Fragments of Two Centuries | Page 9

well authenticated case--the best authenticated perhaps now known in England--in which a member of a respectable family in Royston turned highwayman--an amateur highwayman one would fain hope and believe--and paid the full penalty of the law, and was made to illustrate the horrible custom of those times by hanging in chains on the public highway! For this we must take the liberty of going a few years back before George III. came to the throne. For some years before and after that time, the noted old Posting House of the Red Lion, in the High Street, Royston, was kept by a Mrs. Gatward. This good lady, who managed the inn with credit to herself and satisfaction to her patrons, unfortunately had a son, who, while attending apparently to the posting branch of the business, could not resist the fascination of the life of the highwaymen, who no doubt visited his mother's inn under the guise of well-spoken gentlemen. Probably it was in dealing with them for horses that young Gatward caught the infection of their roving life, but what were the precise circumstances of his fall we can hardly know; suffice it to say that his crime was one of robbing His Majesty's mails, that he was evidently tried at the Cambridgeshire Assizes, sentenced to death and afterwards to hang in chains on a gibbet, and according to the custom of the times, somewhere near the scene of his crime. The rest of his story is so well told by Cole, the Cambridgeshire antiquary, in his MSS. in the British Museum, that the reader will prefer to have it in his own words:--
"About 1753-4, the son of Mrs. Gatward, who kept the Red Lion, at Royston, being convicted of robbing the mail, was hanged in chains on the Great Road. I saw him hanging in a scarlet coat; after he had hung about two or three months, it is supposed that the screw was filed which supported him, and that he fell in the first high wind after. Mr. Lord, of Trinity, passed by as he laid on the ground, and trying to open his breast to see what state his body was in, not being offensive, but quite dry, a button of brass came off, which he preserves to this day, as he told me at the Vice-Chancellor's, Thursday, June 30, 1779. I sold this Mr. Gatward, just as I left college in 1752, a pair of coach horses, which was the only time I saw him. It was a great grief to his mother, who bore a good character, and kept the inn for many years after."
{13}
There is a tradition, at least, that Mrs. Gatward afterwards obtained her son's body and had it buried in the cellar of her house in the High Street. The story is in the highest degree creditable to human nature, but there is no proof beyond the tradition. As to the spot where the gibbeting took place, the only clue we have is given in Cole's words: "Hanged in chains on the Great Road." There seems no road that would so well answer this description as the North Road or Great North Road, and, as the spot must have been somewhere within a riding distance of Cambridge, the incident has naturally been associated with Caxton gibbet, a half-a-mile to the north of the village of Caxton, where a finger-post like structure, standing on a mound by the side of the North Road, still marks the spot where the original gibbet stood.
It seems almost incredible that we have travelled so far within so short a time! That almost within the limits of two men's lives a state of things prevailed which permitted a corpse to be lying about by the side of the public highway, subject now to the insults, now to the pity, of the passer-by! Yet many persons living remember the fire-side stories of the dreadful penalties awaiting any person who dared to interfere with the course of the law, and remove the malefactor from the gibbet!
Towards the end of the century the horrors of gibbeting, as illustrated in Gatward's case, were tempered somewhat by a method of public execution near the spot where the crime was committed, but, apparently of sparing the victim and his friends the exposure of the body for months afterwards till a convenient "high wind" blew it down. The latest instance I have found of an execution of this kind by the highway occurred in Hertfordshire, and to a Hertfordshire man. This was James Snook, who had formerly been a contractor in the formation of the Grand Junction Canal, but turning his attention to the "romance of the road" was tried at the Hertfordshire Assizes in 1802 for robbing the Tring mail. He was capitally convicted and