On the night of the 17th of January, therefore, Brodie, Smith, and Ainslie were at Clark’s, according to their own account, “innocently amusing themselves with a game of dice over a glass of punch,” when their privacy was intruded upon by John Hamilton, a master chimney-sweep in Portsburgh, who insisted on joining them at play. This person was, within a surprisingly short time, relieved by the trio of “five guinea notes, two half guineas in gold, and six shillings in silver,” and being apparently a bad loser, he promptly seized the dice, which, on examination, were found to be “loaded, or false dice, filled at one end or corner with lead.” Here was a pretty scandal for the respectable Deacon to be mixed up in! Outraged innocence was of no avail—the dice spoke for themselves.
But the master sweep’s blood was up, and the matter was not allowed to end there. Hamilton forthwith presented to the magistrates of Edinburgh a petition and complaint against Brodie, Smith, and Ainslie, setting forth his meeting with them at Clark’s, and his being invited to join them in a friendly game, with the result above narrated. The petitioner concluded with praying for a warrant to apprehend and incarcerate the said persons until they should repeat the sum of which he had been so defrauded, and pay a sum over and above in name of damages and expenses. Answers were lodged for Brodie, and separate answers for Smith and Ainslie, in which it was stated that if false dice were used it was unknown to the defenders, as the dice they played with belonged to the house; that Brodie had only gained seven and sixpence; and that “the petitioner himself was a noted adept in the science of gambling, and it was not very credible that he would have allowed himself to be imposed upon in the manner he had alleged.”
Hamilton’s replies to these answers are conceived in a fine vein of irony—“Mr. Brodie knows nothing of such vile tricks—not he! He never made them his study—not he! Mr. Brodie never haunted night houses, where nothing but the blackest and vilest arts were practised to catch a pigeon, nor ever was accessory, either by himself or others in his combination, to behold the poor young creature plucked alive, and not one feather left upon its wings—not he, indeed! He never was accessory to see or be concerned in fleecing the ignorant, the thoughtless, the young, and the unwary, nor ever made it his study, his anxious study, with unwearied concern, at midnight hours, to haunt the rooms where he thought of meeting with the company from which there was a possibility of fetching from a scurvy sixpence to a hundred guineas—not he, indeed! He is unacquainted altogether either with packing or shuffling a set of cards—he is, indeed!” This, one would think, must have been painful reading for the Deacon’s fellow-Councillors; but nothing further appears to have been done in the matter, and the affair blew over without damaging the worthy man’s repute: a singular comment on the moral standard of the time.
In spite of the consummate skill with which Deacon Brodie had hitherto sustained his double character, one is hardly prepared, in view of his manner of life, to find him figuring in a criminal trial in any other capacity than that of the central figure. Strange as it may seem, however, his next public appearance was in the jury-box of the High Court of Justiciary, when, on 4th February, 1788, Allan M‘Farlane, officer of Excise, and Richard Firmin, soldier in the 39th Regiment of Foot, were placed at the bar charged with the murder of Dougald Fergusson, ferryman at Dunoon, Argyllshire.
The facts brought out at the trial were, briefly, as follows:—A party of Excise officers, accompanied by some soldiers, had, in the previous July, gone to Dunoon and seized certain illicit stills, which they put on board their boat. Fergusson, a zealous freetrader, had rung the kirk bell, assembled a mob, who pelted the officers with stones, and, boarding the boat, had knocked down the two boatmen and attempted to carry off the stills. In these circumstances, M‘Farlane ordered Firmin to fire, which he did, killing Fergusson on the spot. The charge against Firmin was abandoned by the Lord Advocate in his address, as it was proved that he had only acted under orders; and the point for the jury to consider was whether M‘Farlane was justified in giving the order to fire in self-defence, in view of the danger to which the Excise party were exposed from the hostile mob behind them, had Fergusson succeeded in carrying off the boat. The jury unanimously found both panels not guilty.
Thus did the Deacon, at the very time when all Edinburgh trembled at his depredations and the authorities were straining
every nerve to discover the guilty author, calmly officiate upon a jury to judge of the crimes of others. But, although he may have laughed in his sleeve at this ironical situation—for he had a pretty wit, and doubtless relished the humour of it keenly—fate had prepared for him one yet more dramatic. A few months later he himself would sit in that dock on trial for his life, the same counsel would conduct the prosecution, the same judges occupy the bench; but the verdict would be a different one, and the sentence to follow upon it, death.
Undisturbed by any shadow of coming disaster, and emboldened by his previous successes, Deacon Brodie now decided to carry out a robbery upon a grander scale than any he had previously attempted, the daring and danger of which were commensurate with the advantages to be gained. The General Excise Office for Scotland was at that period kept in a large mansion, enclosed by a parapet wall and iron railing, situated in Chessel’s Court, Canongate. The building had formerly been occupied as a dwelling-house, and was by no means a secure repository for the great sums of money which in those days were collected there from all parts of the country. The Deacon, in his professional capacity, was familiar with the arrangements of the office, his men having at various times executed repairs on the premises. A connection of his, Mr. Corbett, of Stirling, too, was in the habit of coming to Edinburgh frequently on Excise business, and Brodie took the opportunity of accompanying him upon these occasions with a view to studying how the land lay.
Having learned all that was necessary for his purpose, the Deacon went one day to the office with Smith, on pretence of inquiring for Mr. Corbett, and while he thus engaged the attention of the cashier, Smith took an impression in putty of the key of the outer door, which, according to the prevailing ingenuous custom, was hung upon a nail inside it. From this Brodie prepared a drawing of the wards, and Smith filed a key of similar pattern. The next step was to ascertain the habits of the watchman who guarded the premises, and for this purpose Ainslie—whose department seems to have been scouting—was deputed to observe the office on several successive nights. He found that it was usually closed for the day at eight o’clock; that when all the clerks had left the outer door was locked, and the key taken to Mr. Dundas, “the housekeeper,” who lived in the court, and that the night watchman did not come on duty until ten o’clock. The Excise Office was thus left wholly unguarded between the hours of eight and ten at night.
Smith and Brown had already tried the efficiency of the new key, which readily opened the outer door, but the lock of the inner door to the cashier’s room refused to yield to their persuasive methods. Smith was of opinion that its resistance could only be overcome by violence, observing that the coulter of a plough would be a suitable instrument for that purpose. Accordingly, on the afternoon of Friday, 28th February, Ainslie and Brown repaired to Duddingston as a likely spot for picking up such an implement. Having refreshed themselves after their walk with a bottle of porter at a house in the village, they entered a field in the neighbourhood, where they had seen a man ploughing, and, when his back was turned, removed the coulter of the plough and two iron wedges, which on their way home by the King’s Park they hid in Salisbury Crags. Unfortunately for themselves and Smith, they were accompanied upon this country ramble by a black dog, belonging to the latter, named “Rodney,” which, curiously enough, was at a later stage to bear testimony against its master before the Sheriff.
On Tuesday, 4th March, a final consultation was held by the four desperadoes at Smith’s house in the Cowgate to arrange the details of the attack upon the Excise Office, which was fixed for the following night, when, as they had ascertained, it was the turn of an old man, who watched night about with the other porter, to be on guard. According to Smith’s second declaration, “it was concerted by Brodie, in case of interruption by the man coming into the office before the business was accomplished, to conceal themselves quietly until he was gone to rest, and then