Without the walls of Newgate the house of his frequentation was the `Dog Tavern.'Thither he would wander every afternoon to meet his clients and to extort bloodmoney.In this haunt of criminals and pettifoggers no man was better received than the Newgate Clerk,and while he assumed a manner of generous cordiality,it was a strange sight to see him wince when some sturdy ruffian slapped him too strenuously upon the back.He had a joke and a chuckle for all,and his merry quips,dry as they were,were joyously quoted to all newcomers.His legal ingenuity appeared miraculous,and it was confidently asserted in the Coffee House that he could turn black to white with so persuasive an argument that there was no Judge on the Bench to confute him.But he was not omnipotent,and his zeal encountered many a serious check.At times he failed to save the necks even of his intimates,since,when once a ruffian was notorious,Moll and the Clerk fought vainly for his release.Thus it was that Cheney,the famous wrestler,whom Ralph had often backed against all comers,died at Tyburn.He had been taken by the troopers redhanded upon the highway.Seized after a desperate resistance,he was wounded wellnigh to death,and Briscoe quoted a dozen precedents to prove that he was unfit to be tried or hanged.Argument failing,the munificent Clerk offered fifty pounds for the life of his friend.But to no purpose:the valiant wrestler was carried to the cart in a chair,and so lifted to the gallows,which cured him of his gaping wounds.
When the Commonwealth administered justice with pedantic severity,Briscoe's influence still further declined.There was no longer scope in the State for men of spirit;even the gaols were handed over to the stern mercy of cropeared Puritans;Moll herself had fallen upon evil times;and Ralph Briscoe determined to make a last effort for wealth and retirement.At the very moment when his expulsion seemed certain,an heiress was thrown into Newgate upon a charge of murdering a too importunate suitor.The chain of evidence was complete:the dagger plunged in his heart was recognised for her own;she was seen to decoy him to the secret corner of a wood,where his raucous lovemaking was silenced for ever.Taken off her guard,she had even hinted confession of her crime,and nothing but intrigue could have saved her gentle neck from the gallows.Briscoe,hungry for her moneybags,promised assistance.He bribed,he threatened,he cajoled,he twisted the law as only he could twist it,he suppressed honest testimony,he procured false;in fine,he weakened the case against her with so resistless an effrontery,that not the Hanging Judge himself could convict the poor innocent.
At the outset he had agreed to accept a handsome bribe,but as the trial approached,his avarice increased,and he would be content with nothing less than the lady's hand and fortune.Not that he loved her;his heart was long since given to Moll Cutpurse;but he knew that his career of depredation was at an end,and it became him to provide for his declining years.The victim repulsed his suit,regretting a thousand times that she had stabbed her ancient lover.At last,bidden summarily to choose between Death and the Clerk,she chose the Clerk,and thus Ralph Briscoe left Newgate the richest squire in a western county.Henceforth he farmed his land like a gentleman,drank with those of his neighbours who would crack a bottle with him,and unlocked the strange stores of his memory to bumpkins who knew not the name of Newgate.Still devoted to sport,he hunted the fox,and made such a bullring as his youthful imagination could never have pictured.So he lived a life of country ease,and died a churchwarden.And he deserved his prosperity,for he carried the soul of Falstaff in the shrunken body of Justice Shallow.
GILDEROY AND THE SIXTEENSTRING JACK
I
GILDEROY
HE stood six feet ten in his stockinged feet,and was the tallest ruffian that ever cut a purse or held up a coach on the highway.
A mass of black hair curled over a low forehead,and a glittering eye intensified his villainous aspect;nor did a deep scar,furrowing his cheek from end to end,soften the horror of his sudden apparition.Valiant men shuddered at his approach;women shrank from the distant echo of his name;for fifteen years he terrorised Scotland from Caithness to the border;and the most partial chronicler never insulted his memory with the record of a good deed.
He was born to a gentle family in the Calendar of Monteith,and was celebrated even in boyhood for his feats of strength and daring.While still at school he could hold a hundredweight at arm'slength,and crumple up a horseshoe like a wisp of hay.The fleetest runner,the most desperate fighter in the country,he was already famous before his name was besmirched with crime,and he might have been immortalised as the Hercules of the seventeenth century,had not his ambition been otherwise flattered.At the outset,though the inclination was never lacking,he knew small temptation to break the sterner laws of conduct.His pleasures were abundantly supplied by his father's generosity,and he had no need to refrain from such vices as became a gentleman.If he was no drunkard,it was because his head was equal to the severest strain,and,despite his forbidding expression,he was always a successful breaker of hearts.His very masterfulness overcame the most stubborn resistance;and more than once the pressure of his dishonourable suit converted hatred into love.At the very time that he was denounced for Scotland's disgrace,his praises were chanted in many a dejected ballad.`Gilderoy was a bonny boy,'sang one heartbroken maiden:
Had roses till his shoon,His stockings were of silken soy,Wi'garters hanging doon.
But in truth he was admired less for his amiability than for that quality of governance which,when once he had torn the decalogue to pieces,made him a veritable emperor of crime.
