The weirdest jokes were current of the doomed criminals' behaviour on this melancholy way. Thus Thomas Witherington, executed in 1635, when going up Holborn Hill, requested that the cart might be stopped, for he desired to speak to the sheriff's deputy, who was conducting the affair. "Sir," he is reported to have said, when the deputy asked what it was he wanted, "I owe a small matter at the 'Three Cups' inn, a little further on, and I am afraid I shall be arrested for debt as I go by the door. So I shall be much obliged to you if you will be pleased to carry me down Shoe Lane and bring me up Drury Lane again, so that we don't pass it, and perhaps lose my appointment at Tyburn."
The deputy, entering into the humour of it, said he could not alter the route, but, if they were stopped, he would certainly go bail for him; and so Witherington, "not thinking he had such a good Friend to stand by him in time of need, rid very contentedly to Tyburn."
As these cavalcades progressed, they came gradually into the country. They passed the ultimate boundaries of the City at Holborn Bars, where the ancient timbered and gabled buildings of Staple Inn still look across the road to what is now Gray's Inn Road, but was then merely a lane. Near by is Furnival Street, formerly Castle Street, as a tablet dated 1785 proclaims.
"Holborn Bars" is a name that but mildly stimulates the curiosity of modern Londoners, who, seeing no bars here, wonder idly about the name, resolve to inquire about it, and then in the busy life they lead, forget their passing interest. There were toll-bars here in the highwaymen's days, and those who care to seek for themselves may still determine the exact boundary of the City of London, for a granite obelisk on either side of the road, bearing the City arms, still marks the spot. London had reached thus far early in the seventeenth century, but it went little further westward for another hundred years.
The names of Great Turnstile, Little Turnstile, and New Turnstile, now narrow side streets, giving upon Lincoln's Inn Fields, are reminiscences of the time when the land westward of Lincoln's Inn really was meadow-land, instead of a London square garden surrounded by houses. These various "Turnstile" streets still keep the ancient narrowness of the country lanes they once were, when the "kissing-gates," or turnstiles, led into green fields spangled with butter-cups and daisies; but such things are things of long ago: the old wall-tablet at the Holborn end of New Turnstile, dated 1688, showing when the rustic pathways were first exchanged for streets, and the wayside hedges for bricks and mortar. Until quite recent years Tichborne Court remained near by, with its fine tablet bearing the Tichborne arms and the date 1685.
Kingsway, London's new street, immediately westward, has been driven along the line of Little Queen Street since 1903; its name in some fashion intended to perpetuate the route taken by Charles the Second between Whitehall and Newmarket. When His Majesty shed the light of his countenance upon the races, or when he merely wished to visit his palace at Theobalds, near Cheshunt, his way would lie along what is now Kingsway, across Holborn, along the now vanished Kingsgate Street (demolished in 1903, in the Holborn to Strand street-improvements), and into the Theobald's Road. Kingsgate Street derived the second part of its name from it having been a private road for the King's own use: barred and locked against the passage of meaner folk, except in the case of a privileged few, fortunate enough to obtain passes. Less influential people, passing on foot, on horseback, or by carriage towards Cheshunt and Newmarket, in the wake of the Court, had to struggle as best they might through a network of peculiarly evil and muddy lanes, infested with highwaymen, who, nothing daunted by witnessing the dismal processions of their brethren going westward, robbed with celerity and an exquisite assurance those who, repairing to the races, would in all likelihood have lost their guineas on Newmarket Heath.