Part 13
Having made such a narrow escape from transportation, Rob went home to end his days in comparative peace. He turned Roman Catholic in his old age, not having been hitherto much exercised by religious considerations. When a notorious judge of our time astonished or amused the public by taking the same step, a kinsman of his remarked to me, “Old Harry” (his lordship’s nickname in the family) “likes that sort of thing done for him.” This may have been the case of the Red Macgregor. Yet Scott has a story to show a deeper strain of feeling in him. When towards the end of his life he expressed contrition for some acts in it, and his wife would have laughed away those scruples, he rebuked her with, “You have put strife between me and the best men of the country; and now you would put enmity between me and my God.” The incident would at least fit Scott’s conception of the haughty virago whom he names Helen, while her real name is given as Mary, and her character has been represented in another light. As to Rob’s religious impressions in earlier days, an English traveller, two generations after his death, reports, on the authority of an unnamed witness, a story of his cheating a poor widow out of her only cow, then being moved by a sermon against dishonesty to give it back, promising the minister to amend his ways of business.
The Old Adam came out in Rob when in his last years he had a quarrel with the Appin Stewarts, a branch of whom were his neighbours in Glenfinlas. This was settled honourably by a little blood-letting in a broadsword duel between him and Stewart of Invernahyle, whose adventures in the ’45 were to give Scott more than one hint for _Waverley_. On his death-bed, a visit being announced from one of those hereditary enemies, the Maclarens, “Throw my plaid round me,” he desired, “and bring me my claymore, dirk, and pistols--it shall never be said that a foeman saw Rob Roy Macgregor defenceless and unarmed!” To this story is tacked on the somewhat hackneyed incident of a priest labouring to extract from the dying man some expression of forgiveness, to which he consented, with a plain hint for his son standing by: “I forgive my enemies; but see you to them, Rob.” We shall see presently how young Robin carried out such an injunction. The _Caledonian Mercury_ announces the “Highland partisan’s” death at the end of 1734.
The renown of this popular hero, even in his lifetime, loomed out through a misty halo of such exploits as were attributed to Robin Hood, and such tricks as were more in the style of Jack Sheppard. Estimates of his character range from Doran’s “contemptible rascal” to the picture of a noble champion cherished in Highland memories, and set forth most elaborately in Mr. A. H. Millar’s life of him. Even his personal courage has been doubted by cavilling Lowlanders, who find cause to see in him more of a bully than a fire-eater; and instances are related of his allowing himself to be crowed down for all his cock-of-the-walk airs. The belief that he spoiled the rich and was good to the poor goes far to account for his contemporary popularity. A certain humorous shiftiness went to carry off his very dubious political conduct. With more craft than becomes a hero, there seems to be a general consent that he was not given to wanton cruelty, nor over-thirsty for revenge. Perhaps it may be said of him as of Brutus, “nec bene fecit, nec male fecit, sed _inter_fecit,” a judgment translated into Andrew Fairservice’s homely language, and delicately expressed by some Highlander who called this chequered hero “a man of incoherent transactions.” But for good or evil, he bears in song and story the name of having been
A hedge about his friends, A heckle to his foes.
Rob Roy’s attitude of aloofness towards law would not make for the bringing-up of his family in “decency and order.” He left five sons, of whom the eldest was happy enough to have no history; but the others proved themselves chips of the old block to the point of making a noise in criminal records. The youngest, known as Robin Oig, was first to get into trouble. A Maclaren had ventured to settle on what the family held to be their land. At the instigation, it is said, of his mother, Robin Oig, a lad in his teens, shot this intruder at the plough, with a gun belonging to his father which came into Sir Walter Scott’s possession, while Rob Roy’s claymore has emigrated into the hands of an American historical society; and the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities contains the curious sporan clasp, set with concealed pistols, which is spoken of in the novel. But, indeed, too many of Rob’s weapons have been put upon the market.
The precocious murderer absconded, after a herd of Maclaren cattle had been barbarously mutilated by the help of his friends or his brothers. Two of the latter were tried as his accomplices, along with a rustic pretender to surgery called in to the wounded man, who had refused to give him the benefit of his reputed skill on the plea of not knowing with what shot the gun was loaded. An _alibi_ was set up for the brothers, and the charge of being art and part in the murder was found “not proven,” but the two Macgregors had to give “caution” for good behaviour as “habit and repute thieves.”
Robin Oig appears to have fled abroad; then later he enlisted in King George’s Black Watch, and served at Fontenoy, where he was taken prisoner. After the ’45, he ventured home to Scotland, and in 1750 became concerned in another outrage, that seems as if thrown back into the Middle Ages, Being now a widower, he proposed a forcible marriage with a young widow named Jean Key, whose fortune of a few hundred pounds bulked large enough to balance the risk of abduction. In older days it had been not so uncommon for a Highlander, upon Sabine and savage precedent, to carry off a bride whose heart might not refuse to follow the violent possession of her hand, as in Red Indian story a white squaw has been found so strongly wedded to the wigwam that she would refuse to be rescued by her old kin. Only a generation earlier, the notorious Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, had played a prank of the same kind in high life with peculiar brutality that yet gained its end. But now the Macgregors committed themselves not only to a crime but to a blunder, in forgetting how times had changed.
The third brother, known from his stature as James Mhor, who seems to have been the most active spirit of the family, was the ringleader in this enterprise. Robin, who went to the gallows for it, reading a book, may have been acquainted with Allan Ramsay’s song--
The widow can bake, and the widow can brew, The widow can shape and the widow can sew, And mony braw things the widow can do; Then have at the widow, my laddie! Wi’ courage attack her baith early and late, To kiss her and clap her ye mauna be blate: Speak weel and do better; for that’s the best gate To win a young widow, my laddie.
At the trial it came to be asserted rather than proved that Robin had begun with speaking and other approved forms of courtship, and that he had been encouraged to hope for success with this widow of a few weeks’ standing. In any case, he hastened to _voies de fait_.
She was living with her mother and other friends at her house in the Stirlingshire parish of Baldron, when, one December night of 1750, they found it beset by four of the brothers and other confederates, who broke in, terrified the inmates with a display of weapons, and by threats of murder and burning forced the mother to bring her daughter out of a closet where she had hidden herself. Poor Jean, wooed in such rough style, vainly besought at least a few hours for consideration of the proposal thus pressed upon her. Dragged from her mother’s arms, she was thrown over a horse, tied painfully with ropes, and carried off in spite of her screams and struggles. On their way to Loch Lomond, a distance of two or three hours’ walk, the abductors stopped at more than one house, and seem hardly to have cared to conceal their proceedings, but no one durst interfere with them. Professor William Richardson of Glasgow, then a seven-year-old boy at the manse of Aberfoyle, could afterwards “describe as a terrible dream their violent and noisy entry into the house. The Highlanders filled the little kitchen, brandishing their arms, demanding what they pleased, and receiving whatever they demanded. James Mhor, he said, was a tall, stern, and soldierlike man. Robin Oig looked more gentle; dark, but yet ruddy in complexion--a good-looking young savage. Their victim was so dishevelled in her dress, and forlorn in her appearance and demeanour that he could hardly tell whether she was alive or dead.”
Scott’s story is that at Rowardennan a priest was called in to perform a marriage ceremony in face of the bride’s protests; and that she was afterwards brought to the church of Balquhidder, where the husband affirmed the marriage while the wife kept terrified silence. She seems now to have been cowed into some sort of submission; as it came out on the trial that she had seen the sheriff-substitute, and refused his offer of assistance in escaping from her strange plight. It is said that old women were employed to administer drugs to her by way of love philtres; and by threats and entreaties she was made to sign papers declaring herself to have been carried off by her own consent. For now the high-handed husband found how he lived in a new age. The wife’s relatives appealed to the law, undeterred by threats of vengeful feud in good old Highland fashion. Soldiers were sent to back up warrants; and what made a more effectual hitch in the brothers’ scheme, the Court of Session sequestrated the woman’s property, _teterrima causa_ of the crime.
When she had been carried about the Macgregor country for some weeks, to evade the hue-and-cry that now could be pushed into the Highlands in place of the Fiery Cross, the Glengyle chieftain interfered in her favour. The brothers consented to let her go back to her friends, and under James Mhor’s care she was taken to Edinburgh, at first kept shut up there as a prisoner. But again the Court of Session stretched out its arm to place her in safety in the house of a
connection, guarded by sentinels against the Macgregors’ interference. The unfortunate woman appears to have been so broken down that her own mother hardly knew her; and her mind was shaken so that she could with difficulty be brought to relate the tale of her wrongs. The future Lord Kames, who had a professional interview with her, at first judged his client disposed to condone the violent marriage; then withdrew from the case because she gave it a different aspect at another time. Other accounts represent her as oppressed by an oath she had been forced to take when in the hands of the Macgregors. She did, however, make an affidavit as to what had happened, which formed a main piece of evidence after her death.
Within the year she died at Glasgow, from smallpox, by popular account; what she had gone through might well have made her an easy victim to any illness. She had refused to see her husband again; and when, on the way to Glasgow, one of her escort remarked that a lonely stretch on the road was just the place for the wild Macgregors to appear, “God forbid!” she exclaimed, “the very sight of them would kill me.” Her experience had clearly not been that of the bride as to whose case an old lady warmly assured Scott: “My mither never saw my father till the night that he carried her awa’ wi’ ten head o’ black cattle, and there wasna a happier couple in a’ the Highlands.”
For a year or two the brothers eluded justice. James was the first to be caught and brought to trial on a charge of abduction and of what in Scotland is the capital crime of _hame-sucken_, using violence to a person in his own house. The evidence was contradictory, and the verdict turned out rather vague, the jury recognising the abduction but inclining to look on the subsequent proceedings as condoned by consent. While the Court still sat discussing the effect of this verdict, James Mhor made a bold escape from Edinburgh Castle, to which he had been transferred from the Tolbooth for greater security. Here his daughter visited him, smuggling in a disguise turned to account as told in the _Scots’ Magazine_ of November 1752:--
He dressed himself in an old tattered big coat put over his own clothes, an old night-cap, an old leather apron, and old dirty shoes and stockings so as to personate a cobbler. When he was thus equipped, his daughter, a maid servant who assisted, and who was the only person in the room, except two of his young children, scolded the cobbler for having done his work carelessly, and this with such an audible voice as to be heard by the sentinels without the room door. About seven o’clock, while she was scolding, the pretended cobbler opened the room door, and went out with a pair of old shoes in his hand, muttering his discontent for the harsh usage he had received. He passed the guards unsuspected, but was soon missed and a strict search made in the Castle, and also in the City, the gates of which were shut, but all in vain.
The same authority tells us how two subalterns commanding the guard that night were cashiered, the sergeant who had the key of the prisoner’s room was reduced to the ranks, and the porter was whipped, to enforce greater vigilance for the future. The story is best known to our generation by its dubious hero’s luck to get a _vates sacer_ in R. L. Stevenson.
James having made good his escape to France, his brother Duncan was tried and acquitted of the same charge, finding a jury ready to believe it not proven that he had intended to take part in a crime. Another brother, Ronald, managed to keep out of the way. But in 1753 Robin Oig himself was at last brought to justice. For him it was pleaded that the kidnapped woman’s distress moved him to relenting, overborne by the harder-hearted masterfulness of his brother James. All that could be said, however, did not save Robin’s neck. He died with edifying firmness, confessing his offence, and attributing it to going astray from the Roman Church, to which he now adhered. The body, carried off by friends to Balquhidder, was met at Linlithgow by a band of Macgregors, who conveyed it onwards with the coronach and other signs of Highland mourning.
James Mhor was mixed in other ugly affairs that bring him into Stevenson’s _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_, in connection with Alan Breck Stewart, suspected of the murder of a Campbell factor for which James Stewart appears to have been unjustly condemned by a Campbell jury. It is more than suspected that Rob Roy’s shifty son sought to make his peace with the Government by betraying Alan Breck and by playing the spy on Jacobite exiles. In any case his character seems beyond whitewashing; and we may pass over those obscure intrigues as taking us too far from the heart of Scotland. He died at Paris, 1754, in miserable poverty, his death-bed redeemed from contempt by a touching message to the fellow-exile whom he owned as chief, begging the loan of bagpipes on which to comfort his last hours by “some melancholy tunes,” that might wake memories of the loch and the heather.
James Mhor, who at least fought like a man at Prestonpans, died thus far from his kin. Rob Roy is understood to be buried at the Kirkton of Balquhidder, his grave marked by a timeworn stone, sculptured in some more hoary age. There are tombs in better case ascribed to his wife and to one of his sons. Another ancient slab is said to commemorate the first Christian missionary of these glens that were so slowly lit by the spirit of the new faith, where the most binding oath was on the dirk, yet a man feared to break vows made on the tomb of this shadowy St Angus. A more pretentious monument recalls the Maclarens, those older lords of Roderick Dhu’s country, where yet a Gaelic rhyme boasted that “the hills, the waters and the sons of Alpin were the three oldest things in Alban.”
The stage of such stirring lives has become a favourite tourist scene of Scotland, visited not only by bailies from the Saltmarket, but by stockbrokers from Capel Court, and by bosses from the United States, who have nothing to be afraid of but the chance of not finding room in the trains, coaches, and places of entertainment that now open up this land of lovely lakes and streams. If any of Rob Roy’s descendants be alive to-day, they are like to present hotel bills instead of sword points to the Osbaldistones and Captain Thorntons of our generation. Some of them may be thanking Sassenach sportsmen for tips; and some, with more fidelity than the Dougal cratur, may be tramping the streets of Glasgow as policemen. Times are indeed changed. We no longer carry off our neighbour’s cattle, nor his wife, nor his widow, nor anything that can be protected by the police. We harry him only under forms of law; we get the best of him in the market; we cheat him by tricks of trade; we peacefully poison him with quack drugs and adulterated drink; then we can complacently give thanks that we are not as those bare-shanked publicans who made blood flow into Highland waters almost as freely as lying advertisements stain the columns of our newspapers.
As yet “glad innocence” has never reigned among sons of Eve nursed upon the “Braes of Balquhidder,” any more than about the banks of Cheapside. But a time may come when our customary misdoings as well as Rob Roy’s will seem--
Monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past, That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth As would the saurians of the age of slime.
VIII
MENTEITH
There might now be looked for a chapter on the Trossachs district that makes the most famous corner of Perthshire; but indeed we have been in it for some time back. This was the chief arena of Rob Roy’s exploits. At Inversnaid, where the stones of the English fort, finished in spite of him, have gone to build farmhouses and bothies, he had his early home. Many a time he must have driven a herd, honestly or otherwise come by, over Ben Venue by the pass of Beal-nam-bo.
The dell upon the mountain’s crest Yawned like a gash on warrior’s breast.
The Goblin Cave here seems to have been made too much of in Scott’s imagination, like John Ridd’s Doone houses and the Water-slide on Exmoor; but the whole region is dotted with hiding-holes that sometimes bear Rob’s name. Ellen’s Isle, that shrine of pilgrims, may often have served him as a refuge. Many a time must he have tramped by this chain of lovely lakes, in no more appreciative humour than a certain drover who, being admonished on his way back from Stirling market that in London he could have sold his beasts for twelve pounds a head, sullenly replied that if he could take Loch Lomond to an unmentionable region it would fetch “a pound a tot.”
The gracious name of Loch Katrine is in some spellings degraded into Loch Cateran, as lair of robbers; but different derivations have been suggested, for one, a root found in other Highland names, _Urrin_, which denotes a Celtic hell. That was the native idea of a rough and bristly country through which cattle-driving made awkward work, with the owners of a stolen herd close at the heels of the spoilers. The Highlandmen were slow to understand what strangers could admire in this country, visited by occasional pilgrims of the picturesque, even before Scott gave it such fame that Dr. Graham can record how twenty-two carriages had stopped in one day at the chief inn of Callander, and how a London artist had “actually” spent a whole winter working among those wild mountains. This minister of Aberfoyle wrote an early guide-book, entitled _Sketches of Perthshire_; but he hardly gets farther into the Highlands than the southern edge, widely advertised by the _Lady of the Lake’s_ popularity, when _Waverley_ and _Rob Roy_ were still in the womb of time.
Cold-hearted Southrons may look with curious or complimentary eyes upon this half-Highland region, which to its natives was peopled not only with carnal but with ghostly enemies, albeit of more romantic form and quickened by warmer fancy than in the case of those exhaled from flatter claylands. The most familiar spirits of the Highlands were the “Men of Peace” or “Good People” who lived underground in green hillocks, which by spectacled archæologists have been connected with the conical huts of a race of pigmy aborigines, whose shy prowlings in flesh and blood came to pass for fairy tales. The abductions and other tricks ascribed to them in later days may well have been the doings of caterans, walking in the darkness of superstition. Like the Eumenides, the Highland fairies were to be spoken of by good names, in dread of their turn for impish mischief. They had a favourite trick of carrying off mortals to their underground dwellings, and held special power over unbaptised children, who must be guarded against them night and day. Traditions of their pranks are common all over Scotland, from the leading cases of True Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, whose body and soul stood in sore jeopardy among them.
Once in every seven years They pay the teind to hell, And I’m so fair and fu’ o’ flesh, I fear ’twill be mysel’.
In Menteith the “Men of Peace” seem to have been particularly active. One of Dr. Graham’s predecessors as minister of Aberfoyle, the Rev. Robert Kirke, not only wrote a book testifying his belief in them so late as the Reformation period, but was understood to have fallen under their power. His tombstone may be seen by the church, but the story went that he lived on in fairyland after an ineffectual appearance to a kinsman, who neglected to follow his instructions for disenchanting him. When the fairies could deal so masterfully with the very minister, it may be supposed what their power was over thoughtless young folk, now and then drawn into unhallowed love affairs with this uncanny race. A rash mortal who sought their acquaintance had only on Hallow Eve to walk nine times _widershins_ round one of the conical green hillocks so common in this district; then a door would open for the adventurer, henceforth lost to parents, harsh master, or cruel sweetheart. Dr. Graham relates one legend that had a homelier end.
A young man roaming one day through the forest observed a number of persons all dressed in green, issuing from one of those round eminences which are commonly accounted fairy hills. Each of them in succession called upon a person by name _to fetch his horse_. A caparisoned steed instantly appeared; they all mounted and sallied forth into the regions of air. The young man, like Ali Baba in the _Arabian Nights_, ventured to pronounce the same name, and called for his horse. The steed immediately appeared; he mounted, and was soon joined to the fairy choir. He remained with them for a year, going about with them to fairs and weddings, and feasting, though unseen by mortal eyes, on the victuals that were exhibited on those occasions. They had one day gone to a wedding where the cheer was abundant. During the feast, the bridegroom _sneezed_. The young man, according to the usual custom, said “God bless you!” The fairies were offended at the pronunciation of the sacred name, and assured him that if he dared to repeat it, he would be punished. The bridegroom sneezed a second time. He repeated his blessing; they threatened more tremendous vengeance. He sneezed a third time; he blessed him as before. The fairies were enraged; they tumbled him from a precipice; but he found himself unhurt, and was restored to the society of mortals.