DICK TURPIN.
(Skelt.)
Although this was on Saturday night, the handbills were at once struck off and put into circulation, and by Monday morning information was brought to the "Green Man," that a horse answering the description of "White Stockings," had been left at the "Red Lion," in the Whitechapel Road. The innkeeper went to the house with some Bow Street runners, determined to wait there until some one called for the horse; and about eleven o'clock at night Matthew King came for it. When he was seized, he declared he had bought the animal; but a whip he held in his hand proved to be the identical one stolen by Turpin, and although a portion of the handle had been broken off, Mr. Major's name could still be read on it. An offer was made to Matthew King, that he would be released if he would disclose the actual robber, and he thereupon said it was a stout man in a white duffel coat, who was at that moment waiting in the street.
A movement was then made to capture the man in the duffel coat, who proved to be Tom King; but he resisted and fired at his would-be captors. The pistol merely flashed in the pan, and King then attempted to draw another; but it got twisted in his pocket, and Bayes' hands were being laid upon him, when he cried out to Turpin, who was waiting on horseback at a little distance, "Dick, shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"
Turpin was heavily armed. Nothing less than three brace of pistols contented him, in addition to a carbine slung across his back. He fired, and shot (the stories say) Tom King.
"Dick, you have shot me; make off," the wounded man is represented as saying, but is afterwards said to have cursed him for a coward, and to have informed the authorities that if they wanted him, he might most likely be found at a certain place on Hackney Marsh: indicating, no doubt, the "White House."
Turpin is indeed said to have at once made for that retreat and to have exclaimed, "What shall I do? where shall I go? d——n that Dick Bayes, I'll be the death of him, for I have lost the best fellow I ever had in my life. I shot poor King in endeavouring to kill that dog."
That is the accepted version, but it seems to be incorrect in several particulars. As before mentioned, Matthew King was the victim of that ill-considered aim. A somewhat different account is given in Turpin's alleged confessions to the hangman, printed in the, in most respects, reliable pamphlet narrating his life and trial, published in York in four editions in 1739. In those pages Turpin "said he was confederate with one King, who was executed in London some time since, and that once, being very near taken, he fired a pistol in the crowd, and by mistake, shot the said King in the thigh, who was coming to rescue him."