Part 11

Not all at once would this displacement take place, but fitfully, by waves that sometimes flowed in a spate of aggression, then again ebbed before some outbreak of determined resistance. The process may have been somewhat like what went on in Australia when “selectors” were empowered to “pick the eyes” of a squatter’s holding, here and there putting him to ransom in the name of law. Like Hengist and Horsa, the intruders might make good their settlement by taking sides in the local feuds, or by handling the arrows of Cupid as well as the sword of Mars. The Campbells were noted for being as ready with kisses for their foemen’s daughters as with cold steel for their sons. The Macgregors made alliances as well as _creaghs_ among the newcomers. Some of their hacked and stripped branches shot out to take root in distant quarters, perhaps repeating there the violence that had driven them from their own ancient seats. Under the James kings, such branches appear at Braemar and the Gordon country; and there are hints of a Macgregor leader playing Roderick Dhu as far south as the English border, in company with his supposed cousins, the Griersons of Lag. But the main stock remained scattered over their native heath, from which a remnant of them was never thoroughly extirpated. Their headquarters shifted to be about Balquhidder, a knot of wild glens to the north of Loch Katrine, where a stone called the _puderach_ was a palladium of the clan, the lifting of which made a test of strength for young men, and it gave a byname to the Macgregors of that branch. As far south as the Nun’s Island, Inchcailliach, on Loch Lomond, they had a burying-place; and their strongholds reached as far north as Loch Rannoch, where the chartered Menzies had more difficulty in ousting them than had the Campbells in Breadalbane, who there are well described as ploughing through the centre of the Macgregor country.

On this much-disputed ground, the sons of Alpin were in touch with many neighbours, more or less hostile, their relations with whom are darkly commemorated in such traditional tales of bloodshed, ravage, and treachery as too much stain the rags of Highland history. Some of these tales we have already come upon in passing through Breadalbane. For a time, the Macgregors seem to have shared Balquhidder with other clans, notably the Maclarens, an older stock of occupants, who claimed the right of being first to enter the parish church. This right of precedence is said to have been given up in return for the help of the Macgregors in a hot combat with a neighbour clan, that still darkens a pool of the Leny as “Linn of the dead”; but afterwards the pretension, again raised, led to a fray in the very church, when the priest, a Maclaren, was killed. In the end the Macgregors evicted their rivals, who mainly took refuge among the Appin Stewarts; yet so late as Rob Roy’s time, we shall see a Maclaren fall victim at Balquhidder to that ancient feud, to show how inveterately those clansmen clung to the soil beset by enemies, as well as to hereditary hatreds rooted among them for centuries.

Among so many memories of hate, one tradition stands in relief as illustrating the guest-right owned by Roderick Dhu. In a casual quarrel the Macgregor’s son had been slain by a young Lamont, who fled hotly chased through the night, and by dawn sought refuge at a house he knew not as the home of his victim. To the chief he confessed that he had slain an unnamed man, and was taken into sanctuary. Quick on his heels came the pursuers, their news filling the house with cries of rage and woe. But the weeping father would not let the guest suffer harm: “He has Macgregor’s word.” With an armed band he even escorted the slayer of his son to Inveraray, and there took leave of him with the warning: “No longer can I, or will I, protect you: keep out of the way of my clan.” As edifying sequel it is stated that when Macgregor came to be proscribed and hunted for his life, he in turn found asylum with the man whose life he had saved. In Spain, the same tale is told of Moorish and Christian foemen, as no doubt similar stories came to be passed round Arab camp-fires.

This incident, indeed, belongs to a later period of clan history, which we take up at the time when the Macgregors are seen forced apart into two main bodies in the north and south of western Perthshire, while not entirely uprooted from the central glens. Under James III., a chief known as Gregor Mhor flourished so well as to recover part of the clan territory from its oppressors, and to raise its head in the world. A younger son of his, Duncan, surnamed the Hero, also gained renown and such social advantage as went with a Campbell bride; but he fatally fell out with the head of the Breadalbane family. More than one chief of this period might have answered to Roderick Dhu’s reputation. We read of James IV. making a hunting expedition to Balquhidder; and on another occasion it is said that this king rode alone from Stirling to Perth by the wild borders he

congratulated himself on having pacified for a time. James V. also, in historic record as well as in romance, trusted himself on hunting trips into the Perthshire Highlands, when the troubles that had gathered head during his minority made such visits more truly adventurous. At this time one Duncan Macgregor, surnamed Laideus, who seems a prototype of Rob Roy in a ruder time, became for half a century the bugbear of the central Highlands, sometimes driven into far Lochaber, but returning to work havoc and slaughter, till at last he was caught and executed by the Campbells.

By fits and starts, the later Jameses were able to bring a rough machinery of repression to bear upon the disorders of the Highlands. The Macgregors were not worse than a dozen other clans; but they were within shorter reach than those western and Hebridean stocks, who yet proved not beyond the arm of law as put in force on James V.’s voyage to what had long been the quasi-independent domains of the Lords of the Isles. Then the sons of Alpin had the misfortune to play the reiver too near the half-settled Highland line, where the noise of their exploits echoed in Perth and Stirling; and the king could not follow his sport through “lone Glenartney’s hazel shade” without a chance of perilous encounter. Their most powerful foes, moreover, were close at hand to carry out the rough justice of the border. Once and again we hear of the Macgregors being “put to the horn” and of “letters of fire and sword” granted against them, usually to the Campbells, who, adapting themselves better to new conditions, extended their possessions and influence at the expense of less prudent neighbours. To be at odds with the law is in itself demoralising; and the harassed clan grew but more reckless and insolent in the persecutions brought on them by their repeated offences. All through the sixteenth century they appear drawing towards that doom that left them landless and nameless.

The troubles of the Reformation relaxed the process of turning a proud clan into broken men; and Queen Mary seems to have had a soft place in her heart for the much-abused Macgregors. But when James VI. got well settled upon his uneasy throne, his horror of violence dictated a policy of repression which was steadily carried out in the latter half of his reign. In 1586, “letters of horning” were recorded at Perth against over a hundred Macgregors and their abetters. Soon after this even the feelings of a callous generation were shocked by one deed charged upon the Macgregors, the barbarous slaughter of John Drummond-Ernoch, a descendant of that fugitive to Ireland who figured in the burning of Monzievaird kirk. This man, employed as the king’s forester in Glenartney, was procuring venison for the marriage festivities of James and his Danish bride, when a band of outlaws fell upon him, as related by Scott in the introduction to the _Legend of Montrose_. “They surprised and slew Drummond-Ernoch, cut off his head, and carried it with them, wrapt in the corner of one of their plaids. In the full exultation of vengeance, they stopped at the house of Ardvoirlich and demanded refreshment, which the lady, a sister of the murdered Drummond-Ernoch (her husband being absent), was afraid or unwilling to refuse. She caused bread and cheese to be placed before them, and gave directions for more substantial refreshments to be prepared. While she was absent with this hospitable intention, the barbarians placed the head of her brother on the table, filling the mouth with bread and cheese, and bidding him eat, for many a merry meal he had eaten in that house. The poor woman returning, and beholding this dreadful sight, shrieked aloud, and fled into the woods, where, as described in the romance, she roamed a raving maniac.”

It is but natural that Miss Murray Macgregor would fain believe this crime “to have been perpetrated by men of another name.” She brings forward a tradition in the clan that it was really the work of MacIans of Glencoe, a name which has lived in the breath of historic sympathy. Two young lads of this race, we are told, had been caught poaching in Glenartney, as a punishment for which the forester clipped their ears. Insulted kinsmen vowed revenge for that injury; and the picturesque circumstance is added that their first step was the employment of a local witch, who threw such a spell over Drummond that the MacIans were invisible to him as they approached on their cruel errand. The Macgregor chief’s only part in the matter, we should believe, was harbouring those “Children of the Mist”; or, for some reason or other, it is admitted, he may be understood to have taken the responsibility of the crime upon himself. What came to be believed at the time was that the murderers carried Drummond’s head--his _hand_ in another story--to the Macgregor chief, who, assembling his clan at the church of Balquhidder, made them lay their hands upon the gory trophy, and swear to defend the authors of the deed, as done by their common determination. Sir Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson’s acolyte, has told the story in _Clan Alpine’s Vow_, a poem that reads like an attempt to catch the wind of the _Lady of the Lake’s_ popularity.

The Privy Council made no doubt of the real culprits. Proclamation went forth against the “wicked Clan Gregor, continuing in blood, slaughters, hership, manifest reifts and storths committed upon His Highness’ peaceable and good subjects.” A Commission was issued to several noblemen and gentlemen, empowering them for three years to hunt down the Macgregor chief and a long list of his followers as specified by name. One account tells of thirty-seven Macgregors slain by a party which the murdered man’s brother had raised under this commission; another makes seventeen of the clan hanged upon one tree at Balquhidder, as a round dozen are said to have been at the end of Loch Earn. Against these statements their faithful historian can bring no more satisfactory disproof than depositions of old men in the early part of last century, who had the story in a form more favourable to the Macgregors, and thought it unlikely that such wholesale executions could have taken place without figuring in their traditions. Miss Murray Macgregor makes a stronger point by showing how, when little more than a year had passed, her ancestor the chief and his followers were formally pardoned for whatever share they may have had in Drummond’s murder. It was not always convenient, indeed, to hold on foot the volunteer police of the border line, where the King’s deputies often proved apter to look to the grinding of their own axes than to keeping keen the sword of justice.

In 1596 Macgregor appeared at court, like Roderick Dhu at Holyrood, to give pledges and promises for the good behaviour of his hornet hive. But a few years later came an outbreak that seemed to fill the cup of their offences. There was an old smouldering feud between them and their neighbours, the Colquhouns of Loch Lomond, which flared up into open war just before James succeeded to the English crown. In _The Highlands and Islands_, I gave the traditional version of the Glenfruin fight. Miss Murray Macgregor points out that there were two fights at a few weeks’ interval, one in Glenfinlas, the other in Glenfruin. It was after the first affair, described as a “raid,” that the procession of widows carrying the bloody shirts of the slain stirred James into commissioning Colquhoun of Luss to repress the Macgregors.

Then followed the famous battle in that “Glen of Sorrow,” which the Macgregor historian shows to have been fairly fought and won by the courage and strategy of the Macgregors and their allies, who had taken the initiative against a hostile force advancing to attack them. As for the legend of the slaughtered scholars, she justly insists that this story does not enter into the legal charges formulated against her clan, from which such an atrocity would hardly fail to be omitted if it could be brought home to them. She quotes another tradition as to this crime being the work of a monster or madman of uncertain name; and she is able to show that a few years later a highlander of Glencoe was accused before the Privy Council of having “with his own hand murdered without pity the number of forty poor persons who were naked and without armour,” probably those scholars or other sightseers who had come out from Dumbarton to see the battle, and whom the Macgregor annals represent the chief as placing in a church out of harm’s way; he is also said to have expressed the utmost horror at their unhappy fate. Furthermore, the Macgregors’ plea includes a charge, founded on the dying declaration of their resentful chief, that sly Argyll had a hand in the whole quarrel, who, while professing to keep the peace of the Highlands, was not above secretly setting two hostile clans by the ears that they might destroy one another like Kilkenny cats, at the same time, perhaps, throwing into relief the need for the services of a powerful lord-lieutenant on the Highland border. For myself, I will only say that in the whole affair there appears no evidence to call a blush to the cheek of modern Macgregors; and that I regret having hurt any clan feeling by my slight account of this battle long ago. The Colquhouns’ story has been set forth by Sir William Fraser; and that clan counts among its daughters a distinguished author who might draw the pen against the Macgregor historian, if so disposed. As for the Argyll family of to-day, they are all authors, so I leave it to them to controvert the many hard things that have been said against their forbears.

Glenfinlas and Glenfruin, in one or both of which fights Dumbarton citizens were involved, raised such a noise in the Lowlands that, for the moment, anything would be believed against the Macgregors. James’s parting legacy to them was a persecution that aimed at exterminating the “viperous clan,” as a Campbell styles them in a letter to the king. Their very name was prohibited. They were forbidden to carry any arms but a pointless knife for eating their victuals. Not more than four of them might be suffered to show themselves together. Other offenders were offered pardon on condition of quelling Macgregors, whose heads, in one instance at least, were put to a price like wolves’. Within a year after Glenfruin, more than thirty of them had been executed at Stirling alone. The chief was hanged at Edinburgh; after one daring escape from treacherous arrest, he had fallen into the hands of Argyll, who is said to have promised to send him to England, a promise kept to the letter by taking the captive over the Border, but at once bringing him back to his doom. Hostile clans were set to hunt down the sons of Alpin, as Uncle Sam has employed Cheyenne scouts against the Sioux. As with runaway slaves, bloodhounds were employed in the chase of the proscribed rebels, some of whom took refuge on an island of Loch Katrine, no doubt the same as figures in the _Lady of the Lake_. Severe penalties were denounced against “resetters” of those outlaws, and all holding friendly intercourse with them. They did not want for sympathisers as well as persecutors. It had to be expressly forbidden to ferry any of the fugitives across the lochs to the south of their country, where they might else seek refuge in the wilds of Dumbarton and Argyll.

Under this proscription the Macgregors became broken men. Bands of them, “wolves and thieves,” wandered here and there on dark errands of violence and vengeance. But many let themselves be crushed into submission, changed their names, found “caution” for quiet behaviour, or put themselves under protection of other lords and chiefs. The ruined state of the clan is shown, ten years after Glenfruin, by the Laird of Lawers having on his hands three or four score Macgregor “bairns,” their fathers slain or outlawed, as to whom he was urgent with the authorities that other landlords should at least contribute to the expense of such a troublesome charge, not ten of them above the age of five. What to do with this nursery was a question of some difficulty. It was proposed to apprentice them in the Lowlands, like that uncongenial pupil of Simon Glover; also to distribute them among families who should be answerable for their safe keeping. Any child venturing to run away was liable to be scourged and burned on the cheek, and to be hanged if he tried it again; but over the age of fourteen, a youth risked hanging for the first attempt. Even in face of such penalties, Macgregor bairns must have been hard to hold or to bind on their native heath; and it is likely that some of them gave their keepers the slip. A few years later, His Majesty’s Council in England were made aware of emboldened outlaws, who, after lurking quietly for a time, had again “broken loose, and have associated unto them a number of the young brood of that clan who are now risen up, and with them they go in troops and companies athwart the country, armed with bows, darlochs, hackbuts, pistols, and other armour, committing a number of insolencies upon His Majesty’s good subjects in all parts where they may be masters.” As the Sahara to-day is haunted by veiled Touareg caterans, even so we can imagine how civilescent Murrays and

Menzies would be fain to keep a sharp lookout in crossing the wild moor of Rannoch.

The moon’s on the lake, and the mist’s on the brae, And the clan has a name that is nameless by day.

Like other dubious characters, the sons of Alpin are now found passing under _aliases_. Fresh outrages charged on them provoked an Act of Charles I., 1633, confirming the former proscription, and specially enjoining, on pain of deprivation, that ministers of the Highland or bordering counties should baptize no child by the name of Gregor, and that no clerk or notary should draw any deed in this forbidden patronymic. So late as 1745, when Prince Charlie’s army was at hand, the conscientious minister of Drymen refused to give it to a child offered for baptism as Gregor. It was the real name of that Gilderoy, “the red lad,” precursor of Rob Roy, who came to a more untimely end, as told in his sweetheart’s lament--

If Gilderoy had done amiss, He might have banished been. Ah! what fair cruelty is this, To hang such handsome men!

This bandit was hanged at Edinburgh, 1636. Among the charges against him was one of taking part in a feud in the Grant country, where the Forbes and the Gordons were concerned; we hear of those Ishmaelites as having a hand in various quarrels as well as those of their own country. The fellest foes of the Macgregors could seldom accuse them of not being ready to fight, unless, as at Sheriffmuir, when distracted by plunder. James VI. had offered Elizabeth a levy of Highlandmen, including fifty Macgregors, to put down her Irish rebels. Sundry members of the bellicose stock were let out of prison to make recruits for Gustavus Adolphus in Germany. The Earl of Moray enlisted three hundred Highlanders from Menteith and Balquhidder to overawe the Clan Chattan in the north: these auxiliaries are believed to have been Macgregors, and they are reported not to have taken kindly to this police service, so that their employer dismissed them; while another story makes some of them refuse to be dismissed, settling down on the Deeside lands, whither they had been rashly called in as bailiffs.

In their own fastnesses the Children of the Mist still held out stubbornly. When Montrose set the heather on fire he was followed by part of the proscribed clan, coming boldly forth from the islands and the wild nooks in which they had taken sanctuary; and we may be sure their tartans were made welcome for the nonce. That blaze extinguished, again they rallied to Charles II.’s standard set up by Glencairn at Killin, which soon went down before Cromwell’s soldiery; then when their Argyll enemies were out of favour, the King’s gratitude for fruitless loyalty availed them in the repeal of the act of proscription. Their forfeited lands, however, were not restored, as Montrose had promised in his master’s name; and for the most part they had to content themselves with becoming tenants or dependents of more thriving names.

Here and there, indeed, we find Macgregors, helped by other lawless bands, making bold to drive off the occupants of farms from which they had been themselves evicted; now and then emerges a record of “the good old rule, the simple plan,” leading one of them to the gallows; but at this date their historian can also quote a number of marriage contracts, wadsetts, sasines, bonds, and such-like deeds of Scots law going to show how the clan, on its outskirts at least, began more or less willingly to adapt itself to the conditions of modern life. In 1691, that old enemy Colquhoun of Luss comes forward to testify to the Laird of Macgregor as “a law-abiding man, regularly paying mail and duty,” while other members of the clan are still denounced as lawless loons, “who have little property or inheritance to be a pledge for them.”

A stumbling-block to those hereditary warriors in their new course was the campaign of Killiecrankie. However much set against the law, the Macgregors had always been ready to stand for the king when bloodshed and plunder were in question; and now a body of them, though not the chief, followed Dundee to his fatal victory. This defiance of the Whig Government, and the general disturbed state of the Highlands, prompted a renewal of the clan’s proscription. Perhaps at the instigation of Breadalbane, the special penal act against it was re-enacted early in William’s reign; then the Macgregors’ conduct in 1715 and 1745 did not invite its repeal.