In his compendium of criminal chronicles published in 1825, George Borrow attributes to Sawney Cunningham a sequence of enormities which the present record cannot corroborate by independent judicial documents. In that narrative, the first detailed murder is not the one that brought him to the gallows: Hamilton, a Glasgow advocate, was allegedly struck down in the Cunninghams' own bedchamber, whither Sawney’s wife had lured him. The husband lay in wait behind a door, poised to strike. The corpse thereafter passed from hand to hand; six footpads were condemned in his stead, and Cunningham had leisure enough to flee Glasgow.
According to the chronicler, his youth afforded no palliation: his parents had provided him with a proper education and a respectable patrimony. He married the daughter of a family friend, who brought him an annuity of one hundred and forty pounds. Yet Cunningham squandered both her dowry and his own substance in taverns. He pledged his wife's apparel and goods, meeting her lamentations with oaths and abuse. Both families deliberated upon severing the match, but the young wife refused to depart. This circumstance, upon which the old moralising account insists, heralded a devotion that was soon to prove a snare.
A Glasgow lawyer named Hamilton beset her with dishonourable advances. One evening, the woman disclosed the matter to her husband, professing a desire to be delivered from his importunities. Borrow turns their colloquy into a scene of conjugal depravity: Cunningham counselled her to let Hamilton believe she would yield, in return for gold. The advocate, he writes, promised a purse of one hundred pounds. The assignation was first appointed beneath a church porch, then removed to the Cunninghams' house. The wife led him to believe her husband had departed for eight days; in truth, he lay concealed within the chamber.
Hamilton entered and delivered two purses into the woman's hands. Thereupon Cunningham burst from his hiding place and felled him with a bludgeon. Stripping the corpse of its apparel, he lifted it and carried it through a postern gate toward the advocate’s own dwelling. In the privy of that house, he propped the dead man in such posture as to suggest he had perished of an apoplexy. Borrow depicts the wife as seized with horror at her husband's deed; nothing in the narrative suggests she had foreseen a slaughter.
A friend of Hamilton, who dwelt under his roof, had obtained wind of the tryst. Awakened in the dead of night by a pressing necessity, he went down to the privy and found Hamilton seated there. He lingered awhile, imagining his companion had retired thither on a like errand. Touching him, he saw the body tumble forward, and knew that Hamilton was dead. Apprehensive that suspicion would light upon himself, he bore the corpse to the Cunninghams' door, set it down, and fled. At daybreak, the wife unlatched the door, and the body fell into the entryway. She ran upstairs to rouse her husband, who at first fancied Hamilton had returned alive. Dressing in haste, he seized the body once more, casting about for a place of concealment.
In the street, Cunningham encountered six thieves who had just stolen two great sides of bacon. He watched them stow their sack in a cellar, and then knock up a vintner renowned for his good wine. Lacking coin, the rogues offered their bacon in settlement of the score. One of their number went back to fetch the sack. Its weight astonished him: had the bacon multiplied in the dark? Upon its being opened, the taverner recognized Hamilton. Borrow relates that the six thieves were straightway apprehended, tried, and executed. The vintner, seeing them offer to fly, had raised the hue and cry of murder; his household sprang from their beds, and the watch appeared at the door to ascertain the cause of the tumult. The men lay that night in the lock-up before being committed to the main gaol and brought to the bar. Cunningham had exchanged the body for the spoil, shifting the bloody guilt upon their heads.
Cunningham did not pause. The sum wrested from Hamilton was soon spent; he betook himself to the highway, and, in Borrow’s relation, dispatched without pity those who offered resistance. At Edinburgh, he joined a band of marauders and assumed their command. He was wont to pass himself off to travellers as a fellow wayfarer, inviting them to sup, paying their reckoning, and then causing the company to be set upon on their journey home. His confederates would strip him alongside the rest, sufficiently to maintain the deceit; on the morrow, he would recover his horse and take his portion of the booty. Thus the benefactor and the bandit were one and the same in the eyes of his dupes, who fancied they had met with a chivalrous stranger.
On a certain day, three citizens were compelled to surrender their horses and purses to Cunningham and two associates. Accosting the best-attired of the three, he brazenly asserted that the beast belonged to him, that it had been stolen from his stable, and that his blade should do him right if it were not instantly restored. His comrades laid the like pretext upon the other travellers. The three victims ultimately dismounted and delivered their gold. Cunningham pursued his depredations on the roads, passing from feigned civility to menaces; the spoil thus acquired purchased only a brief respite before some fresh enterprise.
Following his Edinburgh exploits, he returned to dwell for a time with his wife. He put on an appearance of reformed conduct, plausible enough to quiet certain misgivings. She, however, could place no faith in this conversion: the robberies and blood of which she was cognisant weighed heavier than all the vows of the marriage bed. Borrow maintains that Cunningham affected this penitence solely that his neighbours might cease to suspect him, leaving him free to pursue his courses. This lull was therefore no return to domestic peace, but a fresh disguise, rendered serviceable by the town’s restored confidence.
In later days, Cunningham sent for his old nurse, who in his infancy had prophesied that he would amass great riches. Conceiving that his Edinburgh gains had fulfilled the prediction, he resolved to reward her. Disguised, he escorted her to an astrologer, feigning that they came to consult the stars on his own behalf. In a long, mocking discourse, he made light of his thefts and misdeeds, and inquired whether the heavens could foretell his end. The astrologer, discerning who he was, prophesied that he should hang within the month, after having murdered his uncle, William Bean. The nurse fell weeping upon his neck; Cunningham scoffed at the augury, and dismissed it from his thoughts.
Nevertheless, he repaired to the house of Bean, who received him kindly and reasoned with him at length concerning his loose life. The old man was aware of the rumours touching Hamilton and the robberies; he reminded him that his wife had remained faithful, and declared he had wished to leave him his estate, had he but mended his ways. He spoke also of the honour of their house, unstained for centuries, and of the dark charge of murder laid to Sawney’s name. Borrow adds that, for want of male issue, the lands were to devolve upon Cunningham at his uncle’s death: the prospect of immediate possession furnished the guest with a ready motive. Borrow asserts that Cunningham shed a few tears, counterfeiting true remorse. The exhortation ended, he stabbed his uncle to the heart, dispatched the servant-maid who ran to his aid, ransacked the house for its plate, and set it on fire. An unusual smoke alerted the neighbours; gathering to quench the flames, they forced the door and discovered the two corpses within.
Cunningham had vanished. According to Borrow, certain thieves then in ward, who were privy to a portion of his crimes, impeached him. He was cast into the Tolbooth, convicted upon the depositions exhibited against him, and hanged at Leith on the twelfth day of April, 1635. The narrator portrays him going to the tree without outward dread, true to the last to that posture of hardened defiance he had fashioned for himself.