Part 12
For nearly a century now it was illegal to use the name of Macgregor. That had been a matter of less importance when every Highlander was known as the son of his father and of his own deeds; but now that even Macgregors had occasion to put their hands to documents and to be specified in records, it behoved them to answer to some convenient surname, while secretly cherishing their own proscribed patronymic. Some disguised it as Gregory, Gregorson, Grierson, and so forth. Some, since better might not be, took the names of neighbours or of the lords on whom they were now more or less dependent. Dr. Johnson understood that David Malloch, the poet, was a Macgregor by birth, that “beggarly Scotchman” who softened his assumed name to Mallet for London ears. Most of the clan seem to have submitted to adoption as Campbells, Drummonds, Grahams, and Murrays, names borrowed from the ducal houses, that, originally besetting the Macgregor country, had gradually squeezed themselves over it, where room was left by such encroachers as the Menzies and the Campbells of Breadalbane. Near the Trossachs country Rob Roy had to do with both Atholl and Montrose, as landlords and superiors; but, when on his good behaviour, he chose to call himself Campbell as recognising Argyll for his special patron. A good deal later, it was not uncommon to find Perthshire men who knew themselves as Macgregors, but passed before the world by other names. In the middle of last century, Professor Macdougall could tell how one of his Edinburgh students gave his name as Macgregor, then being asked to spell it, unconsciously did so as C-a-m-p-b-e-l-l.
Rob Roy’s life I propose to treat apart; and then something may be said of his clan’s part in the rising of 1715. In 1745 also, it can be taken as a matter of course that the Macgregors did not hold aloof from such a congenial chance of bestirring themselves, and in the _débâcle_ after Culloden, their contingent was the last to disband, after boldly marching through the Highlands to Balquhidder. Two separate bodies of them had joined Prince Charlie’s army, as Scott states; but they seem to have run together in the heat of Prestonpans; then there arose a certain jealousy as to which chief had the best right to be colonel. For the clan, as well as the country, was distracted by a pretender, and by more than one. A dispute as to headship seems almost essential to the dignity of a Highland stock; and the troubled life led by the sons of Alpin for two or three centuries had helped specially to tangle the line of succession into knots which Miss Murray Macgregor is at much pains to unravel, her history being twisted, not to say encumbered, by such contentions. She is naturally concerned to exalt her own family, the Macgregors of Glenstray, above rival branches that during a confused time had usurped precedence in a name legally extinct.
The law of proscription, indeed, had now become a dead letter, the Macgregors being practically free to bear their own name if they pleased, though for a time not to wear their own or any tartan, unless along with the king’s coat. If some sons of the race went into exile after Culloden, some to the gallows, and some are already found seeking fortune across the Atlantic, others gained scope for their warlike energy in the new Highland regiments that did such good service to the Georges. Half-way between the two Jacobite risings, negotiations had been set on foot by the kindred clans Gregor and Grant for taking either Grant or Macalpine as their common name. This proposal wrecked on the question of which clan should supply the chief; but some gentlemen of both appear to have then dubbed themselves Macalpine. Half a century later, the name of Macgregor was no longer in disgrace, its loyalty so well proved that the Government could be called on to redress what made now a mere sentimental grievance.
“Gregor Macgregor, Cacique of Poyais,” whom I mentioned in _Bonnie Scotland_ as no great credit to the clan, was grandson of Gregor, bynamed “Boyac” (the beautiful), who under the _nom de guerre_ of Drummond enlisted in the Black Watch, was presented to George II., won a commission, and came to be adjutant of the West Middlesex Militia. He has the credit of drawing up a petition for the repeal of the laws against his clan, as was granted in 1774 by an act evoking warm professions of gratitude and loyalty from the now fully pardoned Macgregors. At the end of the century these sentiments were made good by the raising of a Clan Alpine regiment that, with a brother of its chief for colonel, fought abroad as bravely as at Glenfruin.
The dynastic question had then been settled in a deed signed by over 800 of the name, recognising as their true prince one long fain to lurk under the disguise of a Murray, as to whose essential Macgregorship I allowed myself to speak so lightly. The chief thus elected as representing the main line, was son of Evan Murray or Macgregor, who had been content to end his days as lieutenant of invalids at Jersey, far from the ancestral Glenstray; and the fortunes of the family seem to have been restored by that modern enterprise known as “shaking the pagoda tree.” His granddaughter duly informs me that “high appointments in India prevented Sir John Macgregor Murray, the first baronet, from fully resuming his own patronymic, although he came under obligations to his clan that his only son should do so at his death.” So the last four generations of Red Macgregors have been free to look the whole world in the face without _alias_ or _alibi_, and flaunt their tartans up to the banks of Jordan, no man daring to make them afraid, an undertaking that seems always to have been beyond the power of most men.
VII
ROB ROY AND HIS SONS
The name of Macgregor now basks in all respectability and renown both at home and far from its native heath. A Buddhist monk, of British origin, who lately undertook to convert us Occidentals, dubbed himself Macgregor, a name that has little suggestion of Nirvana, but seems to accentuate apostasy from the Shorter Catechism. On the other hand Evangelical Christianity and philanthropy of no dreamy sort found a staunch upholder in a “Rob Roy” Macgregor of the last generation, who paddled that byname into fresh note. At South coast resorts, a few years ago, a portly personage attracted much attention by going decked in Macgregor kilt or hose; but scandal gave him out a mere Sassenach, of quite undistinguished name and prosaic occupation, who had the strange fad of posing as a belated chieftain in his holidays, and to intensify that effect donned the most flaring of all tartans, which Rob Roy must have been too canny to wear when his business brought him near excitable bulls. John Bull rather admires the Macgregor tartan, as the most easy to recognise. His sympathies can readily be called out for
“Wee Magregors” and such-like, once looked on as wolf cubs to be caged or exterminated. And much of this favour and familiarity comes through the figure cut by Rob Roy, to make famous a name he himself durst not bear, unless by stealth, when his foot stood firm on his native heath.
As to the popular hero of her clan, Miss Murray Macgregor has not so much to say as might be expected; she seems even inclined to belittle his reputation, and to denounce his freebooting exploits as discreditable anachronism in a day of “changing moral sense.” She would have us know that he was by no means the chief of the clan, as has been lightly said, but only uncle and tutor to the young chieftain of Glengyle, a junior branch rooted at the head of Loch Katrine. But he is by far the most widely celebrated son of Gregor; and we need turn to no more recondite source than Scott for fact and fiction to illustrate a career that in its own day made copy for a London hack writer. Sir Walter, by the way, regrets that rare tract, _The Highland Rogue_, not having fallen to be written by Defoe; but there now seems reason to believe that this catchpenny piece was Defoe’s work. Better informed biographies of Rob Roy have been written in our time, one decked out in trappings of fiction by the novelist James Grant; but he is still best known from the novel that bears his name, or from Wordsworth’s humorously idealising verses. Not to swell out the following sketch of his life with vain repetitions of such qualifying phrases as “it is said,” “he is believed,” the reader will please understand that a writer has here to pick out what seems most likely to be the fact from a mass of deficient and sometimes contradictory materials more easily handled by fiction than by history. Our critical generation has gleaned very little to round off the presentment of his hero by a romancer who in youth had opportunities to gather what passed for truth about the scenes of Rob’s exploits.
Scott had spoken to men who knew the renowned freebooter, and could describe him as hairy and strong like a Highland bull--not tall, but remarkable for the breadth of his shoulders and the length of his arms, so that he could untie his garters without stooping. It was his red hair or complexion, of course, that gave him the well-known byname. He is supposed to have been born early in Charles II.’s reign, a descendant of Ciar Mhor, the “great mouse-coloured man,” whom tradition accused of the murder of those scholars at Glenfruin. He would hardly have been out of his teens when the Revolution gave him an opportunity of apprenticeship to scenes of violence. He may have fought at Killiecrankie. His first recorded exploit was the Hership of Kippen in 1691, when he swooped down into the Lennox to carry off a herd of cows belonging to Lord Livingstone, and while he was about it plundered the village of Kippen, whose inhabitants had presumed to oppose him with such clumsy weapons as they had at hand.
The young leader of this raid was no homeless outlaw. He had a farm of his own at Inversnaid on Loch Lomond, the accommodation of which he may now and then have exchanged for what is shown on the lakeside as Rob Roy’s Cave, said to have given shelter to Robert Bruce also in his day. When the country had settled down after the Revolution, Rob is heard of as taking grazing lands in Balquhidder, and as acquiring further property or holdings at Craig Royston, farther down Loch Lomond, where again an arched cavern is called “Rob Roy’s Prison,” and rival “Rob Roy’s Wells” are pointed out in this tourist-haunted vicinity. Now or afterwards he combined the apparently incongruous professions of cattle-robber and blackmailer or captain of a border “Watch.” In 1695 he appears to have fallen into the hands of the Philistines, for there is a record of his being ordered for exile to Flanders; but somehow he must have escaped this sentence, perhaps owing to the protection of the Duke of Montrose. It is of course possible that he may here be confused with some other member of the clan, in which the agname Roy was not uncommon.
To this nobleman, his neighbour on Loch Lomond, he for a time attached himself, receiving not only protection but loans of money with which to carry on business as a drover. Another way of telling it is that the duke became practically a partner with his enterprising client. For now, putting his pride into his pocket, Rob took to dealing in cattle at the Lowland markets, a trade, as Scott tells us, not altogether peaceful in its incidents.
The cattle, which were the staple commodity of the mountains, were escorted down to fairs, on the borders of the Lowlands, by a party of Highlanders, with their arms rattling around them; and who dealt, however, in all honour and good faith with their Southern customers. A fray, indeed, would sometimes arise, when the Lowland men, chiefly Borderers, who had to supply the English market, used to dip their bonnets in the next brook, and wrapping them round their hands, oppose their cudgels to the naked broadswords, which had not always the superiority. I have heard from aged persons, who had been engaged in such affrays, that the Highlanders used remarkably fair play, never using the point of the sword, far less their pistols or daggers; so that--
With many a thwack, and many a bang, Hard crabtree and cold iron rang.
A slash or two or a broken head was easily accommodated, and as the trade was of benefit to both parties, trifling skirmishes were not allowed to interrupt its harmony.
The area of such operations was extended by the Union allowing Highland cattle to be driven over the Border; and for a time our hero seems to have done a profitable business. By and by, however, it went ill with him in overstocked markets. His losses are also blamed on the rascality of a partner who absconded in 1712, when Rob himself had to keep out of the way of a charge that he had treacherously made off with money entrusted to him by several nobleman and gentlemen for buying cows. Such an embarrassed state of his affairs he faced by withdrawing himself deeper into the Highland wilds. The Duke of Montrose pressed for payment of his advances; then his agents are said to have insulted Rob’s wife, in distraining upon their home in the master’s absence. This outrage is charged against Graham of Killearn, the Duke’s chamberlain, upon whom Rob afterwards took stinted revenge by seizing him while collecting rents, laying hands on the money, and carrying off the man of business to an island on Loch Katrine, from which, however, he was released, robbed but unharmed, after a few days’ imprisonment.
About this time Rob Roy’s refuge appears to have been in the Breadalbane country. Now, at all events, he made up a feud with the Campbells, that had been chronic or intermittent in earlier days, when he ducked one laird of that name in the pool of Strath Fillan. His quarrel with Montrose drove him into a new alliance, and he is presently found attaching himself to the Duke of Argyll, for the sake of a clandestine protection extended to clients of the rival magnates. With the Campbell country to fall back on, he made guerrilla raids against the Grahams, by way of settling accounts which this unsuccessful cattle-dealer maintained to be in his favour. His mother is said to have been a Campbell, as also his wife, though another account makes her a Macgregor by birth, who may have passed under the Campbell name.
That private war was interrupted by the rising of 1715. Rob would hardly have been a Macgregor had he not “gone out” at such a time; but most accounts of the campaign represent him as fighting or foraying too much for his own hand. He took the field as guardian of his young nephew, the chieftain of Glengyle, bynamed _Ghlune Dhu_, “Black Knee,” from a mole shown below his kilt; then to this scion of the house Rob seems to have set no chivalrous example. The battle of Sheriffmuir proved an indecisive one mainly through his refusing to lead the Macgregors to the charge; and his best part in the fight was plundering the baggage and the dead. He would not be the only Highlander in those wars who fought “not for King Shordy nor King Hamish, but for king _Spulzie_.” Balhaldie, head of another branch of the Macgregors, distinguished himself more at this battle fought close to his home.
The attitude of “sitting on the fence” which Rob kept in this Jacobite rising, is thought to have been inspired by his connection with Argyll, the leader of the Hanoverian party in Scotland. But he was active enough on _creaghs_, pushed as far as Falkland Palace in Fife. His own country, at the outset, had been beaten up by the enemy. The Macgregors’ first act of war was to seize the boats on Loch Lomond. To recover them, a force of Dumbarton and Paisley volunteers with a band of Colquhoun Highlanders marched to Inversnaid, waked the mountain echoes with a great din of drumming and shooting, by which they boasted to have “cowed and frighted away” the Macgregors, whose captain, indeed, appears seldom forward to fight unless where something was to be got by it.
It was about this time that Rob paid a visit to Aberdeen, sent by Mar, it is supposed, to raise part of his clan settled in that region. Here he was guest of an imperfectly congenial kinsman, Dr. James Gregory, a Macgregor who had changed his name and his nature to become a professor of medicine at the University, one of a line of men of science and healers who by “Gregory’s powder” and other remedies did much to stanch their ancestors’ blood-letting. That alarming cousin from the hills, in return for the hospitality shown him, offered to take to the Highlands one of the professor’s sons with the view of making a man of him. It was difficult to explain to him how this course of education seemed no favour; he is said to have threatened to carry off the boy by force from the unworthy fate of becoming a bookworm, and the father was fain to temporise with such pressing kindness by a promise to talk of the matter later on, when his son had grown stronger. In the end young Gregory was allowed to follow his destiny to medicine; but Rob did visit the family once more, when his stay was cut short by hearing the drums beat in the barracks. “If these lads are turning out, I must be off,” quoth the prudent outlaw, and took sudden leave of his host. The story of his leaping the water at Culter and shaking his fist in the face of his pursuers seems to be a mere fancy piece, like the statue that commemorates it. Rob Roy’s authentic exploits were far from Deeside.
After the dispersal of the Jacobite army, Rob could not prevent his own country being raided by the soldiers. Two houses of his were burned and plundered, one of them before the angry eyes of the outlaw, who could only fire a few shots at the Swiss mercenaries brought from their own Alps to do such work in Highland glens. It seems to have been at an earlier date that he seized the fort building at his Inversnaid home. About this time fell some of the incidents used in Scott’s _Rob Roy_. The lurking hero became a prisoner to Montrose, but escaped by cutting the girth of his horse, as told in this novel. Again he was captured by Atholl and sent to jail at Logierait, but before he could be handed over to the military, he had given his keepers the slip after making them drunk with _aqua vitæ_, which now begins to play a potent part in Highland frays.[1] For the moment these noblemen were hunting him in company, united by jealousy of Argyll, all three made dukes about the same time. Wonderful stories are told of the pranks he played with soldiers, for whom he was as hard to catch as an eel or a hedgehog. At Tyndrum, for instance, he is said to have joined a detachment in the disguise of a jovial beggar, who undertook to betray himself as Menteith betrayed Wallace, but so managed the matter that on entering the house where they were to find Rob Roy, the redcoats found themselves seized in the dark, each file pinioned and gagged in turn, to be set free in the morning with a good breakfast, but without their arms.
[1] The first mention of _usquebaugh_ which I know in English books, is Lord Hervey’s statement as to this strong Scotch spirit being tried as cordial for the dying Queen Caroline. In _The Highlands and Islands_ were given reasons for taking whisky to be not of immemorial antiquity on the heather.
One slight glimpse of Rob we have as enjoying himself at home not very long after Sheriffmuir. In 1804 there died a great-nephew of his, Alexander Graham, who believed himself to have reached the age of a hundred and five. Before registration days, indeed, the years of those oldest inhabitants were apt to be loosely calculated; and perhaps this patriarch’s recollection should be dated a little later. He related to the minister of Aberfoyle how when about eighteen he tramped up to Balquhidder on a visit to his granduncle, whose house was near the church of that parish. On the way, oppressed by heat, the lad stopped to bathe in every lake and stream. Having reached Balquhidder, and no doubt having found warm hospitality, he was still so feverish that several times through the night he got up to cool himself in Loch Voil. Next day, as he remembered, he felt too unwell “to bear the merriment that was going on
in his uncle’s house,” so he set out homewards, still continuing his hydropathic treatment, till at Inversnaid he broke down with what turned out to be an attack of smallpox. Had he remained with his roistering relatives, he might have had the same experience as that other young man Scott tells of on the authority of the Macnab, who, carried off by caterans on his bridal day to a cave on Schiehallion, took the smallpox before his ransom was paid, and got through it so well in this good air that he always looked on the robbers as having saved his life.
After 1715, Rob submitted to the Government _de facto_; but in the feeble rising of 1719, that was quickly stamped out at Glenshiel, he again headed a band of Macgregors for King James; and again there is a hint of his not being very serviceable. More of an outlaw than ever, he then renewed his attacks upon Montrose, to whom he went the length of addressing a challenge, which Scott looks on as an impudent joke. But that embittered feud came to be made up. Argyll, now no longer trusted by the Government, was reconciled to his ducal neighbour, and got Rob Roy also to make peace with the Grahams. Then the chieftain sent in his celebrated letter of submission to General Wade, in which he makes unworthy excuses for his part in an “unnatural rebellion,” and accuses himself of having all along played the spy for Argyll, while taking care not to do much harm to the redcoats. In further proof of his character as a law-abiding citizen, he asserts that his debt to Montrose is paid “to the uttermost farthing.” Macgregors jealous of his fair fame must rule out this document, as the “Casket Letters” are barred by Queen Mary’s champions. It is signed _Robert Campbell_, whereas his nephew used the name of Graham.
Rob would now be more free to settle down at Balquhidder under the ægis of those two dukes. Still, there was on hand a feud with Atholl, who once more laid snares for him, and again he gave captivity the slip. It has been supposed that he spent the rest of his life quietly, or without more adventure than went with his blackmailing enterprises. But Dr. Doran unearthed from an old newspaper a statement that in 1727 the redoubtable Rob Roy was brought prisoner to Newgate, and sent to Gravesend, handcuffed with Lord Ogilvie, in a convoy of prisoners for transportation to the West Indies; then they came to be pardoned at the last moment. Fancy poor Rob pining among the “redshanks” of Barbados, that had been sadly stocked with political exiles! His fame already reached as far as London, for the _Highland Rogue_ came out in 1723. George II. is said at this time to have had the rebel brought to his notice as a fine specimen of a Highlander; but here may be a confusion with the story of Gregor Boyac which I have already mentioned.