Rupert Matthews - The Little Book of Surrey

The frontispiece for a version of the popular play The Roaring Girle, which was based on the colourful criminal career of Surrey girl Mary Frith.

She got away with a hefty 250, but Fairfax was furious and had the authority to organise a massive operation against highwaymen near London. Frith was caught, but bought her freedom by paying a fine of 2,000 then a colossal sum of cash. She then wisely turned honest to evade the notice of the authorities. She died in 1659 and left 20 in her will to fund a party for named individuals should England ever become a kingdom again, which it did the following year. A play about her life, called The Roaring Girle, was written with her assistance.

James Whitney was a butchers son from Hertfordshire who tired of the hard work involved in his fathers trade at a young age. He then ran off to London to lead a life of petty crime, heavy drinking and wanton womanising.

In 1683, at the age of twenty-three, Whitney decided that he needed to improve himself. He bought himself an elegant suit of fine clothes together with a rapier and a pistol, then stole the best horse he could lay his hands on and became a highwayman. Because many of the first highwaymen had been gentlemen fallen on hard times through supporting the king in the Civil War, the criminal classes looked up to highwaymen as being a social cut above mere pickpockets and burglars. Whitney ostentatiously lived up to the ideal by wearing flashy jewellery, exquisitely tailored suits and behaving with impeccable politeness at all times even when holding a gun to a mans head he remembered to say please and thank you.

By 1690 Whitney was leading a gang of some fifty men. Not all of them rode with him, some lolled about in inns looking for rich victims, others fenced stolen goods and at least one worked for the Surrey magistrates to keep an eye on what they were doing. It was this spy who reported that Mr William Hull had sworn that he would one day watch Whitney ride his horse backwards a reference to the fact that men to be hanged were taken to the gallows tied sitting backwards on a horse. Whitney led his gang to waylay Hull a week later. The unfortunate man was robbed, then tied backwards on his saddle and let loose across Bagshot Heath while the highwaymen jeered at him.