Even today, the mention of the word ‘highwayman’ conjures
up a certain image – that of a masked, well-dressed man astride a horse,
brandishing a pistol and demanding that rich travellers in a stage-coach ‘stand
and deliver’ (in other words, hand over whatever cash and assorted valuables
they might have on them) somewhere on an open road at some point in the
seventeenth or eighteenth century. Having made off with the loot, he would of
course outwit the authorities if they sent anyone after him. It can be a rather
romantic image even though the reality was far from romantic – these were
brutal, violent men operating in a brutal, violent era.
In a very real sense, there was nothing new about highway
robbery, for thieves
who operated on foot – footpads – had been robbing travellers for as long as
there had been roads. However, the gun-toting thief on horseback was something new to the seventeenth
century. This was a violent age (what with the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Civil War in this country), and the increased availability and
effectiveness of firearms combined with the proliferation of men, often former
soldiers, who either lacked or didn’t much care for gainful employment and knew
how to use a gun while riding a horse (the latter being vital to ensure a quick
getaway). They were helped by the ineptitude of the law enforcement system of
the period; in the days before organised policing, the job invariably fell to
the parish constable who was usually under-equipped to deal with anything other
than minor crime, and who was often thought of as being lazy or incompetent
(Shakespeare having set the standard for that particular stereotype with
Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing).
The mounted thieves started to become known as
‘highwaymen’ in the mid-seventeenth century; they were also known as ‘gentlemen
of the road’ on account that many of them dressed smartly enough to pass for
gentry even if they were of more humble birth. The famous demand to ‘stand and
deliver’ goes back to that time, while the earliest references to the follow-up
‘your money or your life’ are from trial reports dating back to the
mid-eighteenth century. The growing print industry produced pamphlets detailing
their crimes, which brought them to the attention of the public (this would
continue in the eighteenth century with publications like the Newgate Calendar and plays like The Beggar’s Opera, followed by the
‘penny dreadfuls’ of the nineteenth century).
One of the earliest highwaymen to become well-known in
England was James Hind, who had fought for the Royalists in the Civil War and
took to highway robbery during the time of the Protectorate, preying in
particular on those associated with the Parliamentarian cause (he once tried,
and failed, to rob Oliver Cromwell himself). Others followed, some becoming
famous in their time. Claude Duval was a Frenchman who operated just north of
Restoration-era London; one of the first highwaymen to dress in fashionable
clothes and put on gentlemanly airs, he’s said to have once agreed to only take
some of his victim’s money, as opposed to all of it, if the his pretty wife agreed
to dance with him by the side of the road (which she did). William Nevison was
a former soldier who rode from Kent to York in less than a day (a previously
unheard-of feat) in order to establish an alibi, a tale that greatly amused
Charles II. Robert Congden was an Old Etonian gentleman-farmer by day and a
highwayman by night who held up the Earl of Dorset for a thousand guineas.
Most famous of them all, though, was the Essex publican’s
son
Dick
Turpin, who had started out as a butcher before turning to crime; in
addition to being a highwayman he was also a poacher, a burglar and, like many
of his fellow-highwaymen, a cold-blooded killer. Such was Turpin’s fame that
acts performed by other highwaymen, such as Nevison’s ride to York, ended up
being attributed to him. Despite their often-violent behaviour some highwaymen
– Turpin in particular – were to a degree idolised in that way in which
criminals are sometimes, and somehow, made out to be popular heroes (a point picked
up in an episode of
Blackadder, wherein
Baldrick describes a highwayman as “halfway to being the new Robin Hood … he
steals from the rich, but he hasn’t got round to giving it to the poor yet”).
From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the main roads of
England became hunting-grounds for the highwaymen and as such very dangerous
places – especially the bits that ran through what was then open country on the
outskirts of London (although robberies in London itself were not unknown; it
was partly concern about highwaymen in Hyde Park that led William III to ensure
that Rotten Row, the road between Westminster and Kensington Palace, became the
first road in the country to be artificially lit). Highwaymen often chose
isolated areas that the main roads passed through; Bagshot Heath, crossed by
the roads to both Portsmouth and the West Country, was popular. To the north,
Finchley Common on the Great North Road acquired a certain reputation, while to
the south on the Dover Road Shooter’s Hill was the venue of choice for hold-ups
(it had already got its name from being a place where archery was practiced in
the Middle Ages). Many such places had gibbets where the bodies of executed
criminals were displayed in metal cages to deter others from a life of crime,
and these were well-known to people who often travelled out of London; Samuel Pepys,
for example, once mentioned riding past “the man that hangs on Shooter’s Hill”.
Quite a few highwaymen ended up on the gallows, having
either been captured in the act or found out later (when people noticed that they’d
suddenly started spending a lot more cash than they usually did, for example). Hind
was done for treason rather than highway robbery because of his overt support
for the Royalist cause, resulting in his being not just hanged but drawn and quartered as well. Congden
had shot and killed his first victim when he had tried to resist, while Nevison had killed a
constable who’d tried to arrest him; both were hanged for murder. Duval,
somewhat unusually it would seem, was actually hanged for no more than highway
robbery. Turpin, meanwhile, was arrested for horse theft which was also a capital
offence at the time – and although some in the government wanted him to stand
trial in London or his native Essex, his trial and subsequent hanging took place at York.
The ‘golden age’ of the highwayman is usually considered
as having been the period between the Restoration (1660) and the death of Queen
Anne (1714), although Turpin’s ‘career’ post-dates this (he is thought to have
turned to crime in the early 1730s, and was hanged in 1739 at the age of 33).
Yet there were still some fairly audacious highway robberies being carried out
well into the eighteenth century; in 1774, no less a person than the Prime
Minister, Lord North, wrote of being “robbed last night as I expected … at the
end of Gunnersbury Lane”. For much of the eighteenth century, travellers along
England’s roads took to preventative measures – Horace Walpole, the writer (and
son of Britain’s first PM), wrote of being “forced to travel, even at noon, as
if one was going into battle”. When encountered by two highwaymen outside
London, the Duke of Montrose shot and killed one of them (the other escaped,
with the duke declining to give pursuit on the grounds that enough blood had
already been spilled). The subject of whether or not one should shoot a
highwayman, regardless of whether or not he’d shot first, is one that Samuel
Johnson (who defined ‘highwayman’ in his Dictionary as simply “a robber that
plunders on the publick roads”) had few doubts about. Boswell records that,
when it came up in conversation, the great man of letters stated: “I would
rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me, than
afterwards swear against him at the Old-Bailey … I am surer I am right in the
one case than in the other. I may be mistaken as to the man, when I swear: I
cannot be mistaken, if I shoot him in the act. Besides, we feel less reluctance
to take away a man’s life, when we are heated by the injury”. Boswell retorted
that Johnson “would rather act from the motive of private passion, than that of
publick advantage”, to which Johnson replied: “Nay, Sir, when I shoot the
highwayman I act from both.”
In such an atmosphere, it became a matter of routine for
coachmen, post-boys and the like to travel either armed or accompanied by
someone who was, the weapon of choice usually being a brace of pistols – as
guns back then were of the muzzle-loading, single-shot variety it paid to have
more than one loaded and ready to fire – or a blunderbuss (an early form of
shotgun with a flared muzzle, easier to load while on the move but only
effective at close range). Rich travellers, particularly those heading along
the Great West Road to the fashionable spa town of Bath, took to travelling
with as little money or jewellery in their coaches as possible – the wealth
could go on ahead, stuffed in the pockets and saddle-bags of a single servant
on horseback, preferably carrying a gun of some sort for his own protection.
Sometimes, a lone rider confronted by a highwayman could
get the better of him; one story is of a servant carrying his master’s money
who, when confronted by a highwayman, said he’d willingly hand over the cash but
asked if the highwayman would be so kind as to put a bullet through his hat first,
so that he later could show that he’d put up some sort of resistance before
standing and delivering. After the highwayman had obligingly fired, the clever
servant produced his own pistol who had been concealed in his coat! As the
highwayman had only been armed with a single pistol, the servant now had the
advantage and took his opponent to the nearest town to hand him over to the
authorities (and, presumably, collect any reward that may have been on offer).
Some highwaymen responded by forming gangs, although many
of these were short-lived as they invariably fell out over how to divide the
spoils. One of the more notable gangs of highwaymen operated in and around Cherhill,
a Wiltshire village on the Great West Road, in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries; being poor men who only owned one set of clothes each
(clearly highway robbery was not always lucrative), they became (in)famous for
doing their robberies naked so that no-one would be able to identify them by their
clothes.
Highway robbery in England died out in the early nineteenth
century. Some would assume that it was killed off by the railways, but it would
appear there were a number of factors at play. Highway robbery had actually become
quite rare by the time that century began, and the last recorded one took place
in 1831 (two years after Stephenson built his
Rocket). The increase in the turnpike system with its tolled and
gated roads had combined in the mid-to-late eighteenth century with the increased
enclosure of farmland to limit highwaymen’s activities (there was, quite
simply, less open space), and in the early nineteenth century they were limited
further by the expansion of cities (especially London) into what had been open
countryside. As the cities grew, policing became more effective, and the
increased use of banknotes helped too as they were easier to trace than gold
coins. The ‘gentleman of the road’ had had his day.
