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A Book of Scoundrels

by Charles Whibley

February, 1999 [Etext #1632]

Project Gutenberg Etext A Book of Scoundrels, by Charles Whibley

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A BOOK OF SCOUNDRELS

by CHARLES WHIBLEY

To the Greeks FOOLISHNESS

I desire to thank the Proprietors of the `National

Observer,' the `New Review,' the `Pall Mall

Gazette,' and `Macmillan's Magazine,' for

courteous permission to reprint certain chapters of

this book.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CAPTAIN HIND

MOLL CUTPURSE AND JONATHAN WILD

I. MOLL CUTPURSE

II. JONATHAN WILD

III. A PARALLEL

RALPH BRISCOE

GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN-STRING JACK

I. GILDEROY

II. SIXTEEN-STRING JACK

III. A PARALLEL

THOMAS PURENEY

SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE

I. JACK SHEPPARD

II. LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE

III. A PARALLEL

VAUX

GEORGE BARRINGTON

THE SWITCHER AND GENTLEMAN HARRY

I. THE SWITCHER

II. GENTLEMAN HARRY

III. A PARALLEL

DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES PEACE

I. DEACON BRODIE

II. CHARLES PEACE

III. A PARALLEL

THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT

MONSIEUR L'ABB<E'>

INTRODUCTION

There are other manifestations of greatness than to relieve

suffering or to wreck an empire. Julius C<ae>sar and John Howard

are not the only heroes who have smiled upon the world. In the

supreme adaptation of means to an end there is a constant

nobility, for neither ambition nor virtue is the essential of a

perfect action. How shall you contemplate with indifference the

career of an artist whom genius or good guidance has compelled to

exercise his peculiar skill, to indulge his finer aptitudes? A

masterly theft rises in its claim to respect high above the

reprobation of the moralist. The scoundrel, when once justice is

quit of him, has a right to be appraised by his actions, not by

their effect; and he dies secure in the knowledge that he is

commonly more distinguished, if he be less loved, than his

virtuous contemporaries.

While murder is wellnigh as old as life, property and the pocket

invented theft, late-born among the arts. It was not until

avarice had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of

wealth, until civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable

property, that thieving became a liberal and an elegant

profession. True, in pastoral society, the lawless man was eager

to lift cattle, to break down the barrier between robbery and

warfare. But the contrast is as sharp between the savagery of

the ancient reiver and the polished performance of Captain Hind

as between the daub of the pavement and the perfection of

Velasquez.

So long as the Gothic spirit governed Europe, expressing itself

in useless ornament and wanton brutality, the more delicate

crafts had no hope of exercise. Even the adventurer upon the

road threatened his victim with a bludgeon, nor was it until the

breath of the Renaissance had vivified the world that a gentleman

and an artist could face the traveller with a courteous demand

for his purse. But the age which witnessed the enterprise of

Drake and the triumph of Shakespeare knew also the prowess of the

highwayman and the dexterity of the cutpurse. Though the art

displayed all the freshness and curiosity of the primitives,

still it was art. With Gamaliel Ratsey, who demanded a scene

from Hamlet of a rifled player, and who could not rob a

Cambridge scholar without bidding him deliver an oration in a

wood, theft was already better than a vulgar extortion. Moll

Cutpurse, whose intelligence and audacity were never bettered,

was among the bravest of the Elizabethans. Her temperament was

as large and as reckless as Ben Jonson's own. Neither her tongue

nor her courage knew the curb of modesty, and she was the

first to reduce her craft to a set of wise and imperious rules.

She it was who discovered the secret of discipline, and who

insisted that every member of her gang should undertake no other

enterprise than that for which nature had framed him. Thus she

made easy the path for that other hero, of whom you are told that

his band was made up `of several sorts of wicked artists, of whom

he made several uses, according as he perceived which way every

man's particular talent lay.' This statesman--Thomas Dun was his

name--drew up for the use of his comrades a stringent and stately

code, and he was wont to deliver an address to all novices

concerning the art and mystery of robbing upon the highway.

Under auspices so brilliant, thievery could not but flourish, and

when the Stuarts sat upon the throne it was already lifted above

the level of questioning experiment.

Every art is shaped by its material, and with the variations of

its material it must perforce vary. If the skill of the cutpurse

compelled the invention of the pocket, it is certain that the

rare difficulties of the pocket created the miraculous skill of

those crafty fingers which were destined to empty it. And as

increased obstacles are perfection's best incentive, a finer

cunning grew out of the fresh precaution. History does not tell

us who it was that discovered this new continent of roguery.

Those there are who give the credit to the valiant Moll Cutpurse;

but though the Roaring Girl had wit to conceive a thousand

strange enterprises, she had not the hand to carry them out, and

the first pickpocket must needs have been a man of action.

Moreover, her nickname suggests the more ancient practice, and it

is wiser to yield the credit to Simon Fletcher, whose praises are

chanted by the early historians.

Now, Simon, says his biographer, was `looked upon to be the

greatest artist of his age by all his contemporaries.' The son

of a baker in Rosemary Lane, he early deserted his father's oven

for a life of adventure; and he claims to have been the first

collector who, stealing the money, yet left the case. The new

method was incomparably more subtle than the old: it afforded an

opportunity of a hitherto unimagined delicacy; the wielders of

the scissors were aghast at a skill which put their own

clumsiness to shame, and which to a previous generation would

have seemed the wildest fantasy. Yet so strong is habit, that

even when the picking of pockets was a recognised industry, the

superfluous scissors still survived, and many a rogue has hanged

upon the Tree because he attempted with a vulgar implement such

feats as his unaided forks had far more easily accomplished.

But, despite the innovation of Simon Fletcher, the highway was

the glory of Elizabeth, the still greater glory of the Stuarts.

`The Laced<ae>monians were the only people,' said Horace Walpole,

`except the English who seem to have put robbery on a right

foot.' And the English of the seventeenth century need fear the

rivalry of no Laced<ae>monian. They were, indeed, the most

valiant and graceful robbers that the world has ever known. The

Civil War encouraged their profession, and, since many of them

had fought for their king, a proper hatred of Cromwell sharpened

their wits. They were scholars as well as gentlemen; they

tempered their sport with a merry wit; their avarice alone

surpassed their courtesy; and they robbed with so perfect a

regard for the proprieties that it was only the pedant and the

parliamentarian who resented their interference.

Nor did their princely manner fail of its effect upon their

victims. The middle of the seventeenth century was the golden

age, not only of the robber, but of the robbed. The game was

played upon either side with a scrupulous respect for a potent,

if unwritten, law. Neither might nor right was permitted to

control the issue. A gaily attired, superbly mounted highwayman

would hold up a coach packed with armed men, and take a purse

from each, though a vigorous remonstrance might have carried him

to Tyburn. But the traveller knew his place: he did what was

expected of him in the best of tempers. Who was he that he

should yield in courtesy to the man in the vizard? As it was

monstrous for the one to discharge his pistol, so the other could

not resist without committing an outrage upon tradition. One

wonders what had been the result if some mannerless reformer had

declined his assailant's invitation and drawn his sword. Maybe

the sensitive art might have died under this sharp rebuff. But

none save regicides were known to resist, and their resistance

was never more forcible than a volley of texts. Thus the High-

toby-crack swaggered it with insolent gaiety, knowing no worse

misery than the fear of the Tree, so long as he followed the

rules of his craft. But let a touch of brutality disgrace his

method, and he appealed in vain for sympathy or indulgence. The

ruffian, for instance, of whom it is grimly recorded that he

added a tie-wig to his booty, neither deserved nor received the

smallest consideration. Delivered to justice, he speedily met

the death his vulgarity merited, and the road was taught the

salutary lesson that wigs were as sacred as trinkets hallowed by

association.

With the eighteenth century the highway fell upon decline. No

doubt in its silver age, the century's beginning, many a

brilliant deed was done. Something of the old policy survived,

and men of spirit still went upon the pad. But the breadth of

the ancient style was speedily forgotten; and by the time the

First George climbed to the throne, robbery was already a sordid

trade. Neither side was conscious of its noble obligation. The

vulgar audacity of a bullying thief was suitably answered by the

ungracious, involuntary submission of the terrified traveller.

From end to end of England you might hear the cry of `Stand and

deliver.' Yet how changed the accent! The beauty of gesture,

the deference of carriage, the ready response to a legitimate

demand--all the qualities of a dignified art were lost for ever.

As its professors increased in number, the note of aristocracy,

once dominant, was silenced. The meanest rogue, who could

hire a horse, might cut a contemptible figure on Bagshot Heath,

and feel no shame at robbing a poor man. Once--in that Augustan

age, whose brightest ornament was Captain Hind--it was something

of a distinction to be decently plundered. A century later there

was none so humble but he might be asked to empty his pocket. In

brief, the blight of democracy was upon what should have remained

a refined, secluded art; and nowise is the decay better

illustrated than in the appreciation of bunglers, whose exploits

were scarce worth a record.

James Maclaine, for instance, was the hero of his age. In a

history of cowards he would deserve the first place, and the

`Gentleman Highwayman,' as he was pompously styled, enjoyed a

triumph denied to many a victorious general. Lord Mountford led

half White's to do him honour on the day of his arrest. On the

first Sunday, which he spent in Newgate, three thousand jostled

for entrance to his cell, and the poor devil fainted three times

at the heat caused by the throng of his admirers. So long as his

fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not take up his pen

without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have robbed him

near Hyde Park. Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the white

feather. Not once was he known to take a purse with his own

hand, the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses'

heads while his accomplice spoke with the passengers. A poltroon

before his arrest, in Court he whimpered and whinnied for

mercy; he was carried to the cart pallid and trembling, and not

even his preposterous finery availed to hearten him at the

gallows. Taxed with his timidity, he attempted to excuse himself

on the inadmissible plea of moral rectitude. `I have as much

personal courage in an honourable cause,' he exclaimed in a

passage of false dignity, `as any man in Britain; but as I knew I

was committing acts of injustice, so I went to them half loth and

half consenting; and in that sense I own I am a coward indeed.'

The disingenuousness of this proclamation is as remarkable as its

hypocrisy. Well might he brag of his courage in an honourable

cause, when he knew that he could never be put to the test. But

what palliation shall you find for a rogue with so little pride

in his art, that he exercised it `half loth, half consenting'?

It is not in this recreant spirit that masterpieces are achieved,

and Maclaine had better have stayed in the far Highland parish,

which bred him, than have attempted to cut a figure in the larger

world of London. His famous encounter with Walpole should have

covered him with disgrace, for it was ignoble at every point; and

the art was so little understood, that it merely added a leaf to

his crown of glory. Now, though Walpole was far too well-bred to

oppose the demand of an armed stranger, Maclaine, in defiance of

his craft, discharged his pistol at an innocent head. True, he

wrote a letter of apology, and insisted that, had the one pistol-

shot proved fatal, he had another in reserve for himself. But

not even Walpole would have believed him, had not an amiable

faith given him an opportunity for the answering quip: `Can I do

less than say I will be hanged if he is?'

As Maclaine was a coward and no thief, so also he was a snob and

no gentleman. His boasted elegance was not more respectable than

his art. Fine clothes are the embellishment of a true

adventurer; they hang ill on the sloping shoulders of a poltroon.

And Maclaine, with all the ostensible weaknesses of his kind,

would claim regard for the strength that he knew not. He

occupied a costly apartment in St. James's Street; his morning

dress was a crimson damask banjam, a silk shag waistcoat, trimmed

with lace, black velvet breeches, white silk stockings, and

yellow morocco slippers; but since his magnificence added no jot

to his courage, it was rather mean than admirable. Indeed, his

whole career was marred by the provincialism of his native manse.

And he was the adored of an intelligent age; he basked a few

brief weeks in the noonday sun of fashion.

If distinction was not the heritage of the Eighteenth Century,

its glory is that now and again a giant raised his head above the

stature of a prevailing rectitude. The art of verse was lost in

rhetoric; the noble prose, invented by the Elizabethans, and

refined under the Stuarts, was whittled away to common sense by

the admirers of Addison and Steele. Swift and Johnson, Gibbon

and Fielding, were apparitions of strength in an amiable,

ineffective age. They emerged sudden from the impeccable

greyness, to which they afforded an heroic contrast. So, while

the highway drifted--drifted to a vulgar incompetence, the craft

was illumined by many a flash of unexpected genius. The

brilliant achievements of Jonathan Wild and of Jack Sheppard

might have relieved the gloom of the darkest era, and their

separate masterpieces make some atonement for the environing

cowardice and stupidity. Above all, the Eighteenth Century was

Newgate's golden age; now for the first time and the last were

the rules and customs of the Jug perfectly understood. If

Jonathan the Great was unrivalled in the art of clapping his

enemies into prison, if Jack the Slip-string was supreme in the

rarer art of getting himself out, even the meanest criminal of

his time knew what was expected of him, so long as he wandered

within the walled yard, or listened to the ministrations of the

snuff-besmirched Ordinary. He might show a lamentable lack of

cleverness in carrying off his booty; he might prove a too easy

victim to the wiles of the thief-catcher; but he never fell short

of courage, when asked to sustain the consequences of his crime.

Newgate, compared by one eminent author to a university, by

another to a ship, was a republic, whose liberty extended only so

far as its iron door. While there was no liberty without, there

was licence within; and if the culprit, who paid for the smallest

indiscretion with his neck, understood the etiquette of the

place, he spent his last weeks in an orgie of rollicking

lawlessness. He drank, he ate, he diced; he received his

friends, or chaffed the Ordinary; he attempted, through the well-

paid cunning of the Clerk, to bribe the jury; and when every

artifice had failed he went to Tyburn like a man. If he knew not

how to live, at least he would show a resentful world how to die.

`In no country,' wrote Sir T. Smith, a distinguished lawyer of

the time, `do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in

England'; and assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of

their fellows, Wild's victims made a brave show at the gallows.

Nor was their bravery the result of a common callousness. They

understood at once the humour and the delicacy of the situation.

Though hitherto they had chaffed the Ordinary, they now listened

to his exhortation with at least a semblance of respect; and

though their last night upon earth might have been devoted to a

joyous company, they did not withhold their ear from the

Bellman's Chant. As twelve o'clock approached--their last

midnight upon earth--they would interrupt the most spirited

discourse, they would check the tour of the mellowest bottle to

listen to the solemn doggerel. `All you that in the condemn'd

hole do lie,' groaned the Bellman of St. Sepulchre's in his

duskiest voice, and they who held revel in the condemned hole

prayed silence of their friends for the familiar cadences:

All you that in the condemn'd hole do lie,

Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die,

Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near,

That you before th' Almighty must appear.

Examine well yourselves, in time repent

That you may not t' eternal flames be sent;

And when St. Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,

The Lord above have mercy on your souls.

Past twelve o'clock!

Even if this warning voice struck a momentary terror into their

offending souls, they were up betimes in the morning, eager to

pay their final debt. Their journey from Newgate to Tyburn was a

triumph, and their vanity was unabashed at the droning menaces of

the Ordinary. At one point a chorus of maidens cast wreaths upon

their way, or pinned nosegays in their coats, that they might not

face the executioner unadorned. At the Crown Tavern they quaffed

their last glass of ale, and told the landlord with many a leer

and smirk that they would pay him on their way back. Though

gravity was asked, it was not always given; but in the Eighteenth

Century courage was seldom wanting. To the common citizen a

violent death was (and is) the worst of horrors; to the ancient

highwayman it was the odd trick lost in the game of life. And

the highwayman endured the rope, as the practised gambler loses

his estate, without blenching. One there was, who felt his leg

tremble in his own despite: wherefore he stamped it upon the

ground so violently, that in other circumstances he would

have roared with pain, and he left the world without a

tremor. In this spirit Cranmer burnt his recreant right hand,

and in either case the glamour of a unique occasion was a

stimulus to courage.

But not even this brilliant treatment of accessories availed to

save the highway from disrepute; indeed, it had become the

profitless pursuit of braggarts and loafers, long before the

abolition of the stage-coach destroyed its opportunity. In the

meantime, however, the pickpocket was master of his trade. His

strategy was perfect, his sleight of hand as delicate as long,

lithe fingers and nimble brains could make it. He had discarded

for ever those clumsy instruments whose use had barred the

progress of the Primitives. The breast-pocket behind the

tightest buttoned coat presented no difficulty to his love of

research, and he would penetrate the stoutest frieze or the

lightest satin, as easily as Jack Sheppard made a hole through

Newgate. His trick of robbery was so simple and yet so

successful, that ever since it has remained a tradition. The

collision, the victim's murmured apology, the hasty scuffle, the

booty handed to the aide-de-camp, who is out of sight before

the hue and cry can be raised--such was the policy advocated two

hundred years ago; such is the policy pursued to day by the few

artists that remain.

Throughout the eighteenth century the art of cly-faking held its

own, though its reputation paled in the glamour of the highway.

It culminated in George Barrington, whose vivid genius persuaded

him to work alone and to carry off his own booty; it still

flourished (in a silver age) when the incomparable Haggart

performed his prodigies of skill; even in our prosaic time some

flashes of the ancient glory have been seen. Now and again

circumstances have driven it into eclipse. When the facile

sentiment of the Early Victorian Era poised the tear of sympathy

upon every trembling eyelid, the most obdurate was forced to

provide himself with a silk handkerchief of equal size and value.

Now, a wipe is the easiest booty in the world, and the Artful

Dodger might grow rich without the exercise of the smallest

skill. But wipes dwindled, with dwindling sensibility; and once

more the pickpocket was forced upon cleverness or extinction.

At the same time the more truculent trade of housebreaking was

winning a lesser triumph of its own. Never, save in the hands of

one or two distinguished practitioners, has this clumsy, brutal

pursuit taken on the refinement of an art. Essentially modern,

it has generally been pursued in the meanest spirit of gain.

Deacon Brodie clung to it as to a diversion, but he was an

amateur, without a clear understanding of his craft's

possibilities. The sole monarch of housebreakers was Charles

Peace. At a single stride he surpassed his predecessors; nor has

the greatest of his imitators been worthy to hand on the candle

which he left at the gallows. For the rest, there is small

distinction in breaking windows, wielding crowbars, and battering

the brains of defenceless old gentlemen. And it is to such

miserable tricks as this that he who two centuries since rode

abroad in all the glory of the High-toby-splice descends in these

days of avarice and stupidity. The legislators who decreed that

henceforth the rope should be reserved for the ultimate crime of

murder were inspired with a proper sense of humour and

proportion. It would be ignoble to dignify that ugly enterprise

of to-day, the cracking of suburban cribs, with the same

punishment which was meted out to Claude Duval and the immortal

Switcher. Better for the churl the disgrace of Portland than the

chance of heroism and respect given at the Tree!

And where are the heroes whose art was as glorious as their

intrepidity? One and all they have climbed the ascent of Tyburn.

One and all, they have leaped resplendent from the cart. The

world, which was the joyous playground of highwaymen and

pickpockets, is now the Arcadia of swindlers. The man who once

went forth to meet his equal on the road, now plunders the

defenceless widow or the foolish clergyman from the security of

an office. He has changed Black Bess for a brougham, his pistol

for a cigar; a sleek chimney-pot sits upon the head, which once

carried a jaunty hat, three-cornered; spats have replaced the

tops of ancient times; and a heavy fur coat advertises at once

the wealth and inaction of the modern brigand. No longer does he

roam the heaths of Hounslow or Bagshot; no longer does he track

the grazier to a country fair. Fearful of an encounter, he

chooses for the fields of his enterprise the byways of the

City, and the advertisement columns of the smugly Christian

Press. He steals without risking his skin or losing his

respectability. The suburb, wherein he brings up a blameless,

flat-footed family, regards him as its most renowned benefactor.

He is generally a pillar (or a buttress) of the Church, and

oftentimes a mayor; with his ill-gotten wealth he promotes

charities, and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a

second-rate Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him,

in the town-hall of his adopted borough.

How much worse is he than the High-toby-cracks of old! They were

as brave as lions; he is a very louse for timidity. His conduct

is meaner than the conduct of the most ruffianly burglar that

ever worked a centre-bit. Of art he has not the remotest

inkling: though his greed is bounded by the Bank of England, he

understands not the elegancies of life; he cares not how he

plumps his purse, so long as it be full; and if he were capable

of conceiving a grand effect, he would willingly surrender it for

a pocketed half-crown. This side the Channel, in brief, romance

and the picturesque are dead; and in France, the last refuge of

crime, there are already signs of decay. The Abb<e'> Bruneau

caught a whiff of style and invention from the past. That other

Abb<e'>--Rosslot was his name--shone forth a pure creator: he

owed his prowess to the example of none. But in Paris crime is

too often passionel, and a crime passionel is a crime with a

purpose, which, like the novel with a purpose, is conceived

by a dullard, and carried out for the gratification of the

middle-class.

To whitewash the scoundrel is to put upon him the heaviest

dishonour: a dishonour comparable only to the monstrously

illogical treatment of the condemned. When once a hero has

forfeited his right to comfort and freedom, when he is deemed no

longer fit to live upon earth, the Prison Chaplain, encouraging

him to a final act of hypocrisy, gives him a free pass (so to

say) into another and more exclusive world. So, too, the

moralist would test the thief by his own narrow standard,

forgetting that all professions are not restrained by the same

code. The road has its ordinances as well as the lecture-room;

and if the thief is commonly a bad moralist, it is certain that

no moralist was ever a great thief. Why then detract from a

man's legitimate glory? Is it not wiser to respect `that deep

intuition of oneness,' which Coleridge says is `at the bottom of

our faults as well as our virtues?' To recognise that a fault in

an honest man is a virtue in a scoundrel? After all, he is

eminent who, in obedience to his talent, does prodigies of valour

unrivalled by his fellows. And none has so many opportunities of

various eminence as the scoundrel.

The qualities which may profitably be applied to a cross life are

uncommon and innumerable. It is not given to all men to be

light-brained, light-limbed, light-fingered. A courage which

shall face an enemy under the starlight, or beneath the shadow of

a wall, which shall track its prey to a well-defended lair,

is far rarer than a law-abiding cowardice. The recklessness that

risks all for a present advantage is called genius, if a

victorious general urge it to success; nor can you deny to the

intrepid Highwayman, whose sudden resolution triumphs at an

instant of peril, the possession of an admirable gift. But all

heroes have not proved themselves excellent at all points. This

one has been distinguished for the courtly manner of his attack,

that other for a prescience which discovers booty behind a coach-

door or within the pocket of a buttoned coat. If Cartouche was a

master of strategy, Barrington was unmatched in another branch;

and each may claim the credit due to a peculiar eminence. It is

only thus that you may measure conflicting talents: as it were

unfair to judge a poet by a brief experiment in prose, so it

would be monstrous to cheapen the accomplishments of a

pickpocket, because he bungled at the concealment of his gains.

A stern test of artistry is the gallows. Perfect behaviour at an

enforced and public scrutiny may properly be esteemed an effect

of talent--an effect which has not too often been rehearsed.

There is no reason why the Scoundrel, fairly beaten at the last

point in the game, should not go to his death without swagger and

without remorse. At least he might comfort himself with such

phrases as `a dance without the music,' and he has not often been

lacking in courage. What he has missed is dignity: his

pitfalls have been unctuosity, on the one side, bravado on the

other. It was the Prison Ordinary, who first misled him into the

assumption of a piety which neither preacher nor disciple

understood. It was the Prison Ordinary, who persuaded him to

sign his name to a lying confession of guilt, drawn up in

accordance with a foolish and inexorable tradition, and to

deliver such a last dying speech as would not disappoint the mob.

The set phrases, the vain prayer offered for other sinners, the

hypocritical profession of a superior righteousness, were neither

noble nor sincere. When Tom Jones (for instance) was hanged, in

1702, after a prosperous career on Hounslow Heath, his biographer

declared that he behaved with more than usual `modesty and

decency,' because he `delivered a pretty deal of good advice to

the young men present, exhorting them to be industrious in their

several callings.' Whereas his biographer should have discovered

that it is not thus that your true hero bids farewell to frolic

and adventure.

As little in accordance with good taste was the last appearance

of the infamous Jocelin Harwood, who was swung from the cart in

1692 for murder and robbery. He arrived at Tyburn insolently

drunk. He blustered and ranted, until the spectators hissed

their disapproval, and he died vehemently shouting that he would

act the same murder again in the same case. Unworthy, also, was

the last dying repartee of Samuel Shotland, a notorious bully of

the Eighteenth Century. Taking off his shoes, he hurled them

into the crowd, with a smirk of delight. `My father and mother

often told me,' he cried, `that I should die with my shoes on;

but you may all see that I have made them both liars.' A great

man dies not with so mean a jest, and Tyburn was untouched to

mirth by Shotland's facile humour.

On the other hand, there are those who have given a splendid

example of a brave and dignified death. Brodie was a sorry

bungler when at work, but a perfect artist at the gallows. The

glory of his last achievement will never fade. The muttered

prayer, unblemished by hypocrisy, the jest thrown at George

Smith--a metaphor from the gaming-table--the silent adjustment of

the cord which was to strangle him, these last offices were

performed with an unparalleled quietude and restraint. Though he

had pattered the flash to all his wretched accomplices, there was

no trace of the last dying speech in his final utterances, and he

set an example of a simple greatness, worthy to be followed even

to the end of time. Such is the type, but others also have given

proof of a serene temper. Tom Austin's masterpiece was in

another kind, but it was none the less a masterpiece. At the

very moment that the halter was being put about his neck, he was

asked by the Chaplain what he had to say before he died. `Only,'

says he, `there's a woman yonder with some curds and whey, and I

wish I could have a pennyworth of them before I am hanged,

because I don't know when I shall see any again.' There is a

brave irrelevance in this very human desire, which is beyond

praise.

Valiant also was the conduct of Roderick Audrey, who after a

brief but brilliant career paid his last debt to the law in 1714.

He was but sixteen, and, says his biographer, `he went very

decent to the gallows, being in a white waistcoat, clean napkin,

white gloves, and an orange in one hand.' So well did he play

his part, that one wonders Jack Ketch did not shrink from the

performance of his. But throughout his short life, Roderick

Audrey--the very name is an echo of romance!--displayed a

contempt for whatever was common or ugly. Not only was his

appearance at Tyburn a lesson in elegance, but he thieved, as

none ever thieved before or since, with no other accomplice than

a singing-bird. Thus he would play outside a house, wherein he

espied a sideboard of plate, and at last, bidding his playmate

flutter through an open window into the parlour, he would follow

upon the excuse of recovery, and, once admitted, would carry off

as much silver as he could conceal. None other ever attempted so

graceful an artifice, and yet Audrey's journey to Tyburn is even

more memorable than the story of his gay accomplice.

But it is not only the truly great who have won for themselves an

enduring reputation. There are men, not a few, esteemed, like

the popular novelist, not for their art but for some foolish

gift, some facile trick of notoriety, whose actions have tickled

the fancy, not the understanding of the world. The coward

and the impostor have been set upon a pedestal of glory either by

accident or by the whim of posterity. For more than a century

Dick Turpin has appeared not so much the greatest of highwaymen,

as the Highwaymen Incarnate. His prowess has been extolled in

novels and upon the stage; his ride to York is still bepraised

for a feat of miraculous courage and endurance; the death of

Black Bess has drawn floods of tears down the most callous

cheeks. And the truth is that Turpin was never a gentleman of

the road at all! Black Bess is as pure an invention as the

famous ride to York. The ruffian, who is said to have ridden the

phantom mare from one end of England to the other, was a common

butcher, who burned an old woman to death at Epping, and was very

properly hanged at York for the stealing of a horse which he

dared not bestride.

Not one incident in his career gives colour to the splendid myth

which has been woven round his memory. Once he was in London,

and he died at York. So much is true; but there is naught to

prove that his progress from the one town to the other did not

occupy a year. Nor is there any reason why the halo should have

been set upon his head rather than upon another's. Strangest

truth of all, none knows at what moment Dick Turpin first shone

into glory. At any rate, there is a gap in the tradition, and

the chap-books of the time may not be credited with this vulgar

error. Perhaps it was the popular drama of Skelt which put

the ruffian upon the black mare's back; but whatever the date of

the invention, Turpin was a popular hero long before Ainsworth

sent him rattling across England. And in order to equip this

butcher with a false reputation, a valiant officer and gentleman

was stripped of the credit due to a magnificent achievement. For

though Turpin tramped to York at a journeyman's leisure, Nicks

rode thither at a stretch--Nicks the intrepid and gallant, whom

Charles II., in admiration of his feat, was wont to call

Swiftnicks.

This valiant collector, whom posterity has robbed for Turpin's

embellishment, lived at the highest moment of his art. He knew

by rote the lessons taught by Hind and Duval; he was a fearless

rider and a courteous thief. Now, one morning at five of the

clock, he robbed a gentleman near Barnet of <Pd>560, and riding

straight for York, he appeared on the Bowling Green at six in the

evening. Being presently recognised by his victim, he was

apprehended, and at the trial which followed he pleaded a

triumphant alibi. But vanity was too strong for discretion,

and no sooner was Swiftnicks out of danger, than he boasted, as

well he might, of his splendid courage. Forthwith he appeared a

popular hero, obtained a commission in Lord Moncastle's regiment,

and married a fortune. And then came Turpin to filch his glory!

Nor need Turpin have stooped to a vicarious notoriety, for he

possessed a certain rough, half conscious humour, which was not

despicable. He purchased a new fustian coat and a pair of

pumps, in which to be hanged, and he hired five poor men at ten

shillings the day, that his death might not go unmourned. Above

all, he was distinguished in prison. A crowd thronged his cell

to identify him, and one there was who offered to bet the keeper

half a guinea that the prisoner was not Turpin; whereupon Turpin

whispered the keeper, `Lay him the wager, you fool, and I will go

you halves.' Surely this impudent indifference might have kept

green the memory of the man who never rode to York!

If the Scoundrel may claim distinction on many grounds, his

character is singularly uniform. To the anthropologist he might

well appear the survival of a savage race, and savage also are

his manifold superstitions. He is a creature of times and

seasons. He chooses the occasion of his deeds with as scrupulous

a care as he examines his formidable crowbars and jemmies. At

certain hours he would refrain from action, though every

circumstance favoured his success: he would rather obey the

restraining voice of a wise, unreasoning wizardry, than fill his

pockets with the gold for which his human soul is ever hungry.

There is no law of man he dares not break but he shrinks in

horror from the infringement of the unwritten rules of savagery.

Though he might cut a throat in self-defence, he would never walk

under a ladder; and if the 13th fell on a Friday, he would starve

that day rather than obtain a loaf by the method he best

understands. He consults the omens with as patient a

divination as the augurs of old; and so long as he carries an

amulet in his pocket, though it be but a pebble or a polished

nut, he is filled with an irresistible courage. For him the

worst terror of all is the evil eye, and he would rather be

hanged by an unsuspected judge than receive an easy stretch from

one whose glance he dared not face. And while the anthropologist

claims him for a savage, whose civilisation has been arrested at

brotherhood with the Solomon Islanders, the politician might

pronounce him a true communist, in that he has preserved a

wholesome contempt of property and civic life. The pedant,

again, would feel his bumps, prescribe a gentle course of

bromide, and hope to cure all the sins of the world by a

municipal Turkish bath. The wise man, respecting his

superstitions, is content to take him as he finds him, and to

deduce his character from his very candid history, which is

unaffected by pedant or politician.

Before all things, he is sanguine; he believes that Chance, the

great god of his endeavour, fights upon his side. Whatever is

lacking to-day, to-morrow's enterprise will fulfil, and if only

the omens be favourable, he fears neither detection nor the

gallows. His courage proceeds from this sanguine temperament,

strengthened by shame and tradition rather than from a self-

controlled magnanimity; he hopes until despair is inevitable, and

then walks firmly to the gallows, that no comrade may suspect the

white feather. His ambition, too, is the ambition of the

savage or of the child; he despises such immaterial

advantages as power and influence, being perfectly content if he

have a smart coat on his back and a bottle of wine at his elbow.

He would rather pick a lock than batter a constitution, and the

world would be well lost, if he and his doxy might survey the

ruin in comfort.

But if his ambition be modest, his love of notoriety is

boundless. He must be famous, his name must be in the mouths of

men, he must be immortal (for a week) in a rough woodcut. And

then, what matters it how soon the end? His braveries have been

hawked in the street; his prowess has sold a Special Edition; he

is the first of his race, until a luckier rival eclipses him.

Thus, also, his dandyism is inevitable: it is not enough for him

to cover his nakedness--he must dress; and though his taste is

sometimes unbridled, it is never insignificant. Indeed, his

biographers have recorded the expression of his fancy in coats

and small-clothes as patiently and enthusiastically as they have

applauded his courage. And truly the love of magnificence, which

he shares with all artists, is sincere and characteristic. When

an accomplice of Jonathan Wild's robbed Lady M----n at Windsor,

his equipage cost him forty pounds; and Nan Hereford was arrested

for shoplifting at the very moment that four footmen awaited her

return with an elegant sedan-chair.

His vanity makes him but a prudish lover, who desires to woo less

than to be wooed; and at all times and through all moods he

remains the primeval sentimentalist. He will detach his life

entirely from the catchwords which pretend to govern his actions;

he will sit and croon the most heartrending ditties in

celebration of home-life and a mother's love, and then set forth

incontinently upon a well-planned errand of plunder. For all his

artistry, he lacks balance as flagrantly as a popular politician

or an advanced journalist. Therefore it is the more remarkable

that in one point he displays a certain caution: he boggles at a

superfluous murder. For all his contempt of property, he still

preserves a respect for life, and the least suspicion of

unnecessary brutality sets not only the law but his own fellows

against him. Like all men whose god is Opportunity, he is a

reckless gambler; and, like all gamblers, he is monstrously

extravagant. In brief, he is a tangle of picturesque qualities,

which, until our own generation, was incapable of nothing save

dulness.

The Bible and the Newgate Calendar--these twain were George

Borrow's favourite reading, and all save the psychologist and the

pedant will applaud the preference. For the annals of the

`family' are distinguished by an epic severity, a fearless

directness of speech, which you will hardly match outside the

Iliad or the Chronicles of the Kings. But the Newgate

Calendar did not spring ready-made into being: it is the result

of a curious and gradual development. The chap-books came first,

with their bold type, their coarse paper, and their clumsy,

characteristic woodcuts--the chap-books, which none can

contemplate without an enchanted sentiment. Here at last you

come upon a literature, which has been read to pieces. The very

rarity of the slim, rough volumes, proves that they have been

handed from one greedy reader to another, until the great

libraries alone are rich enough to harbour them. They do not

boast the careful elegance of a famous press: many of them came

from the printing-office of a country town: yet the least has a

simplicity and concision, which are unknown in this age of

popular fiction. Even their lack of invention is admirable: as

the same woodcut might be used to represent Guy, Earl of Warwick,

or the last highwayman who suffered at Tyburn, so the same

enterprise is ascribed with a delightful ingenuousness to all the

heroes who rode abroad under the stars to fill their pockets.

The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey delighted England in

1605, and was the example of after ages. The anecdote of the

road was already crystallised, and henceforth the robber was

unable to act contrary to the will of the chap-book. Thus there

grew up a folk-lore of thievery: the very insistence upon the

same motive suggests the fairytale, and, as in the legends of

every country, there is an identical element which the

anthropologists call `human'; so in the annals of adventure there

is a set of invariable incidents, which are the essence of

thievery. The industrious hacks, to whom we owe the

entertainment of the chap-books, being seedy parsons or lawyers'

clerks, were conscious of their literary deficiencies: they

preferred to obey tradition rather than to invent ineptitudes.

So you may trace the same jest, the same intrigue through the

unnumbered lives of three centuries. And if, being a

philosopher, you neglect the obvious plagiarism, you may induce

from these similarities a cunning theory concerning the

uniformity of the human brain. But the easier explanation is, as

always, the more satisfactory; and there is little doubt that in

versatility the thief surpassed his historian.

Had the chap-books still been scattered in disregarded corners,

they would have been unknown or misunderstood. Happily, a man of

genius came in the nick to convert them into as vivid and

sparkling a piece of literature as the time could show. This was

Captain Alexander Smith, whose Lives of the Highwaymen,

published in 1719, was properly described by its author as `the

first impartial piece of this nature which ever appeared in

English.' Now, Captain Smith inherited from a nameless father no

other patrimony than a fierce loyalty to the Stuarts, and the

sanguine temperament which views in horror a well-ordered life.

Though a mere foundling, he managed to acquire the rudiments, and

he was not wholly unlettered when at eighteen he took to the

road. His courage, fortified by an intimate knowledge of the

great tradition, was rewarded by an immediate success, and he

rapidly became the master of so much leisure as enabled him to

pursue his studies with pleasure and distinction. When his

companions damned him for a milksop, he was loftily contemptuous,

conscious that it was not in intelligence alone that he was their

superior. While the Stuarts were the gods of his idolatry, while

the Regicides were the fiends of his frank abhorrence, it was

from the Elizabethans that he caught the splendid vigour of his

style; and he owed not only his historical sense, but his living

English to the example of Philemon Holland. Moreover, it is to

his constant glory that, living at a time that preferred as well

to attenuate the English tongue as to degrade the profession of

the highway, he not only rode abroad with a fearless courtesy,

but handled his own language with the force and spirit of an

earlier age.

He wrote with the authority of courage and experience. A

hazardous career had driven envy and malice from his dauntless

breast. Though he confesses a debt to certain `learned and

eminent divines of the Church of England,' he owed a greater debt

to his own observation, and he knew--none better--how to

recognise with enthusiasm those deeds of daring which only

himself has rivalled. A master of etiquette, he distributed

approval and censure with impartial hand; and he was quick to

condemn the smallest infraction of an ancient law. Nor was he

insensible to the dignity of history. The best models were

always before him. With admirable zeal he studied the manner

of such masters as Thucydides and Titus Livius of Padua. Above

all, he realised the importance of setting appropriate speeches

in the mouths of his characters; and, permitting his heroes to

speak for themselves, he imparted to his work an irresistible air

of reality and good faith. His style, always studied, was

neither too low nor too high for his subject. An ill-balanced

sentence was as hateful to him as a foul thrust or a stolen

advantage.

Abroad a craftsman, he carried into the closet the skill and

energy which distinguished him when the moon was on the heath.

Though not born to the arts of peace, he was determined to prove

his respect for letters, and his masterpiece is no less pompous

in manner than it is estimable in tone and sound in reflection.

He handled slang as one who knew its limits and possibilities,

employing it not for the sake of eccentricity, but to give the

proper colour and sparkle to his page; indeed, his intimate

acquaintance with the vagabonds of speech enabled him to compile

a dictionary of Pedlar's French, which has been pilfered by a

whole battalion of imitators. Moreover, there was none of the

proverbs of the pavement, those first cousins of slang, that

escaped him; and he assumed all the licence of the gentleman-

collector in the treatment of his love-passages.

Captain Smith took the justest view of his subject.

For him robbery, in the street as on the highway,

was the finest of the arts, and he always revered it for its

own sake rather than for vulgar profit. Though, to deceive the

public, he abhorred villainy in word, he never concealed his

admiration in deed of a `highwayman who robs like a gentleman.'

`There is a beauty in all the works of nature,' he observes in

one of his wittiest exordia, `which we are unable to define,

though all the world is convinced of its existence: so in every

action and station of life there is a grace to be attained, which

will make a man pleasing to all about him and serene in his own

mind.' Some there are, he continues, who have placed `this

beauty in vice itself; otherwise it is hardly probable that they

could commit so many irregularities with a strong gust and an

appearance of satisfaction.' Notwithstanding that the word

`vice' is used in its conventional sense, we have here the key to

Captain Smith's position. He judged his heroes' achievements

with the intelligent impartiality of a connoisseur, and he

permitted no other prejudice than an unfailing loyalty to

interrupt his opinion.

Though he loved good English as he loved good wine, he was never

so happy as when (in imagination) he was tying the legs of a

Regicide under the belly of an ass. And when in the manner of a

bookseller's hack he compiled a Comical and Tragical History of

the Lives and Adventures of the most noted Bayliffs, adoration

of the Royalists persuaded him to miss his chance. So brave a

spirit as himself should not have looked complacently upon the

officers of the law, but he saw in the glorification of the

bayliff another chance of castigating the Roundheads, and

thus he set an honorific crown upon the brow of man's natural

enemy. `These unsanctified rascals,' wrote he, `would run into

any man's debt without paying him, and if their creditors were

Cavaliers they thought they had as much right to cheat 'em, as

the Israelites had to spoil the Egyptians of their ear-rings and

jewels.' Alas! the boot was ever on the other leg; and yet you

cannot but admire the Captain's valiant determination to

sacrifice probability to his legitimate hate.

Of his declining years and death there is no record. One likes

to think of him released from care, and surrounded by books,

flowers, and the good things of this earth. Now and again,

maybe, he would muse on the stirring deeds of his youth, and more

often he would put away the memory of action to delight in the

masterpiece which made him immortal. He would recall with

pleasure, no doubt, the ready praise of Richard Steele, his most

appreciative critic, and smile contemptuously at the baseness of

his friend and successor, Captain Charles Johnson. Now, this

ingenious writer was wont to boast, when the ale of Fleet Street

had empurpled his nose, that he was the most intrepid highwayman

of them all. `Once upon a time,' he would shout, with an

arrogant gesture, `I was known from Blackheath to Hounslow, from

Ware to Shooter's Hill.' And the truth is, the only `crime' he

ever committed was plagiarism. The self-assumed title of

Captain should have deceived nobody, for the braggart never

stole anything more difficult of acquisition than another man's

words. He picked brains, not pockets; he committed the greater

sin and ran no risk. He helped himself to the admirable

inventions of Captain Smith without apology or acknowledgment,

and, as though to lighten the dead-weight of his sin, he never

skipped an opportunity of maligning his victim. Again and again

in the very act to steal he will declare vaingloriously that

Captain Smith's stories are `barefaced inventions.' But doubt

was no check to the habit of plunder, and you knew that at every

reproach, expressed (so to say) in self-defence, he plied the

scissors with the greater energy. The most cunning theft is the

tag which adorns the title-page of his book:

Little villains oft submit to fate

That great ones may enjoy the world in state.

Thus he quotes from Gay, and you applaud the aptness of the

quotation, until you discover that already it was used by Steele

in his appreciation of the heroic Smith! However, Johnson has

his uses, and those to whom the masterpiece of Captain Alexander

is inaccessible will turn with pleasure to the General History

of the lives and adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen,

Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c., and will feel no regret that for

once they are receiving stolen goods.

Though Johnson fell immeasurably below his predecessor in

talent, he manifestly excelled him in scholarship. A sojourn at

the University had supplied him with a fine assortment of Latin

tags, and he delighted to prove his erudition by the citation of

the Chronicles. Had he possessed a sense of humour, he might

have smiled at the irony of committing a theft upon the historian

of thieves. But he was too vain and too pompous to smile at his

own weakness, and thus he would pretend himself a venturesome

highwayman, a brave writer, and a profound scholar. Indeed, so

far did his pride carry him, that he would have the world believe

him the same Charles Johnson, who wrote The Gentleman Cully and

The Successful Pyrate. Thus with a boastful chuckle he would

quote:

Johnson, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning,

Means not, but blunders round about a meaning

Thus, ignoring the insult, he would plume himself after his

drunken fashion that he, too, was an enemy of Pope.

Yet Johnson has remained an example. For the literature of

scoundrelism is as persistent in its form as in its folk-lore.

As Harman's Caveat, which first saw the light in 1566, serves

as a model to an unbroken series of such books, as The London

Spy, so from Johnson in due course were developed the Newgate

Calendar, and those innumerable records, which the latter half

of the Eighteenth Century furnished us forth. The celebrated

Calendar was in its origin nothing more than a list of

prisoners printed in a folio slip. But thereafter it became the

Malefactor's Bloody Register, which we know. Its plan and

purpose were to improve the occasion. The thief is no longer

esteemed for an artist or appraised upon his merits: he is the

awful warning, which shall lead the sinner to repentance.

`Here,' says the preface, `the giddy thoughtless youth may see as

in a mirror the fatal consequences of deviating from virtue';

here he may tremble at the discovery that `often the best talents

are prostituted to the basest purposes.' But in spite of `the

proper reflections of the whole affair,' the famous Calendar

deserved the praise of Borrow. There is a directness in the

narration, which captures all those for whom life and literature

are something better than psychologic formul<ae>. Moreover, the

motives which drive the brigand to his doom are brutal in their

simplicity, and withal as genuine and sincere as greed, vanity,

and lust can make them. The true amateur takes pleasure even in

the pious exhortations, because he knows that they crawl into

their place, lest the hypocrite be scandalised. But with years

the Newgate Calendar also declined, and at last it has followed

other dead literatures into the night.

Meanwhile the broadside had enjoyed an unbroken and prosperous

career. Up and down London, up and down England, hurried the

Patterer or Flying Stationer. There was no murder, no theft, no

conspiracy, which did not tempt the Gutter Muse to doggerel.

But it was not until James Catnach came up from Alnwick to London

(in 1813), that the trade reached the top of its prosperity. The

vast sheets, which he published with their scurvy couplets, and

the admirable picture, serving in its time for a hundred

executions, have not lost their power to fascinate. Theirs is

the aspect of the early woodcut; the coarse type and the

catchpenny headlines are a perpetual delight; as you unfold them,

your care keeps pace with your admiration; and you cannot feel

them crackle beneath your hand without enthusiasm and without

regret. He was no pedant--Jemmy Catnach; and the image of his

ruffians was commonly as far from portraiture, as his verses were

remote from poetry. But he put together in a roughly artistic

shape the last murder, robbery, or scandal of the day. His

masterpieces were far too popular to live, and if they knew so

vast a circulation as 2,500,000 they are hard indeed to come by.

And now the art is wellnigh dead; though you may discover an

infrequent survival in a country town. But how should Catnach,

were he alive to-day, compete with the Special Edition of an

evening print?

The decline of the Scoundrel, in fact, has been followed by the

disappearance of chap-book and broadside. The Education Act,

which made the cheap novel a necessity, destroyed at a blow the

literature of the street. Since the highwayman wandered, fur-

coated, into the City, the patterer has lost his occupation.

Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles,

whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain. The

misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature,

for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of

Captain Smith. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited,

and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye

of a moral and unimaginative world. Yet the wise man sighs for

those fearless days, when the brilliant Macheath rode vizarded

down Shooter's Hill, and presently saw his exploits set forth,

with the proper accompaniment of a renowned and ancient woodcut,

upon a penny broadside.

CAPTAIN HIND

CAPTAIN HIND

JAMES HIND, the Master Thief of England, the fearless Captain of

the Highway, was born at Chipping Norton in 1618. His father, a

simple saddler, had so poor an appreciation of his son's

magnanimity, that he apprenticed him to a butcher; but Hind's

destiny was to embrue his hands in other than the blood of oxen,

and he had not long endured the restraint of this common craft

when forty shillings, the gift of his mother, purchased him an

escape, and carried him triumphant and ambitious to London.

Even in his negligent schooldays he had fastened upon a fitting

career. A born adventurer, he sought only enterprise and

command: if a commission in the army failed him, then he would

risk his neck upon the road, levying his own tax and imposing his

own conditions. To one of his dauntless resolution an

opportunity need never have lacked; yet he owed his first

preferment to a happy accident. Surprised one evening in a

drunken brawl, he was hustled into the Poultry Counter, and there

made acquaintance over a fresh bottle with Robert Allen, one of

the chief rogues in the Park, and a ruffian, who had mastered

every trick in the game of plunder. A dexterous cly-faker, an

intrepid blade, Allen had also the keenest eye for untested

talent, and he detected Hind's shining qualities after the first

glass. No sooner had they paid the price of release, than Hind

was admitted of his comrade's gang; he took the oath of fealty,

and by way of winning his spurs was bid to hold up a traveller on

Shooter's Hill. Granted his choice of a mount, he straightway

took the finest in the stable, with that keen perception of

horse-flesh which never deserted him, and he confronted his first

victim in the liveliest of humours. There was no falter in his

voice, no hint of inexperience in his manner, when he shouted the

battle-cry: `Stand and deliver!' The horseman, fearful of his

life, instantly surrendered a purse of ten sovereigns, as to the

most practised assailant on the road. Whereupon Hind, with a

flourish of ancient courtesy, gave him twenty shillings to bear

his charges. `This,' said he, `is for handsale sake '; and thus

they parted in mutual compliment and content.

Allen was overjoyed at his novice's prowess. `Did you not see,'

he cried to his companions, `how he robbed him with a grace?'

And well did the trooper deserve his captain's compliment, for

his art was perfect from the first. In bravery as in gallantry

he knew no rival, and he plundered with so elegant a style, that

only a churlish victim could resent the extortion. He would as

soon have turned his back upon an enemy as demand a purse

uncovered. For every man he had a quip, for every woman a

compliment; nor did he ever conceal the truth that the means were

for him as important as the end. Though he loved money, he still

insisted that it should be yielded in freedom and good temper;

and while he emptied more coaches than any man in England, he was

never at a loss for admirers.

Under Allen he served a brilliant apprenticeship. Enrolled as a

servant, he speedily sat at the master's right hand, and his

nimble brains devised many a pretty campaign. For a while

success dogged the horse-hoofs of the gang; with wealth came

immunity, and not one of the warriors had the misfortune to look

out upon the world through a grate. They robbed with dignity,

even with splendour. Now they would drive forth in a coach and

four, carrying with them a whole armoury of offensive weapons;

now they would take the road apparelled as noblemen, and attended

at a discreet distance by their proper servants. But

recklessness brought the inevitable disaster; and it was no less

a personage than Oliver Cromwell who overcame the hitherto

invincible Allen. A handful of the gang attacked Oliver on his

way from Huntingdon, but the marauders were outmatched, and the

most of them were forced to surrender. Allen, taken red-handed,

swung at Tyburn; Hind, with his better mount and defter

horsemanship, rode clear away.

The loss of his friend was a lesson in caution, and

henceforth Hind resolved to follow his craft in solitude. He

had embellished his native talent with all the instruction that

others could impart, and he reflected that he who rode alone

neither ran risk of discovery nor had any need to share his

booty. Thus he began his easy, untrammelled career, making time

and space of no account by his rapid, fearless journeys. Now he

was prancing the moors of Yorkshire, now he was scouring the

plain between Gloucester and Tewkesbury, but wherever he rode, he

had a purse in his pocket and a jest on his tongue. To recall

his prowess is to ride with him (in fancy) under the open sky

along the fair, beaten road; to put up with him at the busy,

white posthouse, to drink unnumbered pints of mulled sack with

the round-bellied landlord, to exchange boastful stories over the

hospitable fire, and to ride forth in the morning with the joyous

uncertainty of travel upon you. Failure alone lay outside his

experience, and he presently became at once the terror and the

hero of England.

Not only was his courage conspicuous; luck also was his constant

companion; and a happy bewitchment protected him for three years

against the possibility of harm. He had been lying at Hatfield,

at the George Inn, and set out in the early morning for London.

As he neared the town-gate, an old beldame begged an alms of him,

and though Hind, not liking her ill-favoured visage, would have

spurred forward, the beldame's glittering eye held his horse

motionless. `Good woman,' cried Hind, flinging her a crown,

`I am in haste; pray let me pass.' `Sir,' answered the witch,

`three days I have awaited your coming. Would you have me lose

my labour now?' And with Hind's assent the sphinx delivered her

message: `Captain Hind,' said she, `your life is beset with

constant danger, and since from your birth I have wished you

well, my poor skill has devised a perfect safeguard.' With this

she gave him a small box containing what might have been a

sundial or compass. `Watch this star,' quoth she, `and when you

know not your road, follow its guidance. Thus you shall be

preserved from every peril for the space of three years.

Thereafter, if you still have faith in my devotion, seek me

again, and I will renew the virtue of the charm.'

Hind took the box joyfully; but when he turned to murmur a word

of gratitude, the witch struck his nag's flanks with a white

wand, the horse leapt vehemently forward, and Hind saw his

benefactress no more. Henceforth, however, a warning voice spoke

to him as plainly as did the demon to Socrates; and had he but

obeyed the beldame's admonition, he might have escaped a violent

death. For he passed the last day of the third year at the siege

of Youghal, where; deprived of happy guidance, he was seriously

wounded, and whence he presently regained England to his own

undoing.

So long as he kept to the road, his life was one long comedy.

His wit and address were inexhaustible, and fortune never

found him at a loss. He would avert suspicion with the tune of a

psalm, as when, habited like a pious shepherd, he broke a

traveller's head with his crook, and deprived him of his horse.

An early adventure was to force a pot-valiant parson, who had

drunk a cup too much at a wedding, into a rarely farcical

situation. Hind, having robbed two gentlemen's servants of a

round sum, went ambling along the road until he encountered a

parson. `Sir,' said he, `I am closely pursued by robbers. You,

I dare swear, will not stand by and see me plundered.' Before

the parson could protest, he thrust a pistol into his hand, and

bade him fire it at the first comer, while he rode off to raise

the county. Meanwhile the rifled travellers came up with the

parson, who, straightway, mistaking them for thieves, fired

without effect, and then, riding forward, flung the pistol in the

face of the nearest. Thus the parson of the parish was dragged

before the magistrate, while Hind, before his dupe could furnish

an explanation, had placed many a mile between himself and his

adversary.

Though he could on occasion show a clean pair of heels, Hind was

never lacking in valiance; and, another day, meeting a traveller

with a hundred pounds in his pocket, he challenged him to fight

there and then, staked his own horse against the money, and

declared that he should win who drew first blood. `If I am the

conqueror,' said the magnanimous Captain, `I will give you ten

pounds for your journey. If you are favoured of fortune, you

shall give me your servant's horse.' The terms were

instantly accepted, and in two minutes Hind had run his adversary

through the sword-arm. But finding that his victim was but a

poor squire going to London to pay his composition, he not only

returned his money, but sought him out a surgeon, and gave him

the best dinner the countryside could afford.

Thus it was his pleasure to act as a providence, many a time

robbing Peter to pay Paul, and stripping the niggard that he

might indulge his fervent love of generosity. Of all usurers and

bailiffs he had a wholesome horror, and merry was the prank which

he played upon the extortionate money-lender of Warwick. Riding

on an easy rein through the town, Hind heard a tumult at a street

corner, and inquiring the cause, was told that an innkeeper was

arrested by a thievish usurer for a paltry twenty pounds.

Dismounting, this providence in jack-boots discharged the debt,

cancelled the bond, and took the innkeeper's goods for his own

security. And thereupon overtaking the usurer, `My friend!' he

exclaimed, `I lent you late a sum of twenty pounds. Repay it at

once, or I take your miserable life.' The usurer was obliged to

return the money, with another twenty for interest, and when he

would take the law of the innkeeper, was shown the bond duly

cancelled, and was flogged wellnigh to death for his pains.

So Hind rode the world up and down, redressing grievances like an

Eastern monarch, and rejoicing in the abasement of the evildoer.

Nor was the spirit of his adventure bounded by the ocean.

More than once he crossed the seas; the Hague knew him, and

Amsterdam, though these somnolent cities gave small occasion for

the display of his talents. It was from Scilly that he crossed

to the Isle of Man, where, being recommended to Lord Derby, he

gained high favour, and received in exchange for his jests a

comfortable stipend. Hitherto, said the Chronicles, thieving was

unknown in the island. A man might walk whither he would, a bag

of gold in one hand, a switch in the other, and fear no danger.

But no sooner had Hind appeared at Douglas than honest citizens

were pilfered at every turn. In dismay they sought the

protection of the Governor, who instantly suspected Hind, and

gallantly disclosed his suspicions to the Captain. `My lord!'

exclaimed Hind, a blush upon his cheek, `I protest my innocence;

but willingly will I suffer the heaviest penalty of your law if I

am recognised for the thief.' The victims, confronted with their

robber, knew him not, picturing to the Governor a monster with

long hair and unkempt beard. Hind, acquitted with apologies,

fetched from his lodging the disguise of periwig and beard.

`They laugh who win!' he murmured, and thus forced forgiveness

and a chuckle even from his judges.

As became a gentleman-adventurer, Captain Hind was staunch in his

loyalty to his murdered King. To strip the wealthy was always

reputable, but to rob a Regicide was a masterpiece of well-doing.

A fervent zeal to lighten Cromwell's pocket had brought the

illustrious Allen to the gallows. But Hind was not one whit

abashed, and he would never forego the chance of an encounter

with his country's enemies. His treatment of Hugh Peters in

Enfield Chace is among his triumphs. At the first encounter the

Presbyterian plucked up courage enough to oppose his adversary

with texts. To Hind's command of `Stand and deliver!' duly

enforced with a loaded pistol, the ineffable Peters replied with

ox-eye sanctimoniously upturned: `Thou shalt not steal; let him

that stole, steal no more,' adding thereto other variations of

the eighth commandment. Hind immediately countered with

exhortations against the awful sin of murder, and rebuked the

blasphemy of the Regicides, who, to defend their own infamy,

would wrest Scripture from its meaning. `Did you not, O monster

of impiety,' mimicked Hind in the preacher's own voice, `pervert

for your own advantage the words of the Psalmist, who said,

``Bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of

iron''? Moreover, was it not Solomon who wrote: ``Men do not

despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is

hungry''? And is not my soul hungry for gold and the Regicides'

discomfiture?' Peters was still fumbling after texts when the

final argument: `Deliver thy money, or I will send thee out of

the world!' frightened him into submission, and thirty broad

pieces were Hind's reward.

Not long afterwards he confronted Bradshaw near Sherborne, and,

having taken from him a purse fat with Jacobuses, he bade the

Sergeant stand uncovered while he delivered a discourse upon

gold, thus shaped by tradition: `Ay, marry, sir, this is the

metal that wins my heart for ever! O precious gold, I admire and

adore thee as much as Bradshaw, Prynne, or any villain of the

same stamp. This is that incomparable medicament, which the

republican physicians call the wonder-working plaster. It is

truly catholic in operation, and somewhat akin to the Jesuit's

powder, but more effectual. The virtues of it are strange and

various; it makes justice deaf as well as blind, and takes out

spots of the deepest treason more cleverly than castle-soap does

common stains; it alters a man's constitution in two or three

days, more than the virtuoso's transfusion of blood can do in

seven years. `Tis a great alexiopharmick, and helps poisonous

principles of rebellion, and those that use them. It

miraculously exalts and purifies the eyesight, and makes traitors

behold nothing but innocence in the blackest malefactors. `Tis a

mighty cordial for a declining cause; it stifles faction or

schism, as certainly as the itch is destroyed by butter and

brimstone. In a word, it makes wise men fools, and fools wise

men, and both knaves. The very colour of this precious balm is

bright and dazzling. If it be properly applied to the fist, that

is in a decent manner, and a competent dose, it infallibly

performs all the cures which the evils of humanity crave.' Thus

having spoken, he killed the six horses of Bradshaw's coach, and

went contemptuously on his way.

But he was not a Cavalier merely in sympathy, nor was he content

to prove his loyalty by robbing Roundheads. He, too, would

strike a blow for his King, and he showed, first with the royal

army in Scotland, and afterwards at Worcester, what he dared in a

righteous cause. Indeed, it was his part in the unhappy battle

that cost him his life, and there is a strange irony in the

reflection that, on the self-same day whereon Sir Thomas Urquhart

lost his precious manuscripts in Worcester's kennels, the neck of

James Hind was made ripe for the halter. His capture was due to

treachery. Towards the end of 1651 he was lodged with one

Denzys, a barber, over against St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet

Street. Maybe he had chosen his hiding-place for its

neighbourhood to Moll Cutpurse's own sanctuary. But a pack of

traitors discovered him, and haling him before the Speaker of the

House of Commons, got him committed forthwith to Newgate.

At first he was charged with theft and murder, and was actually

condemned for killing George Sympson at Knole in Berkshire. But

the day after his sentence, an Act of Oblivion was passed, and

Hind was put upon trial for treason. During his examination he

behaved with the utmost gaiety, boastfully enlarging upon his

services to the King's cause. `These are filthy jingling spurs,'

said he as he left the bar, pointing to the irons about his legs,

`but I hope to exchange them ere long.' His good-humour remained

with him to the end. He jested in prison as he jested on the

road, and it was with a light heart that he mounted the scaffold

built for him at Worcester. His was the fate reserved for

traitors: he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and though his

head was privily stolen and buried on the day of execution, his

quarters were displayed upon the town walls, until time and the

birds destoyed{sic} them utterly.

Thus died the most famous highwayman that ever drew rein upon an

English road; and he died the death of a hero. The unnumbered

crimes of violence and robbery wherewith he might have been

charged weighed not a feather's weight upon his destiny; he

suffered not in the cause of plunder, but in the cause of Charles

Stuart. And in thus excusing his death, his contemporaries did

him scant justice. For while in treasonable loyalty he had a

thousand rivals, on the road he was the first exponent of the

grand manner. The middle of the seventeenth century was, in

truth, the golden age of the Road. Not only were all the

highwaymen Cavaliers, but many a Cavalier turned highwayman.

Broken at their King's defeat, a hundred captains took pistol and

vizard, and revenged themselves as freebooters upon the King's

enemies. And though Hind was outlaw first and royalist

afterwards, he was still the most brilliant collector of them

all. If he owed something to his master, Allen, he added from

the storehouse of his own genius a host of new precepts, and was

the first to establish an enduring tradition.

Before all things he insisted upon courtesy; a guinea stolen

by an awkward ruffian was a sorry theft; levied by a gentleman of

the highway, it was a tribute paid to courage by generosity.

Nothing would atone for an insult offered to a lady; and when it

was Hind's duty to seize part of a gentlewoman's dowry on the

Petersfield road, he not only pleaded his necessity in eloquent

excuse, but he made many promises on behalf of knight-errantry

and damsels in distress. Never would he extort a trinket to

which association had given a sentimental worth; during a long

career he never left any man, save a Roundhead, penniless upon

the road; nor was it his custom to strip the master without

giving the man a trifle for his pains. His courage, moreover,

was equal to his understanding. Since he was afraid of nothing,

it was not his habit to bluster when he was not determined to

have his way. When once his pistol was levelled, when once the

solemn order was given, the victim must either fight or

surrender; and Hind was never the man to decline a combat with

any weapons and in any circumstances.

Like the true artist that he was, he neglected no detail of his

craft. As he was a perfect shot, so also he was a finished

horseman; and his skill not only secured him against capture, but

also helped him to the theft of such horses as his necessities

required, or to the exchange of a worn-out jade for a mettled

prancer. Once upon a time a credulous farmer offered twenty

pounds and his own gelding for the Captain's mount. Hind struck

a bargain at once, and as they jogged along the road he

persuaded the farmer to set his newly-purchased horse at the

tallest hedge, the broadest ditch. The bumpkin failed, as Hind

knew he would fail; and, begging the loan for an instant of his

ancient steed, Hind not only showed what horsemanship could

accomplish, but straightway rode off with the better horse and

twenty pounds in his pocket. So marvellously did his reputation

grow, that it became a distinction to be outwitted by him, and

the brains of innocent men were racked to invent tricks which

might have been put upon them by the illustrious Captain. Thus

livelier jests and madder exploits were fathered upon him than

upon any of his kind, and he has remained for two centuries the

prime favourite of the chap-books.

Robbing alone, he could afford to despise pedantry: did he meet a

traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the pass-word

(`the fiddler's paid,' or what not), as though the highway had

not its code of morals; nor did he scruple, when it served his

purpose, to rob the bunglers of his own profession. By this

means, indeed, he raised the standard of the Road and warned the

incompetent to embrace an easier trade. While he never took a

shilling without sweetening his depredation with a joke, he was,

like all humorists, an acute philosopher. `Remember what I tell

you,' he said to the foolish persons who once attempted to rob

him, the master-thief of England, `disgrace not yourself for

small sums, but aim high, and for great ones; the least will

bring you to the gallows.' There, in five lines, is the

whole philosophy of thieving, and many a poor devil has leapt

from the cart to his last dance because he neglected the counsel

of the illustrious Hind. Among his aversions were lawyers and

thief-catchers. `Truly I could wish,' he exclaimed in court,

`that full-fed fees were as little used in England among lawyers

as the eating of swine's flesh was among the Jews.' When you

remember the terms of friendship whereon he lived with Moll

Cutpurse, his hatred of the thief-catcher, who would hang his

brother for `the lucre of ten pounds, which is the reward,' or

who would swallow a false oath `as easily as one would swallow

buttered fish,' is a trifle mysterious. Perhaps before his death

an estrangement divided Hind and Moll. Was it that the Roaring

Girl was too anxious to take the credit of Hind's success? Or

did he harbour the unjust suspicion that when the last descent

was made upon him at the barber's, Moll might have given a

friendly warning?

Of this he made no confession, but the honest thief was ever a

liberal hater of spies and attorneys, and Hind's prudence is

unquestioned. A miracle of intelligence, a master of style, he

excelled all his contemporaries and set up for posterity an

unattainable standard. The eighteenth century flattered him by

its imitation; but cowardice and swagger compelled it to limp

many a dishonourable league behind. Despite the single

inspiration of dancing a corant upon the green, Claude Duval,

compared to Hind, was an empty braggart. Captain Stafford

spoiled the best of his effects with a more than brutal vice.

Neither Mull-Sack nor the Golden Farmer, for all their long life

and handsome plunder, are comparable for an instant to the robber

of Peters and Bradshaw. They kept their fist fiercely upon the

gold of others, and cared not by what artifice it was extorted.

Hind never took a sovereign meanly; he approached no enterprise

which he did not adorn. Living in a true Augustan age, he was a

classic among highwaymen, the very Virgil of the Pad.

MOLL CUTPURSE AND

JONATHAN WILD

I

MOLL CUTPURSE

MOLL CUTPURSE

THE most illustrious woman of an illustrious age, Moll Cutpurse

has never lacked the recognition due to her genius. She was

scarce of age when the town devoured in greedy admiration the

first record of her pranks and exploits. A year later Middleton

made her the heroine of a sparkling comedy. Thereafter she

became the favourite of the rufflers, the commonplace of the

poets. Newgate knew her, and Fleet Street; her manly figure was

as familiar in the Bear Garden as at the Devil Tavern; courted

alike by the thief and his victim, for fifty years she lived a

life brilliant as sunlight, many-coloured as a rainbow. And she

is remembered, after the lapse of centuries, not only as the

Queen-Regent of Misrule, the benevolent tyrant of cly-filers and

heavers, of hacks and blades, but as the incomparable Roaring

Girl, free of the playhouse, who perchance presided with Ben

Jonson over the Parliament of Wits.

She was born in the Barbican at the heyday of England's

greatness, four years after the glorious defeat of the Armada,

and had to her father an honest shoemaker. She came into the

world (saith rumour) with her fist doubled, and even in the

cradle gave proof of a boyish, boisterous disposition. Her

girlhood, if the word be not an affront to her mannish character,

was as tempestuous as a wind-blown petticoat. A very `tomrig and

rump-scuttle,' she knew only the sports of boys: her war-like

spirit counted no excuse too slight for a battle; and so valiant

a lad was she of her hands, so well skilled in cudgel-play, that

none ever wrested a victory from fighting Moll. While other

girls were content to hem a kerchief or mark a sampler, Moll

would escape to the Bear Garden, and there enjoy the sport of

baiting, whose loyal patron she remained unto the end. That

which most bitterly affronted her was the magpie talk of the

wenches. `Why,' she would ask in a fury of indignation, `why

crouch over the fire with a pack of gossips, when the highway

invites you to romance? Why finger a distaff, when a

quarterstaff comes more aptly to your hand?'

And thus she grew in age and stature, a stranger to the soft

delights of her sex, her heart still deaf to the trivial voice of

love. Had not a wayward accident cumbered her with a kirtle, she

would have sought death or glory in the wars; she would have gone

with Colonel Downe's men upon the road; she would have sailed to

the Spanish Main for pieces of eight. But the tyranny of

womanhood was as yet supreme, and the honest shoemaker, ignorant

of his daughter's talent, bade her take service at a

respectable saddler's, and thus suppress the frowardness of her

passion. Her rebellion was instant. Never would she abandon the

sword and the wrestling-booth for the harmless bodkin and the

hearthstone of domesticity. Being absolute in refusal, she was

kidnapped by her friends and sent on board a ship, bound for

Virginia and slavery. There, in the dearth of womankind, even so

sturdy a wench as Moll might have found a husband; but the

enterprise was little to her taste, and, always resourceful, she

escaped from shipboard before the captain had weighed his anchor.

Henceforth she resolved her life should be free and chainless as

the winds. Never more should needle and thread tempt her to a

womanish inactivity. As Hercules, whose counterpart she was,

changed his club for the distaff of Omphale, so would she put off

the wimple and bodice of her sex for jerkin and galligaskins. If

she could not allure manhood, then would she brave it. And

though she might not cross swords with her country's foes, at

least she might levy tribute upon the unjustly rich, and confront

an enemy wherever there was a full pocket.

Her entrance into a gang of thieves was beset by no difficulty.

The Bear Garden, always her favourite resort, had made her

acquainted with all the divers and rumpads of the town. The

time, moreover, was favourable to enterprise, and once again was

genius born into a golden age. The cutting of purses was an

art brought to perfection, and already the more elegant practice

of picking pockets was understood. The transition gave scope for

endless ingenuity, and Moll was not slow in mastering the theory

of either craft. It was a changing fashion of dress, as I have

said, which forced a new tactic upon the thief; the pocket was

invented because the hanging purse was too easy a prey for the

thievish scissors. And no sooner did the world conceal its

wealth in pockets than the cly-filer was born to extract the

booty with his long, nimble fingers. The trick was managed with

an admirable forethought, which has been a constant example to

after ages. The file was always accompanied by a bull:, whose

duty it was to jostle and distract the victim while his pockets

were rifled. The bung, or what not, was rapidly passed on to the

attendant rub, who scurried off before the cry of STOP THIEF!

could be raised.

Thus was the craft of thieving practised when Moll was enrolled a

humble member of the gang. Yet nature had not endowed her with

the qualities which ensure an active triumph. `The best signs

and marks of a happy, industrious hand,' wrote the hoyden, `is a

long middle finger, equally suited with that they call the fool's

or first finger.' Now, though she was never a clumsy jade, the

practice of sword-play and quarterstaff had not refined the

industry of her hands, which were the rather framed for strength

than for delicacy. So that though she served a willing

apprenticeship, and eagerly shared the risks of her chosen

trade, the fear of Newgate and Tyburn weighed heavily upon her

spirit, and she cast about her for a method of escape. Avoiding

the danger of discovery, she was loth to forego her just profit,

and hoped that intelligence might atone for her sturdy, inactive

fingers. Already she had endeared herself to the gang by

unnumbered acts of kindness and generosity; already her

inflexible justice had made her umpire in many a difficult

dispute. If a rascal could be bought off at the gallows' foot,

there was Moll with an open purse; and so speedily did she

penetrate all the secrets of thievish policy, that her counsel

and comfort were soon indispensable.

Here, then, was her opportunity. Always a diplomatist rather

than a general, she gave up the battlefield for the council

chamber. She planned the robberies which defter hands achieved;

and, turning herself from cly-filer to fence, she received and

changed to money all the watches and trinkets stolen by the gang.

Were a citizen robbed upon the highway, he straightway betook

himself to Moll, and his property was presently returned him at a

handsome price. Her house, in short, became a brokery. Hither

the blades and divers brought their purchases, and sought the

ransom; hither came the outraged victims to buy again the jewels

and rings which thievish fingers had pinched. With prosperity

her method improved, until at last her statesmanship controlled

the remotest details of the craft. Did one of her gang get to

work overnight and carry off a wealthy swag, she had due

intelligence of the affair betimes next morning, so that,

furnished with an inventory of the booty, she might make a just

division, or be prepared for the advent of the rightful owner.

So she gained a complete ascendency over her fellows. And when

once her position was assured, she came forth a pitiless

autocrat. Henceforth the gang existed for her pleasure, not she

for the gang's; and she was as urgent to punish insubordination

as is an empress to avenge the heinous sin of treason. The

pickpocket who had claimed her protection knew no more the

delight of freedom. If he dared conceal the booty that was his,

he had an enemy more powerful than the law, and many a time did

contumacy pay the last penalty at the gallows. But the faithful

also had their reward, for Moll never deserted a comrade, and

while she lived in perfect safety herself she knew well how to

contrive the safety of others. Nor was she content merely to

discharge those duties of the fence for which an instinct of

statecraft designed her. Her restless brain seethed with plans

of plunder, and if her hands were idle it was her direction that

emptied half the pockets in London. Having drilled her army of

divers to an unparalleled activity, she cast about for some fresh

method of warfare, and so enrolled a regiment of heavers, who

would lurk at the mercers' doors for an opportunity to carry off

ledgers and account-books. The price of redemption was fixed

by Moll herself, and until the mercers were aroused by

frequent losses to a quicker vigilance, the trade was profitably

secure.

Meanwhile new clients were ever seeking her aid, and, already

empress of the thieves, she presently aspired to the friendship

and patronage of the highwaymen. Though she did not dispose of

their booty, she was appointed their banker, and vast was the

treasure entrusted to the coffers of honest Moll. Now, it was

her pride to keep only the best company, for she hated stupidity

worse than a clumsy hand, and they were men of wit and spirit who

frequented her house. Thither came the famous Captain Hind, the

Regicides' inveterate enemy, whose lofty achievements Moll, with

an amiable extravagance, was wont to claim for her own. Thither

came the unamiably notorious Mull Sack, who once emptied

Cromwell's pocket on the Mall, and whose courage was as

formidable as his rough-edged tongue. Another favourite was the

ingenious Crowder, whose humour it was to take the road habited

like a bishop, and who surprised the victims of his greed with

ghostly counsel. Thus it was a merry party that assembled in the

lady's parlour, loyal to the memory of the martyred king, and

quick to fling back an offending pleasantry.

But the house in Fleet Street was a refuge as well as a resort,

the sanctuary of a hundred rascals, whose misdeeds were not too

flagrantly discovered. For, while Moll always allowed discretion

to govern her conduct, while she would risk no present

security for a vague promise of advantages to come, her secret

influence in Newgate made her more powerful than the hangman and

the whole bench of judges. There was no turnkey who was not her

devoted servitor, but it was the clerk of Newgate to whom she and

her family were most deeply beholden. This was one Ralph

Briscoe, as pretty a fellow as ever deserted the law for a bull-

baiting. Though wizened and clerkly in appearance, he was of a

lofty courage; and Moll was heard to declare that had she not

been sworn to celibacy, she would have cast an eye upon the

faithful Ralph, who was obedient to her behests whether at Gaol

Delivery or Bear Garden. For her he would pack a jury or get a

reprieve; for him she would bait a bull with the fiercest dogs in

London. Why then should she fear the law, when the clerk of

Newgate and Gregory the Hangman fought upon her side?

For others the arbiter of life and death, she was only thrice in

an unexampled career confronted with the law. Her first occasion

of arrest was so paltry that it brought discredit only on the

constable. This jack-in-office, a very Dogberry, encountered

Moll returning down Ludgate Hill from some merry-making, a

lanthorn carried pompously before her. Startled by her attire he

questioned her closely, and receiving insult for answer, promptly

carried her to the Round House. The customary garnish made her

free or the prison, and next morning a brief interview with

the Lord Mayor restored Moll to liberty but not to forgetfulness.

She had yet to wreak her vengeance upon the constable for a

monstrous affront, and hearing presently that he had a rich uncle

in Shropshire, she killed the old gentleman (in imagination) and

made the constable his heir. Instantly a retainer, in the true

garb and accent of the country, carried the news to Dogberry, and

sent him off to Ludlow on the costliest of fool's errands. He

purchased a horse and set forth joyously, as became a man of

property; he limped home, broken in purse and spirit, the hapless

object of ridicule and contempt. Perhaps he guessed the author

of this sprightly outrage; but Moll, for her part, was far too

finished a humorist to reveal the truth, and hereafter she was

content to swell the jesting chorus.

Her second encounter with justice was no mere pleasantry, and it

was only her marvellous generalship that snatched her career from

untimely ruin and herself from the clutch of Master Gregory. Two

of her emissaries had encountered a farmer in Chancery Lane.

They spoke with him first at Smithfield, and knew that his pocket

was well lined with bank-notes. An improvised quarrel at a

tavern-door threw the farmer off his guard, and though he

defended the money, his watch was snatched from his fob and duly

carried to Moll. The next day the victim, anxious to repurchase

his watch, repaired to Fleet Street, where Moll generously

promised to recover the stolen property. Unhappily security

had encouraged recklessness, and as the farmer turned to leave he

espied his own watch hanging among other trinkets upon the wall.

With a rare discretion he held his peace until he had called a

constable to his aid, and this time the Roaring Girl was lodged

in Newgate, with an ugly crime laid to her charge.

Committed for trial, she demanded that the watch should be left

in the constable's keeping, and, pleading not guilty when the

sessions came round, insisted that her watch and the farmer's

were not the same. The farmer, anxious to acknowledge his

property, demanded the constable to deliver the watch, that it

might be sworn to in open court; and when the constable put his

hand to his pocket the only piece of damning evidence had

vanished, stolen by the nimble fingers of one of Moll's officers.

Thus with admirable trickery and a perfect sense of dramatic

effect she contrived her escape, and never again ran the risk of

a sudden discovery. For experience brought caution in its train,

and though this wiliest of fences lived almost within the shadow

of Newgate, though she was as familiar in the prison yard as at

the Globe Tavern, her nightly resort, she obeyed the rules of

life and law with so precise an exactitude that suspicion could

never fasten upon her. Her kingdom was midway between robbery

and justice. And as she controlled the mystery of thieving so,

in reality, she meted out punishment to the evildoer. Honest

citizens were robbed with small risk to life or property.

For Moll always frowned upon violence, and was ever ready to

restore the booty for a fair ransom. And the thieves, driven by

discipline to a certain humanity, plied their trade with an

obedience and orderliness hitherto unknown. Moll's then was no

mean achievement. Her career was not circumscribed by her trade,

and the Roaring Girl, the daredevil companion of the wits and

bloods, enjoyed a fame no less glorious than the Queen of

Thieves.

`Enter Moll in a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard.' Thus in

the old comedy she comes upon the stage; and truly it was by her

clothes that she was first notorious. By accident a woman, by

habit a man, she must needs invent a costume proper to her

pursuits. But she was no shrieking reformer, no fanatic spying

regeneration in a pair of breeches. Only in her attire she

showed her wit; and she went to a bull-baiting in such a dress as

well became her favourite sport. She was not of those who `walk

in spurs but never ride.' The jerkin, the doublet, the

galligaskins were put on to serve the practical purposes of life,

not to attract the policeman or the spinster. And when a

petticoat spread its ample folds beneath the doublet, not only

was her array handsome, but it symbolised the career of one who

was neither man nor woman, and yet both. After a while, however,

the petticoat seemed too tame for her stalwart temper, and she

exchanged it for the great Dutch slop, habited in which unseemly

garment she is pictured in the ancient prints.

Up and down the town she romped and scolded, earning the name

which Middleton gave her in her green girlhood. `She has the

spirit of four great parishes,' says the wit in the comedy, `and

a voice that will drown all the city.' If a gallant stood in the

way, she drew upon him in an instant, and he must be a clever

swordsman to hold his ground against the tomboy who had laid low

the German fencer himself. A good fellow always, she had ever a

merry word for the passer-by, and so sharp was her tongue that

none ever put a trick upon her. Not to know Moll was to be

inglorious, and she `slipped from one company to another like a

fat eel between a Dutchman's fingers.' Now at Parker's Ordinary,

now at the Bear Garden, she frequented only the haunts of men,

and not until old age came upon her did she endure patiently the

presence of women.

Her voice and speech were suited to the galligaskin. She was a

true disciple of Maltre Fran<c,>ois, hating nothing so much as

mincing obscenity, and if she flavoured her discourse with many a

blasphemous quip, the blasphemy was `not so malicious as

customary.' Like the blood she was, she loved good ale and wine;

and she regarded it among her proudest titles to renown that she

was the first of women to smoke tobacco. Many was the pound of

best Virginian that she bought of Mistress Gallipot, and the

pipe, with monkey, dog, and eagle, is her constant emblem. Her

antic attire, the fearless courage of her pranks, now and again

involved her in disgrace or even jeopardised her freedom; but

her unchanging gaiety made light of disaster, and still she

laughed and rollicked in defiance of prude and pedant.

Her companion in many a fantastical adventure was Banks, the

vintner of Cheapside, that same Banks who taught his horse to

dance and shod him with silver. Now once upon a time a right

witty sport was devised between them. The vintner bet Moll

<Pd>20 that she would not ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch

astraddle on horseback, in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs.

The hoyden took him up in a moment, and added of her own devilry

a trumpet and banner. She set out from Charing Cross bravely

enough, and a trumpeter being an unwonted spectacle, the eyes of

all the town were clapped upon her. Yet none knew her until she

reached Bishopsgate, where an orange-wench set up the cry, `Moll

Cutpurse on horseback!' Instantly the cavalier was surrounded by

a noisy mob. Some would have torn her from the saddle for an

imagined insult upon womanhood, others, more wisely minded,

laughed at the prank with good-humoured merriment. Every minute

the throng grew denser, and it had fared hardly with roystering

Moll, had not a wedding and the arrest of a debtor presently

distracted the gaping idlers. As the mob turned to gaze at the

fresh wonder, she spurred her horse until she gained Newington by

an unfrequented lane. There she waited until night should cover

her progress to Shoreditch, and thus peacefully she returned

home to lighten the vintner's pocket of twenty pounds.

The fame of the adventure spread abroad, and that the scandal

should not be repeated Moll was summoned before the Court of

Arches to answer a charge of appearing publicly in mannish

apparel. The august tribunal had no terror for her, and she

received her sentence to do penance in a white sheet at Paul's

Cross during morning-service on a Sunday with an audacious

contempt. `They might as well have shamed a black dog as me,'

she proudly exclaimed; and why should she dread the white sheet,

when all the spectators looked with a lenient eye upon her

professed discomfiture?' For a halfpenny,' she said, `she would

have travelled to every market-town of England in the guise of a

penitent,' and having tippled off three quarts of sack she

swaggered to Paul's Cross in the maddest of humours. But not all

the courts on earth could lengthen her petticoat, or contract the

Dutch slop by a single fold. For a while, perhaps, she chastened

her costume, yet she soon reverted to the ancient mode, and to

her dying day went habited as a man.

As bear baiting was the passion of her life, so she was

scrupulous in the care and training of her dogs. She gave them

each a trundle-bed, wrapping them from the cold in sheets and

blankets, while their food would not have dishonoured a

gentleman's table. Parrots, too, gave a sense of colour and

companionship to her house; and it was in this love of pets,

and her devotion to cleanliness, that she showed a trace of

dormant womanhood. Abroad a ribald and a scold, at home she was

the neatest of housewives, and her parlour, with its mirrors and

its manifold ornaments, was the envy of the neighbours. So her

trade flourished, and she lived a life of comfort, of plenty

even, until the Civil War threw her out of work. When an

unnatural conflict set the whole country at loggerheads, what

occasion was there for the honest prig? And it is not surprising

that, like all the gentlemen adventurers of the age, Moll

remained most stubbornly loyal to the King's cause. She made the

conduit in Fleet Street run with wine when Charles came to London

in 1638; and it was her amiable pleasantry to give the name of

Strafford to a clever, cunning bull, and to dub the dogs that

assailed him Pym, Hampden, and the rest, that right heartily she

might applaud the courage of Strafford as he threw off his unwary

assailants.

So long as the quarrel lasted, she was compelled to follow a

profession more ancient than the fence's; for there is one

passion which war itself cannot extinguish. When once the King

had laid his head `down as upon a bed,' when once the Protector

had proclaimed his supremacy, the industry of the road revived;

and there was not a single diver or rumpad that did not declare

eternal war upon the black-hearted Regicides. With a laudable

devotion to her chosen cause, Moll despatched the most

experienced of her gang to rob Lady Fairfax on her way to

church; and there is a tradition that the Roaring Girl,

hearing that Fairfax himself would pass by Hounslow, rode forth

to meet him, and with her own voice bade him stand and deliver.

One would like to believe it; yet it is scarce credible. If

Fairfax had spent the balance of an ignominious career in being

plundered by a band of loyal brigands, he would not have had time

to justify the innumerable legends of pockets emptied and pistols

levelled at his head. Moreover, Moll herself was laden with

years, and she had always preferred the council chamber to the

battlefield. But it is certain that, with Captain Hind and Mull

Sack to aid, she schemed many a clever plot against the

Roundheads, and nobly she played her part in avenging the

martyred King.

Thus she declined into old age, attended, like Queen Mary, by her

maids, who would card, reel, spin, and beguile her leisure with

sweet singing. Though her spirit was untamed, the burden of her

years compelled her to a tranquil life. She, who formerly never

missed a bull-baiting, must now content herself with tick-tack.

Her fortune, moreover, had been wrecked in the Civil War. Though

silver shells still jingled in her pocket, time was she knew the

rattle of the yellow boys. But she never lost courage, and died

at last of a dropsy, in placid contentment with her lot.

Assuredly she was born at a time well suited to her genius. Had

she lived to-day, she might have been a `Pioneer'; she might even

have discussed some paltry problem of sex in a printed obscenity.

In her own freer, wiser age, she was not man's detractor, but

his rival; and if she never knew the passion of love, she was

always loyal to the obligation of friendship. By her will she

left twenty pounds to celebrate the Second Charles's restoration

to his kingdom; and you contemplate her career with the single

regret that she died a brief year before the red wine, thus

generously bestowed, bubbled at the fountain.

II

JONATHAN WILD

JONATHAN WILD

WHEN Jonathan Wild and the Count La Ruse, in Fielding's

narrative, took a hand at cards, Jonathan picked his opponent's

pocket, though he knew it was empty, while the Count, from sheer

force of habit, stacked the cards, though Wild had not a farthing

to lose. And if in his uncultured youth the great man stooped to

prig with his own hand, he was early cured of the weakness: so

that Fielding's picture of the hero taking a bottle-screw from

the Ordinary's pocket in the very moment of death is entirely

fanciful. For `this Machiavel of Thieves,' as a contemporary

styled him, left others to accomplish what his ingenuity had

planned. His was the high policy of theft. If he lived on terms

of familiar intimacy with the mill-kens, the bridle-culls, the

buttock-and-files of London, he was none the less the friend and

minister of justice. He enjoyed the freedom of Newgate and the

Old Bailey. He came and went as he liked: he packed juries, he

procured bail, he manufactured evidence; and there was scarce an

assize or a sessions passed but he slew his man.

The world knew him for a robber, yet could not refuse his

brilliant service. At the Poultry Counter, you are told, he laid

the foundations of his future greatness, and to the Poultry

Counter he was committed for some trifling debt ere he had fully

served his apprenticeship to the art and mystery of buckle-

making. There he learned his craft, and at his enlargement he

was able forthwith to commence thief-catcher. His plan was

conceived with an effrontery that was nothing less than genius.

On the one side he was the factor, or rather the tyrant, of the

cross-coves: on the other he was the trusted agent of justice,

the benefactor of the outraged and the plundered. Among his

earliest exploits was the recovery of the Countess of G--d--n's

chair, impudently carried off when her ladyship had but just

alighted; and the courage wherewith he brought to justice the

murderers of one Mrs. Knap, who had been slain for some trifling

booty, established his reputation as upon a rock. He at once

advertised himself in the public prints as Thief-Catcher General

of Great Britain and Ireland, and proceeded to send to the

gallows every scoundrel that dared dispute his position.

His opportunities of gain were infinite. Even if he did not

organise the robbery which his cunning was presently to discover,

he had spies in every hole and corner to set him on the felon's

track. Nor did he leave a single enterprise to chance: `He

divided the city and suburbs into wards or divisions, and

appointed the persons who were to attend each ward, and kept them

strictly to their duty.' If a subordinate dared to disobey

or to shrink from murder, Jonathan hanged him at the next assize,

and happily for him he had not a single confederate whose neck he

might not put in the halter when he chose. Thus he preserved the

union and the fidelity of his gang, punishing by judicial murder

the smallest insubordination, the faintest suspicion of rivalry.

Even when he had shut his victim up in Newgate, he did not leave

him so long as there was a chance of blackmail. He would make

the most generous offers of evidence and defence to every thief

that had a stiver left him. But whether or not he kept his

bargain--that depended upon policy and inclination. On one

occasion, when he had brought a friend to the Old Bailey, and

relented at the last moment, he kept the prosecutor drunk from

the noble motive of self-interest, until the case was over. And

so esteemed was he of the officers of the law that even this

interference did but procure a reprimand.

His meanest action marked him out from his fellows, but it was

not until he habitually pillaged the treasures he afterwards

restored to their grateful owners for a handsome consideration,

that his art reached the highest point of excellence. The event

was managed by him with amazing adroitness from beginning to end.

It was he who discovered the wealth and habit of the victim; it

was he who posted the thief and seized the plunder, giving a

paltry commission to his hirelings for the trouble; it was he who

kept whatever valuables were lost in the transaction; and as he

was the servant of the Court, discovery or inconvenience was

impossible. Surely the Machiavel of Thieves is justified of his

title. He was known to all the rich and titled folk in town; and

if he was generally able to give them back their stolen valuables

at something more than double their value, he treated his clients

with a most proper insolence. When Lady M--n was unlucky enough

to lose a silver buckle at Windsor, she asked Wild to recover it,

and offered the hero twenty pounds for his trouble. `Zounds,

Madam,' says he, `you offer nothing. It cost the gentleman who

took it forty pounds for his coach, equipage, and other expenses

to Windsor.' His impudence increased with success, and in the

geniality of his cups he was wont to boast his amazing rogueries:

`hinting not without vanity at the poor Understandings of the

Greatest Part of Mankind, and his own Superior Cunning.'

In fifteen years he claimed <Pd>10,000 for his dividend of

recovered plunderings, and who shall estimate the moneys which

flowed to his treasury from blackmail and the robberies of his

gang? So brisk became his trade in jewels and the precious

metals that he opened relations with Holland, and was master of a

fleet. His splendour increased with wealth: he carried a silver-

mounted sword, and a footman tramped at his heels. `His table

was very splendid,' says a biographer: `he seldom dining under

five Dishes, the Reversions whereof were generally charitably

bestow'd on the Commonside felons.' At his second marriage with

Mrs. Mary D--n, the hempen widow of Scull D--n, his humour

was most happily expressed: he distributed white ribbons among

the turnkeys, he gave the Ordinary gloves and favours, he sent

the prisoners of Newgate several ankers of brandy for punch.

`Twas a fitting complaisance, since his fortune was drawn from

Newgate, and since he was destined himself, a few years later, to

drink punch--`a liquor nowhere spoken against in the

Scriptures'--with the same Ordinary whom he thus magnificently

decorated. Endowed with considerable courage, for a while he had

the prudence to save his skin, and despite his bravado he was

known on occasion to yield a plundered treasure to an accomplice

who set a pistol to his head. But it is certain that the

accomplice died at Tyburn for his pains, and on equal terms

Jonathan was resolute with the best. On the trail he was savage

as a wild beast. When he arrested James Wright for a robbery

committed upon the persons of the Earl of B--l--n and the Lord

Bruce, he held on to the victim's chin by his teeth--an exploit

which reminds you of the illustrious Tiger Roche.

Even in his lifetime he was generously styled the Great. The

scourge of London, he betrayed and destroyed every man that ever

dared to live upon terms of friendship with him. It was Jonathan

that made Blueskin a thief, and Jonathan screened his creature

from justice only so long as clemency seemed profitable. At the

first hint of disobedience Blueskin was committed to Newgate.

When he had stood his trial, and was being taken to the Condemned

Hole, he beckoned to Wild as though to a conference, and cut

his throat with a penknife. The assembled rogues and turnkeys

thought their Jonathan dead at last, and rejoiced exceedingly

therein. Straightway the poet of Newgate's Garland leaped into

verse:

Then hopeless of life,

He drew his penknife,

And made a sad widow of Jonathan's wife.

But forty pounds paid her, her grief shall appease,

And every man round me may rob, if he please.

But Jonathan recovered, and Molly, his wife, was destined a

second time to win the conspicuous honour that belongs to a

hempen widow.

As his career drew to its appointed close, Fortune withheld her

smiles. `People got so peery,' complained the great man, `that

ingenious men were put to dreadful shifts.' And then, highest

tribute to his greatness, an Act of Parliament was passed which

made it a capital offence `for a prig to steal with the hands of

other people'; and in the increase of public vigilance his

undoing became certain. On the 2nd of January, 1725, a day not

easy to forget, a creature of Wild's spoke with fifty yards of

lace, worth <Pd>40, at his Captain's bidding, and Wild, having

otherwise disposed of the plunder, was charged on the 10th of

March that he `did feloniously receive of Katharine Stetham ten

guineas on account and under colour of helping the said Katharine

Stetham to the said lace again, and did not then, nor any time

since, discover or apprehend, or cause to be apprehended and

brought to Justice, the persons that committed the said felony.'

Thus runs the indictment, and, to the inexpressible relief of

lesser men, Jonathan Wild was condemned to the gallows.

Thereupon he had serious thoughts of `putting his house in

order'; with an ironical smile he demanded an explanation of the

text: `Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree'; but,

presently reflecting that `his Time was but short in this World,

he improved it to the best advantage in Eating, Drinking,

Swearing, Cursing, and talking to his Visitants.' For all his

bragging, drink alone preserved his courage: `he was very

restless in the Condemned Hole,' though `he gave little or no

attention to the condemned Sermon which the purblind Ordinary

preached before him,' and which was, in Fielding's immortal

phrase, `unto the Greeks foolishness.' But in the moment of

death his distinction returned to him. He tried, and failed, to

kill himself; and his progress to the nubbing cheat was a triumph

of execration. He reached Tyburn through a howling mob, and died

to a yell of universal joy.

The Ordinary has left a record so precious and so lying, that it

must needs be quoted at length. The great Thief-Catcher's

confession is a masterpiece of comfort, and is so far removed

from the truth as completely to justify Fielding's incomparable

creation. `Finding there was no room for mercy (and how could I

expect mercy, who never showed any)'--thus does the devil

dodger dishonour our Jonathan's memory!--`as soon as I came into

the Condemned Hole, I began to think of making a preparation for

my soul. . . . To part with my wife, my dear Molly, is so great

an Affliction to me, that it touches me to the Quick, and is like

Daggers entering into my Heart.' How tame the Ordinary's

falsehood to the brilliant invention of Fielding, who makes

Jonathan kick his Tishy in the very shadow of the Tree! And the

Reverend Gentleman gains in unction as he goes: `In the Cart

they all kneeled down to prayers and seemed very penitent; the

Ordinary used all the means imaginable to make them think of

another World, and after singing a penitential Psalm, they cry'd

Lord Jesus Christ receive our Souls, the cart drew away and they

were all turned off. This is as good an account as can be given

by me.' Poor Ordinary! If he was modest, he was also

untruthful, and you are certain that it was not thus the hero met

his death.

Even had Fielding never written his masterpiece, Jonathan Wild

would still have been surnamed `The Great.' For scarce a chap-

book appeared in the year of Jonathan's death that did not expose

the only right and true view of his character. `His business,'

says one hack of prison literature, `at all times was to put a

false gloss upon things, and to make fools of mankind.' Another

precisely formulates the theory of greatness insisted upon by

Fielding with so lavish an irony and so masterly a wit. While it

is certain that The History of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild is as

noble a piece of irony as literature can show, while for the

qualities of wit and candour it is equal to its motive, it is

likewise true that therein you meet the indubitable Jonathan

Wild. It is an entertainment to compare the chap-books of the

time with the reasoned, finished work of art: not in any spirit

of pedantry--since accuracy in these matters is of small account,

but with intent to show how doubly fortunate Fielding was in his

genius and in his material. Of course the writer rejoiced in the

aid of imagination and eloquence; of course he embellished his

picture with such inspirations as Miss Laetitia and the Count; of

course he preserves from the first page to the last the highest

level of unrivalled irony. But the sketch was there before him,

and a lawyer's clerk had treated Jonathan in a vein of heroism

within a few weeks of his death. And since a plain statement is

never so true as fiction, Fielding's romance is still more

credible, still convinces with an easier effort, than the serious

and pedestrian records of contemporaries. Nor can you return to

its pages without realising that, so far from being `the

evolution of a purely intellectual conception,' Jonathan Wild

is a magnificently idealised and ironical portrait of a great

man.

III

A PARALLEL

(MOLL CUTPURSE AND

JONATHAN WILD)

A PARALLEL

(MOLL CUTPURSE AND JONATHAN WILD)

THEY plied the same trade, each with incomparable success. By

her, as by him, the art of the fence was carried to its ultimate

perfection. In their hands the high policy of theft wanted nor

dignity nor assurance. Neither harboured a single scheme which

was not straightway translated into action, and they were masters

at once of Newgate and the Highway. As none might rob without

the encouragement of his emperor, so none was hanged at Tyburn

while intrigue or bribery might avail to drag a half-doomed neck

from the halter; and not even Moll herself was more bitterly

tyrannical in the control of a reckless gang than the thin-jawed,

hatchet-faced Jonathan Wild.

They were statesmen rather than warriors--happy if they might

direct the enterprises of others, and determined to punish the

lightest disobedience by death. The mind of each was readier

than his right arm, and neither would risk an easy advantage by a

misunderstood or unwonted sleight of hand. But when you

leave the exercise of their craft to contemplate their character

with a larger eye, it is the woman who at every point has the

advantage. Not only was she the peerless inventor of a new

cunning; she was at home (and abroad) the better fellow. The

suppression of sex was in itself an unparalleled triumph, and the

most envious detractor could not but marvel at the domination of

her womanhood. Moreover, she shone in a gayer, more splendid

epoch. The worthy contemporary of Shakespeare, she had small

difficulty in performing feats of prowess and resource which

daunted the intrepid ruffians of the eighteenth century. Her

period, in brief, gave her an eternal superiority; and it were as

hopeless for Otway to surpass the master whom he disgraced, as

for Wild to o'ershadow the brilliant example of Moll Cutpurse.

Tyrants both, they exercised their sovereignty in accordance with

their varying temperament. Hers was a fine, fat, Falstaffian

humour, which, while it inspired Middleton, might have suggested

to Shakespeare an equal companion of the drunken knight. His was

but a narrow, cynic wit, not edged like the knife, which wellnigh

cut his throat, but blunt and scratching like a worn-toothed saw.

She laughed with a laugh that echoed from Ludgate to Charing

Cross, and her voice drowned all the City. He grinned rarely and

with malice; he piped in a voice shrill and acid as the tricks of

his mischievous imagination. She knew no cruelty beyond the

necessities of her life, and none regretted more than she the

inevitable death of a traitor. He lusted after destruction with

a fiendish temper, which was a grim anticipation of De Sade; he

would even smile as he saw the noose tighten round the necks of

the poor innocents he had beguiled to Tyburn. It was his boast

that he had contrived robberies for the mere glory of dragging

his silly victims to the gallows. But Moll, though she stood

half-way between the robber and his prey, would have sacrificed a

hundred well-earned commissions rather than see her friends and

comrades strangled. Her temperament compelled her to the loyal

support of her own order, and she would have shrunk in horror

from her rival, who, for all his assumed friendship with the

thief, was a staunch and subtle ally of justice.

Before all things she had the genius of success. Her public

offences were trivial and condoned. She died in her bed, full of

years and of honours, beloved by the light-fingered gentry,

reverenced by all the judges on the bench. He, for all the

sacrifices he made to a squint-eyed law, died execrated alike by

populace and police. Already Blueskin had done his worst with a

pen-knife; already Jack Sheppard and his comrades had warned

Drury Lane against the infamous thief-catcher. And so anxious,

on the other hand, was the law to be quit of their too zealous

servant, that an Act of Parliament was passed with the sole

object of placing Jonathan's head within the noose. His

method, meagre though masterly, lulled him too soon to an

impotent security. She, with her larger view of life, her

plumper sense of style, was content with nothing less than an

ultimate sovereignty, and manifestly did she prove her

superiority.

Though born for the wimple, she was more of a man than the

breeched and stockinged Jonathan, whose only deed of valiance was

to hang, terrier-like, by his teeth to an evasive enemy. While

he cheated at cards and cogged the dice, she trained dogs and

never missed a bear-baiting. He shrank, like the coward that he

was, from the exercise of manly sports; she cared not what were

the weapons--quarterstaff or broadsword--so long as she

vanquished her opponent. She scoured the town in search of

insult; he did but exert his cunning when a quarrel was put upon

him. Who, then, shall deny her manhood? Who shall whisper that

his style was the braver or the better suited to his sex?

As became a hero, she kept the best of loose company: her parlour

was ever packed with the friends of loyalty and adventure. Are

not Hind and Mull Sack worth a thousand Blueskins? Moreover,

plunder and wealth were not the only objects of her pursuit: she

was not merely a fence but a patriot, and she would have

accounted a thousand pounds well lost, if she did but compass the

discomfiture of a Parliament-man. Indeed, if Jonathan, the

thief-catcher, limped painfully after his magnificent

example, Jonathan the man and the sportsman confessed a pitiful

inferiority to the valiant Moll. Thus she avenged her sex by

distancing the most illustrious of her rivals; and if he pleads

for his credit a taste for theology, hers is the chuckle of

contemptuous superiority. She died a patriot, bequeathing a

fountain of wine to the champions of an exiled king; he died a

casuist, setting crabbed problems to the Ordinary. Here, again,

the advantage is evident: loyalty is the virtue of men; a sudden

attachment to religion is the last resource of the second-rate

citizen and of the trapped criminal.

RALPH BRISCOE

RALPH BRISCOE

A SPARE, lean frame; a small head set forward upon a pair of

sloping shoulders; a thin, sharp nose, and rat-like eyes; a flat,

hollow chest; shrunk shanks, modestly retreating from their

snuff-coloured hose--these are the tokens which served to remind

his friends of Ralph Briscoe, the Clerk of Newgate. As he left

the prison in the grey air of morning upon some errand of mercy

or revenge, he appeared the least fearsome of mortals, while an

awkward limp upon his left toe deepened the impression of

timidity. So abstract was his manner, so hesitant his gait, that

he would hug the wall as he went, nervously stroking its grimy

surface with his long, twittering fingers. But Ralph, as justice

and the Jug knew too well, was neither fool nor coward. His

character belied his outward seeming. A large soul had crept

into the case of his wizened body, and if a poltroon among his

ancestors had gifted him with an alien type, he had inherited

from some nameless warrior both courage and resource.

He was born in easy circumstances, and gently nurtured in the

distant village of Kensington. Though cast in a scholar's

mould, and very apt for learning, he rebelled from the outset

against a career of inaction. His lack of strength was never a

check upon his high stomach; he would fight with boys of twice

his size, and accept the certain defeat in a cheerful spirit of

dogged pugnacity. Moreover, if his arms were weak, his cunning

was as keen-edged as his tongue; and, before his stricken eye had

paled, he had commonly executed an ample vengeance upon his

enemy. Nor was it industry that placed him at the top of the

class. A ready wit made him master of the knowledge he despised.

But he would always desert his primer to follow the hangman's

lumbering cart up Tyburn Hill, and, still a mere imp of mischief,

he would run the weary way from Kensington to Shoe Lane on the

distant chance of a cock-fight. He was present, so he would

relate in after years, when Sir Thomas Jermin's man put his

famous trick upon the pit. With a hundred pounds in his pocket

and under his arm a dunghill cock, neatly trimmed for the fray,

the ingenious ruffian, as Briscoe would tell you, went off to

Shoe Lane, persuaded an accomplice to fight the cock in Sir

Thomas Jermin's name, and laid a level hundred against his own

bird. So lofty was Sir Thomas's repute that backers were easily

found, but the dunghill rooster instantly showed a clean pair of

heels, and the cheat was justified of his cunning.

Thus Ralph Briscoe learnt the first lessons in that art of

sharping wherein he was afterwards an adept; and when he

left school his head was packed with many a profitable device

which no book learning could impart. His father, however, still

resolute that he should join an intelligent profession, sent him

to Gray's Inn that he might study law. Here the elegance of his

handwriting gained him a rapid repute; his skill became the envy

of all the lean-souled clerks in the Inn, and he might have died

a respectable attorney had not the instinct of sport forced him

from the inkpot and parchment of his profession. Ill could he

tolerate the monotony and restraint of this clerkly life. In his

eyes law was an instrument, not of justice, but of jugglery. Men

were born, said his philosophy, rather to risk their necks than

ink their fingers; and if a bold adventure puts you in a

difficulty, why, then, you hire some straw-splitting attorney to

show his cunning. Indeed, the study of law was for him, as it

was for Falstaff, an excuse for many a bout and merry-making. He

loved his glass, and he loved his wench, and he loved a bull-

baiting better than either. It was his boast, and Moll

Cutpurse's compliment, that he never missed a match in his life,

and assuredly no man was better known in Paris Garden than the

intrepid Ralph Briscoe.

The cloistered seclusion of Gray's Inn grew daily more irksome.

There he would sit, in mute despair, drumming the table with his

fingers, and biting the quill, whose use he so bitterly

contemned. Of winter afternoons he would stare through the

leaded window-panes at the gaunt, leafless trees, on whose

summits swayed the cawing rooks, until servitude seemed

intolerable, and he prayed for the voice of the bearward that

summoned him to Southwark. And when the chained bear, the

familiar monkey on his back, followed the shrill bagpipe along

the curious street, Briscoe felt that blood, not ink, coursed in

his veins, forgot the tiresome impediment of the law, and joined

the throng, hungry for this sport of kings. Nor was he the

patron of an enterprise wherein he dared take no part. He was as

bold and venturesome as the bravest ruffler that ever backed a

dog at a baiting. When the bull, cruelly secured behind, met the

onslaught of his opponents, throwing them off, now this side, now

that, with his horns, Briscoe, lost in excitement, would leap

into the ring that not a point of the combat should escape him.

So it was that he won the friendship of his illustrious

benefactress, Moll Cutpurse. For, one day, when he had ventured

too near the maddened bull, the brute made a heave at his

breeches, which instantly gave way; and in another moment he

would have been gored to death, had not Moll seized him by the

collar and slung him out of the ring. Thus did his courage ever

contradict his appearance, and at the dangerous game of whipping

the blinded bear he had no rival, either for bravery or

adroitness. He would rush in with uplifted whip until the breath

of the infuriated beast was hot upon his cheek, let his

angry lash curl for an instant across the bear's flank, and then,

for all his halting foot, leap back into safety with a smiling

pride in his own nimbleness.

His acquaintance with Moll Cutpurse, casually begun at a bull-

baiting, speedily ripened, for her into friendship, for him into

love. In this, the solitary romance of his life, Ralph Briscoe

overtopped even his own achievements of courage. The Roaring

Girl was no more young, and years had not refined her character

unto gentleness. It was still her habit to appear publicly in

jerkin and galligaskins, to smoke tobacco in contempt of her sex,

and to fight her enemies with a very fury of insolence. In

stature she exceeded the limping clerk by a head, and she could

pick him up with one hand, like a kitten. Yet he loved her, not

for any grace of person, nor beauty of feature, nor even because

her temperament was undaunted as his own. He loved her for that

wisest of reasons, which is no reason at all, because he loved

her. In his eyes she was the Queen, not of Misrule, but of

Hearts. Had a throne been his, she should have shared it, and he

wooed her with a shy intensity, which ennobled him, even in her

austere regard. Alas! she was unable to return his passion, and

she lamented her own obduracy with characteristic humour. She

made no attempt to conceal her admiration. `A notable and famous

person,' she called him, confessing that, `he was right for her

tooth, and made to her mind in every part of him.' He had been

bred up in the same exercise of bull-baiting, which was her

own delight; she had always praised his towardliness, and

prophesied his preferment. But when he paid her court she was

obliged to decline the honour, while she esteemed the compliment.

In truth, she was completely insensible to passion, or, as she

exclaimed in a phrase of brilliant independence, `I should have

hired him to my embraces.'

The sole possibility that remained was a Platonic friendship, and

Briscoe accepted the situation in excellent humour. `Ever since

he came to know himself,' again it is Moll that speaks, `he

always deported himself to me with an abundance of regard,

calling me his Aunt.' And his aunt she remained unto the end,

bound to him in a proper and natural alliance. Different as they

were in aspect, they were strangely alike in taste and

disposition. Nor was the Paris Garden their only meeting-ground.

His sorry sojourn in Gray's Inn had thrown him on the side of the

law-breaker, and he had acquired a strange cunning in the

difficult art of evading justice. Instantly Moll recognised his

practical value, and, exerting all her talent for intrigue,

presently secured for him the Clerkship of Newgate. Here at last

he found scope not only for his learning, but for that spirit of

adventure that breathed within him. His meagre acquaintance with

letters placed him on a pinnacle high above his colleagues. Now

and then a prisoner proved his equal in wit, but as he was

manifestly superior in intelligence to the Governor, the

Ordinary, and all the warders, he speedily seized and

hereafter retained the real sovereignty of Newgate.

His early progress was barred by envy and contempt. Why, asked

the men in possession, should this shrivelled stranger filch our

privileges? And Briscoe met their malice with an easy smile,

knowing that at all points he was more than their match. His

alliance with Moll stood him in good stead, and in a few months

the twain were the supreme arbiters of English justice. Should a

highwayman seek to save his neck, he must first pay a fat

indemnity to the Newgate Clerk, but, since Moll was the appointed

banker of the whole family, she was quick to sanction whatever

price her accomplice suggested. And Briscoe had a hundred other

tricks whereby he increased his riches and repute. There was no

debtor came to Newgate whom the Clerk would not aid, if he

believed the kindness profitable. Suppose his inquiries gave an

assurance of his victim's recovery, he would house him

comfortably, feed him at his own table, lend him money, and even

condescend to win back the generous loan by the dice-box.

His civility gave him a general popularity among the prisoners,

and his appearance in the Yard was a signal for a subdued

hilarity. He drank and gambled with the roysterers; he babbled a

cheap philosophy with the erudite; and he sold the necks of all

to the highest bidder. Though now and again he was convicted of

mercy or revenge, he commonly held himself aloof from human

passions, and pursued the one sane end of life in an easy

security. The hostility of his colleagues irked him but little.

A few tags of Latin, the friendship of Moll, and a casual threat

of exposure frightened the Governor into acquiescence, but the

Ordinary was more difficult of conciliation. The Clerk had not

been long in Newgate before he saw that between the reverend

gentleman and himself there could be naught save war. Hitherto

the Ordinary had reserved to his own profit the right of

intrigue; he it was who had received the hard-scraped money of

the sorrowing relatives, and untied the noose when it seemed good

to him. Briscoe insisted upon a division of labour. `It is your

business,' he said, `to save the scoundrels in the other world.

Leave to me the profit of their salvation in this.' And the

Clerk triumphed after his wont: freedom jingled in his pocket; he

doled out comfort, even life, to the oppressed; and he extorted a

comfortable fortune in return for privileges which were never in

his gift.

Without the walls of Newgate the house of his frequentation was

the `Dog Tavern.' Thither he would wander every afternoon to

meet his clients and to extort blood-money. In this haunt of

criminals and pettifoggers no man was better received than the

Newgate Clerk, and while he assumed a manner of generous

cordiality, it was a strange sight to see him wince when some

sturdy ruffian slapped him too strenuously upon the back. He had

a joke and a chuckle for all, and his merry quips, dry as they

were, were joyously quoted to all new-comers. His legal

ingenuity appeared miraculous, and it was confidently asserted in

the Coffee House that he could turn black to white with so

persuasive an argument that there was no Judge on the Bench to

confute him. But he was not omnipotent, and his zeal encountered

many a serious check. At times he failed to save the necks even

of his intimates, since, when once a ruffian was notorious, Moll

and the Clerk fought vainly for his release. Thus it was that

Cheney, the famous wrestler, whom Ralph had often backed against

all comers, died at Tyburn. He had been taken by the troopers

red-handed upon the highway. Seized after a desperate

resistance, he was wounded wellnigh to death, and Briscoe quoted

a dozen precedents to prove that he was unfit to be tried or

hanged. Argument failing, the munificent Clerk offered fifty

pounds for the life of his friend. But to no purpose: the

valiant wrestler was carried to the cart in a chair, and so

lifted to the gallows, which cured him of his gaping wounds.

When the Commonwealth administered justice with pedantic

severity, Briscoe's influence still further declined. There was

no longer scope in the State for men of spirit; even the gaols

were handed over to the stern mercy of crop-eared Puritans; Moll

herself had fallen upon evil times; and Ralph Briscoe determined

to make a last effort for wealth and retirement. At the very

moment when his expulsion seemed certain, an heiress was thrown

into Newgate upon a charge of murdering a too importunate

suitor. The chain of evidence was complete: the dagger plunged

in his heart was recognised for her own; she was seen to decoy

him to the secret corner of a wood, where his raucous love-making

was silenced for ever. Taken off her guard, she had even hinted

confession of her crime, and nothing but intrigue could have

saved her gentle neck from the gallows. Briscoe, hungry for her

money-bags, promised assistance. He bribed, he threatened, he

cajoled, he twisted the law as only he could twist it, he

suppressed honest testimony, he procured false; in fine, he

weakened the case against her with so resistless an effrontery,

that not the Hanging Judge himself could convict the poor

innocent.

At the outset he had agreed to accept a handsome bribe, but as

the trial approached, his avarice increased, and he would be

content with nothing less than the lady's hand and fortune. Not

that he loved her; his heart was long since given to Moll

Cutpurse; but he knew that his career of depredation was at an

end, and it became him to provide for his declining years. The

victim repulsed his suit, regretting a thousand times that she

had stabbed her ancient lover. At last, bidden summarily to

choose between Death and the Clerk, she chose the Clerk, and thus

Ralph Briscoe left Newgate the richest squire in a western

county. Henceforth he farmed his land like a gentleman, drank

with those of his neighbours who would crack a bottle with him,

and unlocked the strange stores of his memory to bumpkins who

knew not the name of Newgate. Still devoted to sport, he

hunted the fox, and made such a bull-ring as his youthful

imagination could never have pictured. So he lived a life of

country ease, and died a churchwarden. And he deserved his

prosperity, for he carried the soul of Falstaff in the shrunken

body of Justice Shallow.

GILDEROY AND THE SIXTEEN-

STRING JACK

I

GILDEROY

GILDEROY

HE stood six feet ten in his stockinged feet, and was the tallest

ruffian that ever cut a purse or held up a coach on the highway.

A mass of black hair curled over a low forehead, and a glittering

eye intensified his villainous aspect; nor did a deep scar,

furrowing his cheek from end to end, soften the horror of his

sudden apparition. Valiant men shuddered at his approach; women

shrank from the distant echo of his name; for fifteen years he

terrorised Scotland from Caithness to the border; and the most

partial chronicler never insulted his memory with the record of a

good deed.

He was born to a gentle family in the Calendar of Monteith, and

was celebrated even in boyhood for his feats of strength and

daring. While still at school he could hold a hundredweight at

arm's-length, and crumple up a horseshoe like a wisp of hay. The

fleetest runner, the most desperate fighter in the country, he

was already famous before his name was besmirched with crime, and

he might have been immortalised as the Hercules of the

seventeenth century, had not his ambition been otherwise

flattered. At the outset, though the inclination was never

lacking, he knew small temptation to break the sterner laws of

conduct. His pleasures were abundantly supplied by his father's

generosity, and he had no need to refrain from such vices as

became a gentleman. If he was no drunkard, it was because his

head was equal to the severest strain, and, despite his

forbidding expression, he was always a successful breaker of

hearts. His very masterfulness overcame the most stubborn

resistance; and more than once the pressure of his dishonourable

suit converted hatred into love. At the very time that he was

denounced for Scotland's disgrace, his praises were chanted in

many a dejected ballad. `Gilderoy was a bonny boy,' sang one

heart-broken maiden:

Had roses till his shoon,

His stockings were of silken soy,

Wi' garters hanging doon.

But in truth he was admired less for his amiability than for that

quality of governance which, when once he had torn the decalogue

to pieces, made him a veritable emperor of crime.

His father's death was the true beginning of his career. A

modest patrimony was squandered in six months, and Gilderoy had

no penny left wherewith to satisfy the vices which insisted upon

indulgence. He demanded money at all hazards, and money without

toil. For a while his more loudly clamant needs were fulfilled

by the amiable simplicity of his mother, whom he blackmailed

with insolence and contempt. And when she, wearied by his

shameless importunity, at last withdrew her support, he

determined upon a monstrous act of vengeance. With a noble

affectation of penitence he visited his home; promised reform at

supper; and said good-night in the broken accent of

reconciliation. No sooner was the house sunk in slumber than he

crawled stealthily upstairs in order to forestall by theft a

promised generosity. He opened the door of the bed-chamber in a

hushed silence; but the wrenching of the cofferlid awoke the

sleeper, and Gilderoy, having cut his mother's throat with an

infamous levity, seized whatever money and jewels were in the

house, cruelly maltreated his sister, and laughingly burnt the

house to the ground, that the possibility of evidence might be

destroyed.

Henceforth his method of plunder was assured. It was part of his

philosophy to prevent detection by murder, and the flames from

the burning walls added a pleasure to his lustful eye. His march

across Scotland was marked by slaughtered families and ruined

houses. Plunder was the first cause of his exploits, but there

is no doubt that death and arson were a solace to his fierce

spirit; and for a while this giant of cruelty knew neither check

nor hindrance. Presently it became a superstition with him that

death was the inevitable accompaniment of robbery, and, as he was

incapable of remorse, he grew callous, and neglected the simplest

precautions. At Dunkeld he razed a rifled house to the

ground, and with the utmost effrontery repeated the performance

at Aberdeen. But at last he had been tracked by a company of

soldiers, who, that justice might not be cheated of her prey,

carried him to gaol, where after the briefest trial he was

condemned to death.

Gilderoy, however, was still master of himself. His immense

strength not only burst his bonds, but broke prison, and this

invincible Samson was once more free in Aberdeen, inspiring that

respectable city with a legendary dread. The reward of one

hundred pounds was offered in vain. Had he shown himself on the

road in broad daylight, none would have dared to arrest him, and

it was not until his plans were deliberately laid, that he

crossed the sea. The more violent period of his career was at an

end. Never again did he yield to his passion for burning and

sudden death; and, if the world found him unconquerable, his

self-control is proved by the fact that in the heyday of his

strength he turned from his unredeemed brutality to a gentler

method. He now deserted Scotland for France, with which, like

all his countrymen, he claimed a cousinship; and so profoundly

did he impose upon Paris with his immense stature, his elegant

attire, his courtly manners (for he was courtesy itself, when it

pleased him), that he was taken for an eminent scholar, or at

least a soldier of fortune.

Prosperity might doubtless have followed a discreet profession,

but Gilderoy must still be thieving, and he reaped a rich harvest

among the unsuspicious courtiers of France. His most highly

renowned exploit was performed at St. Denis, and the record of

France's humiliation is still treasured. The great church was

packed with ladies of fashion and their devout admirers.

Richelieu attended in state; the king himself shone upon the

assembly. The strange Scotsman, whom no man knew and all men

wondered at, attracted a hundred eyes to himself and his

magnificent equipment. But it was not his to be idle, and at the

very moment whereat Mass was being sung, he contrived to lighten

Richelieu's pocket of a purse. The king was a delighted witness

of the theft; Gilderoy, assuming an air of facile intimacy,

motioned him to silence; and he, deeming it a trick put upon

Richelieu by a friend, hastened, at the service-end, to ask his

minister if perchance he had a purse of gold upon him. Richelieu

instantly discovered the loss, to the king's uncontrolled

hilarity, which was mitigated when it was found that the thief,

having emptied the king's pocket at the unguarded moment of his

merriment, had left them both the poorer.

Such were Gilderoy's interludes of gaiety; and when you remember

the cynical ferocity of his earlier performance, you cannot deny

him the credit of versatility. He stayed in France until his

ominous reputation was too widely spread; whereupon he crossed

the Pyrenees, travelling like a gentleman, in a brilliant

carriage of his own. From Spain he carried off a priceless

collection of silver plate; and he returned to his own country,

fatigued, yet unsoftened, by the grand tour. Meanwhile, a

forgetful generation had not kept his memory green. The monster,

who punished Scotland a year ago with fire and sword, had passed

into oblivion, and Gilderoy was able to establish for himself a

new reputation. He departed as far as possible from his ancient

custom, joined the many cavaliers, who were riding up and down

the country, pistol in hand, and presently proved a dauntless

highwayman. He had not long ridden in the neighbourhood of Perth

before he met the Earl of Linlithgow, from whom he took a gold

watch, a diamond ring, and eighty guineas. Being an outlaw, he

naturally espoused the King's cause, and would have given a year

of his life to meet a Regicide. Once upon a time, says rumour,

he found himself face to face with Oliver Cromwell, whom he

dragged from his coach, set ignominiously upon an ass, and so

turned adrift with his feet tied under the beast's belly. The

story is incredible, not only because the loyal historians of the

time caused Oliver to be robbed daily on every road in Great

Britain, but because our Gilderoy, had he ever confronted the

Protector, most assuredly would not have allowed him to escape

with his life.

Tired of scouring the highway, Gilderoy resolved upon another

enterprise. He collected a band of fearless ruffians, and placed

himself at their head. With this army to aid, he harried

Sutherland and the North, lifting cattle, plundering homesteads,

and stopping wayfarers with a humour and adroitness worthy

of Robin Hood. No longer a lawless adventurer, he made his own

conditions of life, and forced the people to obey them. He who

would pay Gilderoy a fair contribution ran no risk of losing his

sheep or oxen. But evasion was impossible, and the smallest

suspicion of falsehood was punished by death. The peaceably

inclined paid their toll with regret; the more daring opposed the

raider to their miserable undoing; the timid satisfied the utmost

exactions of Gilderoy, and deemed themselves fortunate if they

left the country with their lives.

Thus Scotland became a land of dread; the most restless man

within her borders hardly dare travel beyond his byre. The law

was powerless against this indomitable scourge, and the reward of

a thousand marks would have been offered in vain, had not

Gilderoy's cruelty estranged his mistress. This traitress--Peg

Cunningham was her name--less for avarice than in revenge for

many insults and infidelities, at last betrayed her master.

Having decoyed him to her house, she admitted fifty armed men,

and thus imagined a full atonement for her unnumbered wrongs.

But Gilderoy was triumphant to the last. Instantly suspecting

the treachery of his mistress, he burst into her bed-chamber,

and, that she might not enjoy the price of blood, ripped her up

with a hanger. Then he turned defiant upon the army arrayed

against him, and killed eight men before the others captured him.

Disarmed after a desperate struggle, he was loaded with chains

and carried to Edinburgh, where he was starved for three

days, and then hanged without the formality of a trial on a

gibbet, thirty feet high, set up in the Grassmarket. Even then

Scotland's vengeance was unsatisfied. The body, cut down from

its first gibbet, was hung in chains forty feet above Leith Walk,

where it creaked and gibbered as a warning to evildoers for half

a century, until at last the inhabitants of that respectable

quarter petitioned that Gilderoy's bones should cease to rattle,

and that they should enjoy the peace impossible for his jingling

skeleton.

Gilderoy was no drawing-room scoundrel, no villain of schoolgirl

romance. He felt remorse as little as he felt fear, and there

was no crime from whose commission he shrank. Before his death

he confessed to thirty-seven murders, and bragged that he had

long since lost count of his robberies and rapes. Something must

be abated for boastfulness. But after all deduction there

remains a tale of crime that is unsurpassed. His most admirably

artistic quality is his complete consistence. He was a ruffian

finished and rotund; he made no concession, he betrayed no

weakness. Though he never preached a sermon against the human

race, he practised a brutality which might have proceeded from a

gospel of hate. He spared neither friends nor relatives, and he

murdered his own mother with as light a heart as he sent a

strange widow of Aberdeen to her death. His skill is undoubted,

and he proved by the discipline of his band that he was not

without some talent of generalship. But he owed much of his

success to his physical strength, and to the temperament, which

never knew the scandal of hesitancy or dread.

A born marauder, he devoted his life to his trade; and, despite

his travels in France and Spain, he enjoyed few intervals of

merriment. Even the humour, which proved his redemption, was as

dour and grim as Scotland can furnish at her grimmes: and

dourest. Here is a specimen will serve as well as another: three

of Gilderoy's gang had been hanged according to the sentence of a

certain Lord of Session, and the Chieftain, for his own vengeance

and the intimidation of justice, resolved upon an exemplary

punishment. He waylaid the Lord of Session, emptied his pockets,

killed his horses, broke his coach in pieces, and having bound

his lackeys, drowned them in a pond. This was but the prelude of

revenge, for presently (and here is the touch of humour) he made

the Lord of Session ride at dead of night to the gallows, whereon

the three malefactors were hanging. One arm of the crossbeams

was still untenanted. `By my soul, mon,' cried Gilderoy to the

Lord of Session, `as this gibbet is built to break people's

craigs, and is not uniform without another, I must e'en hang you

upon the vacant beam.' And straightway the Lord of Session swung

in the moonlight, and Gilderoy had cracked his black and solemn

joke.

This sense of fun is the single trait which relieves the colossal

turpitude of Gilderoy. And, though even his turpitude was

melodramatic in its lack of balance, it is a unity of character

which is the foundation of his greatness. He was no fumbler, led

away from his purpose by the first diversion; his ambition was

clear before him, and he never fell below it. He defied Scotland

for fifteen years, was hanged so high that he passed into a

proverb, and though his handsome, sinister face might have made

women his slaves, he was never betrayed by passion (or by virtue)

to an amiability.

II

SIXTEEN-STRING JACK

SIXTEEN-STRING JACK

THE `Green Pig' stood in the solitude of the North Road. Its

simple front, its neatly balanced windows, curtained with white,

gave it an air of comfort and tranquillity. The smoke which

curled from its hospitable chimney spoke of warmth and good fare.

To pass it was to spurn the last chance of a bottle for many a

weary mile, and the prudent traveller would always rest an hour

by its ample fireside, or gossip with its fantastic hostess.

Now, the hostess of the little inn was Ellen Roach, friend and

accomplice of Sixteen-String Jack, once the most famous woman in

England, and still after a weary stretch at Botany Bay the

strangest of companions, the most buxom of spinsters. Her beauty

was elusive even in her triumphant youth, and middle-age had

neither softened her traits nor refined her expression. Her

auburn hair, once the glory of Covent Garden, was fading to a

withered grey; she was never tall enough to endure an encroaching

stoutness with equanimity; her dumpy figure made you marvel at

her past success; and hardship had furrowed her candid brow into

wrinkles. But when she opened her lips she became instantly

animated. With a glass before her on the table, she would

prattle frankly and engagingly of the past. Strange cities had

she seen; she had faced the dangers of an adventurous life with

calmness and good temper. And yet Botany Bay, with its attendant

horrors, was already fading from her memory. In imagination she

was still with her incomparable hero, and it was her solace,

after fifteen years, to sing the praise and echo the perfections

of Sixteen-String Jack.

`How well I remember,' she would murmur, as though unconscious of

her audience, `the unhappy day when Jack Rann was first arrested.

It was May, and he came back travel-stained and weary in the

brilliant dawn. He had stopped a one-horse shay near the nine-

mile stone on the Hounslow Road--every word of his confession is

burnt into my brain--and had taken a watch and a handful of

guineas. I was glad enough of the money, for there was no penny

in the house, and presently I sent the maid-servant to make the

best bargain she could with the watch. But the silly jade, by

the saddest of mishaps, took the trinket straight to the very man

who made it, and he, suspecting a theft, had us both arrested.

Even then Jack might have been safe, had not the devil prompted

me to speak the truth. Dismayed by the magistrate, I owned,

wretched woman that I was, that I had received the watch from

Rann, and in two hours Jack also was under lock and key.

Yet, when we were sent for trial I made what amends I could. I

declared on oath that I had never seen Sixteen-String Jack in my

life; his name came to my lips by accident; and, hector as they

would, the lawyers could not frighten me to an acknowledgment.

Meanwhile Jack's own behaviour was grand. I was the proudest

woman in England as I stood by his side in the dock. When you

compared him with Sir John Fielding, you did not doubt for an

instant which was the finer gentleman. And what a dandy was my

Jack! Though he came there to answer for his life, he was all

ribbons and furbelows. His irons were tied up with the daintiest

blue bows, and in the breast of his coat he carried a bundle of

flowers as large as a birch-broom. His neck quivered in the

noose, yet he was never cowed to civility. `I know no more of

the matter than you do,' he cried indignantly, `nor half so much

neither,' and if the magistrate had not been an ill-mannered oaf,

he would not have dared to disbelieve my true-hearted Jack. That

time we escaped with whole skins; and off we went, after dinner,

to Vauxhall, where Jack was more noticed than the fiercest of the

bloods, and where he filled the heart of George Barrington with

envy. Nor was he idle, despite his recent escape: he brought

away two watches and three purses from the Garden, so that our

necessities were amply supplied. Ah, I should have been happy in

those days if only Jack had been faithful. But he had a

roving eye and a joyous temperament; and though he loved me

better than any of the baggages to whom he paid court, he would

not visit me so often as he should. Why, once he was hustled off

to Bow Street because the watch caught him climbing in at Doll

Frampton's window. And she, the shameless minx, got him off by

declaring in open court that she would be proud to receive him

whenever he would deign to ring at her bell. That is the penalty

of loving a great man: you must needs share his affection with a

set of unworthy wenches. Yet Jack was always kind to me, and I

was the chosen companion of his pranks.

`Never can I forget the splendid figure he cut that day at

Bagnigge Wells. We had driven down in our coach, and all the

world marvelled at our magnificence. Jack was brave in a scarlet

coat, a tambour waistcoat, and white silk stockings. From the

knees of his breeches streamed the strings (eight at each),

whence he got his name, and as he plucked off his lace-hat the

dinner-table rose at him. That was a moment worth living for,

and when, after his first bottle, Jack rattled the glasses, and

declared himself a highwayman, the whole company shuddered.

``But, my friends,'' quoth he, ``to-day I am making holiday, so

that you have naught to fear.'' When the wine 's in, the wit 's

out, and Jack could never stay his hand from the bottle. The

more he drank, the more he bragged, until, thoroughly fuddled, he

lost a ring from his finger, and charged the miscreants in

the room with stealing it. ``However,'' hiccupped he, ``'tis a

mere nothing, worth a paltry hundred pounds--less than a lazy

evening's work. So I'll let the trifling theft pass.'' But the

cowards were not content with Jack's generosity, and seizing upon

him, they thrust him neck and crop through the window. They were

seventeen to one, the craven-hearted loons; and I could but leave

the marks of my nails on the cheek of the foremost, and follow my

hero into the yard, where we took coach, and drove sulkily back

to Covent Garden.

`And yet he was not always in a mad humour; in fact, Sixteen-

String Jack, for all his gaiety, was a proud, melancholy man.

The shadow of the tree was always upon him, and he would make me

miserable by talking of his certain doom. ``I have a hundred

pounds in my pocket,'' he would say; ``I shall spend that, and

then I shan't last long.'' And though I never thought him

serious, his prophecy came true enough. Only a few months before

the end we had visited Tyburn together. With his usual

carelessness, he passed the line of constables who were on guard.

``It is very proper,'' said he, in his jauntiest tone, ``that I

should be a spectator on this melancholy occasion.'' And though

none of the dullards took his jest, they instantly made way for

him. For my Jack was always a gentleman, though he was bred to

the stable, and his bitterest enemy could not have denied that he

was handsome. His open countenance was as honest as the

day, and the brown curls over his forehead were more elegant than

the smartest wig. Wherever he went the world did him honour, and

many a time my vanity was sorely wounded. I was a pretty girl,

mind you, though my travels have not improved my beauty; and I

had many admirers before ever I picked up Jack Rann at a

masquerade. Why, there was a Templar, with two thousand a year,

who gave me a carriage and servants while I still lived at the

dressmaker's in Oxford Street, and I was not out of my teens when

the old Jew in St. Mary Axe took me into keeping. But when Jack

was by, I had no chance of admiration. All the eyes were glued

upon him, and his poor doxy had to be content with a furtive look

thrown over a stranger's shoulder. At Barnet races, the year

before they sent me across the sea, we were followed by a crowd

the livelong day; and truly Jack, in his blue satin waistcoat

laced with silver, might have been a peer. At any rate, he had

not his equal on the course, and it is small wonder that never

for a moment were we left to ourselves.

`But happiness does not last for ever; only too often we were

gravelled for lack of money, and Jack, finding his purse empty,

could do naught else than hire a hackney and take to the road

again, while I used to lie awake listening to the watchman's

raucous voice, and praying God to send back my warrior rich and

scatheless. So times grew more and more difficult. Jack would

stay a whole night upon the heath, and come home with an empty

pocket or a beggarly half crown. And there was nothing,

after a shabby coat that he hated half so much as a sheriff's

officer. ``Learn a lesson in politeness,'' he said to one of the

wretches who dragged him off to the Marshalsea. ``When Sir John

Fielding's people come after me they use me genteelly; they only

hold up a finger, beckon me, and I follow as quietly as a lamb.

But you bluster and insult, as though you had never dealings with

gentlemen.'' Poor Jack, he was of a proud stomach, and could not

abide interference; yet they would never let him go free. And he

would have been so happy had he been allowed his own way. To

pull out a rusty pistol now and again, and to take a purse from a

traveller--surely these were innocent pleasures, and he never

meant to hurt a fellow-creature. But for all his kindness of

heart, for all his love of splendour and fine clothes, they took

him at last.

`And this time, too, it was a watch which was our ruin. How

often did I warn him: ``Jack,'' I would say, ``take all the

money you can. Guineas tell no tale. But leave the watches in

their owners' fobs.'' Alas! he did not heed my words, and the

last man he ever stopped on the road was that pompous rascal, Dr.

Bell, then chaplain to the Princess Amelia. ``Give me your

money,'' screamed Jack, ``and take no notice or I'll blow your

brains out.'' And the doctor gave him all that he had, the mean-

spirited devil-dodger, and it was no more than eighteenpence.

Now what should a man of courage do with eighteenpence? So poor

Jack was forced to seize the parson's watch and trinkets as

well, and thus it was that a second time we faced the Blind Beak.

When Jack brought home the watch, I was seized with a shuddering

presentiment, and I would have given the world to throw it out of

the window. But I could not bear to see him pinched with hunger,

and he had already tossed the doctor's eighteenpence to a beggar

woman. So I trudged off to the pawnbroker's, to get what price I

could, and I bethought me that none would know me for what I was

so far away as Oxford Street. But the monster behind the counter

had a quick suspicion, though I swear I looked as innocent as a

babe; he discovered the owner of the watch, and infamously

followed me to my house.

`The next day we were both arrested, and once more we stood in

the hot, stifling Court of the Old Bailey. Jack was radiant as

ever, the one spot of colour and gaiety in that close, sodden

atmosphere. When we were taken from Bow Street a thousand people

formed our guard of honour, and for a month we were the twin

wonders of London. The lightest word, the fleetest smile of the

renowned highwayman, threw the world into a fit of excitement,

and a glimpse of Rann was worth a king's ransom. I could look

upon him all day for nothing! And I knew what a fever of fear

throbbed behind his mask of happy contempt. Yet bravely he

played the part unto the very end. If the toasts of London were

determined to gaze at him, he assured them they should have a

proper salve for their eyes. So he dressed himself as a

light-hearted sportsman. His coat and waistcoat were of pea-

green cloth; his buckskin breeches were spotlessly new, and all

tricked out with the famous strings; his hat was bound round with

silver cords; and even the ushers of the Court were touched to

courtesy. He would whisper to me, as we stood in the dock,

``Cheer up, my girl. I have ordered the best supper that Covent

Garden can provide, and we will make merry to-night when this

foolish old judge has done his duty.'' The supper was never

eaten. Through the weary afternoon we waited for acquittal. The

autumn sun sank in hopeless gloom. The wretched lamps twinkled

through the jaded air of the court-house. In an hour I lived a

thousand years of misery, and when the sentence was read, the

words carried no sense to my withered brain. It was only in my

cell I realised that I had seen Jack Rann for the last time; that

his pea-green coat would prove a final and ineffaceable memory.

`Alas! I, who had never been married, was already a hempen widow;

but I was too hopelessly heartbroken for my lover's fate to think

of my own paltry hardship. I never saw him again. They told me

that he suffered at Tyburn like a man, and that he counted upon a

rescue to the very end. They told me (still bitterer news to

hear) that two days before his death he entertained seven women

at supper, and was in the wildest humour. This almost broke my

heart; it was an infidelity committed on the other side of the

grave. But, poor Jack, he was a good lad, and loved me more

than them all, though he never could be faithful to me.' And

thus, bidding the drawer bring fresh glasses, Ellen Roach would

end her story. Though she had told it a hundred times, at the

last words a tear always sparkled in her eye. She lived without

friend and without lover, faithful to the memory of Sixteen-

String Jack, who for her was the only reality in the world of

shades. Her middle-age was as distant as her youth. The

dressmaker's in Oxford Street was as vague a dream as the

inhospitable shore of Botany Bay. So she waited on to a weary

eld, proud of the `Green Pig's' well-ordered comfort, prouder

still that for two years she shared the glory of Jack Rann, and

that she did not desert her hero, even in his punishment.

III

A PARALLEL

(GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN-

STRING JACK)

A PARALLEL

(GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN-STRING JACK)

THEIR closest parallel is the notoriety which dogged them from

the very day of their death. Each, for his own exploits, was the

most famous man of his time, the favourite of broadsides, the

prime hero of the ballad-mongers. And each owed his fame as much

to good fortune as to merit, since both were excelled in their

generation by more skilful scoundrels. If Gilderoy was

unsurpassed in brutality, he fell immeasurably below Hind in

artistry and wit, nor may he be compared to such accomplished

highwaymen as Mull Sack or the Golden Farmer. His method was not

elevated by a touch of the grand style. He stamped all the rules

of the road beneath his contemptuous foot, and cared not what

enormity he committed in his quest for gold. Yet, though he

lived in the true Augustan age, he yielded to no one of his

rivals in glorious recognition. So, too, Jack Rann, of the

Sixteen Strings, was a near contemporary of George Barrington.

While that nimble-fingered prig was making a brilliant

appearance at Vauxhall, and emptying the pockets of his

intimates, Rann was riding over Hounslow Heath, and flashing his

pistol in the eye of the wayfarer. The very year in which Jack

danced his last jig at Tyburn, Barrington had astonished London

by a fruitless attempt to steal Prince Orloff's miraculous snuff-

box. And not even Ellen Roach herself would have dared to assert

that Rann was Barrington's equal in sleight of hand. But Rann

holds his own against the best of his craft, with an imperishable

name, while a host of more distinguished cracksmen are excluded

even from the Newgate Calendar.

In truth, there is one quality which has naught to do with

artistic supremacy; and in this quality both Rann and Gilderoy

were rich beyond their fellows. They knew (none better) how to

impose upon the world. Had their deserts been even less than

they were, they would still have been bravely notorious. It is a

common superstition that the talent for advertisement has but a

transitory effect, that time sets all men in their proper places.

Nothing can be more false; for he who has once declared himself

among the great ones of the earth, not only holds his position

while he lives, but forces an unreasoning admiration upon the

future. Though he declines from the lofty throne, whereon his

own vanity and love of praise have set him, he still stands above

the modest level which contents the genuinely great. Why does

Euripides still throw a shadow upon the worthier poets of his

time? Because he had the faculty of displacement, because

he could compel the world to profess an interest not only in his

work but in himself. Why is Michael Angelo a loftier figure in

the history of art than Donatello, the supreme sculptor of his

time? Because Donatello had not the temper which would bully a

hundred popes, and extract a magnificent advertisement from each

encounter. Why does Shelley still claim a larger share of the

world's admiration than Keats, his indubitable superior? Because

Shelley was blessed or cursed with the trick of interesting the

world by the accidents of his life.

So by a similar faculty Gilderoy and Jack Rann have kept

themselves and their achievements in the light of day. Had they

lived in the nineteenth century they might have been the vendors

of patent pills, or the chairmen of bubble companies. Whatever

trade they had followed, their names would have been on every

hoarding, their wares would have been puffed in every journal.

They understood the art of publicity better than any of their

contemporaries, and they are remembered not because they were the

best thieves of their time, but because they were determined to

interest the people in their misdeeds. Gilderoy's brutality,

which was always theatrical, ensured a constant remembrance, and

the lofty gallows added to his repute; while the brilliant

inspiration of the strings, which decorated Rann's breeches, was

sufficient to conquer death. How should a hero sink to oblivion

who had chosen for himself so splendid a name as Sixteen-

String Jack?

So far, then, their achievement is parallel. And parallel also

is their taste for melodrama. Each employed means too great or

too violent for the end in view. Gilderoy burnt houses and

ravished women, when his sole object was the acquisition of

money. Sixteen-String Jack terrified Bagnigge Wells with the

dreadful announcement that he was a highwayman, when his kindly,

stupid heart would have shrunk from the shedding of a drop of

blood. So they both blustered through the world, the one in

deed, the other in word; and both played their parts with so

little refinement that they frightened the groundlings to a timid

admiration. Here the resemblance is at an end. In the

essentials of their trade Gilderoy was a professional, Rann a

mere amateur. They both bullied; but, while Sixteen-String Jack

was content to shout threats, and pick up half-a-crown, Gilderoy

breathed murder, and demanded a vast ransom. Only once in his

career did the `disgraceful Scotsman' become gay and debonair.

Only once did he relax the tension of his frown, and pick pockets

with the lightness and freedom of a gentleman. It was on his

voyage to France that he forgot his old policy of arson and

pillage, and truly the Court of the Great King was not the place

for his rapacious cruelty. Jack Rann, on the other hand, would

have taken life as a prolonged jest, if Sir John Fielding and the

sheriffs had not checked his mirth. He was but a bungler on

the road, with no more resource than he might have learned from

the common chap-book, or from the dying speeches, hawked in

Newgate Street. But he had a fine talent for merriment; he loved

nothing so well as a smart coat and a pretty woman. Thieving was

no passion with him, but a necessity. How could he dance at a

masquerade or court his Ellen with an empty pocket? So he took

to the road as the sole profession of an idle man, and he bullied

his way from Hounslow to Epping in sheer lightness of heart.

After all, to rob Dr. Bell of eighteenpence was the work of a

simpleton. It was a very pretty taste which expressed itself in

a pea-green coat and deathless strings; and Rann will keep

posterity's respect rather for the accessories of his art than

for the art itself. On the other hand, you cannot imagine

Gilderoy habited otherwise than in black; you cannot imagine this

monstrous matricide taking pleasure in the smaller elegancies of

life. From first to last he was the stern and beetle-browed

marauder, who would have despised the frippery of Sixteen-String

Jack as vehemently as his sudden appearance would have frightened

the foppish lover of Ellen Roach.

Their conduct with women is sufficient index of their character.

Jack Rann was too general a lover for fidelity. But he was

amiable, even in his unfaithfulness; he won the undying affection

of his Ellen; he never stood in the dock without a nosegay tied

up by fair and nimble fingers; he was attended to Tyburn by

a bevy of distinguished admirers. Gilderoy, on the other hand,

approached women in a spirit of violence. His Sadic temper drove

him to kill those whom he affected to love. And his cruelty was

amply repaid. While Ellen Roach perjured herself to save the

lover, to whose memory she professed a lifelong loyalty, it was

Peg Cunningham who wreaked her vengeance in the betrayal of

Gilderoy. He remained true to his character, when he ripped up

the belly of his betrayer. This was the closing act of his life.

Rann, also, was consistent, even to the gallows. The night

before his death he entertained seven women at supper, and

outlaughed them all. The contrast is not so violent as it

appears. The one act is melodrama, the other farce. And what is

farce, but melodrama in a happier shape?

THOMAS PURENEY

THOMAS PURENEY

THOMAS PURENEY, Archbishop among Ordinaries, lived and preached

in the heyday of Newgate. His was the good fortune to witness

Sheppard's encounter with the topsman, and to shrive the battered

soul of Jonathan Wild. Nor did he fall one inch below his

opportunity. Designed by Providence to administer a final

consolation to the evil-doer, he permitted no false ambition to

distract his talent. As some men are born for the gallows, so he

was born to thump the cushion of a prison pulpit; and his

peculiar aptitude was revealed to him before he had time to spend

his strength in mistaken endeavour.

For thirty years his squat, stout figure was amiably familiar to

all such as enjoyed the Liberties of the Jug. For thirty years

his mottled nose and the rubicundity of his cheeks were the

ineffaceable ensigns of his intemperance. Yet there was a grimy

humour in his forbidding aspect. The fusty black coat, which sat

ill upon his shambling frame, was all besmirched with spilled

snuff, and the lees of a thousand quart pots. The bands of his

profession were ever awry upon a tattered shirt. His

ancient wig scattered dust and powder as he went, while a single

buckle of some tawdry metal gave a look of oddity to his clumsy,

slipshod feet. A caricature of a man, he ambled and chuckled and

seized the easy pleasures within his reach. There was never a

summer's day but he caught upon his brow the few faint gleams of

sunlight that penetrated the gloomy yard. Hour after hour he

would sit, his short fingers hardly linked across his belly,

drinking his cup of ale, and puffing at a half-extinguished

tobacco-pipe. Meanwhile he would reflect upon those triumphs of

oratory which were his supreme delight. If it fell on a Monday

that he took the air, a smile of satisfaction lit up his fat,

loose features, for still he pondered the effect of yesterday's

masterpiece. On Saturday the glad expectancy of to-morrow lent

him a certain joyous dignity. At other times his eye lacked

lustre, his gesture buoyancy, unless indeed he were called upon

to follow the cart to Tyburn, or to compose the Last Dying Speech

of some notorious malefactor.

Preaching was the master passion of his life. It was the pulpit

that reconciled him to exile within a great city, and persuaded

him to the enjoyment of roguish company. Those there were who

deemed his career unfortunate; but a sense of fitness might have

checked their pity, and it was only in his hours of maudlin

confidence that the Reverend Thomas confessed to disappointment.

Born of respectable parents in the County of Cambridgeshire,

he nurtured his youth upon the exploits of James Hind and the

Golden Farmer. His boyish pleasure was to lie in the ditch,

which bounded his father's orchard, studying that now forgotten

masterpiece, `There's no Jest like a True Jest.' Then it was that

he felt `immortal longings in his blood.' He would take to the

road, so he swore, and hold up his enemies like a gentleman.

Once, indeed, he was surprised by the clergyman of the parish in

act to escape from the rectory with two volumes of sermons and a

silver flagon. The divine was minded to speak seriously to him

concerning the dreadful sin of robbery, and having strengthened

him with texts and good counsel, to send him forth unpunished.

`Thieving and covetousness,' said the parson, `must inevitably

bring you to the gallows. If you would die in your bed, repent

you of your evildoing, and rob no more.' The exhortation was not

lost upon Pureney, who, chastened in spirit, straightly prevailed

upon his father to enter him a pensioner at Corpus Christi

College in the University of Cambridge, that at the proper time

he might take orders.

At Cambridge he gathered no more knowledge than was necessary for

his profession, and wasted such hours as should have been given

to study in drinking, dicing, and even less reputable pleasures.

Yet repentance was always easy, and he accepted his first curacy,

at Newmarket, with a brave heart and a good hopefulness.

Fortunate was the choice of this early cure. Had he been

gently guided at the outset, who knows but he might have lived

out his life in respectable obscurity? But Newmarket then, as

now, was a town of jollity and dissipation, and Pureney yielded

without persuasion to the pleasures denied his cloth. There was

ever a fire to extinguish at his throat, nor could he veil his

wanton eye at the sight of a pretty wench. Again and again the

lust of preaching urged him to repent, yet he slid back upon his

past gaiety, until Parson Pureney became a byword. Dismissed

from Newmarket in disgrace, he wandered the country up and down

in search of a pulpit, but so infamous became the habit of his

life that only in prison could he find an audience fit and

responsive.

And, in the nick, the chaplaincy of Newgate fell vacant. Here

was the occasion to temper dissipation with piety, to indulge the

twofold ambition of his life. What mattered it, if within the

prison walls he dipped his nose more deeply into the punch-bowl

than became a divine? The rascals would but respect him the more

for his prowess, and knit more closely the bond of sympathy.

Besides, after preaching and punch he best loved a penitent, and

where in the world could he find so rich a crop of erring souls

ripe for repentance as in gaol? Henceforth he might threaten,

bluster, and cajole. If amiability proved fruitless he would put

cruelty to the test, and terrify his victims by a spirited

reference to Hell and to that Burning Lake they were so soon to

traverse. At last, thought he, I shall be sure of my

effect, and the prospect flattered his vanity. In truth, he won

an immediate and assured success. Like the common file or

cracksman, he fell into the habit of the place, intriguing with

all the cleverness of a practised diplomatist, and setting one

party against the other that he might in due season decide the

trumpery dispute. The trusted friend of many a distinguished

prig and murderer, he so intimately mastered the slang and

etiquette of the Jug, that he was appointed arbiter of all those

nice questions of honour which agitated the more reputable among

the cross-coves. But these were the diversions of a strenuous

mind, and it was in the pulpit or in the closet that the Reverend

Thomas Pureney revealed his true talent.

As the ruffian had a sense of drama, so he was determined that

his words should scald and bite the penitent. When the condemned

pew was full of a Sunday his happiness was complete. Now his

deep chest would hurl salvo on salvo of platitudes against the

sounding-board; now his voice, lowered to a whisper, would coax

the hopeless prisoners to prepare their souls. In a paroxysm of

feigned anger he would crush the cushion with his clenched fist,

or leaning over the pulpit side as though to approach the nearer

to his victims, would roll a cold and bitter eye upon them, as of

a cat watching caged birds. One famous gesture was irresistible,

and he never employed it but some poor ruffian fell senseless to

the floor. His stumpy fingers would fix a noose of air

round some imagined neck, and so devoutly was the pantomime

studied that you almost heard the creak of the retreating cart as

the phantom culprit was turned off. But his conduct in the

pulpit was due to no ferocity of temperament. He merely

exercised his legitimate craft. So long as Newgate supplied him

with an enforced audience, so long would he thunder and bluster

at the wrongdoer according to law and the dictates of his

conscience.

Many, in truth, were his triumphs, but, as he would mutter in his

garrulous old age, never was he so successful as in the last

exhortation delivered to Matthias Brinsden. Now, Matthias

Brinsden incontinently murdered his wife because she harboured

too eager a love of the brandy-shop. A model husband, he had

spared no pains in her correction. He had flogged her without

mercy and without result. His one design was to make his wife

obey him, which, as the Scriptures say, all wives should do. But

the lust of brandy overcame wifely obedience, and Brinsden,

hoping for the best, was constrained to cut a hole in her skull.

The next day she was as impudent as ever, until Matthias rose yet

more fiercely in his wrath, and the shrew perished. Then was

Thomas Pureney's opportunity, and the Sunday following the

miscreant's condemnation he delivered unto him and seventeen

other malefactors the moving discourse which here follows:

`We shall take our text,' gruffed the Ordinary `From out the

Psalms: ``Bloodthirsty and deceitful men shall not live out half

their days.'' And firstly, we shall expound to you the heinous

sin of murder, which is unlawful (1) according to the Natural

Laws, (2) according to the Jewish Law, (3) according to the

Christian Law, proportionably stronger. By Nature 'tis unlawful

as 'tis injuring Society: as 'tis robbing God of what is His

Right and Property; as 'tis depriving the Slain of the

satisfaction of Eating, Drinking, Talking, and the Light of the

Sun, which it is his right to enjoy. And especially 'tis

unlawful, as it is sending a Soul naked and unprepared to appear

before a wrathful and avenging Deity without time to make his

Soul composedly or to listen to the thoughtful ministrations of

one (like ourselves) soundly versed in Divinity. By the Jewish

Law 'tis forbidden, for is it not written (Gen. ix. 6):

``Whosoever sheddeth Man's Blood, by Man his Blood shall be

shed''? And if an Eye be given for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth,

how shall the Murderer escape with his dishonoured Life? 'Tis

further forbidden by the Christian Law (proportionably stronger).

But on this head we would speak no word, for were not you all, O

miserable Sinners, born not in the Darkness of Heathendom, but in

the burning Light of Christian England?

`Secondly, we will consider the peculiar wickedness of Parricide,

and especially the Murder of a Wife. What deed, in truth, is

more heinous than that a man should slay the Parent of his own

Children, the Wife he had once loved and chose out of all the

world to be a Companion of his Days; the Wife who long had

shared his good Fortune and his ill, who had brought him with

Pain and Anguish several Tokens and Badges of Affection, the

Olive Branches round about his Table? To embrew the hands in

such blood is double Murder, as it murders not only the Person

slain, but kills the Happiness of the orphaned Children,

depriving them of Bread, and forcing them upon wicked Ways of

getting a Maintenance, which often terminate in Newgate and an

ignominious death.

`Bloodthirsty men, we have said, shall not live out half their

Days. And think not that Repentance avails the Murderer. ``Hell

and Damnation are never full'' (Prov. xxvii. 20), and the meanest

Sinner shall find a place in the Lake which burns unto Eternity

with Fire and Brimstone. Alas! your Punishment shall not finish

with the Noose. Your ``end is to be burned'' (Heb. vi. 8), to be

burned, for the Blood that is shed cries aloud for Vengeance.'

At these words, as Pureney would relate with a smile of

recollected triumph, Matthias Brinsden screamed aloud, and a

shiver ran through the idle audience which came to Newgate on a

Black Sunday, as to a bull-baiting. Truly, the throng of

thoughtless spectators hindered the proper solace of the

Ordinary's ministrations, and many a respectable murderer

complained of the intruding mob. But the Ordinary, otherwise

minded, loved nothing so well as a packed house, and though he

would invite the criminal to his private closet, and comfort his

solitude with pious ejaculations, he would neither shield

him from curiosity, nor tranquillise his path to the unquenchable

fire.

Not only did he exercise in the pulpit a poignant and visible

influence. He boasted the confidence of many heroes. His green

old age cherished no more famous memory than the friendship of

Jonathan Wild. He had known the Great Man at his zenith; he had

wrestled with him in the hour of discomfiture; he had preached

for his benefit that famous sermon on the text: `Hide Thy Face

from my sins, and blot out all my Iniquities'; he had witnessed

the hero's awful progress from Newgate to Tyburn; he had seen him

shiver at the nubbing-cheat; he had composed for him a last dying

speech, which did not shame the king of thief-takers, and whose

sale brought a comfortable profit to the widow. Jonathan, on his

side, had shown the Ordinary not a little condescension. It had

been his whim, on the eve of his marriage, to present Mr. Pureney

with a pair of white gloves, which were treasured as a priceless

relic for many a year. And when he paid his last, forced visit

to Newgate, he gave the Chaplain, for a pledge of his esteem,

that famous silver staff, which he carried, as a badge of

authority from the Government, the better to keep the people in

awe, and favour the enterprises of his rogues.

Only one cloud shadowed this old and equal friendship. Jonathan

had entertained the Ordinary with discourse so familiar, they had

cracked so many a bottle together, that when the irrevocable

sentence was passed, when he who had never shown mercy, expected

none, the Great Man found the exhortations of the illiterate

Chaplain insufficient for his high purpose. `As soon as I came

into the condemned Hole,' thus he wrote, `I began to think of

making a preparation for my soul; and the better to bring my

stubborn heart to repentance, I desired the advice of a man of

learning, a man of sound judgment in divinity, and therefore

application being made to the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, he very

Christian-like gave me his assistance.' Alas! Poor Pureney! He

lacked subtlety, and he was instantly baffled, when the Great Man

bade him expound the text: `Cursed is every one that hangeth on

a tree.' The shiftiest excuse would have brought solace to a

breaking heart and conviction to a casuist brain. Yet for once

the Ordinary was at a loss, and Wild, finding him insufficient

for his purpose, turned a deaf ear to his ministrations. Thus he

was rudely awakened from the dream of many sleepless nights. His

large heart almost broke at the neglect.

But if his more private counsels were scorned, he still had the

joy of delivering a masterpiece from the pulpit, of using `all

the means imaginable to make Wild think of another world,' and of

seeing him as neatly turned off as the most exacting Ordinary

could desire. And what inmate of Newgate ever forgot the

afternoon of that glorious day (May the 24th, 1725)? Mr. Pureney

returned to his flock, fortified with punch and good

tidings. He pictured the scene at Tyburn with a bibulous

circumstance, which admirably became his style, rejoicing, as he

has rejoiced ever since, that, though he lost a friend, the

honest rogue was saved at last from the machinations of the

thief-taker.

So he basked and smoked and drank his ale, retelling the ancient

stories, and hiccuping forth the ancient sermons. So, in the

fading twilight of life, he smiled the smile of contentment, as

became one who had emptied more quarts, had delivered more

harrowing discourses, and had lived familiarly with more

scoundrels than any devil-dodger of his generation.

SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE

I

JACK SHEPPARD

JACK SHEPPARD

IT was midnight when Jack Sheppard reached the leads, wearied by

his magical achievement, and still fearful of discovery. The

`jolly pair of handcuffs,' provided by the thoughtful Governor,

lay discarded in his distant cell; the chains which a few hours

since had grappled him to the floor encumbered the now useless

staple. No trace of the ancient slavery disgraced him save the

iron anklets which clung about his legs; though many a broken

wall and shattered lock must serve for evidence of his prowess on

the morrow. The Stone-Jug was all be-chipped and shattered.

From the castle he had forced his way through a nine-foot wall

into the Red Room, whose bolts, bars, and hinges he had ruined to

gain the Chapel. The road thence to the roof and to freedom was

hindered by three stubborn iron doors; yet naught stood in the

way of Sheppard's genius, and he was sensible, at last, of the

night air chill upon his cheek.

But liberty was not yet: there was still a fall of forty feet,

and he must needs repass the wreckage of his own making to filch

the blankets from his cell. In terror lest he should awaken the

Master-Side Debtors, he hastened back to the roof, lashed

the coverlets together, and, as the city clocks clashed twelve,

he dropped noiselessly upon the leads of a turner's house, built

against the prison's outer wall. Behind him Newgate was cut out

a black mass against the sky; at his feet glimmered the garret

window of the turner's house, and behind the winking casement he

could see the turner's servant going to bed. Through her chamber

lay the road to glory and Clare Market, and breathlessly did

Sheppard watch till the candle should be extinguished and the

maid silenced in sleep. In his anxiety he must tarry--tarry; and

for a weary hour he kicked his heels upon the leads, ambition

still too uncertain for quietude. Yet he could not but catch a

solace from his splendid craft. Said he to himself: `Am I not

the most accomplished slip-string the world has known? The

broken wall of every round house in town attests my bravery.

Light-limbed though I be, have I not forced the impregnable

Castle itself? And my enemies--are they not to-day writhing in

distress ? The head of Blueskin, that pitiful thief, quivers in

the noose; and Jonathan Wild bleeds at the throat from the dregs

of a coward's courage. What a triumph shall be mine when the

Keeper finds the stronghold tenantless!'

Now, unnumbered were the affronts he had suffered from the

Keeper's impertinence, and he chuckled aloud at his own witty

rejoinder. Only two days since the Gaoler had caught him

tampering with his irons. `Young man,' he had said, `I see what

you have been doing, but the affair betwixt us stands thus:

It is your business to make your escape, and mine to take care

you shall not.' Jack had answered coolly enough: `Then let's

both mind our own business.' And it was to some purpose that he

had minded his. The letter to his baffled guardian, already

sketched in his mind, tickled him afresh, when suddenly he leaps

to his feet and begins to force the garret window.

The turner's maid was a heavy sleeper, and Sheppard crept from

her garret to the twisted stair in peace. Once, on a lower

floor, his heart beat faster at the trumpetings of the turner's

nose, but he knew no check until he reached the street door. The

bolt was withdrawn in an instant, but the lock was turned, and

the key nowhere to be found. However, though the risk of

disturbance was greater than in Newgate, the task was light

enough: and with an iron link from his fetter, and a rusty nail

which had served him bravely, the box was wrenched off in a

trice, and Sheppard stood unattended in the Old Bailey. At first

he was minded to make for his ancient haunts, or to conceal

himself within the Liberty of Westminster; but the fetter-locks

were still upon his legs, and he knew that detection would be

easy as long as he was thus embarrassed. Wherefore, weary and

an-hungered, he turned his steps northward, and never rested

until he had gained Finchley Common.

At break of day, when the world re-awoke from the fear of

thieves, he feigned a limp at a cottage door, and borrowed a

hammer to straighten a pinching shoe. Five minutes behind a

hedge, and his anklets had dropped from him; and, thus a free

man, he took to the high road. After all he was persuaded to

desert London and to escape a while from the sturdy embrace of

Edgworth Bess. Moreover, if Bess herself were in the lock-up, he

still feared the interested affection of Mistress Maggot, that

other doxy, whose avarice would surely drive him upon a dangerous

enterprise; so he struck across country, and kept starvation from

him by petty theft. Up and down England he wandered in solitary

insolence. Once, saith rumour, his lithe apparition startled the

peace of Nottingham; once, he was wellnigh caught begging wort at

a brew-house in Thames Street. But he might as well have

lingered in Newgate as waste his opportunity far from the

delights of Town; the old lust of life still impelled him, and a

week after the hue-and-cry was raised he crept at dead of night

down Drury Lane. Here he found harbourage with a friendly fence,

Wild's mortal enemy, who promised him a safe conduct across the

seas. But the desire of work proved too strong for prudence; and

in a fortnight he had planned an attack on the pawnshop of one

Rawling, at the Four Balls in Drury Lane.

Sheppard, whom no house ever built with hands was strong enough

to hold, was better skilled at breaking out than at breaking in,

and it is remarkable that his last feat in the cracking of

cribs was also his greatest. Its very conception was a

masterpiece of effrontery. Drury Lane was the thief-catcher's

chosen territory; yet it was the Four Balls that Jack designed

for attack, and watches, tie-wigs, snuff-boxes were among his

booty. Whatever he could not crowd upon his person he presented

to a brace of women. Tricked out in his stolen finery, he drank

and swaggered in Clare Market. He was dressed in a superb suit

of black; a diamond fawney flashed upon his finger; his light

tie-periwig was worth no less than seven pounds; pistols,

tortoise-shell snuff-boxes, and golden guineas jostled one

another in his pockets.

Thus, in brazen magnificence, he marched down Drury Lane on a

certain Saturday night in November 1724. Towards midnight he

visited Thomas Nicks, the butcher, and having bargained for three

ribs of beef, carried Nicks with him to a chandler's hard by,

that they might ratify the bargain with a dram. Unhappily, a boy

from the `Rose and Crown' sounded the alarm; for coming into the

chandler's for the empty ale-pots, he instantly recognised the

incomparable gaol-thief, and lost no time in acquainting his

master. Now, Mr. Bradford, of the `Rose and Crown,' was a head-

borough, who, with the zeal of a triumphant Dogberry, summoned

the watch, and in less than half an hour Jack Sheppard was

screaming blasphemies in a hackney-cab on his way home to

Newgate.

The Stone-Jug received him with deference and admiration. Three

hundred pounds weight of irons were put upon him for an

adornment, and the Governor professed so keen a solicitude for

his welfare that he never left him unattended. There was scarce

a beautiful woman in London who did not solace him with her

condescension, and enrich him with her gifts. Not only did the

President of the Royal Academy deign to paint his portrait, but

(a far greater honour) Hogarth made him immortal. Even the King

displayed a proper interest, demanding a full and precise account

of his escapes. The hero himself was drunk with flattery; he

bubbled with ribaldry; he touched off the most valiant of his

contemporaries in a ludicrous phrase. But his chief delight was

to illustrate his prowess to his distinguished visitors, and

nothing pleased him better than to slip in and out of his chains.

Confronted with his judge, he forthwith proposed to rid himself

of his handcuffs, and he preserved until the fatal tree an

illimitable pride in his artistry. Nor would he believe in the

possibility of death. To the very last he was confirmed in the

hope of pardon; but, pardon failing him, his single consolation

was that his procession from Westminster to Newgate was the

largest that London had ever known, and that in the crowd a

constable broke his leg. Even in the Condemned Hole he was

unreconciled. If he had broken the Castle, why should he not

also evade the gallows? Wherefore he resolved to carry a

knife to Tyburn that he might cut the rope, and so, losing

himself in the crowd, ensure escape. But the knife was

discovered by his warder's vigilance, and taken from him after a

desperate struggle. At the scaffold he behaved with admirable

gravity: confessing the wickeder of his robberies, and asking

pardon for his enormous crimes. `Of two virtues,' he boasted at

the self-same moment that the cart left him dancing without the

music, `I have ever cherished an honest pride: never have I

stooped to friendship with Jonathan Wild, or with any of his

detestable thief-takers; and, though an undutiful son, I never

damned my mother's eyes.'

Thus died Jack Sheppard; intrepid burglar and incomparable

artist, who, in his own separate ambition of prison-breaking,

remains, and will ever remain, unrivalled. His most brilliant

efforts were the result neither of strength nor of cunning; for

so slight was he of build, so deficient in muscle, that both

Edgworth Bess and Mistress Maggot were wont to bang him to their

own mind and purpose. And an escape so magnificently planned, so

bravely executed as was his from the Strong Room, is far greater

than a mere effect of cunning. Those mysterious gifts which

enable mankind to batter the stone walls of a prison, or to bend

the iron bars of a cage, were pre-eminently his. It is also

certain that he could not have employed his gifts in a more

reputable profession.

II

LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE

LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE

Of all the heroes who have waged a private and undeclared war

upon their neighbours, Louis-Dominique Cartouche was the most

generously endowed. It was but his resolute contempt for

politics, his unswerving love of plunder for its own sake, that

prevented him from seizing a throne or questing after the empire

of the world. The modesty of his ambition sets him below

C<ae>sar, or Napoleon, but he yields to neither in the genius of

success: whatever he would attain was his on the instant, nor did

failure interrupt his career, until treachery, of which he went

in perpetual terror, involved himself and his comrades in ruin.

His talent of generalship was unrivalled. None of the gang was

permitted the liberty of a free-lance. By Cartouche was the

order given, and so long as the chief was in repose, Paris might

enjoy her sleep. When it pleased him to join battle a whistle

was enough.

Now, it was revealed to his intelligence that the professional

thief, who devoted all his days and such of his nights as were

spared from depredation to wine and women, was more readily

detected than the valet-de-chambre, who did but crack a

crib or cry `Stand and deliver!' on a proper occasion.

Wherefore, he bade his soldiers take service in the great houses

of Paris, that, secure of suspicion, they might still be ready to

obey the call of duty. Thus, also, they formed a reconnoitring

force, whose vigilance no prize might elude; and nowhere did

Cartouche display his genius to finer purpose than in this

prudent disposition of his army. It remained only to efface

himself, and therein he succeeded admirably by never sleeping two

following nights in the same house: so that, when Cartouche was

the terror of Paris, when even the King trembled in his bed, none

knew his stature nor could recognise his features. In this

shifting and impersonal vizard, he broke houses, picked pockets,

robbed on the pad. One night he would terrify the Faubourg St.

Germain; another he would plunder the humbler suburb of St.

Antoine; but on each excursion he was companioned by experts, and

the map of Paris was rigidly apportioned among his followers. To

each district a captain was appointed, whose business it was to

apprehend the customs of the quarter, and thus to indicate the

proper season of attack.

Ever triumphant, with yellow-boys ever jingling in his pocket,

Cartouche lived a life of luxurious merriment. A favourite haunt

was a cabaret in the Rue Dauphine, chosen for the sanest of

reasons, as his Captain Ferrand declared, that the landlady was a

femme d'esprit. Here he would sit with his friends and

his women, and thereafter drive his chariot across the Pont Neuf

to the sunnier gaiety of the Palais-Royal. A finished dandy, he

wore by preference a grey-white coat with silver buttons; his

breeches and stockings were on a famous occasion of black silk;

while a sword, scabbarded in satin, hung at his hip.

But if Cartouche, like many another great man, had the faculty of

enjoyment, if he loved wine and wit, and mistresses handsomely

attired in damask, he did not therefore neglect his art. When

once the gang was perfectly ordered, murder followed robbery with

so instant a frequency that Paris was panic-stricken. A cry of

`Cartouche' straightway ensured an empty street. The King took

counsel with his ministers: munificent rewards were offered,

without effect. The thief was still at work in all security, and

it was a pretty irony which urged him to strip and kill on the

highway one of the King's own pages. Also, he did his work with

so astonishing a silence, with so reasoned a certainty, that it

seemed impossible to take him or his minions red-handed.

Before all, he discouraged the use of firearms. `A pistol,' his

philosophy urged, `is an excellent weapon in an emergency, but

reserve it for emergencies. At close quarters it is none too

sure; and why give the alarm against yourself?' Therefore he

armed his band with loaded staves, which sent their enemies into

a noiseless and fatal sleep. Thus was he wont to laugh at

the police, deeming capture a plain impossibility. The traitor,

in sooth, was his single, irremediable fear, and if ever

suspicion was aroused against a member of the gang, that member

was put to death with the shortest shrift.

It happened in the last year of Cartouche's supremacy that a

lily-livered comrade fell in love with a pretty dressmaker. The

indiscretion was the less pardonable since the dressmaker had a

horror of theft, and impudently tried to turn her lover from his

trade. Cartouche, discovering the backslider, resolved upon a

public exhibition. Before the assembled band he charged the

miscreant with treason, and, cutting his throat, disfigured his

face beyond recognition. Thereafter he pinned to the corse the

following inscription, that others might be warned by so

monstrous an example: `Ci git Jean Reb<a^>ti, qui a eu le

traitement qu'il m<e'>ritait: ceux qui en feront autant que lui

peuvent attendre le m<e^>me sort.' Yet this was the murder that

led to the hero's own capture and death.

Du Ch<a^>telet, another craven, had already aroused the

suspicions of his landlady: who, finding him something troubled

the day after the traitor's death, and detecting a spot of blood

on his neckerchief, questioned him closely. The coward fumbling

at an answer, she was presently convinced of his guilt, and

forthwith denounced him for a member of the gang to M. Pacome, an

officer of the Guard. Straightly did M. Pac<o^>me summon Du

Ch<a^>telet, and, assuming his guilt for certitude, bade him

surrender his captain. `My friend,' said he, `I know you for an

associate of Cartouche. Your hands are soiled with murder and

rapine. Confess the hiding-place of Cartouche, or in twenty-four

hours you are broken on the wheel.' Vainly did Du Ch<a^>telet

protest his ignorance. M. Pac<o^>me was resolute, and before the

interview was over the robber confessed that Cartouche had given

him rendezvous at nine next day.

In the grey morning thirty soldiers crept forth guided by the

traitor, `en habits de bourgeois et de chasseur,' for the house

where Cartouche had lain. It was an inn, kept by one Savard,

near la Haulte Borne de la Courtille; and the soldiers, though

they lacked not numbers, approached the chieftain's lair shaking

with terror. In front marched Du Ch<a^>telet; the rest followed

in Indian file, ten paces apart. When the traitor reached the

house, Savard recognised him for a friend, and entertained him

with familiar speech. `Is there anybody upstairs?' demanded Du

Ch<a^>telet. `No,' replied Savard. `Are the four women

upstairs?' asked Du Ch<a^>telet again. `Yes, they are,' came the

answer: for Savard knew the password of the day. Instantly the

soldiers filled the tavern, and, mounting the staircase,

discovered Cartouche with his three lieutenants, Balagny,

Limousin, and Blanchard. One of the four still lay abed; but

Cartouche, with all the dandy's respect for his clothes, was

mending his breeches. The others hugged a flagon of wine over

the fire.

So fell the scourge of Paris into the grip of justice. But once

under lock and key, he displayed all the qualities which made him

supreme. His gaiety broke forth into a light-hearted contempt of

his gaolers, and the Lieutenant Criminel, who would interrogate

him, was covered with ridicule. Not for an instant did he bow to

fate: all shackled as he was, his legs engarlanded in heavy

chains--which he called his garters--he tempered his merriment

with the meditation of escape. From the first he denied all

knowledge of Cartouche, insisting that his name was Charles

Bourguignon, and demanding burgundy, that he might drink to his

country and thus prove him a true son of the soil. Not even the

presence of his mother and brother abashed him. He laughed them

away as impostors, hired by a false justice to accuse and to

betray the innocent. No word of confession crossed his lips, and

he would still entertain the officers of the law with joke and

epigram.

Thus he won over a handful of the Guard, and, begging for

solitude, he straightway set about escape with a courage and an

address which Jack Sheppard might have envied. His delicate ear

discovered that a cellar lay beneath his cell; and with the old

nail which lies on the floor of every prison he made his way

downwards into a boxmaker's shop. But a barking dog spoiled the

enterprise: the boxmaker and his daughter were immediately

abroad, and once more Cartouche was lodged in prison,

weighted with still heavier garters.

Then came a period of splendid notoriety: he held his court, he

gave an easy rein to his wit, he received duchesses and princes

with an air of amiable patronage. Few there were of his

visitants who left him without a present of gold, and thus the

universal robber was further rewarded by his victims. His

portrait hung in every house, and his thin, hard face, his dry,

small features were at last familiar to the whole of France. M.

Grandval made him the hero of an epic--`Le Vice Puni.' Even the

theatre was dominated by his presence; and while Arlequin-

Cartouche was greeted with thunders of applause at the Italiens,

the more serious Fran<c,>ais set Cartouche upon the stage in

three acts, and lavished upon its theme the resources of a then

intelligent art. M. Le Grand, author of the piece, deigned to

call upon the king of thieves, spoke some words of argot with

him, and by way of conscience money gave him a hundred crowns.

Cartouche set little store by such patronage. He pocketed the

crowns, and then put an end to the comedy by threatening that if

it were played again the companions of Cartouche would punish all

such miscreants as dared to make him a laughing stock. For

Cartouche would endure ridicule at no man's hand. At the very

instant of his arrest, all bare-footed as he was, he kicked a

constable who presumed to smile at his discomfiture. His last

days were spent in resolute abandonment. True, he once

attempted to beat out his brains with the fetters that bound

him; true, also, he took a poison that had been secretly conveyed

within the prison. But both attempts failed, and, more

scrupulously watched, he had no other course than jollity.

Lawyers and priests he visited with a like and bitter scorn, and

when, on November 27, 1721, he was led to the scaffold, not a

word of confession or contrition had been dragged from him.

To the last moment he cherished the hope of rescue, and eagerly

he scanned the crowd for the faces of his comrades. But the

gang, trusting to its leader's nobility, had broken its oath.

With contemptuous dignity Cartouche determined upon revenge:

proudly he turned to the priest, begging a respite and the

opportunity of speech. Forgotten by his friends, he resolved to

spare no single soul: he betrayed even his mistresses to justice.

Of his gang, forty were in the service of Mlle. de Montpensier,

who was already in Spain; while two obeyed the Duchesse de

Ventadour as valets-de-pied. His confession, in brief, was so

dangerous a document, it betrayed the friends and servants of so

many great houses, that the officers of the Law found safety for

their patrons in its destruction, and not a line of the hero's

testimony remains. The trial of his comrades dragged on for many

a year, and after Cartouche had been cruelly broken on the wheel,

not a few of the gang, of which he had been at once the terror

and inspiration, suffered a like fate. Such the career and

such the fitting end of the most distinguished marauder the world

has known. Thackeray, with no better guide than a chap-book, was

minded to belittle him, now habiting him like a scullion, now

sending him forth on some petty errand of cly-faking. But for

all Thackeray's contempt his fame is still undimmed, and he has

left the reputation of one who, as thief unrivalled, had scarce

his equal as wit and dandy even in the days when Louis the

Magnificent was still a memory and an example.

III

A PARALLEL

(SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE)

A PARALLEL

(SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE)

IF the seventeenth century was the golden age of the hightobyman,

it was at the advent of the eighteenth that the burglar and

street-robber plied their trade with the most distinguished

success, and it was the good fortune of both Cartouche and

Sheppard to be born in the nick of time. Rivals in talent, they

were also near contemporaries, and the Scourge of Paris may well

have been famous in the purlieus of Clare Market before Jack the

Slip-String paid the last penalty of his crimes. As each of

these great men harboured a similar ambition, so their careers

are closely parallel. Born in a humble rank of life, Jack, like

Cartouche, was the architect of his own fortune; Jack, like

Cartouche, lived to be flattered by noble dames and to claim the

solicitude of his Sovereign; and each owed his pre-eminence

rather to natural genius than to a sympathetic training.

But, for all the Briton's artistry, the Frenchman was in all

points save one the superior. Sheppard's brain carried him

not beyond the wants of to-day and the extortions of Poll Maggot.

Who knows but he might have been a respectable citizen, with

never a chance for the display of his peculiar talent, had not

hunger and his mistress's greed driven him upon the pad? History

records no brilliant robbery of his own planning, and so

circumscribed was his imagination that he must needs pick out his

own friends and benefactors for depredation. His paltry sense of

discipline permitted him to be betrayed even by his brother and

pupil, and there was no cracksman of his time over whose head he

held the rod of terror. Even his hatred of Jonathan Wild was the

result not of policy but of prejudice. Cartouche, on the other

hand, was always perfect when at work. The master of himself, he

was also the master of his fellows. There was no detail of civil

war that he had not made his own, and he still remains, after

nearly two centuries, the greatest captain the world has seen.

Never did he permit an enterprise to fail by accident; never was

he impelled by hunger or improvidence to fight a battle

unprepared. His means were always neatly fitted to their end, as

is proved by the truth that, throughout his career, he was

arrested but once, and then not by his own inadvertence but by

the treachery of others.

Yet from the moment of arrest Jack Sheppard asserted his

magnificent superiority. If Cartouche was a sorry bungler at

prison-breaking, Sheppard was unmatched in this dangerous art.

The sport of the one was to break in, of the other to break

out. True, the Briton proved his inferiority by too frequently

placing himself under lock and key; but you will forgive his

every weakness for the unexampled skill wherewith he extricated

himself from the stubbornest dungeon. Cartouche would scarce

have given Sheppard a menial's office in his gang. How cordially

Sheppard would have despised Cartouche's solitary experiment in

escape! To be foiled by a dog and a boxmaker's daughter! Would

not that have seemed contemptible to the master breaker of those

unnumbered doors and walls which separate the Castle from the

freedom of Newgate roof?

Such, then, is the contrast between the heroes. Sheppard claims

our admiration for one masterpiece. Cartouche has a sheaf of

works, which shall carry him triumphantly to the remotest future.

And when you forget a while professional rivalry, and consider

the delicacies of leisure, you will find the Frenchman's

greatness still indisputable. At all points he was the prettier

gentleman. Sheppard, to be sure, had a sense of finery, but he

was so unused to grandeur that vulgarity always spoiled his

effects. When he hied him from the pawnshop, laden with booty,

he must e'en cram what he could not wear into his pockets; and

doubtless his vulgar lack of reticence made detection easier.

Cartouche, on the other hand, had an unfailing sense of

proportion, and was never more dressed than became the perfect

dandy. He was elegant, he was polished, he was joyous. He

drank wine, while the other soaked himself in beer; he despised

whatever was common, while his rival knew but the coarser

flavours of life.

The one was distinguished by a boisterous humour, a swaggering

pride in his own prowess; the wit of the other might be edged

like a knife, nor would he ever appeal for a spectacle to the

curiosity of the mob. Both were men of many mistresses, but

again in his conduct with women Cartouche showed an honester

talent. Sheppard was at once the prey and the whipping-block of

his two infamous doxies, who agreed in deformity of feature as in

contempt for their lover. Cartouche, on the other hand, chose

his cabaret for the wit of its patronne, and was always happy

in the elegance and accomplishment of his companions. One point

of likeness remains. The two heroes resembled each other not

only in their profession, but in their person. Though their

trade demanded physical strength, each was small and slender of

build. `A little, slight-limbed lad,' says the historian of

Sheppard. `A thin, spare frame,' sings the poet of Cartouche.

Here, then, neither had the advantage, and if in the shades

Cartouche despises the clumsiness and vulgarity of his rival,

Sheppard may still remember the glory of Newgate, and twit the

Frenchman with the barking of the boxmaker's dog. But genius is

the talent of the dead, and the wise, who are not partisans, will

not deny to the one or to the other the possession of the rarer

gift.

VAUX

VAUX

TO Haggart, who babbled on the Castle Rock of Willie Wallace and

was only nineteen when he danced without the music; to Simms,

alias Gentleman Harry, who showed at Tyburn how a hero could

die; to George Barrington, the incomparably witty and adroit--to

these a full meed of honour has been paid. Even the coarse and

dastardly Freney has achieved, with Thackeray's aid (and Lever's)

something of a reputation. But James Hardy Vaux, despite his

eloquent bid for fame, has not found his rhapsodist. Yet a more

consistent ruffian never pleaded for mercy. From his early youth

until in 1819 he sent forth his Memoirs to the world, he lived

industriously upon the cross. There was no racket but he worked

it with energy and address. Though he practised the more

glorious crafts of pickpocket and shoplifter, he did not despise

the begging-letter, and he suffered his last punishment for

receiving what another's courage had conveyed. His enterprise

was not seldom rewarded with success, and for a decade of years

he continued to preserve an appearance of gentility; but it is

plain, even from his own narrative, that he was scarce an

artist, and we shall best understand him if we recognise that he

was a Philistine among thieves. He lived in an age of pocket-

picking, and skill in this branch is the true test of his time.

A contemporary of Barrington, he had before him the most

brilliant of examples, which might properly have enforced the

worth of a simple method. But, though he constantly brags of his

success at Drury Lane, we take not his generalities for gospel,

and the one exploit whose credibility is enforced with

circumstance was pitiful both in conception and performance. A

meeting of freeholders at the `Mermaid Tavern,' Hackney, was the

occasion, and after drawing blank upon blank, Vaux succeeded at

last in extracting a silver snuff-box. Now, his clumsiness had

suggested the use of the scissors, and the victim not only

discovered the scission in his coat, but caught the thief with

the implements of his art upon him. By a miracle of impudence

Vaux escaped conviction, but he deserved the gallows for his want

of principle, and not even sympathy could have let drop a tear,

had justice seized her due. On the straight or on the cross the

canons of art deserve respect; and a thief is great, not because

he is a thief, but because, in filling his own pocket, he

preserves from violence the legitimate traditions of his craft.

But it was in conflict with the jewellers that Vaux best proved

his mettle. It was his wont to clothe himself `in the most

elegant attire,' and on the pretence of purchase to rifle the

shops of Piccadilly. For this offence--`pinching' the Cant

Dictionary calls it--he did his longest stretch of time, and here

his admirable qualities of cunning and coolness found their most

generous scope. A love of fine clothes he shared with all the

best of his kind, and he visited Mr Bilger--the jeweller who

arrested him--magnificently arrayed. He wore a black coat and

waistcoat, blue pantaloons, Hessian boots, and a hat `in the

extreme of the newest fashion.' He was also resplendent with

gold watch and eye-glass. His hair was powdered, and a fawney

sparkled on his dexter fam. The booty was enormous, and a week

later he revisited the shop on another errand. This second visit

was the one flash of genius in a somewhat drab career: the

jeweller was so completely dumfounded, that Vaux might have got

clean away. But though he kept discreetly out of sight for a

while, at last he drifted back to his ancient boozing-ken, and

was there betrayed to a notorious thief-catcher. The inevitable

sentence of death followed. It was commuted after the fashion of

the time, and Vaux, having sojourned a while at the Hulks, sought

for a second time the genial airs of Botany Bay.

His vanity and his laziness were alike invincible. He believed

himself a miracle of learning as well as a perfect thief, and

physical toil was the sole `lay' for which he professed no

capacity. For a while he corrected the press for a printer,

and he roundly asserts that his knowledge of literature and of

foreign tongues rendered him invaluable. It was vanity again

that induced him to assert his innocence when he was lagged for

so vulgar a crime as stealing a wipe from a tradesman in Chancery

Lane. At the moment of arrest he was on his way to purchase base

coin from a Whitechapel bit-faker: but, despite his nefarious

errand, he is righteously wrathful at what he asserts was an

unjust conviction, and henceforth he assumed the crown of

martyrdom. His first and last ambition during the intervals of

freedom was gentility, and so long as he was not at work he lived

the life of a respectable grocer. Although the casual Cyprian

flits across his page, he pursued the one flame of his life for

the good motive, and he affects to be a very model of

domesticity. The sentiment of piety also was strong upon him,

and if he did not, like the illustrious Peace, pray for his

jailer, he rivalled the Prison Ordinary in comforting the

condemned. Had it only been his fate to die on the gallows, how

unctuous had been his croak!

The text of his `Memoirs' having been edited, it is scarce

possible to define his literary talent. The book, as it stands,

is an excellent piece of narrative, but it loses somewhat by the

pretence of style. The man's invulnerable conceit prevented an

absolute frankness, and there is little enough hilarity to

correct the acid sentiment and the intolerable vows of

repentance. Again, though he knows his subject, and can

patter flash with the best, his incorrigible respectability leads

him to ape the manner of a Grub Street hack, and to banish to a

vocabulary those pearls of slang which might have added vigour

and lustre to his somewhat tiresome page. However, the thief

cannot escape his inevitable defects. The vanity, the weakness,

the sentimentality of those who are born beasts of prey, yet have

the faculty of depredation only half-developed, are the foes of

truth, and it is well to remember that the autobiography of a

rascal is tainted at its source. A congenial pickpocket,

equipped with the self-knowledge and the candour which would

enable him to recognise himself an outlaw and justice his enemy

rather than an instrument of malice, would prove a Napoleon

rather than a Vaux. So that we must e'en accept our Newgate

Calendar with its many faults upon its head, and be content.

For it takes a man of genius to write a book, and the thief who

turns author commonly inhabits a paradise of the second-rate.

GEORGE BARRINGTON

GEORGE BARRINGTON

AS Captain Hind was master of the road, George Barrington was

(and remains for ever) the absolute monarch of pickpockets.

Though the art, superseding the cutting of purses, had been

practised with courage and address for half a century before

Barrington saw the light, it was his own incomparable genius that

raised thievery from the dangerous valley of experiment, and set

it, secure and honoured, upon the mountain height of perfection.

To a natural habit of depredation, which, being a man of letters,

he was wont to justify, he added a sureness of hand, a fertility

of resource, a recklessness of courage which drove his

contemporaries to an amazed respect, and from which none but the

Philistine will withhold his admiration. An accident discovered

his taste and talent. At school he attempted to kill a

companion--the one act of violence which sullies a strangely

gentle career; and outraged at the affront of a flogging, he fled

with twelve guineas and a gold repeater watch. A vulgar theft

this, and no presage of future greatness; yet it proves the

fearless greed, the contempt of private property, which mark

as with a stigma the temperament of the prig. His faculty did

not rust long for lack of use, and at Drogheda, when he was but

sixteen, he encountered one Price, half barnstormer, half thief.

Forthwith he embraced the twin professions, and in the interlude

of more serious pursuits is reported to have made a respectable

appearance as Jaffier in Venice Preserved. For a while he

dreamed of Drury Lane and glory; but an attachment for Miss

Egerton, the Belvidera to his own Jaffier, was more costly than

the barns of Londonderry warranted, and, with Price for a

colleague, he set forth on a tour of robbery, merely interrupted

through twenty years by a few periods of enforced leisure.

His youth, indeed, was his golden age. For four years he

practised his art, chilled by no shadow of suspicion, and his

immunity was due as well to his excellent bearing as to his

sleight of hand. In one of the countless chap-books which

dishonour his fame, he is unjustly accused of relying for his

effects upon an elaborate apparatus, half knife, half scissors,

wherewith to rip the pockets of his victims. The mere backbiting

of envy! An artistic triumph was never won save by legitimate

means; and the hero who plundered the Dulce of L--r at Ranelagh,

who emptied the pockets of his acquaintance without fear of

exposure, who all but carried off the priceless snuff-box of

Count Orloff, most assuredly followed his craft in full

simplicity and with a proper scorn of clumsy artifice. At

his first appearance he was the master, sumptuously apparelled,

with Price for valet. At Dublin his birth and quality were never

questioned, and when he made a descent upon London it was in

company with Captain W. H--n, who remained for years his loyal

friend. He visited Brighton as the chosen companion of Lord

Ferrers and the wicked Lord Lyttelton. His manners and learning

were alike irresistible. Though the picking of pockets was the

art and interest of his life, he was on terms of easy familiarity

with light literature, and he considered no toil too wearisome if

only his conversation might dazzle his victims. Two maxims he

charactered upon his heart: the one, never to run a large risk

for a small gain; the other, never to forget the carriage and

diction of a gentleman.

He never stooped to pilfer, until exposure and decay had weakened

his hand. In his first week at Dublin he carried off <Pd>1000,

and it was only his fateful interview with Sir John Fielding that

gave him poverty for a bedfellow. Even at the end, when he slunk

from town to town, a notorious outlaw, he had inspirations of his

ancient magnificence, and--at Chester--he eluded the vigilance of

his enemies and captured <Pd>600, wherewith he purchased some

months of respectability. Now, respectability was ever dear to

him, and it was at once his pleasure and profit to live in the

highest society. Were it not blasphemy to sully Barrington with

slang you would call him a member of the swell-mob, but,

having cultivated a grave and sober style for himself, he

recoiled in horror from the flash lingo, and his susceptibility

demands respect.

He kept a commonplace book! Was ever such thrift in a thief?

Whatever images or thoughts flashed through his brain, he seized

them on paper, even `amidst the jollity of a tavern, or in the

warmth of an interesting conversation.' Was it then strange that

he triumphed as a man of fashionable and cultured leisure? He

would visit Ranelagh with the most distinguished, and turn a

while from epigram and jest to empty the pocket of a rich

acquaintance. And ever with so tactful a certainty, with so fine

a restraint of the emotions, that suspicion was preposterous. To

catalogue his exploits is superfluous, yet let it be recorded

that once he went to Court, habited as a clergyman, and came home

the richer for a diamond order, Lord C--'s proudest decoration.

Even the assault upon Prince Orloff was nobly planned.

Barrington had precise intelligence of the marvellous snuff-box--

the Empress's own gift to her lover; he knew also how he might

meet the Prince at Drury Lane; he had even discovered that the

Prince for safety hid the jewel in his vest. But the Prince felt

the Prig's hand upon the treasure, and gave an instant alarm.

Over-confidence, maybe, or a too liberal dinner was the cause of

failure, and Barrington, surrounded in a moment, was speedily in

the lock-up. It was the first rebuff that the hero had received,

and straightway his tact and ingenuity left him. The

evidence was faulty, the prosecution declined, and naught was

necessary for escape save presence of mind. Even friends were

staunch, and had Barrington told his customary lie, his character

had gone unsullied. Yet having posed for his friends as a

student of the law, at Bow Street he must needs declare himself a

doctor, and the needless discrepancy ruined him. Though he

escaped the gallows, there was an end to the diversions of

intellect and fashion; as he discovered when he visited the House

of Lords to hear an appeal, and Black Rod ejected him at the

persuasion of Mr. G--. As yet unused to insult, he threatened

violence against the aggressor, and finding no bail he was sent

on his first imprisonment to the Bridewell in Tothill Fields.

Rapid, indeed, was the descent. At the first grip of adversity,

he forgot his cherished principles, and two years later the

loftiest and most elegant gentlemen that ever picked a pocket was

at the Hulks--for robbing a harlot at Drury Lane! Henceforth,

his insolence and artistry declined, and, though to the last

there were intervals of grandeur, he spent the better part of

fifteen years in the commission of crimes, whose very littleness

condemned them. At last an exile from St. James's and Ranelagh,

he was forced into a society which still further degraded him.

Hitherto he had shunned the society of professed thieves; in his

golden youth he had scorned to shelter him in the flash kens,

which were the natural harbours of pickpockets. But now, says

his biographer, he began to seek evil company, and, the

victim of his own fame, found safety only in obscene concealment.

At the Hulks he recovered something of his dignity, and

discretion rendered his first visit brief enough. Even when he

was committed on a second offence, and had attempted suicide, he

was still irresistible, and he was discharged with several years

of imprisonment to run. But, in truth, he was born for honour

and distinction, and common actions, common criminals, were in

the end distasteful to him. In his heyday he stooped no further

than to employ such fences as might profitably dispose of his

booty, and the two partners of his misdeeds were both remarkable.

James, the earlier accomplice affected clerical attire, and in

1791 `was living in a Westphalian monastery, to which he some

years ago retired, in an enviable state of peace and penitence,

respected for his talents, and loved for his amiable manners, by

which he is distinguished in an eminent degree.' The other

ruffian, Lowe by name, was known to his own Bloomsbury Square for

a philanthropic and cultured gentleman, yet only suicide saved

him from the gallows. And while Barrington was wise in the

choice of his servants, his manners drove even strangers to

admiration. Policemen and prisoners were alike anxious to do him

honour. Once when he needed money for his own defence, his

brother thieves, whom he had ever shunned and despised, collected

<Pd>100 for the captain of their guild. Nor did gaoler and judge

ever forget the respect due to a gentleman. When Barrington

was tried and condemned for the theft of Mr. Townsend's watch at

Enfield Races--September 15, 1790, was the day of his last

transgression--one knows not which was the more eloquent in his

respect, the judge or the culprit.

But it was not until the pickpocket set out for Botany Bay that

he took full advantage of his gentlemanly bearing. To thrust

`Mr.' Barrington into the hold was plainly impossible, even

though transportation for seven years was his punishment.

Wherefore he was admitted to the boatswain's mess, was allowed as

much baggage as a first-class passenger, and doubtless beguiled

the voyage (for others) with the information of a well-stored

mind. By an inspiration of luck he checked a mutiny, holding the

quarter-deck against a mob of ruffians with no weapon but a

marline-spike. And hereafter, as he tells you in his `Voyage to

New South Wales,' he was accorded the fullest liberty to come or

go. He visited many a foreign port with the officers of the

ship; he packed a hundred note-books with trite and superfluous

observations; he posed, in brief, as the captain of the ship

without responsibility. Arrived at Port Jackson, he was

acclaimed a hero, and received with obsequious solicitude by the

Governor, who promised that his `future situation should be such

as would render his banishment from England as little irksome as

possible.' Forthwith he was appointed high constable of

Paramatta, and, like Vautrin, who might have taken the

youthful Barrington for another Rastignac, he ended his days the

honourable custodian of less fortunate convicts. Or, as a

broadside ballad has it,

He left old Drury's flash purlieus,

To turn at last a copper.

Never did he revert to his ancient practice. If in his youth he

had lived the double-life with an effrontery and elegance which

Brodie himself never attained, henceforth his career was single

in its innocence. He became a prig in the less harmful and more

offensive sense. After the orthodox fashion he endeared himself

to all who knew him, and ruled Paramatta with an equable

severity. Having cultivated the humanities for the base purposes

of his trade, he now devoted himself to literature with an energy

of dulness, becoming, as it were, a liberal education

personified. His earlier efforts had been in verse, and you

wonder that no enterprising publisher had ventured on a limited

edition. Time was he composed an ode to Light, and once

recovering from a fever contracted at Ballyshannon, he addressed

a few burning lines to Hygeia:

Hygeia! thou whose eyes display

The lustre of meridian day;

and so on for endless couplets. Then, had he not celebrated in

immortal verse his love for Miss Egerton, untimely drowned in the

waters of the Boyne? But now, as became the Constable of

Paramatta, he chose the sterner medium, and followed up his

`Voyage to New South Wales' with several exceeding trite and

valuable histories.

His most ambitious work was dedicated in periods of unctuous

piety to his Majesty King George III., and the book's first

sentence is characteristic of his method and sensibility: `In

contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is

alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.'

Would you read further? Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin

goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as

a geographical treatise. His first masterpiece was translated

into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that war

with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable

biography. Was ever thief treated with so grave a consideration?

Then another work was prefaced by the Right Hon. William Eden,

and all were `embellished with beautiful coloured plates,' and

ran through several editions. Once only did he return to poetry,

the favoured medium of his youth, and he returned to write an

imperishable line. Even then his pedantry persuaded him to

renounce the authorship, and to disparage the achievement. The

occasion was the opening of a theatre at Sydney, wherein the

parts were sustained by convicts. The cost of admission to the

gallery was one shilling, paid in money, flour, meat, or spirits.

The play was entitled The Revenge and the Hotel, and

Barrington provided the prologue, which for one passage is for

ever memorable. Thus it runs:

From distant climes, o'er widespread seas, we come,

Though not with much eclat or beat of drum;

True patriots we, for be it understood,

We left our country for our country's good.

No private views disgraced our generous zeal,

What urged our travels was our country's weal;

And none will doubt, but that our emigration

Has proved most useful to the British nation.

`We left our country for our country's good.' That line, thrown

fortuitously into four hundred pages of solid prose, has emerged

to become the common possession of Fleet Street. It is the man's

one title to literary fame, for spurning the thievish practice he

knew so well, he was righteously indignant when The London Spy

was fathered upon him. Though he emptied his contemporary's

pockets of many thousands, he enriched the Dictionary of

Quotations with one line, which will be repeated so long as there

is human hand to wield a pen. And, if the High Constable of

Paramatta was tediously respectable, George Barrington, the Prig,

was a man of genius.

THE SWITCHER

AND GENTLEMAN HARRY

I

THE SWITCHER

THE SWITCHER

DAVID HAGGART was born at Canonmills, with no richer birthright

than thievish fingers and a left hand of surpassing activity.

The son of a gamekeeper, he grew up a long-legged, red-headed

callant, lurking in the sombre shadow of the Cowgate, or like the

young Sir Walter, championing the Auld Town against the New on

the slopes of Arthur's Seat. Kipping was his early sin; but the

sportsman's instinct, born of his father's trade, was so strong

within him, that he pinched a fighting cock before he was

breeched, and risked the noose for horse-stealing when marbles

should have engrossed his boyish fancy. Turbulent and lawless,

he bitterly resented the intolerable restraint of a tranquil

life, and, at last, in the hope of a larger liberty, he enlisted

for a drummer in the Norfolk Militia, stationed at the moment in

Edinburgh Castle. A brief, insubordinate year, misspent in his

country's service, proved him hopeless of discipline: he claimed

his discharge, and henceforth he was free to follow the one craft

for which nature and his own ambition had moulded him.

Like Chatterton, like Rimbaud, Haggart came into the full

possession of his talent while still a child. A Barrington of

fourteen, he knew every turn and twist of his craft, before he

escaped from school. His youthful necessities were munificently

supplied by facile depredation, and the only hindrance to

immediate riches was his ignorance of flash kens where he might

fence his plunder. Meanwhile he painted his soul black with

wickedness. Such hours as he could snatch from the profitable

conduct of his trade he devoted to the austere debauchery of

Leith or the Golden Acre. Though he knew not the seduction of

whisky, he missed never a dance nor a raffle, joining the frolics

of prigs and callets in complete forgetfulness of the shorter

catechism. In vain the kirk compared him to a `bottle in the

smoke'; in vain the minister whispered of hell and the gallows;

his heart hardened, as his fingers grew agile, and when, at

sixteen, he left his father's house for a sporting life, he had

not his equal in the three kingdoms for cunning and courage.

His first accomplice was Barney M'Guire, who--until a fourteen

stretch sent him to Botany Bay--played Clytus to David's

Alexander, and it was at Portobello Races that their brilliant

partnership began. Hitherto Haggart had worked by stealth; he

had tracked his booty under the cloud of night. Now was the

moment to prove his prowess in the eye of day, to break with a

past which he already deemed ignoble. His heart leaped with the

occasion: he tackled his adventure with the hot-head energy

of a new member, big with his maiden speech. The victim was

chosen in an instant: a backer, whose good fortune had broken the

bookmakers. There was no thief on the course who did not wait,

in hungry appetence, the sportsman's descent from the stand; yet

the novice outstripped them all. `I got the first dive at his

keek-cloy,' he writes in his simple, heroic style, `and was so

eager on my prey, that I pulled out the pocket along with the

money, and nearly upset the gentleman.' A steady brain saved him

from the consequence of an o'erbuoyant enthusiasm. The notes

were passed to Barney in a flash, and when the sportsman turned

upon his assailant, Haggart's hands were empty.

Thereupon followed an infinite series of brilliant exploits.

With Barney to aid, he plundered the Border like a reiver. He

stripped the yeomen of Tweedside with a ferocity which should

have avenged the disgrace of Flodden. More than once he

ransacked Ecclefechan, though it is unlikely that he emptied the

lean pocket of Thomas Carlyle. There was not a gaff from

Newcastle to the Tay which he did not haunt with sedulous

perseverance; nor was he confronted with failure, until his

figure became a universal terror. His common method was to price

a horse, and while the dealer showed Barney the animal's teeth,

Haggart would slip under the uplifted arm, and ease the blockhead

of his blunt. Arrogant in his skill, delighted with his

manifold triumphs, Haggart led a life of unbroken prosperity

under the brisk air of heaven, and, despite the risk of his

profession, he remained two years a stranger to poverty and

imprisonment. His worst mishap was to slip his forks into an

empty pocket, or to encounter in his cups a milvadering horse-

dealer; but his joys were free and frank, while he exulted in his

success with a boyish glee. `I was never happier in all my life

than when I fingered all this money,' he exclaims when he had

captured the comfortable prize of two hundred pounds. And then

he would make merry at Newcastle or York, forgetting the knowing

ones for a while, going abroad in white cape and tops, and

flicking his leg like a gentleman with a dandy whip. But at last

Barney and a wayward ambition persuaded him to desert his proper

craft for the greater hazard of cracking a crib, and thus he was

involved in his ultimate ruin. He incurred and he deserved the

untoward fate of those who overlook their talents' limitation;

and when this master of pickpockets followed Barney through the

window of a secluded house upon the York Road, he might already

have felt the noose tightening at his neck. The immediate reward

of this bungled attack was thirty pounds, but two days later he

was committed with Barney to the Durham Assizes, where he

exchanged the obscurity of the perfect craftsman for the

notoriety of the dangerous gaol-bird.

For the moment, however, he recovered his freedom: breaking

prison, he straightway conveyed a fiddlestick to his comrade, and

in a twinkling was at Newcastle again, picking up purses well

lined with gold, and robbing the bumpkins of their scouts and

chats. But the time of security was overpast. Marked and

suspicious, he began to fear the solitude of the country; he left

the horse-fair for the city, and sought in the budging-kens of

Edinburgh the secrecy impossible on the hill-side. A clumsy

experiment in shop-lifting doubled his danger, and more than once

he saw the inside of the police-office. Henceforth, he was free

of the family; he loafed in the Shirra-Brae; he knew the flash

houses of Leith and the Grassmarket. With Jean Johnston, the

blowen of his choice, he smeared his hands with the squalor of

petty theft, and the drunken recklessness wherewith he swaggered

it abroad hastened his approaching downfall.

With a perpetual anxiety to avoid the nippers his artistry

dwindled. The left hand, invincible on the Cheviots, seemed no

better than a bunch of thumbs in the narrow ways of Edinburgh;

and after innumerable misadventures Haggart was safely lodged in

Dumfries gaol. No sooner was he locked within his cell than his

restless brain planned a generous escape. He would win liberty

for his fellows as well as for himself, and after a brief council

a murderous plot was framed and executed. A stone slung in a

handkerchief sent Morrin, the gaoler, to sleep; the keys found on

him opened the massy doors; and Haggart was free with a

reward set upon his head. The shock of the enterprise restored

his magnanimity. Never did he display a finer bravery than in

this spirited race for his life, and though three counties were

aroused he doubled and ducked to such purpose that he outstripped

John Richardson himself with all his bloodhounds, and two days

later marched into Carlisle disguised in the stolen rags of a

potato-bogle.

During the few months that remained to him of life he embarked

upon a veritable Odyssey: he scoured Scotland from the Border to

St. Andrews, and finally contrived a journey oversea to Ireland,

where he made the name of Daniel O'Brien a terror to well-doers.

Insolent and careless, he lurched from prison to prison; now it

was Armagh that held him, now Downpatrick, until at last he was

thrust on a general charge of vagabondage and ill-company into

Kilmainham, which has since harboured many a less valiant

adventurer than David Haggart. Here the culminating disgrace

overtook him: he was detected in the prison yard by his ancient

enemy, John Richardson, of Dumfries, who dragged him back to

Scotland heavily shackled and charged with murder. So nimble had

he proved himself in extrication, that his captors secured him

with pitiless severity; round his waist he carried an iron belt,

whereto were padlocked the chains, clanking at his wrists and

ankles. Thus tortured and helpless, he was fed `like a sucking

turkey in Bedlam'; but his sorrows vanished, and his dying

courage revived at sight of the torchlight procession, which set

forth from Dumfries to greet his return.

His coach was hustled by a mob, thousands strong, eager to catch

sight of Haggart the Murderer, and though the spot where he slew

Morrin was like fire beneath his passing feet, he carried to his

cell a heart and a brain aflame with gratified vanity. His guilt

being patent, reprieve was as hopeless as acquittal, and after

the assured condemnation he spent his last few days with what

profit he might in religious and literary exercises. He composed

a memoir, which is a model of its kind; so diligently did he make

his soul, that he could appear on the scaffold in a chastened

spirit of prayerful gratitude; and, being an eminent scoundrel,

he seemed a proper subject for the ministrations of Mr. George

Combe. `That is the one thing I did not know before,' he

confessed with an engaging modesty, when his bumps were squeezed,

and yet he was more than a match for the amiable phrenologist,

whose ignorance of mankind persuaded him to believe that an

illiterate felon could know himself and analyse his character.

His character escaped his critics as it escaped himself. Time

was when George Borrow, that other picaroon, surprised the

youthful David, thinking of Willie Wallace upon the Castle Rock,

and Lavengro's romantic memory transformed the raw-boned

pickpocket into a monumental hero, who lacked nothing save a vast

theatre to produce a vast effect. He was a Tamerlane,

robbed of his opportunity; a valiant warrior, who looked in vain

for a battlefield; a marauder who climbed the scaffold not for

the magnitude, but for the littleness of his sins. Thus Borrow,

in complete misunderstanding of the rascal's qualities.

Now, Haggart's ambition was as circumscribed as his ability. He

died, as he was born, an expert cly-faker, whose achievements in

sleight of hand are as yet unparalleled. Had the world been one

vast breast pocket his fish-hook fingers would have turned it

inside out. But it was not his to mount a throne, or overthrow a

dynasty. `My forks,' he boasted, `are equally long, and they

never fail me.' That is at once the reason and the justification

of his triumph. Born with a consummate artistry tingling at his

finger-tips, how should he escape the compulsion of a glorious

destiny? Without fumbling or failure he discovered the single

craft for which fortune had framed him, and he pursued it with a

courage and an industry which gave him not a kingdom, but fame

and booty, exceeding even his greedy aspiration. No Tamerlane

he, questing for a continent, but David Haggart, the man with the

long forks, happy if he snatched his neighbour's purse.

Before all things he respected the profession which his left hand

made inevitable, and which he pursued with unconquerable pride.

Nor in his inspired youth was plunder his sole ambition: he

cultivated the garden of his style with the natural zeal of

the artist; he frowned upon the bungler with a lofty contempt.

His materials were simplicity itself: his forks, which were

always with him, and another's well-filled pocket, since,

sensible of danger, he cared not to risk his neck for a purse

that did not contain so much as would `sweeten a grawler.' At

its best, his method was always witty--that is the single word

which will characterise it--witty as a piece of Heine's prose,

and as dangerous. He would run over a man's pockets while he

spoke with him, returning what he chose to discard without the

lightest breath of suspicion. `A good workman,' his

contemporaries called him; and they thought it a shame for him to

be idle. Moreover, he did not blunder unconsciously upon his

triumph; he tackled the trade in so fine a spirit of analysis

that he might have been the very Aristotle of his science. `The

keek-cloy,' he wrote, in his hints to young sportsmen, `is easily

picked. If the notes are in the long fold just tip them the

forks; but if there is a purse or open money in the case, you

must link it.' The breast-pocket, on the other hand, is a

severer test. `Picking the suck is sometimes a kittle job,'

again the philosopher speaks. `If the coat is buttoned it must

be opened by slipping past. Then bring the lil down between the

flap of the coat and the body, keeping your spare arm across your

man's breast, and so slip it to a comrade; then abuse the fellow

for jostling you.'

Not only did he master the tradition of thievery; he vaunted his

originality with the familiar complacence of the scoundrel.

Forgetting that it was by burglary that he was undone, he

explains for his public glorification that he was wont to enter

the houses of Leith by forcing the small window above the outer

door. This artifice, his vanity grumbles, is now common; but he

would have all the world understand that it was his own

invention, and he murmurs with the pedantry of the convicted

criminal that it is now set forth for the better protection of

honest citizens. No less admirable in his own eyes was that

other artifice which induced him to conceal such notes as he

managed to filch in the collar of his coat. Thus he eluded the

vigilance of the police, which searched its prey in those days

with a sorry lack of cunning. In truth, Haggart's wits were as

nimble as his fingers, and he seldom failed to render a

profitable account of his talents. He beguiled one of his

sojourns in gaol by manufacturing tinder wherewith to light the

prisoners' pipes, and it is not astonishing that he won a general

popularity. In Ireland, when the constables would take him for a

Scot, he answered in high Tipperary, and saved his skin for a

while by a brogue which would not have shamed a modern patriot.

But quick as were his wits, his vanity always outstripped them,

and no hero ever bragged of his achievements with a louder

effrontery.

Now all you ramblers in mourning go,

For the prince of ramblers is lying low,

And all you maidens that love the game,

Put on your mourning veils again.

Thus he celebrated his downfall in a ballad that has the true

Newgate ring, and verily in his own eyes he was a hero who

carried to the scaffold a dauntless spirit unstained by

treachery.

He believed himself an adept in all the arts; as a squire of

dames he held himself peerless, and he assured the ineffable

Combe, who recorded his flippant utterance with a credulous

respect, that he had sacrificed hecatombs of innocent virgins to

his importunate lust. Prose and verse trickled with equal

facility from his pen, and his biography is a masterpiece.

Written in the pedlar's French as it was misspoken in the hells

of Edinburgh, it is a narrative of uncommon simplicity and

directness, marred now and again by such superfluous reflections

as are the natural result of thievish sentimentality. He tells

his tale without paraphrase or adornment, and the worthy Writer

to the Signet, who prepared the work for the Press, would have

asked three times the space to record one-half the adventures.

`I sunk upon it with my forks and brought it with me'; `We

obtained thirty-three pounds by this affair'--is there not the

stalwart flavour of the epic in these plain, unvarnished

sentences?

His other accomplishments are pallid in the light of his

brilliant left hand. Once, at Derry--he attended a cock-

fight, and beguiled an interval by emptying the pockets of a

lucky bookmaker. An expert, who watched the exploit in

admiration, could not withhold a compliment. `You are the

Switcher,' he exclaimed; `some take all, but you leave nothing.'

And it is as the Switcher that Haggart keeps his memory green.

II

GENTLEMAN HARRY

GENTLEMAN HARRY

`DAMN ye both! stop, or I will blow your brains out!' Thus it

was that Harry Simms greeted his victims, proving in a phrase

that the heroic age of the rumpad was no more. Forgotten the

debonair courtesy of Claude Duval! Forgotten the lightning wit,

the swift repartee of the incomparable Hind! No longer was the

hightoby-gloak a `gentleman' of the road; he was a butcher, if

not a beggar, on horseback; a braggart without the courage to

pull a trigger; a swashbuckler, oblivious of that ancient style

which converted the misery of surrender into a privilege. Yet

Harry Simms, the supreme adventurer of his age, was not without

distinction; his lithe form and his hard-ridden horse were the

common dread of England; his activity was rewarded with a

princely treasure; and if his method were lacking in urbanity,

the excuse is that he danced not to the brilliant measure of the

Cavaliers, but limped to the clumsy fiddle-scraping of the early

Georges.

At Eton, where a too-indulgent grandmother had placed him,

he ransacked the desks of his school-fellows, and avenged a

birching by emptying his master's pockets. Wherefore he lost the

hope of a polite education, and instead of proceeding with a

clerkly dignity to King's College, in the University of

Cambridge, he was ignominiously apprenticed to a breeches-maker.

The one restraint was as irksome as the other, and Harry Simms

abandoned the needle, as he had scorned the grammar, to go upon

the pad. Though his early companions were scragged at Tyburn,

the light-fingered rascal was indifferent to their fate, and

squandering such booty as fell to his share, he bravely `turned

out' for more. Tottenham Court Fair was the theatre of his

childish exploits, and there he gained some little skill in the

picking of pockets. But a spell of bad trade brought him to

poverty, and he attempted to replenish an empty pocket by the

childish expedient of a threatening letter.

The plan was conceived and executed with a futility which ensured

an instant capture. The bungler chose a stranger at haphazard,

commanding him, under penalty of death, to lay five guineas upon

a gun in Tower Wharf; the guineas were cunningly deposited, and

the rascal, caught with his hand upon the booty, was committed to

Newgate. Youth, and the intercession of his grandmother,

procured a release, unjustified by the infamous stupidity of the

trick. Its very clumsiness should have sent him over sea; and it

is wonderful that from a beginning of so little promise, he

should have climbed even the first slopes of greatness. However,

the memory of gaol forced him to a brief interlude of honesty;

for a while he wore the pink coat of Colonel Cunningham's

postillion, and presently was promoted to the independence of a

hackney coach.

Thus employed, he became acquainted with the famous Cyprians of

Covent Garden, who, loving him for his handsome face and

sprightly gesture, seduced him to desert his cab for an easier

profession. So long as the sky was fair, he lived under their

amiable protection; but the summer having chased the smarter

gentry from town, the ladies could afford him no more than would

purchase a horse and a pair of pistols, so that Harry was

compelled to challenge fortune on the high road. His first

journey was triumphantly successful. A post-chaise and a couple

of coaches emptied their wealth into his hands, and, riding for

London, he was able to return the favours lavished upon him by

Covent Garden. At the first touch of gold he was transformed to

a finished blade. He purchased himself a silver-hilted sword,

which he dangled over a discreet suit of black velvet; a

prodigious run of luck at the gaming-tables kept his purse well

lined; and he made so brilliant an appearance in his familiar

haunts that he speedily gained the name of `Gentleman Harry.'

But the money, lightly won, was lightly spent. The tables took

back more than they gave, and before long Simms was astride his

horse again, flourishing his irons, and crying: `Stand and

deliver'! upon every road in England.

Epping Forest was his general hunting-ground, but his enterprise

took him far afield, and if one night he galloped by starlight

across Bagshot Heath, another he was holding up the York stage

with unbridled insolence. He robbed, he roared, he blustered

with praiseworthy industry; and good luck coming to the aid of

caution, he escaped for a while the necessary punishment of his

crimes. It was on Stockbridge Downs that he met his first check.

He had stopped a chariot, and came off with a hatful of gold, but

the victims, impatient of disaster, raised the county, and

Gentleman Harry was laid by the heels. Never at a loss, he

condescended to a cringing hypocrisy: he whined, he whimpered, he

babbled of reform, he plied his prosecutors with letters so

packed with penitence, that they abandoned their case, and in a

couple of days Simms had eased a collector at Eversey Bank of

three hundred pounds. For this enterprise two others climbed the

gallows, and the robber's pride in his capture was miserably

lessened by the shedding of innocent blood.

But he forgot his remorse as speedily as he dissipated his money,

and sentimentality neither damped his enjoyment nor restrained

his energy. Even his brief visits to London were turned to the

best account; and, though he would have the world believe him a

mere voluptuary, his eye was bent sternly upon business. If

he did lose his money in a gambling hell, he knew who won it, and

spoke with his opponent on the homeward way. In his eyes a

fuddled rake was always fair game, and the stern windows of St.

Clement's Church looked down upon many a profitable adventure.

His most distinguished journey was to Ireland, whither he set

forth to find a market for his stolen treasure. But he

determined that the road should bear its own charges, and he

reached Dublin a richer man than he left London. In three months

he was penniless, but he did not begin trade again until he had

recrossed the Channel, and, having got to work near Chester, he

returned to the Piazza fat with bank-notes.

With success his extravagance increased, and, living the life of

a man about town, he was soon harassed by debt. More than once

he was lodged in the Marshalsea, and as his violent temper

resented the interference of a dun, he became notorious for his

assaults upon sheriff's officers. And thus his poor skill grew

poorer: forgetting his trade, he expected that brandy would ease

his embarrassment. At last, sodden with drink, he enlisted in

the Guards, from which regiment he deserted, only to be pressed

aboard a man-of-war. Freed by a clever trick, he took to the

road again, until a paltry theft from a barber transported him to

Maryland. There he turned sailor, and his ship, The Two

Sisters, being taken by a privateer, he contrived to scramble

into Portugal, whence he made his way back to England, and

to the only adventure of which he was master. He landed with no

more money than the price of a pistol, but he prigged a prancer

at Bristol horsefair, and set out upon his last journey. The

tide of his fortune was at flood. He crammed his pockets with

watches; he was owner of enough diamonds to set up shop in a

fashionable quarter; of guineas he had as many as would support

his magnificence for half a year; and at last he resolved to quit

the road, and to live like the gentleman he was. To this

prudence he was the more easily persuaded, because not only were

the thief-takers eager for his capture, but he was a double-dyed

deserter, whose sole chance of quietude was a decent obscurity.

His resolution was taken at St. Albans, and over a comfortable

dinner he pictured a serene and uneventful future. On the morrow

he would set forth to Dublin, sell his handsome stock of jewels,

and forget that the cart ever lumbered up Tyburn Hill. So elated

was he with his growing virtue, that he called for a second

bottle, and as the port heated his blood his fingers tingled for

action. A third bottle proved beyond dispute that only the

craven were idle; `and why,' he exclaimed, generous with wine,

`should the most industrious ruffler of England condescend to

inaction?' Instantly he summoned the ostler, screaming for his

horse, and before Redburn he had emptied four pockets, and had

exchanged his own tired jade for a fresh and willing beast.

Still exultant in his contempt of cowardice, he faced the

Warrington stage, and made off with his plunder at a drunken

gallop. Arrived at Dunstable, he was so befogged with liquor and

pride, that he entered the `Bull Inn,' the goal of the very coach

he had just encountered. He had scarce called for a quartern of

brandy when the robbed passengers thronged into the kitchen; and

the fright gave him enough sobriety to leave his glass untasted,

and stagger to his horse. In a wild fury of arrogance and

terror, of conflicting vice and virtue, he pressed on to

Hockcliffe, where he took refuge from the rain, and presently,

fuddled with more brandy, he fell asleep over the kitchen fire.

By this time the hue and cry was raised; and as the hero lay

helpless in the corner three troopers burst into the inn,

levelled their pistols at his head, and threatened death if he

put his hand to his pocket. Half asleep, and wholly drunk, he

made not he smallest show of resistance; he surrendered all his

money, watches, and diamonds, save a little that was sewn into

his neckcloth, and sulkily crawled up to his bed-chamber.

Thither the troopers followed him, and having restored some nine

pounds at his urgent demand, they watched his heavy slumbers.

For all his brandy Simms slept but uneasily, and awoke in the

night sick with the remorse which is bred of ruined plans and a

splitting head. He got up wearily, and sat over the fire `a good

deal chagrined,' to quote his own simple phrase, at his miserable

capture. Escape seemed hopeless indeed; there crouched the

vigilant troopers, scowling on their prey. A thousand plans

chased each other through the hero's fuddled brain, and at last

he resolved to tempt the cupidity of his guardians, and to make

himself master of their fire-arms. There were still left him a

couple of seals, one gold, the other silver, and watching his

opportunity, Simms flung them with a flourish in the fire. It

fell out as he expected; the hungry troopers made a dash to save

the trinkets; the prisoner seized a brace of pistols and leapt to

the door. But, alas, the pistols missed fire, Harry was

immediately overpowered, and on the morrow was carried, sick and

sorry, before the Justice. From Dunstable he travelled his last

journey to Newgate, and, being condemned at the Old Bailey, he

was hanged till he was dead, and his body thereafter was carried

for dissection to a surgeon's in that same Covent Garden where he

first deserted his hackney cab for the pleasures of the town.

`Gentleman Harry' was neither a brilliant thief nor a courteous

highwayman. There was no touch of the grand manner even in his

prettiest achievement. His predecessors had made a pistol and a

vizard an overwhelming terror, and he did but profit by their

tradition when he bade the cowed traveller stand and deliver.

His profession, as he practised it, neither demanded skill nor

incurred danger. Though he threatened death at every encounter,

you never hear that he pulled a trigger throughout his career.

If his opponent jeered and rode off, he rode off with a

whole skin and a full pocket. Once even this renowned adventurer

accepted the cut of a riding-whip across his face, nor made any

attempt to avenge the insult. But his manifold shortcomings were

no hindrance to his success. Wherever he went, between London

and York, he stopped coaches and levied his tax. A threatening

voice, an arched eyebrow, an arrogant method of fingering an

unloaded pistol, conspired with the craven, indolent habit of the

time to make his every journey a procession of triumph. He was

capable of performing all such feats as the age required of him.

But you miss the spirit, the bravery, the urbanity, and the wit,

which made the adventurer of the seventeenth century a figure of

romance.

One point only of the great tradition did Harry Simms remember.

He was never unwilling to restore a trinket made precious by

sentiment. Once when he took a gold ring from a gentleman's

finger a gentlewoman burst into tears, exclaiming, `There goes

your father's ring.' Whereupon Simms threw all his booty into a

hat, saying, `For God's sake, take that or anything else you

please.' In all other respects he was a bully, with the

hesitancy of a coward, rather than the proper rival of Hind or

Duval. Apart from the exercise of his trade, he was a very

Mohock for brutality. He would ill-treat his victims, whenever

their drunkenness permitted the freedom, and he had no better

gifts for the women who were kind to him than cruelty and

neglect. One of his many imprisonments was the result of a

monstrous ferocity. `Unluckily in a quarrel,' he tells you

gravely, `I ran a crab-stick into a woman's eye'; and well did he

deserve his sojourn in the New Prison. At another time he

rewarded the keeper of a coffee-house, who supported him for six

months, by stealing her watch; and, when she grumbled at his

insolence, he reflected, with a chuckle, that she could more

easily bear the loss of her watch than the loss of her lover.

Even in his gaiety there was an unpleasant spice of greed and

truculence. Once, when he was still seen in fashionable company,

he went to a masquerade, dressed in a rich Spanish habit, lent

him by a Captain in the Guards, and he made so fine a show that

he captivated a young and beautiful Cyprian, whom, when she would

have treated him with generosity, he did but reward with the loss

of all her jewels.

Moreover, he had so small a regard for his craft, that he would

spoil his effects by drink or debauchery; and, though a

highwayman, he cared so little for style, that he would as lief

trick a drunken gamester as face his man on Bagshot Heath or

beneath the shade of Epping Forest. You admire not his success,

because, like the success of the popular politician, it depended

rather upon his dupes than upon his merit. You approve not his

raffish exploits in the hells of Covent Garden or Drury Lane.

But you cannot withhold respect from his consistent dandyism, and

you are grateful for the record that, engaged in a mean

enterprise, he was dressed `in a green velvet frock and a short

lac'd waistcoat.' Above all, his picturesque capture at

Hockcliffe atones for much stupidity. The resolution, wavering

at the wine glass, the last drunken ride from St. Albans--these

are inventions in experience, which should make Simms immortal.

And when he sits `by the fireside a good deal chagrined,' he

recalls the arrest of a far greater man--even of Cartouche, who

was surprised by the soldiers at his bedside stitching a torn

pair of breeches. His autobiography, wherein `he relates the

truth as a dying man,' seemed excellent in the eyes of Borrow,

who loved it so well that he imagined a sentence, ascribed it

falsely to Simms, and then rewarded it with extravagant applause.

But Gentleman Harry knew how to tell a simple story, and the

book, `all wrote by myself while under sentence of death,' is his

best performance. In action he had many faults, for, if he was a

highwayman among rakes, he was but a rake among highwaymen.

A PARALLEL

(THE SWITCHER AND GENTLEMAN

HARRY)

HAGGART and Simms are united in the praise of Borrow, and in the

generous applause of posterity. Each resumes for his own

generation the prowess of his kind. Each has assured his

immortality by an experiment in literature; and if epic

simplicity and rapid narrative are the virtues of biography, it

is difficult to award the prize. The Switcher preferred to write

in the rough lingo, wherein he best expressed himself. He packs

his pages with ill-spelt slang, telling his story of thievery in

the true language of thieves. Gentleman Harry, as became a

person of quality, mimicked the dialect wherewith he was familiar

in the more fashionable gambling-dens of Covent Garden. Both

write with out the smallest suggestion of false shame or idle

regret, and a natural vanity lifts each of them out of the pit of

commonplace on to the tableland of the heroic. They set forth

their depredation, as a victorious general might record his

triumphs, and they excel the nimblest Ordinary that ever penned a

dying speech in all the gifts of the historian.

But when you leave the study for the field, the Switcher

instantly declares his superiority. He had the happiness to

practise his craft in its heyday, while Simms knew but the fag-

end of a noble tradition. Haggart, moreover, was an expert,

pursuing a difficult art, while Simms was a bully, plundering his

betters by bluff. Simms boasted no quality which might be set

off against the accurate delicacy of Haggart's hand. The

Englishman grew rich upon a rolling eye and a rusty pistol. He

put on his `fiercest manner,' and believed that the world would

deny him nothing. The Scot, rejoicing in his exquisite skill,

went to work without fuss or bluster, and added the joy of

artistic pride to his delight in plunder. Though Simm's manner

seems the more chivalrous, it required not one tithe of the

courage which was Haggart's necessity. On horseback, with the

semblance of a fire-arm, a man may easily challenge a coachful of

women. It needs a cool brain and a sound courage to empty a

pocket in the watchful presence of spies and policemen. While

Gentleman Harry chose a lonely road, or the cover of night for

his exploits, the Switcher always worked by day, hustled by a

crowd of witnesses.

Their hours of leisure furnish a yet more striking contrast.

Simms was a polished dandy delighting in his clothes,

unhappy if he were deprived of his bottle and his game. Haggart,

on the other hand, was before all things sealed to his

profession. He would have deserted the gayest masquerade, had he

ever strayed into so light a frivolity, for the chance of

lightening a pocket. He tasted but few amusements without the

limits of his craft, and he preserved unto the end a touch of

that dour character which is the heritage of his race. But,

withal, he was an amiable decent body, who would have recoiled in

horror from the drunken brutality of Gentleman Harry. Though he

bragged to George Combe of his pitiless undoing of wenches, he

never thrust a crab-stick into a woman's eye, and he was

incapable of rewarding a kindness by robbery and neglect. Once--

at Newcastle--he arrayed himself in a smart white coat and tops,

but the splendour ill became his red-headed awkwardness, and he

would have stood aghast at the satin frocks and velvet waistcoats

of him who broke the hearts of Drury Lane. But if he were

gentler in his life, Haggart was prepared to fight with a more

reckless courage when his trade demanded it. It was the

Gentleman's boast that he never shed the blood of man. When

David found a turnkey between himself and freedom, he did not

hesitate to kill, though his remorse was bitter enough when he

neared the gallows. In brief, Haggart was not only the better

craftsman, but the honester fellow, and though his hands were red

with blood, he deserved his death far less than did the more

truculent, less valiant Simms. Each had in his brain the

stuff whereof men of letters are made: this is their parallel.

And, by way of contrast, while the Switcher was an accomplished

artist, Gentleman Harry was a roystering braggart.

DEACON BRODIE AND

CHARLES PEACE

I

DEACON BRODIE

DEACON BRODIE

AS William Brodie stood at the bar, on trial for a his life, he

seemed the gallantest gentleman in court. Thither he had been

carried in a chair, and, still conscious of the honour paid him,

he flashed a condescending smile upon his judges. His step was

jaunty as ever; his superb attire well became the Deacon of a

Guild. His coat was blue, his vest a very garden of flowers;

while his satin breeches and his stockings of white silk were

splendid in their simplicity. Beneath a cocked hat his hair was

fully dressed and powdered, and even the prosecuting counsel

assailed him with the respect due to a man of fashion. The

fellow's magnificence was thrown into relief by the squalor of

his accomplice. For George Smith had neither the money nor the

taste to disguise himself as a polished rogue, and he huddled as

far from his master as he could in the rags of his mean estate.

Nor from this moment did Brodie ever abate one jot of his

dignity. He faced his accusers with a clear eye and a frigid

amiability; he listened to his sentence with a calm

contempt; he laughed complacently at the sorry interludes of

judicial wit; and he faced the last music with a bravery and a

cynicism which bore the stamp of true greatness.

It was not until after his crime that Brodie's heroism approved

itself. And even then his was a triumph not of skill but of

character. Always a gentleman in manner and conduct, he owed the

success and the failure of his life to this one quality. When in

flight he made for Flushing on board the Endeavour, the other

passengers, who knew not his name, straightway christened him

`the gentleman.' The enterprise itself would have been

impossible to one less persuasively gifted, and its proper

execution is a tribute to the lofty quality of his mind. There

was he in London, a stranger and a fugitive; yet instead of

crawling furtively into a coal-barge he charters a ship, captures

the confidence of the captain, carries the other passengers to

Flushing, when they were bound for Leith, and compels every one

to confess his charm! The thief, also, found him irresistible;

and while the game lasted, the flash kens of Edinburgh murmured

the Deacon's name in the hushed whisper of respect.

His fine temperament disarmed treachery. In London he visited an

ancient doxy of his own, who, with her bully, shielded him from

justice, though betrayal would have met with an ample reward.

Smith, if he knew himself the superior craftsman, trembled at the

Deacon's nod, who thus swaggered it through life, with none

to withhold the exacted reverence. To this same personal

compulsion he owed his worldly advancement. Deacon of the

Wrights' Guild while still a young man, he served upon the

Council, was known for one of Edinburgh's honoured citizens, and

never went abroad unmarked by the finger of respectful envy. He

was elected in 1773 a member of the Cape Club, and met at the

Isle of Man Arms in Craig's Close the wittiest men of his time

and town. Raeburn, Runciman, and Ferguson the poet were of the

society, and it was with such as these that Brodie might have

wasted his vacant hour. Indeed, at the very moment that he was

cracking cribs and shaking the ivories, he was a chosen leader of

fashion and gaiety; and it was the elegance of the `gentleman'

that distinguished him from his fellows.

The fop, indeed, had climbed the altitudes of life; the cracksman

still stumbled in the valleys. If he had a ready cunning in the

planning of an enterprise, he must needs bungle at the execution;

and had he not been associated with George Smith, a king of

scoundrels, there would be few exploits to record. And yet for

the craft of housebreaker he had one solid advantage: he knew the

locks and bolts of Edinburgh as he knew his primer--for had he

not fashioned the most of them himself? But, his knowledge once

imparted to his accomplices, he cheerfully sank to a menial's

office. In no job did he play a principal's part: he was merely

told off by Smith or another to guard the entrance and sound

the alarm. When M`Kain's on the Bridge was broken, the Deacon

found the false keys; it was Smith who carried off such poor

booty as was found. And though the master suggested the attack

upon Bruce's shop, knowing full well the simplicity of the lock,

he lingered at the Vintner's over a game of hazard, and let the

man pouch a sumptuous booty.

Even the onslaught upon the Excise Office, which cost his life,

was contrived with appalling clumsiness. The Deacon of the

Wrights' Guild, who could slash wood at his will, who knew the

artifice of every lock in the city, let his men go to work with

no better implements than the stolen coulter of a plough and a

pair of spurs. And when they tackled the ill omened job, Brodie

was of those who brought failure upon it. Long had they watched

the door of the Excise; long had they studied the habits of its

clerks; so that they went to work in no vain spirit of

experiment. Nor on the fatal night did they force an entrance

until they had dogged the porter to his home. Smith and Brown

ransacked the place for money, while Brodie and Andrew Ainslie

remained without to give a necessary warning. Whereupon Ainslie

was seized with fright, and Brodie, losing his head, called off

the others, so that six hundred pounds were left, that might have

been an easy prey. Smith, indignant at the collapse of the long-

pondered design, laid the blame upon his master, and they

swung, as Brodie's grim spirit of farce suggested, for four

pounds apiece.

The humours of the situation were all the Deacon's own. He

dressed the part in black; his respectability grinned behind a

vizard; and all the while he trifled nonchalantly with a pistol.

Breaking the silence with snatches from The Beggar's Opera, he

promised that all their lead should turn to gold, christened the

coulter and the crow the Great and Little Samuel, and then went

off to drink and dice at the Vintner's. How could anger prevail

against this undying gaiety? And if Smith were peevish at

failure, he was presently reconciled, and prepared once more to

die for his Deacon.

Even after escape, the amateur is still apparent. True, he

managed the trip to Flushing with his ancient extravagance; true,

he employed all the juggleries of the law to prevent his

surrender at Amsterdam. But he knew not the caution of the born

criminal, and he was run to earth, because he would still write

to his friends like a gentleman. His letters, during this

nightmare of disaster, are perfect in their carelessness and

good-fellowship. In this he demands news of his children, as

becomes a father and a citizen, and furnishes a schedule of their

education; in that he is curious concerning the issue of a main,

and would know whether his black cock came off triumphant. Nor,

even in flight, did he forget his proper craft, but would have

his tools sent to Charleston, that in America he might

resume the trade that had made him Deacon.

But his was the art of conduct, not of guile, and he deserved

capture for his rare indifference. Why, then, with no natural

impulsion, did he risk the gallows? Why, being no born thief,

and innocent of the thief's cunning, did he associate with so

clever a scoundrel as George Smith, with cowards craven as Brown

and Ainslie? The greed of gold, doubtless, half persuaded him,

but gold was otherwise attainable, and the motive was assuredly

far more subtle. Brodie, in fact, was of a romantic turn. He

was, so to say, a glorified schoolboy, surfeited with penny

dreadfuls. He loved above all things to patter the flash, to

dream himself another Macheath, to trick himself out with all the

trappings of a crime he was unfit to commit. It was never the

job itself that attracted him: he would always rather throw the

dice than force a neighbour's window. But he must needs have a

distraction from the respectability of his life. Everybody was

at his feet; he was Deacon of his Guild, at an age whereat his

fellows were striving to earn a reputable living; his

masterpieces were fashioned, and the wrights' trade was already a

burden. To go upon the cross seemed a dream of freedom, until he

snapped his fingers at the world, filled his mouth with slang,

prepared his alibi, and furnished him a whole wardrobe of

disguises.

With a conscious irony, maybe, he buried his pistols beneath

the domestic hearth, jammed his dark lantern into the press,

where he kept his game-cocks, and determined to make an

inextricable jumble of his career. Drink is sometimes a

sufficient reaction against the orderliness of a successful life.

But drink and cards failed with the Deacon, and at the Vintner's

of his frequentation he encountered accomplices proper for his

schemes. Never was so outrageous a protest offered against

domesticity. Yet Brodie's resolution was romantic after its

fashion, and was far more respectable than the blackguardism of

the French Revolution, which distracted housewifely discontent a

year after the Deacon swung. Moreover, it gave occasion for his

dandyism and his love of display. If in one incarnation he was

the complete gentleman, in another he dressed the part of the

perfect scoundrel, and the list of his costumes would have filled

one of his own ledgers.

But, when once the possibility of housebreaking was taken from

him, he returned to his familiar dignity. Being questioned by

the Procurator Fiscal, he shrugged his shoulders, regretting that

other affairs demanded his attention. As who should say: it is

unpardonable to disturb the meditations of a gentleman. He made

a will bequeathing his knowledge of law to the magistrates of

Edinburgh, his dexterity in cards and dice to Hamilton the

chimney-sweeper, and all his bad qualities to his good friends

and old companions, Brown and Ainslie, not doubting, however,

that their own will secure them `a rope at last.' In prison

it was his worst complaint that, though the nails of his toes and

fingers were not quite so long as Nebuchadnezzar's, they were

long enough for a mandarin, and much longer than he found

convenient. Thus he preserved an untroubled demeanour until the

day of his death. Always polite, and even joyous, he met the

smallest indulgence with enthusiasm. When Smith complained that

a respite of six weeks was of small account, Brodie exclaimed,

`George, what would you and I give for six weeks longer? Six

weeks would be an age to us.'

The day of execution was the day of his supreme triumph. As some

men are artists in their lives, so the Deacon was an artist in

his death. Nothing became him so well as his manner of leaving

the world. There is never a blot upon this exquisite

performance. It is superb, impeccable! Again his dandyism

supported him, and he played the part of a dying man in a full

suit of black, his hair, as always, dressed and powdered. The

day before he had been jovial and sparkling. He had chanted all

his flash songs, and cracked the jokes of a man of fashion. But

he set out for the gallows with a firm step and a rigorous

demeanour. He offered a prayer of his own composing, and `O

Lord,' he said, `I lament that I know so little of Thee.' The

patronage and the confession are alike characteristic. As he

drew near the scaffold, the model of which he had given to his

native city a few years since, he stepped with an agile

briskness; he examined the halter, destined for his neck, with an

impartial curiosity.

His last pleasantry was uttered as he ascended the table.

`George,' he muttered, `you are first in hand,' and thereafter he

took farewell of his friends. Only one word of petulance escaped

his lips: when the halters were found too short, his contempt for

slovenly workmanship urged him to protest, and to demand a

punishment for the executioner. Again ascending the table, he

assured himself against further mishap by arranging the rope with

his own hands. Thus he was turned off in a brilliant assembly.

The Provost and Magistrates, in respect for his dandyism, were

resplendent in their robes of office, and though the crowd of

spectators rivalled that which paid a tardy honour to Jonathan

Wild, no one was hurt save the customary policeman. Such was the

dignified end of a `double life.' And the duplicity is the

stranger, because the real Deacon was not Brodie the Cracksman,

but Brodie the Gentleman. So lightly did he esteem life that he

tossed it from him in a careless impulse. So little did he fear

death that, `What is hanging?' he asked. `A leap in the dark.'

II

CHARLES PEACE

CHARLES PEACE

CHARLES PEACE, after the habit of his kind, was born of

scrupulously honest parents. The son of a religious file-maker,

he owed to his father not only his singular piety but his love of

edged tools. As he never encountered an iron bar whose scission

baffled him, so there never was a fire-eating Methodist to whose

ministrations he would not turn a repentant ear. After a handy

portico and a rich booty he loved nothing so well as a soul-

stirring discourse. Not even his precious fiddle occupied a

larger space in his heart than that devotion which the ignorant

have termed hypocrisy. Wherefore his career was no less suitable

to his ambition than his inglorious end. For he lived the king

of housebreakers, and he died a warning to all evildoers, with a

prayer of intercession trembling upon his lips.

The hero's boyhood is wrapped in obscurity. It is certain that

no glittering precocity brought disappointment to his maturer

years, and he was already nineteen when he achieved his first

imprisonment. Even then 'twas a sorry offence, which merited no

more than a month, so that he returned to freedom and his

fiddle with his character unbesmirched. Serious as ever in pious

exercises, he gained a scanty living as strolling musician.

There was never a tavern in Sheffield where the twang of his

violin was unheard, and the skill wherewith he extorted music

from a single string earned him the style and title of the modern

Paganini. But such an employ was too mean for his pride, and he

soon got to work again--this time with a better success. The

mansions of Sheffield were his early prey, and a rich plunder

rewarded his intrepidity. The design was as masterly as its

accomplishment. The grand style is already discernible. The

houses were broken in quietude and good order. None saw the

opened window; none heard the step upon the stair; in truth, the

victim's loss was his first intelligence.

But when the booty was in the robber's own safe keeping, the

empiricism of his method was revealed. As yet he knew no secret

and efficient fence to shield him from detection; as yet he had

not learnt that the complete burglar works alone. This time he

knew two accomplices--women both, and one his own sister! A

paltry pair of boots was the clue of discovery, and a goodly

stretch was the proper reward of a clumsy indiscretion. So for

twenty years he wavered between the crowbar and the prison house,

now perfecting a brilliant scheme, now captured through

recklessness or drink. Once when a mistake at Manchester sent

him to the Hulks, he owned his failure was the fruit of

brandy, and after his wont delivered (from the dock) a little

homily upon the benefit of sobriety.

Meanwhile his art was growing to perfection. He had at last

discovered that a burglary demands as diligent a forethought as a

campaign; he had learnt that no great work is achieved by a

multitude of minds. Before his boat carried off a goodly parcel

of silk from Nottingham, he was known to the neighbourhood as an

enthusiastic and skilful angler. One day he dangled his line,

the next he sat peacefully at the same employ; and none suspected

that the mild mannered fisherman had under the cloud of night

despatched a costly parcel to London. Even the years of

imprisonment were not ill-spent. Peace was still preparing the

great achievement of his life, and he framed from solitary

reflection as well as from his colleagues in crime many an

ingenious theory afterwards fearlessly translated into practice.

And when at last he escaped the slavery of the gaol, picture-

framing was the pursuit which covered the sterner business of his

life. His depredation involved him in no suspicion; his changing

features rendered recognition impossible. When the exercise of

his trade compelled him to shoot a policeman at Whalley Range,

another was sentenced for the crime; and had he not encountered

Mrs. Dyson, who knows but he might have practised his art in

prosperous obscurity until claimed by a coward's death? But a

stormy love-passage with Mrs. Dyson led to the unworthy

killing of the woman's husband--a crime unnecessary and in no

sense consonant to the burglar's craft; and Charles Peace was an

outlaw, with a reward set upon his head.

And now came a period of true splendour. Like Fielding, like

Cervantes, like Sterne, Peace reserved his veritable masterpiece

for the certainty of middlelife. His last two years were nothing

less than a march of triumph. If you remember his constant

danger, you will realise the grandeur of the scheme. From the

moment that Peace left Bannercross with Dyson's blood upon his

hands, he was a hunted man. His capture was worth five hundred

pounds; his features were familiar to a hundred hungry

detectives. Had he been less than a man of genius, he might have

taken an unavailing refuge in flight or concealment. But,

content with no safety unattended by affluence, he devised a

surer plan: he became a householder. Now, a semi-detached villa

is an impregnable stronghold. Respectability oozes from the

dusky mortar of its bricks, and escapes in clouds of smoke from

its soot-grimed chimneys. No policeman ever detects a desperate

ruffian in a demure black-coated gentleman who day after day

turns an iron gate upon its rusty hinge. And thus, wrapt in a

cloak of suburban piety, Peace waged a pitiless and effective war

upon his neighbours.

He pillaged Blackheath, Greenwich, Peckham, and many another home

of honest worth, with a noiselessness and a precision that were

the envy of the whole family. The unknown and intrepid

burglar was a terror to all the clerkdom of the City, and though

he was as secret and secluded as Peace, the two heroes were never

identified. At the time of his true eminence he `resided' in

Evelina Road, Peckham, and none was more sensible than he how

well the address became his provincial refinement. There he

installed himself with his wife and Mrs. Thompson. His drawing-

room suite was the envy of the neighbourhood; his pony-trap

proclaimed him a man of substance; his gentle manners won the

respect of all Peckham. Hither he would invite his friends to

such entertainments as the suburb expected. His musical evenings

were recorded in the local paper, while on Sundays he chanted the

songs of Zion with a zeal which Clapham herself might envy.

The house in Evelina Road was no mere haunt of quiet gentility.

It was chosen with admirable forethought and with a stern eye

upon the necessities of business. Beyond the garden wall frowned

a railway embankment, which enabled the cracksman to escape from

his house without opening the front door. By the same embankment

he might, if he chose, convey the trophies of the night's work;

and what mattered it if the windows rattled to the passing train?

At least a cloud of suspicion was dispelled. Here he lived for

two years, with naught to disturb his tranquillity save Mrs.

Thompson's taste for drink. The hours of darkness were spent in

laborious activity, the open day brought its own

distractions. There was always Bow Street wherein to loaf, and

the study of the criminal law lost none of its excitement from

the reward offered outside for the bald-headed fanatic who sat

placidly within. And the love of music was Peace's constant

solace. Whatever treasures he might discard in a hurried flight,

he never left a fiddle behind, and so vast became his pilfered

collection that he had to borrow an empty room in a friend's

house for its better disposal.

Moreover, he had a fervent pride in his craft; and you might

deduce from his performance the whole theory and practice of

burglary. He worked ever without accomplices. He knew neither

the professional thief nor his lingo; and no association with

gaol-birds involved him in the risk of treachery and betrayal.

His single colleague was a friendly fence, and not even at the

gallows' foot would he surrender the fence's name. His master

quality was a constructive imagination. Accident never marred

his design. He would visit the house of his breaking until he

understood its ground-plan, and was familiar with its

inhabitants. This demanded an amazing circumspection, but Peace

was as stealthy as a cat, and he would keep silent vigil for

hours rather than fail from an over keen anxiety. Having marked

the place of his entry, and having chosen an appropriate hour, he

would prevent the egress of his enemies by screwing up the doors.

He then secured the room wherein he worked, and the job finished,

he slung himself into the night by the window, so that, ere

an alarm could be raised, his pony-trap had carried the booty to

Evelina Road.

Such was the outline of his plan; but, being no pedant, he varied

it at will: nor was he likely to court defeat through lack of

resource. Accomplished as he was in his proper business, he was

equally alert to meet the accompanying risks. He had brought the

art of cozening strange dogs to perfection; and for the exigence

of escape, his physical equipment was complete. He would resist

capture with unparalleled determination, and though he shuddered

at the shedding of blood, he never hesitated when necessity bade

him pull the trigger. Moreover, there was no space into which he

would not squeeze his body, and the iron bars were not yet

devised through which he could not make an exit. Once--it was at

Nottingham--he was surprised by an inquisitive detective who

demanded his name and trade. `I am a hawker of spectacles,'

replied Peace, `and my licence is downstairs. Wait two minutes

and I'll show it you.' The detective never saw him again. Six

inches only separated the bars of the window, but Peace asked no

more, and thus silently he won his freedom. True, his most

daring feat--the leap from the train--resulted not in liberty,

but in a broken head. But he essayed a task too high even for

his endeavour, and, despite his manacles, at least he left his

boot in the astonished warder's grip.

No less remarkable than his skill and daring were his means

of evasion. Even without a formal disguise he could elude

pursuit. At an instant's warning, his loose, plastic features

would assume another shape; out shot his lower jaw, and, as if by

magic, the blood flew into his face until you might take him for

a mulatto. Or, if he chose, he would strap his arm to his side,

and let the police be baffled by a wooden mechanism, decently

finished with a hook. Thus he roamed London up and down

unsuspected, and even after his last failure at Blackheath, none

would have discovered Charles Peace in John Ward, the Single-

Handed Burglar, had not woman's treachery prompted detection.

Indeed, he was an epitome of his craft, the Complete Burglar made

manifest.

Not only did he plan his victories with previous ingenuity, but

he sacrificed to his success both taste and sentiment. His dress

was always of the most sombre; his only wear was the decent black

of everyday godliness. The least spice of dandyism might have

distinguished him from his fellows, and Peace's whole vanity lay

in his craft. Nor did the paltry sentiment of friendship deter

him from his just course. When the panic aroused by the silent

burglar was uncontrolled, a neighbour consulted Peace concerning

the safety of his house. The robber, having duly noted the

villa's imperfections, and having discovered the hiding-place of

jewellery and plate, complacently rifled it the next night.

Though his self-esteem sustained a shock, though henceforth

his friend thought meanly of his judgment, he was rewarded with

the solid pudding of plunder, and the world whispered of the

mysterious marauder with a yet colder horror. In truth, the

large simplicity and solitude of his style sets him among the

Classics, and though others have surpassed him at single points

of the game, he practised the art with such universal breadth and

courage as were then a revolution, and are still unsurpassed.

But the burglar ever fights an unequal battle. One false step,

and defeat o'erwhelms him. For two years had John Ward

intimidated the middle-class seclusion of South London; for two

years had he hidden from a curious world the ugly, furrowed

visage of Charles Peace. The bald head, the broad-rimmed

spectacles, the squat, thick figure--he stood but five feet four

in his stockings, and adds yet another to the list of little-

great men--should have ensured detection, but the quick change

and the persuasive gesture were omnipotent, and until the autumn

of 1878 Peace was comfortably at large. And then an encounter at

Blackheath put him within the clutch of justice. His revolver

failed in its duty, and, valiant as he was, at last he met his

match. In prison he was alternately insolent and aggrieved. He

blustered for justice, proclaimed himself the victim of sudden

temptation, and insisted that his intention had been ever

innocent.

But, none the less, he was sentenced to a lifer, and, the mask of

John Ward being torn from him, he was sent to Sheffield to stand

his trial as Charles Peace. The leap from the train is

already recorded; and at his last appearance in the dock he

rolled upon the floor, a petulant and broken man. When once the

last doom was pronounced, he forgot both fiddle and crowbar; he

surrendered himself to those exercises of piety from which he had

never wavered. The foolish have denounced him for a hypocrite,

not knowing that the artist may have a life apart from his art,

and that to Peace religion was an essential pursuit. So he died,

having released from an unjust sentence the poor wretch who at

Whalley Range had suffered for his crime, and offering up a

consolatory prayer for all mankind. In truth, there was no enemy

for whom he did not intercede. He prayed for his gaolers, for

his executioner, for the Ordinary, for his wife, for Mrs.

Thompson, his drunken doxy, and he went to his death with the

sure step of one who, having done his duty, is reconciled with

the world. The mob testified its affectionate admiration by

dubbing him `Charley,' and remembered with effusion his last grim

pleasantry. `What is the scaffold?' he asked with sublime

earnestness. And the answer came quick and sanctimonious: `A

short cut to Heaven!'

III

A PARALLEL

(DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES

PEACE)

A PARALLEL

(DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES

PEACE)

NOT a parallel, but a contrast, since at all points Peace is

Brodie's antithesis. The one is the austerest of Classics,

caring only for the ultimate perfection of his work. The other

is the gayest of Romantics, happiest when by the way he produces

a glittering effect, or dazzles the ear by a vain impertinence.

Now, it is by thievery that Peace reached magnificence. A

natural aptitude drove him from the fiddle to the centre-bit. He

did but rob, because genius followed the impulse. He had studied

the remotest details of his business; he was sternly professional

in the conduct of his life, and, as became an old gaol-bird,

there was no antic of the policeman wherewith he was not

familiar. Moreover, not only had he reduced house-breaking to a

science, but, being ostensibly nothing better than a picture-

frame maker, he had invented an incomparable set of tools

wherewith to enter and evade his neighbour's house. Brodie, on

the other hand, was a thief for distraction. His method was

as slovenly as ignorance could make it. Though by trade a

wright, and therefore a master of all the arts of joinery, he was

so deficient in seriousness that he stole a coulter wherewith to

batter the walls of the Excise Office. While Peace fought the

battle in solitude, Brodie was not only attended by a gang, but

listened to the command of his subordinates, and was never

permitted to perform a more intricate duty than the sounding of

the alarm. And yet here is the ironical contrast. Peace, the

professional thief, despised his brothers, and was never heard to

patter a word of flash. Brodie, the amateur, courted the society

of all cross coves, and would rather express himself in Pedlar's

French than in his choicest Scots. While the Englishman scraped

Tate and Brady from a one-stringed fiddle, the Scot limped a

chaunt from The Beggar's Opera, and thought himself a devil of

a fellow. The one was a man about town masquerading as a thief;

the other the most serious among housebreakers, singing psalms in

all good faith.

But if Peace was incomparably the better craftsman, Brodie was

the prettier gentleman. Peace would not have permitted Brodie to

drive his pony-trap the length of Evelina Road. But Brodie, in

revenge, would have cut Peace had he met him in the Corn-market.

The one was a sombre savage, the other a jovial comrade, and it

was a witty freak of fortune that impelled both to follow the

same trade. And thus you arrive at another point of

difference. The Englishman had no intelligence of life's

amenity. He knew naught of costume: clothes were the limit of

his ambition. Dressed always for work, he was like the

caterpillar which assumes the green of the leaf, wherein it

hides: he wore only such duds as should attract the smallest

notice, and separate him as far as might be from his business.

But the Scot was as fine a dandy as ever took (haphazard) to the

cracking of kens. If his refinement permitted no excess of

splendour, he went ever gloriously and appropriately apparelled.

He was well-mannered, cultured, with scarce a touch of

provincialism to mar his gay demeanour: whereas Peace knew little

enough outside the practice of burglary, and the proper handling

of the revolver.

Our Charles, for example, could neither spell nor write; he

dissembled his low origin with the utmost difficulty, and at the

best was plastered over (when not at work) with the parochialism

of the suburbs. So far the contrast is complete; and even in

their similarities there is an evident difference. Each led a

double life; but while Brodie was most himself among his own

kind, the real Peace was to be found not fiddle-scraping in

Evelina Road but marking down policemen in the dusky byways of

Blackheath. Brodie's grandeur was natural to him; Peace's

respectability, so far as it transcended the man's origin, was a

cloak of villainy.

Each, again, was an inventor, and while the more innocent

Brodie designed a gallows, the more hardened Peace would have

gained notoriety by the raising of wrecks and the patronage of

Mr. Plimsoll. And since both preserved a certain courage to the

end, since both died on the scaffold as becomes a man, the

contrast is once more characteristic. Brodie's cynicism is a

fine foil to the piety of Peace; and while each end was natural

after its own fashion, there is none who will deny to the Scot

the finer sense of fitness. Nor did any step in their career

explain more clearly the difference in their temperament than

their definitions of the gallows. For Peace it is `a short cut

to Heaven'; for Brodie it is `a leap in the dark.' Again the

Scot has the advantage. Again you reflect that, if Peace is the

most accomplished Classic among the housebreakers, the Deacon is

the merriest companion who ever climbed the gallows by the

shoulders of the incomparable Macheath.

THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT

THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT

THE Abb<e'> Bruneau, who gave his shaven head in atonement for

unnumbered crimes, was a finished exponent of duplicity. In the

eye of day and of Entrammes he shone a miracle of well-doing; by

night he prowled in the secret places of Laval. The world

watched him, habited in the decent black of his calling; no

sooner was he beyond sight of his parish than his valise was

opened, and he arrayed himself--under the hedge, no doubt--in a

suit of jaunty grey. The pleasures for which he sacrificed the

lives of others and his own were squalid enough, but they were

the best a provincial brain might imagine; and he sinned the sins

of a hedge priest with a courage and effrontery which his

brethren may well envy. Indeed, the Man in the Grey Suit will be

sent down the ages with a grimmer scandal, if with a staler

mystery, than the Man in the Iron Mask.

He was born of parents who were certainly poor, and possibly

honest, at Ass<e'>-le-Berenger. He counted a dozen Chouans among

his ancestry, and brigandage swam in his blood. Even his

childhood was crimson with crimes, which the quick memory of

the countryside long ago lost in the pride of having bred a

priest. He stained his first cure of souls with the poor, sad

sin of arson, which the bishop, fearful of scandal and loth to

check a promising career, condoned with a suitable advancement.

At Entrammes, his next benefice, he entered into his full

inheritance of villainy, and here it was--despite his own

protest--that he devised the grey suit which brought him ruin and

immortality. To the wild, hilarious dissipation of Laval, the

nearest town, he fell an immediate and unresisting prey. Think

of the glittering lamps, the sparkling taverns, the bright-eyed

women, the manifold fascinations, which are the character and

delight of this forgotten city! Why, if the Abb<e'> Bruneau

doled out comfort and absolution at Entrammes--why should he not

enjoy at Laval the wilder joys of the flesh? Lack of money was

the only hindrance, since our priest was not of those who could

pursue bonnes fortunes; ever he sighed for `booze and the

blowens,' but `booze and the blowens' he could only purchase with

the sovereigns his honest calling denied him. There was no

resource but thievery and embezzlement, sins which led sometimes

to falsehood or incendiarism, and at a pinch to the graver

enterprise of murder. But Bruneau was not one to boggle at

trifles. Women he would encounter--young or old, dark or fair,

ugly or beautiful, it was all one to him--and the fools who

withheld him riches must be punished for their niggard hand.

For a while a theft here and there, a cunning extortion of money

upon the promise of good works, sufficed for his necessities, but

still he hungered for a coup, and patiently he devised and

watched his opportunity.

Meanwhile his cunning protected him, and even if the gaze of

suspicion fell upon him he contrived his orgies with so neat a

discretion that the Church, which is not wont to expose her

malefactors, preserved a timid and an innocent silence. The

Abb<e'> disappeared with a commendable constancy, and with that

just sense of secrecy which should compel even an archiepiscopal

admiration. He was not of those who would drag his cloth through

the mire. Not until the darkness he loved so fervently covered

the earth would he escape from the dull respectability of

Entrammes, nor did he ever thus escape unaccompanied by his

famous valise. The grey suit was an effectual disguise to his

calling, and so jealous was he of the Church's honour that he

never--unless in his cups--disclosed his tonsure. One of his

innumerable loves confessed in the witness-box that Bruneau

always retained his hat in the glare of the Caf<e'>, protesting

that a headache rendered him fatally susceptible to draught; and

such was his thoughtful punctilio that even in the comparative

solitude of a guilty bed-chamber he covered his shorn locks with

a nightcap.

And while his conduct at Laval was unimpeachable, he always

proved a nice susceptibility in his return. A cab carried

him within a discreet distance of his home, whence, having

exchanged the grey for the more sober black, he would tramp on

foot, and thus creep in tranquil and unobserved. But simple as

it is to enjoy, enjoyment must still be purchased, and the

Abb<e'> was never guilty of a meanness. The less guilty scheme

was speedily staled, and then it was that the Abb<e'> bethought

him of murder.

His first victim was the widow Bourdais, who pursued the honest

calling of a florist at Laval. Already the curate was on those

terms of intimacy which unite the robber with the robbed; for

some months earlier he had imposed a forced loan of sixty francs

upon his victim. But on the 15th of July 1893, he left

Entrammes, resolved upon a serious measure. The black valise was

in his hand, as he set forth upon the arid, windy road. Before

he reached Laval he had made the accustomed transformation, and

it was no priest, but a layman, doucely dressed in grey, that

awaited Mme. Bourdais' return from the flower-market. He entered

the shop with the coolness of a friend, and retreated to the door

of the parlour when two girls came to make a purchase. No sooner

had the widow joined him than he cut her throat, and, with the

ferocity of the beast who loves blood as well as plunder,

inflicted some forty wounds upon her withered frame. His escape

was simple and dignified; he called the cabman, who knew him

well, and who knew, moreover, what was required of him; and the

priest was snugly in bed, though perhaps exhausted with

blood and pleasure, when the news of the murder followed him to

his village.

Next day the crime was common gossip, and the Abb<e'>'s friends

took counsel with him. One there was astonished that the culprit

remained undiscovered. `But why should you marvel?' said

Bruneau. `I could kill you and your wife at your own chimney-

corner without a soul knowing. Had I taken to evil courses

instead of to good I should have been a terrible assassin.'

There is a touch of the pride which De Quincey attributes to

Williams in this boastfulness, and throughout the parallel is

irresistible. Williams, however, was the better dandy; he put on

a dress-coat and patent-leather pumps because the dignity of his

work demanded a fitting costume. And Bruneau wore the grey suit

not without a hope of disguise. Yet you like to think that the

Abb<e'> looked complacently upon his valise, and had forethought

for the cut of his professional coat; and if he be not in the

first flight of artistry, remember his provincial upbringing, and

furnish the proper excuse.

Meanwhile the scandal of the murdered widow passed into

forgetfulness, and the Abb<e'> was still impoverished. Already

he had robbed his vicar, and the suspicion of the Abb<e'> Fricot

led on to the final and the detected crime. Now Fricot had noted

the loss of money and of bonds, and though he refrained from

exposure he had confessed to a knowledge of the criminal.

M. Bruneau was naturally sensitive to suspicion, and he

determined upon the immediate removal of this danger to his

peace. On January 2, 1894, M. Fricot returned to supper after

administering the extreme unction to a parishioner. While the

meal was preparing, he went into his garden in sabots and

bareheaded, and never again was seen alive. The supper cooled,

the vicar was still absent; the murderer, hungry with his toil,

ate not only his own, but his victim's share of the food, grimly

hinting that Fricot would not come back. Suicide was dreamed of,

murder hinted; up and down the village was the search made, and

none was more zealous than the distressed curate.

At last a peasant discovered some blocks of wood in the well, and

before long blood-stains revealed themselves on the masonry.

Speedily was the body recovered, disfigured and battered beyond

recognition, and the voice of the village went up in denunciation

of the Abb<e'> Bruneau. Immunity had made the culprit callous,

and in a few hours suspicion became certainty. A bleeding nose

was the lame explanation given for the stains which were on his

clothes, on the table, on the keys of his harmonium. A quaint

and characteristic folly was it that drove the murderer straight

to the solace of his religion. You picture him, hot and red-

handed from murder, soothing his battered conscience with some

devilish Requiem for the unshrived soul he had just parted from

its broken body, and leaving upon the harmonium the

ineradicable traces of his guilt. Thus he lived, poised between

murder and the Church, spending upon the vulgar dissipation of a

Breton village the blood and money of his foolish victims. But

for him `les tavernes et les filles' of Laval meant a veritable

paradise, and his sojourn in the country is proof enough of a

limited cunning. Had he been more richly endowed, Paris had been

the theatre of his crimes. As it is, he goes down to posterity

as the Man in the Grey Suit, and the best friend the cabmen of

Laval ever knew. Them, indeed, he left inconsolable.

MONSIEUR L'ABB<E'>

MONSIEUR L'ABB<E'>

The childhood of the Abb<e'> Rosselot is as secret as his origin,

and no man may know whether Belfort or Bavaria smiled upon his

innocence. A like mystery enshrouds his early manhood, and the

malice of his foes, who are legion, denounces him for a Jesuit of

Innsbruck. But since he has lived within the eye of the world

his villainies have been revealed as clearly as his attainments,

and history provides him no other rival in the corruption of

youth than the infamous Thwackum.

It is not every scholar's ambition to teach the elements, and

Rosselot adopted his modest calling as a cloak of crime. No

sooner was he installed in a mansion than he became the mansion's

master, and henceforth he ruled his employer's domain with the

tyrannical severity of a Grand Inquisitor. His soul wrapped in

the triple brass of arrogance, he even dared to lay his hands

upon food before his betters were served; and presently,

emboldened by success, he would order the dinners, reproach the

cook with a too lavish use of condiments, and descend with

insolent expostulation into the kitchen. In a week he had

opened the cupboards upon a dozen skeletons, and made them rattle

their rickety bones up and down the draughty staircases, until

the inmates shivered with horror and the terrified neighbours

fled the haunted castle as a lazar-house. Once in possession of

a family secret, he felt himself secure, and henceforth he was

free to browbeat his employer and to flog his pupil to the

satisfaction of his waspish nature. Moreover, he was endowed

with all the insight and effrontery of a trained journalist. So

sedulous was he in his search after the truth, that neither man

nor woman could deny him confidence. And, as vinegar flowed in

his veins for blood, it was his merry sport to set wife against

husband and children against father. Not even were the servants

safe from his watchful inquiry, and housemaids and governesses

alike entrusted their hopes and fears to his malicious keeping.

And when the house had retired to rest, with what a sinister

delight did he chuckle over the frailties and infamies, a guilty

knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner!

To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this

wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's

scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian

resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his

vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this smiling,

demoniacal tutor.

But a too villainous curiosity was not the Abb<e'>'s capital sin.

Not only did he entertain his leisure with wrecking the

happiness of a united family, but he was an enemy open and

declared of France. It was his amiable pastime at the dinner-

table, when he had first helped himself to such delicacies as

tempted his dainty palate, to pronounce a pompous eulogy upon the

German Emperor. France, he would say with an exultant smile, is

a pays pourri, which exists merely to be the football of

Prussia. She has but one hope of salvation--still the monster

speaks--and that is to fall into the benign occupation of a

vigorous race. Once upon a time--the infamy is scarce credible--

he was conducting his young charges past a town-hall, over the

lintel of whose door glittered those proud initials `R. F.'

`What do they stand for?' asked this demon Barlow. And when the

patriotic Tommy hesitated for an answer, the preceptor exclaimed

with ineffable contempt, `Race de fous'! It is no wonder, then,

that this foe of his fatherland feared to receive a letter openly

addressed; rather he would slink out under cover of night and

seek his correspondence at the poste restante, like a guilty

lover or a British tourist.

The Ch<a^>teau de Presles was built for his reception. It was

haunted by a secret, which none dare murmur in the remotest

garret. There was no more than a whisper of murder in the air,

but the Marquis shuddered when his wife's eye frowned upon him.

True, the miserable Menaldo had disappeared from his seminary ten

years since, but threats of disclosure were uttered continually,

and respectability might only be purchased by a profound

silence. Here was the Abb<e'>'s most splendid opportunity, and

he seized it with all the eagerness of a greedy temperament. The

Marquise, a wealthy peasant, who was rather at home on the wild

hill-side than in her stately castle, became an instant prey to

his devilish intrigue. The governess, an antic old maid of

fifty-seven, whose conversation was designed to bring a blush to

the cheek of the most hardened dragoon, was immediately on terms

of so frank an intimacy that she flung bread pellets at him

across the table, and joyously proposed, if we may believe the

priest on his oath, to set up housekeeping with him, that they

might save expense. Two high-spirited boys were always at hand

to encourage his taste for flogging, and had it not been for the

Marquis, the Abb<e'>'s cup would have been full to overflowing.

But the Marquis loved not the lean, ogling instructor of his

sons, and presently began to assail him with all the abuse of

which he was master. He charged the Abb<e'> with unspeakable

villainy; salop and saligaud were the terms in which he would

habitually refer to him. He knew the rascal for a spy, and no

modesty restrained him from proclaiming his knowledge. But

whatever insults were thrown at the Abb<e'> he received with a

grin complacent as Shylock's, for was he not conscious that when

he liked the pound of flesh was his own!

With a fiend's duplicity he laid his plans of ruin and death.

The Marquise, swayed to his will, received him secretly in

the blue room (whose very colour suggests a guilty intrigue),

though never, upon the oath of an Abb<e'>, when the key was

turned in the lock. A journey to Switzerland had freed him from

the haunting suspicion of the Marquis, and at last he might

compel the wife to denounce her husband as a murderer. The

terrified woman drew the indictment at the Abb<e'>'s dictation,

and when her husband returned to St. Amand he was instantly

thrust into prison. Nothing remained but to cajole the sons into

an expressed hatred of their father, and the last enormity was

committed by a masterpiece of cunning. `Your father's one chance

of escape,' argued this villain in a cassock, `is to be proved an

inhuman ruffian. Swear that he beat you unmercifully and you

will save him from the guillotine.' All the dupes learned their

lesson with a certainty which reflects infinite credit upon the

Abb<e'>'s method of instruction.

For once in his life the Abb<e'> had been moved by greed as well

as by villainy. His early exploits had no worse motive than the

satisfaction of an inhuman lust for cruelty and destruction. But

the Marquise was rich, and when once her husband's head were off,

might not the Abb<e'> reap his share of the gathered harvest?

The stakes were high, but the game was worth the playing, and

Rosselot played it with spirit and energy unto the last card.

His appearance in court is ever memorable, and as his ferret eyes

glinted through glass at the President, he seemed the

villain of some Middle Age Romance. His head, poised upon a

lean, bony frame, was embellished with a nose thin and sharp as

the blade of a knife; his tightly compressed lips were an

indication of the rascal's determination. `Long as a day in

Lent'--that is how a spectator described him; and if ever a

sinister nature glared through a sinister figure, the Abb<e'>'s

character was revealed before he parted his lips in speech.

Unmoved he stood and immovable; he treated the imprecations of

the Marquis with a cold disdain; as the burden of proof grew

heavy on his back, he shrugged his shoulders in weary

indifference. He told his monstrous story with a cynical

contempt, which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and

priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis

himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary. He

brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an

insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim. He

described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in

a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer

than upon a pious Abb<e'>. And, his story ended, he leered at

the Court with the satisfaction of one who had discharged a

fearsome duty.

But his rascality overshot its mark; the Marquise, obedient to

his priestly casuistry, displayed too fierce a zeal in the

execution of his commands. And he took to flight, hoping to lose

in the larger world of Paris the notoriety which his prowess won

him among the poor despised Berrichons. He left behind for

our consolation a snatch of philosophy which helps to explain his

last and greatest achievement. `Those who have money exist only

to be fleeced.' Thus he spake with a reckless revelation of

self. Yet the mystery of his being is still unpierced. He is

traitor, schemer, spy; but is he an Abb<e'>? Perhaps not. At

any rate, he once attended the `Messe des Morts,' and was heard

to mumble a `Credo,' which, as every good Catholic remembers, has

no place in that solemn service.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty

at the Edinburgh University Press

End of Project Gutenberg Etext A Book of Scoundrels, by Charles Whibley