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.