The waggon contained £4000, intended to pay the troops quartered at Oxford and Gloucester. Another account states that near Wheatley, Cottington put a pistol to the carrier’s head and bade him stand, at which both carter and guard rode off for their lives, fearing an ambuscade. The town of Reading he laid under frequent contribution, breaking into a jeweller’s shop in that town and carrying off the contents, which he sported on his person in London. Again at Reading, hearing that the Receiver-General was about to send £6000 to London in an ammunition waggon, he entered the receiver’s house, bound the family, and decamped with the money. Being by this time so notorious a character, he was arrested on suspicion, and committed for trial at Abingdon Assizes. There, however, being flush of cash, he found means to corrupt the jury and secure acquittal, although Judge Jermyn exerted all his skill to hang him. His fame was now at its zenith. He became the burthen of street songs--a criminal hero who laughed the gallows to scorn. But about this time he was compelled to fly the country for the murder of Sir John Bridges, with whose wife he had had an intrigue. He made his way to Cologne, to the Court of Charles II., whom he robbed of plate worth £1500. Then he returned to England, after making overtures to Cromwell, to whom he offered certain secret papers if he might be allowed to go scot free. But he was brought to the gallows, and nobly deserved his fate. Claude Duval is another hero whose name is familiar to all readers of criminal chronology. A certain halo of romance surrounds this notorious and most successful highwayman. Gallant and chivalrous in his bearing towards the fair sex, he would spare a victim’s pockets for the pleasure of dancing a “corranto” with the gentleman’s wife. The money he levied so recklessly he lavished as freely in intrigue. His success with the sex is said to have been extraordinary, both in London and in Paris. “Maids, widows, and wives,” says a contemporary account, “the rich, the poor, the noble, the vulgar, all submitted to the powerful Duval.” When justice at length overtook him, and he was cast for death, crowds of ladies visited him in the condemned hold; many more in masks were present at his execution. After hanging he lay in state in the Tangier Tavern at St. Giles, in a room draped with black and covered with escutcheons; eight wax tapers surrounded his bier, and “as many tall gentlemen in long cloaks.” Duval was a Frenchman by birth--a native of Domfront in Normandy, once a village of evil reputation. Its curé was greatly surprised, it is said, at finding that he baptized as many as a hundred children and yet buried nobody. At first he congratulated himself in residing in an air producing such longevity; but on closer inquiry he found that all who were born at Domfront were hanged at Rouen.