The happy idea of licensing private adventurers to build and equip vessels to make private war upon smuggling craft, and to capture them and their cargoes, was an extension of the original plan of issuing letters of marque to owners of vessels for the purpose of inflicting loss upon an enemy’s commerce; but persons intending to engage upon this private warfare against smuggling had, in the first instance, to give security to the Commissioners of a diligence in the cause thus undertaken, and to enter into business details respecting the cargoes captured. It was, however, not infrequently found, in practice, that these privateers very often took to smuggling on their own account, and that, under the protective cloak of their ostensible affairs, they did a very excellent business; while, to complete this picture of failure, those privateers that really did keep to their licensed trade generally contrived to lose money and to land their owners into bankruptcy.
TERRORISING BANDS OF SMUGGLERS—THE HAWKHURST GANG—ORGANISED ATTACK ON GOUDHURST—THE “SMUGGLERS’ SONG”
BUT the smugglers of Kent and Sussex were by far the most formidable of all the “free-traders” in England, and were not easily to be suppressed. Smuggling, export and import, off those coasts was naturally heavier than elsewhere, for there the Channel was narrower, and runs more easily effected. The interests involved were consequently much greater, and the organisation of the smugglers, from the master-men to the labourers, more nearly perfect. To interfere with any of the several confederacies into which these men were banded for the furtherance of their illicit trade was therefore a matter of considerable danger, and, well knowing the terror into which they had thrown the country-side, they presumed upon it, to extend their activities into other, and even less reputable, doings. The intervals between carrying tubs, and otherwise working for the master-smugglers became filled, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, with acts of highway robbery and house-breaking, and, in the home counties, at any rate, smuggling proved often to be only the first step in a career of crime.
Among these powerful and terrorising confederacies, the Hawkhurst gang was pre-eminent. The constitution of it was, necessarily, a matter of inexact information, for the officers and the rank and file of such societies are mentioned by no minute-books or reports. But one of its principals was, without question, Arthur Gray, or Grey, who was one of those “Sea Cocks” after whom Seacox Heath, near Hawkhurst, in Kent, is supposed to be named. He was a man who did things on, for those times, a grand scale, and was said to be worth £10,000. He had built on that then lonely ridge of ground, overlooking at a great height the Weald of Kent, large store houses—a kind of illicit “bonded warehouses”—for smuggled goods, and made the spot a distributing centre. That all these facts should have been contemporaneously known, and Gray’s store not have been raided by the Revenue, points to an almost inconceivable state of lawlessness. The buildings were in after years known as “Gray’s Folly”; but it was left for modern times to treat the spot in a truly sportive way: when Lord Goschen, who built the modern mansion of Seacox Heath on the site of the smuggler’s place of business, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. If the unquiet ghosts of the old smugglers ever revisit their old haunts, how weird must have been the ironic laughter of Gray at finding this the home of the chief financial functionary of the Government!