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:
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.
