THE FIGHT IN THE HOLLOW ROAD.
At last, overpowered, four of the defeated highwaymen were conveyed to Newgate. Slader soon afterwards died of his many wounds, and the others were found guilty on various counts at their trial at the Old Bailey on April 10th and 11th, and hanged with remarkable despatch on the 15th; Jackson being gibbeted on the scene of that last stand, opposite the spot now occupied by the house called "Wildwoods."
His body long swung and gyrated in the wind, suspended there from a beam stretched between two elms: the "Gibbet Elms," as they were long known. One was blown down in 1850, and the other survived until so recently as March 1907, when it, too, was uprooted in a storm. The trunk, at this time of writing, still lies on the ground.
This, then, is the short story of Jackson's life. Let us now see of what his "Recantation" consists. It affords curious reading, but cannot be more than paraphrased here. It is, however, in spite of its breadth and freedom of language, extremely moral in its teaching.
How vain, he moralises, are the thoughts of those who, while they enjoy youth and strength, never consider they are mere statues of dust, kneaded with tears and moved by the hidden engines of restless passions; clods of earth, which the shortest fever can burn to ashes, or a complication of miseries dissolve into nothingness!
He had once thought himself one of Heaven's favourites, and had persuaded himself that the machinations of his brain were able to unhinge the poles. (Any reader conversant with twentieth-century slang phrases will at this point consider the youthful seventeenth-century Jackson himself at that time "up the pole.")
But Heaven, continued Jackson, thought fit to deliver him into the terrestrial hell of the condemned cell at Newgate, where, in imagination surrounded by the howls and hollow groans of damned souls, conscience started out of her dead sleep, and he was thrown into the greatest agony imaginable. At this time a charitable physician for his sin-sick soul came to visit him, and to that pious man he laid open the whole course of his life, much to his amazement and wonder. This wonder was soon changed to pity and commiseration that one so young should be thus weeded out of the world just as he had entered into the blooming springtime of his age. He then acquainted him with the benefit of true repentance, so that the obduracy of his heart was able to hold out no longer, and, melting into tears, he was willing to have its flintiness broken by the hammer of sacred Scripture.
Then, to give the holy man some real testimony of his unfeigned repentance, he produced an abstract of his life, which, he tells us, he had prepared before his apprehension, intending to have published it and then to have abandoned his evil courses. But a reformed highwayman was so very rare a thing, if even not altogether so unheard-of a curiosity, that we may take leave to doubt that detail. He probably wrote his life in prison, and there occasionally peep out such tell-tale passages of real enjoyment in the telling of his misdeeds, that the flowery moral passages wear a strong suspicion of insincerity.