Chapter 26

On the arrival of Clunie two days afterwards, the royal fugitive and his friend Lochiel removed from Mellamur, and went two miles further into Ben Aulder, until they reached a shiel called Uiskchiboa, where the hut was peculiarly wretched and smoky; "yet his Royal Highness," as Clunie related, "put up with everything." Here they remained for two or three nights, and then went to a habitation still two miles further into Ben Aulder, for no less remote retreat was thought secure. This retreat was prepared by Clunie, and obtained the name of the Cage. "It was," as he himself relates, "a great curiosity, and can scarcely be described to perfection." It is best to give the account of the edifice which he had himself constructed, in Macpherson's own words. "It was situated in the face of a very rough, high, and rocky mountain, called Lettemilichk, still a part of Ben Aulder, full of great stones and crevices, and some scattered wood interspersed. The habitation called the Cage, in the face of that mountain, was within a small but thick wood. There were first some rows of trees laid down, in order to level a floor for the habitation; and, as the place was steep, this raised the lower side to an equal height with the other; and these trees, in the way of joists or planks, were levelled with earth or gravel. There were betwixt the trees, growing naturally on their own roots, some stakes fixed in the earth, which, with the trees, were interwoven with ropes, made of heath or birch-twigs, up to the top of the Cage, it being of a round or rather oval shape, and the whole thatched and covered over with bog. This whole fabric hung, as it were, by a large tree, which reclined from the one end, all along the roof to the other, and which gave it the name of the Cage; and by chance there happened to be two stones, at a small distance from one another, in the side next the precipice, resembling the pillars of a chimney, where the fire was placed. The smoke had its vent out here, all along the face of the rock, which was so much of the same colour that one could discover no difference in the clearest day. The Cage was no larger than to contain six or seven persons, four of whom were frequently employed playing at cards, one idle looking on, one baking, and another fixing bread and cooking."[295]

Charles and Lochiel remained six or seven days in this seclusion, which was one of several to which Clunie was in the habit of retiring, never even informing his wife or his most attached friends whither he was going. But the deliverance of the Prince and Lochiel was now at hand. Several small vessels had arrived from France, and touched on the west coast, expressly to carry away the Prince, but not being able to find him out, they had returned. By the fidelity of the Highlanders and the connection between every member of the different clans, the Prince had been able to keep up a continual communication with persons on the coast, without discovery. This was managed by some of his adherents skulking near the shore; and though they knew not where Charles was, yet they conveyed the intelligence to others, who imparted it to persons in the interior, who again told it to those who were acquainted with the obscure place of his retreat. At last two French vessels, l'Heureux and la Princesse de Conti, departed under the command of Colonel Warren, from St. Malo, and arrived at Lochnarmagh early in September. This event was communicated to Cameron of Clunes, who, on the other hand, learned where the Prince was from a poor woman. A messenger was immediately dispatched to the Cage, and he reached that place on the thirteenth of September. Charles Edward and Lochiel now prepared to bid Scotland a final adieu. Notices were sent round by the Prince to different friends who might choose to avail themselves of this opportunity of escape; and it was intimated to them that they might join him if they were inclined.

The place of embarkation was Borodale, whence Charles had first summoned Lochiel to support his cause. The party travelled only by night, and were six days on their road. They were joined by Glengary, John Roy Stewart, Dr. Cameron, and a number of other adherents. On the twentieth of September they left Lochnarmagh, and had a fair passage to the coast of France. The Prince had intended to sail direct for Nantes, but he altered his course in order to escape Admiral Lestoch's squadron; and after being chased by two men-of-war, he landed at Morlaix, in Lower Bretagne, in a thick fog, on the twenty-ninth of September.

Lochiel was accompanied in his flight to France by his wife, the faithful and affectionate associate of his exile. His eldest son was left in the charge of his brother Cameron, of Fassefern. In Paris Lochiel found his father, who was then eighty years of age; and to this aged chief the Prince paid the well-merited compliment of placing him in the same carriage with himself and Lord Lewis Gordon, when he first went to the Court of Louis the Fifteenth in state. The Prince was followed on that occasion by a number of his friends, both in coaches and on horseback. Lord Ogilvy, Lord Elcho, and the Prince's secretary Kelly, preceded the royal carriage: the younger Lochiel and several gentlemen followed on horseback. Amid this noble train of brave men, the Prince appeared pre-eminent in the splendour of his dress. A coat of rose-coloured velvet, lined with silver tissue, presented a singular contrast to the brown short coat in which some of his adherents had formerly seen him. His waistcoat was of gold brocade with a spangled fringe, set out in scollops, and the white cockade in his hat was studded with diamonds. The order of St. Andrew and the George on his breast were adorned with the same jewels: "he glittered," as an eye-witness observed, "all over like the star which they tell you appeared at his nativity." But all this display, and the feigned kindness of his reception, were but the prelude to a heartless abandonment of his cause on the part of Louis the Fifteenth.

Lochiel was, eventually, provided for by the French Monarch. He was made Colonel of a French regiment, and having a peculiar faculty of attaching others to him, he soon became beloved by those under his command. The Prince showed him affectionate respect; and, blessed in the society of his wife, and in a daughter whom he called Donalda, Lochiel might have passed the rest of his days in tranquil submission to the course of events: but his heart yearned for Scotland; he could not give up the hopes of another expedition, which he desired to undertake with any force that could be collected. Cherishing this scheme, the coldness of the Court of France, and the rashness of the Prince, gave great sorrow to his harassed mind. Soon after his arrival in Paris he opened a correspondence with the Chevalier St. George, and represented to him that the misfortunes which had befallen the cause were not irretrievable, and that if ten regiments only could be landed in Scotland before the depopulating system adopted by the English Government had taken effect, an insurrection might again be raised with good grounds for the hope of success.

Still hoping thus to return to his country, and again to take arms in her service, as he deemed it, it was long before Lochiel consented to accept the command of the French regiment, "intending still," as he said, "to share the fate of his people." "I told his Royal Highness," he wrote to the Chevalier St. George, "that Lord Ogilvy or others might incline to make a figure in France, but my ambition was to save the crown and serve my country, or perish with it. His Royal Highness said, he was doing all he could, but persisted in his resolution to procure me a regiment. If it is obtained, I shall accept it out of respect to the Prince; but I hope your Majesty will approve of the resolution I have taken to share in the fate of the people I have undone, and, if they must be sacrificed, to fall along with them. This is the only way I can free myself from the reproach of their blood, and show the disinterested zeal with which I have lived, and shall dye.

"Your Majesty's most humble, most obedient, and most faithful servant."[296]

When Prince Charles, disheartened at the growing indifference of the French Court to his interests, contemplated leaving Paris, Lochiel objected to a proposal which seemed to imply an abandonment of the cause which he had pledged himself to support. His representations to the Prince were ineffectual, for a stronger influence had arisen to baffle the endeavours of Charles's friends; and he was under the sway of one who was, not inaptly, termed "his Delilah." He left Paris and arrived at Avignon, to which place Lochiel addressed to him a letter full of the most cogent reasons why he should not leave Paris. From his arguments it appears that the English Jacobites had expressed their willingness to rise, had the Prince either supplied them with arms or brought them troops to support them.

"For Heaven's sake, sir," wrote Lochiel,[297] "be pleased to consider these circumstances with the attention that their importance deserves; and that your honour, your essential interest, the preservation of the royal cause, and the bleeding state of your suffering friends, require of you. Let me beg of your Royal Highness, in the most humble and earnest manner, to reflect that your reputation must suffer in the opinion of all mankind, if there should be room to suppose that you had slighted or neglected any possible means of retrieving your affairs."

These remonstrances were at last so far effectual, that Charles returned to Paris, and was only again removed from that capital by force.

The spirit of Lochiel was meantime broken by the mournful tidings which reached him of the death of friends on the scaffold, the cruelties enacted in Scotland, and, more than all, of the Act which took effect in August 1747, disarming the Highlanders and restraining the use of the Highland garb. By this statute it was made penal to wear the national costume: a first offence was punished with six months' imprisonment; a second, with transportation for seven years. Such were the efforts made to break the union of a fiery but faithful people, and such the attempt to produce a complete revolution in the national habits!

Many were the projects which amused the exiled Jacobites into hopes that ended in bitter disappointment, and many the fleeting visions of a restoration of the Stuarts. During one of these brief chimeras, Lochiel and Clunie visited Charles at a retreat on the Upper Rhine, whither he had retired after the perfidious imprisonment at the Castle of Vincennes. They found the Prince sunk in the lassitude which succeeds a long course of exciting events, and of smothered but not subdued misery. The visit yielded to neither party satisfaction. Charles was deaf to the remonstrances of Lochiel, and Lochiel beheld his Prince wholly devoted to Miss Walkinshaw and her daughter, afterwards Countess of Albany, and completely under the influence of his mistress, who was regarded by Lochiel and Clunie as a spy of Hanover.

Lochiel left the Prince, and they never met again. The health of the chief began to decline; his malady was a mental one, and admitted of no cure but a return to those vassals who had been so faithful and so much attached to him, and to friends with whose misfortunes he seems to have blamed himself. Of the affection of the clansmen he received frequent proofs. "The estates of Lochiel," says Mrs. Grant, "were forfeited like others, and paid a moderate rate to the Crown, such as they had formerly given to their chief. The domain formerly occupied by the Laird was taken on his behoof by his brother. The tenants brought each a horse, cow, colt, or heifer, as a free-will offering, till this ample grazing-farm was as well stocked as formerly. Not content with this, they sent a yearly tribute of affection to their beloved chief, independent of the rents they paid to the commissioners for the forfeited estates. Lochiel's lady and her daughters once or twice made a sorrowful pilgrimage among their friends and tenants. These last received them with a tenderness and respect which seemed augmented by the adversity into which they were plunged."

At last the suffering spirit was released. Lochiel is conjectured to have died about the year 1760, and is generally thought to have sunk under the pressure of hopeless sorrow, or, to use the words of one who spoke from tradition, "of a broken heart." His daughter Donalda, who was about fourteen at the time of his death, had attached herself so fondly to her father, that after his decease she pined away, and never recovered. She died soon after her father, and the mother did not long survive her daughter. Never, perhaps, did a brave and unfortunate man sink to rest more honoured by society at large, more admired and respected by his friends, more revered by his vassals, than the gentle Lochiel. The beauty of his character showed itself also in the close ties of domestic life: and in some of these, more particularly as a brother, his warm and constant affections were destined to be severely wounded. He felt deeply the banishment of his brother Cameron of Fassefern; and still more severely the cruel fate of another brother, Dr. Archibald Cameron. The fate of that young man, who attended Charles Edward in most of his wanderings, presents, indeed, one of the saddest episodes of this melancholy period. Dr. Cameron, after sharing the dangers which the Prince ran, and following him to France, returned to Scotland in 1749. Charles Edward had left a large sum of money in the charge of Macpherson of Clunie, upon leaving Scotland; and Dr. Cameron was privy to the concealment of the money. He visited Clunie, and obtained from him six thousand louis-d'ors, for which, however, Clunie took Dr. Cameron's receipt. In 1753, Dr. Cameron made another visit, which is conjectured to have had a similar object. The money was concealed near Loch Arkeg, to the amount of twenty-two thousand louis-d'ors. Some degree of obscurity rests upon this transaction, which undoubtedly throws a degree of discredit on the memory of Dr. Cameron. Among the Stuart papers there is a letter from Mr. Ludovick Cameron to Prince Charles, alluding to the "misfortune" of his nephew, Dr. Cameron, in taking away a good round sum of his Highness's money, and clearing himself from the imputation. This proves that there was no commission, as it has been suggested,[298] to Dr. Cameron, but that the transaction was regarded in a disgraceful light, even by the relative of the unfortunate young man.

A severe retribution awaited the offender, who intended, it is said, to enter into a mercantile concern at Glasgow with the money thus procured. He was taken prisoner in the house of Stewart of Glenbuckie, by a party of soldiers from the garrison at Inversnaid. He was carried to London, arraigned upon the Act of Attainder in 1745, in which his name was included, and sentenced to the death of a traitor. His wife, who then resided at Lisle, hurried to London to proffer fruitless petitions for mercy. Whatever may have been Dr. Cameron's errors, his death was worthy of the name he bore, and he sustained his fate with calmness and resignation. Seven children were left to deplore his loss. The Chevalier St. George, kindly passing over his fault, wrote of him in these terms. "I am a stranger to the motives which carried poor Archibald Cameron into Scotland; but whatever they may have been, his fate gives me the more concern, as I own I could not bring myself to believe that the English Government would carry their rigour so far." The French Government settled a pension of one thousand five hundred livres upon Mrs. Cameron, and an annual allowance of two hundred livres to each of her sons, who were in their service. The unfortunate Dr. Cameron was buried in the Savoy in London. The family of the man who betrayed him is said, in the Highlands, to have been visited with a severe retribution, having, ever since, had one of its members an idiot. Such is the notion of retributive justice in the Highlands.

The death of this brother, and still more the stain upon the honour of Dr. Cameron, must have added greatly to the burden of sorrow which fell so heavily upon Lochiel. His son was, however, spared for some years, and was cherished by the Scots as the representative of their ancient chiefs. He was, it is true, what they called a "landless laird," yet the clansmen paid him all the honours due to the eldest son of Lochiel. He received a good education, and was prevented by his friends from taking any part in the various schemes set on foot at certain intervals for the return of Charles. He married at an early age. Government was at that time engaged in levying men for the American war, and found it convenient to use the influence of the clans for that purpose; Lochiel was offered a company in General Fraser's regiment, the seventy-first, provided he could raise it among his clan. Poor and broken as they were, the clansmen, true to their bond of fidelity, mustered around their landless laird; and Lochiel marched at the head of his company to Glasgow, in order to embark for America.

It happened that whilst here, he was taken ill of the measles, a disorder which prevented his marching. It was therefore arranged that the first lieutenant should take his place. When, on the point of marching to Greenock in order to embark, the clansmen discovered this, they laid down their arms, declaring that they had not engaged with King George, but with Lochiel; and they refused to move. The chief hearing of this dilemma, ill as he was, arose, dressed himself, and went down to his people. He harangued them, and represented that unless they went on board, their conduct would be imputed to disaffection, and might injure, if not ruin his interests. The men immediately took up their arms, huzzaed their chief, and began to march. The result is melancholy. Enfeebled by this effort, Lochiel again took to his bed; the day on which he had made this fatal exertion was a raw November morning. He never recovered from that exposure, but died in a few days afterwards.

Most of the company of Camerons perished in the contest which ensued. Thrice during the American war was General Fraser's regiment renewed.[299] Such was the devotion of this gallant race of men to their chief; and such were the services which those whose fathers had fought at Culloden, devoted to the cause of the English Monarch.

Late in the eighteenth century, the estates of Lochiel were restored to the grandson of Lochiel; and the descendants of that race, in which so much honour, such disinterested exertion, such kindness and heroism existed, are again the Lords of Achnacarry.

FOOTNOTES:

[247] I am indebted to a MS. account of Cameron of Lochiel for the most interesting facts in the following memoir. It was communicated to me by R. Chambers, Esq., and was written by Mrs. Grant of Laggan. In her letters unpublished, she declares the source of her information to have been some papers in the possession of a Scotch clergyman, "which," says Mrs. Grant, "it appears he did not give to John Home, who would scarcely have asked the favour, keeping very shy of his old brethren."

[248] Brown's History of the Highlands, part ii. p. 141.

[249] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[250] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[251] Brown's Highlands.

[252] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[253] "The credit of this feat," writes Mrs. Grant, "rests merely on the country tradition: and the silence concerning it, in the publications and records of those times, is accounted for, first, by the shame which the commanders of the party felt at being thus surprised and outwitted by an inferior number of those whom they had been accustomed to style barbarians and to treat as such."--_MS._

[254] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[255] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[256] Sketches of the Highlands, vol. i. pp. 60, 61.

[257] Brown's Highlands.

[258] Reay, p. 88.

[259] See Culloden Papers.

[260] Stewart's Sketches, vol. i. p. 86.

[261] Reay, p. 271.

[262] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[263] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[264] Conjectured to be Lord Lovat.

[265] Appendix to the Memoirs of Sir Ewan Cameron of Lochiel, p. 177.

[266] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[267] Appendix to Home's History of the Rebellion, No. II.

[268] See Appendix, No. II.

[269] Home. Appendix. From the papers of Cameron of Fassefern, Lochiel's nephew.

[270] In the year 1781, Fassefern repeated this conversation to Mr. Home. History of the Rebellion, p. 7.

[271] Forbes, p. 19.

[272] Home, p. 5.

[273] Forbes, p. 19.

[274] Home, p. 6.

[275] Maxwell of Kirkconnel's Narrative, p. 23.

[276] The beautiful poem of Campbell, entitled "Lochiel," is founded on this circumstance.

[277] Mrs. Grant's MS.

[278] Life of Jenny Cameron. London. Printed for C. Whitefield, in White Friars, 1746.

[279] Life of Jenny Cameron.

[280] Forbes, p. 23.

[281] The poem entitled "Jeanie Cameron's Lament," is, with other inedited Jacobite songs, likely soon to be given to the world, arranged to true Scottish airs, and published in parts. These songs are collected by a member of one of the most ancient Jacobite families. The accomplished young lady who has engaged in this undertaking is Miss Charlotte Maxwell, the sister of Sir William Maxwell, Bart., of Menteith, Wigtonshire, and a descendant of the Earl of Nithisdale. The ballad of Sherriff Muir, is among the first of the interesting collection.

[282] Forbes, p. 23.

[283] Maxwell of Kirkconnel, p. 45.

[284] Maxwell, p. 105.

[285] Home, p. 164.

[286] Dated, Edinburgh, 12th Jan. 1745-6. This extract, for which I am indebted to Mr. Macdonald, who possesses the orderly-book, was considered an extremely curious passage by Sir Walter Scott.

[287] Burrell's regiment was so broken, that not two men were left standing. Home, Appendix.

[288] In a letter among the papers of Mr. Murray of Abercairney, the imputations upon the Highlanders are strongly and ably refuted. For obvious reasons I have not given the extract, nor gone more closely into a subject which belongs to the province of history.

[289] See Mrs. Grant's MS.

[290] Home, Appendix, p. 373.

[291] See note 2 in Chambers's History of the Rebellion, p. 121.

[292] See History of the Rebellion, taken from the Scots' Magazine, p. 353.

[293] Cluny Macpherson's Narrative. Home, Appendix, p. 365.

[294] Of one of these there is an interesting anecdote in the Tales of a Grandfather, vol. iii. p. 295, note.

[295] Home's History of the Rebellion, Appendix, p. 146.

[296] Brown's History of the Highlands, Part II. App. CVII. from the Stuart Papers.

[297] Brown's History of the Highlands. No. LXX.

[298] Chambers, p. 145.

[299] Mrs. Grant's MS.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

LONDON:

Printed by S. & J. BENTLEY, WILSON, AND FLEY,

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* * * * *

Transcriber's Note: The following errors in the original have been corrected.

Page 24 - missing quote mark added: in Scots' affairs."[B]

Page 36 - missing quote mark added: Scottish nobility."

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Page 54 - missing quote mark added: faithfully serving King George."

Page 66 - few duties changed to feu duties

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