Glencoe

by John Prebble

  Any direction the King gave would now be on Stair's advice and conveyed to Melville by the Master. Having once enjoyed William's confidence, Melville had become the servant of a servant, the dog that is last kicked. Though he shared the Secretaryship, the responsibility for failure seemed still to be his, and the problem was the same as it had been when he took office – the pacifying of the rebel chiefs and the bringing of them to the oath of allegiance. Along the Highland Line, and in the garrisons of the glens, were seven troops of Horse and thirty-nine companies of Foot. Their pay alone was nearly £50,000 a year. In William's opinion, soldiers who were being paid should be campaigning, and if they were not they should either be disbanded or sent to Flanders where he could make proper use of them.

  The King's first ‘direction’ came from The Hague in February, where he was preparing his spring campaign against the French. It was ably composed, by Stair no doubt, and while it gave Melville and the Privy Council no clear indication of what action they should take, it presented William in a most favourable light – the wise and clement ruler.

  We are willing to convince all our subjects of our affection and tenderness towards them by the evidence of an equal and moderate government, rather than to prosecute the failings of any with rigour, who are sensible of their errors, and return to their duty; but if any continue incorrigible or so foolish as to be imposed upon by vain suggestions to make their native country the stage of war and desolation, it will be your care to discover their designs and secure such persons that they be not in a capacity to ruin themselves and others.

  By letters from Flanders, however, perhaps by a malicious note from Stair, Melville learned that the King was in a less charitable mood than this direction might suggest. His vanity had been stung by the derision of some princes of Europe who were asking why so great a captain, the opponent of the Sun King, was unable to crush a handful of half-naked savages. For hope and action, Melville looked to the hills, to the old man at Inverlochy.

  And from Fort William there came word that John Hill was once again close to death.

  Melville received this information from Sir Thomas Living-stone, a good-looking but mediocre soldier who had been raised from a colonel of dragoons to Commander-in-chief since the silly rout of Cromdale. His letter contained little regret for the valiant old governor of the Black Garrison. He told Melville that Hill ‘is feared to be dead before this time’, and then went on to complain, in near hysteria, of the threat of rebellion in his army. Some troops of dragoons, in an attempt to get their arrears of pay, had locked up their trumpets and standards, imprisoned their officers, and entered into a seditious Bond of Association. Since there was a risk of this disaffection spreading to other units, equally angry about their pay, Livingstone was not much concerned about the health of an old man.

  But John Hill would not let himself die. After a week or so, still feeble and light-headed, he pulled himself from his bed and went back to work. ‘God has the reins in his hands,’ he said once, ‘and it's He that governs the world.’ When the Almighty had such a heavy responsibility, men should not weaken. Since the arrival of his sorry regiment, he had had little time for treating with the clans. He was short of officers, and the men were quarrelsome and insubordinate. The morning drums, sounding the General, brought them to parade in untidy mobs, shouting for pay and food. And it was the same at Tap-to, with a few good men and none willing to stand their turn at the night-watch. The Articles of War authorized fearsome punishments for the reluctant, rebellious or criminal soldier. His tongue could be bored by a hot iron, or his cheek branded. He could be shot, hanged, beheaded or burnt. He could be flogged, whipped naked through the gauntlet, or tied astride a wooden horse with bags of musket-balls at each ankle. Hill had been created by the Army, and Commonwealth officers had flogged their men as vigorously as any who followed them. But though he probably set up the halberts and flogged the thief, the deserter and the coward, Hill did his best to make a regiment out of his men by promise, persuasion and prayer, and by the superb example of his own devotion to duty.

  There were daily problems and disappointments. The Lamb was long overdue with supplies from Greenock. The Duke of Gordon, feudal superior of the land on which the fort stood, declared that Hill should be held personally responsible for the woods destroyed, the peat taken and the moss cut by his soldiers. After their early and patriotic enthusiasm for the fort, the Glasgow merchants were now counting pennies. ‘Honest men are too few,’ said Hill sadly, ‘and those discouraged.’

  The coming of spring lifted his spirits and straightened the backs of his ragged garrison. Winds were warm, the air full of the sound of running water. Across the loch in Ardgour there was the astonishing vision of green leaf. Geese flew westward to the Isles, and the red deer moved on the braes below the fading snowline. There were other, less innocent movements. French men-of-war were reported off Skye, and the young men of the clans, said Hill, had begun to gather in small bodies. News had reached them of the surrender of Mons to Louis XIV and William's retreat, and this, Hill told Melville, had ‘pushed them up to a great degree, and that's much heightened by the malignants in Edinburgh and other places’. Up the Great Glen, MacDonald of Glengarry was surrounding his castle with a ditch and palisades. When Living-stone heard of this he asked Hill to take some of the fort's cannon and blow Glengarry's impudent works to pieces. Hill ignored the fatuous suggestion.

  He turned instead to his writing-desk, to firm letters of friendly advice, telling the chiefs that it was in their own good interest to submit while the King's grace held. He reminded the Council that he had not yet received one farthing of the pay and allowance promised him, beyond a grant of £100. He wondered what sort of men they were who acted like his enemies in denying him the just payment for his duty. ‘They say I am old, and would, I think, have me reduce all the Highlands myself.’ The passion, and the hurt to his pride tired him and his fever returned, died away, and returned again. Sometimes he was unable to move about the fort without an arm to lean upon. He had no deputy-governor yet, and no lieutenant-colonel now that young Menzies had left for good. A third of the garrison was always sick, and the graveyard grew in the shadow of the ramparts.

  In the second week of May he received another insane order from Livingstone. He was told to gather those men of his garrison who could march and fight, and to fall upon the clans who stubbornly refused to submit. Livingstone promised to send a strong detachment of foot to assist him. Hill did what he always did when his conscience or his good sense was outraged – nothing. He waited, and he hoped that someone in Edinburgh or Flanders would soon have the wit to restrain the Commander-in-chief.

  While he waited, something happened to convince him that his way was best, and that in time his work would bear full fruit. On a bright Wednesday morning, all the gentry of Clan Cameron came to Inverlochy, with Lochiel's consent and to assure Hill that he would have no trouble from their people. The spring sun, washed by a drift of rain, shone on the tartan and the feathers, on muscled thighs and the steel of weapons. This was how it had been thirty-five years before. The Camerons made no promises of submission to William, or of acceptance of the oath, but their friendliness and their wish to live in peace delighted the old man. They drank his health, wished him well, left him gifts of meat from their chief, and then marched away. He looked southwards, wishing that MacIain would come in the same friendly manner. But the old buff coat, the bristling horns of the white moustache were not seen at Inverlochy.

  The Master of Stair stopped Livingstone before he could send his soldiers against the clans. From London he sent the Commander-in-chief a succession of tart, peremptory letters. ‘His Majesty ordered me to write to you not to meddle with them at present, for you know how little the Treasury can spare…. It is plain you are in a condition to raise the Highlanders who are at present quiet, and to give them a pretext to fall down and carry cattle from the Lowlands…. If it please God to give success to the projects to straighten France, then
more may be thought fit to attempt upon the Highlanders…’

  Hill did not know that an empty Treasury and the success of French arms against William, not common sense and caution, had stopped that move to reduce the clans by force. But he knew that the Highlands might yet be kept quiet, with himself as the instrument for bringing all to submission and grace. His hopes were strengthened when Lochiel's men began to build a saw-mill and a corn-mill within two miles of the fort. This, he said, was scarcely evidence of hostility and disquiet. He had his little frigate, armed with eight small guns, to patrol the lochs and Isles, and it had met with no trouble. His men were looking more like soldiers, but the daily sick-roll kept steady, and deaths were as frequent as they were meaningless. If only he could have more food for their bellies, and a competent minister for their neglected souls.

  At the beginning of June, in a long report to Melville, he confessed that he had not followed the strict letter of his orders in persuading some of the Highlanders to submit. If he had insisted on the surrender of all arms, he would have been given no more than ‘some old rusty trash’. So he had not insisted. The oath of allegiance, he thought, was too much for Highlanders' pride to stomach.

  I hope I have taken the better way, which is easier, viz., I sent them the form of a very strict oath, and that withal a draft of one much easier, which is never to take up arms against King William and Queen Mary and their Government, nor to suffer any of their friends, men, tenants and servants to take up arms; and to this oath most of Clan Cameron have already sworn, and many of the MacDonalds in the Brae of Lochaber. More are coming in daily…

  He could not have pretended to himself that this sensible compromise would be accepted as enough by the Privy Council or the King, but none could argue that it had not kept the hills quiet. It was true that no chief had come to Fort William to take any form of oath, but again it could not be said that this was because they were stubbornly obstinate in spirit. ‘Lochiel sent me word,’ explained Hill, ‘that he stood upon a point of honour with his confederates that they should not accuse him as the first to break the ice, but waits for some to come before him, or with him, but saith he will not stir to rise in arms.’ It needed one chief only, even the obdurate MacIain of Glencoe, to swear to Hill's mild and considerate oath, and the others would follow, content that their honour was safe. Of MacIain's eventual submission he was daily hopeful. Most of the Glencoe tacksmen, with others of Appin, had already been to see him, saying that they would prefer to make what submission was necessary to the Earl of Argyll, their feudal superior, and to this Hill had agreed.

  All this had been done, he said, by gentle methods, to make the Highlanders ‘sit quiet that the King's greater affairs may not be interrupted, and that His Majesty may use some of the forces now here where there is greater occasion’. He was a good servant and deserved a better master. He was kept short of food, supplies and money. He was given a mob of rogues instead of a regiment. The debts he had incurred on his country's behalf were churlishly ignored, and his pay was not sent to him for eighteen months. He fought death and despair to do his duty. The least reward that could have been given him would have been to take his advice. Had the King, the Privy Council, the Master of Stair and sundry other great gentlemen left him alone to continue with his gentle methods and artful compromise, he might have had all the Highlands at peace by the end of that summer.

  But the Earl of Breadalbane was allowed to take a hand in the game once more.

  ‘Cunning as a fox, wise as a serpent, slippery as an eel’

  HE was a chief, MacCailein 'ic Dhonnachaidh, the son of Colin, son of Duncan. His clansmen called him Iain Glas, Grey John Campbell, eleventh Laird of Glenorchy, first Earl of Breadalbane, and sometime Earl of Caithness. After the Earl of Argyll, who was his nephew by marriage and with whom he shared a common ancestry, he was the most powerful man of his name, and the most ambitious. All his public and private actions, his marriages, his plotting and bargaining, dissimulation and cunning innocence, crocodile tears and surly spats of anger, were directed to one end: the leadership of Clan Campbell and a hand in the government of Scotland.

  Though no one else liked him, or trusted him, his people gave him the unquestioning respect and loyalty due to a great Ceann-cinnidh, their tribal chief and father. John Macky spoke for all others when he said that Breadalbane was ‘as cunning as a fox, wise as a serpent, slippery as an eel. No Government can trust him but where his private interest is in view. He knows neither honour nor religion but where they are mixed with interest, and then they serve as specious pretences. He plays the same game with the Williamites as he did with the Jacobites, viz., always on the side he can get most by, and will get all he can of both.’ This, like most of Macky's summations, is less than complete, and says nothing of Breadalbane's loyalty to his own gentry and people. But since he needed both to support his power and ambition, his feelings may not have been disinterested.

  He was a bold-looking, impressive man, fair-skinned, thin-lipped below the prow of his nose, and Spanish in the gravity of his face and carriage. His body was robust and needed to be, for he put a tremendous strain upon it, and his constant fear of being left out of great events kept him on the move between his Highland castles, his house in Edinburgh, and his lodgings in London. During the first years of William's reign, except for one winter when he thought it wiser and safer to remain in the mountains, he was never in one place for longer than a few weeks. His chamberlain on Loch Tayside and his law-agent in Edinburgh, both Highland gentlemen of his name and following, were daily busy with letters to and from their chief and master. These could be concerned as much with the sale of cattle as the signing of a treaty.

  Some great men can best be seen in perspective, down the avenue of their ancestry. The history of the lairds of Glenorchy was as violent, as bloody, and as savagely bizarre as any in the Highlands. Their land of Breadalbane was a thick knot of mountains in western Perthshire, tied to Loch Tay by the green strands of Glen Lyon, Glen Lochay and Glen Dochart. For centuries it was almost impregnable. Safe within its rock walls and many castles, the lairds defied their enemies, their neighbours, and the Crown. Only the Lochaber Men, coming over the Pass of Meran at night, or raiding from the east when the Campbell gentry had whisky in their heads, broke into it without opposition.

  The first Laird was Black Colin Campbell, a crusader and a Knight of Saint John, who came from the west in the middle of the fifteenth century. His father, Sir Duncan Campbell,* Lord of Lochow, was the progenitor of both great families of the name. To the descendants of his first son he left the lands of Argyll, and to Black Colin he gave Glen Orchy, a narrow, twisting valley that runs south-westward from Rannoch Moor and the mountains of Breadalbane to Loch Awe. From the ruins of a MacGregor keep on the shore of the loch, Black Colin built the great castle of Kilchurn, using the smiths of Clan MacNab to make its iron bars and gate. He garrisoned it with wild kerns to subdue and drive Clan Gregor from Glen Orchy and Glen Strae. For all his pious crusade and noble knighthood, he lopped off MacGregor heads as indifferently as he might brush away a fly, and thus began his family's merciless feud with the Gregarach. He was greedy for land, and jealous of his nephew who not only held a greater property in Argyll but was soon an earl as well. Black Colin could move eastward only, into Breadalbane, and there he became a tenant vassal of the Laird of Menzies. His son, Duncan, extended the tenancy by guile and threat until he made a more memorable contribution to Scotland's bloody history by dying with her King and most of her nobility at Flodden. Those who succeeded him – all known as ‘the Grey’ or ‘the Black’ – also did what they could to fulfil Black Colin's ambition by acquiring more holdings on Menzies's land.

  To be vassals only, however, was irksome to their pride. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Grey Colin, the Sixth Laird, used his influence and his talent for bullying to make himself master in fact of what his forbears had held in feu. He enlisted a small army of broken men, many of them Stewarts from Appin,
to harry the lands of Clan Menzies, to burn out the MacGregors, and to hang any Lochaber man who came over Glen Meran. One of them, called James the Grizzled, was said to be able to shoot an arrow from one side of Loch Tay to the other. Unable to resist these mercenaries by force, the Menzies chief complained to Edinburgh. He said that Grey Colin's men had stolen his cattle, killed his clansmen, burnt his houses, and vilely oppressed and imprisoned a tailor of Clan Menzies, ‘a common man, ready to work for every person for his living’. A Crown Messenger, sent to investigate these charges, never returned from Loch Tay, and was generally believed to have abandoned his commission at the end of a rope outside Grey Colin's castle. When the Laird was ordered to appear before the Privy Council, he sent his son Duncan instead, saying that he would have come himself but for ‘shortness of time’. Had the Council beheaded Duncan in his place, he might well have been grateful. He hated the boy and wished to disinherit him, a dangerous precedent in feudal custom that was only avoided by the disapproval of the Breadalbane gentry and the intervention of the Earl of Argyll. Unable to see what it could do about him, the Council lamely asked the old rogue to behave himself. So he hanged no one, stole nothing and burnt nothing belonging to the Menzies for some months, using the time more profitably in persuading his friend the Earl of Morton, Regent of Scotland, to grant him full control of his holdings in Breadalbane.