After a few successful years of constant attention to his profession, Wicks was at last executed at Warwick, on August 29th, 1719, aged twenty-nine.
DICK TURPIN
Richard Turpin, the hero of half a hundred plays, and of many hundred ballads and chap-book histories, now demands our attention. His name stands out, far and away above that of any other of the high-toby fraternity. Not Claude Du Vall himself owns half his celebrity, nor Hind, nor Whitney, nor Sixteen-String Jack. Ballad-mongers, playwrights of the old penny-gaff order, and novelists, with Harrison Ainsworth at their head, have ever united to do him honour and have conspired—innocently as a rule—to deprive another and a worthier highwayman of his due, in order to confer it upon "Dick." The familiar "Dick" itself shows us how the great public long ago took Turpin to its ample bosom, and cherished him, but the student of these things smiles a little sourly as he traces the quite unheroic doings of this exceptionally mean and skulking scoundrel, and fails all the time to note anything of a dashing nature in his very busy but altogether sordid career.
Turpin never rode that famous Ride to York upon Black Bess: another and an earlier than he by some sixty years—the bold and daring Nevison—performed that ride, as we have already shown; and the chivalry, the courtesy, and consideration, generally so much in evidence in the plays and the stories, are by no means found in the many contemporary reports of his doings.
Richard Turpin was born on September 21st, 1705, at the village of Hempstead, in Essex. There are those who find a fanciful appropriateness in the fact, that a man, whose wife was to become a "hempen widow," should have been born at a place so significantly named. Those who are curious enough to seek it, may duly find the record of the future highwayman's baptism in the parish register, and will find the baptism of an elder sister, Maria, recorded nearly three years and a half earlier, April 28th, 1702.
The Reverend William Sworder, vicar of Hempstead, who performed the baptism, and thereafter made an entry of it in his register, was evidently proud of his acquaintance with the language of the ancients, and less pleased with his native tongue, for his entries are generally in Latin: and thus we find the infant Dick and his parents figuring, "Richardus, filius Johannis et Mariae Turpin."
