10 Facts in the Appalling True Story of Dick Turpin, the 18th Century Robin Hood

‘John Palmer’

By the time that this £200 information-bounty over his head was announced, Turpin had based himself in Lincolnshire, a largely rural county in the north of England. The Artist Formerly Known As Dick Turpin, Violent Highwayman and Robber Extraordinaire, was now simply John Palmer, ‘horse-dealer’. We know of Turpin’s activities as John Palmer from evidence given at his trial (see below). One of the chief witnesses was William Harris, innkeeper of the Ferry Inn at Brough and Turpin’s occasional landlord, on the Yorkshire side of the Humber Estuary, who gave the following account of Turpin’s time in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.

‘One John Palmer came to this informant’s house in Brough aforesaid and boarded with this informant at Brough four or five months and during this time went from this examinant’s house over the water into the county of Lincoln at divers times and the said times returned to this informant’s house att Brough aforesaid with severall horses at a time which he sold and disposed of to divers persons in the county of York… the said John Palmer told this informant that he lived at Long Sutton with his father and that his sister kept his father’s house there’.

As you’ve probably guessed, Turpin/ Palmer was stealing the horses to sell in Yorkshire. Although it is tempting to see Harris as incredibly gullible, given the circulation of physical descriptions of Turpin and his notoriety, it seems that information from the South East had not reached Yorkshire. Dealing in horses meant that he rubbed shoulders with the gentry and Turpin, apparently, ‘often went out a hunting and shooting with several gentlemen of the neighbourhood’. This is perhaps the only humorous side to Turpin’s real story: a criminal hobnobbing with the gentry shows the absurdity of the 18^th-century’s rigid class distinctions.

We know of several horse thefts Turpin committed in Lincolnshire. In July 1737, Turpin stole a horse, rode it to Hempstead to visit his family, and left it there, leading to his father’s arrest for horse theft. He then stole a mare, foal, and gelding in August from one Thomas Creasy, selling the former two and keeping the gelding for himself. Legal records also suggest that Turpin was arrested for sheep-stealing around this time, but escaped, possibly with the aid of Creasy’s horses. It was for the theft of Creasy’s livestock that John Palmer was eventually tried and convicted.

Capture

It was after one of his aforementioned hunting trips that Turpin’s downfall began. On 2^nd October 1738, ‘Abraham Green saith that John Palmer of Welton… with a gun kill[ed] a tame fowl which did belong to Francis Hall of Brough… and did throw the fowl into the fields of Elloughton… [John Robinson] reprimanding the said John Palmer concerning the same, he the said John Palmer did threaten to shoot this informant’. Several witnesses complained to local magistrates, who committed Turpin to keep the peace and provide sureties whilst they conducted an investigation. Turpin refused, and was imprisoned at Beverley, Yorkshire.

Things now gathered momentum. Turpin rode the horse he had stolen from Thomas Creasy, and stabled it at a nearby tavern. Meanwhile, the magistrates’ investigations led them to become suspicious of John Palmer. Although Palmer ‘lived like a gentleman’, no one knew how he made a living, and his movements followed a regular, determined pattern. Whenever he returned from Lincolnshire, he always brought back several horses and large sums of money, which led to suspicions that he was either a highwayman or horse-stealer. Turpin responded to the allegations by claiming he was a butcher from Long Sutton, Lincolnshire.

Enquiries were made at Long Sutton, but it transpired that Palmer, though a resident, was not a butcher, and was actually suspected of sheep- and horse-theft. Thus what had started as a trivial matter was now a major investigation: horse-theft had been a capital offence since 1545, and was punishable by death. Turpin was moved from the prison for petty-criminals at Beverley to York Castle. Meanwhile, Thomas Creasy by chance found out that a horse-dealer had been arrested, and had stabled a gelding matching the description of his missing horse. He found his missing horses in the vicinity of Beverley.

In addition to the suspicions of Palmer at Long Sutton, the justices now had a specific charge against him for horse-theft. Additional evidence was taken from the man to whom Turpin sold the mare and foal, Captain George Dawson. He revealed how Palmer had sold him the animals on the street during a chance encounter, claiming that they were bred in Lincolnshire. Crucially, the horse-dealer also explicitly stated that the animals belonged to him. Although it was unlikely that a horse-stealer would be executed for a first offence, one with charges of murder, robbery, and assault was a different matter.

Trial and Discovery

Awaiting trial at the York assizes, Turpin wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, ‘Pompr’ Rivenell, at Hempstead. The letter does not survive, but is thought to have been an update on Turpin’s whereabouts and a request for false character witnesses for John Palmer. When Rivenell went to collect his letters from the local post office, he refused Turpin’s, having seen the York postmark and remarking that he had no contacts there. Unfortunately, one of Turpin’s old school friends, James Smith, was there at the same time, and recognised the handwriting. Smith informed a local magistrate, and the secret was out.

Four days later, on 23^rd February, Smith was in York, having been sent by several Essex magistrates. He was taken to see the prisoner, John Palmer, and swore to the York authorities that he was ‘Richard Turpin, and no other person’. The matter was raised from a local to a national level. The failure to apprehend Turpin in the London area had caused the government to be rebuked: ‘a fellow, who is known to be a thief by the whole kingdom, shall for a long time rob us… make a jest of us, shall defy laws, and laugh at justice’.

On 22^nd March 1739, Turpin, as he was now known, was charged with two counts of stealing horses, all from Thomas Creasy. To be tried for highway robbery and murder would have required Turpin to be moved down to London, and it seems that the government wished to act expediently. Thus statements were heard from Thomas Creasy and Captain Dawson, and James Smith and another Hempstead man, Edward Saward, swore that John Palmer was Richard Turpin. The latter testimony ensured that Turpin could still be held, even if he defeated the horse-stealing charges. Turpin denied stealing any horses.

Although he admitted that he was Dick Turpin, the defendant claimed that he adopted his mother’s maiden name because he was in debt. He claimed to have purchased the horses legitimately, but produced no witnesses as evidence. On this basis, he asked the judge to defer the trial to a later date, since he had assumed that he would be tried in Essex and had thus not summoned anyone for his defence. The judge, however, was unimpressed: ‘as your country has found you guilty of a crime worthy of death, it is my office to pronounce sentence against you’.

Execution

In a slight nod to the later tradition of Turpin the dapper highwayman, Turpin purchased himself a new frock coat and shoes for his execution. He also hired five professional mourners to follow his procession to the scaffold and to oversee his body’s interment. After giving a range of other gifts to people, including a gold ring and several pairs of shoes to a married woman with whom he had had an affair whilst in Brough, Turpin was transported by a cart from York Castle to be hanged on 7^th April 1739. The vehicle was strongly guarded to prevent escape.

Appropriately, given his conviction for horse-stealing, the site of the execution, Knavesmire, was the York racecourse, and it still used for the purpose today. A small stone marks the spot where the gallows once stood. As he passed spectators, Turpin nodded politely to them. Astride the ‘Three-Legged-Mare’, as the gallows was nicknamed, Turpin looked out at the assembled crowd with ‘undaunted courage’. Ironically, the hangman for the day was Thomas Hadfield, a highwayman himself who had been sentenced to death but pardoned. Turpin then ‘spoke a few words to the topsman, then threw himself off, and expir’d in five minutes’.

Turpin was left hanging for most of the afternoon, then interred at St George’s Church, Fishergate, in the city of York. His body was swiftly stolen by body-snatchers, but they were apprehended and Turpin was laid to rest for a second time. Thus ended the appalling life of England’s most famous highwayman. Perhaps the only person in York sad to see him go was his jailer, who allegedly made over £1000 selling tickets to visit Turpin at York Castle as he awaited execution. Even before his death, the foundations were laid for the modern myth of Turpin the celebrity highwayman.

Cultural Legacy

So, what do we make of the real Dick Turpin? From the above, it is clear that he was a violent and unscrupulous criminal, who cared not how old or how wealthy his victims were, and was willing to use vicious methods to get his loot, and even murder to avoid discovery. Far from the dashing figure of myth, Turpin must rank as one of history’s most odious thugs. However, the reality behind the legend did not even stop his contemporaries from becoming fascinated with him, and so perhaps we are not entirely to blame for his unwarranted reputation.

As mentioned in the previous section, Turpin enjoyed a grisly celebrity after being sentenced to execution. Capitalising on this craze in the immediate aftermath of the execution, Richard Bayes, the man whose attempts to arrest King resulted in the latter’s death, rushed to complete his biography, The Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin. The document contains a hearty mixture of details from Turpin’s trial and wild speculation where no definitive evidence was forthcoming. Despite its factual inaccuracies, Bayes’s narrative was a popular work, and is important for giving the fullest contemporary account of Turpin’s execution at Knavesmire.

Turpin was far from the only highwayman of his day, and by no means the most popular in his lifetime. Chapbooks and pamphlets appeared in honour of several others – James Hind, Claude Duval, Jack Ovet – to whom many of the romantic features later associated with Turpin were ascribed in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In particular, Claude Duval (see picture above) was the closest thing to a real version of the mythical Dick Turpin in contemporary sources. He had a reputation as a gentleman, and once refused to rob a coach after being granted a dance with a beautiful lady.

Turpin had no such reputation in his day, and his story was primarily of interest because of his barbarity and long evasion of capture by the authorities. However, the main features of the Dick Turpin myth were taken from accounts of other highwaymen, and combined into Turpin by William Harrison Ainsworth in his aforementioned-novel, Rookwood, in 1834. It is unclear why Ainsworth chose Turpin of all highwaymen to include in his novel, but the image he portrayed has been a lasting one, and it is to Ainsworth that we are indebted for our prevailing impression of Dick Turpin.

As well as essentially reimagining Turpin as Claude Duval, Ainsworth is also the source of two important features of the modern Turpin legend: naming Turpin’s horse as Black Bess, and the legend of the heroic day’s ride to York. The latter, in fact, was actually a feat ascribed to another highwayman altogether, ‘Swift Nicks’, by Daniel Defoe. Ainsworth was also instrumental, more generally, in securing the romantic reputation of highwaymen, as his Turpin proclaims: ‘it is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman as it is for a doctor to have his diploma’.

Rookwood was an overnight sensation. Ainsworth’s image of Turpin, via scores of plagiarised Penny Dreadfuls, has since prevailed through fiction and alleged fact. In 1906, Turpin’s relationship with the silver screen began with the silent film, Dick Turpin’s Last Ride to York. Many other films, plays, and novels have since appeared. Based on the narrative of Turpin’s life in Rookwood, literally thousands of pubs in the UK claim to have hosted Dick Turpin during his lifetime, without realising they are involved in an elaborate game of charades in which hardly anyone knows the truth. But at least you do now.

Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Rookwood. London: J.M. Dent, 1931.

Ash, Russell. Discovering Highwaymen. Tring: Shire Publications, 1970.

Barlow, Derek. Dick Turpin and the Gregory Gang. London: Phillimore, 1973.

Brandon, David. Stand and Deliver: A History of Highway Robbery. Stroud: Sutton, 2002.

Moore, Lucy. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld. London: Penguin, 2004.

Sharpe, James. Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman. London: Profile Books, 2005.