The horseman made his bow to the lady before relieving her of one hundred pounds.
The account published in 1825 by George Borrow attributes to Claude Du Vall an opening passage that resembled a festive diversion far more than an ambuscade. Upon the open road, a knight and his lady were travelling with four hundred pounds in their coach. Du Vall did not ride alone: several horsemen attended him. The lady, observing their approach, drew forth a flageolet and began to play. Du Vall answered her upon his own instrument, rode up to the carriage door, and solicited the knight’s leave to dance a courante with his wife. The husband consented. The measure ended, Du Vall handed the young gentlewoman back to her carriage, whereupon he demanded the price of the music. The knight delivered unto him a purse of one hundred pounds. The rogue, according to Borrow, gave thanks and suffered them to proceed on their journey with the remaining three hundred.
This scene establishes Du Vall in the character he was to cultivate throughout the chronicle: that of a marauder determined to dictate the very form of his dispossessions. Civility did not extinguish the peril; it merely turned it into theater. Borrow relates that his renown grew until his name was set down first in a royal proclamation against sundry highwaymen. Yet before these cavalcades and displays of address, the compilation assigns him an early youth marked by successive departures.
He is said to have been born in Normandy, at Domfront, the son of a miller and a tailor’s daughter. At thirteen years of age, according to this retrospective biography, his parents ceased to care for him. He made his way to Rouen, and thence to Paris, where English travellers assisted him in securing a place as a running-footman at an inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. When Charles II was restored to England in 1660, Du Vall crossed the Channel in the service of a person of quality. Borrow charges his first English years with gambling, drunkenness, and prodigal expense. He ultimately sought upon the highways the gold he refused to earn through honest labour.
Upon Blackheath, the band did not always conduct themselves with such ceremony. Another tale recounts their halting a coach filled with gentlewomen, among whom was an infant holding a silver feeding-bottle. A confederate of Du Vall searched the travellers, stripped them of their jewels, watches, and coin, and then retained the silver bottle despite their entreaties. Du Vall rode forward when he observed the fellow tarrying. He threatened to discharge his pistol into him if he did not return the vessel, adding a sharp rebuke upon his lack of breeding. The confederate surrendered the bottle. Du Vall then took his leave of the ladies; the gesture protected the babe, yet it did not undo a single one of the remaining thefts.
At Beaconsfield, his ingenuity assumed a more elaborate complexion. Arriving at the Crown Inn during a fair, Du Vall overheard a farmer boast that he carried one hundred pounds upon his person. He watched for the moment the man joined the country dance. In the yard, Du Vall struck a bargain with the ostler, who was to receive two guineas for his pains. The fellow clad a great mastiff in a cow’s hide, affixed horns to its head, and lowered it down the chimney into the hall where the villagers were dancing. The beast fell howling into their midst; the music ceased, tables were overturned, and the company tumbled headlong toward the stairs. While the dog made its escape through the stables and the ostler stripped away its disguise, Du Vall seized the farmer’s purse. He was in the saddle and away to London at full gallop.
Upon returning to the room, the revellers found neither hound nor purse. Borrow records that they concluded the Devil had flown away with the money, and the loss was universally recounted as a judgment upon the farmer’s covetousness. The theft left behind two distinct explanations: one involving Du Vall and his accomplice, the other a supernatural decree.
Du Vall confined himself neither to country balls nor to rustic deceits. In Windsor Forest, he surprised Roper, master of King Charles II’s buckhounds, and compelled him to yield a purse which Borrow estimates at fifty guineas. He then bound Roper fast and tethered his horse beside him before taking his leave. The proclamation offering a reward for his apprehension made England precarious ground; he accordingly withdrew to France.
In Paris, he found another dupe to whom he could hold out the promise of an easy fortune. The chronicle identifies his mark as a Jesuit and confessor to the King, wealthy and possessed by a passion for alchemy. Du Vall presented himself in the habit of an itinerant scholar, professed the art of transmuting base metals into gold, and persuaded the divine to finance a laboratory. For his demonstration, he concealed fragments of pure gold within a hollow wand, after the fashion of lead in a pencil. In stirring the molten metal, he suffered the gold to dissolve into the crucible. The confessor caused the ingot to be assayed and found it true; persuaded of the reality of the transmutation, he furnished Du Vall with the means to pursue his experiments.
As the priest grew more pressing in his entreaties to learn the secret, Du Vall appointed a day for the grand revelation. Ere that hour arrived, he stole into the chamber where the valuables were kept. Borrow relates that he gagged and bound the sleeping churchman, took his keys, and carried off as much treasure as he could transport without exciting suspicion. The spurious alchemist forthwith quitted France. As upon the English turnpikes, the stratagem rested entirely upon the victim’s own cupidity: the prospect of unearned gain had gained credence for a counterfeit proof, and subsequently delayed the discovery of the theft.
Borrow further credits him with consummate skill at play and wagers. At the card-table, he writes, Du Vall would carry off ten, twenty, thirty, and sometimes an hundred pounds, all the while feigning to be favoured by mere fortune. He likewise studied catch-questions, winning wagers upon the true bearing of a town or the length of a staff. These contrivances were extensions of the selfsame art of misdirection: to deceive his marks without ever allowing them to perceive they had been overreached.
His final apprehension took place, according to Borrow, while he lay deep in drink at the Hole-in-the-Wall in Chandos Street. He was committed to Newgate, brought to trial, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn on the 21st of January, 1669–1670—a date commonly rendered as the 21st of January, 1670. The volume affirms that he was twenty-seven years of age, though it adduces no parish register in support of the fact. Women, some of high rank among them, visited his cell and interceded on his behalf. Several followed him to the gallows tree, mourning beneath their veils.
After the execution, men in deep mourning caused his remains to be placed in a mourning coach and conveyed to an inn in Saint Giles. A chamber had been hung with black cloth; eight wax tapers burned about the corpse. The concourse of spectators grew so immense that a judge dispatched a messenger to command the assembly to disperse. The chronicle concludes upon this scene—the final public spectacle of a man who had made of appearance the very instrument of his rapine, and who, even in death, was exhibited as a theatrical figure.