A great fuss was made over this robbery, and the Privy Council took the matter up.  The chief robber was undoubtedly an officer, said M’Fadyen, and besides the large wart over his eye, there were other marks which made him noticeable—­for example, “the little finger of his left hand bowed towards his loof.”  Notwithstanding these tell-tale marks, neither robber was ever found; M’Fadyen and his hard-earned L150 had parted company for ever.  And though the Privy Council went so far as to “recommend Sir James Leslie, commander-in-chief for the time being of their Majesties’ forces within this kingdom, to cause make trial if there be any such person, either officer or soldier, amongst their Majesties’ forces, as the persons described,” no one was ever brought to book, either amongst the troops in Scotland, or amongst “the officers which are come over from Flanders to levy recruits.”

Not so fortunate as this scarlet-coated gentleman was Mr. Hudson, alias Hazlitt, who in 1770 stopped a post-chaise on Gateshead Fell, near Newcastle, and robbed the occupant, a lady who was returning to Newcastle from Durham.  A poor-spirited creature was this Hudson, a little London clerk gone wrong, and he trembled so excessively when robbing the lady that she plucked up spirit, and, protesting that half a guinea was all she had, got off with the loss of that modest sum, not even having her watch taken.  Despite his pistol, one cannot but feel that of the two the lady was the better man, and that, had it occurred to her, she might very readily have bundled the highwayman neck and crop into her chaise, and handed him over to the authorities.

His career, however, was almost as brief as if she had done so.  That same evening he robbed a mounted postman of his mail-bags—­having first ascertained that the postman was unarmed.  And here Hudson came to the end of his tether.  The postman gave the alarm, and the robber was arrested in Newcastle the following day, some of the property lost from the mail-bags still in his possession.  At his trial the following week at Durham Assizes he did not attempt to make any defence, but after conviction, by confessing where the booty was hid, he made what reparation lay in his power.  Poor wretch!  He had not even the posthumous satisfaction of going down to posterity as a bold, bad man, a hero of the road.  Not for him was it to emulate Jack Shepherd or Dick Turpin; he was of feebler clay, unfitted to excel in evil-doing.

After the barbarous fashion of the day, they hanged his body in chains on the scene of his poor, feebly-executed crimes; and there, on Gateshead Fell, through many a dreary winter’s night, fringed with loathly icicles, lashed by rains, battered by hail, dangled that pitiful, shrunken figure, creaking dolefully, as it swung to and fro in the bitter blasts that come howling in from a storm-tossed North Sea.  And far from acting as the warning intended to others, so little was this gruesome thing a “terror to evil-doers,” that the vicinity of the gibbet actually became a place noted for the frequency of crimes of violence.