HE stood six feet ten in his stockinged feet, and was the tallest
ruffian that ever cut a purse or held up a coach on the highway. A
mass of black hair curled over a low forehead, and a glittering eye
intensified his villainous aspect; nor did a deep scar, furrowing his
cheek from end to end, soften the horror of his sudden apparition.
Valiant men shuddered at his approach; women shrank from the distant
echo of his name; for fifteen years he terrorised Scotland from
Caithness to the border; and the most partial chronicler never insulted
his memory with the record of a good deed.
He was born to a gentle family in the Calendar of Monteith, and was
celebrated even in boyhood for his feats of strength and daring. While
still at school he could hold a hundredweight at arm's-length, and
crumple up a horseshoe like a wisp of hay. The fleetest runner, the most
desperate fighter in the country, he was already famous before his name
was besmirched with crime, and he might have been immortalised as the
Hercules of the seventeenth century, had not his ambition been otherwise
flattered. At the outset, though the inclination was never lacking,
he knew small temptation to break the sterner laws of conduct. His
pleasures were abundantly supplied by his father's generosity, and he
had no need to refrain from such vices as became a gentleman. If he was
no drunkard, it was because his head was equal to the severest strain,
and, despite his forbidding expression, he was always a successful
breaker of hearts. His very masterfulness overcame the most stubborn
resistance; and more than once the pressure of his dishonourable suit
converted hatred into love. At the very time that he was denounced for
Scotland's disgrace, his praises were chanted in many a dejected ballad.
'Gilderoy was a bonny boy,' sang one heart-broken maiden:
Had roses till his shoon,
His stockings were of silken soy,
Wi' garters hanging doon.
But in truth he was admired less for his amiability than for that
quality of governance which, when once he had torn the decalogue to
pieces, made him a veritable emperor of crime.
His father's death was the true beginning of his career. A modest
patrimony was squandered in six months, and Gilderoy had no penny
left wherewith to satisfy the vices which insisted upon indulgence. He
demanded money at all hazards, and money without toil. For a while his
more loudly clamant needs were fulfilled by the amiable simplicity of
his mother, whom he blackmailed with insolence and contempt. And when
she, wearied by his shameless importunity, at last withdrew her
support, he determined upon a monstrous act of vengeance. With a noble
affectation of penitence he visited his home; promised reform at supper;
and said good-night in the broken accent of reconciliation. No sooner
was the house sunk in slumber than he crawled stealthily upstairs in
order to forestall by theft a promised generosity. He opened the door of
the bed-chamber in a hushed silence; but the wrenching of the cofferlid
awoke the sleeper, and Gilderoy, having cut his mother's throat with
an infamous levity, seized whatever money and jewels were in the house,
cruelly maltreated his sister, and laughingly burnt the house to the
ground, that the possibility of evidence might be destroyed.
Henceforth his method of plunder was assured. It was part of his
philosophy to prevent detection by murder, and the flames from the
burning walls added a pleasure to his lustful eye. His march across
Scotland was marked by slaughtered families and ruined houses. Plunder
was the first cause of his exploits, but there is no doubt that death
and arson were a solace to his fierce spirit; and for a while this
giant of cruelty knew neither check nor hindrance. Presently it became
a superstition with him that death was the inevitable accompaniment
of robbery, and, as he was incapable of remorse, he grew callous, and
neglected the simplest precautions. At Dunkeld he razed a rifled house
to the ground, and with the utmost effrontery repeated the performance
at Aberdeen. But at last he had been tracked by a company of soldiers,
who, that justice might not be cheated of her prey, carried him to gaol,
where after the briefest trial he was condemned to death.
Gilderoy, however, was still master of himself. His immense strength not
only burst his bonds, but broke prison, and this invincible Samson
was once more free in Aberdeen, inspiring that respectable city with a
legendary dread. The reward of one hundred pounds was offered in vain.
Had he shown himself on the road in broad daylight, none would have
dared to arrest him, and it was not until his plans were deliberately
laid, that he crossed the sea. The more violent period of his career
was at an end. Never again did he yield to his passion for burning
and sudden death; and, if the world found him unconquerable, his
self-control is proved by the fact that in the heyday of his strength
he turned from his unredeemed brutality to a gentler method. He now
deserted Scotland for France, with which, like all his countrymen, he
claimed a cousinship; and so profoundly did he impose upon Paris with
his immense stature, his elegant attire, his courtly manners (for he was
courtesy itself, when it pleased him), that he was taken for an eminent
scholar, or at least a soldier of fortune.
Prosperity might doubtless have followed a discreet profession, but
Gilderoy must still be thieving, and he reaped a rich harvest among the
unsuspicious courtiers of France. His most highly renowned exploit was
performed at St. Denis, and the record of France's humiliation is still
treasured. The great church was packed with ladies of fashion and their
devout admirers. Richelieu attended in state; the king himself shone
upon the assembly. The strange Scotsman, whom no man knew and all men
wondered at, attracted a hundred eyes to himself and his magnificent
equipment. But it was not his to be idle, and at the very moment whereat
Mass was being sung, he contrived to lighten Richelieu's pocket of a
purse. The king was a delighted witness of the theft; Gilderoy, assuming
an air of facile intimacy, motioned him to silence; and he, deeming it
a trick put upon Richelieu by a friend, hastened, at the service-end, to
ask his minister if perchance he had a purse of gold upon him. Richelieu
instantly discovered the loss, to the king's uncontrolled hilarity,
which was mitigated when it was found that the thief, having emptied the
king's pocket at the unguarded moment of his merriment, had left them
both the poorer.
Such were Gilderoy's interludes of gaiety; and when you remember the
cynical ferocity of his earlier performance, you cannot deny him the
credit of versatility. He stayed in France until his ominous reputation
was too widely spread; whereupon he crossed the Pyrenees, travelling
like a gentleman, in a brilliant carriage of his own. From Spain he
carried off a priceless collection of silver plate; and he returned to
his own country, fatigued, yet unsoftened, by the grand tour. Meanwhile,
a forgetful generation had not kept his memory green. The monster,
who punished Scotland a year ago with fire and sword, had passed
into oblivion, and Gilderoy was able to establish for himself a new
reputation. He departed as far as possible from his ancient custom,
joined the many cavaliers, who were riding up and down the country,
pistol in hand, and presently proved a dauntless highwayman. He had
not long ridden in the neighbourhood of Perth before he met the Earl of
Linlithgow, from whom he took a gold watch, a diamond ring, and eighty
guineas. Being an outlaw, he naturally espoused the King's cause, and
would have given a year of his life to meet a Regicide. Once upon a
time, says rumour, he found himself face to face with Oliver Cromwell,
whom he dragged from his coach, set ignominiously upon an ass, and so
turned adrift with his feet tied under the beast's belly. The story is
incredible, not only because the loyal historians of the time caused
Oliver to be robbed daily on every road in Great Britain, but because
our Gilderoy, had he ever confronted the Protector, most assuredly would
not have allowed him to escape with his life.
Tired of scouring the highway, Gilderoy resolved upon another
enterprise. He collected a band of fearless ruffians, and placed himself
at their head. With this army to aid, he harried Sutherland and the
North, lifting cattle, plundering homesteads, and stopping wayfarers
with a humour and adroitness worthy of Robin Hood. No longer a lawless
adventurer, he made his own conditions of life, and forced the people to
obey them. He who would pay Gilderoy a fair contribution ran no risk of
losing his sheep or oxen. But evasion was impossible, and the smallest
suspicion of falsehood was punished by death. The peaceably inclined
paid their toll with regret; the more daring opposed the raider to their
miserable undoing; the timid satisfied the utmost exactions of Gilderoy,
and deemed themselves fortunate if they left the country with their
lives.
Thus Scotland became a land of dread; the most restless man within
her borders hardly dare travel beyond his byre. The law was powerless
against this indomitable scourge, and the reward of a thousand marks
would have been offered in vain, had not Gilderoy's cruelty estranged
his mistress. This traitress--Peg Cunningham was her name--less for
avarice than in revenge for many insults and infidelities, at last
betrayed her master. Having decoyed him to her house, she admitted fifty
armed men, and thus imagined a full atonement for her unnumbered wrongs.
But Gilderoy was triumphant to the last. Instantly suspecting the
treachery of his mistress, he burst into her bed-chamber, and, that she
might not enjoy the price of blood, ripped her up with a hanger. Then he
turned defiant upon the army arrayed against him, and killed eight men
before the others captured him.
Disarmed after a desperate struggle, he was loaded with chains and
carried to Edinburgh, where he was starved for three days, and then
hanged without the formality of a trial on a gibbet, thirty feet
high, set up in the Grassmarket. Even then Scotland's vengeance was
unsatisfied. The body, cut down from its first gibbet, was hung in
chains forty feet above Leith Walk, where it creaked and gibbered as a
warning to evildoers for half a century, until at last the inhabitants
of that respectable quarter petitioned that Gilderoy's bones should
cease to rattle, and that they should enjoy the peace impossible for his
jingling skeleton.
Gilderoy was no drawing-room scoundrel, no villain of schoolgirl
romance. He felt remorse as little as he felt fear, and there was no
crime from whose commission he shrank. Before his death he confessed to
thirty-seven murders, and bragged that he had long since lost count of
his robberies and rapes. Something must be abated for boastfulness. But
after all deduction there remains a tale of crime that is unsurpassed.
His most admirably artistic quality is his complete consistence. He was
a ruffian finished and rotund; he made no concession, he betrayed no
weakness. Though he never preached a sermon against the human race, he
practised a brutality which might have proceeded from a gospel of hate.
He spared neither friends nor relatives, and he murdered his own mother
with as light a heart as he sent a strange widow of Aberdeen to her
death. His skill is undoubted, and he proved by the discipline of his
band that he was not without some talent of generalship. But he owed
much of his success to his physical strength, and to the temperament,
which never knew the scandal of hesitancy or dread.
A born marauder, he devoted his life to his trade; and, despite his
travels in France and Spain, he enjoyed few intervals of merriment.
Even the humour, which proved his redemption, was as dour and grim as
Scotland can furnish at her grimmes: and dourest. Here is a specimen
will serve as well as another: three of Gilderoy's gang had been
hanged according to the sentence of a certain Lord of Session, and
the Chieftain, for his own vengeance and the intimidation of justice,
resolved upon an exemplary punishment. He waylaid the Lord of Session,
emptied his pockets, killed his horses, broke his coach in pieces,
and having bound his lackeys, drowned them in a pond. This was but the
prelude of revenge, for presently (and here is the touch of humour) he
made the Lord of Session ride at dead of night to the gallows, whereon
the three malefactors were hanging. One arm of the crossbeams was still
untenanted. 'By my soul, mon,' cried Gilderoy to the Lord of Session,
'as this gibbet is built to break people's craigs, and is not uniform
without another, I must e'en hang you upon the vacant beam.' And
straightway the Lord of Session swung in the moonlight, and Gilderoy had
cracked his black and solemn joke.
This sense of fun is the single trait which relieves the colossal
turpitude of Gilderoy. And, though even his turpitude was melodramatic
in its lack of balance, it is a unity of character which is the
foundation of his greatness. He was no fumbler, led away from his
purpose by the first diversion; his ambition was clear before him, and
he never fell below it. He defied Scotland for fifteen years, was hanged
so high that he passed into a proverb, and though his handsome, sinister
face might have made women his slaves, he was never betrayed by passion
(or by virtue) to an amiability.