difficult to become a "gentleman" highwayman. Born at Monaghan in 1724,
he was the second son of Lauchlin Maclaine, a Presbyterian minister,
who, although settled in Ireland, was a Scotsman of unmixed Scottish
blood, and of undoubted Scottish sympathies. There are plenty of
materials for a life of his son James, the highwayman, for the story
of his career had a remarkable attraction for all classes of people
at the time when he went to die at Tyburn, in 1750; and consequently
the "Lives" and "Memoirs" of him are numerous. There are also several
portraits of him, most of them showing a distinctly Scottish type of
countenance, but not one solving the mystery of his extraordinary
fascination for women. Indeed, the full-length portrait of him
engraved in Caulfield's _Remarkable Characters_, in which he is styled
"Macleane, the Ladies' Hero," shows a heavy-jowled person, with dull,
yet staring fish-like eyes; exactly the kind of person who might be
expected to create an unfavourable impression. Perhaps the artist
does him an injustice, but none of the several artists and engravers
who have handed down to us their respective versions of his features
have succeeded in imparting the slightest inkling of good looks to him,
and few of the portraits agree with one another. He was tall above
the average, as the various prints show; and he wore fine clothes. It
was these exceedingly fine feathers, and the fashionable resorts he
affected, that gave him the distinction of "gentleman" highwayman; and
it is to be feared that his exquisite dress, in larger measure than the
quality of his manners, influenced the ladies of 1750, who wept over
his fate just as the equally foolish women of 1670 had wept over the
hanging of Du Vall.
[Illustration: JAMES MACLAINE.
_From a contemporary Portrait._]
The Ordinary of Newgate saw nothing remarkable in Maclaine. He speaks
of him as "in person of the middle-size, well-limbed, and a sandy
complexion, a broad, open countenance pitted with the small-pox, but
though he was called the _Gentleman Highwayman_, and in his dress and
equipage very much affected the fine gentleman, yet to a man acquainted
with good breeding, and that can distinguish it from impudence and
affectation, there was very little in his address or behaviour that
could entitle him to the character."
[Illustration: MACLAINE, THE LADIES' HERO.]
Archibald, the elder brother of this fashionable hero, was an entirely
respected and blameless person, who entered the Church, and was pastor
of the English community at The Hague for forty-nine years, from 1747
to 1796.
James, the future knight of the road, was intended by his father for
a merchant; but that pious father died when James was eighteen years
of age, and so the youthful "perfect master of writing and accompts,"
as he is styled, instead of proceeding, as intended, to a Scottish
merchant in Rotterdam, received a modest inheritance, with which he
immediately took himself off to Dublin, where he lost or expended it
all inside twelve months, in dissipation, after the example of the
Prodigal Son in the Scriptures.
Only, unfortunately for him, when the money was gone, and he would,
given the opportunity, perhaps have returned, like that illustrious
exemplar, from his husks and his harlots, to partake of the fatted
calf, there was no father, no home, and no fatted calf to which he
might return.
But he had still some relatives left in Monaghan, and he thought he
might be received by them. In this he was altogether mistaken when he
tried to put it to the proof, and was reduced almost to the point of
starvation there, when he attracted the attention of a gentleman, who
offered him a footman's place in his service. He did not keep this
situation long. He was too impudent to his master, and too patronising
towards the other servants. He was discharged, and for a time subsisted
upon a scanty allowance from his brother.
In this extremity he found a gentleman of Cork, a "Colonel F——n," who
was confiding enough to engage him as butler. But he apparently did not
make a good butler; and was, moreover, discovered making away with his
master's property, and discharged. We next find him in London, thinking
of joining the Irish Brigade in the French service; but abandoning
the idea from conscientious scruples against being employed in Popish
surroundings. Maclaine had a very tender conscience and a timid nature,
and what with his religious scruples and the fear of being shot (to
which he does not allude, but which was very vivid to him), he had to
abandon the notion of wearing a fine uniform, which we may suspect had
originally given him the impulse to a military life.
[Illustration: JAMES MACLAINE.]
Maclaine did not at this period keep very reputable society; but
was in 1746 again occupying a position with the forgiving "Colonel
F——n." The Colonel seems to have, on this second occasion, found
him an undesirable servant; whereupon, "being prepossessed with the
perfections of his person," he proposed to enlist in Lord Albemarle's
troop of horseguards. The Colonel, as an old soldier, thought this, no
doubt, the best thing, and, with an advance of ten pounds, bade him go
where glory waited him.
Maclaine accordingly enlisted. He had visions of being seated on a
prancing steed—"steed" being the superlative of "horse"—and, dressed in
something with plenty of blue or scarlet and gold in it, taking part
in ceremonial processions and escorts. Unhappily, soon after he had
enlisted, he heard that the troop was to proceed at once to Flanders
on active service, and hurriedly got, somehow, out of the dangerous
position.
He then made some attempt to settle down and live respectably, for he
married the daughter of a Mr. Maclagen, a horse-dealer in the Oxford
Road—the Oxford Street of to-day. His wife brought a small dowry of
£500, and with this they set up business in the grocery and chandlery
way in Welbeck Street. Unhappily for any views he may have entertained
of a settled life as a tradesman, his wife died in 1748. It appeared
then that the business had not prospered, or that their style of living
had been beyond their means, for the stock and furniture were then
found to be worth only £85.
Maclaine's first idea after this domestic catastrophe was one very
prevalent at that time: the notion of posing as a gentleman of fortune
and of fashion, with the object of ensnaring the affections of some
susceptible young lady of means and marrying her for her money. He
accordingly realised all his effects, and, placing his two infant
daughters in the care of his mother-in-law, burst upon the town as one
of the elegants of the day.
A needy neighbour, like himself a tradesman, Plunkett by name, who had
failed as a chemist, was induced by this hopeful widower to act a part
as his footman, and together they frequented places of fashionable
assemblage, both in London and at Tunbridge Wells, on the look-out for
heiresses. But the game was shy, and meanwhile the small capital of
£85 was fast melting away. Fine clothes were ten times more expensive
in that age than the finest clothes of to-day, and although it was
possible to obtain a good deal on credit, it was not at all workable to
visit Vauxhall and such expensive places, and to cut a dash there, for
any considerable time on so inconsiderable a capital.
It was Plunkett who at this stage of affairs, when their funds were
nearly exhausted, suggested the road as a place where money might
usually be had for the asking.
"A brave man," said Plunkett, "cannot want. He has a right to live, and
need not want the conveniences of life. While the dull, plodding, busy
knaves carry cash in their pockets, we must draw upon them to supply
our wants. Only impudence is necessary, and the getting better of a
few idle scruples. Courage is scarcely necessary, for all we have to
deal with are mere poltroons." But when poltroon meets poltroon, when
the timid traveller, ready to hand over his purse on demand, cannot do
so because the coward highwayman dare not reach out and take it, what
happens? It is an embarrassing moment, whose fortunes are (or were)
determined only by chance.
Plunkett did not know the manner of man he had to deal with until they
had taken the road together. He had always seemed a bold, swaggering
fellow, and big enough in all conscience; but when it came to highway
robbery he was a helpless companion.
Their first affair was with a grazier, going home from Smithfield with
the proceeds of his day's business in his pocket. Plunkett, suddenly
enlightened as to Maclaine's want of nerve, took the conduct of the
incident firmly in hand at once, or the results might have been
disastrous for both. He took £60 from the grazier, while Maclaine
looked on and spoke no word, inwardly in greater fear than he, and
ready, had there been any sign of resistance, to fly.
Their next attempt was to stop and rob a coach on the St. Albans road.
It was agreed that Maclaine should stop the coachman and present his
pistol on one side, while Plunkett did the same on the other. But
although he rode up several times, intending to challenge the Jehu with
the traditional cry of the bold and fearless fellows who did the like
every night, his heart failed him; so Plunkett had to carry it off
as best he could, while Maclaine sat shivering with cowardice in the
background, in spite of the "Venetian mask" that covered the upper part
of his face and concealed his identity sufficiently well.
But Plunkett, as may have been already gathered, was a man with
sufficient resolution for two, and although Maclaine was quaking with
terror on every occasion, he brought him in some fashion up to the
scratch in a long series of robberies. They frequently hired or stabled
horses at Hyde Park Corner, and thence rode out for a day and a night
upon Hounslow Heath, or elsewhere.
"In all this while," we learn, he scarcely ever thought of his
daughters, "and seldom visited his mother-in-law." O villain!
When in town, he had lodgings on the first floor over a shop in St.
James's Street, and presented a gorgeous figure to morning callers.
He was even more gorgeous in the evening, when he frequented places
of public entertainment, and obtained the freedom of some fashionable
houses. But the morning picture he presented will probably suffice. He
then wore a crimson damask banjan, a silk shag waistcoat turned with
lace, black velvet breeches, white silk stockings, and yellow morocco
slippers.
On one exceptional occasion, Plunkett and Maclaine went as far as
Chester, and did good business on the way; but their best haul was on
Shooter's Hill, where they stopped and robbed an official of the East
India Company of a large sum.
With his share of the plunder, Maclaine took a little holiday on the
Continent, and visited his brother at The Hague, probably astonishing
that worthy man by his sudden magnificence. He then returned and
rejoined Plunkett.
Horace Walpole wrote at different times several accounts of how he was
once stopped by these brothers-in-arms. It was a moonlight night, in
the beginning of November 1749, nearly a year before Maclaine's career
was brought to a close, that Horace was returning from Holland House,
Kensington, to London. The hour was ten o'clock, the place Hyde Park.
What trifles, or what amount of money Messrs. Maclaine and Plunkett
took on this occasion we are not told; for Walpole does not take his
correspondents so completely and voluminously into his confidence over
this affair as he generally did. He only tells them, and us, that the
pistol of "the accomplished Mr. Maclean," as he calls him, went off—by
accident, he is careful to say—and that the bullet passed so close as
to graze the skin beneath his eye and stun him. The bullet then went
through the roof of the carriage.
The incident that so nearly brought the life of Horace Walpole to
an untimely end, and might thus have left the world much poorer in
eighteenth-century gossip, was conducted, as he tells us, "with the
greatest good-breeding on both sides." He further adds that the reason
of Maclaine being out that night and taking a purse _that_ way was, he
had only that morning been disappointed of marrying a great fortune. It
does not seem at all an adequate reason; but that was the eighteenth
century and this is the twentieth, and perhaps we cannot see eye to eye
on all these matters.
But, at any rate, Maclaine afterwards behaved very nicely about the
articles he had taken; sending a note to Walpole as soon as ever he had
returned to his lodgings, in which he made his excuses, if not with
the witty grace of a Voiture, at least expressed in a manner ten times
more natural and easily polite. He declared that, had the bullet found
its billet in Walpole's head, he would certainly have put one through
his own. Then, in a postscript, which, like the postscripts in letters
written by feminine hands, contained the whole substance of and reason
for the letter, Maclaine added that he would be pleased to meet the
gentleman at Tyburn (O ominous tryst!) at twelve at night, where the
gentleman might purchase again any trifles he had lost.
There, if not particularly elsewhere, Maclaine seems to have indeed
proved himself, in one brief moment, a "gentleman" highwayman. You
see the argument passing in his mind. The trifles were indeed trifles
intrinsically, but they might have had some sentimental worth, of old
or new association, that would have made the loss of them a grievous
thing to their rightful owner. Well, then, if that owner liked to
ransom them for a trifling sum, here was his chance. A very considerate
offer.
But Horace Walpole did not accept the rendezvous. Possibly he doubted
the honour of a highwayman met at such a spot.
The "gentleman highwayman" resented criticism, as will be seen by
the following story: Maclaine frequented Button's Coffee House, in
Russell Street, Covent Garden, and paid particular attention to the
barmaid there, daughter of the proprietor. The attentions of such a
fine gentleman as he appeared to be were very flattering to the girl,
and very noticeable to other frequenters of the house, one of whom,
a certain Mr. Donaldson, knew Maclaine, and took the opportunity of
warning the girl's father of his real character. The father in his turn
cautioned his daughter, and foolishly let slip the name of the person
who had warned him; and she, of course, passed on the information to
the engaging Maclaine.
On the next occasion when Donaldson visited Button's, and while he was
sitting in one of the boxes, Maclaine entered, and in a loud voice, and
the pronounced Irish brogue that was ever on his tongue, said: "Mr.
Donaldson, I wish to spake to you in a private room."
Mr. Donaldson, being unarmed, and naturally afraid of being alone with
such a man as he knew Maclaine to be, said that as there could not
possibly be anything pass between them that the whole world was not
welcome to know, he begged leave to decline the invitation.
"Very well," rejoined Maclaine, "we shall meet again."
A day or so later, as Mr. Donaldson was walking near Richmond in the
evening, he saw Maclaine on horseback, approaching him; but fortunately
at that moment a gentleman's carriage appeared, and Maclaine rode
after it; Donaldson hastening into the protection that the streets
of Richmond town afforded. It is probable that, but for this timely
diversion, Maclaine would have shot the man who dared tell the truth
about him.
But the end of the alliance of Maclaine and Plunkett was now at hand.
On June 26th, 1750, at two o'clock in the morning, they stopped the
Salisbury stage on Turnham Green. The courage of the coach passengers
was at a low ebb at that unconscionable hour, and they suffered
themselves to be robbed, without making the least resistance. They
numbered five men and one woman. The men were bidden step out, and,
doing so, were searched and robbed at leisure. A Mr. Higden had an
exceptionally fine waistcoat, and had to part with even that to
Maclaine, who was a connoisseur in waistcoats. A Mr. Lockyer also was
constrained to give up a wig. From the lady was taken "only what she
chose to give." Here, at any rate, is a faint sweet relic of an older
courtesy.
As an afterthought, Maclaine went back for two or three of the
portmanteaux stored away in the hoot.
They then, riding off westward, met the Earl of Eglinton, travelling in
his post-chaise. He had an escort of two mounted servants, but as they
were over half a mile behind at the time, he might equally well have
been travelling alone.
[Illustration: MACLAINE AND PLUNKETT ROBBING THE EARL OF EGLINTON ON
HOUNSLOW HEATH.]
Maclaine, riding up to the postboy, threatened him with a pistol and
told him to stop instantly; but, at the same time, was sufficiently
cautious to so place himself that the occupant of the post-chaise would
be unable to fire at him without hitting the postboy. The highwaymen
were, as a rule, exceedingly well-informed persons; and Maclaine knew
perfectly well that Lord Eglinton carried a blunderbuss with him, and
had the reputation of always being ready and willing to use it.
But in the strategic position he had taken up, he was quite safe, and
meanwhile Plunkett had advanced from the rear and taken his lordship
completely by surprise. He threatened, indeed, instantly to shoot him,
if he did not throw the blunderbuss away; and my lord flung the weapon
from him at once, as though it had been red-hot. Plunkett then took
seven guineas from him.
Maclaine was not behindhand, and seized his lordship's overcoat and the
blunderbuss which was lying upon the heath. He was a frugal person,
and in that particular did credit to his Scots ancestry. A curious
old print shows this robbery, famous in its day, and in it Maclaine
and Plunkett do certainly look most awe-inspiring in their attitudes:
Maclaine, in particular, being apparently engaged in pushing his pistol
through the postboy's head. But that is doubtless artistic licence.
Maclaine did a very foolish thing when he returned to his St. James's
Street rooms, early that same day. He sent for a Jew dealer to come and
make an offer for some clothes he wished to sell; none other, in fact,
than those he had taken from the coach, and when they were shortly
advertised as having been stolen, the mischief was done. As if that
were not folly enough, Maclaine's frugality had led him also to remove
the gold lace from one of the stolen coats and to offer it for sale.
He chanced to take it to the very laceman who had recently sold it.
His arrest was then a matter of course. Equally of course, he strongly
protested against the indignity of a "gentleman" being arrested for
theft, and then he broke down and wept in "a most dastardly and
pusillanimous manner, whimpering and crying like a whipt schoolboy."
Maclaine declared that the absconded Plunkett had left the clothes with
him, in part satisfaction of a debt he owed, and that he, Maclaine, was
to have sold them for what they would fetch, as part liquidation of the
debt.
Any so-called confession he might have made, he now declared
impossible. What should a gentleman like himself know of highway
robbery? "It is true enough that when first apprehended, the surprise
confounded me and gave me a most extraordinary shock. It caused a
delirium and confusion in my brain which rendered me incapable of being
myself, or knowing what I said or did. I talked of robberies as another
man would do in talking of stories; but, my Lord, after my friends had
visited me in the Gate-house, and had given me some new spirits, and
when I came to be re-examined before Justice Lediard, and was asked
if I could make any discovery of the robbery, I then alleged I had
recovered my surprise, that what I had talked of before concerning
robberies was false and wrong, and was entirely owing to a confused
head and brain."
He called nine witnesses to character; among them Lady Caroline
Petersham, who is represented in a curious print of the trial at the
Old Bailey, under examination.
The elegant Maclaine stands prominently in the dock handsomely attired,
but, alas! heavily fettered, with his laced hat under his left arm.
One hand holds his lengthy written defence, the other is affectedly
spread over his breast, in gentlemanly protestation of his being an
injured person. His is a tall, upstanding figure; but he appears, by
the evidence of the print, to have had a face like a pudding: and the
majority of the counsel seated at a table in front of him are shown
regarding it with easily understood curiosity and astonishment.
One of the dignified persons on the bench is represented addressing
Lady Caroline: "What has your Ladyship to say in favour of the
Prisoner at y^e Bar?"
[Illustration: MACLAINE IN THE DOCK.]
With a dramatic gesture, she replies: "My Lord, I have had the Pleasure
to know him well: he has often been about my House, and I never lost
anything."
In spite of this cloud of witness, our gentleman was convicted, and
that with the utmost dispatch, for the jury returned their verdict of
"guilty" without leaving the box.
The time between his condemnation and execution was spent in an
affectation of repentance, that does not read very pleasantly. He
suddenly found himself a great sinner, and indeed revelled luxuriantly
in the discovery. But there was not the true note of abasement and
conviction in all this; for he went among his fellow-criminals like
a superior person, and offered them consolation from the rarefied
heights of his "gentility," that must have been excessively galling to
them. Their profanity and callousness shocked him profoundly. Probably
their behaviour was not less profane when he, condemned to die for
misdeeds similar to their own, presumed to lecture them on the error of
their ways. But preaching was in his blood, and would find expression
somehow, and he found excuse for his almost consistent lack of courage
on the road in the moral reflection that it was conscience made a
coward of him. But conscience did not prevent him sharing in the swag
when the enterprise was carried through.
He said it was true that, since he had entered upon the highway, he
had never enjoyed a calm and easy moment; that when he was among ladies
and gentlemen they observed his uneasiness, and would often ask him
what was the matter, that he seemed so dull. And his friends would tell
him that surely his affairs were under some embarrassment; "But they
little suspected," said he, "the wound I had within."
He protested in a good cause he believed there was not a man of greater
natural courage than himself, but that in every scheme of villainy
he put Plunkett on the most hazardous post. "There," said he, "I was
always a coward—my conscience"——always that sickly, unconvincing
iteration. But the insistence of conscience that Plunkett should always
be placed in the way of the bullets is at least amusing.
Walpole tells how Maclaine had rooms in St. James's Street, opposite
White's Club, and others at Chelsea. Plunkett, he says, had rooms in
Jermyn Street. Their faces were as well known in and about St. James's
as that of any of the gentlemen who lived in that quarter, who might
also be in the habit of going upon the road, if the truth were known
about everybody. Maclaine, he said, had quarrelled, very shortly
before his arrest, with an army officer at the Putney Bowling Green.
The officer had doubted his gentility, and Maclaine challenged him to
a duel, but the exasperating officer would not accept until Maclaine
should produce a certificate of the noble birth he claimed.
"After his arrest," says Walpole, "there was a wardrobe of clothes,
three-and-twenty purses, and the celebrated blunderbuss found at his
lodgings, besides a famous kept-mistress." Walpole concluded he would
suffer, and as he wished him no ill, he did not care to follow the
example of all fashionable London, and go to see him in his cell. He
was almost alone in his thus keeping away. Lord Mountfield, with half
White's Club at his heels, went to Newgate the very first day. There,
in the cell, was Maclaine's aunt, crying over her unhappy nephew. When
those great and fashionable frequenters of White's had gone, she asked,
well knowing who they were, but perhaps not fully informed of their
ways, beyond the fact that they gambled extravagantly: "My dear, what
did the Lords say to you? Have you ever been concerned with any of
them?"
"Was it not admirable?" asks Walpole; adding, "but the chief personages
who have been to comfort and weep over their fallen hero are Lady
Caroline Petersham and Miss Ashe: I call them 'Polly' and 'Lucy,' and
asked them if he did not sing: 'Thus I stand like the Turk with his
doxies around'?"