Part 5

Taken before the venerable Cardinal, and examined, he was about to be taken off in custody; when, falling upon his knees, with uplifted hands he begged the Cardinal to listen to him. He then declared with ready lies, that, brought up as a heretic, and falling into evil ways that had brought him to want and misery, he had seen the folly of his life, and offered prayers before the effigy of the Virgin Mary. While he was thus praying, he continued, the figure pointed to the box, as if it were giving him leave to take what was necessary to supply his wants. In consequence of this singular interposition on his behalf, he concluded he had made up his mind to become a Roman Catholic, but at the moment of this decision he had been arrested.

This singular narrative was heard by the Cardinal with much surprise, and at the close of it he exclaimed, fervently, "A miracle indeed!" All who had heard it also shared the same opinion and "it being justly concluded that none had a better right to dispose of the money than the Virgin herself, to whom it was devoted," Withers was carried in solemn procession, as a convert singularly honoured, and placed before the high altar while an Ave Maria was sung.

It is not, it may be added, necessary to believe this precious story in its entirety. Withers was, of course, as we shall see, capable of worse than this, and the probability is that the actual theft was committed by him; but we can hardly believe the Roman Catholic clergy quite such fools as they figure here.

At Antwerp, Withers made a second essay in sacrilege. There he stole a great silver crucifix. But he felt that there was really no career for him in these enterprises, and so, deserting from the army, he crossed to England, and took up the profession of highwayman.

It would be of little interest to follow Withers in all his highway doings, but the adventure of himself and two companions with an actor on the road is perhaps worth repeating. They espied one morning a gentleman walking alone and displaying all the gestures of passion, distraction, and fury to excess; casting his eyes to heaven, stretching forth his arms imploringly, or folding them moodily upon his breast. Near by was a pond.

"Make haste!" exclaimed Withers to his companions, "'tis even as we thought; the poor gentleman is just going to kill himself for love." Then, rushing towards him, two of them taking an arm each, Withers addressed him earnestly: "Pray, sir, consider what you do! what a sad thing it would be to drown yourself here. Be better advised and consider, before it is too late."

The actor was indignant. "What a plague is all this for?" he asked. "I am not going to hang, stab, or drown myself. I am not in love, but only a player, learning a part."

"A player, are you?" rejoined Withers. "If I had thought that, you should have drowned yourself, or hanged yourself indeed, before we had taken the pains to follow you up and down. But, to make amends for our trouble, the least you can do will be to give us what money you have."

So saying, they bound his hands and legs together, emptied his pockets of ten shillings, and took away a silver-hilted sword he carried.

It is, in this connection, curious to observe the animus displayed against the stage. It is met largely in the satire of the time, and not merely in the literature inspired by the Puritans, but even in those by no means puritanical books and plays in which the highwaymen figure as heroes. Thus, in the play, the _Prince of Priggs_, written around the career of Captain Hind, but not intended to be staged, we find the prologue chiefly concerned with a sneer at those "apes and parrots," silenced under the sour rule of the Commonwealth:

Since that the Apes and Parrots of the Stage, Are silenc'd by the Clamours of the Age; Like Conies forc'd to feed on bran and grass, (The true Desciples of _Pithagoras_) Whose Copper-Lace,[1] and Copper-Noses once Made them to think themselves great _Prester-Johns_: You'l (sure) have cause to praise, and thank that man, Can make each thief a compleat _Roscian_: Then much good doe't you (Sirs) fall to and eat, You ne're had cheaper (perhaps) better meat.

[1] _i.e._ imitation gold-lace.

The last adventure of Withers was that in which he and a companion, William Edwards by name, near Beaconsfield beset a nobleman and his servant. Withers' horse was shot in the resistance they made, and, mounting behind his friend, they took to flight. But the horse with two riders was no match for the others, not so heavily burdened; and, being hard pressed along the road, the two fugitives dismounted and ran across country in the direction of London. Sleeping in the hedges overnight, the next morning they continued their flight. Meeting, one mile on the London side of Uxbridge, with a penny postman, they robbed him of eight shillings; and Withers, to prevent their being identified, drew a large butcher's knife he carried, and barbarously cut his throat. They then ripped up his body, filled his stomach with stones, and flung him into the little stream that here flows across the road. The burial registers of Hillingdon church bear witness to this and to another murder they appear to have committed at, or near, the same place; "1702, November 13. Will Harrison, Postman, murdered near the Great Bridge between Hillingdon and Uxbridge. November 28. Edward Symonds, Drover, murdered at the same time, and about the same place, and by the same hands."

Withers and Edwards were arrested the following January in Norfolk, for a highway robbery committed there, and were tried and executed at Thetford, April 16th, 1703.

PATRICK O'BRIAN

"Patrick O'Brian," says Captain Alexander Smith, "was a native of Ireland." Perhaps we might, without undue stress of mind, have guessed as much. It seems that his parents were very indigent natives of Loughrea, and so Patrick left his native land for England, and presently enlisted in the Coldstream Guards. But he was not a good soldier; or, at any rate, if good in that profession, infinitely better in the practice of all kinds of vice. He was resolved not to want money, if there were any to be obtained, no matter the means to it; but began cautiously by running into debt at public-houses and shops; and then followed up that first step by borrowing from every acquaintance, until that source was dried up.

When all these means to existence were exhausted, O'Brian went upon the road. The first person whom he met was, strange to say, another unmitigated scoundrel: none other, in fact, than the Reverend William Clewer, vicar of Croydon, who here demands a little paragraph entirely to himself.

William Clewer, who was collated to the living of Croydon in 1660, was notorious, we are told, for his singular love of litigation, unparalleled extortions, and criminal and disgraceful conduct. His character became so bad, and his ways of life so notorious, that he was eventually ejected in 1684. He must have been, indeed, pre-eminently bad, to have been ejected in that easy-going age. Dispossessed of his living, on these substantial grounds, he at last died, in 1702, and was buried in St. Bride's, Fleet Street.

We are indebted to Smith for the account of the meeting of O'Brian and this shining light of the clerical profession:

"O'Brian, meeting with Dr. Clewer, who was try'd once and burnt in the hand at the Old Bailey for stealing a silver cup, coming along the road from Acton, he demanded his money; but the reverend doctor having not a farthing about him, O'Brian was for taking his gown. At this our divine was much dissatisfied; but, perceiving his enemy would plunder him, quoth he: 'Pray, sir, let me have a chance for my gown'; so, pulling a pack of cards out of his pocket, he further said: 'We'll have, if you please, one game of all-fours for it, and if you win it, take it and wear it.' This challenge was readily accepted by the footpad; but, being more cunning than his antagonist at slipping and palming the cards, he won the game, and the doctor went contentedly home without his canonicals."

On one memorable occasion, O'Brian happened, in his lurkings upon the road, to stop a man who proved to be an acrobat, and who, when Patrick bade him "stand and deliver!" instantly jumped over his head. The ignorant and superstitious Irishman thought he had chanced upon the devil himself, come to sport with him before his time, and while he was trembling and crossing himself, the acrobat, rolling along the road in a series of somersaults and cartwheels, got clear away.

These adventures appear to have been mere tentative experiments, for we learn that O'Brian then deserted from the army and commenced highwayman in earnest. He one day stopped the carriage of none other than Nell Gwynne and addressed her thus: "Madam, I am a gentleman. I have done a great many signal services to the fair sex, and have, in return, been all my life maintained by them. Now, as I know you to be a charitable woman, I make bold to ask you for a little money; though I never had the honour of serving you in particular. However, if any opportunity shall ever fall in my way, you may depend upon it I will not be ungrateful."

Nell, we are told, made this mercenary knight-errant a present of ten guineas.

It was the same with O'Brian as with every other wicked man, says Smith; he was eager to lead others into the evil path himself had chosen. In particular, he induced a young man named Wilt to become a highwayman; and Wilt was unfortunate enough to be apprehended in his first experiment and to be hanged for it.

O'Brian was also arrested, and hanged at Gloucester. After his body had swung the usual time, it was cut down and his friends were allowed to carry it off. When it was taken indoors, it was observed to move slightly, strange to say; upon which a surgeon was hurriedly called; and, what with being bled and his limbs being exercised, O'Brian was presently restored to life.

This marvellous recovery was kept a strict secret for a time, and it was hoped the experience would have a salutary effect, the more especially as his friends were willing to contribute towards his support in some retired employment. He agreed to reform his life, and, indeed, while the memory of the bitterness of death was fresh upon him, kept his promise; but as that dreadful impression wore off by degrees, he returned to his former ways. Abandoning an honest life, he procured a horse (Smith says he purchased one, but we may be allowed our doubts upon that matter) "and other necessaries": _i.e._ pistols, powder and ball, and sword, and again visited the road.

This was about one year after his execution and supposed death, and the travelling public of the districts he had principally affected had long grown tired of congratulating themselves upon his disappearance, and were quite accustomed to thinking of him as a memory. It was, therefore, a bad shock to the gentleman whom he had last robbed, and for plundering whom he had been, to all appearance, satisfactorily turned off, when he was the first person to be stopped by O'Brian in this second series of his adventures.

His consternation, we are told, and may readily believe, was great. "Wher—why?" he asked, with chattering teeth, "I ther—thought you had been hanged a twelvemonth ago."

"So I was," rejoined O'Brian, "and therefore you ought to imagine that what you see now is only my ghost. However, lest you should be so uncivil as to hang my ghost too, I think the best way is to secure you." So saying, he discharged a pistol through the gentleman's head, and, alighting from his horse, in a fury hewed the body to pieces with his hanger.

Later, he committed a fearful atrocity in Wiltshire, which, although fully detailed in contemporary literature, cannot be set forth here. He carried off at the same time no less a sum of money than £2,500; but was fortunately brought to justice after a further two years of miscellaneous plundering, chiefly through the evidence of an accomplice lying under sentence of death in Bedford gaol. He was taken at his lodgings in Little Suffolk Street, by the Haymarket, and then sent down to Salisbury, to be tried for his Wiltshire enormity. Once lodged in gaol there, he confessed a series of crimes, for which he was executed on April 30th, 1689, aged thirty-one.

JACK BIRD

Jack Bird was humbly born and as humbly educated. When it is added that he was born in the second half of the seventeenth century, it will rightly be supposed that his education did not include any of the sciences, and that it probably did not go far beyond teaching him to write his own name. He had no use for even that small accomplishment, for he was apprenticed to a baker, and before his indentures were expired had run away and 'listed for a soldier in the foot-guards; being almost immediately sent out to the Low Countries. He served under the Duke of Monmouth at the siege of Maestricht, but found too many masters in the army, and so deserted and made his way to Amsterdam, where he commenced a new career by stealing a piece of silk. He was detected in the act, taken before a magistrate, and condemned to a term of hard labour in the "rasp-house," where he was set to rasping log-wood, and to other severe drudgeries, for the term of twelve months. Unaccustomed to such hard labour, Jack fainted at his tasks, but the labour-master set it down to laziness, and to cure it, chained him in the bottom of an empty cistern by one foot, and caused a number of taps to be turned on, so that the cistern began rapidly to fill and the prisoner to be obliged, as the cistern was deeper than his own height, to work vigorously at a pump fixed in it, lest the water should gain upon, and drown, him. An hour's experience of this ingenious punishment rendered him quite anxious to return to the labour that had before been too much for him.

At the end of his term of bondage he hastened to take leave of Holland and the Hollanders, who had proved themselves such connoisseurs in quaint punishments. In England, justice certainly was more severe, and hanged men who stole quite trivial things, but it did not make people perform such hard labour, and Jack was one of those who would rather die than work. There are many of his kind even now.

Although hard labour was distasteful to our hero, he was by no means satisfied to live as humbly as he had been born, and his thoughts turned lightly to the road, as a likely place on which to pick up a good living without over-exertion. There was the choice of footpad or highwayman, and of course he chose the higher branch of the profession; for a footpad had to pad the hoof and be content, after all, with robbing the comparatively poor; while a highwayman could cut a fine figure on horseback, plunder the best, and be at little personal fatigue in doing so. Many foolish fellows, commencing highwayman, would hire, or even purchase, a horse; not so Jack Bird. "Thorough" was his motto, and he began business by stealing the mount he fancied. At the same time he took excellent good care to go fully armed, for we read that he provided himself with six good pistols and a broadsword. In this fortified condition, and in the dress of a gentleman, he opened his campaign. His first few attempts were highly successful, but he soon learned, in a painful adventure on the Dover Road, between Gravesend and Chatham, that fortune is fickle. There he encountered one Joseph Pinnis, a pilot, who was returning from London, where he had received ten or twelve pounds for piloting a Dutch ship up-river. He had been so unfortunate as to lose both hands during an engagement in the Dutch war, some years earlier, and it seemed to our callous highwayman an easy task to rob him.

Summoned to "Stand and deliver!" the pilot replied, "You see, sir, that I have never a hand, so cannot take my money out of my pocket. Be so kind, therefore, as to take the trouble to search me."

The highwayman, without the slightest misgiving, complied with this very reasonable request, and securing the pilot's purse, began to examine its contents, when he found himself suddenly seized around the waist by the traveller, who appeared to have enormous strength in his arms, even though he had no hands. He succeeded in overthrowing the highwayman, and falling upon him, beat him fearfully about the face with his metal-shod wrists.

Presently some other travellers approached, and, asking the cause of the struggle, Pinnis told them: asking them to take a hand and give the ruffian a further drubbing, and adding that he was almost out of breath with what he had done already.

The travellers then, informed of the whole affair, conducted Bird in custody to a magistrate, who committed him to Maidstone gaol, where he was tried and condemned to death, but was afterwards, for some reason that has escaped the historian, pardoned and set at liberty, to work more outrages upon unarmed and inoffensive folk.

At first, however, the danger and indignity he had passed through, of being so completely vanquished by a handless man, whom he had at first foolishly despised, quite put him out of conceit with himself and the road, and he resolved to abandon an employment which had at first promised so well, only to turn out so ill. But work—real work—was uncongenial as ever, and as he had to exist somehow, it happened that the road called him successfully again, after all.

The first person he encountered in his new series of adventures was a Welsh drover, who proved to be a muscular man, and the very devil of a fellow with that nasty weapon, the quarter-staff. "Once bit, twice shy," murmured Jack, withdrawing swiftly out of reach. "If a villain of a sailor without hands can overthrow me, I shall not venture my carcase within reach of one that has hands, for fear of something worse." So, he pulled a pistol from the armoury he carried in his belt, and from a safe distance shot the drover through the head. He then searched the body and found, to his disgust, only eighteenpence. But he summoned what philosophy he could over this disappointment, and, cynically remarking that "'Tis a price worth killing a man for, any time," rode off without the least remorse.

On another occasion he met the original "Poor Robin," the almanac-writer and humorous prognosticator; and as he did not disdain to exact contributions from the poor, as well as the rich (although "Poor Robin" probably was by no means so poor as his name would imply), he desired the calendar-maker to halt and surrender. As this was the first time Poor Robin had heard such language, and as he had received no hint of this occasion from the stars, he stood and stared, as if himself had been planet-struck.

"Come now," said Jack, "this is no child's play: I am in earnest."

Robin pleaded the poverty to which, he said, his nickname bore witness.

"That," returned Bird, "is a miserable, threadbare excuse, and will not save your bacon."

"But," pleaded the almanac-maker, "as author of those calendars that yearly come out in my name, I have canonised a great many gentlemen of your profession; look in them for their names, and let this be my protection."

But all in vain; Bird ransacked his pockets, and from them extracted fifteen shillings, took a new hat from his head, and requested him, as he had now given him cause, to canonise him also.

"Ay!" exclaimed Poor Robin grimly, "that will I, when you have suffered martyrdom at Tyburn, which will not be long hence."

"Poor Robin's" publications, it may be said, in this connection, are well worth examination. In an age when Lilly, Perkins, and a host of others issued prophetic almanacs, divining future events from the stars, and were extensively believed in, "Poor Robin's" almanac, year by year, made much fun out of those pretensions; fun that sometimes reads curiously modern. Seventeenth-century humour is, as a rule, as flat to the modern taste as champagne opened and left to stand, but much of "Poor Robin's" wit and humour still sparkles. While Perkins, with a provoking solemnity, would give a chronological table of events from the Year One and would proceed by degrees from "Adam, created 1, B.C., 3962," and would continue by way of "Methuselah, born 687, B.C., 2306," to "The Tyrant Oliver began his government, December 16th, 1653"; "Poor Robin" would devote his attention largely to the days when highwaymen were hanged, and would draw farcical conclusions from planetary dispositions. Thus we find him saying:

"Now the effects of the conjunction of Saturn and Mars will much operate: such conjunctions are always attended with remarkable accidents. There was one in the year 1672, and the German Princess rode up Holborn Hill; another in 1673, and Du Vail visited the three-legged tenement at Hyde Park Corner. I might instance in divers other examples, but these shall suffice."

The so-called "German Princess" was an adventuress, really a native of Canterbury, and a daughter of one of the choristers in the Cathedral there, named Moders. She was hanged at Tyburn, in 1678 (not in 1672), and so was Du Vall (not at Hyde Park Corner, and not in 1673).

In his burlesque monthly forecasts of the weather and public events, he evidently reflects upon his serious contemporaries, whose predictions would occasionally go wrong, and who, like our modern "Old Moore," would in consequence grow less cocksure and more cautious, and would then more or less cleverly tell readers to "expect" something or other, together with such eminently safe remarks for February and March as, "Wind and rainstorms are to be looked for by the farmer."

In February 1664, for example, "Poor Robin," in burlesque of this kind of thing, warns his readers to "expect some showers of rain, either this month or the next, or the next after that, or else we shall have a very dry spring.... The twenty-seventh day of this month died Cardinal Mazarine, and if you would know the reason why he died, then, I answer, it was because he could live no longer."

Under June, he declares that, "If the frost nips the fruit trees, there will be no apples." In July, "Fleas will grow troublesome, and will lie with you without leave," and elsewhere we find that "Tyburn shall be a great eye-sore to Highway men and cut-purses," and that "The leafless tree betwixt London and Paddington will this month bear fruit, but it will be only Medlers, and they are stark naught until they are rotten." The which extracts fully illustrate the allusions in the short life of Jack Bird.

Made bold by a long series of successes, Bird procured a good horse and determined never again to stoop to robbing for mere shillings. A meeting with the Earl of ——, rolling along in his carriage, accompanied by his chaplain, and attended by two servants, gave him his first opportunity of putting this excellent determination into practice.