Coaching days, old and new, having now been disposed of, we might set off down the road at once, were it not that our steps are at once arrested by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which, together with the "Old Red Lion," adjoining, stands on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid career.
It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin shot Matthew King in 1737. He had stolen a fine horse belonging to a Mr Major, near the "Green Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of the animal to the inn, where he was found by the Bow Street runners in company with Matthew and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself. The landlord endeavoured to arrest King, who fired at him without effect, calling to Turpin, "Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"
Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on his person—three brace of pistols and a carbine slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew King, whether by accident or design is not known. King first exclaimed, "Dick! you have shot me; make off," but is said afterwards to have cursed him as he went, for a coward. King died a week later of his wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted mansion in Essex, and thence to a cave in Epping Forest. It is usually said that it was the more famous Tom King who met so dramatic an end, but original authorities give Matthew; and certainly we find a Tom King, highwayman, decorously executed at Tyburn eighteen years later.
THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT MATTHEW KING.
From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854.
We have met Turpin before, notably at York, where he made an end, two years after this exploit. This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and the romantic imagination of the average errand boy belongs especially to this road, for he was an Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705. Apprenticed to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he commenced his career of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow farmer, and then joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set up a storehouse of stolen goods in the cave just mentioned. This band became so notorious that a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their arrest; but it was not until the amount had been doubled that two of the ringleaders were caught and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin was reduced to scouring the roads singly, and pursued a solitary career until one dreary February night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road, he saw a horseman approaching through the mist. At the time-honoured demand, "Your money or your life!" the stranger simply laughed.
"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We are of a like trade."
Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up a partnership. If only one quarter of the deeds assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on the roads of England. Although by no means a mythical person, the stories told of him nearly all belong to the regions of romance, and his true history shows him to have had few redeeming qualities. Many of the old knights of the road were courageous, and hand in hand with their courage went a humour not seldom kindly; but Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage is not an established fact, and whose humour, like the "tender mercies of the wicked," was cruel, not to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to attempt to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after this lapse of time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance has enjoyed too great and too long a popularity for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint him as the cowardly ruffian he was.
Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of Turpin, owns an unenviable repute, and its very name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour, however, goes back no greater distance in time than the first half of the eighteenth century, for until that period it was not built upon, and indeed "Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as 1761, maps proving the old church to have been quite rural at that date. Originally a chapel-of-ease to the great mother-parish of Stepney, the district was erected into a separate parish so far back as the fourteenth century and the original "white chapel"—doubtless so called from its mediæval coats of whitewash—made a church. But old names cling, and although it has been a church for over six hundred years, it has not been able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly misleading nowadays, for it is no longer a chapelry and its stately church is in red brick; so that there is some force in the argument for re-christening the borough and dignifying it by a revival of the old name of Eastminster, owned by that not very fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by Edward the Third in 1348, which formerly stood on the site of the Royal Mint.