#HistFicThursdays - Horrible Histories 8 - Dick Turpin

Going down to visit my grandma in Lincolnshire from our Orkney home was always an adventure. We did it most years, sometimes by train, sometimes by car. This might seem an odd way to open a blog about Dick Turpin, as we were the best part of 300 years too late to be stopped by highwaymen, but there is a reason! It's strange the sort of things our memories are built on. I can still remember the stuffy smell of the veranda, and the rows of bun boxes in the pantry (and yes, from time to time I might have sneakily helped myself to the tubs of sugar-strand toppings). And I also remember a decorative plate she had on the wall in the Living Room. It was of a cloaked man, hiding behind a bush as a stagecoach travelled towards him (see, I told you there was a reason!). At the bottom, it had a line from John Gay's poem "A Journey to Exeter":

Where broken gamesters oft repair their loss

In the poem, the travellers are not journeying by coach, but riding. This would have bettered their chances had those "broken gamesters" appeared, but they were never stopped as they crossed Bagstot Heath.

It's a strange thing how highwaymen have been portrayed in fiction and arts. They are often romantic figures who, if not morally right, are at least relatable. William Harrison Ainsworth's Rockwood, is responsible for most of the misconceptions about Dick Turpin, but there is an entire subgenre built on the - usually uncharacteristically heroic - antics of highwaymen.

Dick Turpin himself was not a trendsetter, his robberies arrived in the middle of that "golden age" of highwaymen, which is broadly thought to last from 1650-1800 (the first official reference to "highwaymen" being made in 1617, and the last man - Robert Snooks - to be executed as a highwayman in 1802). He only killed two men in his entire career, far fewer than others, and he lived the first 25 of his 30 years as an ordinary person, no antics, no trouble.  He married a woman from his local area when he was about 20 but, as far as is known, they had no children.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all was that he appears to have stumbled into a life of crime rather than set out for it. His initial role in the "notorious gang of Gregory" had nothing to do with guns or robberies, but processing the meat from the deer they had poached. It takes a strong-minded person to withdraw from a group like that and one thing Turpin was certainly not, was strong-minded. Instead, perhaps tantalised by the promise of riches or the the adrenaline of the actions, he began to partake in the gang's more criminal actions. By the time he was 29, Turpin was a fully inducted member of the group, breaking into houses and taking off with hundreds (which relates to thousands today) of pounds worth of goods.

The Gregory brothers were caught and executed along with most of their gang in the first half of 1736, but Dick Turpin was not among them. Since they were given over to the law by one of their accomplices, John Wheeler, it would seem that Turpin was either not as much of a key figure as we are led to believe, or Wheeler had built a strong enough relationship with him to spare Turpin in his confession.

Being identified after committing a handful of highway robberies at around the same time, Dick Turpin dropped off the radar for for the best part of eight months. When he returned in 1737, he teamed up with other highwaymen, one of whom was his "good mate, Matt King". This partnership, however strong, was short-lived. According to Richard Bayes (who went on to write a biography of Turpin), Dick Turpin accidentally shot Matthew King while trying to hit Bayes. This had a profound effect on Turpin who, up to this point, does not appear to have killed anyone. Matthew King died about a week later, and Dick Turpin had already gone into hiding.

The floodgates were now open, and Dick Turpin was becoming the monster of legend. A price was set on his head, and he killed at least one of the people who tried to capture him. Desperate to begin again, he traveled to the relative obscurity of Yorkshire, rebranded himself as a trader, and renamed himself as John Palmer. For more than a year, he was absorbed back into society. Ironically, it was the shooting of a cockfighting bird which ultimately led to Dick Turpin's downfall. His refusal to pay any money to the court led to further and further investigations. It was the "postie" who claimed the reward for him, as the song says, but in another tragic twist of the knife, this had been because his sister's husband had refused to pay for his letter.

His entire life, as it swung between highs and lows, goods and bads, appears to have been governed not by himself but by the company he kept. In this time of alternative history stories, I'd love to think about what would have happened to Richard Turpin if he had plucked up the courage to say that initial "no" to the Gregory Gang. But perhaps this is not a new idea at all. After all, from as early as the nineteenth century, Dick Turpin had risen from his role as a monster in the legend, to a romantic figure. Now, he was doing daring deeds for a cause. The fact is, none of us like to think about people manipulating others, but this was exactly what the real story of Dick Turpin showed to have happened.

I suppose the love of highwaymen should not be surprising. I know I have a tendency to go for those characters in books - both as a reader and a writer - who are a little bit shady but turn out to be good underneath. The real Dick Turpin may not have been like that, but his story since has certainly portrayed him so.