There, in London, Frank narrowly escaped being taken. As it chanced, at that time an Italian bravo was earning for himself an unsavoury notoriety by going about boastfully challenging all England to stand up before him to prove who was the better man. He would mark his man, pick a quarrel with him, and the result was always the same. The Italian's trick of fence was deadly, his wrist a wrist of steel. None yet had been able to stand long before him; not one had got inside his guard.
As he walked once near Leicester Field in the dusk of an evening, Stokoe's great figure caught the eye of this little Italian, in whose mind suddenly arose the irresistible longing to bring this huge bulk toppling to earth. That would be something not unworth boasting about—that he, a sort of eighteenth-century David, should slay this modern Goliath.
No one had ever been able to complain that it was difficult to pick a quarrel with Frank Stokoe. Not that he was quarrelsome—far otherwise; but never was he known to shrink from any combat that was pressed on him, and on this occasion the venomous little foreigner found him most ready to oblige. It wanted but a slight jostle, an Italian oath hissed out, a few words in broken English to the effect that big men were proverbially clumsy, and that bigness and courage were not always to be found united. Stokoe knew very well who his assailant was, knew his reputation, and the slender chance the ordinary swordsman might expect to have against this foreigner's devilish skill, but his weapon was unsheathed almost before the Italian had ceased to curse. Cautiously keeping a check on his habitual impetuosity, calling to his aid every ounce of the skill he possessed, and content meanwhile if he could evade the vicious thrusts of his enemy, Stokoe for a time kept the fiery little man well at bay. Irritated at length by the giant's coolness, and by finding him, perhaps, not quite so easy a conquest as he had anticipated, unable to draw him on to expose himself by attacking, the Italian for a moment lost patience. None other in England had given him so much trouble. It was time this farce ended; he would spit the giant now. Once, twice, thrice—it was with the utmost difficulty that Stokoe saved himself from being run through the body, and once the sword of his enemy went through his clothes, grazing his ribs, and sending a warm stream trickling down his side. Then, suddenly, again the Italian lunged. This time it surely had been all over with Stokoe. But the foot of the hectoring little foreigner slipped, or he stumbled owing to some slight inequality of the ground. For a single instant the man was overbalanced and off his guard, and before he could recover, Frank Stokoe's sword passed through his body, sending out of this world one who whilst in it had wrought much evil.
"Well done, Stokoe! Old Northumberland for ever!" cried a voice from amongst the considerable crowd of spectators who had run up before the fight had been in progress many seconds. "Well done, Stokoe!"
Here was danger greater even than that from which he had but now escaped. He was recognised! And for him to be recognised in London probably meant instant arrest, and an almost certain end on the gallows. He was too deeply involved in the late Rebellion; King George's Government would show him as little mercy as they had showed to his chief.
Stokoe glanced round uneasily as he wiped his sword, but it was not possible to say which in the group of spectators was the man who had given that compromising cry; it might be one of several who, to Stokoe's extreme discomposure, seemed to look at him rather intently. Time to be out of this, thought he; the farther he was from London the more freely he would breathe just at present, and the less chance was there of that breathing being permanently stopped. Policemen had not been invented in those days, and there was not much chance of his being arrested for duelling, for what was then called "the watch" was singularly inefficient, and seldom to be found when wanted. Nevertheless, it was now no easy matter for Stokoe to shake off the little "tail" of admirers who insisted on following him; it was not every day that they had the chance of seeing a man killed in fair fight, and they were loth to lose sight of the man who had done it—a hero in their eyes. However, by dint of plunging down one narrow street and up some other unsavoury alley, and repeating the manoeuvre at intervals, blinding his trail as far as possible, he at length shook off the last persevering remnant of his admirers, and, without being tracked or shadowed, gained the shelter of the house where he lodged. A few days saw him and his friends safely out of London, bearing with them the body of the Earl of Derwentwater, which was later buried at Dilston.
Frank Stokoe's position was an unfortunate one from now on. He was a proscribed man; his property had been seized, and those now in possession threatened if he put in an appearance, or made any attempt to regain the property, that they would give him up to Government. Times consequently became hard for poor Stokoe; his affairs went from bad to worse, and though his name was included in the general pardon which Government issued some time later, he never got back his land nor any of his possessions. Part of the land passed with the Derwentwater Estate to Greenwich Hospital, part, including the peel tower, where he and his ancestors had lived for generations, remained in the clutches of those who had seized it. Old age came upon Frank and found him poverty-stricken; want came, "as an armed man," and found him too weak to resist. The spirit was there, but no longer the strength that should have helped the spirit. He sank and died, leaving behind him no shred of worldly gear.
Another noted Northumbrian who was "out" in the '15 was him whom men then called "Mad Jack Hall" of Otterburn. Not that he was in any sense mad, or even of weak intellect—far from it; the name merely arose from the fiery energy of the man, and from the reckless courage with which he would face any danger or any odds. As a man, he was extremely popular, and no one could have been more beloved by his dependents. His fine estate he managed himself, and managed well, though before he went "out" misfortunes fell on him which no management could have averted. They were misfortunes so crushing, and following so immediately on each other's heels, that amongst the simple country folk they were looked on, and spoken of, with awe, as manifestly judgments from Heaven for some fancied sin they supposed him to have committed. He might, people said, have prevented, but did not prevent, a duel which took place in the streets of Newcastle, in which a very popular young man was killed. It was "murder," and no fair fight, folk said; and, whatever the rights of the case, at least the successful duellist was afterwards hanged for the murder. Hall's failure to interfere seems to have strained his popularity for a time. In such circumstances people are prone to assume that an all-wise Providence, necessarily seeing eye to eye with them, inflicts some special punishment on the person who has sinned some special sin, or who has, at all events, done (or not done) something which, in the popular judgment, he should not have done (or done, as the case may be). Misfortune or accident comes to some one who has roused popular clamour. "I told you so," cries the public; "a judgment!"
In this instance, the sin of not interfering to prevent a duel—or a murder, as popular opinion called it—was punished, firstly, by Hall's house at Otterburn being burned to the ground, together with all his farm buildings and great part of his farm stock; and, secondly, this grievous loss was followed in the time of harvest by a devastating flood in the Rede, which swept away from the rich, low-lying haughs every particle of the fat crops which already had been cut, and were now merely waiting to be carried home.
By such drastic means having apparently been purged of his sin, Mr. Hall seems to have regained his normal popularity, and an incident which presently occurred raised it to an even greater height than before. As far back at least as the time of Cromwell it had been customary to send offenders against the law, political prisoners and the like who were not judged quite worthy of the gallows or the block, to what in Charles the Second's day were called His Majesty's Plantations—our colonies, that is, in America or the West Indies. Not only were "incorrigible rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars" thus dealt with, but those also who attended illegal prayer-meetings found themselves in the same box if they happened to have been previously convicted of this heinous offence; and the moss-troopers of Northumberland and Cumberland were treated in similar fashion when taken—deported from their own heathery hills and grey, weeping skies, to the hot swamps and savannahs of Jamaica or Virginia. In the beginning, those sentenced were merely compelled, under penalty of what Weir of Hermiston called being "weel haangit," to remove themselves to the Plantations. Later, a custom sprang up under which criminals of all sorts were delivered over by the authorities to the tender mercies of contractors, who engaged to land them in the West Indies or America, it being one of the conditions of the contract that the services of the prisoner were the property of the contractor for a given number of years. On landing, these wretched prisoners were put up to auction and sold to the highest bidder—in other words, they were slaves. Many men made large sums of money in this inhuman trade, trafficking in the lives of their fellow-countrymen. The thing at last reached such a pitch that practically no able-bodied man was safe from the danger of being kidnapped, sold to some dealer, and shipped off to slavery in the Plantations. That was the fate of many a young man who mysteriously disappeared from the ken of his friends in those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century days. Once shipped to the Plantations, the chance was small of a man ever returning to his native land. Fever, brought on by exposure to the hot sun and heavy rain of a tropical or semi-tropical climate, took care of that; in the West Indies, at least, they died like flies. Not many had the luck, or the constitution, of one Henry Morgan, who, kidnapped in Bristol when a boy and sold as a slave in Barbadoes, lived to be one of the most famous—or rather notorious—buccaneers of all time, and died a knight, Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, and commander of our forces in that island.