The highwayman had masked his features. He had also chosen, when stopping a carriage upon the North Road, a postilion who happened to know him well. A sudden gust of wind sufficed to undo the precaution: beneath the crape visor, Richard Ferguson recognized one of the men he was accustomed to meeting at the lodgings of a certain London woman. The traveller in the post-chaise had come, quite against his will, to deliver his purse to the footpads; his postilion brought them a far more perilous hazard—a name and an address.
This encounter is recorded in the chapter which Pelham’s compilation devotes to Ferguson, known by the cant name of “Galloping Dick.” The volume, in an edition of 1887, presents his career as a romance of the high-toby, assimilating him readily to the celebrated highwaymen of the age. We follow here this retrospective chronicle, subject to the customary shortcomings of an account whose compiler provides no official court records. The narrative begins far from the mask and the horse-pistol, in a Hertfordshire stable: Ferguson, the son of a gentleman’s servant, had learned horses long before he ever thought of stripping travellers upon the road.
The lad had found employment under his father’s master. The illness of the regular postilion afforded him a temporary advancement; yet when the invalid recovered, young Ferguson was returned to his former drudgery. Pelham attributes to wounded pride the sullen temper with which he bore this demotion. A friend of his master was then in search of an active postilion; Ferguson offered his services, was engaged, and accompanied his new patron to London. The stables had furnished him with a trade; they now opened the capital to him.
He remained for a considerable period in this service. The compiler gives him credit for steady conduct and perseverance, before noting that his dismissal was brought about by an intrigue with one of the maidservants. Such is the extent of what is recorded of this breach. The discharged postilion then endured an idle interval, frequenting public-houses where he consorted with other liveried servants out of place. At length, he entered the service of a horse-chaise keeper in Piccadilly. This second situation restored him to familiar employment, but his master presently died. Ferguson found himself adrift once more, yet not wholly unprovided: the deceased liveryman had bequeathed him a legacy of fifty pounds.
Pelham now credits him with the ambition of setting up for a “gentleman.” The legacy was laid out in suits of mourning and visits to the playhouses. At Drury Lane, Ferguson formed an acquaintance with an extravagant woman whom he visited at her lodgings. The chronicler approaches this liaison with the moralizing vocabulary and stern judgments of his century, portraying the postilion’s infatuation as the true mainspring of his ruin. The fifty pounds melted away under repeated visits. Other men were seen going in and out of the house. Ferguson knew their faces and their bearing, but was as yet ignorant of the calling that enabled them to present themselves in vastly better feather than himself.
His funds being entirely exhausted, he procured a situation as a post-boy at an inn in Piccadilly. Driving post-chaises across the environs of London, he occasionally caught sight of his former rivals, remarkably well mounted and handsomely attired. Then came the stoppage on the North Road. A masked rider held him at the muzzle of a pistol; an accomplice stepped from a cross-lane to demand the traveller’s purse. When the wind blew aside the crape visor of the first robber, Ferguson recognized the man whom the compilation styles Jerry Avershaw. Distant horsemen appeared upon the road, and the highwaymen fled in haste.
The incident might have remained nothing more than an ordinary robbery witnessed by Ferguson in the line of duty. The robbers, according to Pelham, perceived that it placed them in mortal jeopardy. They baited their horses at a roadside public-house and sent word that the postilion should be brought in to them when he returned to water his team. They offered him money to purchase his silence; Ferguson accepted the bribe. The very men whose haunts he might have betrayed now furnished him with the means to renew his visits to the woman in London.
With the money came an invitation to supper that very evening, at their rendezvous in the Borough. The chronicle interposes a final visit to his mistress between the encounter and the feast: she shut her door against him. Undeterred, he kept the appointment with the thieves. The supper was bountiful, the company numerous, dissolute, and noisy. Pelham marks this carousal as the hour of Ferguson’s formal enlistment in the gang. Yet the highwaymen had no immediate need of another horseman upon the road; they held something far more serviceable to their trade—an agent inside the posting-inn.
Ferguson was employed to furnish intelligence concerning the routes and hours of the chaises setting out from the yard. The driver knew the roads intimately because he traversed them daily; the highwaymen could now choose with leisure the most secluded spot to intercept their prey. The compilation relates that he received a dividend of several lucrative robberies conducted upon this principle. It supplies neither the names of the victims nor the sums taken. The crux of the mechanism lay elsewhere: the robbery was organized in the very house to which the traveller entrusted his safety. The pistol made its appearance only later, upon the heath or common rendered fatal by information leaked from the stable-yard.
So long as Ferguson retained his post, his share of the spoil rewarded mere information, without requiring him to lay hands upon the reins himself. Such was the initial service his confederates demanded of him. The chronicler carefully separates this intelligence trade from his subsequent career upon the highway: the two callings did not begin together.
Suspicion at length fell upon his dealings with notorious characters. Discharged from his place, Ferguson took directly to the highway. His consummate skill in horsemanship served him equally well to overtake a chaise or to outdistance hue and cry. From the rapidity of his courses the book derives his cant name, “Galloping Dick.” The knowledge acquired in the service of travellers was thus turned against them: the same roads, the same cattle, and the same stages were put to a darker use. Pelham lends to this period the appearance of uninterrupted success, though without assigning dates to the individual exploits.
He singles out one adventure upon the Edgware Road. Ferguson, in company with two associates, is said to have stopped two gentlemen. Ferguson made his escape on horseback; his accomplices were captured, tried, and executed. The compiler does not name them in this chapter. He also relates elopements with two married women, wives of publicans in the Borough, and thereafter declines to enumerate the myriad exploits with which popular rumor credited his hero. These sweeping assertions, which tend to place Ferguson at the bottom of nearly every robbery committed in the home counties, belong to the realm of literary legend rather than to an authenticated judicial record.
The volume notes several examinations at Bow Street and trials at the Old Bailey, all ending in acquittals, yet it preserves neither their dates nor their arguments. An affair near Aylesbury brought this long impunity to an end. Ferguson was engaged in a robbery which Pelham characterizes as uncommonly daring; he was apprehended shortly thereafter and identified. At the ensuing assizes he was convicted of the highway robbery and received sentence of death. Nothing in the text enables us to reconstruct the depositions, to identify the plundered traveller, or to depict the courtroom proceedings as if they had been recorded by a shorthand writer.
Pelham assigns the execution to Aylesbury in April 1800, omitting the exact day. He concludes with the conventional portrait of a condemned felon who, having abandoned all hope of royal clemency, resigned himself decently to his fate. The postilion whose roadcraft had betrayed his passengers to the high-toby thus departs in a narrative where his final reckoning with justice occupies but a handful of lines. Of his entire career, the most singular detail remains perhaps that first meeting upon the North Road: a highwayman who had chosen his mark amiss. On that day, the thieves bought his silence; with it, they purchased the route of every traveller to come.