15. Captain James Hind: The Royalist who robbed Cromwell.
Moll Cutpurse was not the only person to take to highway robbery as a way of supporting Charles I. During the 1650s, the antics of Captain James Hind appeared in at least 16 printed pamphlets as he took to the road, robbing roundheads linked to the death of Charles II. Amongst his victims was Hugh Peters, the Puritan preacher who had advocated Charles’s death and even prayed at his execution- and Oliver Cromwell himself. The Lord Protector was on his way to London with a guard of seven men when Hind and his partner Thomas Allen accosted them. The soldiers took Allen during the scuffle, but Hind escaped.
Despite having such prominent roundheads at his mercy, Hind did not kill any of them. Indeed, the Newgate Calendar noted that “never was highwayman more careful than Hind to avoid bloodshed.” In 1651, he abandoned robbery to join the royalist army of King Charles II in Scotland where he became a Captain. However, after Parliament’s forces once again defeated the Royalists at Worcester; a friend betrayed Hind. On September 24, 1652, he was hung, then drawn and quartered for treason. Hind stood resolute in the face of his awful death, expressing no remorse and plenty of pleasure for the fact that, for a time at least, he had the Roundheads at his mercy.