Glencoe

by John Prebble

  Since February it had been known that Thomas Buchan, a major-general in James's army, had been flitting in and out of the Western Highlands, now with a few officers, now with supplies, urging the clans to rise again in the spring. In April he came again with Alexander Cannon and raised the Stuart standard. They gathered fifteen hundred men, but most of the chiefs took Lochiel's sober counsel and stayed at home. Some MacDonalds came out, honouring the bond they had signed at Blair, and MacIain's son Alasdair Og joined them with a party of Glencoe men.

  Hugh Mackay stirred from his sick despair like a bear after winter. He sent Sir Thomas Livingstone against Buchan with twelve hundred horse and foot, and some levies from Clan Grant and Clan Mackay. The Jacobite leader was a brave and romantic fool. He made no proper reconnaissance, and posted too few sentinels. In the first dawn of May, while his army was still sleeping upon the haughs of Cromdale, Livingstone's six troops of dragoons galloped out of the mist, swinging their swords. It was a rout, not a battle. Cannon escaped in his shirt, and Buchan without hat, coat or sword. Four hundred Highlanders were taken prisoner and the rest went home in disgust. Mackay's arguments had been proved. Why should one treat with or bribe an enemy that was perversely determined to resist? Seizing opportunity by the throat, he sent Captain Scipio Hill of Leven's Regiment to Chester (where William was preparing to embark for Ireland), with orders to impress upon the King the urgent need for an immediate invasion of the Highlands. The captain took with him a plan of the proposed fort at Inverlochy, and also maps of the country adjacent.

  A day or so behind Scipio Hill, the Earl of Breadalbane also left Edinburgh for Chester in his big travelling-coach. Allied for the moment with Tarbat and Melville, he hoped to persuade the King that the policy of treating with the clans and buying off the malcontents might be more successful and less expensive than a campaign. But William was a skilled strategist and could appreciate a changed situation as well as Mackay. While he was in Ireland he wanted no trouble at his back. Scipio Hill returned to Scotland with orders for the Privy Council to supply Mackay with the men and supplies he needed to invade the Highlands and to buld a new Black Garrison at Inverlochy. Breadalbane went home to Loch Tay. He was able to wait.

  Melville saw his once-bright future fading with William's growing lack of confidence in him. Since the beginning of the year he had been receiving nagging complaints and criticism from the King, and he had answered them more like a penitent child than a capable minister: ‘I must resolve to go over, if I can, what you were pleased to blame me for, in not being resolute enough, nor taking enough on me.’

  Mackay worked quickly. In addition to his advance on the central Highlands, he planned a diversion up the west coast. Captain Thomas Pottinger, commanding the sloops-of-war Lamb and Dartmouth at Greenock, was ordered to take aboard six hundred foot-soldiers under Major James Ferguson of the Cameronians, and to sail at once for a summer rendezvous with Mackay at Inverlochy. On his way, he and Ferguson were ‘to alarm the rebels' coasts, cut their communications with the islanders now in rebellion, and take away or burn all their boats, whether in the isles or along the coasts of the rebels on the firm land’. Though they were not to make landings without certainty of success, they could help the Argyll Campbells in their assault on the Macleans of Mull. They were to take the surrender of any rebels who submitted, and to give them the full protection of Their Majesties King William and Queen Mary. They were also to behave themselves. ‘The said major shall have special care his men be kept under exact discipline both as soldiers and Christians, to hinder cursing and swearing, and all other unchristian and disorderly customs.’

  In Inverness, orders came to John Hill also. By the first week of July he was expected at Inverlochy, there to meet Mackay and the ships from Greenock. When the fort was built he would be its commander and the Governor of Lochaber once more, with power to accept the submission of the rebels. Few men can have been made so happy.

  ‘I know many are against any gentle way of dealing’

  IN the second week of June, Hugh Mackay was once more in the saddle and in command of an army, but his temper was as hot and his patience as short as ever. There had been weeks of exasperating delay before his six thousand horse and foot could be gathered at Perth. He had discovered that squeezing £4,000 from a penny-pinching King might take longer than getting approval for the expedition, and not having the time for it he asked Mammon to pay for God's work. In Glasgow to superintend the embarkation of some Danish cavalry for Ireland, he persuaded the magistrates and merchants of that city to furnish most of the stores and provisions he needed. In view of the Highlanders' winter marauding outside their gates, these gentlemen may have considered the money well lent, were they ever to see it again or not. Glasgow money had also helped to get Captain Pottinger away with the Dartmouth, the Lamb, and Ferguson's six hundred redcoats.

  Mackay had then to decide on his own route to Inverlochy. He could, of course, have gone by sea, but he had no hope of getting the Privy Council's speedy approval for the armada this would have needed. Instead, he chose a swinging march through the heart of the Highlands, northward first to Braemar where he paused to breathe sullen fire over his shoulder at the Council. ‘May it please your Grace and Lordships,’ he wrote, knowing that the tone of his letters gave them no pleasure at all, ‘I find myself so straightened with the want of provisions that I must venture forward before I have the assurance of any of our victuallers being about.’ This, he said, with sarcastic contempt for the ignorance of civilians, was somewhat contrary to the maxims of war. He had laboured hard to get this army on the march and now, because of the delays caused by others, he had less than two months' fair weather in which to do all that should be done. But he trusted in God's providence. Knowing how hot and then how cold a government's enthusiasm could blow in war, he entreated the Council not to recall him before his work was done.

  His drummers beat the Assembly and he moved on, northward and eastward from Braemar to chastise some rebels in Strathdon, and then westward and northward to the valley of the Spey. Here he was joined by Livingstone's command, and by a flustered John Hill whom Livingstone had called from Inverness at less than a day's notice. The old man was irritated by this haste. He had been given no time to equip himself properly, nothing but his cloak and the earth to keep him warm at night, and he thought that by now someone should have sent him the £400 he had spent from his own pocket in the defence of Belfast. But he was quickly warmed by Mackay's civil and kindly welcome.

  The General now drove his army south-westward up the Spey to Dalwhinnie in the braes of Badenoch. Three days march away, over the shoulder of Ben Alder, was his objective. On 3 July the soldiers came down to Loch Linnhe with pikes slanting, colours flowing, and the battalion drums beating bravely against the hills of Lochaber. There had been no serious resistance, though some clansmen had appeared on the heather in arms. ‘The Highlanders were all in Glen Roy,’ John Hill told Tarbat, ‘to stop the passes upon us, but we gave them the go-by in sending a party of Horse toward them, and in the meantime marching the Army through Glen Spean, so that we came without any injury, only some Highlanders that were in a hill shot at us, and our Highlanders went out and killed two of them.’

  Floating on Loch Linnhe under clean yards were the Lamb, the Dartmouth, and a merchantman full of meal sent by the Provost of Glasgow. Pottinger and Ferguson were in good spirits. They had burnt all the boats they could find belonging to the Macleans of Mull. Off the Isle of Skye they had a short but dignified correspondence with the MacDonald chief of Sleat before opening fire upon him. ‘Passing his house,’ said Pottinger, ‘I complimented the same with thirty or forty shots, sending the guards thereof to the hills.’ By springs and guys he then laid the Lamb inshore and broadside to MacDonald's house, ‘playing smartly upon the same for two or three hours with our best guns. Major Ferguson landed our men under the protection of my guns, burned both houses to the ground in the Highlanders' view, the whistling nine-pounders sending
them scampering to the hills to overlook what they could not prevent.’ This, he thought, would stop the Laird of Sleat from ‘belching out defiance to authority and power’. He was less pleased when Mackay demanded six of those whistling culverins, and six more from the merchantman, to man the proposed fort.

  On a narrow spit by the mouth of the River Nevis, the green ruin of his old garrison must have filled John Hill with sad memories, though all else in Lochaber seemed unchanged. But Mackay grumbled about the site. In his experience a fort was built on high ground, and not commanded, as this was, by the rise of a hill. There was no time, however, to find a better position and on 5 July the work was started. Seven hundred clan levies, men of the Williamite Grants, Rosses and Menzies, were sent into the hills to keep the rebels away. The rest of the Army began to dig, helped by Pottinger's disgusted seamen and by workmen brought up from Glasgow in the merchantman. In the heavy heat they scooped out a deep, star-shaped ditch, palisading it with a glacis and chemin couvert. On the inner side of this ditch was to be raised a rampart of stone, earth and timber, twenty feet in height and cut with embrasures for those twelve naval guns. Around a levelled parade-ground inside the wall would be a bomb-proof magazine, kitchens, storehouses, offices, and dwelling-places and barracks for six officers and ninety-six private men. A larger garrison would have to lodge in tents and huts outside.

  Mackay drove the workers relentlessly, and in eleven days he reported triumphantly to Edinburgh: ‘One would marvel how far our works have advanced. Any time next week I shall be ready to march and leave this fort not only palisaded round, but with most of the works at their full height.’ All this, he added with anger and pride, had been done by men who had nothing more than meal and water to sustain them, and now and then a little aqua vitae. Where was the meat they had been promised?

  He had no illusions about the future, and mildly derided all talk of treaties and submissions. He advised Hill to burn the houses, lift the cattle and destroy the crops of all the clans within striking distance of the fort. This was the way of war as he had known it for thirty years. Hungry men did not sit down to besiege a well-fed garrison. But John Hill did not see this as his duty. In his first report to Tarbat, written the day after he arrived, he said that he had already heard from John Stewart of Ardshiel, tutor to the young chief of Appin. Ardshiel was ready to treat, promising to give up Castle Stalker to the Campbells, should proper compensation be paid to Stewart pride. Hill had also sent word to his old friend in the fir-wood house at Achnacarry, hoping Lochiel would persuade the Glencoe and Keppoch MacDonalds to ‘take their young men off the heather’. Though the Cameron would not come to Inverlochy, he sent a friendly message to Hill advising him to let it be known that he was ready to receive any Highland gentleman and his people who wished to submit to King William's clemency. This Hill did, sending some of the Grant and Menzies officers to the glens. But, he admitted to Tarbat, ‘I know many are against any gentle way of dealing’.

  He was remembering the old days under the Protectorate, when it was thought proper to leave a man his dignity and self-respect. He was remembering too, and this bitterly, that in those days he was given civil as well as military power over Lochaber, for the one was useless without the other. He was more deeply hurt than Mackay by the lack of supplies, since he was the one who would have to deal with the results of shortage. Most of the two thousand bolls of meal which the Glasgow ship had brought would be eaten by the Army before it left. There were no beds and no blankets, and even in summer the Highland nights could be bitterly cold. There were no pots, pans, kettles, platters or spoons. He asked for coals, for butter and candles. He asked for shoes and stockings. He asked for soap, telling the fastidious Tarbat that men in unwashed clothing made bad soldiers. He asked for ‘a minister, storekeeper, chirurgeon and two mates, gunner and mattrosses for twelve guns, and their pay afforded, and such as may be encouraging; for who will be willing to be banished here without some encouragement?’ He needed such encouragement himself. With dignity, he asked again for the £400 owing to him, and did not get it. He reminded Tarbat that when he had last been Governor of Inverlochy he had received ten shillings a day in addition to his pay as Colonel. He thought a similar allowance should now be paid. ‘I hope it will be rather more than before, so I hope (if God permit) to merit it.’ As the years passed he would merit it. He would also learn that Lord Protectors were more grateful to their soldiers than were Kings.

  Mackay supported Hill in the almost daily reports he sent to Edinburgh, hoping to prod the Privy Council into a sense of urgency. ‘I am resolved to leave this garrison in a posture of defence, to which the speedy arrival of planks, cannon and other materials would contribute much. Your Grace and Lordships would seriously mind the speedy supplying of this important post from the west, of such necessaries as I sent you a list of, given by Colonel Hill, otherwise all the pains and expenses men have been at may prove fruitless.’

  Across Loch Linnhe in the Corpach woods, or on the rise of the Ardgour braes, the Camerons and the Macleans watched the building of the fort. High on the drove road to Glencoe, MacIain's men looked down on the poppy-red battalions and listened to the sound of hammers, the voices of the English-speakers, the beating of drums at dawn and noon and dusk. Now and then they fell upon the meagre supply-trains that tried to pass through Atholl and Badenoch, a brief, bloodless descent of flashing swords from which the baggage-men ran in panic, leaving their horses and packs behind. The constant threat of these raids made the supplying of the fort by sea inevitable. This had been realized from the beginning, but Mackay was angered by the knowledge that his fine fort was hemmed in by robbers and thieves. To soothe his pride and to get meat for his Army, he sent out patrols in force, with orders to strip the land of cattle for twenty miles around. None was found. The Camerons and MacDonalds had driven their herds into the hills.

  But one of the captains of the patrols, a Menzies or a Grant, brought Hill some disquieting news which seemed to explain the continued resistance of the clans and the failure of his gentle approaches to them. Down by Loch Tay an old man who had lost one move at Chester was plotting another. ‘I find my lord Breadalbane hath broken all our measures with the Highlanders,’ Hill reported to Tarbat, ‘and hath been a means to keep them up in arms to work out by that way some end of his own.’ It was the beginning of Hill's distrust and dislike of the clever fox of Glenorchy. But he was determined to persevere. ‘I shall pursue my former methods,’ he said, this time in a letter to Melville, ‘in case any of the Highlanders comply, though at present they seem more sturdy than before; for I know the methods of another nature will hardly ever do the work, nor can the arms of this garrison reach all over the Highlands.’

  It was as well that Mackay was going, for he and Hill would soon have quarrelled violently. Mackay was angry enough. He was faced by a near-revolt in one of his battalions, the God-fearing Cameronians of the Earl of Angus's Foot. They had been told that they would remain as part of Inverlochy's permanent garrison, and they had not liked the news at all. To Mackay's disgust, the strongest protest came from the officers and from a windy-mouthed preacher who should have been concerned with the soldiers' eternal destination, not their present disposition. Mackay handed the whole matter over to the Privy Council, advising their Lordships to write to the lieutenant-colonel of the Cameronians, telling him that their particular confidence in the regiment was the reason why it had been chosen for the garrison. It would not necessarily be true, but by such small vanities are soldiers persuaded to do their duty.

  On 16 July, two days before he marched his army away, Mackay appointed a deputy-governor to Hill, Robert Menzies, first son of Sir Alexander Menzies of that Ilk, Laird of Weem and Chief of Clan Menzies. Hill was disappointed, though he did not dislike this round-faced, hawk-nosed boy with the gentle mouth and black eyes. He believed it unwise to put any Highlander in such a responsible position, and his doubts were strengthened by the fact that Clan Menzies was divided in its loyalty. Tho
ugh Robert Menzies had led a hundred of his father's people against Dundee, fighting well on the right wing of Mackay's army at Killiecrankie, others of the clan had come out more readily for the Jacobites. Mackay would have no argument. He told Hill that Menzies's Independent Company* could help with the building of the fort, and Hill must have bitten on his tongue at the bizarre thought of Highlanders working obediently with axe and spade. But if his own pride were wounded he kept the pain to himself when Mackay said that Menzies would be a good man to treat with the clans, being of their blood, tongue and manner. Perhaps the General was joking, for the same could be said of him.

  On the eighteenth day of July, Mackay marched away. His army moved by battalions up the Great Glen to Glen Spean, making a fine show with its colours and drums. To Hill's chagrin, the troops left behind were almost all Highlanders – ten Independent Companies from Clan Grant and Clan Menzies, and four companies of Campbells from the Earl of Argyll's Regiment. The only Lowland regulars were two hundred and fifty Cameronians, whose chaplain began to complain about his exile before the rearguard of Mackay's dragoons had ridden out of sight. But the General had been in no mood to listen to Hill's protests. The news from beyond the mountains had been mixed and discouraging. Though William had defeated James on the River Boyne and was now laying siege to Limerick, a French fleet had beaten the English and Dutch off Beachy Head, and there were wild rumours of invasion.

  At least, Hill consoled himself, Mackay's constant badgering of the Privy Council had produced some results. There was another merchantman from Glasgow anchored off the Nevis, with her hold full of meal. The garrison now had fifty fat cows, eight barrels of herring, and a good supply of aqua vitae for morale and medicine. There was £500 sterling in the Governor's chest, and that might placate the grumbling Cameronians. Mackay had also promised to send coats, shoes, breeches and stockings, and plaids to keep the men warm in the harsh winter coming. ‘A garrison,’ he said, ‘ought to be kept in good humour, and capable to serve well.’