William Brodie
William Brodie (BROH-dee) was a notable figure from Edinburgh, Scotland, whose life encompassed both respectable and criminal elements. Born to a successful cabinetmaker and educated in classics, Brodie became a deacon of the Wrights and a member of the town council, using his position to advance his career in carpentry. However, he led a double life influenced by the character Macheath from *The Beggar's Opera*, engaging in gambling and maintaining multiple relationships. His criminal activities peaked in the late 1780s when he masterminded a series of thefts, including a significant bank robbery and various other heists, before being betrayed by a gang member.
Brodie's attempts to escape justice took him to London and then to Holland, but he was ultimately captured due to his connections with a forger. During his trial, he was convicted and sentenced to hang, but his body mysteriously disappeared after execution, leading to speculation and legend surrounding his fate. Brodie's life and duality left a lasting cultural impact, inspiring literary works such as Robert Louis Stevenson's *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* and contributing to his enduring legacy in Edinburgh, where a statue commemorates both his public persona and his criminal legacy.
Subject Terms
William Brodie
Scottish carpenter, businessman, and burglar
- Born: September 28, 1741
- Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
- Died: October 1, 1788
- Place of death: Edinburgh, Scotland
Major offenses: Theft attended with housebreaking
Active: August, 1786-March 8, 1788
Locale: Edinburgh, Scotland
Sentence: Death by hanging
Early Life
The firstborn son of a prosperous Edinburgh cabinetmaker and descendant of a landed family from northern Scotland, William Brodie (BROH-dee) studied classics at the high school of Edinburgh before following his father’s trade, although he romantically desired a career at sea. In 1781, when the older Brodie suffered a paralysis, William succeeded him as deacon of the Wrights (president of Edinburgh’s guild of carpenters; not an ecclesiastical title) and member of the town council, whose monopoly on public building contracts advanced young Brodie’s profession. Inspired by Macheath, the dashing highwayman of John Gay’s popular The Beggar’s Opera (pr., pb. 1728), Brodie kept two separate mistresses and dressed like a dandy in satin breeches and silk stockings. He was a gambler with his own cockfighting flock, and he frequented an irreverent mock-Masonic club that nicknamed him Sir Lluyd (pronounced “lewd”).
Criminal Career
In August, 1786, using a counterfeit key, Brodie and three accomplices stole œ800 from a bank in the Royal Exchange, then whimsically returned œ250 to the town council chambers. That autumn, they robbed two goldsmiths and a jeweler. In 1787, they stole more than three hundred pounds of tea from a grocer and deposited packages of tea along the road back to Edinburgh. As winter approached, they robbed a shoemaker’s shop and a silk shop and stole Edinburgh University’s silver mace. Exasperated, the Home Department at Whitehall offered King George’s full pardon to any gang member who betrayed his fellows.
In March, Brodie and his fellow thieves broke into the Excise Office but found only petty cash. Two days later, John Brown, a gang member already evading deportation for crimes in England, seized the pardon by confessing to the sheriff-clerk. Brodie fled to London, and the sheriff-clerk offered two hundred pounds as reward for his capture.
Next, calling himself John Dixon, Brodie sailed to Holland. He entrusted letters to Edinburgh friends to the care of a Scottish tobacconist, who delivered them to the sheriff-clerk instead. Brodie planned to escape to the United States, but in Amsterdam he befriended a man who forged Scottish bank notes; there, a London public office clerk arrested him.
Legal Action and Outcome
At Brodie’s trial for the bungled attempt on the Excise Office, his advocate (attorney) objected to Brown’s testimony as an inadmissible report of a convicted felon. However, the presiding justice overruled the objection, declaring that the king’s pardon, which removed all past convictions, made Brown’s word legitimate. The jury voted conviction, and the justice sentenced Brodie to hang.
Awaiting execution on the gibbet (gallows) that he had helped design, Brodie acted cheerful, secretly hoping to thwart the noose with a steel collar and prompt removal of his body from the gallows. Though the plan evidently failed, those who later opened Brodie’s unmarked grave found it empty.
Impact
William Brodie became legendary in Edinburgh, where, in the twenty-first century, his statue continues to stand on the High Street across from a large pub sign which depicts him as both the elegant town councilman and a masked thief. Robert Louis Stevenson adapted Brodie’s double life into his somber science-fiction thriller The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Muriel Spark named her defiant, flamboyant protagonist after Brodie’s sister.
Bibliography
Edwards, Owen Dudley. “Stevenson, Jekyll, Hyde, and All the Deacon Brodies.” Folio 1 (2000): 9-12. Asserts that it was not the historical Brodie but Stevenson’s tempestuous collaboration with William Ernest Henley on a melodrama that inspired his subsequent novella.
Gibson, John S. Deacon Brodie: Father to Jekyll and Hyde. Edinburgh, Scotland: Paul Harris, 1977. Lively account of Brodie’s life and its transformation into popular legend.
McNally, Raymond T., and Radu R. Florescu. In Search of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000. Brief Brodie biography and comprehensive annotated bibliography of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the Jekyll and Hyde story.