James Maclaine: Monaghan highwayman executed in 1750

In 1999, a film was released about an infamous Monaghan born highwayman named James Maclaine (spelled Macleane for the movie) and his accomplice William Plunkett. It starred Johnny Lee Miller as the wayward Monaghan man alongside the great Scottish actor Robert Carlyle as the gentleman thief’s sidekick and brains of the operation, William Plunkett. Both Miller and Carlyle, you may remember, were in ‘Trainspotting’ together. Carlyle played Trainspotting’s vicious psychopath, Begby. The Hollywood blockbuster adaptation about the highwaymen’s exploits was called ‘Plunkett and Macleane’. Maclaine met his end on Tyburn Hill in the mid-18th century.

Maclaine’s father was a respectable clergyman whose life was far removed from what his son later got up to as an adult. James’ elder brother became a tutor to the ‘Prince of Orange’ and was lauded with a mention in John Wesley’s journals. Young James Maclaine was the black sheep of the family who became a bad lad with no scruples when it came to making any kind of fast financial gain for himself. Greed for money is an awful thing and there was an innate need for more in Maclaine which took him down the wrong road. When he moved to London, he hoped to make the fortune he had dreamed about.

He married a lady of considerable fortune with whom a daughter was born, and he made a living by becoming a grocer and chandler (candlemaker) at Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square. However, his wife died and from then on, he went off the rails completely to make that elusive fortune. He soon teamed-up with a like-minded crafty chemist called William Plunkett and both would scheme and plot their paths in an attempt to steal others’ wealth by deception and robbery.

A few robberies followed and Maclaine got caught. Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Orford and a Whig politician almost met his end at the hands of the Monaghan highwayman. The encounter was a total fiasco for Maclaine and Walpole nearly got shot through the head. Maclaine’s pistol accidentally unloaded, and thankfully just scorched the nobleman’s face. But we learn that Maclaine had a softer side and regretted what he almost did to his victim.

Maclaine emphasised that it was against his personal code to ever shoot those he robbed ‘at the mouth of a pistol’.

Afterwards, Maclaine sat down and wrote two letters to Walpole to apologise sincerely for the unintended mishap during the robbery and even offered the Earl an opportunity to settle matters by facing him in a duel should it help to resolve the unfortunate event. Wisely, they say, Walpole declined to accept Maclaine’s offer.

The Highwayman’s next robbery was to be his undoing. Unfortunately, for him, Maclaine took too big a bite of the cherry by robbing the grand sounding Salisbury Coach. He was not satisfied just to take the hapless people’s money, but he also threatened them at gunpoint to remove their ‘superfluous clothing.’ One of the pieces he took was a gold laced coat belonging to a Mr Higden and other lace items of his too. Unfortunately, for the thief, he found a buyer for the lace who just happened to be the very person that originally sold the clobber to Mr Higden. Having twigged the stuff to be stolen, Higden was informed and Maclaine was earmarked for a court appearance. The police nabbed the gentle highwayman. At the trial they say there were lots of ladies present who adored him. Maclaine had become something of a folk hero.

Walpole who had been an earlier casualty left us an account of what went on around the time of the trial and tells us that there was no other ‘conversation but about Maclaine, a fashionable Highwayman, who is just taken, and who robbed me among others, as Lord Eglinton, Sir Thomas Robinson of Vienna, Mrs Talbot’ and others. He then provides a little background on the man who robbed and accidentally shot him. He says of Maclaine: ‘His father is an Irish dean, his brother is a Calvinist minister in great esteem at the Hague’ and that James Maclaine ‘himself was once a grocer, but, losing a wife’ and with ‘about £200 in his pocket, which he soon spent and then took to the road.’

In 1918, the Northern Whig’s account on the anniversary of his execution, corrects Walpole’s assertion that Maclaine's father was ‘a dean’ and explains he was in fact a ‘Presbyterian minister.’ The junior Maclaine, it states, was ‘something of a bad egg right from the start’ who lived ‘hand to mouth’ and was in Walpole’s view, ‘a coward’. Before the sentence of death was passed Maclaine had hoped to give a speech from the dock pleading for clemency. But he became upset and was unable to speak.

There is a story that he was made share a cell with a petty thief at Newgate prison. He believed it was an afront for gentleman highwayman like himself to share a room with a lower class of robber. Along with 11 other convicted criminals he was taken to Tyburn Hill where he was hanged alongside them in the year 1750.

More information on James Maclaine can be found in an article by Patrick M. Geoghegen in the ‘Dictionary of Irish Biography’; ‘Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman’, by James Sharpe; and in ‘History of Monaghan,’ by D.C. Rushe.

The Highwayman

By Alfred Noyes (Part one)

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding—

Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,

A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.

They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.

And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,

His pistol butts a-twinkle,

His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard.

He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.

He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there

But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

Bess, the landlord’s daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.