Glencoe

by John Prebble

  If thou art Red Duncan the Hospitable

  far will I bear thy fame.

  As we turn our backs on each other,

  it is I whom am shirtless, not thou.

  For what was put upon the backs of the Campbells of Glenlyon had usually been taken from the shoulders of a MacGregor, a Stewart, or a Menzies.

  The third laird was Mad Colin, whose wits never recovered from a blow on the head in his youth. He was a violent man, malevolent and arrogant. His life was a furious storm of ill-temper, relieved only by the letting of blood. It was he who hanged thirty-six raiders from Keppoch and Glencoe on the braes of Meggernie, after first pistolling their leader. For a hundred years the Lochaber Men spoke of Glen Lyon as if Mad Colin were still there, leering from the walls of Meggernie Castle at the bodies of three dozen MacDonalds. He quarrelled with everyone, the King and his Glenorchy cousins, his wife and his children. He would shelter the MacGregors one day to spite his Campbell kin, and hang them the next to amuse himself. From his violent loins came a surprisingly gentle successor, another Red Duncan who preferred avenues of sycamores to hanging-trees. He did not molest the MacGregors of Roro who lived in Glen Lyon, protected them from Glenorchy's harrying, and was not too angry when his daughter eloped with one. But he did more damage to his family than Mad Colin's temper could ever have done. He was a passionate and unlucky gambler, creating a labyrinth of debt and mortgage from which his son escaped only by dying before he inherited it.

  Robert Campbell, the fifth Laird, succeeded his tree-loving and amiable grandfather at the age of eight, and he was fourteen when the Gallows Herd went home from Montrose's wars by way of Glen Lyon. He was well grounded in French, Latin, mathematics and the story of his family's vengeful hatred of the MacDonalds. Among the earliest sounds he heard was the cry of Clan Donald's slogan and the rattle of his grandfather's dice, and both were to have the strongest influence over his life. His redoubtable mother was Jean Campbell, a sister of the tenth Laird of Glenorchy and the aunt of Grey John of Breadalbane. She made marriage and childbirth her vocation, having three husbands and sixteen children. After the death of Archibald Campbell, Robert's father, she married Patrick Roy MacGregor. He was a vigorous and mettlesome gentleman, but no match for her, and when he went the way of his predecessor she married Duncan Stewart the Third of Appin by whom, understandably perhaps, she had one child only. This girl married a Campbell of Lochnell, and their daughter Sarah became the wife of Alasdair Og, the younger son of MacIain the Twelfth of Glencoe.

  When Jean Campbell died, the Stewarts of Appin, the MacGregors of Roro, and the Campbells of Glenlyon held a wake that was remembered in Breadalbane for two hundred years. The days between the death of the valiant old woman and her interment were filled with riotous drinking, feasting and games, as was the custom. All three clans competed against each other in wrestling, fencing, throwing the stone and tossing the caber. The Campbells outmatched their opponents, until a MacGregor threw a stone between the fork of a high tree and could not be beaten. Believing that Glenlyon should be the first at his mother's funeral as it had been in her marriage bed, Robert Campbell sent for one of his herdsmen, a MacArthur who lived fifteen miles up the glen. This sturdy fellow arrived the next morning on the run, and without removing plaid or bonnet he threw the stone between the same tree-fork and far beyond the MacGregor's mark. The delighted Robert Campbell broached more whisky and postponed his mother's burial for another twenty-four hours of games and drinking.

  Glenlyon's apologists, and they grew fewer as his creditors increased, said that since he had grown up under the restrictive rule of the Commonwealth there had been little to occupy him but gambling and drinking. The Restoration, however, increased his taste for both. Once he was free from the guardianship of his uncle, and the full inheritor of a debt-burdened estate, he borrowed money from the kin of his first step-father, which says much for his power of persuasion and their magnanimity, since the MacGregors claimed Glen Lyon as theirs by right. He borrowed from all the Campbells of Breadalbane, and from any Perthshire laird who was foolish enough to listen to him, and to repay one debt he saddled himself with three more. He signed bonds and mortgages with a recklessness that would have terrified his grandfather. He was so busy with dice, drinking and debts that he was thirty-eight before he thought of marrying. His wife was Helen Lindsay from Angus, a loyal woman who bore his improvidence and his children with patient stoicism. To put her in a setting that fitted his station, he signed more bonds, borrowed more money, and enlarged Meggernie Castle.

  His infuriated creditors took him to law, where he was compelled to raise some of the money owing them by leasing the fir-woods of Glen Lyon to John Crawford and a company of Lowland merchants. For three years Glenlyon watched in sullen resentment as Crawford built a sawmill, dammed the River Lyon, and began to fell the splendid red trees. The people of Glen Lyon were resentful too. They did not like the Lowlanders, and they accused Crawford of building his mill on the site of Saint Adamnan's corn-mill. They put the Evil Eye on his water-wheel and roasted his oxen over the timber he had cut. Crawford complained, but Robert Campbell had now remembered that he was the great-grandson of Mad Colin who had hanged a King's Messenger and put his foot upon the King's order. On the real or imagined excuse that the Lowlanders had gone beyond the terms of their lease, he called out his people in arms. According to a complaint made to the Privy Council, they ‘came on 26th July, 1677, armed with swords, guns, dirks, pistols and other weapons, and fell upon the wrights and workmen at the mill and stole their tools and worklooms, and threatened to hang them if they worked any longer’. Three times Glenlyon and his brother Colin raided the mill, and when Crawford died ‘the said Robert Campbell and others came to the said John Crawford's house where his corpse was lying, and violently seized the chest wherein were his whole papers, particularly some discharges and receipts granted him by Glenlyon, and carried it off to his own house at Chesthill’.

  Crawford's successor was a Stewart and a Highlander, and he knew how to deal with a situation like this. He came back the next year ‘with others of his name, armed with swords, pistols, hagbuts and dirks’. Thus protected, he cut down eight thousand trees, built more dams, and burned the houses and crops that stood in the way of his ox-wagons. Glenlyon complained to the Privy Council this time, saying that the woodmen had ruined the salmon-fishing from which he drew most of his rents, and asking for £34,333 Scots in compensation. It was a brave try, but the unsympathetic Council told him to behave himself, and put him under oath not to molest Patrick Stewart of Ballechan lest he have Letters of Fire and Sword issued against him.

  The people of Glen Lyon relished the affair, and their Bard composed a song in honour of it – ‘How we burned the wide-horned oxen on the boards of Crawford's saw-mill.’

  The only man in Scotland now willing to lend Robert Campbell a shilling was his cousin Grey John, who advanced him £5,000 against his bond. There were so many charter-chests filled with so many bonds signed by Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, that the Earl cannot have hoped to see his money again. But he had a clannish concern for the feckless man, and he believed that credit cemented the loyalty of his vassals as well as kinship. Two years later Glenlyon repaid some of this debt, or at least an interest on it, by leading Grey John's army into Caithness against the Sinclairs.

  He was fifty when his debts, his drinking, his gambling, and the destitution they had brought upon his family, at last became a matter of honour to Clan Campbell. He was ordered to accept the comhairl'-taigh, the guidance of his house as given by its chief, the ninth Earl of Argyll. He took it like a frightened child, willingly signing all papers put before him by Campbell lawyers in the presence of the Provosts of Perth and Edinburgh. He confessed that his way of life had brought his estates and family into ruin, and that he could not alone save them.

  And likewise understand how easy I may be circumvented and deceived in the management of my affairs by subtle and crafty persons who have designs on me, and
may entice me to the dilapidation of my lands, goods and gear, to my great hurt and prejudice. And I being fully persuaded and having good proof and experience of the love and kindness of my noble and real friends, Archibald, Earl of Argyll, and John, Earl of Caithness whose counsel and advice I now resolve to use and by whom I am hereafter to be governed in all my affairs and business.

  He promised to sell no more of his lands or rents, to make no further bonds or obligations without the joint consent of Argyll and Grey John. If he did so they would be ‘null and void, as if the same had never been made’.

  Five years later he broke this promise. Argyll had died under the Maiden, but the terms of the bond still made Glenlyon subject to Breadalbane's consent. Grey John was tired of his cousin Robin, and refused to lend him any more money. Glenlyon was filled with rage as violent as any that had ever convulsed Mad Colin, and he swore that if he could get no help from his own kinsmen he would sell all he owned in the glen, that not one blade of grass would thenceforward belong to a Campbell. Breadalbane threatened him with the bond, and he ignored it. His people offered him half of their cattle to pay his debts, but he refused it. On a deer-hunt some days before the sale, a ball from another gun narrowly missed him, passing between his legs. ‘Would it have been your loins,’ said his gillie, ‘then Glen Lyon would not be sold.’

  It was sold, to the Murrays of Atholl. All that was left to Glenlyon was the house and estate of Chesthill, the dower-land of his wife, and this too was to go to the Murrays when she died. When it was raped by the Glencoe men after Killiecrankie, Glenlyon was poorer than he had ever been. He drank more and gambled more, his fair skin flushed and his voice loud and quarrelsome. In 1690 he raised a ragged force of men from Argyll and went raiding in Strathfillan, hoping to lift enough cattle to pay some of his debts. Breadalbane was sure that he was now mad. ‘He ought to be sent to Bedlam,’ the Earl told Carwhin, ‘I wish we had chambered him years ago.’ Yet the man's pathetic dignity, even in drink, was disarming, the call of clanship was always strong, and Grey John could sometimes feel sorry for him. ‘He is an object of compassion when I see him, but when he is out of sight I could wish he had never been born.’

  Glenlyon may well have wished this himself now. Since the savage raid by the Glencoe men there had been no rents collected on Chesthill. His family almost starved in the winter of 1690, and to buy them meal he borrowed a little money on a short term from one of the Murrays. When he failed to repay it, the Murray had him outlawed, and he would have been hunted in the hills had his son-in-law not honoured the debt for him. He now bitterly regretted the sale of Glen Lyon to Lord Murray, which Breadalbane had been disputing for years. In his drunken rages, his mornings of maudlin self-pity, he complained that he had been tricked by the ‘subtle and crafty persons’ whom he had once before blamed for his misfortunes. Impatient with Breadalbane's failure to get the sale reversed, he asked Argyll for assistance. He took a commission in the Earl's regiment at this time, and this may have been as much an attempt to help his petition as it was a desperate and last effort to support his family.

  Argyll persuaded him to accept a decision reached by himself and the Earl of Arran as arbitrators. Glenlyon agreed, and the two Earls decided in favour of the Murray claim. Lord Murray's support for King William, against the Jacobite sympathies of his father and clan, needed some generous acknowledgement, and Glenlyon's support was of value to nobody. Breadalbane was enraged, though not so much on his cousin's behalf. ‘It has been done of purpose against me,’ he said, and the next time he saw Lord Murray at Holyroodhouse he set about him with his fists.

  Which did not, of course, help Robert Campbell of Glenlyon who was now a captain of Foot at eight shillings a day.

  ‘There put in due execution the orders you have received’

  BEYOND the mouth of Gleann an Fiodh, the Valley of Wood less than a mile from Invercoe, Glenlyon halted his command. On this narrow, Iochside track he had formed his companies in close order and by half-files, a column of scarlet, black, yellow and grey, fifty yards long with an advance file and an after-guard. The soldiers' breath hung above their bonnets in a white roll, their sergeants' cries echoed across the water. ‘Order your muskets… order your pikes… rest on your arms!’ The brass heels of the muskets struck the frosted earth, the pikes slanted and were still. The musketeers blew on their naked fingers and envied the leather gauntlets of the pikemen.

  Only the leading files could see the reason for the halt. Across their path, from the brae to the edge of the loch, were twenty Highlanders, still and suspicious, like a deer-herd nervously scenting danger. Before them stood a gentleman in plaid and trews, his head up in question. Glenlyon could see no weapons, no point of sword or swing of dirk beneath the tartan, and the gentleman himself was plainly unarmed. He called up a lieutenant, his wife's kinsman John Lindsay, and sent him forward with the quartering-papers. He waited, leaning on his half-pike, listening to the sound of Lindsay's feet, the hawking and coughing of his men.

  As soon as the first boat had been seen on the ferry the news had run from Ballachulish to Invercoe, from the big house at Carnoch to Inverrigan, Achnacone and Achtriachtan. Although he had John Hill's promise of protection, and expected no danger, MacIain told his people to hide their arms in their peat-stacks, or on the brae beneath heaps of stones. If the soldiers were coming to disarm Glencoe, let them be given no more than rusty, useless weapons. He sent his son John, whose calm judgement he could trust, to meet the soldiers with some of his clan, to ask them their business and to make them welcome if they came in peace. Now John MacDonald looked beyond Lieutenant Lindsay to the tall figure at the head of the soldiers. If he recognized the flushed face, the fair hair and staring eyes, he cannot have been easy in spirit. Lindsay was holding out the papers in a gauntleted hand, but MacDonald did not take them. ‘Do you come as friends,’ he asked, ‘or as enemies?’

  ‘As friends,’ said the lieutenant, pushing forward the papers again. On his parole of honour, no harm was intended MacIain or his people, But here were orders, as Mr MacDonald would see if he read them, signed by his commanding officer and demanding quarters in Glencoe for two companies of the King's Foot. MacIain's son took the papers, and now Glenlyon came forward, his plaid thrown back from his red coat, his hand out, and the light cold on the gilt gorget at his throat. He greeted the MacDonald boisterously, asking for news of his niece Sarah and his nephew Sandy, making a family gathering of the meeting by introducing the lieutenant as one of his kin too. He was probably nervous, remembering that less than three years before this quiet man, and others of the clan, had brought him and his family close to starvation. And John MacDonald must have thought that of all the officers who could bring troops to Glencoe, in peace or hostility, the one least welcome would be he who had most reason to hate MacIain. And to come with Argyll men at his back, forbye…

  Glenlyon's husky, shouting voice beat down their mutual doubts. Here were bad times, when men must impose themselves upon others' hospitality in such weather. But the fort was full, did MacDonald know that? A great gathering of soldiers to punish Glengarry when the weather lifted, and until then, until they were called, he and his men would be grateful for what quarters Glencoe could find them. It was in order, MacDonald would see that from the papers, but it was also the Highland way to ask for bed and comfort as a gentleman and a friend, and this he did willingly. Would MacIain refuse him?

  ‘You and your men are welcome in Glencoe,’ said John MacDonald, and he held out his hand. Behind him, his scowling clansmen moved and broke, running back to Invercoe with news that the soldiers were coming. The drums beat, the companies marched, and John MacDonald walked beside Glenlyon to his father's house.

  The Argyll men were halted again on the flat, frosted meadow by Carnoch, and the people of the glen gathered to stare at them uneasily. Among the grenadiers, MacIain's gillies may have recognized the soldiers who took them and their chief prisoner at Loch Creran ferry a month before, and this would have
deepened their uncertainty. MacIain came from his door with his wife at his side, and once more Glenlyon asked for quarters and hospitality, promising that the burden he put upon them would soon be lifted when orders set him and his men against Glengarry. ‘You are welcome,’ said MacIain kindly, and perhaps his greeting was all the warmer because he was relieved to hear that no more than this was expected of him. John Hill and Ardkinglas had promised him the protection of the garrison at Inverlochy, and he could, if he wished, see these soldiers as evidence of it. Nothing was said on either side of Glen Lyon cattle steaming in Glencoe byres, of a red stallion that had been taken from the stables at Chesthill, of a copper kettle once belonging to Helen Campbell and now in Lady Glencoe's kitchen, or that Robert Campbell would not have become a King's officer in a red coat had it not been for the raiding of MacIain and his MacDonalds. Glenlyon asked again for his niece Sarah and her husband Sandy, his voice growing softer as his confidence grew. He introduced his officers punctiliously, and each gentleman removed his hat in salute, bowing over the crimson sash at his waist.

  The records of this day, and of the thirteen that followed in Glencoe, mention three officers and one non-commissioned officer only – Glenlyon, Lieutenant John Lindsay, Ensign John Lundie and Sergeant Robert Barber. But there is no reason to believe that there were not more. The names of Lindsay and Lundie do not appear on the last surviving Muster Roll* of Glenlyon's company. They could have replaced officers who were on leave, or they could have been recent and specially selected appointments. Although Captain Thomas Drummond was not yet present to command his grenadiers, his junior officers, Lieutenants John Kilpatrick and Robert Campbell may well have been. Certainly both companies would have had their full establishment of sergeants, two to the battalion company and three to the grenadiers. Barber was the senior sergeant of Glenlyon's, with James Hendrie as his junior. Walter Purdie, Walter Buchanan and Walter Bruss were sergeants of the grenadiers. All were Lowlanders who had been transferred to Argyll's Regiment from Bargany's or other units. In addition, there were two drummers and three corporals to each company, and most of them were also from the Lowlands. More than two-thirds of the private sentinels were recognizably Highland by name, from the clan lands of Argyll and his vassals. The majority of those with Lowland names were in the grenadier company.