As for Turpin, or Palmer, as he now called himself, he settled at Welton, near Beverley, and then at Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, as a gentleman horse-dealer. He had not long been domiciled in those parts before the farmers and others began to lose their stock in a most unaccountable manner. The wonder is that no one suspected him, and that he could manage, for however short a period, to safely sell the many horses he stole. He even managed to mix freely in company with the yeomen of the district, and despite his ill-favoured countenance, made himself not unwelcome. But his brutal nature was the cause of his undoing. Returning from a shooting excursion, he wantonly shot one of his neighbour’s fowls, and on being remonstrated with, threatened to serve one of his new friends the same. He was accordingly summoned at the Beverley Petty Sessions, when it appeared that he had no friends to find bail for him, and that he was, in point of fact, a newcomer to the district, whose habits, now investigated for the first time, proved suspicious. Eventually he was charged with stealing a black mare, blind of the near eye, off Heckington Common, and was committed to York Castle. From his dungeon cell he wrote a letter to his brother at Hempstead, to cook him up a character. The letter was not prepaid, and the brother, not recognising the handwriting, refused to pay the sixpence demanded by the Post Office. On such trivial things do great issues hang! The village postmaster happened to have been the schoolmaster who had taught Turpin to write. He recognised the handwriting and read the letter. He was a man of public spirit, and, travelling to York, identified the prisoner as the Richard Turpin who had long been “wanted” for many crimes.
After his trial and condemnation the farmers flocked in hundreds to see him. His last days in prison were as well attended as a levee, and, to do him justice, his courage, conspicuously lacking at other times, never faltered at the last. He became one of the shows of that ancient city for a time, but nothing daunted him. He spent his last days in joking, drinking, and telling stories, as jovial, merry, and frolicsome as though the shadow of the gallows was not impending over him. He scouted the Ordinary, and suffered no twinges of conscience, but busied himself in preparing a decent costume for his last public appearance. Nothing would serve him but new clothes and a smart pair of pumps to die in. On the morning before the execution, he gave the hangman £3. 10s. to be divided among five men who were to follow him as mourners, and were to be furnished with black hatbands and mourning gloves. When the time came and he went in the tumbril to be turned off, he bowed to the ladies and flourished his cocked hat as though he would presently see them again. He certainly, when he had mounted the ladder, kept the people waiting for the spectacle they had come to see, for he talked with the hangman for over half-an-hour. But when the conversation was ended, he threw himself off in the most resolute fashion, and had the reward of his courage, for he died in a moment.
Thus died the famous Turpin, in the thirty-third year of his age. After the execution his body lay in state for that day and the succeeding night at the “Black Boar” inn in Castlegate. The following morning it was buried in the churchyard of St. George’s, by Fishergate Postern, and the evening afterwards it was dug up again by some of the city surgeons, for dissection. By this time the mob had apparently agreed that this brutal horse-stealer, who according to the contemporary London Magazine, was “so mean and stupid a wretch,” was really a very fine fellow; and they determined that his remains should not be dishonoured. Accordingly they rescued the body and reinterred it, in black lime, so as to effectually balk any further attempts on the part of the surgeons.
Dick Turpin, although his name bulks so largely in the legendary story of the roads, was by no means the foremost of his profession. He was brutal, and lacked the finer instincts of the artist. It could never, for instance, have been in his nature to invite the wife of a traveller he had just robbed to dance a coranto with him on the Common, as Duval did on Hounslow Heath when the distant clocks were sounding the hour of midnight. With Turpin it was an oath and a blow. Curses and violence, not courtesy, were his methods. Therefore, it is with the less compunction that we may tear away the romance from Richard Turpin and say that, so far from being the hero of the Ride to York, he never rode to York at all, except on that fatal morning when he progressed to York Castle in chains, presently to be convicted and hanged for the unromantic crimes of horse, sheep, and cattle stealing. He was little better than a vulgar burglar and horse-thief. It was Harrison Ainsworth who made Turpin a hero from such very unpromising material, and he, in fact, invented not only the ride to York, but Black Bess as well. According to the novelist, Turpin started from Kilburn, and came into the Great North Road at Highgate, with three mounted officers after him. Thence he turned into Hornsey, and so by the Ware route, the mare clearing the twelve feet high toll-gate on the way without an effort. They always do that in fiction, but the animal that could do it in fact does not exist.
At Tottenham (always according to the novelist, of course) the people threw brickbats at the gallant Turpin. They “showered thick as hail, and quite as harmlessly, around him,” and Turpin laughed, as, indeed, he had an occasion to do, because the Tottenham people must have been the poorest of marksmen. And so pursuers and pursued swept through Edmonton and Ware, and quite a number of places which are not on our route. At Alconbury Hill he comes into view again, and the inconceivable chase proceeds until Black Bess expires, at sunrise, within sight of the glorious panorama of York’s spires and towers.
There are very many who believe Ainsworth’s long rigmarole, and take their ideas of that unromantic highwayman from his novel, but the dashing, highsouled (and at times maudlin) fellow of those pages is absolutely fictitious.
IV
Ainsworth constructed his fictitious hero from a very slight basis of fact. What a pity he did not rear his narrative on better lines, and give the credit of the Ride to York to the man who really did it. For it was done, and it was a longer ride by some twenty-six miles, at least, than that recounted in the vulgar romance of Rookwood. It was, in fact, a better ride, by a better man, and at a much earlier period.
John Nevison was the hero of this exploit. It was on a May morning in 1676, at the unconscionable hour of four o’clock, that he robbed a traveller on Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, and, fired with the ambition of establishing an alibi, immediately set off to ride to York. Crossing the Thames from Gravesend to Tilbury, he rode on his “blood bay” to Chelmsford, where he baited and rested his horse for half-an-hour. Thence on to Cambridge and through the town without drawing rein, he went through by-lanes to Fenny Stanton, Godmanchester, and Huntingdon, where he took another half-hour’s rest; continuing, by unfrequented ways, until York was reached, the same evening. Of course, he must have had several fresh horses on the way. Stabling the horse that had brought him into the cathedral city, he hastily removed the travel-stains from his person, and strolled casually to the nearest bowling-green, where the Mayor of York happened to be playing a game with some friends. Nevison took the opportunity of asking him the time, and received the answer that it was just a quarter to eight. That was sufficient for his purpose. By this question and the reply he had fixed the recollection of himself and of the time in the Mayor’s mind, and had his alibi at need. Sure enough, he needed it a little later, when he was arrested for another highway robbery, and the Gad’s Hill traveller happened to be the one witness who could swear to him. Nevison called his York witnesses, who readily enough deposed to his being there on the evening of the day on which the traveller swore he had been robbed by him near Chatham. This was conclusive. No one conceived it possible for a man to have been in two places so remote in one day, and he was acquitted. Then, when the danger was past, his sporting instincts prevailed, and he told the story. He became the hero of a brief hour, and Charles the Second, who dearly loved a clever rogue, is said to have christened him “Swift Nicks.” If we roughly analyse this ride we shall find that Nevison’s performance amounted to about 230 miles in fifteen hours: a rate of over fifteen miles an hour. To have done as much was a wonderful exploit, even though (as seems certain) he had remounts at the houses of confederates. He probably had many such houses of call, for he was one of a numerous band of highwaymen whose headquarters were at Newark.
This escape served him for eight years longer, for it was in 1684 that his career came to a close on Knavesmire, where he was hanged on the 4th of May.