"Alas! sir, it seems that is enough to hang one."
"I am afraid you will find it so," answered the gentleman.
"Well, God's will be done," replied Hind; "I value it not threepence to lose my life in so good a cause; and if it were to do again, I protest," said he, laying his hand on his breast, "I would do the like."
"Come," said the keeper, "no more of this discourse; clear the room."
Hind in due course suffered the hateful penalty for high treason at Worcester. He maintained a light and frolicsome demeanour to the last. "These are filthy, jingling spurs," he remarked with a laugh, pointing to the fetters that clanked about his legs as he walked from the bar, "but I hope to exchange them ere long."
He was drawn to the scene of execution, then hanged, and afterwards quartered: his head being placed midway on the Severn bridge, and the other portions of him over the several gates of the city, September 24th, 1652.
JOHN CLAVEL, "GENTLEMAN"
One of the really notable highwaymen of the early years of the seventeenth century was John Clavel, who came from an ancient, if perhaps not particularly distinguished, family, tracing their descent back to Walter de Clavile, in the reign of William the Conqueror. For more than seven hundred years the Clavel, or Clavell, family flourished in a modest way upon their manor of Smedmore, on the Dorset coast, in the neighbourhood of Kimmeridge, and finally ended with the death, s.p., as genealogists would say, of George Clavel in 1774. The only Clavel who fully emerges from the obscurity in which the family were content to remain, from the days of the original Walter until those of the ultimate George, is John Clavel, whose vocation was robbery under arms upon the highway. What laid this calling upon him, the personal history of John Clavel does not inform us; but probably, when we consider that he was merely a nephew of Sir William Clavel, the head of the family, we shall be correct in placing him among those younger sons and expectant heirs who, however great were their expectations in some more or less remote future, were generally, in the present tense, not only poor, but head over ears in debt. As the history of the highwaymen has already shown us, their ranks were very largely recruited from those youthful members of reputable families, whose family name was better than their personal credit. Confound the law of primogeniture, and pity the sorrows of a younger son with an excellent ancestry and an empty purse!