Part 10
My own first experience of school life was near Crieff, where I spent a year in the family of an English clergyman, whom I dimly remember as a model for the head of the Fairchild family. For all his austerity, my recollections are of cheerful days spent under his charge, and especially of a keen relish for meals, which may be connected with the fact that this was the only period in my life when I might not eat as much as I pleased. But also I have two painful memories of this place. The first is breaking my arm on the rocks of the Turret one Saturday afternoon, and not getting a doctor for it till Monday evening: my tutor, who had been a soldier before he took orders, and ought to have known better, judged the hurt no more than a sprain; then on Sunday I had to walk three miles to church, and back, with my arm hanging helpless, the torment relieved only by my brother holding it up. The other woeful experience was my own fault, and such as many sons of Adam have to confess. Some years later, I was sent on a holiday task, a ride of seventeen miles with a pointer pup to be handed over at Crieff to a keeper, whose lodge made a sort of canine academy. I was to dine at the “Drummond Arms,” after making sure to see my pony fed first--a sound instruction to heedless youth. Somewhat elated by this independent charge, as I strolled about the town it occurred to me that my own meal ought to be crowned by a cigar. It was my first; it cost twopence. “Left to myself” as I was in that rash undertaking, I had sense enough to seek out for it a secluded spot on the banks and braes of the Earn, where ere long my song would be--“How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair!”
At Crieff, with its two railways and everything handsome about it, we get upon a regular caravan route of tourists, too few of whom stop to discover the lochs, falls, and shaggy glens that around it are strung upon the Highland line, among hills making with the Earn valley a choice epitome of Perth scenery. I have already extolled this neighbourhood in _Bonnie Scotland_, so now I must pass quickly over the most picturesque part of Strathearn. Nothing could be prettier in its way than the walk up the Earn, foaming and rippling through its leafy banks, past wooded eminences, like Torleum, whose top makes a weather-glass for the countryside, and Tomachastle, crowned by a monument to Sir David Baird, the hero of Seringapatam. This local worthy’s widow cherished his renown regardless of expense, the model village of St. David’s, below Crieff, being also a memorial of him; but
the too towering obelisk on Tomachastle challenged a thunderbolt to rebuke the vanity of mortal fame.
Soon appear on either side mantled crags and bristling ridges, and the mountain moors begin to close in upon fields and parks. Half-way between Crieff and Loch Earn, Comrie stands at the head of the rich strath which now begins to take on the features of a Highland glen, still tamed by mansions and plantations. On one side the Ruchill Water comes in from Glenartney, where the stag was startled from his midnight lair by Fitzjames’s hounds; on the other, by Dunira, the Lednock rushes down a wilder ravine over which stands out a monument to Dundas, Lord Melville, head of the Tory oligarchy that to its own satisfaction ruled Scotland in the days of Pitt. This satrap is not so much admired by later leaders of Scottish politics. He has another tall column at Edinburgh in a line with statues of George IV. and Pitt, a trio of monuments denounced as “Vice standing between Tyranny and Corruption” by the Radical orator, Bailie Jamieson, who went to prison for such speeches, as his more widely famous son did for certain doings in South Africa.
As I write, newspapers record the death of a Dundas of Dunira, whose name takes me back half a century to the morning when two of his brothers breakfasted at our house on their way from school, wearing scarlet flannel, then known as “Crimean,” shirts, which, to us unsophisticated provincials, not yet “in the movement,” seemed below the dignity of Harrow boys. Dr. Keate would have agreed with us, who, in the former generation, gave an Eton culprit two extra cuts for the vulgarity of having a “checked shirt” to turn up in disclosing circumstances. Times are changed; but it is not so clear about _nos et mutamur_: one can fancy the schoolmasters and schoolboys of to-day still cocking a critical eye at changes of custom and costume, which in a few years will seem matters of course.
The stranger who, to a panorama of celebrated scenes flitting before his strained eyes, prefers settling down and photographing on memory characteristically charming landscapes, could not do better than set up his tent at Comrie, where he may come in for the excitement of one of its slight earthquakes. Among the many excursions radiating hence, he must not neglect to follow up the Earn to its parent lake. The last time I took this lovely walk, it was in company with the late Dr. Andrew Melville, Clerk of the Free Church, a name well-known in Scotland as reviving that of his forbears, the Reformation champions. He made his summer home at Comrie, which, through another sojourner, the widow of Lord Chancellor Cairns, had come to be a resort of the English sect called Plymouth Brethren; and I recall his telling me on our walk how a party of sisters of that ilk, invited together to a house at Comrie, proved to be hardly on speaking terms after a rent in this exclusive communion. It is not only in Scotland that Seceders split up into Auld Lichts and New. And in Scotland, by the way, the Wee Free Church that lately made such a profitable contention for the faith as once delivered to Calvinistic saints, begins to generate a fissiparous ferment, having already mutinied against the lay champion who led it to victory and booty. At least sects are fewer in Scotland, which seldom welcomes exotic divinity, its taste being for home-made dissensions. A local writer has an amusing account of a Plymouth Brother, at Crieff, roaring down a Mormon missionary who promised mounts and marvels across the Atlantic; but the contest did not tend to conversion or edification.
Our way up the Earn has led us by several eddies and backwaters of Scottish Protestantism; but now we pass into the shadow of the hills where the cross itself was dipped in fire and blood. When I walked up to Loch Earn with that kindly kinsman of mine, the railway did not go beyond Comrie, as it does now, under outlying masses of Ben Voirlich, where wooded knolls huddle below slopes of turf and rock and fern dappled by patches of brown or purple heather. We are here fairly in the Highlands; and from St. Fillan’s Hill, shooting up over the river, we look down upon a true central Perthshire prospect of a long lake stretching below high mountains; but else, as a disappointed Cockney complained, one can’t see the view for the hills.
The smart village of St. Fillans, spreading out along the loch foot in villakins of rusticating townsfolk, is a modern settlement, but it may have had ancient memories to forget, for here, or hereabouts, stood Dundurn, capital of the Pictish land called Fortrenn, which seems to have taken in Angus, along with Strathearn and the lower basin of the Tay. The island in the foreground was in later times lair of a gang of robbers named Neish, who in an ill turn for themselves undertook to rob a servant of the Macnabs, bringing their Christmas fare from Crieff. The Macnab of that day had a round dozen of Samsonlike sons, to whom, at their bare board, he significantly spoke--“The night is the night, were the lads but the lads!” On this hint the twelve set out, dragged a boat across from Loch Tay to Loch Earn, surprised the revelling Neishes at dead of night, and slew all but one youth who managed to slip off. Next morning they greeted their father with the outlaws’ gory heads and the boast, “The lads _were_ the lads!” Another account makes them exclaim on this occasion, “Dread nought!” which has remained the Macnabs’ motto.
It is nearly sixty years ago that I spent a summer at St. Fillans, as yet hardly known to the outside world. At times that sojourn comes back to me as a dream of childish delight; but I was too young to gather a faggot of impressions that would serve when--
As less the olden glow abides, And less the chillier heart aspires, With drift-wood beached in past spring tides We light our sullen fires.
Perhaps the most prosaic English urchin stores up as warm memories of “days in the distance enchanted,” spent on the fattest claylands or the smoothest fen. Anyhow, one’s heart goes out to the bare-headed and bare-kneed youngsters, “hardy, bold, and wild,” who from the train are seen taking all chances of weather with frolic and glee on the banks of Loch Earn, heedless of the cloud of “Rudiments” and “Delectus” that will loom back upon them with the shortening autumn days.
Even less to be envied passengers have a good glimpse of this lake, as upon a shelf above the northern side they are whisked along a fine panorama, with Ben Voirlich’s rugged head for its background. Farther on, the shores grow tamer, where fields come down to the water edge; then, as by the scattering of houses at Lochearnhead the railway winds round its upper end, it overlooks a fine retrospect of the loch’s whole reach from St. Fillans. A few minutes more among bare green slopes, and we are at the Balquhidder Junction of the railway to Oban, standing lonely as if lost in the heart of the Highlands. The name seems misleading, for it is rather at the next halting-place southward, Kingshouse, that one turns off a couple of miles to Loch Voil and the Braes of Balquhidder, where Rob Roy rests at peace beneath a circle of chieftainly Bens, through which Glenfinlas would lead us to the Trossachs region.
Thus, whichever way we take through the heart of Scotland--by Atholl, by Breadalbane, by Strathearn--we come upon memories of the Macgregors. It is at Balquhidder that this famous stock was most at home in historic times; so here seems the place for some account of it, a story that will carry us back over all those regions, and bring most of the Perthshire clans on to its stage.
VI
THE MACGREGORS
What perils do environ The man that meddles with cold iron
--in the shape of a pen! And surely the rash adventurer lays himself open to special risks when he undertakes to touch such a thistly subject as Scottish history, not to mention theology. It seems that I have given offence to certain partisans, who find their sympathies ruffled by what had to be said in my former volumes. I am accused of want of reverence for the Sabbath--an idol that, even in the cold North, is wearing away to a stump like snow wreaths in thaw. By an organ of that persuasion I am rebuked, more in sorrow than in anger, for enmity to the Free Church, my only expression of such enmity being a statement that the said worshipful body has set its face against dancing and piping in the Highlands, and a hint that it must be heartily ashamed of the way it treated one of its worthiest sons in our generation. But the hottest of my ecclesiastical assailants is a “Priest of the Church of England,” who writes to me from a Midland county, characterising my book on the Highlands as “nauseating,” “ungenerous,” “brutal,” and so forth. I will not give his name, for I guess this priest not so far out of deaconship as to be beyond a chance of learning better language in a less perfervid country. He appears to be a Highlander of Catholic loyalty, since he takes alike ill any aspersion on the fair fame of Glengarry or of Argyll; but amid much abusing at large, he waxes specially indignant that I have not been silent on the “later failings” of the poor young Pretender. Did I not say in advance that there are three subjects on which the hardest-headed Scot listens willingly to sentiment rather than reason? One of them, of course, is gallant Prince Charlie; then I may be thankful to have passed over all scandal about Queen Mary, as to have touched lightly on the later, and earlier, “failings” of Robert Burns.
If there were as many revilers in the Midlands as there are slates on Auld Reekie, I can do no other. I was apprenticed to fiction, which is a school of truth in dealing with human nature. Let my critics write books of their own, setting forth the facts as they would have them. Let them declare that Charles Edward ended his days as a worthy citizen of Rome, a model husband, a diligent student of Anglican divinity, and an office-bearer of its Diocesan Temperance Society. Let them assert that Free Church pastors have exhorted youths and maidens to skip upon the Highland hills like young rams. Let them maintain that the Jewish Sabbath has _semper et ubique_ been a characteristic observance of the Christian Church, and that this doctrine flourishes as much as ever in its last sanctuary. I, for one, do not love Scotland, or its idols, better than the truth; and in such a cause can play the advocate without suppressing or glossing over the evidence. There is a quotation with which a Priest of the Church of England must be familiar, as much aired at clerical Congresses--_Haud tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis!_
Of all the charges made against me, the one by which I am most concerned is a reproach that I have spoken lightly of serious matters concerning the Clan Macgregor. Miss Murray Macgregor, the historian of her race, writes courteously but firmly to remonstrate with me on apparent libels against it in _The Highlands and Islands_. My most crying offence here, it seems, is one that would offend only a Highlander. In my haste I spoke of the modern Macgregors as “new-made,” when the law finally allowed them to wear their own patronymic, and I called their chief “Murray,” whereas I ought to have precisely defined him as for certain reasons bearing the name of Murray. Miss Murray Macgregor must accept my apologies for having heedlessly omitted to style her grandfather Sir John Macgregor Murray. In this contention, she seems to be unwittingly reviving old Nominalist and Realist controversies, for her part holding Macgregorism to be a principle with a real existence apart from its phenomena, whereas I use the name merely as a notion that casually labels certain sons of Adam. But hereby I recant, disavow, and seek absolution for any words of mine seeming to imply that a Murray and a Macgregor be not distinct entities _in rerum natura_, and _in saecula saeculorum_.
Another offence against the Macgregors laid to my charge is one in which I have many fellow-sinners. In
a slight account of the Glenfruin battle, I have repeated the tale--there expressly qualified as “tradition”--of the scholars of Dumbarton slaughtered by a bloodthirsty Macgregor--as to whom I mentioned another tradition that this crime made him an outlaw from the clan. Its historian would have me understand how no Macgregor was ever capable of such villainy, and more particularly points out that the evidence for it is in this case by no means convincing. I can only reply that if in any account of the Highlands, one were to give no stories but those that go without contradiction, and none that touch on deeds of violence, the result would make a volume that might well be advertised as suitable for the waistcoat pocket.
I had not the slightest intention of doing injustice to this once much abused clan, and in proof thereof am half-inclined to propitiate them with the dearest sacrifice a kindly Scot can offer. In those bad old times, forbears of my own were living in the Macgregor country, as to whose intromissions there perhaps the less said the better. It is unlikely that those sons of Eve did not mix their blood with the MacHeths and other clans among which they would be in the way of exchanging vows both soft and stern. I myself feel at times stirred to a right Macgregor scowl, when I see Sassenach knaves advertising their bad whisky, tea, or what not as the “best.” When in future any black deed be associated with their name, let the sons of Alpin blame it on a taint of Moncrieff blood, and hold every true Macgregor incapable of murdering a mouse; then I shall not be at pains to contradict this view. The plain truth is that most Highlanders of those misty legends--not to speak of Lowlanders--appear to have been a fierce and bloody-minded brood--always excepting members of the U.F. Church--and none of us can uphold our kin as any better than their fellows. Having thus, I hope, made peace with the sons of Gregor, I am free to turn dirk and claymore against the Menzies historian who, before heaven and earth, has not scrupled to guess at the Moncrieffs as originally vassals or dependents of his clan, as to which I will only call back how a curse has been laid upon it, that no Sassenach can pronounce its uncouth name aright.
Honestly, I don’t think I have been unfair to the Macgregors, who managed to earn among their neighbours an ill-fame, which they have redeemed by indomitable loyalty to their name. But for any slip of respect towards this clan, one can best make amends by telling its story at more length, with the help of Miss Murray Macgregor’s goodly quartos and other _mémoires pour servir_ that are not much in the way of the general reader. Such a story may need a good deal of boiling down to make porridge for that hasty reader’s taste. At the best, it must be a story too much coloured by the vivid red and black chequers of the clan tartan; and if any Macgregor look dark at what I have to tell, let me repeat what I said in the former sketch, that this name seems to have been more unlucky but not more guilty than others that wear their stains and glories in a less striking pattern. The great author, to whose sympathy they owe most renown, goes a little farther in commentating on their history--“The tricks of a bear that is constantly baited can neither be expected to be innocent nor entertaining.”
It has been already pointed out in _Bonnie Scotland_ how this clan clearly stood as models for the Vich Alpines of Scott’s _Lady of the Lake_. They claim to be sons of Alpin, as descended from King Girig, Gregor, or Gregory, the heir of Kenneth MacAlpin, though his sonship seems a disputed point. At a very early period is found widely settled in the heart of Scotland a race claiming to be united by royal blood, their traditional descent not at first stereotyped in name. As yet, the Highlanders’ surnames sat as loosely as their garments: a man’s Christian name was supplemented rather by the name of his father, or by some agname taken from personal appearance or position. This clan shot out branches that might come to be known by other patronymics, the Macnabs, “sons of the Abbot”; the Grants, said to be descended from one Gregor _graund_, that is “the ill-favoured”; the Griersons, whose name suggests such descent; and the same origin is ascribed to the Mackays, the Mackinnons, and others, who may perhaps claim for themselves some still bluer blood of Adam. Of course there would be a good deal of miscegenation through the accidents of love and war; a small broken stock might be adopted into a more powerful one, with or without a change of name, and a Highland heiress might bring for her dowry not only cows but a tail of kinsmen to be adopted into her husband’s clan; then even mere Lowlanders have no doubt been absorbed as captives, runaways, or masters of useful arts. The Comanche Indians, it is said, have as much adulterated white as red blood in them; the Creeks and Seminoles were recruited by negro slaves; and the Tuscaroras were admitted bodily into the Iroquois League. A Highland clan of old days was in much the same social state as a Red Indian tribe. Often also a family interlaced itself with congenial neighbours by the exchange of foster-children, to be brought up in bonds that were sometimes drawn as close as those of blood.
As the Hurons in Ontario and the Iroquois in New York, the main stock of this clan seem to have been originally most at home in what came to be known as the Macgregor country--Glenorchy, Glendochart and Glenlyon--on the western side of Perthshire. Early in the twelfth century, its chief was Malcolm of Glenorchy, renowned for such strength of body as then made the surest title to rank and fame. Of him it is told that when the king’s life was in danger from a boar, or other savage beast, the doughty chief plucked up an oak by the roots and with this gigantic club made mincemeat of the monster. As reward, the grateful king ennobled his preserver, giving him as cognisance an oak-tree eradicate, now displayed by the clan, whose older emblem appears to have been a pine-tree, “Clan Alpine’s pine in banner brave.” This chief married a lady of royal blood, and was known as “Lord of the Castles,” by reason of several strongholds said to have been built by him from Kilchurn to Taymouth; but here tradition may be confusing him with a supplanting Campbell who had the same renown.
In the next century another Macgregor figures among the partisans of Bruce, delivering him from his enemy, Lorn, harbouring him in a cave, fighting by his side at Bannockburn, and elsewhere. But it seems that all the clan did not stand together, some siding with Baliol and thus exposing themselves to forfeiture, when his rival became settled on the throne. And even before this the sons of the mountain glens must have begun to feel the pressure of the feudal system, imposing duties and obligations, as well as conferring coats of arms and titles, along with charters of lordship that did not always take into account the rights of inheritance.
Swarms of Saxon and Norman adventurers hived themselves in Scotland, winning favour at court and grants of land from which the occupants had to be ousted by force, where they were not found willing to remain as vassals of the new lords. A proud and uncomplying race like the Macgregors was bound to come off ill in such a scramble; whose history, indeed, all through the Stuart period, is one of gradual intrusion into their country by strangers, notably the pushful Campbells, who at last drove them out of their fair glens to outlawed seclusion in fastnesses from which they looked with an angry eye on their old birthright.
Where dwell we now? See rudely swell Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell. Ask we this savage hill we tread For fattened steer or household bread; Ask we for flocks those shingles dry, And well the mountain might reply-- “To you, as to your sires of yore, Belong the target and claymore: I give you shelter in my breast, Your own good blades must win the rest!