By a general consensus of the opinions current in his age, Captain James Hind was incomparable among his fellow-highwaymen for courage, for resource, and for courtesy, and succeeding ages, although prolific in highwaymen, failed to produce the like of him.
James Hind was born in 1616 at Chipping Norton, the son of a saddler, and began life as apprentice to a butcher of that town. The lives of celebrated men, as told in popular biographies, afford many contradictions, and the career of Hind, set forth in the innumerable chapbooks of his own period, of the era of the Catnach press, and in a robustious kind of juvenile gutter-literature, that has survived even to our own day, is told in a variety of ways. His course was sufficiently adventurous, but his biographers have not condescended to the critical attitude; and thus, among the tales of wonder in which he moves, there are doubtless many that have simply accrued, just as the house-flies of summer are attracted to fly-papers. Indeed, as the highwaymen have ever been something (and generally a good deal) of heroes, so legends inevitably have gathered round them. If their exploits have not found a Homer to do for them what the Greek poet performed for the heroes of the Iliad, that is merely their misfortune, and they have had to be content with a Smith, a Johnson, and the trivial production of scribblers fortunate in anonymity.
Among the earliest of the chapbooks dealing with the short life and merry of Captain Hind is that scarce and curious print entitled No Jest like a True Jest, which presents us with what is quaintly styled "the true Protracture" of him, reproduced here. Observe his gallant bearing, the bravery of his dress, his winning smile, his lady-like feet! He carries a formidable pistol, it is true, but as you note him standing so debonair beside his gallant charger, you perceive, as it were, the courtesy and consideration that unfailingly accompanied his actions, shining out behind the rude methods of the old wood-engraver who seems to have hewed the portrait out of the wood with a billhook.
According to No Jest like a True Jest, which is but indifferently truthful in many of its details, and does not strike one as being a jest-book, Hind's father, before apprenticing him to a butcher, "put him to school, intending to make him a Scholar, but he minded his wagish Pastimes more than his Book," and so all ideas of a liberal education were cut off. Nor was the apprenticeship to the butchering more successful, for he, "having a Running Pate, soon grew weary of that also, and in conclusion ran away from his Master." Excusing himself, by complaining of the rough and quarrelsome character of the master, he borrowed two pounds from his mother, and fled to London. He was fifteen years of age at this time, and, if we may believe the biographers—a difficult enough exercise—"he soon contracted a relish for the pleasures of the town. A bottle and a female companion became his principal delight, and occupied the greater part of his time. So precocious were the 'prentice-boys of the early seventeenth century, and so far did forty shillings go!"
Ere long this youthful adventurer found his way into the society of highwaymen. It was in the Poultry Compter, whither he had been consigned for his part in a drunken riot, that he first made the acquaintance of Robert Allen, who was expert in most thievish arts. Over a bottle they struck up a friendship, and Allen presently introduced him to the gang he himself captained. They were mounted men, and the first test of the young recruit was the choice of a horse. He chose, with the unerring judgment in horseflesh that was one of his distinguishing characteristics through life, the best animal in the stable. Taken then to Shooter's Hill, and set to bid the first traveller "Stand and deliver!" he acquitted himself in so finished a manner as to win the respect of his new comrades, who, witnessing the exploit from the leafy coverts beside the road, could not withhold their admiration.
The horseman whom he thus robbed instantly handed over the ten guineas he was possessed of, and was no doubt bitterly wondering how he was to get home in a penniless state, when Hind courteously returned him one guinea. "This," said he, "is for handsel sake." The watching band of highwaymen marvelled greatly. Here was an intrepid youngster, the coolest hand at robbery, courteously giving back a percentage of his honest earnings. They were witnessing the foundation of a new school in an old art, a school that, although its fit pupils were few and far between, did at least establish a tradition that, while it did not greatly advantage the travelling world, did at least serve to win a long line of highwaymen an amount of forbearance that seems to us moderns almost incredible. The law visited highway robbery with sentences of the utmost ferocity, but individuals, as a general rule, took their losses, not only with an astonishing philosophy, but with a remarkable display of good-nature.
says a well-known couplet; but here we have the strange spectacle of courtesy disarming the resentment caused by the turning out of those pockets! Hind was not yet the holder of a commission, but he was evidently already captain of himself.
Those were successful years, in which Hind scoured the roads with Allen's band. They robbed by wholesale, but never did the gentlemanly Hind omit the courteous formula of raising his hat on requesting a delivery. Your tax-gatherer and rate-collector of modern times do not do so much, in the presentation of their "Demand Notes."
Not only did Allen's gang pervade the country upon horseback: they conducted operations in lordly style, travelling often in carriages, or setting forth, some equipped as noblemen and others as their servants, all the better to conduct their campaign of robbery. Allen, of course, like most highwaymen of that time, was of Royalist sympathies. He conceived the magnificent idea of waylaying the travelling coach of no less a personage than His Highness, the Lord Protector of the Realm, Oliver Cromwell himself, on the way from Huntingdon. Unfortunately, the coach was guarded by seven servants, unusually full of fight, and so the attack not merely failed, but several of the highwaymen were captured, among them their leader, Allen, who, a short time later, suffered at Tyburn for his error of judgment. Hind was fortunate enough to escape, by dint of a good horse and excellent horsemanship.
We are told, however, that Hind's horse was killed by the exhausting efforts of this escape. Having no money to purchase another (how on earth did the highwaymen manage to dissipate all the money they stole?), he was under the necessity of trying his fortune on foot until he should find means to procure another. It was not long before he espied a horse tied to a hedge, with a saddle on, and a brace of pistols in the holsters.
"This is my horse," cried Hind to the owner, whom he observed on the other side of the hedge, and forthwith he vaulted into the saddle.
"The horse is mine, you rascal!" roared the owner, making a dash for it.
"Sir," rejoined Hind, "you may consider yourself well off, that I have left you with all your money in your pocket to buy another, which you had best lay out before I meet you again, lest you should be worse used." So saying, he rode off in search of new booty.
To rob the rich, to act as special providence to the poor, to succour the distressed, and to plague the existence of their political opponents seem to have been as much the attributes of the seventeenth-century highwaymen as they were of that merry outlaw, Robin Hood. It is thus that, in the vilely printed pamphlets written by illiterates, composed of blunted type, struck off upon incredibly bad paper by the aid of rickety hand-presses, and sold at the old country fairs, the highwaymen have always had a niche in the affections of the rustics, who had no purse nor gear to lose. Hind was of this type, whether actually or as the creature of legend it is now no use to inquire. We learn, for instance, how, riding through the town of Warwick, and hearing a commotion in a side street, he drew rein to discover the cause. An innkeeper, he was told, had been arrested at the suit of a rascally old usurer, for a debt of twenty pounds. It was the work of a few minutes for Hind to leap from his horse, to pay the money, and thus to release the innkeeper. "Generosity!" you will exclaim. Well, no; or, at any rate, merely a generous impulse that cost him nothing but a little physical exertion, for what was easier to Hind than recovering again those twenty sovereigns! He followed the money-lender out of the town, and, overtaking him in a lonely place, said, with his forceful politeness, "My good friend, I lent you, of late, a sum of twenty pounds. Repay at once, or I take your miserable life!"
Twenty sovereigns were with fear and trembling handed over, together with another twenty, "for interest," and when this ill-used man sought to recover his due from the innkeeper under legal plea of "duress," or what not technical terms, he was not only defeated on the innkeeper producing his signed discharge, but was soundly flogged into the bargain.
The fanciful book of Hind's exploits called The English Gusman, published in 1652, contains some marvellous stories, notably that in which a witch gives him a talisman protecting him for three years. He had been staying the night at the "George" inn, Hatfield, and leaving early the next morning, encountered an ill-favoured old woman who begged alms of him.
"His horse presently staid, and would go no further. 'Sir,' said the old woman, 'I have something to say to you, and then you shall be gone.'
"Hind, not liking her Countenance, puld out five shillings and gave her, thinking she would but like a Gipsee, tell his fortune, said, 'Good woman, I am in haste.'
"'Sir,' said she, 'I have staid all this morning to speak to you; and would you have me lose my labour?'
"'Speak your mind,' said Hind.
"The old woman began thus: 'Captain Hind, you ride and go in many dangers; wherefore, by my poor skill, I have thought of a way to preserve you for the space of three years; but, that time being past, you are no more than an ordinary man, and a mischance may fall on you, as well as another; but if you be in England, come to me, and I will renew the Verteu of this Charm again.'
"In saying these words, she puld out of her bosom a little box, almost like a Sun-Dyal, and gave it to Captain Hind, and said to him, 'When you are in any distress, open this, and which way you see the Star turns, ride or go that way, and you shall escape all dangers.'
"So she switched him with a white Rod that was in her hand, and strook the horse on the buttocks, and bid him farewell. The horse presently leaped forward with such courage that Hind could not turn to give her thanks; but, guessing her will it should be so, rode on his way."
The talisman, according to the author of these marvels, lasted him until the time when he was present at the siege of Youghal, and its expiry was marked by his being wounded there.
He was a wide traveller, our gallant "Captain." We hear of him as a "true Royalist," receiving a commission from Sir William Compton, and find him at the desperate two-months' siege of Colchester, where the beleaguered Royalists made a last stand for Charles the First. On the surrender of that town, August 27th, 1648, to Fairfax, he managed to escape in woman's, or, according to another account, sailor's clothes.
The scene now shifts to Enfield, and we perceive Hind and the regicide, Hugh Peters, encountering in the green rides of the Chase. Politely Hind requests his purse, yet discloses a not altogether inopportune pistol. To this Peters replies with a defensive volley of texts. "Thou shalt not steal; let him that stole steal no more," and the like, together with a variety of paraphrases of the eighth commandment.
Hind, anxious to answer Peters in his own vein, finds himself a little floored at first, from want of practice, but presently he begins, "Verily," says he, imitating the sanctimonious tones of the Puritan, "if thou hadst regarded the Divine principles, as thou oughtest to have done, thou wouldst not have wrested them to such an abominable and wicked sense as thou didst the words of the Prophet, when he said, 'Bind their Kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron.' Didst thou not then, detestable hypocrite, endeavour from these words to aggravate the misfortunes of thy Royal master, whom thy cursed republican party unjustly murdered before the gate of his own palace?"
Here Peters began to extenuate the action of the regicides, and to quote Scriptural authority; with an excursus upon the sinfulness of robbery.
"Pray, sir," replies Hind, Doctor of Divinity, pro tem., "make no reflection against men of my profession, for Solomon plainly said, 'Do not despise a thief.' But it is to little purpose for us to dispute: the substance of what I have to say is this: Deliver thy money presently, or else I shall send thee out of the world to thy master, the Devil, in an instant."
"These terrible words of the Captain," we are told, "so terrified the old Presbyterian that he gave him thirty broad pieces of gold, and then departed."
But Hind must needs still further humiliate the enemy. He accordingly rode after him at full speed, and, overtaking him, addressed him in this wise: "Sir, now I think of it, I am convinced this misfortune has happened to you because you did not obey the words of the Scripture, which says, expressly, 'Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass, in your purses for your journey,' whereas it is evident that you had provided a pretty decent quantity of gold. However, as it is now in my power to make you fulfil another commandment, I would by no means slip the opportunity; therefore, pray, give me your cloak. You know, sir, it is commanded that, if any man take away thy cloak, thou must not refuse thy coat also."
The old Puritan shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably before he proceeded to uncloak them, but on Hind assuring him he must needs be obeyed, he surrendered the garment, and off went the highwayman with it.
The next Sunday, ascending his pulpit, Peters held forth, with a natural warmth of feeling, upon the crime of highway robbery, taking as his text, "I have put off my coat, how shall I put it on?" when an honest plain man present, who had heard of the incident, exclaimed, "Upon my word, sir, I believe there is nobody here can tell you, unless Captain Hind were here." The which put the congregation into such an excessive fit of laughter that the parson was made to blush, and descended from his prattling-box without further prosecuting the subject.
It was upon the road between Sherborne and Shaftesbury that Hind fell in with Serjeant Bradshaw, prominent among those who had sat in judgment upon the King. Bradshaw was in his travelling chariot, and, progressing with a considerable degree of state, declined to be robbed; mentioning his name.
"Pooh!" exclaimed Hind, "I fear neither you nor any king-killing villain alive. I have now as much power over you as you lately had over the King, and I should do God and my country good service if I made the same use of it; but live, villain, to suffer the pangs of thine own conscience, till Justice shall lay her iron hand upon thee, and require an answer for thy crimes, who are unworthy to die by any hands but those of the common hangman, or at any other place than Tyburn. Nevertheless, though I spare thy life, deliver up thy money, or die for thine obstinacy."
To save a miserable life, he put his trembling hand into his pocket, and drew out about forty shillings in silver, which he presented to the Captain, who swore he would that minute shoot him through the heart, unless he found him coin of another species. The Serjeant was then compelled to present Hind with a purse full of Jacobuses.
What a devil of talk possessed Hind. To be robbed and insulted, that was perhaps endurable; but to be lectured—oh, horrible!
"This, sir," says he, receiving the purse, "is the metal that wins my heart for ever! O precious gold! I admire and adore thee, as much as either Bradshaw, Prynne, or any other villain of the same stamp. This is that incomparable medicament which the republican physicians call the wonder-working plaster. It is truly Catholic in operation, and somewhat akin to the Jesuit's powder, but more effectual. The virtues of it are strange and various; it maketh justice deaf, as well as blind; and takes out spots of the deepest treasons, as easily as Castile soap does common stains. It alters a man's constitution in two or three days, more than the virtuoso's transfusion of blood can do in seven years. 'Tis a great alexiopharmick, and helps poisonous principles of rebellion, and those that use them. It miraculously exalts and purifies the eyesight, and makes traitors behold nothing but innocence in the blackest malefactors. It is a mighty cordial for a declining cause: it stifles faction and schism, as certainly as the itch is destroyed by butter and brimstone. In a word, it makes fools wise men, and wise men fools, and both of them knaves. The very colour of this precious balm is bright and dazzling. If it be properly applied to the fist, that is, in a decent manner, and in a competent dose, it infallibly performs all the above-mentioned cures, and many others, too numerous to be here mentioned."
With this, probably having quite exhausted himself, he haughtily pistolled the six horses that drew Bradshaw's carriage, and so left the unfortunate regicide, stripped of his money, deprived of all means of locomotion, and stunned by his flow of verbiage.
This, like the most of Hind's exploits, was robbing on the grand scale. To be sure, he rarely stooped to little larcenies, for he was a practical philosopher among the "skilful surveyors of highways and hedges" that he and his kind were pleased to style themselves. "Remember what I tell you," he would say; "disgrace not yourselves for small sums, but aim high, and for great ones; the least will bring you to the gallows."
There spoke the "Prince of Prigs," who was indeed so notable in his own lifetime that he had the honour accorded him of a play written around his exploits while yet he survived to add to them. It is not a good play, but that is no fault of our "gentleman" highwayman: the thing is that it should have been written and printed at all. Thus runs the title-page, that he himself may have read:
An Excellent Comedy
called, The
PRINCE OF PRIGGS
Revels:
or
The Practises of that grand Thief Captain
JAMES HIND
Relating
Divers of his Pranks and Exploits, never
heretofore published by any.
Repleat with various Conceits, and Tarltonian Mirth,
suitable to the Subject
Written by J. S.
London, Printed for G. Horton, 1651.
Seventy pounds he took from Colonel Harrison, another of the regicides, on the Bath Road, at Maidenhead Thicket; and so at one and the same time avenged his King and full-lined his pockets. A hue-and-cry was raised immediately, and the "Captain" was in danger long before he suspected it. It was an innkeeper who warned him—for the taverners and tapsters of that, of earlier, and of succeeding ages were ower sib to the gentlemen of the high-toby trade, and stood them in good stead whenever possible.
In this situation, it seems, Hind experienced an unwonted access of nervousness, and was apprehensive of every person he met upon the road. He had reached Knowl Hill, some four miles only from the spot where he had held up Harrison in his carriage, when a gentleman's servant, George Symson by name, riding at full speed after his master, came dashing by. With his mind full of the hue-and-cry raised after him, Hind, supposing this to be one of his pursuers, turned about, and raising his pistol, shot the unfortunate man dead: the only occasion of his taking life.
In May 1649, he was at The Hague, in the councils of Charles the Second. Thence, after a three days' stay, he crossed to Ireland and was made a corporal in the Duke of Ormonde's Life Guards. Wounded in action with Cromwell's troopers before Youghal, he escaped to Dungannon, but plague raged there, and he sailed for Scilly, which had a clean bill of health, and was, moreover, the safest place in which a hunted Royalist, highwayman or not, could at that time find himself. For, when all else had failed, even in the staunch and long-enduring West, the Scilly Isles still held out for the cause. The King was dead, but his son reigned in the hearts of the Cavaliers, and a faithful band, captained by Sir John Grenville, retired to that remote archipelago, fortified the islands, and made them a privateering base. It was not until June 1651, that Blake's flotilla forced them to surrender.
Meanwhile, so famous had Hind become, that rumour posted him everywhere where highway robberies were reported. He was already in his lifetime a kind of bogey, or will-o'-wisp sort of a fellow, who could miraculously be in at least two places at one and the same time. Thus, while he was certainly in Scilly, The Perfect Weekly Account of September 13th, 1649, reports from Bedford: "Last night was brought into this gaol, two prisoners taken up upon pursuit by the county, for robbing some soldiers of about £300 upon the way, in the day-time: there were five in the fact, and are very handsome gentlemen: they will not confess their names, and therefore are supposed to be gentlemen of quality, and 'tis conceived they are of the knot of Captain Hind, that grand thief of England, that hath his associates upon all roads. They strewed at least £100 upon the way, to keep the pursuers doing, that they might not follow them."
No doubt this would have been an enterprise entirely after Hind's own heart; but he was not there, nor were the highwaymen of his company.
Again, September 20th: "Yesterday about 20 horse of Hind's party (the grand highway thief) in the space of two hours robbed about 40 persons between Barnet and Wellin. They let none pass, to carry news while they staid about this work, by which means they all escaped before the county could be raised, but the Lord General's horse are diligent in seeking after them."
Hind remained in the sanctuary afforded by the Scilly Isles for eight months, and then travelled to the Isle of Man, where he sojourned thirteen weeks. There had been little scope for his peculiar activities on Scilly, but he found more opportunities on the Isle of Man, the kingdom at that time of my lord the Earl of Derby, to whom he obtained an introduction. He even became what modern diplomats would describe as a persona grata in that island Court. Robbery had been unknown in this most fortunate of the Fortunate Isles before ever Hind set foot there; but with his advent a perfect epidemic of highway robbery prevailed. The Manxmen would have been of the densest had they not connected the coming of Hind with these disasters, and they laid their suspicions before the Governor, Sir Philip Musgrave, who, with Hind by his side, in good-fellowship thought the insinuation absurdly ungenerous. Hind declared his innocence, but protested his willingness to suffer the extremest penalty of the island laws, if he were recognised for the thief. This offer was not so impetuously ingenuous as it looked, for, naturally, if he were so recognised, he would perforce, in the usual course of affairs, be made to suffer; and secondly, he had already taken the precaution of robbing in disguise. The Manxmen had come to the Governor with tales of an aged, hairy man, with long hair and beard; and confronted with the youthful Cavalier-like Hind, protested with apologies, that this was not the man. And then, when they were gone, what must our tricksy Captain do but produce, for the Governor's amusement, the shameless wigs and costumes in which he had masqueraded. There must have been a deal of fellow-feeling in that Governor, and little humour. Your true humorist could not possibly have resisted the obvious conclusion to the screaming farce, and would have had Hind fettered and sent off at once to the deepest dungeon available.
Hind then went across the Border into Scotland, where preparations were afoot for an armed invasion of England on behalf of Charles the Second. At Stirling he loyally kissed the hand of His Majesty and offered his services, not in taking purses on the road, but in fighting for the cause. The King commended him to the Duke of Buccleuch, and he came south and fought for Charles (the "King of Scots," as the Republicans were pleased to call him) at the disastrous Battle of Worcester. Escaping in the headlong flight, he hid himself in London. Near the close of that year, 1651, lodging in the name of James Brown, in the house of one Denzys, who exercised the trade of a barber over against St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, in Fleet Street, he was betrayed to the Republican party and carried before the Speaker of the House of Commons, who, after a lengthy examination "in regard to his late engagement with Charles Stewart, and whether he was the man that accompanied the Scots king for the furtherance of his escape," committed him in irons to the Gatehouse. There was a choice before his captors of the charge to be preferred. At first he was removed to Newgate, and tried at the sessions for highway robbery. A rude woodcut in a biography shows him, visited by his wife and father, at this stage of affairs, with a pitiful verse beneath.
The charges not being sustained by sufficient evidence, he was sent under a strong guard to Reading, there to be tried, March 1st, 1652, for the murder of George Symson at Knowl Hill. Convicted of this, he would forthwith have been hanged, had it not been for an Act of Oblivion that had been passed, securing an indemnity for "all past offences." This, apparently, did not include the offence of high treason; and so reduced, much against their will, to making a political martyr of Hind, the high personages of the Commonwealth, after endeavouring to dispose of him on the ignoble charges of highway robbery and murder, removed him by Order in Council to Worcester gaol, where he was condemned for high treason.
The book published at this period, entitled The English Gusman, one of those purporting to give an authentic life of Hind, narrates a conversation in his cell, here or at Newgate. Hind says: "I had not been here now if there had not been a Judas abroad, for indeed I was betrayed by one who formerly served the King, but now he is for you (pointing to a Captain who was present), but God forgive him."
The keeper of the prison then called him from the fireside to the window, to see if the iron shackles upon his legs were in order.
"Well," said Hind, "all this I value not threepence. I owe a debt to God, and a debt I must pay. Blessed be His name, that He hath kept me from shedding blood unjustly, which is now a great comfort to me. Neither have I wronged any poor man of the worth of a penny, but I must confess that I have (when I have been necessitated to) made bold with a rich bumpkin, or a lying lawyer, whose full-fed fees from the rich farmer doth too much impoverish the poor cottage-keeper."
The many "witty jingles" he put forth occasioned much laughter, but a gentleman standing by said, "Captain, you are not brought hither for robbing, but for treason."
"Treason," replied Hind; "I am not guilty in the least."
"Yes, sir," replied the gentleman, "you are, for complying with Charles Stuart, and engaging against the Commonwealth of England."
"Alas! sir, it seems that is enough to hang one."
"I am afraid you will find it so," answered the gentleman.
"Well, God's will be done," replied Hind; "I value it not threepence to lose my life in so good a cause; and if it were to do again, I protest," said he, laying his hand on his breast, "I would do the like."
"Come," said the keeper, "no more of this discourse; clear the room."
Hind in due course suffered the hateful penalty for high treason at Worcester. He maintained a light and frolicsome demeanour to the last. "These are filthy, jingling spurs," he remarked with a laugh, pointing to the fetters that clanked about his legs as he walked from the bar, "but I hope to exchange them ere long."
He was drawn to the scene of execution, then hanged, and afterwards quartered: his head being placed midway on the Severn bridge, and the other portions of him over the several gates of the city, September 24th, 1652.