Half-hours with the Highwaymen - Vol 1 / Picturesque Biographies and Traditions of the "Knights of the Road"

Half-hours! In the days when the highwaymen flourished, and made travel perilous for law-abiding persons, a five-minutes' interview with one of these "Knights of the Road," who were but rarely knightly in their manners, would have been more than sufficient. Travellers, who had been violently abused, threatened, and robbed, did not observe that atmosphere of romance about the highwaymen, with which, not only modern times, but their own age, enwrapped them. The highwaymen have ever been accounted romantic, as we shall see in these ensuing pages; from the more or less mythical Robin Hood, down to the Carolean age of Captain Hind, Swiftnicks, and Du Vall, whose exploits were followed with interest and sympathy by their contemporaries. From a lengthy study of these things, one fact rises prominently above all others: it is the fact that the highwayman's only ceased to be a romantic figure when he stopped and robbed one's self, under the usual circumstances of coarse vituperation and personal indignity. On all other occasions, although he commonly practised after nightfall, he paradoxically moved in a rosy atmosphere, in company with the knightly figures of ancient chivalry (who themselves, if the truth of it were told, would probably be disclosed as a rather sordid crew).

The thrilling romance—or the side-splitting humorous circumstances, as the case might be—of one's acquaintance or next-door neighbour being plundered, threatened with death at the pistol-muzzle, and then, with his very coat stripped off his back, being bidden make haste away, is obvious enough, and the highwayman who did all the threatening and the plundering is easily seen to be at once a hero and a humorist; but when he met yourself in the darkling lane, and had your purse, your coat, and your gold watch, and d——d you because you did not carry more wealth, and so make it better worth the while of a gentleman like himself to be out upon the roads at such unconscionable hours—why, then he was a rogue of the most debased description, and the occasion was not so much humorous as tragical; while, as for Romance: what sickly cant is this? Where are the patrol? What are the peace-officers doing, to earn their pay? Is this a civilised country?

We shall see in these pages the fine flower and the gradual declension of the highwaymen: shall trace the mythical and the almost wholly imaginary figures to the time when, under Charles the First and the Commonwealth, it was difficult to tell where the Cavalier ended and the highwayman began; and shall thence come, by way of the disbanded troopers, who turned highway robbers in William the Third's reign, to that curious age when there was an even chance that the armed and mounted man who bade you "Stand and deliver!" was a baronet, or a footman out of place, turned gentleman of the road to support the vices he had learned of his masters.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, to its close—the era of Maclaine and Sixteen String Jack, the art of highway robbery becomes less idealised. There is more police-court about it, and less hazy glamour. Beau Brocade is a fine figure, well-dressed and splendidly mounted, on the heath, but in the dock at Bow Street, and later at the Old Bailey, he never showed to advantage, Sixteen String Jack excepted, with his pea-green coat and his bouquet, as big as a cabbage. And as the eighteenth century closed and gave place to the nineteenth, the mounted highwayman gradually disappeared, and the footpad, a miserable, muddy, cowardly figure, for whom no one ever had a good word, is seen in his dark lurk, in the wayside ditch, not often courageous enough to work alone, and generally found in couples, ready perhaps with the suffocating pitch-plasters that so terrified the wayfarers of that time.

The footpad never had the slightest inkling of romance, and was always brutal, whether he clapped that pitch-plaster over your mouth, or terrified you, or finished off his examination of your pockets by knocking you down and jumping on your body. A far cry, indeed, from the generous days of Captain Hind, or Claude Du Vall.

No one would ever contemplate a work on "Half-Hours with the Footpads." It would be to introduce the reader into the very worst of society, and the least entertaining; and so we come by degrees to the present era of the housebreakers and the newspaper records, where you may seek romance if you will.

The history of the highwaymen is a lengthy emergence from ancient fables and marvellous rustic folklore, to more settled records. It is not peculiar in that gradual development. Such is the evolution of all history. But that of the highwaymen begins with the giants and the heroes, continued down through the legendary period of Robin Hood, to the times of the Civil War in England, between King Charles and his Parliament, when highway robbers cloaked their villainies with Royalist partisanship, to the less romantic eighteenth century, and finally ended, early in the nineteenth century, with all the glamour and tinselled things of the past, in squalid, commonplace circumstances. The highwaymen begin in the dimness of antiquity, continue very largely as heroic myths throughout the middle ages, become philanthropic and chivalric figures in succeeding eras, and later are seen to be mere masquerading footmen, brave only in their masters' fine clothes, seeking money wherewith to gamble and to live dissolute lives. They end, sordid, mud-splashed figures, from which romance shrinks; in no detail distinguishable from such vermin as the footpads, who on dark nights robbed women and children, and defenceless old men, for coppers in solitary lanes, and fled in terror from the robust.

When the profession of highwayman became extinct, those of pickpocket, card-sharper, and burglar were greatly reinforced. Some severe censors of modern times declare that the Joint Stock and Limited Liability Acts were passed in the interest of the classes in whose veins the highwayman blood flowed, and whose instincts could not, in the altered conditions of life, find expression on the road. As company promoters of the Whitaker Wright and Jabez Balfour type, it has been said, these providential enactments enabled them to satisfy their natural leanings. And so the old world journeys down the ringing grooves of change, even as Tennyson desired it should do, though perhaps not on the exact lines of his thoughts.

There are no heroes in these days; or, at the most of it, the hero of to-day, beslavered with overmuch praise, is discovered to-morrow to be a greatly overrated person, not so heroic as ourselves, if the truth were known and every one had his due.

The very last hero in the records of these allied criminal enterprises was Charles Peace, the burglar, who was hanged February 25th, 1879, for the murder (not in the way of his business), of Mr. Dyson, at Banner Cross, near Sheffield, on November 29th, 1876.

There can be no doubt that "Charley," as the police themselves almost affectionately called him, would in a more favourable era have been a highwayman. He had the instincts for the career, and was undoubtedly courageous enough, resourceful enough, and sufficiently equipped with what passed for wit and humour to have shone with no dim light, even in such days as those of Hind and Du Vall. He was not a hero, and the age insisted that he should ply a less respected craft than that of the highwayman, but he could have risen to such an occasion on the road, and perhaps because the public dimly saw as much, he figures in the imagination less as the armed midnight burglar he was, ready in cold blood to shoot down any one who stood in his way, than as a wonderfully daring and skilful adventurer, whose known exploits and whose legendary doings—for legends have accumulated around his well-known and ascertained career—can stir the pulse and heat the imagination. He was well-equipped even in the accident of his name. The heathen gods themselves might have laughed in their heavens—for humour was appreciated among the Olympians—at the sardonic jest of one named Peace prowling at dead of night, armed with a six-chambered revolver, ready and willing to slay those who should bar his path. And then how fine his gauge of the average intelligence, which even nowadays does not often range beyond that primitive conception of the typical burglar, in which he is pictured in the ankle-jacks, the breeches, the velveteen coat, and the moleskin cap of Bill Sikes. He saw that was the mental picture the British public cherished of gentlemen of his trade, and he took his cue therefrom, posing as an independent gentleman. It mattered little that his physiognomy actually reproduced the Bill Sikes head and face, with remarkable closeness; he dressed well, talked well, lived in nicely furnished houses in respectable neighbourhoods, and—last and clinching sign of respectability—he kept a horse and trap.

Until his arrest on the night of November 17th, 1878, in the act of committing a burglary at St. John's Park, Blackheath, he was a respected villa resident, who had a liking for art, a great fondness for music, and, in general, cultivated tastes. There was no reason, except such reason or such elements of chance, as may be found in the busy conduct of his trade, why he should ever have been caught. He burgled as cleverly as he lived; and had too much sense to work in company. Keeping his own counsel, and working alone, he was quite sure no pal would betray him.

His impudent assurance is well displayed in the authentic and well-known anecdote of his offering a choice cigar from among some he had looted, to a tradesman well acquainted with him. He entered the Peckham chemist's shop, made a purchase, passed the time o' day, and offered him his cigar-case. The shopkeeper took one, and later smoked it with great satisfaction.

When next Peace entered the shop, the shopkeeper said: "That was a fine cigar, sir, you gave me the other day."

"Yes," replied Peace, "they are good. I can't afford to buy, so I steal them."

"Do you?" rejoined the man, with a laugh at the absurdity of such a statement from a customer so apparently respectable as Peace; "I wish, then, you would steal me some more."

"I will!" said Peace; and he did. He had the effrontery to again burgle the place whence his original supply had come.

"Here," he said in a day or two, giving the shopkeeper a box full, "are the cigars I promised to steal for you." The delighted recipient thought how exquisitely his customer's kindness and humour blended.

There is nothing neater in all the history of highwaymen than this anecdote, twinkling brightly amid the matter-of-fact records of a degenerate day.

There is plentiful evidence that when Captain Alexander Smith in 1719-20 wrote and published his work upon the highwaymen and other evil-doers, he based his book upon the many chapbooks and broadsides then in existence. Many of them may even now be found by those who do not mind searching for them, but whether they will repay the trouble is quite another matter. He includes in his gallery even Robin Hood and Sir John Falstaff; and, not concerned to point out their legendary or merely literary character, gives an exact (though necessarily not a truthful) biography of each.

Several editions of Smith exist; some in three, others in two volumes. The title-pages vary largely, but all are extremely lengthy, and so curious that it is well worth while to reproduce one as on the next page.