In a series of books designed to tell the story of the roads, and not only of the roads, but of all subjects connected with road-travel in all ages, a book on the Highwaymen was sooner or later inevitable. We have had in this series the story of the rise and progress towards perfection of coaching, and of the decay of stage-coach and mail when the era of steam came in; and we have had two volumes on the Old Inns of Old England, to which the travellers of a bygone age came, wearied, when the day's tedious travel was done. The story of the highwaymen, who robbed those travellers, is now told, for the first time since Captain Alexander Smith in 1719-20, in three small octavo volumes, and Captain Charles Johnson in 1742, in one folio volume, collated the numerous chapbooks and "last dying speeches and confessions" of that and earlier ages. Captain Johnson, who stole extensively from Smith, who himself was prone to include the most extravagant myths in his pages, calls his folio A General and True History of the Lives and Actions of the Most Famous Highwaymen. Both of them include pirates and murderers. Of the "truth" of much in Smith and Johnson, the less said the better.
No one has ever reprinted those authors in their original extravagance, or their grossness. It would be impossible; and, if possible, it would not be entertaining. Nor has any one ever edited them, or even written an independent history of the highwaymen. When we consider how astonishingly popular those romances have ever been which have had Claude Du Vall, and Turpin, and their like for heroes, this is not a little surprising.
Perhaps the task has been abandoned because of the difficulty—the almost insuperable difficulty—of sifting fact from fiction, and because of a chilling sense that it would be a thankless task to present the highwayman as he really was: a fellow rarely heroic, generally foul-mouthed and cruel, and often cowardly. No novelist would be likely to thank the frank historian for this disservice; and I do not think the historian who came to the subject in this cold scientific spirit of a demonstrator in surgery would be widely read. Most of us like to keep a few of the illusions we believed in when schoolboys. Scientific historians have degraded many of our ancient heroes and exalted the villains, for whom of old no mud was too thick and slab. Beliefs are being assailed on every side. To abolish the traditional courtesy of Claude Du Vall or the considerate conduct of Captain Hind would, therefore, be strokes of the unkindest, and I have here attempted no such iconoclasm. Even where I cannot believe, I have told the tale—whenever it has been worth the telling—as it is found in criminal trials, or in Smith or Johnson, and other old sources, decorously stripped of much vile language. For really, where much that seems incredible may be fully proved, and where the believable turns out not rarely to be false, 'tis your only way.
To continue the story of the highwaymen from Smith and Johnson down to the approaching end of all such things in the beginning of the nineteenth century, is like taking up and concluding a half-told tale. But it was worth the doing. Only in respect of the great figure Turpin has always made, has it been found really necessary to seriously consider and re-state the career of that much-overrated scoundrel, and to put him in his proper place: a very much lower one than he usually occupies.
Hero-worshippers of the highwaymen we cannot be; as thorough disbelievers of their picturesque exploits we dare not pose: for the rest, the proper spirit in which to treat the subject is that of ironic tolerance.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
Petersham,
Surrey,
October 1908.