But no one seems to have been very greatly scandalised at the exceedingly hard measure meted out to the others, who had no charming sweethearts to plead for them, but who, nevertheless, certainly ought to have been reprieved with Morgan, who by no means deserved his good fortune; for he entered upon a wild life, and was observed, six months later, gambling with a fraudulent bankrupt, who himself was presently hanged.
Some thirty years earlier, in 1722, to be precise, a man named John Hartley, who had been convicted and condemned to death for robbing upon the highway as a footpad, had his life begged by an extraordinary deputation of six young women, who went, dressed in white, to plead with the King at St. James's Palace, for a reprieve. Hartley's crime would in our own day be considered severely punished with the award of six months' hard-labour, for he had merely felled a poor journeyman tailor, gone over his pockets, and, in a furious rage, because he found no greater sum than twopence, stripped him of every stitch of his clothing, tied him to a tree, and made off with this singular booty. It was, no doubt, an assault, aggravated by exposing the unfortunate tailor to the bitter blast; but that a man should die for twopence, and a bundle of not very desirable clothes, seems a punishment altogether beyond the bounds of reason. Yet, at a period when a man might be hanged for merely stealing a handkerchief, without any aggravated assault, this was not considered unreasonable. "Society must be protected," in effect, said the law; and if Society could not police the streets and the roads with living police, and so prevent crime, it took care that gallows and gibbet should display unmistakable evidence of its readiness to avenge it.
There must have been some extraordinary attraction about John Hartley, in spite of his mean and paltry occupation of a footpad, for the young women who went in white to beg for a reprieve were eager, if their prayer were granted, to cast lots among themselves for the honour of being his wife. But it was not to be. The reprieve was refused by the King in person, who told the hopeful young women that he thought hanging would be better for him than marriage.
Their hazardous calling begat in the gentlemen of the high-toby a ghastly kind of humour. Thus, when that unholy trio, Christopher Dickson, John Gibson, and Charles Weymouth, united in the not very desperate job of robbing a poor old man, who proved to have nothing on him but the suit of clothes he stood up in, and a pair of spectacles; and when Dickson would have taken even these from him, Gibson intervened. "Give the old fellow his spectacles back," he said; "for, if we follow this trade, we may assure ourselves we shall never reach his years, to make use of them." True enough: they were hanged soon afterwards, and never required any aids to eyesight.
The impudence of the highwaymen is sometimes so unconsciously extravagant, that it is on that account alone extremely amusing. They felt it an intolerable grievance when they happened upon purses not particularly well lined, and resented it hotly. An instance of this may be found, not in any irresponsible novel, or other work of imagination, but in the sober pages of the Worcester Journal of September 29th, 1738, where we learn that in the early morning of September 21st, between the hours of four and five, the "Flying Bath Coach" was stopped by two footpads, about a mile on the London side of Newbury. There were five passengers in the coach, all of whom these daring adventurers robbed, without being resisted in the least. While one of them held the horses' heads, the other interviewed the passengers.
From a Sardinian gentleman he took a purse of guineas and a rich scimetar that might have been profitably employed by the Sardinian gentleman, one would have thought, about the robber's head and body; from Captain Willoughby of Abchurch Lane, twenty-six shillings and—oh! degrading—his coat and periwig; from Mr. Grubb, a distiller, of Bishopsgate Street, twenty-five shillings; from Mr. Rawlinson, High Constable of Westminster, three half-crowns, together with his periwig and silver stock-buckle; and from Mr. Pratt, proprietor and coachman of the "Flying Coach," four guineas, and his silver watch. He threatened every minute to blow out their brains with a horse-pistol he flourished, and although he had succeeded, without any trouble, in securing a not inconsiderable booty, cursed them violently, saying, "gentlemen were not obliged to be at the expense of powder and ball, and likewise a long attendance on the road, to lose their time for so slender a profit."
To frighten travellers by these outrageous methods was a duly calculated part of the business. We have, in the pages of Borrow's Romany Rye, the theory of violent language and violent behaviour on the part of the highwaymen duly expounded by the ostler of the unnamed inn mentioned in chapter xxiv. This ostler, a Yorkshireman by birth, had seen a great deal of life in the vicinity of London, to which he had gone at a very early age. "Amongst other places where he had served as ostler was a small inn at Hounslow, much frequented by highwaymen, whose exploits he was fond of narrating, especially those of Jerry Abershaw, who, he said, was a capital rider." Abershaw, he would frequently add, however, was decidedly inferior to Galloping Dick, who was a pal of Abershaw's. I learned from him that both were capital customers at the Hounslow inn, and that he had frequently drunk with them in the corn-room. He said no man could desire more jolly or entertaining companions over a glass of "summat"; but that upon the road it was anything but desirable to meet them: there they were terrible, cursing and swearing, and thrusting the muzzles of their pistols into people's mouths; and at this part of his locution the old man winked and said, in a somewhat lower voice, that upon the whole they were right in doing so, and that when a person had once made up his mind to become a highwayman, his best policy was to go the whole hog, fearing nothing, but making everybody afraid of him; that people never thought of resisting a savage-faced, foul-mouthed highwayman, and if he were taken, they were afraid to bear witness against him, lest he should get off and then cut their throats some time or other, upon the roads; whereas people would resist being robbed by a sneaking, pale-visaged rascal, and would swear boldly against him on the first opportunity: adding, that Ferguson and Abershaw, two most awful fellows, had enjoyed a long career; whereas, two disbanded officers of the army, who wished to rob a coach like gentlemen, had begged the passengers' pardon, and talked of hard necessity, had been set upon by the passengers themselves, amongst whom were three women, pulled from their horses, conducted to Maidstone, and hanged with as little pity as such contemptible fellows deserved. "There is nothing like going the whole hog," he repeated, "and if ever I had been a highwayman, I should have thought myself all the more safe; and, moreover, shouldn't have despised myself. To curry favour with those you are robbing, sometimes at the expense of your own comrades, as I have known fellows do, why, it is the greatest——"
"So it is," interposed the postilion.
The newspapers of those times afford deeply interesting reading. Very few of them but contain some startling item of highway robbery, or news of the capture or trial of the highwaymen who dared even to ply their trade within sight of the streets. It seems so very long ago, and it all has an extraordinary air of unreality. Even although you turn over the small quarto and foolscap pages of those daily and evening, or weekly or bi-weekly sheets, these things seem the stuff that dreams are made of; but if the items of news give that effect, certainly when you turn to the advertising columns, you feel once more that you are in touch with actualities. The same quacks, or rather their great-great-grandfathers, are puffing the same kinds of goods, and even the blackguard fellows who figure, with their own "brainy" or impudent faces, in the advertising pages of twentieth-century popular magazines, and successfully gull hundreds of thousands of simpletons, have their ancestors posturing in these yellowing sheets. They are not so boldly "displayed," for the mechanical possibilities of the age did not permit of it, and they of necessity appealed only to hundreds, instead of the hundred thousand; but they are at one, in all essentials, with the creatures who nowadays make "this unparalleled offer to YOU," and rudely point a finger at you out of the page. In the Grub Street Journal for 1737 and succeeding years, and in its numerous contemporaries are to be found advertised the "greatest Restorative in the world," cures for consumption, marvellous literary works, without which life would be a blank, and a certain Dr. Newman's vile electuaries. Dr. Newman advertised largely and long, and he generally included a quaint little woodcut of himself, seated at a table, and with a box of his beastly pills (comparatively the size of a saucepan) on the table beside him, with a bottle of his medicine, apparently supplied in two-gallon carboys, keeping it company. He is the ancestor, you perceive, as you observe him staring out of the page, of all those modern pushful persons, who seem to think that by picturing themselves in their advertisements of how to add to your stature, to add to your purse, or turn your nose down, your ears in, to grow stouter or leaner, or what not, their statements are by some mysterious means fortified and endorsed.