Horace Walpole writes in 1750 to Horace Mann:
“I have been in town for a day or two, and heard no conversation but about MᶜLean, a fashionable highwayman, who is just taken, and who robbed me among others; as Lord Eglinton, Sir Thomas Robinson of Vienna, Mrs. Talbot, etc. He took an odd booty from the Scotch Earl, a blunderbuss, which lies very formidably upon the justice’s table. He was taken by selling a laced waistcoat to a pawnbroker, who happened to carry it to the very man who had just sold the lace. His history is very particular, for he confesses every thing, and is so little of a hero, that he cries and begs, and I believe, if Lord Eglinton had been in any luck, might have been robbed of his own blunderbuss. His father was an Irish Dean; his brother is a Calvinist minister in great esteem at the Hague. He himself was a grocer, but, losing a wife that he loved extremely about two years ago ... he quitted his business with two hundred pounds in his pocket, which he soon spent, and then took to the road with only one companion, Plunket, a journeyman apothecary, whom he has impeached but [who] has not been taken.
“MᶜLean had a lodging in St. James’s Street, over against White’s, and another at Chelsea.... There was a wardrobe of clothes, three and twenty purses, and the celebrated blunderbuss found at his lodgings....
“As I conclude he will suffer, and wish him no ill, I don’t care to have his idea, and am almost single in not having been to see him. Lord Mountford at the head of half White’s, went the first day: his Aunt was crying over him; as soon as they were withdrawn, she said to him, knowing they were of White’s, ‘My dear, what did the lords say to you? have you ever been concerned with any of them?’ Was it not admirable? What a favourable idea people must have of White’s! and what if White’s should not deserve a much better! But the chief personages who have been to comfort and weep over this fallen hero are Lady Caroline Petersham and Miss Ashe.”
Walpole a few days later writes to the same correspondent:
“My friend MᶜLean is still the fashion; have not I reason to call him friend? He says, if the pistol had shot me, he had another for himself. Can I do less than say I will be hanged if he is? They have made a print, a very dull one, of what I think I said to Lady Caroline Petersham about him.
“Thus I stand like the Turk with his doxies round.
“MᶜLean is condemned, and will hang. I am honourably mentioned in a Grub ballad for not having contributed to his sentence. There are as many prints and pamphlets about him as about the earthquake. His profession grows no joke; I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday night, the clock had not struck eleven, when I heard a loud cry of ‘Stop thief!’ A highwayman had attacked a post-chaise in Piccadilly, within fifty yards of this house: the fellow was pursued, rode over the watchman, almost killed him, and escaped.
“Robbing is the only thing that goes on with any vivacity, though my friend Mr. MᶜLean is hanged. The first Sunday after his condemnation, three thousand people went to see him; he fainted away twice with the heat of his cell. You can’t conceive the ridiculous rage there is of going to Newgate.”
Even children were not exempt. A girl of fourteen, convicted for white-washing farthings to make them appear like sixpences, was condemned to be burnt, and was only reprieved when she was actually at the stake.