Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. A s a child, I must have passed an old pub called the Spaniards Inn, on the road between Hampstead and Highgate, a thousand times. Here, modern life had to defer to the preservation of historic buildings. It was all very romantic, except for drivers in a hurry, who were and still are exasperated at having to wait their turn to pass between the Spaniards and the cottage. The bar on the second floor of the inn is still called the Turpin Bar.
Soon after his arrival in York, in , he was hanged, which was a bit of a shame because he was such a handsome gentleman, who was gallant and charming to ladies, and who robbed the rich only to succour the poor.
I suppose I must have come by this knowledge somehow, yet it seemed to have communicated itself to me directly, without intermediary, via the atmosphere: at any rate, it was the kind of thing that everyone knew. For forty years, I thought no further of Dick Turpin, but having accumulated rather more knowledge of human nature than I possessed then, and having through my work made the acquaintance of some hundreds of robbers, I was not really surprised to read in a newly published book, Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman , 1 that he was not a gentleman at all, but a cruel, cowardly, unscrupulous, murderous villain, a career criminal, who thought nothing of the rape of the servants of the households he and his gang broke into, or of beating old people to extract from them the whereabouts of their money.
He was without redeeming features, even physically, being heavily pockmarked by the smallpox. He never had a horse called Black Bess, and though he did indeed make his way to York, it was not in the dramatic fashion of the legend. As for the Spaniards Inn, it is unlikely that he was ever there, since the building, though of sixteenth century origin, was not used as an inn until after his death. There was nothing romantic about him in the least.
It turns out that my knowledge of Turpin if one can be said to know something that is not true was derived from a novel by Harrison Ainsworth, who was famous in the s and s, but is now almost forgotten except by specialists. In , Ainsworth published a gothic novel called Rookwood , in which Turpin appeared in a sub-plot.
