Books: Gentlemen of the Road

STAND AND DELIVER (287 pp.)—Patrick Pringle—Norton ($3.75).

Bold Turpin vunce,on Hounslow Heath,

His bold mare Bess bestrode -er ;

Yen there he see’d the Bishop’s coach

A-coming along the road -er.

So he gallops close to the ‘orse’s legs,

And he claps his head vithin;

And the Bishop says, “Sure as eggs is eggs,

This here’s the bold Turpin!”

Says Turpin, “You shall eat your words,

With a sarse of leaden bul-let”;

So he puts his pistol to his mouth,

And he fires it down his gullet.

—Sam Weller

The courtesy of the road, in truth as in ballad, was subject to broad interpretations on the narrow highways of 17th and 18th Century England. Bold Dick Turpin was one, but only one, of a numerous night-errantry that pranced the moonlight lanes about London, hearts high and pistols level, to cry the hapless traffic to Stand and deliver what it had in pocket. “The finest men in England, physically speaking,” said Thomas De Quincey, “the very noblest specimens of man, considered as an animal, were the mounted robbers who cultivated their profession of the great roads.”

The story of these natural noblemen, and of their ignoble exceptions, is told for the first time in something like full detail by British Historian Patrick Pringle. His grace of style, his assiduous research in old newspapers and chapbooks, and above all, the teeming fascinations of his subject, make Stand and Deliver a fast, exciting excursion down a secondary road of historical inquiry.

Cavaliers & Cromwells. Highway robbery in England began on an amateur footing. One Thomas Dun, a precocious boy who had developed a nervous habit of murdering people, stabbed a farmer one day in the reign of Henry I (1100-1135), confiscated his wain of corn and sold it at Bedford Market. Thereby Dun gave rise to an unpleasant tradition of brutality in a business that otherwise often had its lighthearted moments.

Two of the grislier practitioners of the 17th Century were Thomas Wilmot and William Cady. Once when a lady’s ring refused to come off her finger, Highwayman Wilmot cut off the one to get the other; when one lady swallowed her wedding ring to keep it from his clutches, Highwayman Cady slit her belly open and took the ring anyway. Nevertheless, such ferocities were few, especially for an age that hanged a man as promptly for simple theft as for murder.

Highwayman Zachary Howard, a Cavalier who had taken to the road during the Puritan succession, once got the great Cromwell himself in his sights, when they both stopped at the same inn. Cromwell was so impressed with Howard’s feints of piety that he invited him to come to his chamber that they might say their goodnight prayer together. Howard consented; but once inside the bedroom he exchanged piety for pistols, bound, gagged and robbed the Protector. Then, says one old source, “taking the pan out of a closestool that stood in the room, which happened to be pretty well filled, he clapped it on [Cromwell’s head], crowning him in such a manner as he deserved.”

Many a highwayman prided himself on his gallantry, and one of them, James Maclaine, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had such a fetching way with his women victims that when he was captured there was an informal day of mourning throughout the nation. “The first Sunday after his condemnation,” wrote Horace Walpole, “three thousand people went to see him”—most of them women.

The George & Gallows. Britain’s Age of Highwaymen began to wane with the introduction of detectives by Novelist Henry Fielding, during his term as Commissioner of the Peace in London (1748-54). Yet even in their heyday, the highwaymen could seldom cheat the gallows. If not caught in the act of robbery, they were betrayed by a woman scorned or an accomplice deceived. A few of them escaped from prison (William Nevison, for instance, who hired a quack to spot him with bluing and declare him dead of the plague), but almost all were recaptured and bravely took the long cart ride to Tyburn Tree.

“His heart’s not great,” wrote a poetical one of their number, “that fears a little rope.” On the last ride, the condemned highwayman cracked wise to his friends in the crowds that lined the way, and following a custom established by an early gentleman of the road on his way to the gallows,

. . . stopt at the George for a bottle of sack,

And promised to pay for it when he came back.