of some bank bills, the first halves whereof we took out of
the mail on Monday morning." In the pages of Captain Charles Johnson
we see Sympson and John Hawkins, represented in a large copper-plate
engraving, engaged in robbing two postboys and binding them with rope.
The great size of the highwaymen and the diminutive character of the
postboys seemed to make it an easy task.
The Post Office was roused to fury by this latest of many impudent
mail-robberies; and Wilson, while taking his ease at the Moorgate
Coffee House in the City, and listening to the gossip, a week later,
heard of a great hue-and-cry undertaken. Seriously alarmed by this,
he contemplated taking a sea-passage to Newcastle, but was traced by
one of the stolen notes and arrested before he could get aboard. The
officers took him at once to the Post Office, where no less a personage
than the Postmaster-General himself examined him; but he disclaimed
all knowledge of the affair, and repeated his denials when he was
re-examined the following morning.
Meanwhile the Post Office had also secured John Hawkins and Sympson,
and had them detained in the Gatehouse. The Post Office officials then
appear to have in the most Machiavellian way played off one against
the other. They knew well enough that criminals were usually too eager
to save their own necks to care about anything in the way of loyalty
to their companions, and that they were always ready to turn evidence
against them. In this case there seems to have been keen competition to
be first with the confession; but Wilson's evidence was selected, and
it convicted John Hawkins and Sympson, who were executed on May 21st,
1722, their bodies being afterwards hanged in chains at the end of
Longford Lane, three miles on the London side of Colnbrook.
There is a considerable literature, in the form of old chapbooks,
about these confederates: notably an account by William Hawkins, the
surviving brother of John. Although himself at an earlier period an
informer, having purchased his liberty at the price of his confederate,
Wright's, life, he is found vehemently attacking Wilson for the same
deed, in respect of his brother.
A mysterious affair, which has never been properly cleared up, was the
death of Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe, in 1752. An Irish Bishop, even
although a Kentish man of ancient descent, did not perhaps rank very
high upon the Episcopal bench, but he was sufficiently exalted to make
the innuendo that he had died from being shot on the Heath while taking
purses at the pistol-muzzle a very startling one.
Grantley Berkeley says: "The Lord Bishop Twysden, of Raphoe, a member
of the old Kentish family of that name, was found suspiciously out
at night on Hounslow Heath, and was most unquestionably shot through
the body. A correspondent of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ asked, 'Was
this the bishop who was taken _ill_ on Hounslow Heath, and so carried
back to his friend's house (? Osterley Park), where he died of an
inflammation of the bowels?'"
Twysden was father of the then Lady Jersey, and great-grandfather of
the present Earl.
In the midst of this wild waste of Hounslow—according to the Honble
Grantley Berkeley, "Houndslot"—Heath, the pretty village of Cranford
stood; and there, too, was, and still is, Cranford Park, long a seat
of the Fitzhardinge Berkeleys. Cranford was a favourite with the fifth
Earl of Berkeley (died 1810), and he used frequently to stay there from
Saturdays to Mondays, even although the journey between it and London
was not infrequently made hazardous by the enterprising gentlemen who
found the Heath a veritable "Tom Tiddler's ground," where they were
always pretty sure to pick up gold and silver. Twice my lord's carriage
had been stopped between Cranford and the village of Hounslow, and
robbed: on the second occasion by a footpad dressed as a sailor, who
with trembling hand pointed a fully cocked pistol at him. While the
Earl was collecting his loose change, the trigger was accidentally
pulled by this nervous footpad. Fortunately it missed fire, or else
there would have been another tragic episode to chronicle. "I beg your
pardon, my lord," exclaimed the man, humbly deprecating his clumsiness;
and, re-cocking his pistol, went off with the Earl's involuntary
contribution.
There are several variants of Lord Berkeley's adventures here.
According to one, which rather discredits his having been actually
robbed here as well as stopped, he is said to have declared that, while
it was no disgrace to be overpowered by numbers, he at any rate would
never consent to be robbed by a single highwayman. The high-toby gentry
(this version continues) heard of his boast, and one was deputed to
try his mettle. He stopped my lord's carriage and said, "You are Lord
Berkeley, I think?"
"Yes," replied his lordship.
"Then," rejoined the man, "I am a single highwayman, and I demand your
money or your life!"
"You cowardly scoundrel!" exclaimed the Earl, "d'ye think I can't see
your confederate standing behind you?"
Startled by this, and hurriedly glancing over his shoulder, the
highwayman's attention was for the moment distracted, and Lord Berkeley
shot him dead.
In the story told by the Earl's son, the Honble Grantley Berkeley, he
says his father, after the adventure with the sailor footpad, swore
he would never be robbed _again_; and thereafter always travelled
at night with a short carriage-gun and a brace of pistols. It was a
November night in 1774, and his carriage, or postchaise, was nearing
Hounslow, from Cranford, when a voice called upon the postboy to halt,
and a man rode up, and, as Lord Berkeley let down the glass, thrust
in the muzzle of a pistol. With his left hand Lord Berkeley seized
it and turned it away, while with the other he pushed the short,
double-barrelled carbine he had with him against the man's body and
fired once. The man was mortally wounded and his clothes on fire, but
he rode away some fifty yards, and fell lifeless. Two accomplices who
were hovering about then fled, leaving the body of their comrade. The
_Gentleman's Magazine_ of that date has an account of the affair in
which it is said that the dead highwayman was traced by means of the
horse he rode, which he had that morning hired in London. His lodgings
were in Mercer Street, Long Acre, and the Bow Street officers had
hardly entered them when a youth, booted and spurred, called and asked
for "Cran Jones," which apparently was the name of the deceased. The
youth, who was an accomplice, was seized, and impeached two others:
one a clerk to a laceman in Bury Street, St. James's, who was traced
along the Portsmouth Road, and to Farnham, where, at three o'clock in
the morning, he was surprised in bed. He was then taken to London.
The other was also apprehended, and all three were brought before Sir
John Fielding. Their names were Peter Houltum, John Richard Lane,
and William Sampson. The last-named had £50 due to him for wages. An
evening newspaper later stated that there were in all seven youths
in custody over this affair. They were from eighteen to twenty years
of age, and the parents of some of them were in easy, and others in
affluent, circumstances; all of them overwhelmed with sorrow by the
sins of their unhappy sons."
Sir John Fielding, the Bow Street magistrate, had in 1773 written
to Garrick asking him to suppress the _Beggar's Opera_, which he
produced. He said the exploits of Macheath, the highwayman hero, and
the glorification of the criminal life on the stage, were calculated to
reinforce the ranks of the real highwaymen from the scatterbrain and
stage-struck apprentices of town; and it would indeed appear from the
foregoing account that he was correct.
Hounslow Heath was the scene of many tragedies. It was in November 1802
that a Mr. Steele, proprietor of a lavender warehouse in Catherine
Street, Strand, was murdered on that then lonely waste. He had gone on
a Friday to Bedfont, where he cultivated a large acreage of lavender,
and intended to return home the following day. As he did not return
at the appointed time, his family concluded he had been unexpectedly
detained on business matters, but when Monday came, and no news of him,
they not unnaturally grew alarmed, and sent a messenger to Bedfont. He
learned that Mr. Steele had only set out on his return on the Saturday
evening, and, being unable to procure a conveyance, had resolved to
return at least a part of the way on foot.
He was a bold man who, unarmed, should attempt such a journey across
Hounslow Heath in those days; and the unfortunate lavender merchant
paid the penalty of his rashness with his life. His brother-in-law and
other relatives, on receiving the news of his being missing, set out
in search of him, and at last found his mangled body secreted beneath
some clods and turf, under a furze-bush. The first clue to a tragedy
having been enacted was discovered, after many hours' searching over
the heath, in the sight of a piece of blue cloth. Pulling at this, they
found it to be the skirt of his greatcoat, buried in the sandy soil. At
a little distance away they saw a soldier's hat, lying near a bush, and
on the bush itself a great quantity of congealed blood.
[Illustration: MURDER OF MR. STEELE ON HOUNSLOW HEATH.]
Mr. Steele had received several wounds on the back of the head, and a
part of his forehead was entirely cut away; but a piece of leathern
belt tightly drawn round his neck showed that he had first been
strangled. This crime was traced to two men, Haggarty and Holloway,
one of them a soldier, who had planned it all beforehand, at the
"Turk's Head" Inn, Dyot Street, Holborn. Evidence was adduced by which
it appeared that a coach passed at a little distance along the road
while they were robbing Mr. Steele, who cried out for help. Holloway
exclaimed, with an oath, "I'll silence him," and beat in his head with
two blows of a bludgeon.
It is satisfactory to be able to say they were hanged. Both loudly
declared their innocence, but no one believed them. The execution took
place at the Old Bailey, when no fewer than twenty-eight persons among
the immense crowds who had come to see the sight were crushed to death,
and large numbers greatly injured.
The case attracted a great deal of attention at the time, and copies
are still occasionally found of a terrific engraving representing
the ferocious pair polishing off the unhappy Mr. Steele, one of them
wielding an immense club, fit for a Goliath.