Jonathan Keates

Early Essex man

Crime is a species of performance art. Acts of murder, theft or fraud assume the collusive presence of an audience formed from that law-abiding majority for whom felony on a grand scale holds an inextinguishable glamour. Even a simple mugging possesses elements of street theatre, as if some sort of scenario had been worked out between the robber and his victim before the offence took place. However much we proclaim our hatred of the sinner, his sinfulness nourishes our less respectable dreams and fantasies. Thus the agents of havoc are easily metamorphosed into folk heroes, loved, envied and applauded even at the foot of the gallows.

Highwaymen were archetypal avatars of the criminal as popular entertainer. If during their heyday, in the 100-odd years between the Restoration and the accession of George III, they enjoyed undue levels of popular sympathy, this owed something to an awareness of their social origins as spoiled gentry or tradesmen corrupted by expensive tastes. That they stole horses, beat their victims senseless, shot or stabbed them and raped any wives or daughters who happened to be present was a tiresome bagatelle beside their skill in horsemanship, their deftness at eluding constables and magistrates and the dashing effrontery with which they rifled and plundered anybody stupid enough to be travelling country roads without a blunderbuss or a pistol primed.

In the case of the most celebrated of them all, Richard Turpin, hanged at York in 1739, a gap as wide as an ocean divides romance from reality. The facts, simply put, are these. Turpin, having turned up in York under the alias of John Palmer, quickly acquired a reputation for drunkenness and casual violence. Local magistrates grew suspicious when he refused to produce sureties after being bound over to keep the peace, and, having nailed him for horse-stealing, were cock-a-hoop to discover that their prisoner was a notorious Essex gang-leader with a £200 price on his head.

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