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 traitressPeg Cunningham was her nameless 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 bedchamber,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 drawingroom 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 thirtyseven 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.
