The career of James Maclean, or Maclaine, shows that it was not really 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.

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."

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.

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.

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?"

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'?"

In that last passage, Walpole refers to Gay's Beggar's Opera, written in 1716 and produced in 1728; a play written around an imaginary highwayman, "Captain Macheath," who might very well have stood for Maclaine himself. Polly and Lucy were two of Macheath's friends in the opera.

We have Walpole's own authority for the otherwise almost incredible statement that three thousand people went to see Maclaine in his cell, the first Sunday after he was condemned. He fainted away twice with the heat of the cell. "You can't conceive the going there is to Newgate, and the prints that are published of the malefactors and the memoirs of their lives and deaths, set forth with as much parade as Marshal Turenne's."

The fatal October 3rd came at last, when he was to die. A curious etched print published at the time, at the small price of threepence, entitled "Newgate's Lamentation, or the Ladies' Last Farewell of Maclaine," shows the parting, and bears the following verses:

Thus fortified, and giving his blessing, for what it might be worth, he went to Tyburn diligently conning his prayer-book all the way, and not once glancing at the crowds.

To the constable who had arrested him, and who now came to beg his forgiveness, he replied earnestly: "I forgive you, and may God bless you, and your friends; may He forgive my enemies and receive my soul." And then he was turned off, and died quite easily. There was a great sale for the many more or less truthful lives of him hawked round the gallows.