"The figurative part of my text is still to be set forth. Though I call you 'gentlemen,' yet in my heart I think ye to be all rogues; but I mollify my spleen by a Charientismus, which is a figure or form of speech mitigating hard matters with pleasant words. Thus, a certain man being apprehended, and brought before Alexander the Great, King of Macedon, for railing against him, and being demanded by Alexander why he and his company had so done, he made answer: 'Had not the wine been all drunk, we had spoken much worse.' Whereby he signified that those words proceeded rather from wine than malice, by which free and pleasant confession he assuaged Alexander's great displeasure, and obtained remission.
"But now, coming to the Tropological part of my text, which signifies drawing a word from its proper and genuine signification to another sense, as, in calling you most famous thieves; I desire your most serious attention, and that you will embrace this exhortation of St. Paul the apostle. 'Let him that stole, steal no more.' Or else the letters of my text point towards a tragical conclusion; for T, 'take care;' H, 'hanging;' E, 'ends not'; F, 'felony;' T, 'at Tyburn.'"
The parson having ended his sermon, which some of Whitney's gang took down in shorthand, they were so well pleased with what he had preached, that they were contented to pay him tithes; so, counting over the money they had taken from him, and finding it to be just ten pounds, they gave him ten shillings for his pains, and then rode away to seek whom they might next devour.
He then met Lord L—— shortly afterwards, near London, and robbed him single-handed. Knowing that his lordship moved in close attendance upon the King, William the Third, and perhaps being keenly conscious that the many serious robberies committed by himself and his men were drawing the net uncomfortably close around them, he made an offer to compound with the authorities. He said if the King would give him an indemnity for past offences, he would bring in thirty of his gang, for military service in Flanders. So saying, he whistled, and, quite in the Roderick Dhu style, twenty or thirty mounted bandits at once appeared.
Whitney, having thus given proofs of his words, continued that, if the King refused his offer, His Majesty might send a troop of Dutchmen to apprehend him and his, but they would find it a hard task to take any, and that he and his men would stand on their defence, and bid them defiance.
There is little or nothing of the "Jacobite Robber" in the stories told of Whitney; but it seems to have been fully recognised that he was a somewhat belated adherent of James the Second. He gathered around him a gang that varied in numbers according to circumstances, but was occasionally about thirty strong. These he was enabled by his superior courage and resource to captain; and with the imposing mounted force they presented, he laid many important and wealthy personages under contribution near London. It was doubtless his gang that stopped and robbed the great Duke of Marlborough of five hundred guineas near London Colney, on the night of August 23rd, 1692, and as a Jacobite, Whitney would be particularly pleased at the doing of it. It is almost equally certain that the numerous other rich hauls about that time on the St. Albans road were the handiwork of Whitney's party. On December 6th, 1692, there was a pitched battle between Whitney's force and a troop of dragoon patrols, near Barnet. One dragoon was killed, and several wounded, and Whitney is most circumstantially said to have then been captured; but as an even more circumstantial account tells us, with a wealth of detail, how he was finally captured in Bishopsgate Street, on December 31st, this cannot be altogether correct.
Was it, we wonder, his professed Jacobite views that made many travellers so good-humoured with him as they are said to have been when he lightened their pockets? A fellowship in political views does not in our own days necessarily make a stranger free of our purse. Whitney, for example, meeting Sir Richard B—— between Stafford and Newport, accosted him with a "How now? whither away?"
"To London," replied the knight; whereupon Whitney troubled him for £4.
Then, much to our surprise, we read of Sir Richard, who appears to have known Whitney very well by sight, saying, "Captain, I'll give you a breakfast, with a fowl or two." It would have come more naturally to read that he offered to give him in charge!
Whitney politely declined, but said he would drink to the knight's health then and there; and, halting a passing waggon, broached a cask out of it on the spot.