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.