Dick Turpin

• 1. Introduction

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  Dick Turpin, baptised Richard Turpin on the 21st of September 1705, is the most famous highwayman in English history, and very little of his reputation survives scrutiny. No portrait of him made during his lifetime exists. He was notorious but unremarkable, and nobody thought him worth painting. The dashing rider of ballads, plays and films has almost nothing in common with the man in the court records, who was a butcher's son from Essex, a deer-thief's associate, a burglar and a killer, and who was hanged in York.

  Three questions run through his story. How does a village butcher end up among armed gangs raiding farmhouses after dark? How did an ordinary letter, and a relative's refusal to pay for it, bring down a man who had slipped past the authorities for years? And how did a pockmarked thug become a folk hero, with a rider's gallop, a loyal mare and a gallantry that none of his contemporaries ever described?

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• 2. Butcher Among Poachers

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  The Blue Bell Inn at Hempstead in Essex, later renamed the Rose and Crown, was where Turpin was born, the fifth of six children of John Turpin and Mary Elizabeth Parmenter. His parents had married in the same parish more than ten years before the baptism. His father was both a butcher and an innkeeper. Later stories suggest the son followed him into the meat trade. One says he was apprenticed as a teenager to a butcher in the village of Whitechapel, and another says he ran his own shop in Thaxted.

  Testimony given at his trial in 1739 hints at only a rudimentary education. Around 1725 he married Elizabeth Millington, although no record of the wedding survives. After his apprenticeship the couple moved north to Buckhurst Hill in Essex, where he opened a butcher's shop of his own.

  The Royal Forest of Waltham, close to his new home, had long been plagued by deer poaching. In 1723 the Black Act was passed to deal with it, named for its ban on blackening or disguising the face in the forests. Stealing deer was a domestic offence heard by justices of the peace rather than in the civil courts. Transportation for seven years was not introduced as a penalty until 1737.

  In 1731 seven verderers grew so alarmed by rising thefts that they signed an affidavit. It was lodged with the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of State, who offered a reward of £10 to anyone naming the thieves, plus a pardon for any thief who gave up his colleagues. After incidents that included a threat to murder a keeper and his family, the government raised the reward to £50 in 1733.

  The thieves became known as the Essex gang, sometimes called the Gregory Gang. Its members included Samuel Gregory and his brothers Jeremiah and Jasper, Joseph Rose, John Jones, Thomas Rowden and a young John Wheeler. Mary Brazier acted as the gang's fence. They needed contacts to sell the deer, and a young butcher who traded in the area was an obvious one.

  Turpin almost certainly became involved. By 1733 he seems to have left butchery to become landlord of a public house, most likely the Rose and Crown at Clay Hill. No evidence places him in the deer thefts themselves, yet by the summer of 1734 he was a close associate of the gang. By October 1734 several of its members had been captured or had fled, and the rest were turning from poaching to something far more violent.

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• 3. Houses After Dark

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  At Woodford in October 1734, the gang raided the home of Peter Split, a chandler and grocer. Nobody knows who carried out the raid, though Turpin may have been among them. Two nights later they struck at the Woodford home of a gentleman named Richard Woolridge, who held the post of Furnisher of Small Arms in the Office of Ordnance at the Tower of London.

  In December, Jasper and Samuel Gregory, John Jones and John Wheeler attacked the Chingford home of John Gladwin, a higler, and John Shockley. On the 19th of December Turpin and five other men raided Ambrose Skinner, a 73-year-old farmer from Barking. They left with an estimated £300.

  Two days later the gang, without Turpin, attacked the house of a keeper named William Mason in Epping Forest. His servant slipped away and came back about an hour later with neighbours, but the house had been ransacked and the thieves were long gone. On the 11th of January 1735 the gang raided the Charlton home of a Mr Saunders. A week later, at Croydon, Turpin arrived masked and armed with pistols, alongside four others, to rob a gentleman named Sheldon. That same month two men, possibly from the same gang, raided the home of a Reverend Mr Dyde. He was away, so they cut his manservant across the face "in a barbarous manner".

  On the 1st of February 1735 five men with pistols entered the house of the Widow Shelley at Loughton. A newspaper reported that they threatened to lay her across the fire unless she revealed where her money lay. She held out until her son, also threatened with murder, said he would tell them if they spared his mother. The gang took close to £100, a silver tankard and plate. They then helped themselves to ale and wine in the cellar and cooked a meal. Meanwhile two of them robbed a farmer named Turkle, who rented one end of the widow's house, of more than £20 and took two of his horses, which turned up in Old Street the next morning.

  The gang lived in and around London. Turpin stayed for a time at Whitechapel and then at Millbank. On the 4th of February 1735 he met John Fielder, Samuel Gregory, Joseph Rose and John Wheeler at an inn on The Broadway in London. Their target was Joseph Lawrence, a farmer at Earlsbury Farm in Edgware. After stopping twice for food and drink, they seized a shepherd boy, burst into the house with pistols and tied up two maidservants.

  Lawrence was 70, and he refused to say where his money was hidden. The gang dragged him about the house by his nose and hair, tipped a kettle of water over his head and forced him to sit on the fire. Turpin beat the old man's bare buttocks with his pistols. Gregory also took one of the maidservants upstairs and raped her. For all this the gang escaped with less than £30.

  Three days later, with William Saunders and Humphrey Walker added to the party, Turpin and the others raided a farm in Marylebone and took just under £90.

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• 4. A Gang Unravels

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  The day after the Marylebone raid, the Duke of Newcastle offered £50 for information leading to the conviction of those behind the two Woodford robberies and the attacks on the widow Shelley and Reverend Dyde. On the 11th of February, Fielder, Saunders and Wheeler were arrested. Two accounts of their capture survive. In one, an Edgware alehouse owner who had served the gang before the Lawrence attack spotted their horses outside a Bloomsbury alehouse and called the parish constable. In the other, a servant of Joseph Lawrence recognised two of the men. They were drinking with a woman, possibly Mary Brazier.

  Wheeler, who may have been only 15, quickly betrayed his companions. Descriptions of the men still at large were printed in the press. The London Gazette described Turpin as "a tall fresh coloured man, very much marked with the small pox", about 26 years old and five feet nine inches tall, who wore a blue grey coat and a natural wig.

  Once Wheeler's confession was known, the rest scattered. Turpin warned Gregory and the others and left Westminster. On the 15th of February, three or four men, most likely Samuel Gregory, Herbert Haines, Turpin and possibly Thomas Rowden, robbed a Mrs St. John at Chingford. The next day Turpin parted from Gregory and Haines and went to Hempstead to see his family.

  On the 17th of February, Gregory and Haines stopped at an alehouse in Debden and ordered a shoulder of mutton, planning to stay the night. A man named Palmer recognised them and fetched the parish constable. In the fracas that followed, both men escaped. They rejoined Turpin, may have travelled to Gravesend, and then returned to Woodford. With the authorities hunting them, the survivors lay low, probably in Epping Forest.

  Six days after the first arrests, Rose, Brazier and Walker were seized at a chandler's shop in Westminster while drinking punch. Fielder, Rose, Saunders and Walker were tried at the Middlesex General Session between the 26th of February and the 1st of March 1735, and the indictments for burglary also named Turpin and Gregory. Walker died in Newgate Prison. The other three were hanged at Tyburn on the 10th of March, and their bodies were hung in gibbets along the Edgware Road. Walker's body was hung in chains.

  Jasper Gregory was captured and executed late in March. His brothers were arrested on the 9th of April at Rake in West Sussex after a struggle in which Samuel lost the tip of his nose to a sword and Jeremy was shot in the leg. Jeremy died in Winchester gaol. Samuel was tried in May and executed on the 4th of June, and his body was later moved to hang beside the others at Edgware. Herbert Haines was captured on the 13th of April and executed in August. Mary Brazier was transported to the Thirteen Colonies.

  Wheeler, whose evidence had proved the cases against his former friends, went free. He died at Hackney in January 1738, and the cause is not recorded. Turpin, named on the indictments, was still at large, and by July he would be seen on the roads around London.

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• 5. The Road and the Forest

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  On the 10th of July 1735, a highway robbery was blamed for the first time on "Turpin the butcher", working with Thomas Rowden, "the pewterer". Two earlier highway robberies, on the 10th and the 12th of April, may also have been theirs. Days later they struck in Epping Forest and stripped a man from Southwark of his belongings. With a bounty of £100 now on their heads, they kept working through the rest of the year.

  In August they robbed five people accompanying a coach on Barnes Common, and soon afterwards attacked another coach party between Putney and Kingston Hill. On the 20th of August they relieved a Mr Godfrey of six guineas and a pocket book on Hounslow Heath. They then moved on to Blackheath in Hertfordshire and back to London, and on the 5th of December they were seen near Winchester. After the capture of John Jones in late December, the pair separated.

  Rowden had earlier been convicted of counterfeiting. In July 1736 he was convicted of passing counterfeit coin under the alias Daniel Crispe. His real name was eventually discovered, and he was transported in June 1738. Jones was also transported to the Thirteen Colonies.

  Little is known of Turpin during 1736. Sightings were reported in Holland, but he may simply have taken a new name and dropped out of view. In February 1737 he arranged by letter to meet his wife at Puckeridge, where he spent a night with her, her maid and a man called Robert Nott. The authorities intercepted that letter. Turpin escaped to Cambridge, but the others were arrested on suspicion of being dangerous rogues and robbing upon the highway. They were held at Hertford gaol. The women were later acquitted, and Nott was released at the next Assize.

  In March 1737 Turpin was reported to be working with two other highwaymen, Matthew King and Stephen Potter. King has often been wrongly called Tom King. The trio committed a string of robberies in March and April that ended at Whitechapel, after a horse was stolen near Waltham Forest. Its owner, Joseph Major, told Richard Bayes, the landlord of the Green Man at Leytonstone, who would later write a biography of Turpin. Bayes traced the animal to the Red Lion at Whitechapel, and he and Major kept watch for the thieves.

  John King, Matthew's brother, arrived late that night and was quickly seized by the party, which included the local constable. He revealed that Matthew was waiting nearby. In the struggle that followed Matthew King was shot, and he died on the 19th of May. Potter was caught later, but was released at his trial for lack of evidence.

  Who fired is disputed. Early reports blamed Turpin, but the same newspapers retracted that a month later and said Bayes had fired the fatal shot. Bayes' own statement may have been heavily embellished. What came next is better documented. Turpin escaped to a hideaway in Epping Forest, where Thomas Morris, a servant of the keeper Henry Tomson, spotted him. On the 4th of May, Morris tried to capture him, armed with pistols, and Turpin shot him dead with a carbine.

  The Gentleman's Magazine reported that the King promised a pardon to any accomplice, and a reward of £200 to anyone who could discover Turpin so that he might be convicted. Elizabeth King, wife of Matthew King, was arrested at the Red Lion on the 7th of May while trying to claim two of his horses, but was released without charge. The killing of Morris set off a flood of reports about Turpin, which then stopped, and the next trace of him is in Yorkshire.

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• 6. A Man Named Palmer

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  Around June 1737, a guest calling himself John Palmer, or Parmen, took lodgings at the Ferry Inn at Brough, on the Humber estuary between the East Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. He posed as a horse trader and often hunted with the local gentlemen. On the 2nd of October 1738 he shot another man's game cock in the street. When John Robinson rebuked him, he threatened to shoot Robinson too.

  Three East Riding justices travelled to Brough to take depositions: George Crowle, the Member of Parliament for Hull, Hugh Bethell and Marmaduke Constable. They wanted to bind him over, but he would not pay the surety, so he was committed to the House of Correction at Beverley. The parish constable, Carey Gill, escorted him there. Turpin made no attempt to escape, and it has been suggested he was depressed about the failures in his life.

  Robert Appleton, Clerk of the Peace for the East Riding, left the account of the incident. He recorded that the justices asked how Palmer paid for his lifestyle and suspected crime. Turpin said he was a butcher who had fallen into debt and had levanted from his home in Long Sutton, Lincolnshire. A Mr Delamere, the justice there, confirmed that a John Palmer had lived in Long Sutton for about nine months. He was suspected of sheep stealing and had escaped the local constable. Delamere also suspected him of horse theft, had taken several depositions, and said he would prefer Palmer detained.

  The Brough justices judged the case too serious for a house of correction. They demanded sureties for an appearance at York Assizes, Turpin refused again, and on the 16th of October he was moved to York Castle in handcuffs.

  Horse theft had been a capital offence since 1545. Most of the 200 capital statutes of the 17th and 18th centuries concerned property, and robbery with violence was among the offences prosecuted with the greatest rigour. As Palmer, Turpin had stolen several horses. In July 1737 he took one from Pinchbeck in Lincolnshire and rode it to visit his father at Hempstead. On the way back to Brough he stole three more horses, and he left the gelding with his father.

  The identity of John Turpin's son was well known, and the horse was soon traced. On the 12th of September 1738, John Turpin was committed to gaol in Essex on a charge of horse theft. He helped to prevent a gaolbreak, and the charges were dropped on the 5th of March 1739. About a month after Palmer reached York Castle, Thomas Creasy, the owner of the three stolen horses, tracked them down. Those thefts became the basis of the trial.

  From his cell Turpin wrote to his brother-in-law, Pompr Rivernall of Hempstead, who was married to Turpin's sister Dorothy. The letter sat in the local post office. Rivernall saw the York postmark, refused to pay the delivery charge and said he "had no correspondent at York". He may have grudged the money, or he may have wanted to distance himself from Turpin.

  The letter then went to the post office at Saffron Walden, where James Smith recognised the handwriting. Smith had taught his younger schoolmate Turpin to write. He alerted a justice, Thomas Stubbing, who paid the postage and opened the letter. Smith travelled to York Castle and on the 23rd of February identified Palmer as Turpin. For this he received the £200 reward that the Duke of Newcastle had first offered after the murder of Thomas Morris.

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• 7. Trial and Gallows

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  The Duke of Newcastle wanted Turpin tried in London, but York Assizes heard the case. Proceedings began on the 22nd of March, three days after the winter Assizes opened. Turpin stood accused of stealing Thomas Creasy's horses: a mare worth three pounds, a foal worth twenty shillings and a gelding worth three pounds. The indictments named him as "John Palmer alias Pawmer alias Richard Turpin" and placed the thefts at Welton on the 1st of March 1739. Both details were wrong. The horses were taken at Heckington in August 1738, so the charges were technically invalid.

  Sir William Chapple, a respected judge in his early sixties, presided. The prosecution was led by the King's Counsel Thomas Place and Richard Crowle, brother of George. A York resident, Thomas Kyll, recorded the proceedings. Turpin had no defence barrister. Representation was costly for felony defendants at that time, and the presiding judge was expected to look after their interests.

  Seven witnesses testified, among them Creasy and James Smith. Turpin questioned them very little. Asked whether he had anything to put to Creasy, he said he had no witnesses present and asked for the trial to be put off. Of Smith he claimed to know nothing. He said he had bought the mare and foal from an innkeeper near Heckington, and that Palmer was his mother's maiden name. Asked what he was called before Lincolnshire, he answered "Turpin". The jury convicted him of stealing the mare and foal without leaving the courtroom, and later convicted him on the gelding as well.

  Asked why he should not be sentenced to death, Turpin said: "It is very hard upon me, my Lord, because I was not prepar'd for my Defence." The judge answered: "Why was you not? You knew the Time of the Assizes as well as any Person here." Turpin said he had been told the trial would be held in Essex. Chapple replied that whoever said so was highly to blame, and he pronounced the sentence of death.

  The gaoler was said to have earned £100 selling drinks to Turpin and his many visitors. Turpin rejected a local clergyman's "serious remonstrances and admonitions". A letter dated the 29th of March, possibly from his father, urged him to "beg of God to pardon your many transgressions, which the thief upon the cross received pardon for at the last hour". Turpin bought a new frock coat and shoes. The day before his execution he hired five mourners, who shared three pounds and ten shillings.

  On the 7th of April 1739, followed by his mourners, Turpin and a horse thief named John Stead were carted through York to Knavesmire, the city's counterpart to London's Tyburn. Turpin "behav'd himself with amazing assurance" and "bow'd to the spectators as he passed". York had no permanent hangman, and by custom a prisoner was pardoned on condition that he did the job. The man chosen was a fellow highwayman, Thomas Hadfield. The Gentleman's Magazine recorded that Turpin, feeling his right leg tremble as he climbed the ladder, spoke a few words to the executioner and then "threw himself off, and expir'd in five minutes".

  The short drop meant slow strangulation, and Turpin was left hanging until late afternoon. He was then cut down and taken to a tavern in Castlegate. The next morning he was buried in the graveyard of St George's Church in Fishergate. On the following Tuesday his corpse was reportedly stolen by body-snatchers, a common enough crime that York's authorities may have tolerated, though the public disliked it. A mob caught the thieves with the body. It was reburied, supposedly with quicklime. Doubt persists over whether the grave in St George's graveyard is really his.

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• 8. Making of a Legend

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  Richard Bayes, the Leytonstone landlord, published The Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin in 1739. It was a hurried mixture of fact and fiction, put together after the trial to feed public appetite. Accounts of condemned prisoners' speeches, criminal biographies and trial reports were hugely popular in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. They served as news and as a place to work through public worries about crime and punishment.

  Bayes got a good deal wrong. His claim that Turpin married a Miss Palmer is almost certainly false. His lists of those present at the Essex gang's robberies include names that never appeared in contemporary newspapers, which the author Derek Barlow takes as a sign of embellishment. The tale of Turpin and "King the Highwayman" is almost certainly fictional too. Barlow also distrusts the account of the stolen corpse added to Kyll's 1739 publication, because it is handled with a delicacy that comes close to reverence.

  The only report calling him a highwayman before his death was a broadsheet of June 1737, headed "News news: great and wonderful news from London in an uproar or a hue and cry after the Great Turpin, with his escape into Ireland". Seventeenth-century highwaymen such as James Hind, Claude Duval and William Nevison had earned chapbooks of their own, yet their names are far less familiar today. Fictional versions of Turpin's exploits only began to appear around the turn of the 19th century.

  William Harrison Ainsworth gave the legend its shape in his 1834 novel Rookwood. Turpin first appears under the name Palmer, and later has to flee on his horse, Black Bess. She outruns his pursuers but dies of the strain. Readers preferred this scene to the rest of the book, and the likeable rogue became part of the legend. The artist Edward Hull then published six prints of notable moments in Turpin's career.

  Ainsworth's ride had an older source in Daniel Defoe's 1727 work A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain. Defoe recorded that William Nevison, after a robbery in Kent in 1676, rode to York to establish an alibi. A similar ride was credited to Turpin as early as 1808 and was on the stage by 1819. The version Ainsworth imagined, about 200 miles in less than a day, is impossible.

  The tale still spread. Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, a penny dreadful of 254 parts published in 1867-68, made Turpin the hero and gave him trusty comrades in Claude Duval, Tom King and Jack Rann. Such stories turned a pockmarked thug and murderer into "a gentleman of the road and a protector of the weak". The ballads, the earliest apparently from 1737, cast him as an 18th-century Robin Hood. One has him saying: "Turpin was caught and his trial was passed, and for a game cock he died at last."

  The playwright George Dibdin Pitt dramatised the most notable "facts" of Turpin's life in 1845. In 1846 Marie Tussaud added a wax sculpture of him to her collection, and Astley's Amphitheatre staged a hippodrama, Dick Turpin's Ride to York. Fred Ginnett wrote and starred in a 1906 film, Dick Turpin's Last Ride to York. The 1922 British silent drama Dick Turpin's Ride to York, directed by Maurice Elvey, was the first feature-length version. Film historians long assumed it lost until two reels were rediscovered in 2003.

  Sid James played Turpin in the 1974 film Carry On Dick, and Richard O'Sullivan took the role in the LWT series Dick Turpin from 1979 to 1982. Noel Fielding starred in The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin for Apple TV+. In 2009 the Castle Museum in York published an E-FIT of Turpin built from the surviving descriptions.

  Near Hatton Cross tube station, on the edge of Heathrow Airport, a street in Feltham is named Dick Turpin Way. The name reflects the local belief that he once lurked on Hounslow Heath.

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