Part 10

Ned Wicks one day met Lord Mohun on the road between Windsor and Colnbrook, attended by only a groom and a footman. He commanded his lordship to "stand and deliver!" for he was in great want of money, and money he would have, before they parted company. Lord Mohun, a noted bully and rustler of that age, proposed that, if the highwayman was so insistent, they should fight for it, and Wicks very readily accepted this proposal; whereupon, my lord, seeing him busily preparing his pistols for the engagement, began to back out of the bargain. Wicks, perceiving this, said contemptuously: "All the world knows me to be a man, and such a man am I that, although your lordship could, in a cowardly manner, murder Mumford the actor, and Captain Cout, I am by no means afraid of you. Therefore, since you will not fight, I order you to down with your gold, or expect no quarter!"

Thus meeting with more than his match, Lord Mohun fell into a passionate fit of swearing. "My lord," said Wicks, when he could get a word in edgeways, "I perceive you swear perfectly well, _extempore_: come, I'll give your honour a fair chance for your money, and that is, he that swears best of us two shall keep his own, and the money of he who loses as well."

My lord, an expert in this line, through long cursing over losses at cards, eagerly agreed to this new bargain, and threw down a purse of fifty guineas. Wicks staked a like sum, and the competition started.

After a quarter of an hour's prodigious swearing on both sides, it was left to his lordship's groom to declare the winner.

He said: "Why, my lord, your honour swears as well as ever I heard any Person of Quality in my life; but, indeed, to give the Strange Gentleman his due, he has done better than yourself, and has won the wager, even if it were for a thousand pounds."

After a few successful years of constant attention to his profession, Wicks was at last executed at Warwick, on August 29th, 1719, aged twenty-nine.

DICK TURPIN

Richard Turpin, the hero of half a hundred plays, and of many hundred ballads and chap-book histories, now demands our attention. His name stands out, far and away above that of any other of the high-toby fraternity. Not Claude Du Vall himself owns half his celebrity, nor Hind, nor Whitney, nor Sixteen-String Jack. Ballad-mongers, playwrights of the old penny-gaff order, and novelists, with Harrison Ainsworth at their head, have ever united to do him honour and have conspired—innocently as a rule—to deprive another and a worthier highwayman of his due, in order to confer it upon "Dick." The familiar "Dick" itself shows us how the great public long ago took Turpin to its ample bosom, and cherished him, but the student of these things smiles a little sourly as he traces the quite unheroic doings of this exceptionally mean and skulking scoundrel, and fails all the time to note anything of a dashing nature in his very busy but altogether sordid career.

Turpin never rode that famous Ride to York upon Black Bess: another and an earlier than he by some sixty years—the bold and daring Nevison—performed that ride, as we have already shown; and the chivalry, the courtesy, and consideration, generally so much in evidence in the plays and the stories, are by no means found in the many contemporary reports of his doings.

Richard Turpin was born on September 21st, 1705, at the village of Hempstead, in Essex. There are those who find a fanciful appropriateness in the fact, that a man, whose wife was to become a "hempen widow," should have been born at a place so significantly named. Those who are curious enough to seek it, may duly find the record of the future highwayman's baptism in the parish register, and will find the baptism of an elder sister, Maria, recorded nearly three years and a half earlier, April 28th, 1702.

The Reverend William Sworder, vicar of Hempstead, who performed the baptism, and thereafter made an entry of it in his register, was evidently proud of his acquaintance with the language of the ancients, and less pleased with his native tongue, for his entries are generally in Latin: and thus we find the infant Dick and his parents figuring, "_Richardus, filius Johannis et Mariae Turpin._"

[Illustration: TURPIN'S BAPTISMAL REGISTER OF HEMPSTEAD.]

John Turpin at that time kept the inn that even now, somewhat altered perhaps in detail, looks across the road to the circle of pollard trees known as "Turpin's Ring," and thence up to the steep church-path. It was then, it appears, known as the "Bell," but at times is referred to as the "Royal Oak," and is now certainly the "Crown." Such are the difficulties that beset the path of the historian. Nor has this mere nomenclature of the ancestral roof-tree been the only difficulty. Were there not seven cities that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer? In like manner at least one other place, Thaxted, is said to have been Turpin's native home; but with the register as witness we can flatly disprove this, and give the honour of producing the famous person to Hempstead.

The youthful Turpin was apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel, and soon afterwards set up in business for himself at Waltham Abbey, at the same time marrying at East Ham a girl named Hester Palmer, whose father is said to have kept the "Rose and Crown" inn at Bull Beggar's Hole, Clay Hill, Enfield.

As a butcher, he introduced a novel method of business by which, except for the absurd and obstinate old-fashioned prejudices that stood in his way, he might soon have made a handsome competence. This method was simply that of taking your cattle wherever they might best be found, without the tiresome and expensive formality of buying and paying for them. It might conceivably have succeeded, too, except that he worked on too Napoleonic a scale, and stole a herd. It was a herd belonging to one "Farmer Giles," of Plaistow, and unfortunately it was traced to his door, and he had to fly. More restrained accounts, on the other hand, tell us it was only two oxen that were taken.

The Plaistow-Waltham Abbey affair rendered Turpin's situation extremely perilous, and he retired north-east in the Rodings district, generally called in those times "the Hundreds of Essex"—to "Suson," say old accounts, by which Seward-stone is meant.

But although a comparatively safe retreat, it was exceedingly dull, and nothing offered, either in the way of the excitements he now thirsted for, or by way of making a living. He was reduced to the at once mean and dangerous occupation of robbing the smugglers who then infested this, and indeed almost every other, country district. It was mean, because they, very like himself, warred with law and order; and dangerous, because although he might only attack solitary "freetraders," there was that strong fellow-feeling among smugglers that made them most ferociously resent interference with their kind. Turpin probably ran greater risks in meddling with them than he encountered at any other period in his career.

Sometimes he would rob them without any beating about the bush: at others he would make pretence of being a "riding-officer," _i.e._ a mounted Revenue officer, and would seize their goods "in the King's name."

But that line of business could not last long. Writers on Turpin generally say he wearied of it: but the truth is, he was afraid of the smugglers' vengeance, which, history tells us, could take fearful forms, scarcely credible in a Christian country, did we not know, by the irrefragible evidence of courts of justice, and by the terrible murders by smugglers in Hampshire, duly expiated in 1749, to what lengths those desperate men could go.

He turned again, therefore, to the neighbourhood of Waltham, and, with a few chosen spirits, haunted Epping Forest. There they established themselves chiefly as deer-stealers, and soon formed an excellent illicit connection with unscrupulous dealers in game in London, to whom they consigned many a cartload of venison, which generally travelled up to town covered over with an innocent-looking layer of cabbages, potatoes, or turnips.

[Illustration: TURPIN AND HIS GANG IN THEIR CAVE IN EPPING FOREST.]

But the prices they obtained for these supplies did not, in their opinion, pay them sufficiently for the work they did, or the risks they ran, and they then determined to throw in their lot with a notorious band of housebreakers and miscellaneous evil-doers, dreaded in Essex and in the eastern suburbs of London as "Gregory's Gang." The earliest of their exploits in this new class of venture was the robbing of Mr. Strype, who kept a chandler's shop at Watford, a district hitherto unaffected by them. They cleared the house of everything of any value, without offering Mr. Strype any violence (which was thought to be very good of them) and so disappeared; to reappear always unexpectedly in widely-sundered districts.

Nothing came amiss to them. In one night they robbed both Chingford and Barking churches, but found little worth their while; and then, in a manner most baffling to the authorities of those times, would for a time disband themselves and work separately, or some of them would lie entirely by for a while. An odd one or two would even be taken and hanged, which rendered it more than ever desirable for their surviving brethren to make themselves scarce for a time. But want of money was not long in bringing such generally spendthrift and improvident rogues back again to the calling they had chosen. Several among them were already too well and too unfavourably known as deer-stealers to the verderers of Epping Forest for their reappearance in those glades to be safe, but Turpin, among others, ventured. Mr. Mason, one of the chief of these verderers, rangers, or keepers, was especially active in putting down this poaching, and the gang vowed they would repay him for it. But more immediate schemes claimed their attention. First among these was a plan for robbing a farmhouse at Rippleside, near Barking. There would seem to have been eight or nine of them on this occasion. After their manner, they knocked at the door at night, and when, properly afraid of strangers coming after dark, the people refused to open, they rushed forward in a body and broke the door in. Having bound the farmer, his wife, his son-in-law, and the servant-maid, they ransacked the house, and stole £700.

"This will do!" exclaimed Turpin, captaining the band; adding regretfully, "if it were always so!"

The attack then made by the gang upon the house of Mr. Mason, the vigilant keeper of Epping Forest, was probably determined upon in the first instance from a desire rather to be revenged upon him for interfering with their earlier deer-stealing operations, than from the idea of plunder. Turpin was not present on this occasion, for although he had intended to take part in the act of vengeance, he was at the time in London, squandering his share of the Rippleside robbery, and in too advanced a state of intoxication to meet his accomplices as he had arranged to do.

Rust, Rose, and Fielder were the three concerned in the affair, and it clearly shows the spirit in which they entered upon it, when it is said that, before starting, they bound themselves by oath not to leave anything in the house undamaged. An oath would not necessarily be of any sacred quality of irrevocability with scoundrels of this or any other type, but when the compact fitted in with their own earnest inclinations, there was no difficulty in adhering to it.

Fielder gained admission to the house by scaling the garden wall and breaking in at the back door, then admitting the other two by the front entrance. Mason was upstairs, sitting with his aged father in his bedroom, when the three suddenly burst in upon them, and, seizing them, bound them hand and foot. They asked the old man if he knew them: he said he did not, and they then carried him downstairs and laid him, helplessly tied up, under the kitchen dresser. Mason, the keeper, had a sack forced over his head and tied round his waist; his little daughter, terrified at what she heard, slipping hurriedly out of bed and out of doors, and hiding in a pigstye.

The revengeful three then entered upon the work of wanton destruction upon which they had come. They first demolished a heavy fourpost bedstead, and then, each armed with a post, systematically visited every room in the house and battered everything to pieces. Carpets, curtains, bedclothing, and linen, and everything that could not be broken, were cut to shreds. Money had not been expected, but in smashing a china punch-bowl that stood somewhat out of the way, on a high shelf, down fell a shower of a hundred and twenty-two guineas, with which they went off, doubly satisfied with revenge and this unlooked-for plunder. They hastened up to London and joined Turpin at the Bun-House in the Rope Fields, and shared their booty fairly with him, although he had not been present to earn his portion—an unusual support of that generally misleading proverb, "There is honour among thieves."

From 1732 and onwards a solitary inn, on the then desolate, remote, and often flooded Hackney Marshes was greatly frequented by Turpin on his way to and from Epping and London. This inn, the "White House" by name, then kept by one Beresford, was the resort of sportsmen interested in cock-fighting. Turpin was known there as a private gentleman. The house was demolished and entirely rebuilt in 1900; but another at Tyler's Ferry, Temple Mills, also a white-faced house, remains, and claims a similar association.

On January 11th, 1735, Turpin and five of his companions, Ned Rust, George Gregory, Fielder, Rose, and Wheeler, went boldly to the house of a Mr. Saunders, a rich farmer at Charlton, Kent, between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, and, having knocked at the door, asked if Mr. Saunders were at home. When they learned that he was within, they rushed immediately into the house and found the farmer, with his wife and some friends, playing at cards. They told the company they would not be injured if they remained quiet, and then proceeded to ransack the house. First seizing a trifle in the way of a silver snuff-box that lay on the card-table, they left a part of their gang to stand guard over the party, while the rest took Mr. Saunders and forced him to act the part of guide, to discover the whereabouts of his valuables. They broke open some escritoires and cupboards, and stole about £100, exclusive of a quantity of plate. Meanwhile, the maid-servant had retreated into her room upstairs and bolted the door, and was calling "Thieves!" at the top of her voice, out of window. But the marauders presently found their way upstairs, broke open the door and secured and silenced her: not, apparently, doing her any considerable injury: and then at leisure thoroughly searched every corner of the house, and gleaned everything of a portable nature that was worth taking. There was no hurry. They discovered some relics of the late Christmas festivities in the larder, in the shape of mince-pies, and sat down impudently, with the master of the house and his friends, to partake of them. One of the gang, by careful foraging, had found a bottle of brandy, and broached it at the table, hospitably offering some to Mr. Saunders and his friends, and assuring them, with a quaint humour, that they were as welcome as could be to it. Mrs. Saunders did not, however, see the humour of it, and was fainting from terror; and so they mixed her some brandy-and-water, to revive her.

At length, having taken everything possible, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves, they made off, declaring that if any of the family gave the least alarm within two hours, or if they dared to advertise the marks on the stolen plate, they would infallibly return at some future period, and murder them.

It was afterwards ascertained that they then retired to a public-house in Woolwich, near by, where the robbery had been planned, and soon afterwards crossed the river and resorted to an empty house in Ratcliffe Highway, where they deposited the plunder until they had found a purchaser ready to buy without asking any inconvenient questions.

A week later, the same gang visited the house of a Mr. Sheldon, near Croydon church. They arrived at about seven o'clock in the evening, and, finding the coachman in the stable, immediately gagged and bound him. Then, leaving the stable, they encountered Mr. Sheldon himself, in the yard, come to hear what the unaccustomed sounds of scuffling and struggling in the stable could mean. The unfortunate Mr. Sheldon was then compelled to act as guide over his own house, and to show the gang where all his valuables resided. Jewels, plate, and other valuable articles were removed, together with a sum of eleven guineas; but at the last moment, they returned two guineas, and apologised more or less handsomely for their conduct. They then had the effrontery to repair to the "Half Moon" tavern, close at hand, and to each take a glass of spirits there, and to change one of the guineas of which they had robbed Mr. Sheldon.

The manners of the gang would thus appear to be mending, but their unwonted politeness did not last long, as we shall presently see.

In giving some account of the doings of Turpin, either singly or in association with others, it is desirable, as far as possible, to tell his story largely by the aid, and in the exact words, of the newspapers of the time. Only in this manner is it likely that a charge of exaggeration can be avoided. Where all have boldly enlarged upon the popular theme and have as richly brocaded it as their imaginations permit, to revert to plain facts becomes a healthy exercise.

The _London Evening Post_ of February 6th, 1735, is the original authority for the next two incidents; two of the foremost in all popular accounts of Turpin's life. So much extravagant nonsense has been written, and is still being written, and will yet continue to be written about Dick Turpin, that any original documents about him are

## particularly valuable. They help to show us what we must discredit and

what we may safely retain. Indeed, without such newspaper paragraphs, the conscientious writer, faced with the flood of indubitably spurious Turpin "literature," might in his impatience with its extravagance, refuse to credit any portion of it. But the newspapers of that day serve amply to show that in this case, truth is equally as strange as fiction. Not stranger, as the proverb would have us believe, but certainly as strange.

Thus we read in the _London Evening Post_: "On Saturday Night last, about Seven o'Clock, five Rogues enter'd the House of the Widow Shelley, at Loughton in Essex, having Pistols etc., and threaten'd to murder the old Lady, if she did not tell them where her Money lay, which she obstinately refusing for some Time, they threaten'd to lay her across the Fire if she did not instantly tell them, which she would not do; but her Son being in the Room, and threaten'd to be murder'd, cry'd out, he would tell them if they would not murder his Mother, and did; whereupon they went up Stairs and took near £100, a Silver Tankard, and other Plate, and all Manner of Household Goods; they afterwards went into the Cellar, and drank several Bottles of Ale and Wine, and broil'd some Meat, eat the Relicts of a Fillet of Veal, etc. While they were doing this, two of their Gang went into Mr. Turkle's, a Farmer's, who rents one End of the Widow's House, and robb'd him of above £20 and then they all went off, taking two of the Farmer's Horses to carry off their Luggage; the Horses were found on Sunday Morning in Old Street; they staid (the Rogues, not the horses) about three Hours in the House."

[Illustration: TURPIN HOLDS THE LANDLADY OVER THE FIRE.]

This house, still in existence, although part of it has been rebuilt, is identified with a place now styled "Priors," but at that time known as "Traps Hill Farm." The heavy outer door, plentifully studded with nail-heads, is said to have been added after this visit.

This incident is probably the original of the story told of Turpin holding the landlady of the "Bull" inn, Shooter's Hill, over the fire; although it is inherently possible that he and his scoundrelly crew, having certainly threatened to do as much at Loughton, and having done the like to a farmer at Edgeware, actually perpetrated the atrocity.

The startling paragraph already quoted is followed immediately by another report, a good deal more startling: "On Tuesday Night," it says, very circumstantially, "about Eight o'Clock, five Villains"—it will be noticed that by this time the "Rogues" of the earlier narration have become "Villains," and their conduct, by natural consequence, infinitely more heinous—"came to the House of Mr. Lawrence, a Farmer at Edgewarebury, near Edgeware, in Middlesex, but the Door being bolted, they could not get in, so they went to the Boy who was in the Sheep-house, and compell'd him to call the Maid, who open'd the Door; upon which they rush'd in, bound the Master, Maid, and one Man-Servant, and swore they would murder all the Family, if they did not discover their Money, etc.; they trod the bedding under foot, in case there should be money hidden in it, and took about £10 in Money, Linnen etc., all they could lay their Hands on, broke the old Man's Head, dragg'd him about the House, emptied a kettle of water from the fire over him, which had fortunately only just been placed on it, and ravish'd the Maid, Dorothy Street, using her in a most barbarous Manner, and then went off, leaving the Family bound, lock'd the Door, and took the key away with them: The Son, who came Home soon after they were gone, call'd the Boy to take his Horse, but could make nobody hear, but at last the old Man call'd out, and told him Rogues had been there" (surely, he meant "Villains"), "as they were all bound, and that the Rogues said they would go rob his Brother; whereupon he rode and alarm'd the Town, went to his Brother's, but they had not been there; they pursued them to the Turnpike, and found they had been gone through for London about an Hour. They were all arm'd with Pistols, and one had a Handkerchief all over his Face."

Neither of these accounts mentions the name of Turpin, but these outrages were immediately ascribed to a gang of which he was a member.

The same evening journal of February 11th has a later account: "Mr. Lawrence, the Farmer at Edgeware-Bury, who was robb'd last Week (as we mention'd) lies so ill, of the Bruises etc., he receiv'd, that its question'd whether he'll recover: the Rogues, after he had told them where his Money was, not finding so much as they expected, let his Breeches down, and set him bare—on the Fire, several times; which burnt him prodigiously."

There seems, by this account, to have been much in common between this gang and those "chauffeurs" described by Vidocq in his _Memoirs_; bands of robbers who pervaded the country districts of France, and adopted the like methods of persuasion with people who could not otherwise be made to disclose the whereabouts of their hoards.