THE “OLD MAGPIES.”
“ARLINGTON OF HARLINGTON”
Harlington, up the road to Uxbridge, was once the seat of the Bennets, one of whom, Henry Bennet, was created Viscount Thetford and Earl of Arlington in 1663, and lives in history as the “Arlington” of the Cabal. He selected this village for one of his titles, but the ’eralds’ College (as it surely should have been called) made out his patent of nobility without the “H,” and so “Arlington” he had to become. Arlington Street, Piccadilly, remains to this day, and the Dukes of Grafton, in whose numerous titles this is merged, are still Barons “Arlington of Harlington, in Middlesex.”
After which we will hasten on, passing Sipson (a corruption of “Shepiston”) Green. Here we come upon the trail of messieurs the footpads again, for the road between this inn and the humbler “Old Magpies,” a few hundred yards further on, is sad with the story of highway murder.
XV
The times of the highwaymen are, fortunately for the wayfarer, if unhappily for romance, long since past, and many of the once-notorious haunts of Sixteen-string Jack, Claude du Vall, Dick Turpin, and their less-famed companions have disappeared before the ravages of time and the much more destructive onslaughts of the builder. A hundred years ago it would have been difficult to name a lonely suburban inn that was not more or less favoured and frequented by the “Knights of the Road.” Nowadays the remaining examples are, for those interested in the old story of the roads, all too few.
Perhaps this queer little roadside inn, the “Old Magpies,” is the most romantic-looking among those that are left. For one thing, it possesses a thick and beetle-browed thatch which impends over the upper windows like bushy eyebrows, and gives those windows—the eyes of the house—just that lowering and suspicious look which heavy and bristling eyebrows confer upon a man.
But it is not only its romantic appearance that gives the “Old Magpies” an interest, for it is a well-ascertained fact that outside this house, so near to the once terrible Hounslow Heath, the brother of Mr. Mellish, M.P. for Grimsby, was murdered by highwaymen in April, 1798, when returning from a day’s hunting with the King’s hounds.