Portrait of Gilder Roy in complete highland outfit. This is probably the same type of image that people would have associated with both Lachlan Mackintosh and Patrick Roy
Gilderoy was a bonny Boy When he went to the Glen, He had silk Stockings on his Legs, And Roses in his Shoon: No Woman then or woman kind Had ever greater Joy, Then we two when we lodg’d alone, I and my Gilderoy.
These lines, printed in 1701 but probably reflecting a much older tradition, refer to a highland cattle-robber named Patrick ‘Gilderoy’ MacGregor. At the time of his death in 1636, ‘Gilderoy’ was regarded simply as a criminal and bandit. Within a few decades, however, he had been transformed, memorialised in verse as a romantic, tragic anti-hero. Similar posthumous metamorphoses have been undergone by numerous other bandits throughout European history, with most of them emerging from the process as champions of the common folk daring to challenge the powers-that-be. But behind such myth-making lie very real people, many of them, like ‘Gilderoy’ or the border reiver Johnnie Armstrong (d.1530), similarly a subject of post mortem romantic balladry, responsible for horrific acts of violence. The golden age of this realworld banditry in Scotland was the late-17th and early-18th centuries, with most of it concentrated in Scotland’s very own ‘wild west’, the highlands. This article explores the world of the highland bandits, asking what they got up to, why, and how the authorities responded. It does so by means of a case-study, focusing on the Mackintosh- MacGregor gang, which operated in the north-east during the 1660s and became probably the most notorious group of its type in the entirety of the 17th century.