ton, and was invited to accompany William to Newmarket, where
the largest and most splendid Spring Meeting ever known was about to
assemble. The attraction must be supposed to have been great; for the
risks of the journey were not trifling. The peace had, all over Europe,
and nowhere more than in England, turned crowds of old soldiers into
marauders. [12] Several aristocratical equipages had been attacked even
in Hyde Park. Every newspaper contained stories of travellers stripped,
bound and flung into ditches. One day the Bristol mail was robbed;
another day the Dover coach; then the Norwich waggon. On Hounslow Heath
a company of horsemen, with masks on their faces, waited for the great
people who had been to pay their court to the King at Windsor. Lord
Ossulston escaped with the loss of two horses. The Duke of Saint Albans,
with the help of his servants, beat off the assailants. His brother the
Duke of Northumberland, less strongly guarded, fell into their hands.
They succeeded in stopping thirty or forty coaches, and rode off with
a great booty in guineas, watches and jewellery. Nowhere, however, does
the peal seem to have been so great as on the Newmarket road. There
indeed robbery was organised on a scale unparalleled in the kingdom
since the days of Robin Hood and Little John. A fraternity of
plunderers, thirty in number according to the lowest estimate, squatted,
near Waltham Cross, under the shades of Epping Forest, and built
themselves huts, from which they sallied forth with sword and pistol
to bid passengers stand. The King and Tallard were doubtless too
well attended to be in jeopardy. But, soon after they had passed the
dangerous spot, there was a fight on the highway attended with loss of
life. A warrant of the Lord Chief justice broke up the Maroon village
for a short time, but the dispersed thieves soon mustered again, and had
the impudence to bid defiance to the government in a cartel signed, it
was said, with their real names. The civil power was unable to deal with
this frightful evil. It was necessary that, during some time, cavalry
should patrol every evening on the roads near the boundary between
Middlesex and Essex.

The state of those roads, however, though contemporaries described it as
dangerous beyond all example, did not deter men of rank and fashion
from making the joyous pilgrimages to Newmarket. Half the Dukes in the
kingdom were there. Most of the chief ministers of state swelled the
crowd