FALSTAFF ON GAD'S HILL.
How the rogue roared!"
There is, indeed, a beautiful view from the southern slope of the hill, looking down upon Strood and Rochester; but to see Gad's Hill as it was of old, we should have to sweep away Gad's Hill Place, and the rows of mean cottages that now form quite a hamlet here. The hedges and enclosures, too, did not exist until modern times, but, instead of them, dense woods and dark hiding-places came close up to, and overshadowed, the highway, which was always full of ruts and liquid mud. These facts will give some idea of how terrible the hill could be of nights, when the rogues who hid in the shadows sprang forth and relieved travellers of their gold. The Danish Ambassador was set upon and plundered here in 1656, and it is quite evident that the knights of the road who despoiled him were no illiterate rogues, because they sent him a very whimsical letter of explanation, in which they said that: "The same necessity that enforc't ye Tartars to breake ye wall of China compelled them to wait upon him at Gad's Hill." Once in a way, however, travellers were more than equal for these gentry, as we may well see in these extracts from Gravesend registers: "1586, September 29th daye, was a thiefe yt. was slayen, buryed"; and again, "1590, Marche the 27th daie, was a theefe yt. was at Gad's Hill wounded to deathe, called Robert Writs, buried."
It would be an easy matter to write a long chapter on Gad's Hill and its terrors. We will conclude with a mention of the Duke of Würtemberg's adventure. He and his suite were travelling along the road, when a man with a drawn sword ran after them. The Duke promptly told the coachman to drive as fast as he could; not, as he naïvely added, because he was afraid of one man, but he didn't know how many others there might be. The Prince evidently had that discretion whose lack has been the death of many a bold, but ill-advised, fellow.
Shakespeare's scenes in Henry the Fourth, in which the travellers are robbed and Falstaff afterwards fooled, were greatly appreciated in his own day, because such happenings to wayfarers were the merest ordinary incidents of travel, not only in the time of Henry the Fourth, but in that of Elizabeth. The play touched life in one of its most familiar experiences.
[II.]—THE BATH ROAD
The Bath Road was not far inferior to the old highway to Dover in records of highway robbery, although they are chiefly of a later date than the Gad's Hill encounters; but the records of St. Mary Abbot's Church, Kensington, afford us an interesting peep into a time when the boundary of that now metropolitan borough, towards Knightsbridge, was very dangerous to honest folk. Thus we read, in the burial register, November 29th, 1687, of the interment of "Thomas Ridge, of Portsmouth, who was killed by thieves, almost at Knightsbridge."
This was no mere chance case. Some years earlier, John Evelyn recorded in his diary the ill-repute of the road at this point, and says robberies took place even while the road was full of coaches and travellers. The innkeepers of Knightsbridge shared the disfavour in which these first reaches of the Bath Road were held. When the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Rochester quarrelled, in the time of Charles the Second, and agreed to fight a duel, the Duke and his second lay at an inn at Knightsbridge, the night before the encounter, in order to avoid any suspicion of their intentions and any possible interruption. Much to their surprise, they found themselves in some danger of being arrested, not on any charge of breaking the King's peace over the approaching duel, but on the altogether unexpected suspicion of being highwaymen, who purposed skulking at an inn for the night, the better to waylay travellers. "But this," remarks the Duke, in his Memoirs, "I suppose, the people of the house were used to, and so took no notice of us, but liked us the better."
And so the neighbourhood remained, very little changed for the better, until the nineteenth century dawned.