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  DICK TURPIN

  James Sharpe is Professor of History at York University and is a leading expert on the history of crime in pre-modern England. He was a founder member of the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, and currently serves on its committee. He has also acted as director for an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project on the history of violence in England, 1600–1800. Previous publications include Crime in seventeenth-century England: a County Study, and The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (Profile). He is married with two children.

  DICK TURPIN

  The myth of the

  English highwayman

  JAMES SHARPE

  This paperback edition published in 2005

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

  Profile Books Ltd

  58a Hatton Garden

  London EC1N 8LX

  www.profilebooks.co.uk

  Copyright © James Sharpe, 2004, 2005

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  Typeset in Poliphilus by MacGuru

  [email protected]

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  eISBN: 978-1-84765-114-3

  For Freddie

  As a warning against bad men

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 York, April 1739

  2 Highwaymen

  3 Crime

  4 The Essex Gang and Its Aftermath

  5 The Man from Manchester

  6 Turpin Hero

  Conclusion: Dick Turpin and the Meaning of History

  Notes and References

  PREFACE

  Dick Turpin has been in my thoughts for a long time. My first researches as a historian of crime were carried out on seventeenth-century England, but from an early stage I broadened out, backwards into the late sixteenth century, and forwards into the early eighteenth. Both of these periods, as far as criminality is concerned, have their distinctive features. Those of the late sixteenth century need not detain us. Those of the early eighteenth include, firstly, insofar as we can reconstruct these things, changes in patterns of crime; secondly, and more certainly, changes in punishment, and hence, thirdly, changes in official perceptions of how crime might be combated. And, fourthly, changes, connected with an explosion in printed materials, in how crime and criminals were portrayed in the books, pamphlets, plays and newspapers of the period. From an early stage it struck me that the criminal career, trial, and execution of Dick Turpin drew a number of these themes together.

  This feeling became deeper, and much better informed, when I had to focus my ideas on Turpin after agreeing in the late 1980s to give a lecture on him in one of York University’s Open Course Lecture Series. This also introduced me to William Harrison Ainsworth, the man who, roughly a century after Turpin was executed, created the mythical Turpin who is currently a much more familiar figure than the historical one. Pursuing this theme further, and giving the occasional public talk on Turpin and the Turpin legend, not only convinced me of the interest of the theme, but also led me to ponder on how the disjuncture between the historical and the mythical Turpin, and the way in which England’s best-known highwayman was constantly being recreated, reflected on the uses and meanings of history in modern Britain. Writing a book on Turpin seemed the only way to get history’s most famous Essex Man off my mind.

  While putting this book together I have benefited from the resources, and the helpfulness of the staff, of the British Library, the J. B. Morrell Library of the University of York, York Minster Library, the Gurney Library of the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York, the Public Record Office, London, York City Archives, the East Riding Archive Office, the Essex Record Office, and York Castle Museum. I have also benefited from correspondence with that great Turpin scholar, Derek Barlow. Once again, my wife, Krista Cowman, has been a source of support and advice.

  I have decided to dispense with a formal structure of footnotes in this book, but any interested reader can follow the sources I have used by examining the notes and references at its end.

  And, finally, a personal observation. Although I am not a native of that part of the country, I began my career as a historian working on the archives of the county of Essex. There is, as I write, every probability that I will end that career at York. There is a certain irony that, even if I have not exactly followed either Dick Turpin’s footsteps or Black Bess’s hoofprints, my professional life has followed a similar geographical trajectory to that of the man whose career and later reputation form the subject matter of this book.

  Stillingfleet, North Yorkshire

  chapter one

  YORK, APRIL 1739

  At least he died well, in what the eighteenth century considered the appropriate manner for its condemned criminals. Determined to look his best when he met his end, he had, a few days previously, bought himself a new frock coat and a pair of pumps. He had also, as a further preparation, on the day before his execution appointed five men as his mourners, and given them three pounds and ten shillings to be shared among them for following the cart that would carry him to the gallows and for overseeing his subsequent interment. He distributed hatbands and gloves to several other people, and left a gold ring and two pairs of shoes and clogs to a married woman with whom he had consorted, despite reports that he had a wife and child living in the south, while he lived under an assumed identity at the Humberside township of Brough.

  On Saturday 7 April, the day of execution, he was carried in a cart, his mourners behind him, from the county gaol at York Castle through the centre of the city, up Micklegate, through Micklegate Bar, and on to what a contemporary source describes as ‘a fair broad street, well paved on both sides’; in fact, the first few hundred yards of the road to Tadcaster. He was accompanied in the cart by the other man sentenced to death a fortnight previously at the Yorkshire assizes, John Stead, like him convicted for horse-stealing. Of John Stead we know little. But Stead’s companion in the cart, up to a few weeks before known to his captors as John Palmer, was a rather more significant figure: the notorious highwayman Richard Turpin, a year or two previously England’s most wanted criminal, with a £200 reward for murder on his head. Sir George Cooke, sheriff of Yorkshire and the official responsible for the smooth running of the execution, was later to claim twenty pounds in expenses for conveying Turpin and Stead ‘under a strong guard’ to the place of execution, evidence of concern over an attempted escape or rescue. In the event, such worries proved misplaced. Turpin, so the description of his execution tells us, acted out the role fate had allotted to him, ‘behav’d himself with amazing assurance’, and ‘bow’d to the spectators as he passed’. His and Stead’s last morning was probably a cold one: certainly Arthur Jessop, an apothecary living at Wooldale over in the West Riding, had noted in his diary that the previous day had seen ‘a blustering cold wind, rain hail and snow’. But, despite the circumstances, Turpin was evidently determined to die game.

  The place of execution, known in imitation of its better-known metropolitan equivalent as Tyburn, was at the Knavesmire, about a mile outside the city and on the left-hand side of the road heading west. The Knavesmire will be most familiar to the modern reader as the site o
f York racecourse, and, indeed, it had by 1739 already acquired this function. But criminals had long been executed there, and a small stone currently marks the spot where the gallows stood. These gallows, like those at the more famous Tyburn in London, took the form of a triangle laid on its side, and held above the ground at each corner by a vertical beam, a design which led to the York gallows being nicknamed ‘The Three-Legged Mare’. A ladder was placed against one of the horizontal beams of the wooden triangle, upon which Turpin was expected to stand. He mounted the ladder, and managed to control a trembling in his left leg, ‘which he stamped down with an air’, after which he looked round about him with ‘undaunted courage’.

  Turpin then turned to speak to the executioner, and it is here that we confront the first of the several ironies we shall encounter in the story of Dick Turpin. York did not have a permanent hangman. It was the custom at each York assize to pardon one of the prisoners who had been sentenced to death on condition that he acted as executioner for the other capitally convicted prisoners. On this occasion the former prisoner acting as hangman was a Thomas Hadfield, who had been pardoned after being sentenced to death for highway robbery: thus the most famous highwayman in English history ended his life by being hanged by one of his own kind. After a few words (we may dismiss accounts that claimed the two men talked for half an hour) Turpin ‘threw himself off the ladder, and expired directly’. As the pamphlet account of his execution published shortly after his death put it, Turpin ‘went off this stage with as much intrepidity and unconcern, as if he had been taking horse to go on a journey’.

  The York where Turpin spent the last few weeks of his life was very much a city ‘on the up’. In a striking prefiguration of what was to happen to a number of British urban centres in the late twentieth century, York, having experienced the doldrums of de-industrialization and economic stagnation after its status as a cloth-manufacturing centre collapsed in the sixteenth century, reinvented itself in the late seventeenth as a centre of services for the local elite. Francis Drake, from 1727 city surgeon at York and author of a massive history of the city first published three years before Turpin’s execution, gave a number of reasons for this development. York was much cheaper to live in than London, it offered good educational facilities for the children of the gentry and the better-off townsfolk, and it offered a wide range of leisure activities to people of taste and fashion, among them a company of stage players and, of course, the races. York’s new status as a place of resort for the fashionable was symbolised by the Assembly Rooms, the creation of the aristocrat-cum-architect Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, lying at the top of Blake Street in the heart of the city, and opened in time for race week 1732. In the same year the city council, who had already in 1719 improved and beautified Lord Mayor’s Walk, skirting York’s northern city wall, opened New Walk, along the banks of the Ouse between Fishergate and Fulford, to provide yet another location where persons of taste and quality might promenade.

  The early eighteenth century witnessed a further, if considerably less genteel, demonstration of York’s growing regional importance and civic pride. This was the construction of a new county gaol, built in 1701 and paid for by a county tax raised by private Act of Parliament. Previously, as was the case in most English counties in the period, the county gaol for Yorkshire had been located in an old castle. But its structure had deteriorated badly and it had been decided to replace it with a new purpose-built prison, according to Drake a ‘most magnificent structure …a building so noble and compleat as exceeds all others, of its kind, in Britain; perhaps in Europe’. Drake claimed that ‘the justices of the peace for this county have of late years taken great care that this gaol should be as neat and convenient within, as it is noble without; by allowing of straw for the felons, and raising their beds which before used to be upon the ground’. The authorities’ solicitude for the prisoners extended to the construction of a chapel, and to the provision of an infirmary and a salaried surgeon. One doubts if Turpin was much impressed by any of this, or that his architectural sensibilities were sufficiently developed for his being able to take pleasure from spending his last few weeks in what was the only baroque prison ever to be built in England. But at least while he awaited trial and, subsequently, execution, he was held in what was, by the standards of the time, a well-run and advanced penal institution.

  The final stages of Turpin’s time in York Castle were evidently very sociable. An anonymous ‘Letter from York’, published in the General Evening Post of 8 March 1739 (the letter was dated six days earlier) reported of Turpin that

  a great concourse of people flock to see him, and they all give him money. He seems very sure that nobody is alive that can hurt him, and told the gentleman with whom he used to hunt, that he hoped to have another day’s sport with him yet. And that if he had thought they would have made such a rout with him he would have owned it before … He is put every night into the condemned hold, which is a very strong place …

  ‘Since he was suspected to be Turpin’, ran another ‘Letter from York’, in this instance dated 23 March, ‘the whole countrey have flock’d here to see him, and have been very liberal to him, insomuch as he has had wine constantly before him.’ The same source noted that the gaoler at York Castle ‘has made £100 by selling liquors to him and his visitors’.

  Further confirmation that the condemned Turpin was a centre of public attention comes from one of the descriptions of his execution. This, commenting on how the prospect of death seemed so often to hold few terrors for men who ‘for many years successively, have employ’d all their talents and endeavours in robbing, plundering, and destroying the lives and properties of their fellow creatures’, and remarked that this was also true of ‘the unhappy Turpin’, who

  being committed prisoner to York Castle, as has been before related, lived in as much pleasure as the liberties of the prison would afford, eating, drinking and carousing with anybody that would spend their time with him. Neither did he alter his behaviour even after his condemnation. After it was rumour’d abroad, that he was the Turpin who had render’d himself so notorious for his robberies in the southern parts of England, abundance of people from all parts resorted daily to see him … he continu’d his mirthful humour to the last, spending his time in joking, drinking and telling stories.

  It was always felt necessary to prepare the condemned spiritually for their end, and accordingly a clergyman (we do not know his identity) offered Turpin ‘serious remonstrances and admonitions’, but to no avail. Turpin ignored his efforts, ‘and whatever remorse he had on his conscience for his past villanies, he kept it to himself, not expressing the least concern at the melancholy circumstances he was in’.

  Those circumstances became definitively melancholy on the morning of Saturday 7 April 1739. The humour, the joking, drinking and story-telling came to an end. His corpse was left hanging on the gallows until three in the afternoon to ensure that he was really dead, when it was cut down, and laid out in the Blue Boar tavern in Castlegate. Eighteenth-century England had hanged another criminal.

  Another criminal, perhaps, but not any other criminal. Dick Turpin is one of that select band of figures from England’s past (others might include Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, Sir Winston Churchill and, interestingly, Robin Hood) who are instantly recognisable to everyone. Even the most subliterate fourteen-year-old will have heard of Turpin, and will be able to recognise the image of the man in the tricorn hat with his frock coat, pistols and riding boots, and will be able to inform the questioner that Turpin had a horse called Black Bess, on whom he rode from London to York. More generally, the public at large imagine Turpin as a courageous and romantic figure, a man of considerable daring, a defier of corrupt officialdom and a man who, like Robin Hood, robbed the rich to help the poor. But it is in legend, in a mythologised view of history, that Dick Turpin flourishes: if his image is instantly recognisable to everyone, few people could give any very precise details about him.

  This
is a pity, as Turpin’s story, which can be reconstructed from newspaper reports of his period, from two pamphlets published immediately after his death, and from a scattering of archival records, is an instructive one. This process of reconstruction may not tell us much about Turpin’s personality, but it does give us the opportunity to put together a remarkable criminal biography, a tale of violent robberies from houses, of highway robberies, of murder, and, eventually, of the horse-thefts that led to his execution. But with Turpin we are not just witnessing the career of one criminal: we also gain an entry into the workings of both the criminal-justice system and the criminality of the early eighteenth century, of the law-and-order machine on the one hand and the world of organised crime on the other. The former, with its lack of a professional police force and its dependence on public execution as the main bulwark against serious offenders, has been much misunderstood; the latter, much romanticised. So writing a book about Turpin involves not just telling the story of a well-documented criminal, but also involves understanding the very distinctive forms of crime and punishment of Turpin’s England, when both organised crime in something like the modern sense and the identification of crime as a political issue, a theme so familiar in the modern world, were emerging for the first time. And it was also a period in which there was an avid taste for tales about criminals.

  But, if Dick Turpin’s story opens up some major areas of history, it also throws light on that other way of constructing and remembering the past: legend. Turpin is a figure who is instantly recognisable to the bulk of the population, and around whom a potent mythology has gathered. None of this would have been apparent to those who apprehended, guarded, executed, or gave evidence against him in 1739. Yes, he was a notorious criminal: but one or two of those emerged every year in the eighteenth century, to enjoy a brief fame before they, too, ended their career on the gallows. Yes, a couple of pamphlets were written after Turpin’s execution, but this was pretty standard, and numerous such ephemeral publications recounting the careers and recording the last hours of dozens of now long-forgotten criminals survive in the nation’s research libraries. But it is Turpin we remember, Turpin who has passed into the popular consciousness, not the dozens of others. So with Dick Turpin we encounter two other issues. The first is the nature of legend, of how it gets created and perpetuated, an issue that also leads us into contemplating the nature of fame. The second is the relationship between history and legend, and, by extension, of how the two operate in our modern culture, and how we draw on both of them to imagine our past. For what if Turpin were not the swashbuckling figure of legend, but rather an unpleasant and violent criminal as unheroic as any who commit crimes today? What if he were not the dashing silk-clad dandy of legend, but rather a heavily pockmarked man of average height? And what, indeed, if the ride to York and Black Bess were nothing but fictions? Why, then, should a totally fictitious version of the past prove so pervasive?