by John Prebble
In a short feud with the people of Appin the Glencoe men are said to have dirked and shot more Stewarts than any other clan, and included in the number was a surprised burgess of Inverness. When a large raiding party of MacDonalds relieved Stewart of Strathgarry of all the cattle he pastured on eastern Rannoch, killing some of his clansmen as well, a meeting of Stewart chiefs was called – Appin, Athole and Balquhidder, and they entered into a written bond to avenge the death of their clansmen and the rape of their property. They asked Edinburgh for Letters of Fire and Sword against Glencoe, reinforcing the request in the customary way by sending one of the widows of the slaughtered men, with her husband's bloody shirt.
The Letters came with understandable promptness, and the Stewarts gathered on Loch Levenside by the mouth of Glencoe. It was high summmer, and the MacDonalds were away in the shielings of Rannoch and the Black Mount. The Stewarts marched unmolested up the length of Glencoe, surrounded the shielings, and fell upon Clan Iain with sword, dirk, axe and matchlock. Some versions of the story say that the battle took place by Carnoch, and that the Stewarts never entered Glencoe, but wherever it occurred there is general agreement on the result: the MacDonalds lost. The Stewarts lopped off the heads of MacIain and his brother (neither of whom had survived the fight), put them in a barrel and sent them south to the Privy Council on the back of a simple-minded messenger. He stopped on the way to give Stewart of Strathgarry's lady a sudden and stunning sight of his burden, and he entertained himself now and then by knocking the heads together in the barrel and crying out ‘Why are you making such a noise in there? Aren't you friends?’
In the manner of things this should have made any reconciliation between Glencoe and Appin impossible, but by the middle of the century they were amiable friends and firm allies. Their common fear of Clan Campbell was stronger than their own quarrels.
In 1635 the Privy Council got its hands on the animate head, trunk and limbs of a MacIain – Red Alasdair, the eleventh Chief. He was accused of raiding far across country into Aberdeenshire, burning, robbing and killing in the lands of the Crichtons. The foray was the work of broken men who had brought MacIain their calp, though he was indeed responsible under the General Band, and perhaps it was this that he went south to explain, having more faith in the moderate temper of the Council than his predecessors. He was lodged comfortably enough in Edinburgh, and had the Council's permission to travel a Sabbath day's journey beyond the capital, on promise to return. But in July, having exhausted their Lordships' patience, no doubt, he was thrown into the Tolbooth and there he stayed until he promised to obey the relevant Acts against his like.
To the south-east of Glencoe, twenty miles across the bogs and black pools of Rannoch, was the district of Breadalbane where the Campbell lairds of Glenorchy, Glenlyon and Lawers enjoyed the valleys and meadows that had once been Clan Gregor's. The Glencoe men were always hungry for the rich meat of Breadalbane, but never felt strong enough to lift it on their own. They raided in company with the MacDonalds of Keppoch, and the records of the Privy Council refer to them both as ‘the Lochaber men’, and this pejoratively. The first great raid which Glencoe and Keppoch made upon Breadalbane was a terrible failure, and one which they never forgot. Mad Colin Campbell, the Laird of Glenlyon, captured thirty-six of them, more than half the party, and hanged them in rows outside his castle of Meggernie. He was as independent a spirit as any MacIain, and as reluctant to acknowledge any authority but his own. When he was asked by the Privy Council if he would put his hand to a deed swearing that he had executed the MacDonalds in defiance of proper justice, he said that he would not only put his hand on the paper but his foot as well.
The next time the Lochaber men came to Glenlyon, in the summer of 1583, it was with more cunning and success. They came, said Mad Colin in his complaint to the Council,
… with bow, quiver and other weapons invasive, upon the 24th of June last by the break of day, and masterfully reft, spulzied and took away from the said complainer and his servants, four score head of kye, eleven horses and mares, together with the whole insight and plenishings of their houses; and also not satisfied with the said oppression committed by them as said is, struck and dang the women of the said lands and cutted the hair of their heads.
When the great wars between King and Parliament spread to the Highlands in 1644, Clan Donald fought for the King, not so much out of a selfless loyalty to the Stuarts (whose attitude to the Gaelic way of life was rarely sympathetic and frequently brutal), as from the belief that the struggle for the leadership of the Gael between them and the Campbells might here be finally settled in their favour. The Glencoe men, with others of their name, joined the clan army which the Marquis of Montrose raised for Charles I against the English Parliament's allies in Scotland. The campaigns which Montrose conducted in the mountains and the Lowlands appealed to the clans. He was one of the most skilful and intelligent of the world's great captains, and he used the Highlanders in the only way they could be effectively employed, in the sudden shock of the charge.
It was a war of brilliant forced marches, of clan banners above the tartan of belted plaids, of pipes ranting in the rain, and sunlight like watered silver on the blades of terrible swords. When the clans were put to the fight in the only way they knew, they were always victorious. It would be a century before Lowland and English troops found the courage and learnt the simple skill to stand against the rush of screaming, half-naked Highlanders. The ancient way of clan fighting, said Martin Martin of Skye, was by set battles,
... and for arms some had broad, two-handed swords and headpieces, and others bows and arrows. When all their arrows were spent they attacked one another sword in hand. Since the invention of guns they are very early accustomed to use them, and carry their pieces with them wherever they go. They likewise learn to handle the broadsword and target. The chief of each tribe advances with his followers within shot of the enemy, and having first laid aside their upper garments, and after one general discharge, they attack them sword in hand, having their target on their left hand, which soon brings the matter to an issue and verifies the observations made of them by our historians: ut mors cito, aut victoria laeta.
The Glencoe men joined Montrose after his raid on Inveraray in December, 1644, when clansmen who had old and unhealed reasons for hating Clan Campbell exulted in the streets of its hitherto inaccessible capital. Returning northward, Montrose's army came by Glencoe. A MacIain guided it over The Devil's Staircase and the high passes to Kilcumein on Loch Ness. Hearing that the Earl of Argyll was in pursuit with three thousand Campbells, Montrose turned southwards in a brilliant flanking march over the mountains and met them at Inverlochy. He was outnumbered two to one, but his MacDonalds – from Antrim, Keppoch, Glencoe and Glengarry – fell upon the Campbells in fury, driving them into Loch Linnhe or over the drove road to Ballachulish. The fields at Inverlochy, said Iain Lom the splendid-tongued bard of Keppoch, were thereafter not manured by the dung of sheep or goats but by the congealed blood of Clan Diarmaid. He asked for damnation if he felt any pity for the Campbells, their children, or their lamenting women. In his song there was no mention of Montrose. Victory was won by the blue, well-balanced swords of Clan Donald.
It was a time for scourging the Campbells. In December 1645, the MacDonalds of Keppoch and Glencoe raided Breadalbane again, this time with the MacNabs and MacGregors. They killed every man they found in arms, burned houses and corn--stacks, lifted the cattle, and carried away the baptismal font from the Kirk of Kenmore. It was said that one house only was left standing on the south shore of Loch Tay, and this because it was hidden by trees. When the Kirk Session of Kenmore met to consider a visitation like unto the plagues of Egypt it reported that there were ‘many poor people who were burned and spoiled and have nothing to live on’. The Laird of Glenorchy had to borrow great sums, £5,000 from Parliament, to buy food and seed-corn for his people that spring.
Montrose, realizing that the King's cause could only be harmed if the cl
ans used it for the settlement of their private grievances, gave the lairds of Breadalbane his word that their lands would in future be free from pillage. But a promise made by their captain was not one which the Lochaber men felt bound to keep when it ran counter to their pride and their ever-eager hunger. Early in June 1646, some young men of Glencoe and Keppoch were on their way home from a foray into Stirlingshire, under the leadership of Angus Og, son of the Chief of Keppoch. They heard that Campbell of Glenorchy was celebrating the marriage of his daughter to a laird of Clan Menzies, and that all the gentry of Breadalbane were gathered at Finlarig Castle on Loch Tay, with ‘whisky in their heads’. So they came down like locusts and were driving their stolen cattle over the brae of Sron a'Chlachain, a big hill to the west of Finlarig, before the Campbells got news of them. Whisky in their heads or not, the Breadalbane gentry ran out of Finlarig with swords in their hands.
Below the knob of Sron a'Chlachain, the hill of stones, the MacDonalds turned, swinging their swords and crying their slogans as they ran down the slope. Thirty-six Campbells were killed and twenty-one were wounded, in less than ten minutes, and among the dead were fifteen cadets of the house of Glenorchy. Big Archibald MacPhail was there, taking time before he charged to make a brief call upon Heaven. If God, he said, could not join the MacDonalds at this time would He please stay out of the fight altogether and ‘let it be between ourselves and the carles’. He then ran on, stringing his bow and firing his arrows into the Campbells as they struggled up the heather. When they broke he followed them down to the lochside, and boasted afterwards that he shot an arrow into the groin of the Menzies bridegroom, thus ending any hope the gentleman might have had of siring an heir that evening.
But the MacDonald losses were also heavy. The fight was made in the shallow Corrie of the Bannocks, and the stream that ran crimson from it was known thereafter as The Bloody Burn. Carrying their wounded on stretchers made from withes, the Lochaber men hurried up Glen Lyon toward Rannoch. Another party of Campbells set out after them, and there followed a straggling, running fight in which Menzies of Culdares (not, it would seem, too much hindered by Big Archibald's arrow) cut down young Angus of Keppoch. The boy was carried to ‘the little house of Coire Charmaig’ and there he died, while Iain Lom wept beside him, and compared himself in his grief to a tree stripped of its bark without sap and without fruit.
In 1655 Clan lain again raided Breadalbane in strength with their friends from Keppoch. They burned byres and lifted cattle from the pastures about the castle of Cashlie, and then they turned away quickly for Rannoch. Swept up with them in the retreat was a girl called MacNee who had been tending the milch cows. When the raiders reached Glen Meran, the narrow pass to the safety of the Moor, she broke the legs of some of the calves and delayed the MacDonalds long enough for the pursuing Campbells to come up with them. There was a bloody little struggle on the shore of Loch Lyon in which the girl was killed, but she had saved some of her people's cattle, and the Lochaber men went back over Rannoch with less booty than they had taken from Cashlie. Birth and death, victory and defeat, lesser men as well as the great, all found their way into Highland song, and although the girl called MacNee had died in the stamping, slashing fight by Glen Meran she lived on for two centuries in an air which Breadalbane women sang to their children. The words were meant to be hers – Crodh Chailean mo cridhe, crodh lain mo ghaoil…
Colin's cows of my heart, John's cows are so dear,
They'll give milk on the heather with nothing to fear.
Colin's cows of my heart, Colin's cows of my love,
Like the wing of a moor-hen, brown-speckled above.
The chief of Glencoe was now the red-haired giant Alasdair, twelfth of the name MacIain. And the laird of the valley from which his people had taken Colin's cows was Robert Campbell of Glenlyon.
‘The cruelty of thieves, sorners, and broken men’
THEY were by nature reivers and cattle-lifters. If the prize were attractive enough, they could be mercenaries too. The only people they would never rob or fight belonged to Clan Donald. On at least two occasions they helped Clan Campbell in its little wars of aggrandizement, and if their services at these times were demanded as a feudal right by the houses of Argyll and Glenorchy, the Glencoe men became the condottieri of their traditional enemies from a simple desire for pillage and gain. It is unlikely that they argued the ethical point among themselves, for what they were willing to do on behalf of the Campbells today they were as ready to do against them tomorrow.
In 1563 they were used by the Laird of Glenorchy to clear eastern Rannoch of some rebellious remnants of Clan Gregor. They delivered the leader of the MacGregors to Glenorchy, saw his head lopped from his body, and heard his wife cry out that only by drinking a cup of her husband's blood could she endure her terrible grief. In 1591 they were employed by the seventh Earl of Argyll in his family's calculated feud with the Ogilvies of Glenisla. The cause of the feud was as melodramatic as the Campbell's motives in pursuing it were unsentimentally practical. A Campbell gentleman attending an Ogilvy wedding got drunk enough to insult the bride and dirk her protesting father. He was disarmed and tolerantly kicked beyond the bounds of Ogilvy land. The Campbells, coveting Glenisla, decided to avenge what they declared to be an offence against their house, but they had no intention of using their own clansmen. They called out the men of Glencoe and Keppoch, with any others willing to join, and unleashed five hundred raiders upon the Ogilvies. So violent was this foray, Lord Ogilvy complained to the Privy Council, that he was not ‘able to resist, but with great difficulty and sore advertisement he, his wife, and his bairns escaped’.
Cutting MacGregor throats for Campbell paymasters did not prevent the Glencoe men from becoming Clan Gregor's allies in the next generation, and here too, if indirectly, they were serving the Campbells. The circumstances beg the mind's patience for understanding. The seventh Earl of Argyll, known to all as Archibald the Grim, was quarrelling now with the Colquhouns of Luss, and he invited the MacGregors to ‘commit both hership and slaughter’ upon them. Clan Gregor gladly welcomed any great man's protection, for since the General Band no landowner had wanted its troublesome presence. Alasdair MacGregor of Glenstrae, with his kinsmen and followers, went down to the rich Colquhoun lands between Loch Lomond and Loch Long and drove off 420 cows, 400 sheep and goats, and 100 horses. They also killed some men, of course. Since the seventh Earl of Argyll was Justice-General of Scotland, and therefore hard to picture in the dual role of judge and defendant, Colquhoun of Luss wisely decided to ignore the Campbells' part in the raid. He sent the customary bloody shirt to Edinburgh and asked for Letters of Fire and Sword against Clan Gregor.
But Alasdair of Glenstrae was a rare man, who took the advantage before his opponent had the wit to seize it, and he prepared to hit the Laird of Luss before he was himself harried. He gathered four hundred men ‘arrayed in arms, with halberts, pole-axes, two-handed swords, bows and arrows and other weapons’. Among them were some Camerons, Campbells, and an eager detachment of MacDonalds from Glencoe. They left the braes of Balquhidder in the bitter February weather of 1603, crossed Loch Lomond from Glen Arklet to the Pass of Arrochar, and swung down the eastern shore of Loch Long to come up on the rear of the Colquhouns. The Laird of Luss had an army of 500 foot and 300 horse, formed from his own people, from Buchanan levies, and from the alarmed townsmen of Dumbarton. In open country his cavalry could have ridden down the Highlanders with ease, but he placed them and his foot across the marshy floor of Glen Fruin. His Lowland infantry broke at once before the charge of the clans, his horses were hamstrung and slaughtered in the bogs. MacGregors, Campbells, Camerons and MacDonalds of Glencoe ran over the dead to fire every house and stack in the lands of Luss, and to take their share of two thousand head of cattle, sheep, goats and horses.
Forty prisoners were left behind in the charge of a Glencoe man called Allan Og MacIntuach, and he saw no profit in this work when others were enjoying themselves. So he cut the forty th
roats of the Colquhouns and rejoined his kinsmen. When Alasdair of Glenstrae asked him where the prisoners were, he was momentarily uncertain about the propriety of their disposal. He held out his bloody dirk. ‘Ask that,’ he said, ‘and God help me!’ The Privy Council was more outraged by Allan Og than by all the ‘odious, barbarous and detestable butchery and slaughter committed by Clan Gregor upon His Majesty's good subjects at Glen Fruin’. It ordered his arrest but it was six years before anyone was able to put a rope about his neck. ‘In the whole course of his by-past life,’ said the Privy Council, dispatching him to further and higher judgement, ‘he has so exercised himself in theft, murder, reif and oppression, and he is most unworthy to be suffered any longer to breathe the air of this country.’
For his work in suppressing disorder in the Highlands (which was to include the near-extermination of his former bully-boys, the MacGregors), the Crown gave the seventh Earl of Argyll all the lands in Kintyre. Since these were taken from Clan Donald, the men of Glencoe were reminded of old rivalries and older loyalties, and thereafter drew no blood and robbed no byres for any Campbell.
