Glencoe

by John Prebble

  He returned to his writing-desk, to the quiet night hours when the flame of his candle seemed frozen by the cold. He composed his report on his first six months at Inverlochy. The hills were quiet under snow. Buchan had gone to France at last, but Cannon was lurking somewhere in Badenoch. Some young gentry of the clans, smarting under their chiefs' inactivity wanted to go to France to serve in King Louis' army, and he thought it wise to give them passes and have them out of the way. It would be sensible, too, to give passes to those Popish priests who wished to leave. He had heard of another meeting of the rebel chiefs, and he believed that, with God's good grace, they would decide on submission in the spring. He had got most of the firelocks he wanted, and since there had been good winds from the south for some days he hoped that ships might soon bring him bread. All but a score of the Independent Company raised from Clan Ross had deserted, and these twenty Hill had dismissed, believing himself well rid of them.

  He hoped that Tarbat would come to the Highlands to see things for himself, and thus be able to tell the King what was truth and what was falsehood. But Tarbat knew without coming, and he told the King:

  ‘One thing all the clans desire which is as much to your advantage as theirs, which is that all these superiorities be bought from the Highland lords, so that [the chiefs] may hold their estates immediately of you; and having them as immediate vassals, keeping a little garrison in Lochaber, and a man of ability, being no Highlander, to be your lieutenant-governor there, you will indeed be master of the Highlands as ever King of Scotland was.’

  3

  GREY JOHN AND THE MASTER

  ‘The origin and principle instrument of all misfortunes’

  THE handsome face on the canvas is round and well fleshed, aloof in a frame of long grey curls. The eyes behind lowered lids are alert to paradox and hypocrisy, the lips firm and humorous. The body, thickening with middle age, is poised calmly on a turn, as if the man has halted to listen to a petition, a scrap of useful scandal, or news that the sky has fallen. It is the enduring likeness of Sir John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, murderer of Glencoe.

  ‘I love not so many masters!’ John Hill had once cried in a moment of frustrated despair. In January 1691, Dalrymple became another of them, but one who would make all others his servants within the year, and himself the supreme ruler of Scotland under the Crown. A dispatch from The Hague, where Dalrymple was with the King, informed the Earl of Melville that henceforward he would share the Secretaryship with the Master. Melville felt the first giddy movement of his own inevitable fall. He had been expecting this for months, increasingly aware that he was failing to satisfy William, and he had complained like a fretful child. Tarbat lost patience with the ugly little man. ‘For God's sake,’ he said, ‘take no pets! Remember your King, your country, and your friends!’ His King and country were causes Melville could recognize, but who were his friends? ‘I have lived with you in intimate friendship for many years,’ the elder Dalrymple once told him, ‘God knows I never had a distrust of your friendship or kindness.’ And the son had been equally disarming. ‘I am extremely troubled to understand these representations that have been made of my father and myself to your lordship, as if we were discontented.’ The good-intentioned and conscientious Secretary would have liked to believe such bland reassurances from men who, he was told, were plotting against him. The Dalrymples' many enemies were less charitable. Not having the strength or the courage for open opposition, they attacked by lampoon.

  That slippery Stair goes unstraight, stoops and high,

  Do like his neck turn his whole course awry.

  That trap, for public place, that Jacob's ladder…

  The Dalrymples were new to the government of Scotland, though they had held land in the western shires since the fourteenth century, and they came to power as many did, by way of the Law. The wry-necked father, James, was one of the greatest jurists of his time, and a skilful politician whose loyalty to his conscience under Charles I, the Commonwealth and the Restoration had made him enemies on both sides of every issue. The most passionate of these had been the dead hero of Killiecrankie, John Graham of Claverhouse, Bloody Dundee, the persecutor of the Covenanting martyrs. With the support of the Privy Council, and the open assistance of the Duke of York, Dundee drove Sir James Dalrymple into exile. Six years later he returned, landing at Torbay with William of Orange. He was restored as Privy Councillor and President of the Court of Session, appointed Commissioner for the shire of Ayr in the Parliament of Scotland, and created Viscount Stair, Lord Glenluce and Stranraer.

  Sir John Dalrymple the son, now known by the courtesy title of Master of Stair, was as resilient in politics as the father, almost as skilled in Law, and more inexorable in ambition. He chose to keep most of his early life in darkness, and to care little what the groping hands of his enemies pretended to find there. An explanation of his character and his success was sought in the supernatural arts his family was supposed to practise. His sister Sarah, who was plainly an epileptic, was said to be possessed by an evil spirit that could lift her over high walls. His mother, who was probably no more than an embittered shrew, was believed to be a witch, casting spells and spinning ruin even upon her own children. When her daughter Janet chose to marry an unsatisfactory suitor, Lady Dalrymple screamed ‘Ye may marry him, but sair shall ye repent it!’ On the bridal night, so went the story, she locked bride and groom in their room. All night screams and groans kept the house awake, and when Lady Dalrymple surrendered the key in the morning the girl was dead on the bed, drenched with blood, and the groom was cackling insanely in a chimney-corner. The facts were more prosaic.* Janet died of a natural illness two weeks after her marriage.

  John Dalrymple was knighted when he was nineteen, and one reason for this early honour is given in a suspect defence of his character published after the Glencoe Massacre. This claimed that he and a friend, visitors to London, saved a man-of-war from destruction when the Dutch fleet came up the Medway, though how two young landsmen were able to do what seamen could not was not explained. He was twenty when he married Elizabeth Dundas, who may have been grateful for the alliance since her marriage value had been seriously depreciated. According to a report laid before the Privy Council, she had been the subject of abduction and ‘most violent and barbarous rape’ by a disappointed lover. But she was the daughter of the Lord Clerk Register of Scotland, and a young law student like Dalrymple, about to be admitted a member of the Faculty of Advocates, could have been excused for believing that influence was more important than virginity. For that matter, Elizabeth's ravisher had also been an advocate. There were nine children of this amiable and happy marriage, and two of them were victims of the black violence popularly believed to be inseparable from the Dalrymples. The second son was accidentally shot by the first. Bishop Burnet, never content with a good story when it might still be improved, said that the elder child rode his horse over his brother's head. Another son, added Burnet with relish, poisoned himself with cantharides.

  This Gothic elaboration of fact would follow the Master to his own death-bed. It was gutter-hatred, but even men of his own class detested him with brutish passion. To the Jacobites he was evil incarnate. ‘He was the origin and principal instrument of all the misfortunes that befell either the King or the Kingdom of Scotland,’ wrote one of them, George Lockhart of Carnwath. ‘He was false and cruel, covetous and imperious, altogether destitute of the sacred ties of honour, loyalty, justice and gratitude, and lastly a man of very great parts else he could never have perpetrated so much wickedness.’

  This was a bizarre libel, but written with the understandable bitterness of a man who believed that Stair had betrayed Scotland and the Scots Parliament to the English. It should, perhaps, be balanced by an equally emotional encomium from one of the Master's friends. But there is not one to be found, even in the pamphlet which his brother published after Glencoe. The lazy contempt in Stair's eyes, his obvious self-satisfaction, and self-reliance, his cold and intelligent a
mbition, invited no man's love. He wanted power, he secured power, and such single-minded men do not have friends, they buy allies and attract sycophants. Yet in society he was popular. His sense of humour was alert and incisive, his mockery deep with understanding. His small-talk was facetious, and he flattered others into believing that their gossip entertained him more than politics. But, like Tarbat at such times, he was a dissembler, and he fooled the normally astute Macky who said that ‘he made always a better companion than a statesman, being naturally very indolent’. George Lockhart was more discerning. ‘Had a judgement of his inside been taken from his outside, he might well enough have passed for that of which he was the least.’ This could be a fitting epitaph on any successful statesman, and although he was dead when it was written, the Master might have been pleased by it.

  His first notable appearance at the Bar was in 1681, as junior counsel in the defence of the ninth Earl of Argyll on a charge of treason. Though his advocacy did not help the Earl, his own talents were quickly recognized, not the least by his father's enemies. But he was no coward, and he was not frightened by Dundee's bright cuirass and bloody plume, or the harrassing of his tenants by the Graham's troopers. Though his father fled to Holland, he remained. He was accused of obstructing Dundee's authority, and of exacting nominal fines only from those of his people who were charged with attending conventicles. Twice the persistent Dundee secured his arrest. He was thrown into the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and released only when he had asked the King's forgiveness and paid a fine of £500. A year later, in the middle of a September night, Dundee's dragoons pulled him from his bed in the fine house of Newliston that had come to him with his wife's dowry. He was taken before the Privy Council where he boldly refused to give evidence against the Lord Chancellor, who was accused of leniency in his dealings with the Presbyterians. He was sent to the Tolbooth again, on foot as a common malefactor and escorted by a file of musketeers, and there he remained for three months until he raised a bail of £5,000. He was then conditionally liberated within the bounds of Edinburgh, and to those few men who kept him company he smiled, and said that he was suffering for the ‘original sin of my Presbyterian father’.

  When the restriction on his movements was lifted sixteen months later, he still did not join his father in Holland. He waited and he watched and he listened for a year. He was a more sensitive weathervane than most men of his time, and when he felt the first faint change in the political wind he went to London. In three months he was back in Edinburgh as King's Advocate. His fine of £500 had been repaid to him, and he had been given another £700 for his expenses in London and to compensate him for loss of employment. He brought with him the King's pardon for all crimes alleged against him, his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters. Included in this blanket remission was a pardon for his thirteen-year-old son, the innocent murderer of a brother.

  He had been bought. For the price paid, James II expected him to urge the relaxation of the penal laws against Catholics. Dalrymple's own religious views were tolerant and expedient, the original sin of conviction was his father's. He probably believed that sectarian squabbles were an improper exercise for a logical mind, and bigotry an obvious offence to reason. But the Presbyterians did not forgive him, and their resentment hardened into contempt and hatred when, as Lord Advocate, he moved against the field-preachers and the conventicles on whose behalf his father had been exiled. Within a year he was Lord Justice Clerk in the Court of Justiciary, and Judge in the Court of Session. He was forty. His neck and jowls had thickened, his body coarsened, but he was still handsome. He wore the awesome vestment of impartial justice, and what lay behind his faint smile only he knew.

  At the Revolution he abandoned James with no more apparent thought than he might have given to a change of mind at his wardrobe. Before any of his enemies could move against him, and isolate him as a committed servant of the Stuart, he was the dominant member of a Committee for the Settlement of the Kingdom, representing the Three Estates. For a brief while this committee was the only voice of Scotland, and it spoke with Dalrymple's tongue. His cold logic drove it to its final decision: that James had forfeited his right to the throne, that the Crown of Scotland should be offered to William and Mary.

  In these days, too, the tap-root of his political life was momentarily exposed. He argued for and forced through a vote upon a Treaty of Union, whereby the Scots and English Parliaments might be merged into one. But the English were as yet indifferent to any further ties with a country that seemed to consist of psalm singers and savages, and where the Scots were not hostile they were mostly uncertain. The proposal was not a new one, and Dalrymple must have discussed and considered it many times. It was William who made it an issue. Plagued enough by one Parliament, he could not see why he should have to tolerate two in one kingdom.

  In the beginning Dalrymple may have become an advocate of Union in order to ingratiate himself with William, but it became in time his supreme objective, and one to which he dedicated the whole of his political life. All that opposed or delayed it, he attempted to destroy. If William wanted to pacify the Highlands because it was a strategic necessity in his war with France, Dalrymple knew that the English would never accept the Scots as civilized equals until their warring mountain tribes had been crushed. Like many Scotsmen in his own time, and for two centuries to come, he felt a nagging sense of inferiority to the English. Iain Lom MacDonald said they were greedy and gluttonous men, who would break the shafts and let the ox stray, who would put a halter on their country, who would treat it as a carrion bird.

  On a May afternoon in 1689, Dalrymple was one of three Commissioners from the Convention of Estates who offered the Crown of Scotland to William and Mary, and administered the coronation oath. William had shown no desire to go to Edin-burgh for this, and the undignified post-gallop of the Commissioners to London was the beginning of a long self-humiliation by those whom the Highlanders derisively called ‘the English-speakers’. There was a brief ceremony in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall, beneath the flesh-pink and sky-blue of Rubens' splendid ceiling. The asthmatic Dutch king sat under a rich canopy with his wife, facing the nobility and gentry of England. The clear spring sunlight fell through the tall windows, gently dusting the gold-and-scarlet cloth, and shining on the upheld blade of the Sword of State. The Earl of Argyll, as leader of the Commission, told the solemn King and smiling Queen that it had ‘pleased God to raise up Your Majesties to be the glorious instruments of relieving our religion, liberty and property from the very brink of ruin’. Argyll could speak this with feeling, particularly the reference to property, and he inwardly hoped that the Revolution would bring him adequate compensation for the sack of his glens by the Atholl raiders.

  He then read the oath, ‘distinctly word by word’, said the News Sheets, ‘and their Majesties repeated it after him, holding up their right hands according to the custom of taking oaths in Scotland’. It was read and repeated without interruption until Argyll reached the last clause:

  We shall be careful to root out all heretics and enemies to the true worship of God that shall be convicted by the true Kirk of God of the foresaid crimes, out of our lands and empire of Scotland.

  Here there was some solemn play-acting. William must have known the terms of the oath before this afternoon, and the objection he now raised was clearly designed to free him of responsibility for any future excesses of zeal on the part of the Scots. He could not, he said righteously, promise to be a persecutor. There was a pause, until Dalrymple accepted the cue. Neither the words of the oath nor the laws of Scotland, he said, put such an obligation upon the King. William nodded. ‘In that sense, then, I swear, and I desire you all, my lords and gentlemen to witness that I do.’ This careful public statement, the glances of understanding, may perhaps have been remembered two and a half years later when the King and Dalrymple were alone together in a room at Kensington Palace, discussing the extirpation of Glencoe.

  Now that Scotland had a king again,
the Convention of Estates pressed for permission to reconstitute itself as a Parliament. This was necessary, said a journalist's report of its proceedings, because ‘there can be no Treaty of Union without a Commission from King and Parliament, so that unless this meeting be turned into a Parliament, this Treaty must be for a long time delayed and postponed’. It was necessary to recreate what it would be necessary to destroy.

  Within a month of his adroit special pleading in the Banqueting Hall, Dalrymple was a Privy Councillor. A week later he was Lord Advocate again, representing the King in the new Parliament of Scotland. By the next year, when he became known as the Master of Stair upon his father's elevation to a viscountcy, he was potentially the most powerful man in the northern kingdom. He was feared by his colleagues in Holyroodhouse and Parliament Hall, and loathed by the extreme Presbyterians. The exiled Court at Saint-Germain excluded him from any amnesty should James return, and in Edinburgh coffee-houses Jacobite hotheads of The Club threatened to pistol him some day as he went down Canongate in his coach. Not a mark of this was to be seen on his bland, calm face. In January 1691, when he became Joint Secretary of State for Scotland, nobody believed that such an ill-balanced partnership could last long, least of all the unhappy Melville. The Master was rarely in Scotland. He was at the King's elbow, in Kensington Palace or the great siege-camps of Flanders. He wrote smooth letters of instruction to Melville, telling him the King's will and the King's desire, and hinting now and then at the King's displeasure. ‘I do not see what ground of confidence the Jacobites in Scotland should have…. I hope the different measures and humours which always obstructed the alleys to do anything considerable, shall now, for this year, be entirely at the King's direction…’