Glencoe

by John Prebble

  In 1683 a special Commission was sent on a tour of the Highlands, to hold sederunts for the hearing of complaints, and to exact bonds of good behaviour. It was led by Lieutenant-General Sir William Drummond of Cromlix, a tired old man who had once served the Tsar as Governor of Smolensk, and who was popularly supposed to have introduced the thumb-screw as an instrument of judicial persuasion. There were eight others on his Commission, including some Highland lairds such as Robertson of Struan, Campbell of Lawers, and Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, the last apparently appointed on the belief that a poacher can make the best bailiff. They travelled slowly from Perth to Crieff, and in June they came to Achallader, a Campbell castle to the south of Rannoch Moor. They stayed there for two months, said Drummond, summoning MacIain and his neighbour who showed a willing ‘inclination to comply and concur with any means that could be proposed for suppressing theft and robbery’. Drummond did not say he was surprised to discover such a willingness in MacIain, a man generally believed to be the worst thief and robber in the Highlands, apart from the MacGregors. Perhaps the old soldier was pleased to see him there at all. More people had answered the Commission's summons, he said, ‘than it reasonably could have expected’. Alasdair MacDonald also had a certain rough charm, and his splendid carriage, his mane of white hair and his fierce moustache, may have moved General Drummond to nostalgic memories of Muscovy. Since MacIain sensibly realized that he could not ignore a Royal Commission that was sitting on his doorstep, he probably chose to disarm it. He invited it to Glencoe, ‘which was a very tedious journey’, wrote the Commission clerk unhappily. In deference to its chief, Clan Iain Abrach was hospitable, even no doubt to Campbell of Lawers whose cattle they had more than once stolen. ‘All the inhabitants of those parts,’ reported the clerk, ‘did meet the Lieutenant-General in their best order, and attended him during his abode there.’ And then the Commission went back to Edinburgh.

  Two years later, having done what it could to subdue the clans, the government appealed to them in its own defence. Argyll was back from Holland, and in arms. James, Duke of York, had succeeded his brother Charles without the unanimous approval of the English or the Scots, the majority of whom would have preferred a Protestant king. His bastard nephew, Monmouth, landed in Dorset to unseat him. Four hundred miles to the north, Argyll had already raised three thousand Campbells for the same purpose. Both men were too early by three years, they were defeated and executed. Monmouth died horribly, his neck butchered by five strokes of the axe, but Mac-Cailein-Mor walked calmly to the guillotine machine which the Scots called the Maiden.

  The army which the Privy Council had raised to oppose Argyll included levies from most of the clans with a long hatred of Campbells, particularly the Macleans and the MacDonalds, and when the Earl was dead the Marquis of Atholl took them into Argyllshire for the fruits of their loyalty to James II. The Atholl Raid was the greatest foray ever made. It was not a punitive campaign against rebels, but a time for collecting old debts. The clans came in three columns, from the north, the south and the east. They hanged some of Argyll's kinsmen on Gallows Hill, and would have suspended his sick son there too, had the Privy Council not stopped them. From the Earl's lands alone they took booty worth £60,000 sterling. They looted, burned and killed in all the glens, and although many of the Campbell lairds had actively supported the Crown against their chief, they too were pillaged. The raiders filled the Tolbooth of Inveraray and the common gaols of southern Argyll with their prisoners, whether these had or had not been out with the Earl. The Privy Council, concerned for the safety of the prisoners while the clans remained their gaolers, ordered them to be sent to the Lowlands. It was a brief mercy. With their ears cropped, most of them were later transported, and those who survived the voyage worked out their lives in bondage on the plantations of America.

  MacIain of Glencoe was with the raiders, coming to Inveraray for the second of the three times he was to visit it. He divided his clansmen into several parties for better profit. One, under his son Alasdair Og, went north-west with some Appin Stewarts to the green and ragged coast of Kilbride. There, according to a meticulous accounting made some years later in the hope of compensation, they took from the lands of Ivor Campbell of Asknish ‘the full and whole soumes* of the said lands, being forty-eight cows with their followers, three plough-horses and two mares with their followers, which were totally robbed away in full bulk’. Including what they later took from Archibald Campbell of Barbreck, their plunder in Kilbride was worth £868 Scots.

  John MacDonald, MacIain's heir, crossed Loch Fyne to Cowal. From Campbell of Carrick and his tenants he took a cow, three steers and two horses, all of high value and worth £388 Scots. From the house of John Campbell of Ardintennie he looted ‘pewter plates, whole glass windows, a great house Bible, Josephus his Works, Turk's Historie, Polybius, the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, with several other great volumes, together with several small grammar authors’. Ardintennie was obviously a scholar of some discernment, and he bitterly lamented the loss of these books, saying they were worth £100 Scots. Just as plainly, John MacDonald had a good taste for literature, unless his father's clansmen stole the books to make cartridges from their leaves.

  A small band of Glencoe men under Alexander MacDonald of Dalness raided Kenmoir and took cattle worth £104 Scots. From the land of Colin Campbell of Dressalch, Sheriff-clerk of Argyll, twelve cows worth £240 Scots were driven over to Glencoe, a loss which he may have remembered too well some years later. In both of these small forays the MacDonalds were helped by followers of the Laird of Lochnell, who was himself a Campbell and related by marriage to MacIain's family. His assault on men of his own name was not uncommon. The Atholl raid offered a rare opportunity for some Campbells to enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbours.

  One of the greatest lairds in Argyll was the Sheriff of the county, Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglas, who held sweet glens across Loch Fyne from Inveraray. The Glencoe men joined with Keppoch and Appin in plundering these. Together they stole 500 horses, 1,500 cows and over 2,000 sheep and goats. They burned or stole all goods and crops, houses and barns, boats and nets, and the total loss to Ardkinglas and his people was £63,630 18s. Scots.

  Old MacIain, selecting the sweetest fruit for himself, went down to Rosneath. This narrow peninsula on the Firth of Clyde was well stocked and well cultivated, fat with good living. From the property and tenants of Donald Campbell of Knockderrie, MacIain and those Appin men who went with him took milch-cows and beef-cattle, horses, sheep and goats, clothing, furnishing and household goods (including one copper kettle) to the value of £998 1s. 4d. Scots. What they could not take with them, they destroyed.

  Campbell of Knockderrie was astounded, and rightly so, for like MacIain he was ‘in His Majesty's service the whole time of the troubles’.

  ‘We scorn your usurper and his government’

  IT was the spring of 1689, in the beginning of May. Old MacIain was in his house at Carnoch, ‘the hospitable house,’ said a bard, ‘of wine-cups and panelled walls’. That winter, with his hunting-dogs at his feet and his valley still rich with the loot of Argyll, his leisure hours had been pleasantly passed with George Tooke's inspiring history of the expedition against Cadiz in 1625, or the Countess of Pembroke's edition of her brother's pastoral and chivalrous romance. But for rumours of war he would by now have gone with his women and his servants to his summer home in Gleann Leac na Muidhe, and his people would have been eating the custard cake of Beltane before driving their cattle to the shielings on the Black Mount. But Ewen Cameron of Lochiel had come over the ferry from Carness, leaving word with Stewart of Ballachulish that the clans were to gather in defence of James Stuart.

  That obstinate man's reign had lasted three years and ten months. In November his son-in-law, William of Orange, had landed at Torbay with 15,000 men, three divisions of English, Scots and Dutch, distinguished from each other by the white, blue and scarlet of their banners. They advanced on London, enlisting those s
ent to oppose them, and by Christmas Day James II was an exile in France. He went to Dublin in the New Year, raising an army of Irish Catholics, and sending an appeal to the loyal clans of the Highlands. Nine months before, when still a king at St James's, he had declared that some of them, particularly the MacDonalds, were thieves and robbers, murderers and assassins, and he had granted the Laird of Mackintosh Letters of Fire and Sword against them. He had further expressed his will that ‘all Our good subjects will concur in suppressing and rooting out the said barbarous and inhuman traitors, to their utmost power, which We will look upon as most acceptable service’. Now he asked the MacDonalds, and all others, to help him against ‘the oppression of antimonarchial and ill men’. This no doubt far more acceptable service would be rewarded by his special favour.

  John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee and butcher or hero according to the way one's religious notions went, had James Stuart's commission to raise the clans. This appointment must have quickened the blood of the MacDonalds, for they had memories of that other Graham, the Great Marquis of Montrose, who had led them against the Campbells forty years before. The cause he proposed was one easily understood by the clans. It was in defence of a Stuart and therefore a Scottish king. It was, or seemed to be, in defence of Episcopacy and the toleration of Catholics. It was, or seemed to be, in defence of their own way of life against Lowland authority. To Clan Donald it was all this and more. The Campbells, under the heir to the earldom of Argyll, had declared for William and the Protestant Revolution, and the leadership of the Gaels was once more in dispute.

  In the third week of May the Jacobite clans gathered in the Great Glen to meet Dundee, by the River Lochy on a low green field called Dalcomera. It was twenty-five miles from Glencoe and five from Lochiel's splendid fir-wood house at Achnacarry. Ewen Cameron was first on the field with his men. He was sixty years of age, but still with a healthy thirst for battle (in his youth he had bitten the throat from a Cromwellian officer with whom he grappled). Though his mother was a Glenorchy Campbell, and the seventh earl of Argyll had been his guardian, his attachment to the Stuarts was strong. The wardship of Argyll had prevented him from fighting with the Great Marquis, but it was said of him that ‘Montrose is ever in his mouth’. He was the archetype of a Highland chief, arrogant, emotional, stiff with pride and extravagantly brave.

  The weather was sweet and fresh, the spring sun strong, and it was a time to stir a man with thoughts of honour, battle and pillage. Dundee's young standard-bearer, James Philip of Almerieclose in Angus, was particularly affected by the brave colour and wild music, by the savage men who stood about him in arms like classical heroes. In later years he wrote an heroic poem in Latin, Panurgi Philocaballi Scoti Grameidos, describing the gathering and much of the campaign that followed. ‘We tell of warlike deed for time to come,’ he said hopefully, remembering the saffron shirts and the blue bonnets, the vivid tartan plaids and red feather plumes. In his poem all the clansmen are giants, and what he learned of their barbaric customs filled him with awe and admiration.

  These are they who under the frozen waters of the Roy, like the red-hot iron plunged into the flowing river, dip their new-born babes and teach their offspring in their tender years to despise the hailstorms and tempests of the North, and to harden them against wounds. The infant is plunged in the wave by a midwife, skilled to unfold the future of the babe in mystic mutterings. Suspended in the air, he is turned thrice round a fire, mid Stygian murmurs and words of incantation.

  One by one, the Lowlander Philip described the chiefs as he remembered them at Dalcomera, or as they came later to Dundee's army. There was Ewen Cameron of Lochiel at the head of a thousand men, riding a grey horse and wearing a cuirass of leather, his tartan hose gartered below the knee. There was the great Keppoch, Coll of the Cows, ‘whom love of plunder would impel to any crime’. Less than a year before, and with the Glencoe MacDonalds, he and his people had fought twelve hundred Mackintoshes in a bloody affray at Mulroy. He was wrapped in a tartan plaid, carried a great target studded with brass on his left arm, and walked at the head of eight hundred men. Black Alasdair MacDonald of Glengarry, heir to his frail and aged father the chief, was also richly dressed in fretted tartan, his plaid held by a brooch made from ‘the grinning head of some wild animal’. He brought with him his brother, his son, and the best men of his clan, ‘their brawny shanks enveloped in scarlet hose. Bristling with arms, afar they shone, their shields covering their bodies, their loins begirt with the terrible claymore’.

  From the western coast and the Hebrides came the Clanranald MacDonalds, ‘all whom Moidart and Knoidart nurse, all who embark from the black isles of Uist and Benbecula’. From Skye came Donald MacDonald of Sleat, ‘in the first flower of his years, with five hundred youthful warriors armed with sword and spear’. There were Macleans, brought by a fleet of long-boats from the isles of Mull, Coll and Tiree, led by the chief of Duart, a young and well-favoured boy of nineteen with an undying hatred of the Argyll Campbells. Beneath a yellow-crossed banner of blue came two hundred Stewarts from Appin, ‘huge men carrying huge arms, with rough bonnets on their heads’. The old chief in Appin was too ill to leave his home, and his son Robert, ‘so young that the yellow down covers not his cheek’, was hurrying from college to be with his people.

  MacIain brought a hundred men or more to Dalcomera, and was one of the first to arrive at the gathering. Small though his contribution was, his influence for the moment was strong. He was among friends, and although all except the other MacDonalds had at one time lost cattle or blood to Glencoe he was welcomed today as a man of honour and integrity, blameless in his conduct. He was the oldest chief there, tall and erect in his buff coat and tartan trews, a broadsword on his hip, a bullhide target on his back, and his blunderbuss in his hand. The spikes of his great moustache curled up to his ears, and his white hair fell to his shoulders. At one elbow was his son Alasdair Og, at the other his piper Big Henderson of the Chanters. And behind him, serving as his officers, were the tacksmen of Achtriachtan, Inverrigan, Laroch and Achnacone.

  Into his breathless account of the gathering Philip crowded portraits of all the chiefs of the Jacobite clans – MacNeills, MacLeods, MacLachlans, Grants, Frasers, and MacMillans – whether or no they were at Dalcomera. His enthusiasm, if not the tortured allegories of his prose, recreated a forgotten day when the grass was covered with steel and tartan, when the air was filled with the sound of pipes, and Graham of Dundee stood his horse before his army, with green leaves in his hat, a scarlet coat on his back, and a glass of wine in his hand. He drank a toast with the chiefs, said Philip, ‘the crash and clang of the pipes rose to the skies, and the flaming faggots lighten up the whole camp. Said the Graham, Generals, raise your standards…!’

  But not all was unity and comradely love. Before Dundee could get his touchy army to march, he had to give it its head in private matters. There were raids on neutral clans, and Keppoch went off to harry the Mackintoshes again. There were also family feuds to settle. The Camerons fell upon those Grants whose sympathies were with the Protestant Revolution, and they killed a Glengarry MacDonald who was married to a Grant and living with his wife's people. MacDonald of Glengarry demanded revenge, telling Dundee that by the arithmetic of his pride ‘One MacDonald is worth two Camerons’.

  Finally the army moved southward, skirmishing and manoeuvring to meet the forces which had been sent against it under Hugh Mackay of Scourie, a hard old veteran of the Dutch wars. On 27 July, both armies met in the Pass of Killiecrankie. From the brae of Craig Eallaich; half an hour before sunset, the clansmen came down in the old way upon Mackay's unnerved, unhappy troops. They came at the cry of ‘Claymore!’, throwing off their plaids and running half-naked, with heads down behind their targets, dirks in their left hands, broadswords in their right. Within range of Mackay's volleys they halted, discharged what fire-arms they had, threw the pieces away and then ran on to a hacking, stabbing slaughter before the redcoats could screw their bayonets
into the muzzles of their muskets. Mackay's men broke. Most of them were Lowland levies, and even his regular battalions had recently been made up with untrained recruits. Nobody had told them what to expect, screaming faces with black, open mouths, white swords that could whistle through an arm or a leg, or split a man's body from his scalp to his waist. Their volley-fire had killed six hundred Highlanders in the onset, but it had not stopped the charge. Though Mackay rallied four hundred men in a hasty retreat, the rest ran in panic into the dusk. ‘In the twinkling of an eye,’ said their general sourly, ‘our men as well as the enemy were out of sight, being got down pell mell to the river where our baggage stood.’

  Where the Glencoe men were at Killiecrankie is not known, perhaps in the centre with the Appin Stewarts, but more probably with Clanranald and Glengarry in Clan Donald's traditional place to the right. Iain Lom, the bard of Keppoch, saw it as a MacDonald victory, of course, a hard tussle for the seed of Conn, King William's forces brushed away like flies, and blood flowing in waves across the grass. But, he said, though they had driven away the enemy they were under a great load of sorrow. Dundee had been mortally wounded as he led his few horse against the centre of Mackay's line. The clansmen carried him away in their plaids and buried him in the old kirk of Blair. Not an enemy would have lived between Orkney and the Tweed, said Iain Lom, had not that bullet struck Dundee beneath the skirt of his coat.

  His death ended any real hope that James II could have had for an influential rising in the Highlands. An army of clans, for ever quarrelling like children, needed a superlative leader to knit and hold them together. Only a Graham, or a Stuart Prince, had the genius or the charm for this. Lochiel went home, and although he left his clan regiment behind under his son, it was plain that he now thought little of the campaign's success. Others went too, to take their booty home, or to foray in Breadalbane and Argyll. But the MacDonalds remained at Blair, to serve Dundee's successor Colonel Alexander Cannon, a man of little charm and meagre ability. Three weeks after Killiecrankie, the remaining chiefs addressed a swaggering letter to Mackay, ribaldly refusing his offers of pardon and indemnity. ‘That you may know the sentiments of men of Honour,’ they said,