Dying in Style: The Life and Death of Isaac Darkin

It’s 23rd March, 1761. The golden age of highwaymen was past its peak, but was not quite over yet.

Before an expectant crowd at Oxford Castle Prison, 20-year-old Isaac Darkin is about to be hanged for highway robbery. It isn’t the first time he’s been sentenced to death, but it will be the last. Darkin plays out the script of the ‘game’ highwayman to the end: he dies in good spirits, without fear, without complaint and without giving up his accomplices.

A game criminal didn’t die passively. He tried to take back control of the story through the performance of his death. Rather than wait for the hangman, Darkin climbed the ladder himself, put the rope about his own neck and, like the infamous Dick Turpin before him, stepped off.

So who was Isaac Darkin, and why did he choose to die game?

Who was Isaac Darkin?

Isaac Darkin was born in Eastcheap, London, as the son of a cork-cutter, and grew up in a boarding school in Kent. Had he not become a highwayman, doubtless we would never have heard his name.

His crimes turned him into a celebrity and, after his death, accounts of his life were published to feed the curiosity of an eager public. These accounts both glamorize him with stories of daring and adventure, but also serve as a cautionary tale. It is made clear throughout that it is Darkin’s own failings that lead to his life of crime, and to his eventual downfall. Therefore, take all that follows with a degree of skepticism.

At school, though intelligent and charming, he preferred fine company to any serious study and could be called “No one's enemy but his own.” At 14, he helped take over the family business after the death of his father, and this supposedly failed due to Darkin’s own wild and carefree nature, and his expensive habits.

To make a living, inspired by the many famous bandits he would have read of, he took to the road to rob travelers at gunpoint.

Darkin’s first death sentence and pardon

In February 1758, he was arrested for the robbery of one Mr Cockburn. Darkin plead guilty, and was sentenced to death. The judge, on account of his youth, reduced this sentence to transportation for fourteen years.

It was a lucky escape, and not the last. While waiting transportation, Darkin uncovered a plot by the other prisoners to murder the warden, Mr Reynolds. He reported it, and the grateful warden secured him a pardon on condition that he join the army.

From soldier to deserter

Darkin enlisted with the 48th regiment of foot, and set sail for Antigua. In the army he was found to be highly competent but undisciplined. In just seven weeks, he was dragged before a court martial on three separate occasions. He was acquitted each time.

Not willing to put up with the severe nature of the military, he begged for help from a merchant ship to desert back to England, with the promise of a large bribe when they arrived. One which he would never deliver.

If we take at face value the accounts published after his death then, once again, Darkin had the chance to turn his life around and yet his own character failings lead him back to the road.

The robbery of Lord Percival near Bath

Darkin changed his name to Harris and began once again to rob on the highways up and down the country. When the heat grew too high, he enlisted with the navy yet continued his robberies while on shore leave.

On 22 June 1760, he held up Lord Percival near Bath. Darkin was dressed in black, rode a black horse and had a cravat tied across his face. At pistol-point he demanded money and was handed 13 guineas. Business as usual, until he demanded more.

Lord Percival seized Darkin’s pistol, fired and missed. Darkin drew a second pistol and fled.

He was soon recognised and chased on horseback for several hours. Cornered, he threatened to shoot whoever came at him first, and escaped. Later that same day, a farmer he had asked for lodging recognised him from Lord Percival’s description. Darkin was seized shortly after going to bed. The pistol he carried matched the one Lord Percival had taken.

He was jailed to await trial under yet another false name: John Dumas.

Why were Georgian highwaymen treated like celebrities?

The accounts both of Darkin’s, or Dumas’, time in jail and of his defense shed much light both on his character and the way highwaymen were perceived. They were not viewed as mere criminals. Readers may remember Horrible Histories iconic highwayman song featuring Dick Turpin, and recall that it asks modern listeners not to glamourize what were essentially thugs. Yet that work had already been done for us by those same highwaymen and their contemporaries, at a time when criminals could often be cast as media personalities.

The idea of the ‘gentleman thief’ captivated the 18th century public, who devoured ‘last dying speeches’ and other accounts of the lives and deaths of highwaymen. Huge crowds would gather at their trials and executions, and many would try to visit them.

Darkin himself received a great deal of attention from ladies while in jail, one of whom wrote him the following poem:

Joy to thee, lovely Thief! that thou

Hast 'scaped the fatal string,

Let Gallows groan with ugly Rogues,

Dumas must never swing.

Dost thou seek Money?

Our Purses we'll resign;

Could we our Hearts to guineas coin

Those guineas all were thine.

To Bath in safety let my lord

His loaded Pockets carry;

Thou ne'er again shall tempt the Road,

Sweet youth! if thou wilt marry.

No more shall niggard travellers

Avoid thee—We'll ensure them:

To us thou shalt consign thy Balls

And Pistol; we'll secure 'em.

Yet think not, when the Chains are off,

Which now thy Legs bedeck,

To fly: in Fetters softer far

We'll chain thee by the Neck."

Acquitted, then arrested again

At the trial itself his defense was this: He was a man from the West Indies, confused in a foreign country. He had lost a pistol upon the road, which must have been found and used by the highwayman.

It was not this that saved him though, rather that Lord Percival could not confidently identify him as the assailant. He was released, and even successfully petitioned for the return of the 13 guineas. He went away with a warning from the judge to leave his life of crime behind him.

It was only about six weeks until Darkin was arrested again. This time after a letter he had written to a lover in London ended up in the hands of the man he had just robbed, revealing Darkin’s address from which he was seized. This time there would be no escape.

Darkin attempted to have the trial postponed on the basis that a critical witness for his defense was too sick to travel, but this was rejected, as were the pleas for mercy on account of his youth. The judge had only this to say to Darkin “A Day of this Sort you could not but have expected; and it hath now overtaken you. Happy would it have been for you, had your former Deliverance in a Situation such as this, been a Memento to you to have altered your Conduct. I hope your present Circumstances will have a better Effet upon you, and induce you to Repentance. Make proper Use of the Time you have to live in endeavouring to make your Peace with God, for you will soon be in another World.”

He was taken back to jail at around midnight, to avoid the large and curious crowds that had gathered to see him.

Darkin’s final days in Oxford Castle Prison

In his final days, Darkin received numerous letters from friends and lovers, and was by all accounts in good spirits. He was described as having a high sense of honor, and claimed that he had never actually killed a man. It was written of him that “He was possessed of too great a Share of Pride for his Circumstances in Life, and retained more of it to the last than was becoming a Person in his unhappy Situation.”

While in prison, he paid a great deal of attention to his attire, supposedly always having his hair done in the latest fashions, and possessed a fondness for silk stockings. He boasted at the end to have taken money on the highway equal to 600 guineas.

He showed no fear of dying, only a worry that his body would be given over to the universities to be anatomized (see our blog post on the Murder Act of 1751).

What does it mean to die ‘game’?

Was Darkin truly fearless of death? It cannot be known. What we do know however was that Darkin was but the latest in a long line of highwaymen determined to die ‘game.’ It was a tradition that would have been familiar to Darkin, to his jailors, and the spectators at his execution.

To many, the highwayman was not simply a thug, but a Robin Hood type figure, whose victims were almost exclusively the rich.

While a highwayman would die for his crimes, the rich could rob a country dry and face no consequences. Perhaps the most popular play of the century, the Beggar’s Opera, performed first in 1728, satirized inequality and injustice and its main character, the charming rogue Macheath, was said to have inspired many real-life acts of highway robbery.

One of the most frequently quoted lines from the Beggar’s Opera makes exactly this point.

But gold from the law can take out the sting;

And if rich men like us were to swing,

’Twould thin the land, such numbers to string

Upon Tyburn Tree!

While awaiting execution, Isaac Darkin supposedly diverted himself with readings from the Beggar’s Opera, and “appeared to enter thoroughly into the Spirit of Mackheath’s part.” Mackheath, like Darkin, would display no fear of the gallows, instead “went out snapping his fingers, singing, At the Tree I shall suffer with Pleasure”.

Darkin must have had a flair for the dramatic and clearly understood and played into the romanticized image of highwaymen. The gallows were a final and most public theatre, and by 1761, there was a long history of ‘game’ highwaymen, cementing their own image in popular imagination through the way they chose to die.

In the words of one Georgian observer “the day appointed by law for the thief’s shame is the day of glory in his own opinion.”

The execution of Isaac Darkin at Oxford Castle, 23 March 1761

Before an expectant crowd, on the 23rd March 1761, Isaac Darkin came out dressed to impress, with a striped waistcoat and clean ruffled shirt. He knelt down to pray, then stepped up the ladder at his own direction.

He tied a white handerkerchief around his face, tied the rope about his neck, and rather than waiting for the hangman to kick the ladder away, stepped off.

What happened to Isaac Darkin’s body?

When he was cut down, the crowd carried his body away, cut open his stomach and filled it with unslaked lime. This was to stop grave robbers from stealing the corpse and selling it to the medical school. Isaac Darkin would not be anatomised.

One problem remained. The crowd had prepared no grave for the man they held in such high esteem. So they dug up the coffin of Grindey, another criminal hanged some time earlier, and laid Darkin to rest inside it.