In Yorkshire, John Palmer passed himself off as a butcher and claimed to come from an established family in Long Sutton, Lincolnshire. For a time he lived at Brough and Welton, buying and selling horses, and occasionally riding out with the local gentlemen to hunt. One day in October 1738, he shot his landlord’s gamecock. A neighbour rebuked him for the act. Palmer retorted that the man had better stand still while he reloaded his piece. The neighbour went off to report the threat; the landlord obtained a warrant, and Palmer soon found himself before the magistrates at Beverley.
He was still able to account for his horses and his movements. He related that he had quit Long Sutton on account of debts, following the purchase of sheep that had proved diseased, and had come to settle in Yorkshire. The justices dispatched an inquiry to Lincolnshire to verify his tale. The return of the post overturned his version entirely: Palmer was wanted there for the theft of sheep and horses, his father did not reside where he had claimed, and several inhabitants stood ready to testify against him. He was conveyed to the prison of York Castle, handcuffed and under close guard.
A few weeks later, two men came forward to claim a mare and her foal, sold by Palmer to a captain, as well as the horse upon which the prisoner had ridden into Beverley. They swore the beasts had been stolen in Lincolnshire. The captive had initially been committed under an assumed name; yet long before his trial came on, men from the South recognized him as Richard Turpin, the highwayman long sought for his violent depredations. In March 1739, he stood at the bar of the York Assizes, indicted this time for horse-stealing. The verdict did not rest solely upon common report: two witnesses from Essex appeared to establish his true identity.
James Smith had known Turpin as a child and had taught him to write. A letter addressed to one of the prisoner's brothers-in-law, bearing the York postmark, had caught his eye. Smith declared that he recognized Turpin’s hand; at the Castle, he instantly identified the man behind the bars. Edward Seward, who had bought meat from the young butcher and had known him at Hampstead, also stated that he had recognized him during a visit to the gaol; he identified Turpin as the son of John Turpin, innkeeper of the Bell at Hampstead. Turpin denied all knowledge of Seward, yet appeared in the end to acknowledge Smith. The name of John Palmer could no longer shield him.
Borrow’s chronicle then turns back to his earlier years of gang violence and robbery, from the days of his butcher’s apprenticeship. Turpin first emerges among a gang of cattle thieves in Essex. The men raided houses, carried off horses and coin, and at times resorted to brutality to force their victims to speak. During a robbery at the house of an elderly woman in Laughton, Borrow relates, the gang tortured her near the fire to extort the hiding-place of four hundred pounds. Another raid upon a farmer yielded an even greater prize. These scenes are not presented with the precision of a judicial record: they form the retrospective portrait of a man depicted as having graduated from cattle-lifting to armed assault.
The gang dispersed when its continued existence became too perilous. One rendezvous ended in disaster because Turpin, having drunk to excess, failed to arrive at the appointed hour. The others attacked the lodge of Mason, the forest keeper, without him: they beat the man and ransacked his dwelling. Months later, following the robbery at Farmer Francis’s, pursuers came upon several members of the band gathered at an inn in Westminster. Fielder, Rose, and Wheeler were taken after a struggle; Turpin leaped through a window and seized a horse. His flight rendered him more solitary, but also more difficult to trace. He shifted his refuges, went armed, and was henceforth obliged to choose his resting places alone.
It was then that he fell in with another highwayman, Tom King. Borrow lends their meeting a singular opening: Turpin, it is said, attempted to rob King, before the latter made himself known as a fellow of the craft. The two men thereupon resolved to ride together. Borrow describes a retreat in the woods, a cave furnished with garments, wine, and ham, from which they issued to scour the roads on horseback. Their partnership ended in a London alleyway. Turpin had taken a horse from a traveller named Major. Bayes, having received intelligence of the robbery, traced the animal to the Red Lion in Whitechapel and lay in wait until someone came to claim it. Near eleven o'clock at night, King’s brother appeared. Upon being apprehended, he pretended he had bought the mount. Bayes handed him over to a constable. It was then proposed to set him at liberty if he pointed out those who had sent him: he indicated a man in a light coat waiting in Red Lion Street. It was King.
Bayes stepped forward and grappled with King. The latter drew a pistol, but the piece flashed in the pan; he could not draw the second from his pocket. Turpin waited on horseback close at hand. Hearing the tumult, he drew near, and King shouted his name, urging him to fire. Turpin’s ball missed Bayes and struck King in two places. While Turpin galloped off, his confederate fell. King survived for a week. Before he died, he denounced Turpin as a coward and disclosed to Bayes a house near Hackney Marsh where the fugitive might be harboured. The chronicle relates that Turpin, having reached that retreat, lamented the loss of the best comrade he had ever possessed, and swore vengeance against Bayes.
The woods soon ceased to offer him shelter. The cave was discovered; pursuers set hounds upon his track. Borrow relates that one day, beholding the dogs baying beneath the tree into which he had clambered, Turpin was so stricken with terror that he determined to quit the country at once for Yorkshire. He assumed the name of Palmer. Passing through Lincolnshire, he was taken up for stolen sheep, but slipped from the constable’s grasp. Other horses followed, sold or traded upon his arrival in Yorkshire. This traffic in livestock eventually aroused the suspicions of those who as yet knew him only by the name of Palmer.
On the 22nd of March, the jury found him guilty of horse-stealing. After sentence was passed, the gaol thronged with curious visitors, drawn by the highwayman’s fame which the gazettes and popular broadsides had spread abroad. Borrow portrays him as light-hearted and indifferent to the exhortations of the divines, yet leaves his inner thoughts unrecorded. On the eve of his execution, Turpin distributed money among five men who were to follow the cart as mourners, and bestowed a ring, shoes, and pattens upon a woman from Brough. Yet he acknowledged that he possessed both a wife and a child.
On the 7th of April, 1739, a cart bore him to the place of execution at York, in company with another condemned felon. Turpin bowed to the spectators as he passed. As he mounted the ladder, his right leg trembled; he stamped his foot upon the rung and looked about him. After some discourse with the executioner, he cast himself off the ladder and expired. His body was interred, then torn from its grave in the dead of night. The mob, suspecting the corpse was destined for the anatomist's knife, rescued it, carried it through the streets, and laid it once more in the earth, having first filled the coffin with slaked lime. The assumed name had for a season kept his past at bay; on the road to the gallows, his own handwriting had delivered him up.