It seems, looking upon the closeness of modern Knightsbridge to the very centre of things, almost the language of extravagance to say as much, but the literature of the ensuing periods fully supports the truth of it. Thus writes Lady Cowper, in her diary, October 1715: "I was at Kensington, where I intended to stay as long as the camp was in Hyde Park, the roads being so secure by it, that we might come from London at any time in the night without danger, which I did very often."
In 1736, Lord Hervey wrote from Kensington: "The road between this place and London is grown so infamously bad that we live here in the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean; and all the Londoners tell us there is between them and us a great impassable gulf of mud." Impassable roads—through which, nevertheless, some wayfarers certainly did manage to pass—and highwaymen may always be bracketed together. Thus in April 1740, only four years after Lord Hervey had written that doleful letter—and we may be quite sure the roads had not improved during the interval—the Gentleman's Magazine recorded that, "The Bristol Mail from London was robbed a little beyond Knightsbridge by a man on foot, who took the Bath and Bristol bags, and, mounting the postboy's horse, rode off towards London."
On June 3rd, 1752, a professional thief-taker named Norton was instructed to repair to Knightsbridge, to see if he could apprehend a man who had on two or three occasions stopped and robbed the Devizes chaise. He proceeded in a chaise to a lonely inn, known as the "Halfway House"—half-way between Knightsbridge and Kensington—and as the vehicle approached, a man stopped it by threats from a pistol. Out jumped Norton and seized the man, a certain William Belchier, who was hanged, a little later.
On July 1st, 1774, William Hawke was executed for a robbery here, and two others, for a like offence, on November 30th following. Three highwaymen were thus accounted for, at short intervals, but others, equally daring, were evidently left, for on the 27th of the next month, a Mr. Jackson, of the Court of Requests at Westminster, was attacked at Kensington Gore, by four men on foot. He shot one, and the others fled.
A Mr. Walker, a London police-magistrate, writing in 1835, said: "At Kensington, within the memory of man, on Sunday evenings a bell used to be rung at intervals, to muster the people returning to town. As soon as a band was assembled, sufficiently numerous to ensure mutual protection, it set off; and so on, till all had passed."
Such are the memories that belong to the very beginning of this road; but they cluster most thickly, of course, around Hounslow Heath, on which Du Vall very largely practised, in the reign of Charles the Second. Du Vall is important enough to require a full biography elsewhere in these pages, and we pass on to others, who merely, so to say, stride across the stage, and so disappear.
Hounslow Heath no longer exists as a heath. Enclosure Acts and cultivation have, during the last hundred years, wrought a remarkable change upon the scene, and smiling market-gardens now spread for miles where once existed nothing more than a waste of furze-bushes, swampy gravel-pits, in which tall grasses and bulrushes grew, and grassy hillocks. This home of snipe and frogs, and haunt of the peewit, was not without its highwaymen by day, and at night it swarmed with them.
There was excellent reason why it should be so particularly favoured. Through its whole length ran, not only the Bath Road, from Hounslow town to Colnbrook and Slough, but the Exeter Road, on to Staines. Both roads were largely travelled to and from the West of England, and the Bath Road was, in addition, the road to Windsor; and was from that circumstance travelled by some of the wealthiest and most important people, who sorely tempted the daring spirits of the age. At a time when it was possible for a band of conspirators to assemble in Sutton Lane, near Gunnersbury, for the purpose of waylaying and assassinating William the Third, on his way from Richmond Park to Kensington Palace (February 10th, 1696), it was nothing out of the way for noblemen, returning from a visit to the King at Windsor Castle, to be stopped and robbed in their carriage when crossing Hounslow Heath. Masked robbers made no difficulty about endeavouring to halt Lord Ossulston's carriage here, one day in 1698; and it was merely by good fortune that he escaped with the loss of two of his horses, shot dead. The Duke of St. Albans was also attacked; but, with the aid of the gentlemen with him, beat off his assailants. The Duke of Northumberland, as Macaulay tells us, was not so fortunate, and fell into the hands of these audacious ruffians; with what result we do not learn.
