Highwaymen
On December 30, 2010, in English History, Spanish History, World History, by Dean Swift
Just as Spain had its bloodthirsty salteadores, or guerilleros, Britain was plagued with
robbers who worked, mostly at night or at dawn, on the main roads. Highwaymen
operated just about everywhere in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Though they
were ruthless thieves, they achieved the inexplicable status of popularity. They were
supposed to be ‘romantic’, though they were just as likely to put a pistol or musket ball
through the brain of your coachman, and then cut not only the string of your lady’s
purse and corset, but your throat as well.
There had always been footpads, cutthroats, and murdering thieves from Anglo-Saxon
times, but the much improved roads and more frequent use of them by large coaches,
packed uncomfortably inside and out with daring travellers encouraged any man with
his own horse (or, in one famous case, woman) to hold up the stages with a pair of
primed pistols, yelling the infamous command: “Stand and deliver!”.
Another good reason for the existence of these bandits was the proliferation of coaching
inns on all main arterial roads. It is a sad fact that the highwaymen, alone or with a
small but well-mounted gang, frequently worked hand-in-glove with the innkeepers,
who supplied them with information about rich travellers using, for instance, a private
coach easily identified by a painted coat of arms on the doors.
Highwaymen were in fact much less ‘romantic’ than has always been shown in fiction
and on the screen. A very popular British film of the late 1940s featured a lady of
fashion, living in a country mansion in Hertfordshire. Her income actually derived from
night work, which was robbing stage and mail coaches on the roads of the Home
Counties. The film was called ‘The Wicked Lady’. The lady was played by Margaret
Lockwood. The mansion was Brocket Hall, now open to the public.
Real-life highwaymen such as Dick Turpin (riding his horse Black Bess), Swift Nick
Levison (hanged for highway robbery at York in 1684), and Jack Shepherd (excellently
portrayed by Tommy Steele in a 1960s film) were good newspaper material, though
their fame ran out when they were caught and hanged. Turpin famously rode Black Bess
from London to York to escape the original British ‘police’, called The Bow Street
Runners. Sir Robert Peel had yet to invent the English ‘bobby’ or ‘peeler’. Levison,
Turpin and Shepherd became folk heroes, though all three were assassins. Levison was
hanged at 34, and Shepherd even younger, at 22. Legend has it that Jack Shepherd
escaped the noose at Tyburn (now Marble Arch, London) and lived on to a great age.
Finally, highwaymen went too far; they began to rob coaches and riders on the
highways of central London, Exeter, York and Plymouth, provoking rigorous efforts to
stamp them out, popular heroes or not. The tiresomeness and real danger of these
highway robbers became legend. The poet Alfred Noyes penned a still famous short
story in verse about an imaginary highwayman. The stirring tale begins: ‘The moon was
a ghostly galleon / tossed on cloudy seas . . .’ but by the early 19th century the menace of
highwayman (also known popularly as ‘High Toby’ had largely been overcome.
Overcome in England perhaps, but in several Latin American countries the profession
of highwayman has continued to flourish. The author himself was robbed near Bogotá
in the Seventies by heavily armed and masked young men who held up the motorcar he
and others were travelling in. The leader of the gang was exquisitely polite as he asked
for ‘contributions to the revolutionary fund’ while his finger itched on the trigger of a
wartime .45 Colt.