Gad's Hill, not far from Chatham, was formerly a noted place for
depredations on seamen, after they had received their pay at the latter
place. The following robbery was committed there in or verging on the
year 1676: About four o'clock one morning, a gentleman was robbed by one
Nicks, on a bay mare, just as he was on the declivity of the hill, on
the west side. Nicks rode away, and as he said, was stopped nearly an
hour by the difficulty of getting a boat, to enable him to cross the
river; but he made the best use of it as a kind of bait to his horse.
From thence he rode across the county of Essex to Chelmsford. Here he
stopped about an hour to refresh his horse, and give the animal a
ball;--from thence to Braintree, Bocking, and Withersfield; thence over
the Downs to Cambridge; and from thence, keeping still the cross roads,
he went by Fenny Stratford, [9] to Godmanchester and Huntingdon, where
he and his mare baited about an hour; and, as he said himself, he slept
about half an hour: then holding on the north road, and keeping a full
gallop most of the way, he came to York the same afternoon; put off his
boots and riding clothes, and went dressed as if he had been an
inhabitant of the place, to the bowling-green, where, among many other
gentlemen, was the Lord Mayor of the city. He, singling out his
lordship, studied to do something particular that the mayor might
remember him, and then took occasion to ask him what o'clock it was. The
mayor, pulling out his watch, told him the time, which was a quarter
before, or a quarter after eight at night. Upon a prosecution for this
robbery, the whole merit of the case turned upon this single point:--the
person robbed, swore to the man, to the place, and to the time, in which
the robbery was committed; but Nicks, proving by the Lord Mayor of
York, that he was as far off as _Yorkshire_ at that time, the jury
acquitted him on the bare supposition, that the man could not be at two
places so remote on one and the same day.
[9] Fenny, or Fen Stanton, not Stratford, must be here meant, as
the former is in the direct road from Cambridge to Huntingdon.
I need not remind your numerous readers that the roads in 1676 were in a
very different plight to those of 1831; at the former period it would
not have been possible for Tom Thumb to have trotted sixteen miles an
hour on any turnpike road in England. Even my friend, the respected
driver of the Old Union Cambridge Coach to London, can remember, in his
time, the coach being two days on the road, and occasionally being
indebted to farmers for the loan of horses to drag the coach wheels out
of their sloughy tracks.