Introduction
On the 13th of September 1750, in the midst of the crime wave which struck London following the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, James Maclaine was tried at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, for highway robbery. The son of an Irish Presbyterian minister turned “gentleman highwayman”, Maclaine was charged with the theft at gunpoint of two guineas (£2 and 2 shillings) and some clothes, including a coat, a pair of silk stockings, and a pair of silver shoe buckles, from Isaac Higden, a passenger on the Salisbury Flying Coach. Maclaine mounted a weak defence, and was convicted and sentenced to death. During the robbery, which took place between one and two o’clock in the morning, Maclaine and his accomplice James Plunket, both “armed and masked”, had ordered the passengers to get out of the coach and “threatened to blow [Higden’s] brains out” for concealing some of his valuables. At a time of significant public concern about the increasing fre...