Again, Bishop Earle, in his Microcosmography, shows us how the highwaymen were recruited. Speaking of the sorrows of younger sons, and narrating the shifts to which they were often reduced, he says: "Others take a more crooked path, through the King's highway, where at length the vizard is plucked off, and they strike fair for Tyburne."
The biographies of highwaymen given later in these pages, fully illustrate the position of affairs in the succeeding age, and show that the country swarmed with highway robbers after the conclusion of the Civil War between King and Parliament. Many of them were impoverished cavaliers, but the most prominent were only pretended gentlemen, who used any Royalist sympathies they may have had in giving a specious excuse for their misdeeds. Captain Hind is typical of these plundering fellows in the era of the Commonwealth. So many were they, and so formidable, travelling, as they often did, in bands, that it became the business of the troops, at the conclusion of the war, to hunt out all such associated brigands.
On September 17th, 1649, General Fairfax issued a proclamation addressed to the commanders of "every respective regiment of horse," urging them to activity in the apprehension of all robbers, and promising high rewards for everyone captured. To this a Royalist print, the Man in the Moon, sarcastically rejoined that the "House of Robbers"—by which the House of Commons was meant—had voted for the next six months a reward of £10 for the taking of every burglar or highway-robber, "the State's officers exempted."
The proclamation, however, had its due effect, for on December 24th, no fewer than twenty-eight malefactors, principally of the classes specified, were all gibbeted together at Tyburn. Among them was "one Captain Reynolds, who was of the King's party in Cornwall, at the disbanding of the Lord Hopton's army at Truro.... His carriage was very bold, and, as he was going to be turned off, he cried: 'God bless King Charles: Vive le Roi.'"
But they were generally defiant at the last, whether Royalists or mere purse-takers; whether of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Conscience, which makes cowards of all, did not awake and begin to unnerve these candidates for Jack Ketch until the very opening of the nineteenth century.
Thus, in the olden times we find the condemned highwaymen nearly always nursing the grievance of their doom, and speaking of Justice and her emissaries as their "enemies"; as witness Thomas Hill, executed July 19th, 1694. Was he penitent at Tyburn? Not at all. His last words were, "God bless all my friends, and let all my enemies be hanged as I am"; and, adds his biographer "other reflecting and abusive Expressions."
Although it might well seem, after an extensive course of reading in the thoughts and deeds of those times, that the country was entirely populated by two classes: the scoundrels who were always trying to evade Justice, and the officers of the law, continually occupied in tracing them, an unobtrusive residuum of well-intentioned and well-conducted people existed. We do not, it is true, hear much of them, which is only to be expected; but they existed, nevertheless, and were often as anxious to save sinners as any modern tract-distributor.
A curious seventeenth-century four-page leaflet in the British Museum, styled A Terrible and Seasonable Warning, shows something of the well-meaning forces, as well as a good deal of the superstition, of the time, in an account of how a young man named Abraham Joiner, aged between seventeen and eighteen, described as a ballast-man, of Shakesby's Walk, near Shadwell church, was saved at the last moment from becoming a footpad or a highwayman. It is nothing more nor less than a seventeenth-century ancestor—and a very badly printed one—of the modern religious tracts produced nowadays by the million, in a rather hopeless endeavour to save hurrying sinners, often too anxiously wondering how they are to live in this world, without troubling about the next.
The young man began to keep bad company, and in especial that of one Ann Turner, who said she must have money, and he must by some means get it for her. Abraham went home in a desperate frame of mind. He thought of the several ways (none of them honest ones) in which money in a sufficiency might suddenly be obtained; and frightened his mother by saying he must and would get some, even though he asked the devil to help him to it.
"In this Humour," we learn, "he went out to the Cock and Lyon in King Street, where there came into A Room to him a Person in a Dark-colour'd Habit, and ask'd him what made him so Melancholly? If he wanted Money, he cou'd help him to it, and bid him meet him the next Night, which he at first told him he wou'd do; but afterwards suspecting it might be the Devil, he told him he cou'd not meet him at the time, then bid him meet him on Sunday, behind Stepney church, which he consented to do, and, going away, gave him a Pistole in gold (a coin, not a firearm) after which the Young Man grew uneasy in his Mind, and going home show'd his Brother, who advis'd him to throw the Money away, assuring him it could be none but the Devil, which very much terrified the young man, so that he threw the Money away, and was taken with a sudden trembling, and falling on his knees, besought God to forgive him.