Highwaymen: The Violent Truth Behind the Gentlemen of the Road

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In 1690 the danger of robbery in Hyde Park was so great that King William III had oil lamps strung along his route between St. James's Palace and Kensington Palace, creating the first artificially lit highway in Britain. The men he feared were highwaymen, a term first printed around 1617 that meant a mounted robber and nothing less. Thieves on foot were mere footpads. The golden age began around the Restoration in 1660, when disbanded soldiers with horses, weapons, and cavalry training returned to a country with no work for them and no real police, only unpaid parish constables.

This episode sets the polite rogue of legend against the record of shootings, bayonets through carriage windows, and protection rackets run on carriers. It explores why crowds cheered condemned robbers at Tyburn, how Irish tories and rapparees, Balkan hajduks, and Hungarian betyars came to be seen as rebels, and why India's Thugs offered no romance at all. It also explains what really ended the trade in England, where the last recorded mounted robbery took place in 1831, before the railways were built.

• Highwaymen worked choke points on the roads out of London, including Hounslow Heath, Bagshot Heath, and Shooters Hill, and followed wealthy travelers toward Epsom and Banstead Downs.
• Lord North wrote in 1774 that a highwayman fired at his postilion simply because the carriage did not stop quickly enough.
• Historian Roy Porter's point that violence was routine in 18th century life helps explain the ironic title gentlemen of the road.
• Mounted police patrols around London from 1805, traceable banknotes, and reliable repeating handguns such as the pepperbox all raised the cost of robbery.
• The Enclosure Act of 1773 carved open heaths into walled and fenced private fields, leaving a robber boxed in on patrolled roads with manned turnpike gates.