But he was not a Cavalier merely in sympathy, nor was he content to prove his loyalty by robbing Roundheads.  He, too, would strike a blow for his King, and he showed, first with the royal army in Scotland, and afterwards at Worcester, what he dared in a righteous cause.  Indeed, it was his part in the unhappy battle that cost him his life, and there is a strange irony in the reflection that, on the self-same day whereon Sir Thomas Urquhart lost his precious manuscripts in Worcester’s kennels, the neck of James Hind was made ripe for the halter.  His capture was due to treachery.  Towards the end of 1651 he was lodged with one Denzys, a barber, over against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet Street.  Maybe he had chosen his hiding-place for its neighbourhood to Moll Cutpurse’s own sanctuary.  But a pack of traitors discovered him, and haling him before the Speaker of the House of Commons, got him committed forthwith to Newgate.

At first he was charged with theft and murder, and was actually condemned for killing George Sympson at Knole in Berkshire.  But the day after his sentence, an Act of Oblivion was passed, and Hind was put upon trial for treason.  During his examination he behaved with the utmost gaiety, boastfully enlarging upon his services to the King’s cause.  ‘These are filthy jingling spurs,’ said he as he left the bar, pointing to the irons about his legs, ‘but I hope to exchange them ere long.’  His good-humour remained with him to the end.  He jested in prison as he jested on the road, and it was with a light heart that he mounted the scaffold built for him at Worcester.  His was the fate reserved for traitors:  he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and though his head was privily stolen and buried on the day of execution, his quarters were displayed upon the town walls, until time and the birds destoyed{sic} them utterly.

Thus died the most famous highwayman that ever drew rein upon an English road; and he died the death of a hero.  The unnumbered crimes of violence and robbery wherewith he might have been charged weighed not a feather’s weight upon his destiny; he suffered not in the cause of plunder, but in the cause of Charles Stuart.  And in thus excusing his death, his contemporaries did him scant justice.  For while in treasonable loyalty he had a thousand rivals, on the road he was the first exponent of the grand manner.  The middle of the seventeenth century was, in truth, the golden age of the Road.  Not only were all the highwaymen Cavaliers, but many a Cavalier turned highwayman.  Broken at their King’s defeat, a hundred captains took pistol and vizard, and revenged themselves as freebooters upon the King’s enemies.  And though Hind was outlaw first and royalist afterwards, he was still the most brilliant collector of them all.  If he owed something to his master, Allen, he added from the storehouse of his own genius a host of new precepts, and was the first to establish an enduring tradition.