Glencoe

by John Prebble

  4. That if (King William's) forces go abroad, then we will rise.

  5. That if King William and Queen Mary deny all or any of these articles, then my Lord Breadalbane is to join us with a thousand men, which he promises to perform, both on oath and honour.

  It was probably the last of these articles that stuck in MacIain's throat, and turned him away in contempt for a man who was one king's servant in the mountains, and another's in the capital.

  The day after Hamilton was given Hill's letter, he read it to the fifteen members of the Council at Holyroodhouse. It was startlingly confirmed by the old Earl of Kintore who dramatically pulled a paper from his pocket, saying that it had been written by Buchan's nephew, and that it too contained an account of the Private Articles. Both letters were sent to the King with the Council's loyal indignation. This charge of double-dealing delighted the enemies of Grey John and the Master. The Duke of Hamilton, who led a faction against Stair, told his friend Melville ‘That Breadalbane will deny these articles sent by Colonel Hill, I put no doubt of, as I little doubt the truth of them would be found if put to exact trial.’

  At Balloch on Loch Tay, Breadalbane did deny them, most strenuously. He was not long back from the King's camp in Flanders, where he had been kept informed of events in Scotland by his Edinburgh law-agent, Colin Campbell of Carwhin. Carwhin's letters, written almost daily and sealed with black wax stamped by a bleeding heart, told the Earl that the Queen had expressed satisfaction with the Achallader negotiations, that Appin had been arrested and then released, that some broken men of the clans were raiding the Lowlands, and that Colonel Hill had been spreading malicious rumours about Breadalbane. Grey John called these ‘coffee-house stories’, but he came home in haste to deal with them. He may now have wished himself back in Flanders, close by Stair and the King's elbow. He was uneasy and afraid, and he sent a letter to the Master, asking if he should write to the King, exonerating himself. Stair advised him to do nothing. With considerable distortion of fact, he said that nobody would believe Breadalbane capable of so base a thing as the Private Articles, and then he turned the compliment upside down by saying that nobody thought ‘there could be any secrets in your treaties when there were so many ill eyes upon your proceedings’. The King's faith in the Earl was unshaken and when all was made known Breadalbane would stand even higher in Royal favour. ‘Let not anything discourage you,’ said the Master, ‘but believe all these devices will tend to magnify your service when you finish your undertaking.’

  Thus encouraged, Breadalbane turned upon Hill, not in violent protest but in well-phrased sorrow. ‘I could not have believed you would have been the transmitter of an accusation (yet very lame) to the Council against me, until you had first resigned that old friendship past unviolated on my side for many years.’ He asked for an apology, no more; with that he would be content. No doubt astonished to discover that he was the Earl's old friend, Hill refused to apologize or retract. In a letter stiffer than usual with parentheses, he stoutly defended himself. He had done his duty, he said, and his had not been the only accusation laid before the Council. Nor was Breadalbane fair in accusing him of endangering the peace of the kingdom, ‘for who laid the first stone in the foundation of peace and settlement?’ If he had not done his duty, let the King remove him from Inverlochy and put a better man in his place, were there one to be found. Hill had earned the right to that conceit.

  Breadalbane's denials, his anxious appeals to Stair for reassurance, went on into autumn. Long before then the King had dismissed the matter from his attention. A cold and imperious man, he was a realist who worried more about his asthma than he did about the moral weakness of other men. Rogue or not, Breadalbane was the only man dealing with the rebel chiefs, and the more his rascality was exposed the more diligent he might be in atonement. As for the Private Articles, William acknowledged that they probably existed, and gave Breadalbane's motives the expedient benefit of the doubt. ‘Men who manage treaties,’ he said with unstatesmanlike candour, ‘must give fair words.’

  Three weeks before he heard of the Articles he had decided, on Stair's prompting no doubt, to put a limit to the havering of the chiefs. From his camp at St Gerard on 17 August, he had given them four months to make up their minds.

  And we, being satisfied that nothing can conduce more to the peace of the Highlands and reduce them from rapine and arms to virtue and industry than the taking away of the occasions of these differences and feuds, which oblige them to neglect the opportunities to improve and cultivate their country, and accustom themselves to depredations and idleness* – are graciously pleased not only to pardon, indemnify and restore all that have been in arms who shall take the oath of allegiance before the 1st day of January next, but likewise we are resolved to be at some charge to purchase the lands and superiorities which are the subject of these debates and animosities, at the full and just avail whereby the Highlanders may have their immediate and entire independence of the Crown.

  The Crown was ready to pay £12,000 for the superiorities of the great landowners, thus relieving the chiefs of their feudal obligations and making them vassals of the King only. If there was as yet no mention of the bribes Breadalbane had led them to expect, at least an ancient and irksome yoke was to be lifted from them.

  William was determined to be as reasonable as possible, from common sense if not from compassion. He was told that some Highland lairds would be reluctant to take the oath if they were still to be held responsible for crimes that had little to do with rebellion or the Jacobite cause. He accordingly discharged them from this fear, including the most notorious of the Gallows Herd. MacIain of Glencoe and his cousin John MacDonald of Achtriachtan were pardoned, indemnified, fully and freely acquitted of ‘a slaughter committed by them’. This pardon, which William signed under the Great Seal of Scotland on 20 August, gave no details of the slaughter. But there can be no doubt that it referred to the bloody incident twenty years before when, on the orders of MacIain, ‘John MacDonald son to Alexander MacDonald and brother to MacAlan Rory was taken out of his house after it had been fired and killed after dinner in cold blood, and stabbed to pieces’.

  On 27 August, when Major Forbes was hurrying to deliver Hill's letter to Livingstone, the Privy Council put William's orders into a Proclamation of Indemnity. It was posted at the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh, and at crosses in the head burghs throughout the kingdom. It ordered all men who had been in arms against King William and Queen Mary to appear before the Sheriffs of their shires and there swear the oath of allegiance. And this, on pain of punishment to the utmost extremity of the law, was to be done before the first day of January 1692.

  The chiefs looked southward to France for guidance from James. This garrulous, weakling exile, scratching at his memoirs and pious aphorisms, shamed by the recollection of his sexual appetites, surrounding himself with priests and enjoying the melancholy tragedy of his life, as yet knew nothing of what was expected from him. The emissaries had not left the Highlands. Two men had been selected. The first was Sir George Barclay, Buchan's second-in-command and co-signator of the Achallader Treaty, a brave and determined man with a weakness for assassination plots. The second was Major Duncan Menzies of Fornooth, a fanatical Jacobite who had defied his chief and taken some of his clan to join Dundee two years before. Since the end of July, Barclay had had a pass to travel freely through England to France and back. It had been given to him by Breadalbane, and he seems to have been reluctant to test its validity at first, pausing at Achallader to discuss the matter with Campbell of Barcaldine, Breadalbane's chamberlain. At last he took the risk and got away without stop.

  Toward the end of August, Menzies left Edinburgh where he had been in hiding. In keeping with his character he made an adventure of the journey. He had no pass, and for a year now it had been impossible for even the most innocent of travellers to go in or out of British ports without one. But he had friends in the city, and one of them was the Postmaster at Holyrood Palace, William Cairne
s. With a commendable indifference to the safety of his own neck, Cairnes made out a pass for the Major in the name of Stewart, and under this scarcely innocent alias Menzies posted down through the Lowlands and England, and over the Channel to France. When the Privy Council heard of the affair, it threw the luckless Postmaster into the Tolbooth, along with an advocate and a gentleman of the Palace Guard who had helped him.

  Much now depended on the speed with which James II acted in response to the chiefs' appeal. In the palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris he lived a comfortable life as a pensioner of Louis XIV, rapidly becoming senile, obsessed with guilt over the pleasures he had enjoyed with his ugly mistresses, and happy only when he was hunting or working on his papers of devotion. His greatest fault had always been irresolution. It had now become a vice.

  ‘Look on and you shall be satisfied of your revenge’

  WITH the approach of his second winter in the Highlands, John Hill was depressed by a sense of failure. Those whom he had trusted, Tarbat and Melville, had lost their influence in the Council and at Court. He now had Glengarry's promise to swear on oath to the truth of the Private Articles and the treachery of Breadalbane, but no one was interested. If the offer of pardon and indemnity brought peace to the Highlands it would be the result of his patient work in laying the ground, yet neither the King nor the Master of Stair had had the grace to acknowledge this. The damp cold, the mist above the marsh, brought back his rheumatism, and his eyes were sore and inflamed by long hours at his desk. He did his duty loyally. ‘I came not to serve myself,’ he told the Earl of Crawford, ‘by expecting to gain anything by pinching and unjust methods, but only the bare pay and salary my Master allows me; but I will always be a faithful subject and servant to the King in any station, either military or civil.’ Though he agreed with the poet, Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores, he was not too deeply hurt because others had taken the credit for his work. ‘Let me but live in such favour with my Master as he thinks fit to vouchsafe me. I shall therein rest fully satisfied, though I confess it would much please me to see the King's affairs, the true religion, and the public good prosper.’

  The old man's humility was as real as his occasional small vanities. He put his faith and energies into what he believed to be a righteous cause, and in the end it would betray him. He was never in doubt about the necessity of his work until it reached its bloody climax, and not even then did he see his world for what it was. Great men are often dwarfed by their honest servants.

  That autumn his duties at Fort William were at last eased by the appointment of a Deputy-Governor, James Hamilton, who was also given the lieutenant-colonelcy of Hill's Regiment. Hamilton is a mystery, and it seems fitting that he should be. He appears late on the stage like a cloaked bravo, and what he was matters less than what he may have been sent to do. His Christian name is a common one in the Hamilton family, and it is impossible to find him with any certainty in its extensive genealogy. He may have been a Scot, and he may have been Scoto-Irish, for there were several James Hamiltons who came from Ireland to serve in the army of William III. The first record of him is in July 1690, when he appears on the muster rolls as the lieutenant-colonel of Cunningham's Regiment of Foot. A year later, his name is on the roll of Hill's Regiment at Inverlochy. Oblique references in the letters that passed between him and Stair suggest that the Master secured him the appointment. They suggest also that there was some incident in Hamilton's recent past, some error of judgement or dereliction of duty, for which he was anxious to atone by diligent and unquestioning service.*

  Hill's attitude to Hamilton, in his letters and reports, was briefly non-committal. This, too, is curious, for the Governor was a man who generously recommended those whom he respected, and boldly censured those whom he distrusted. But for nearly five years Hill said almost nothing about Hamilton, little that was good or bad. For his part, when Hamilton first came to Fort William he was full of compliments for ‘this worthy gentleman, my Colonel’, but such calculated phrases dropped from his letters as he grew more sure of his own influence. He had none of Hill's avuncular concern for the clans, or his wish to bring them to submission by reasonable persuasion. To Hamilton the Highlanders were all villains, insolent and saucy, and he was eager to take the field against them, and ‘to put in execution such commands as shall come for reducing them to better manners’. When Hill was shown Hamilton's letters, before their dispatch to Edinburgh or London, he may have wondered why the words were ‘shall come’ and not ‘may come’.

  Hamilton was a liar when it suited his interest. Hill had no illusions about the rabble he had been given for a regiment, hoping that time and God's will would eventually make soldiers of those who did not die or desert. Though they could now stand watch and march on patrol, they still did not look like soldiers. They wore what clothing there had been when Glen-cairn's and Kenmure's were disbanded, and this lacked uniformity where it was not already in rags. Some men were wearing coats, breeches, hose and shoes that had seen three or four others through to the graveyard. Hill had been sent a cap and a coat for approval, but they were of poor quality and unlike the pattern of the new uniform he had chosen. Patiently he asked for better design and workmanship, and waited. He knew that a good red coat with bright facings, stout shoes and a waterproof hat went a long way toward the making of a soldier. Until his men could respect themselves, they would continue to drink, to rebel, and to desert. More worldly wise, Hamilton saw what Edinburgh wished to see. ‘I do not know, nor have not known,’ he reported, ‘a regiment better composed of discreet, sober men, and am satisfied they are entirely zealous to the service.’ The sick and ill-clad bodies of these discreet and sober men were rungs upon which Hamilton was determined to climb. ‘Let what will be said of them, I shall never deserve the King's pay, nor be trusted in his service, if any in this kingdom exceed them in any point which my willing though weak industry shall never fail to be employed.’

  Hamilton's industry as Deputy-Governor, and his ambition, were far from weak, and Hill began to have uneasy doubts. Once more he was afraid that he was about to be replaced, perhaps by Hamilton, and he wrote to the Privy Council in protest. To recall him now, he said, would be dishonourable, and would cause more trouble than the King's affairs could afford.

  By the end of October and the beginning of the winter storms, there was still no word from the vacillating exile at Saint-Germain. Some of the chiefs who had accepted Breadalbane's assurances at Achallader were now openly disgusted with him. Though Coll of Keppoch had been one of the first to accept the Earl's promises, he locked himself away in his hills and refused to talk about the oath. Lochiel retired in haughty silence to his fir-wood house at Achnacarry, and the Macleans, with a cautious eye on the Campbells of Argyll, were behaving as if there had been no talk of pardon, indemnity or oath. The chiefs' hostility and waywardness angered Breadalbane. ‘They are ruined and abused with lies that children of ten years of age could not believe,’ he told his chamberlain, ‘and they talk as if they were to give terms and not to receive them, but they will find that a great mistake in a few weeks, notwithstanding my endeavours to the contrary.’

  They will find that a great mistake in a few weeks… How much Breadalbane knew of Stair's intentions, should the chiefs ignore the Proclamation of Indemnity, it is hard to say. But that sentence indicates some knowledge, or some suspicion. What might happen to the malcontents, however, worried him less than what was happening to him. Since the exposure of the Private Articles, since his return to Balloch from Flanders, he had felt the ground moving uncertainly beneath him, and Stair had a machiavellian trick of increasing his alarm while professedly reassuring him. ‘There wants no endeavours to render you suspicious to the King, but he asked what proof there was for the information, and bid me tell you to go on in your business. I hope your Lordship will not only keep [the chiefs] from giving offence, but bring them to the allegiance.’ Breadalbane thought that the chiefs would be less like to give offence (and more wil
ling to talk to him) if they could be given some news of the money he had promised them. Stair gave him little encouragement. ‘The King said they were not presently to receive it, which is true, but that he had ordered it to be delivered out of his treasury, so they need not fear in the least performance.’

  November and winter had closed the glens. In one sense, John Hill was glad to see snow on Ardgour, and black ice rimming the banks of the Nevis. There had been talk again of making Glengarry surrender his castle, but winter had made this impossible, even if someone had thought of the artillery and engineers such an attempt would need. A fire burned continuously in his tiny room inside the fort, but he was never warm and never well. His age lay heavily upon him. His dear child, John Forbes, was away in Edinburgh, and he was lonely for the young man's bright company.

  November, and Rannoch was white. There was snow on Aonach Eagach and the five fingers of Bidean nam Bian. Home from the shielings for more than a month now, Clan Iain Abrach waited for spring. Black cattle that had once grazed in Breadalbane and Argyll were herded close to the townships, and Glenlyon's fine stallion was warmly stabled at Carnoch. MacIain kept to his house. John MacDonald of Achtriachtan had Colonel Hill's protection in his pocket, and like the other tacksmen of Glencoe he left the oath of allegiance to the conscience of his chief. None of the rebel chiefs had as yet appeared before the Sheriff of his shire. It was twelve weeks since the departure of Menzies and Barclay, and no word had come from France.

  At the beginning of December there was news from London. The Earl of Melville had been relieved of his office, and the Master of Stair was the sole Secretary of State for Scotland.

  Now the pace changed. For a year Stair had worked to secure a peaceful and bloodless settlement with the chiefs. He had waited three months for them to obey the Proclamation of Indemnity and swear the oath of allegiance. There were four weeks left until the first day of January, and there was no sign that anything had been achieved. Alone in office he could not lay the blame for failure or delay upon Melville. If the entire responsibility he coveted had become his at the worst moment, perhaps he welcomed the opportunity to succeed by one bold, merciless and effective stroke. He did not believe that James would now send the chiefs a discharge from his service, or that if it came the Highlanders would readily take the oath. His impatience, his anger, his growing fear of failure were suddenly evident in everything he wrote or did. It was as if the bland, ungiving mask of his face had cracked, revealing the scars he had kept hidden – the memory of the Highland Host, the thought that these obstinate chiefs had been the friends of Dundee, the implacable enemy of the Dalrymples, and the bitter hurt of knowing that outside Scotland men saw little difference between a Lowland laird and a Highland cateran. He was now obsessed with what the clans called Mi-run mor nan Gall, the Lowlander's great hatred of the Highlander. From the moment he took full office he no longer talked of treaties and bargains. He spoke of force, and soon the word would spit from his pen in black venom.