"And whom have you won of?"
"Of the same person that I left the six hundred pounds for with you, before dinner."
"And how will you get your winnings, my friend?"
"Of his ambassador, to be sure," said Rumbold, drawing his sword. Thereupon, he advanced to the carriage with pistols and drawn sword, and, searching under the carriage-seat, found his own six hundred guineas, and fourteen hundred besides; with which forty pounds weight avoirdupois of bullion, we are gravely told, he got clear off.
The incident is, without a doubt, one of Smith's own inventions—and not one of the best. It serves to show us how entirely lacking in criticism he thought his public, to set before them, without any criticism of his own, such a tale, in which a highwayman who certainly could in real life have been no fool, to have held his own so long on the road, is made to act like an idiot without any advantage likely to be gained by so doing. We see him, in this preposterous story, taking the trouble to carry six hundred guineas with him and playing the fool needlessly, when he might just as well have gone with empty pockets and searched and robbed the carriage with equal success.
More easily to be credited is his robbing of the Earl of Oxford at Maidenhead Thicket. Rumbold was no exquisite, having, as we have already learnt, been merely a bricklayer's apprentice before he assumed the crape mask, and, mounting a horse and sticking a pair of pistols in his belt, took to the road. He often assumed the appearance of a rough country farmer; but he was, at the same time, always a man of expedient. To say of him that he had ostlers and chambermaids in his pay, to give him information of likely travellers, is but to repeat the practice of every eminent hand in the high-toby craft. On the occasion which led to his great exploit here, he had been lurking for some well-laden travellers, who, luckily for them, took some other route, and he was just on the point of riding moodily off when two horsemen rode up the hill. As they drew near he perceived that they were the Earl of Oxford and a servant. That nobleman knew Rumbold (how the acquaintance had been made we are not told), and so it was necessary for the highwayman to assume some sort of disguise. Here we perceive Rumbold's readiness of resource. He threw his long hair over his face, and, holding it in his teeth, rode up in this extraordinary guise and demanded the Earl's purse, with threats to shoot both if it was not immediately forth-coming.
That nobleman was Aubrey De Vere, twentieth and last Earl, the descendant of the old "fighting Veres" and colonel of the Oxford Blues, a regiment named after him, and not after the city of Oxford. Despite all these things, which might have made for valiance, he surrendered like the veriest woman, and submitted to the indignity of being searched. Rumbold rifled him, and at first found only dice and cards, until, coming to his breeches pockets, he turned out a "nest of goldfinches"; that is to say, a heap of guineas. Saying he would take them home and cage them, Rumbold recommended the Earl to return to his regiment and attend to his duty, giving him eighteenpence as an encouragement.
From these examples, it will readily be seen that Maidenhead Thicket did not obtain its ill repute without due cause.
A number of incredible stories of Rumbold are told, both by Smith and Johnson, who seem to have made up for the little real information we have of his more than twenty years' career by writing absolutely unconvincing fiction around him. He was at last executed at Tyburn in 1689.