y suspected of being
highwaymen, but against whom there was not sufficient evidence, would be
paraded at Newgate in riding dresses: their horses would also be shown;
and all gentlemen who had been robbed were invited to inspect this
singular exhibition. On another occasion a pardon was publicly offered
to a robber if he would give up some rough diamonds, of immense value,
which he had taken when he stopped the Harwich mail. A short time after
appeared another proclamation, warning the innkeepers that the eye
of the government was upon them. Their criminal connivance, it was
affirmed, enabled banditti to infest the roads with impunity. That these
suspicions were not without foundation, is proved by the dying speeches
of some penitent robbers of that age, who appear to have received from
the innkeepers services much resembling those which Farquhar's Boniface
rendered to Gibbet. [151]

It was necessary to the success and even to the safety of the highwayman
that he should be a bold and skilful rider, and that his manners and
appearance should be such as suited the master of a fine horse. He
therefore held an aristocratical position in the community of thieves,
appeared at fashionable coffee houses and gaming houses, and betted with
men of quality on the race ground. [152] Sometimes, indeed, he was a man
of good family and education. A romantic interest therefore attached,
and perhaps still attaches, to the names of freebooters of this class.
The vulgar eagerly drank in tales of their ferocity and audacity, of
their occasional acts of generosity and good nature, of their amours,
of their miraculous escapes, of their desperate struggles, and of their
manly bearing at the bar and in the cart. Thus it was related of William
Nevison, the great robber of Yorkshire, that he levied a quarterly
tribute on all the northern drovers, and, in return, not only spared
them himself, but protected them against all other thieves; that he
demanded purses in the most courteous manner; that he gave largely to
the poor what he had taken from the rich; that his life was once spared
by the royal clemency, but that he again tempted his fate, and at length
died, in 1685, on the gallows of York. [153] It was related how Claude
Duval, the French page of the Duke of Richmond, took to the road, became
captain of a formidable gang, and had the honour to be named first in a
royal proclamation against notorious offenders; how at the head of his
troop he s