Reward Notice for William Brodie in Edinburgh

Background. William Brodie was a Scottish cabinet-maker, deacon of a trades guild, and Edinburgh city councillor who maintained a secret life as a burglar to support his mistresses and fund a gambling addiction. In 1786 he recruited a gang of three thieves: John Brown, a transported thief on the run; George Smith, a locksmith and grocer in the Cowgate; and Andrew Ainslie, a shoemaker.

The Reward Notice. A legacy discovery record states that the Edinburgh Evening Courant carried a notice on 14 March 1788 offering £200 for the capture of William Brodie, a town councillor doubling as a burglar. No supplied passage independently attests the notice, its date, or its amount. The paper was an Edinburgh broadsheet whose Evening Courant title began publication in 1718. The 5 March 1788 armed raid on the excise office in Chessels Court, on the Canongate, which Brodie organised, is the sourced event that led to his downfall; any connection between that raid and the recorded notice is an inference without cited support.

Aftermath. Brodie's public reputation remained high, and in the summer of 1788 he was chosen to sit on a jury in the High Court. The trial of Brodie and Smith began on 27 August 1788, and both were hanged at the Old Tolbooth, on the High Street, on 1 October 1788 before a crowd of 40,000.