In Chapter One the myths and legends surrounding Robin Hood were explored. Probably no other character associated with British folklore has been so celebrated in popular words and song as Robin. The earliest fragments associated with him date back to more than 500 years ago but none of these really obviates the mystery about Robin and his activities. Robin Hood makes an appearance in the narrative poem Piers Plowman, written between the 1360s and 1380s, and in several ballads dated from about 1450. He also appears in a variety of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ritual revels. His green clothing and sylvan associations may have had connections with the ‘Green Man’ cults and as a fabled outlaw he made an ideal Lord of Misrule. He also received considerable attention from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquaries, such as Joseph Hunter and William Stukeley, and has continued to feature in plays and more recently in films.
In 1908 Robin Hood and his Merry Men was released, a British film in which Robin saves a band of his outlaws from the Sheriff of Nottingham’s gallows. This was followed in 1912 by Robin Hood Outlawed, also a British production. In 1922 the American film Robin Hood was issued, which starred Douglas Fairbanks at his buccaneering best, or worst. In 1976 Robin and Marion was made, an American film starring Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Audrey Hepburn and Robert Shaw. In it an elderly Robin returns from the crusades to find that his beloved Marion has became an abbess. In 1991 the swashbuckling British film Robin Hood was released, starring Patrick Bergin, Uma Thurman, Jurgen Procknow and Edward Fox, while in the same year its American rival Robin Hood also came out, featuring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Sean Connery, Alan Rickman and Elizabeth Mastrantonio. This was not a film for those who preferred their myths to be kept sacrosanct.
One of the earliest films to feature the highwayman theme was Highwayman Hal, made in the UK in 1914. This was a comedy starring Harry Buss as Hal Harkaway in which the denouement involves the heroine bringing a pardon from the King at the very last possible moment and thereby saving hero Hal from an ignominious end on the gallows. Other silent films included A Highwayman’s Honour (1914), Dick Turpin’s Ride to York with Matheson Lang (1922) and any number of Hollywood versions of Dick Turpin’s adventures with such actors as Tom Mix, Victor Mclaglen, Louis Hayward and David Weston in leading roles. Two film adaptations have been made of the story of the highwaywoman Lady Catherine Ferrers, both entitled The Wicked Lady and featuring respectively Margaret Lockwood (1945) and Faye Dunaway (1983) in the title role. Laurence Olivier appeared as Macheath in the 1953 film adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera, while in 1969 Tommy Steele played the lead in Where’s Jack?, a musical about Jack Sheppard. A British television series in the 1980s featured Richard O’Sullivan as Robin Hood and the theme of highway robbery continues to draw audiences with, for example, Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller co-starring as Plunkett and Macleane (sic), which was screened on network television in April 2000. A film adaptation of Alfred Noyes’ poem ‘The Highwayman’ was filmed in 1951.
Highwaymen have attracted much attention from writers over the centuries. Indeed the writers of fiction have played a major part both in creating and perpetuating the image of romance and gallantry that surrounds the ‘Knights of the High Toby’. This literary admiration does not extend to footpads and other forms of criminal life lurking in the streets and highways and the highwayman, therefore, has centre stage even in writing that purports to be factual. A good example of this latter genre is The History of the Lives of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Footpads, House-breakers, Shop-lifts and Cheats. This work by Captain Alexander Smith was first published in about 1714 and, in spite of its title, devotes most of its attention to highwaymen. Although it has some factual base, its content is highly impressionistic and subjective. A similar work is Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Most Famous Highwaymen, published in 1734. Other contemporary material can be garnered from such documents as the Newgate Calendar or Malefactor’s Bloody Register. This was first published in about 1774 and contains anonymous and lurid biographies of the most notorious criminals who spent time confined in Newgate Prison.
Another valuable source is the catchpenny ballads and broadsheets sold, for example, at executions. Although these claim to be factual, much of the material they contain is no more than simple invention and the more lurid and sensational they were the better they sold. A good example of this is The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey, published in 1605. This was followed after Ratsey’s execution by an even more sensational update, Ratsey’s Ghoste; or, The Second Part of his Madde Pranks and Robberies. The ‘Life and Death’ is the earliest recorded biography of a highwayman. Unfortunately, nothing is known of its author or, for that matter, its historical authenticity. A document titled The Memoirs of Monsieur Du Vall (sic), published in 1670, has the subtitle: ‘Intended as a severe reflection on the too great fondness of English ladies towards French footmen which at that time of day was a too common complaint’. Although this was once thought to be Duval’s autobiography, it was actually written by Dr William Pope. In 1671 Duval’s exploits were given fulsome treatment in a panegyric entitled To the Memory of the Most Renowned Du-Vall by Samuel Butler (1613–80). The artist William Powell Frith (1819–1909) painted a canvas of the famous tale of Duval dancing with a beautiful and high-born lady before her husband is robbed (see Chapter Seven). This well-known work can be viewed in Manchester City Art Gallery.
In 1728 John Gay (1685–1732) produced The Beggar’s Opera, which was an immediate success, partly because it scandalised polite and puritanical opinion by making heroes of criminals. It features a blackguard by the name of ‘Peachum’, who is Jonathan Wild under another guise, and the first stage highwayman the gallant ‘Captain Macheath’, who is in love with Peachum’s pretty daughter Polly. Peachum enjoys using the criminals under his control but cares nothing when they have served their purpose and he greedily collects the reward for serving them up to the authorities. The audience enjoys the eventual worsting of the dreadful Peachum and the marriage of Macheath and Polly. Interestingly, Macheath who had been arrested for highway robbery is reprieved, but shows absolutely no remorse for his crimes. These are portrayed as ‘social crimes’, merely peccadilloes. He can be seen on another level as the popular hero, the maverick who takes up his cudgels for the small people against the all-pervading, all-powerful state that uses tyrants such as Peachum as its agents. Macheath is the prototype of the gallant highwayman-hero and as evidence of nature imitating art, many subsequent highwaymen seem to have thought that they must behave like him. It is highly likely that the part of Macheath was based on James Maclaine.
The authorities deplored the idolisation of a criminal figure and they managed to prevent Gay staging Polly, the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera. They also resented this play because its satirical content unfavourably contrasted the covert corruption and venality of the Government with the open thieving of the highwayman, while also demonstrating that perceptions of wrongdoing are relative. Gay’s later operatic drama featuring the life of Jack Sheppard, who was much less successful as a highwayman than as an escapologist from Newgate, was also what we would now consider a box-office success.
Debates have raged for years about the possible corrupting influence on those who watch them of the portrayal of crime and violence on television and in films. It is interesting, therefore, to note that there were two cases of young men from respectable families who claimed to have been so impressed by watching The Beggar’s Opera that they both resolved to take to lives of crime which, inevitably, ended in the ignominy of a premature death by hanging. But it was not just men who featured in plays about robbery. The female highway robber Ann Meders was immortalised in a seventeenth-century play entitled The German Princess, this being her nickname. It was written by John Holden and made something of a sensation in the theatres of London at this time. Samuel Pepys was one celebrity who watched it and it met with his approval.
The glamorised, heroic image of the highwayman was vividly reproduced in Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood. The Dick Turpin that Ainsworth creates here is somewhat eclectic, and the qualities and activities ascribed to Turpin were by no means definitely his own. Ainsworth (1805–82) was a solicitor by profession who found fame and fortune in writing historical novels. These tended to focus on notorious characters from history and included Jack Sheppard and Guy Fawkes. He also produced a fictional work about the seventeenth century goings-on with witchcraft called The Lancashire Witches. Rookwood appeared in instalments and was enormously successful and was adapted for the theatre and for the circus, as well as being a best-selling novel of the time. As Frank McLynn wittily states about Rookwood, ‘. . . the gallant figure of Dick Turpin is as far removed from the historical personage as an advertising campaign from the tobacco industry is from the truth about lung cancer.’1
Ainsworth came under a sustained attack for his novel Jack Sheppard, which was published in 1839. This was phenomenally successful, having a major impact not only in its own right but also because of the way in which it generated plagiaristic novels, ballads, plays, periodicals and spurious ‘autobiographies’ and ‘memoirs’. It would be no exaggeration to say that Jack Sheppard, both in an actual historical sense and an imaginative, fictional one, became a cult figure. The novel was reissued in fifteen monthly parts and also many times in complete form. Late in 1839 there were eight plays about him running simultaneously in the theatres of London and untold numbers of loose adaptations of his life being staged in cheap concert rooms attached to drinking places or by street-theatre performers. This runaway success evoked the disapproval of many censorious middle-class Victorians. At this time there was a great belief in the uplifting effects of good books but an even more marked concern about the corrupting effect of ‘bad’ books on the lower orders, who were thought to be more susceptible to their harmful effects. When Courvoisier, a valet who had brutally murdered his master, admitted in court having read Jack Sheppard shortly before he carried out the dastardly deed there was a sustained chorus of ‘I told you so’.
Technological advances starting with mechanised paper-making in 1803, the steam press in 1814 and multi-cylinder stereotype printing in 1827 permitted for the first time the cheap and quick dissemination of the printed word. The years between 1830 to 1860 saw a massive rise in the number of journals, magazines and other periodicals of an illustrated and often sensationalised nature and they became an integral part of the evolving popular culture. More ephemeral were the broadsides and chapbooks, many of which were sold by itinerant vendors. A broadside was a single sheet with text and maybe one woodcut illustration which cost a halfpenny or penny at the most. A chapbook was a short, fictional work usually with a soft cover and about a dozen pages, selling for perhaps as much as 3d. There was not a great deal of literary merit in these publications but they sometimes sold in surprisingly large numbers, especially if they featured murders and executions. One produced in 1828, giving what was claimed to be the dying speech and confession of the murderer William Corder, sold 1,116,000 copies.
Ballads were an ancient and integral part of popular culture and a valuable method of transmitting ideas from one generation to another. Highwaymen often featured in such material and here are a few excerpts from a piece typical of its genre; the date is unknown:
On Hounslow Heath, as I rode o’er,
I spied a lawyer riding before;
‘Kind sir,’ said I, ‘are you not afraid,
Of Turpin that mischievous blade?’
O rare Turpin, hero,
O rare Turpin, O.
Says Turpin, ‘I have been most acute,
My gold I’ve hid in the heel of my boot;’
‘O,’ says the lawyer, ‘there’s none can find
My gold, for it lies in my cape behind.’
O rare Turpin, hero,
O rare Turpin, O.
As they rode down by the Poulter mill,
Turpin demands him to stand still;
Says he, ‘your cape I must cut off,
For my mare she wants a saddle cloth.’
O rare Turpin, hero,
O rare Turpin, O.
For shooting of a dunghill cock,
Poor Turpin he at last was took;
And carried straight into a jail,
Where his misfortune he does bewail.
O poor Turpin hero,
O poor Turpin, O.
Now Turpin he’s condemned to die,
To hang upon yon gallows high;
Whose legacy is a strong rope,
For stealing of a dung-hill cock.
O poor Turpin hero,
O poor Turpin, O.
This piece casts Turpin in the usual heroic mode and as a victim of circumstances, although not before he has managed to outwit and rob those usual recipients of popular hatred, lawyers, usurers and excisemen.
Writers of factual rather than fictional material have also had much to say about highwaymen. Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), best-known for his Confessions of an Opium Eater, was not, however, under the influence of drugs when he wrote that highwaymen ‘required more accomplishments than either the bar or the pulpit’, since they needed to be strong, healthy and agile as well as possessing excellent horsemanship. Writing at about the same time, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), the noted historian, reiterated the importance of excellent horsemanship skills and remarked that their dashing and romantic activities had great popular appeal.
It is clear from just this sample that the world of the arts in the broadest sense has found a rich seam of inspiration from the activity of highway robbers. The spotlight, however, is firmly on the highwayman and nobody seems to have wanted to celebrate his skulking counterpart, the footpad, in the same way.