On the night of the 29th of October, 1812, the Leeds mail-coach was traversing Higham Ferrers, in Northamptonshire. The guard quit his customary post at the rear to sit beside the coachman upon the box. During this interval, according to the relation given by Camden Pelham, certain men picked the lock and carried off the bags. The robbery was straightway reported in London. Before long, two Bow Street officers, Richard and John Limbrick, took to the road; they were in pursuit of a felon whose name had already altered many a time.
Huffey White was by no means unknown to the authorities. Convicted in 1809 for burglary, he had been consigned to the hulks at Woolwich pending his transportation for life. Thence he escaped, only to reappear amidst the criminal enterprises of the capital. An attempted burglary at Chester brought him once more before the bar of justice: White had assumed the style of Evans, his associate Mackcoull that of Martin. Unmasked by officers dispatched from Bow Street, White was capitally convicted for being found at large before the expiration of his term; his sentence was commuted to transportation for life. The hulks received him anew, yet not for long. His uncommon facility for breaking prison had become the primary circumstance which his pursuers were bound to keep in mind.
He had allied himself with men who aided in the contrivance of his schemes, and Pelham’s account presently discovers him in another banking affair at Glasgow. That enterprise had already brought to light the implements, the false names, and the confederates that surrounded White. In the matter of the Leeds mail, however, this past served merely as a guide: it explained why the Limbricks fixed their scrutiny upon him, without furnishing proof that he had been one of the men upon the highway.
The chronicler recalls also the town of Kettering, where White, equipped with skeleton keys, gained entry into the banking-house of Keep & Gotch. The bankers did not discover on the morrow that their doors had been forced: the intruders had carried off nothing, the funds in hand having appeared insufficient to tempt them. Their intention, according to Pelham, was nonetheless to return. An accomplice ultimately confessed the enterprise, specifying the precise folio of the London ledger which the trespassers had inspected. This detail persuaded the bankers that the impossible had indeed transpired. It proved nothing regarding the Leeds mail, yet it illustrates the nature of the traces left in White’s wake: forced locks, an examined register, and an investigation that commenced only upon the disclosures of a third party.
The mail robbery was to afford his pursuers a public itinerary to track, rather than a mere lock to examine.
The officers received intelligence that he lay concealed in Bristol, lodging with Ned Burkitt and John Goodman, two notorious thieves. They did not precipitate an assault upon the dwelling. Several days elapsed while they watched for a propitious moment to effect the seizure. The occasion presented itself when Goodman and his wife were apprehended upon suspicion of having robbed the Canterbury bank. The Limbricks thereupon knocked at the door behind which the others harboured. Burkitt answered; the entry became a violent struggle. Amidst the fray, White made good his escape through a lean-to at the rear. The raid had not resolved the robbery of the mail: it had merely demonstrated to the officers that their quarry could still slip through their fingers.
A fresh clue directed their course to Liverpool. Early in April 1813, they came upon White in the house of one Mary Howes, who likewise went by the name of Taylor. A man named Haywood was in his company. The officers forced an entrance, though the threshold was first fiercely contested by the old woman. Once within, they descended straight to the cellar. There White and Haywood stood at bay, prepared, as Pelham relates, to offer a desperate resistance. A furious struggle ensued; a constable discharged his pistol. On this occasion, White was secured. A search beneath a flagstone brought to light a set of housebreaking implements. Mary Howes was likewise taken into custody.
At the trial, held at the Northampton summer assizes, White, Richard Kendall, and Mary Howes stood indicted for the robbery of the mail. The chronicle does not regard the Liverpool cellar as proof of the felony committed six months prior: it was incumbent upon the Crown to connect the prisoners with Higham Ferrers. It was established in evidence that on the night of the robbery, White and Kendall had been seen upon the road in a two-wheeled chaise, and subsequently at the dwelling of Mary Howes, who resided hard by. It was further deposed that no other vehicle of that description had passed the toll-gate that night. Following the robbery, the two men had been seen in company and tracked to London, where White attempted to negotiate certain bills and notes, part of the plunder, with a man already under sentence for another felony.
In Pelham’s relation, the chain of proof rested upon itineraries, the passage through the turnpike, and the tender of the stolen paper; he records no witness who had seen the mailbags rifled. Forty witnesses were examined. The trial endured for fourteen hours before a crowded courtroom. These circumstances attest to the great public interest excited by the case, as well as to the tedious accumulation of evidence composed of journeys, encounters, and documents. Upon returning into court, the jury delivered a verdict of guilty against White and Kendall. They acquitted Mary Howes, the Court having directed that the offence charged against her had not been committed within the jurisdiction of the county wherein she was tried. Her arrest at Liverpool and her presence in the narrative were thus insufficient to warrant her conviction under that indictment.
The sentence of the law did not immediately extinguish White’s resolution. On the eve of his execution, he succeeded in severing his irons and forcing his way through several doors. The outer gate alone remained between him and freedom when he was recaptured. The turnkeys thrust him back into his cell. His life had been marked by repeated escapes; this last attempt miscarried at the final threshold, leaving the impending sentence unchanged.
On the 13th of August, 1813, at nine o’clock in the morning, the procession set forth toward the place of execution at Northampton. Richard Kendall, weighed down with bitter sorrow, ceased not to protest his innocence. He declared to the assembled multitude that he died merely because he had suffered the misfortune of being in White’s company on the night of the robbery. Pelham so records it; such an assertion could not suffice to reopen the judicial proceedings, yet it forbids posterity from mistaking condemnation for a confession.
White, according to the chronicler, exhibited a defiant indifference. He repeatedly censured the chaplain for the manner in which he discharged his sacred office. When a clergyman inquired whether he could afford him any spiritual comfort, the prisoner replied that he could do so only by procuring another man to be hanged in his stead. Shortly before the end, he declared Kendall to be innocent. This utterance came from a dying convict, not from a formal judicial retraction, and the chronicle supplies no independent confirmation of its truth. Yet it remains at the heart of the case: the man who had baffled so many pursuits affirmed to the last that his companion ought not to have shared his fate.
The mail-coach had been rifled in an instant; the investigation, by contrast, was built up over many months, between Bristol, Liverpool, Northampton, and London. A carriage sighted upon the highway, a neighbouring house, bills offered for negotiation, and the comings and goings of the accused constituted the body of proof laid before the jury. Pelham’s retrospective account makes White the thread uniting all these stages, from the hulks to the final threshold of his cell. It preserves, too, the voice of Kendall, who protested to the scaffold against the fatal inference drawn from his company. In this cause, two men were condemned together, yet they left very different dying words behind them.