“Old sithes they had with the rumples set even,
And then into a tree fast driven;
And some had hatchets set on a pole--
Mischievous weapons, antic and droll.
Each where they lifted tax and cess,
And did the lieges sore oppress,
And cocks and hens, and churns and cheese,
Did _kill_ and eat when they could seize.”
DUGALD GRAHAM’S _History of the Rebellion._
[Sidenote: THE FORTY-FIVE.]
With the solitary exception mentioned in the previous chapter, the
whole people of Cromarty were loyal to the house of Hanover. They were
all sound Protestants to the utmost of their ability, and never failed
doing justice in a bumper to the “best in Christendom” but when the
liquor was bad. It was therefore with no feelings of complacency, that,
in the autumn of 1745, they learned that the Pretender, after landing
in the western Highlands, had set off with a gathering of Gaelic Roman
Catholics to take London from the King. They affirmed, however, that
the redcoats were too numerous, and London too strong, to leave the
enterprise a chance of success; and it was not until Cope had been set
a-scampering, and the bayonets of England proved insufficient to defend
it on the Scottish side, that they began to pity George Rex (poor man),
and to talk about the downfall of the Kirk. Their attention, however,
was called off from all such minor matters to a circumstance connected
with the outbreaking which directly affected themselves. Parties of
wild Highlanders, taking advantage of the defenceless state of the
Lowlands, and the cause of the Pretender, went prowling about the
country, robbing as the smith fought, “every man to his own hand;”
and stories of their depredations began to pour into the town. They
were doing great skaith, it was said, to victual and drink, spulzieing
women of their yarn, and men of their shoes and bonnets; as for money,
there was luckily very little in the country. Nor was it possible to
conciliate them by any adaptation whatever of one’s politics to the
Jacobite code. A man of Ferindonald, a genuine friend to the Stuart,
had gone out to meet with them, and in the fulness of his heart, after
perching himself on a hillock by the wayside, he continued to cry out,
“You’re welcome! you’re welcome!” from their first appearance until
they had come up to him. “Welcomes or na welcomes,” said a bareheaded,
barefooted Highlander, as stooping down he seized him by the ankles;
“welcomes or na welcomes, _thoir dho do brougan_.” (Give me your shoes.)
Every day brought a new story of the marauders;--a Navity tacksman,
who had listened himself half crazy, and could speak or think of
nothing else, was enough of himself to destroy the quiet of the whole
parish. Some buried casks of meal under their barn floors, others
chests of plaiding and yarn. The tacksman interred an immense girnal,
containing five bolls of oatmeal, which escaped the rebels only to be
devoured by the rats. So thoroughly had he prepared himself for the
worst, that, when week after week went by, and still no Highlanders,
he seemed actually disappointed. One morning, however, in the end of
January 1746, he was called out to his cottage door to see something
unusual on the hill of Eathie; a number of fairy-like figures seemed
moving along the ridge, and then, as they descended in a dark compact
body to the hollow beneath, there were seen to shoot out from them,
at uncertain intervals, quick, sudden flashes, like lightnings from
a cloud. “Och, och!” exclaimed the tacksman, who well knew what the
apparition indicated, “the longest day that e’er came, even came at
last.” And away he went to reside, until the return of quieter times,
in a solitary cave of the hill.
[Sidenote: NANNIE MILLER’S ONSLAUGHT.]
The marauders entered the town about mid-day. They were armed every
one after his own fashion, some with dirks and broadswords, some with
pistols and fowling-pieces, and not a few with scythes, pikes, and
Lochaber-axes. Some carried immense bunches of yarn, some webs of
plaiding, some bundles of shirts and stockings. Most of the men of the
place, who would readily enough have joined issue with them at the
cudgel, but bore no marked affection to broadswords and Lochaber-axes,
had conveyed themselves out of the way, leaving their wives to settle
with them as they best might. They entered the better-looking houses
by half-dozens, turned the furniture topsy-turvy, emptied chests and
drawers, did wonderful execution on dried salmon and hung beef, and
set ale-barrels abroach. One poor woman, in attempting to rescue a
bundle of yarn, had her cheek laid open by a fellow who dashed the
muzzle of his pistol into her face; another was thrown down and robbed
of her shoes. There lived at this time one Nannie Miller, a matron
of the place, who sold ale. She was a large-boned, amazon-looking
woman, about six feet in height, of immense strength, and no ordinary
share of courage. Two of the Highlanders entered her cottage, and
with much good-nature (for they had had a long walk, she said) she
set down before them a pint of her best ale and a basket of scones,
with some dried fish. They ate and drank, and then rose to spulzie;
but they were too few, as it proved, for the enterprise; for when one
of them was engaged in ransacking a large meal-barrel, and the other
in breaking open a chest, Nannie made a sudden onslaught, bundled the
one fellow head-foremost into the barrel, and turning on his companion
as he rushed in to the rescue, floored him with a single blow. The
day was all her own in a twinkling; the Highlanders fled, one of them
half-choked by the meal, the other more than half-throttled by Nannie;
but glad, notwithstanding, to get off so well.
[Sidenote: THE RETREAT.]
In the middle of the spulzie a sloop of war hove in sight, and a boat
was seen shooting out to meet her from under the rocks of the hill.
Sail after sail was run out on her yards as soon as the boat touched
her side, and she came careering up the Firth like an angry giant. The
Highlanders gathered in the street, and, according to old Dunbar,
Fu’ loud in Ershe they begowt to clatter,
And rouped like revin and ruke.
One of them, who seemed to have drunk freely, was hacking with his
broadsword at the rails of a wooden bridge, and swearing furiously at
the ship; and a little girl, who chanced to be passing with a jug of
milk, was so terrified that she fell and broke the jug. “Poor sing,
poor sing!” said the Highlander, as he raised her and wiped her face
with the corner of his plaid, “hersel’ widna hurt a pit o’ you.” The
party, in their retreat, took the road that passes towards the west,
along the edge of the bay; and no sooner had the sloop cleared the
intervening headland, than she began to fire on them. One of the
bullets struck off a piece from a large granite boulder on the shore
termed the _Pindler_, and in less than half a minute the Highlanders
were scattered over the face of the hill. They did not again return to
Cromarty. Though they fared better in their predatory excursions than
most of their countrymen who accompanied the Prince, and transferred to
their homes much of the “plenishing” of the Lowlands, it was observed
that in few instances did their gains enrich their descendants. I once
wrought in the same shed with an old mason, a native of the parish of
Urquhart, who, in giving me a history of his early life, told me that
his father had left at his death a considerable sum of money to himself
and three brothers, and that not one of them was sober for two days
together until they had squandered the whole. “And no wonder,” remarked
another mason from the same parish, who was hewing beside him; “your
father went out a-harrying in the Forty-Five, and muckle did he bring
back with him, but it was ill gotten, and couldna last.”
As spring came on, a new set of stories began to pass current among
the people of the town. The Pretender had failed, it was said, in
his enterprise, and was falling back on the Highlands. But there was
something anomalous in the stories; for it was affirmed that he was
both running away and gaining all the battles. This they could not
understand; and when, early in March, Lord Louden entered the town at
the head of sixteen hundred men, in full retreat before the rebels,
they began to ask whether it was customary for one flying army to
pursue another. His Lordship dealt by them more hardly than even
the marauders; for, after transporting his men across the ferry, he
broke all their boats. “It’s a sair time for puir folk,” said an old
fisherman when witnessing the destruction of his skiff; “gain King,
gain Pretender, waes me, I’m the loser gain wha like.”
[Sidenote: THE BATTLE OF CULLODEN.]
Amid all the surmises and uncertainties of the town’s-people, matters
were fast drawing to a crisis with the Highlanders. On the 15th
of April a sloop from Lossiemouth entered the Firth, and brought
intelligence that Duke William and his army had crossed the Spey, and
were on the march for Inverness, then occupied by the rebels. On the
following morning nearly all the males of the place, and not a few of
the women, had climbed the neighbouring hill to watch the progress of
their march. The weather was dull and unpleasant. There was a cold
breeze from the east, accompanied by a thick drizzling rain, and the
hills of Moray and Inverness were girdled with wreaths of mist. The
lower grounds, which lie along the Firth, looked dim and blue through
the haze, and the eye vainly commanded the whole tract of country
which stretches between Inverness and Nairn. A little after noon,
however, the weather began to clear up, and a sailor, who had brought
with him the ship-glass, thought he could discover something unusual
on the moor of Culloden. Every eye was turned in that direction.
Suddenly there rose a little dense cloud of smoke, as if a volcano had
burst out on the moor; then succeeded the booming of cannon and the
rattle of musketry. “They are at it, God wi’ the right!” shouted out
Donald Sandison; “look, Sandy Wright, is the smoke no going the way
o’ Inverness?” “It’s but the easterly haar,” said Sandy; “auld as I
am, Donald, I could wish to be near enough to gae ae stroke for the
king!” The smoke continued to rise in clouds that went rolling towards
the west, and the roar of cannon to rebound among the hills. At length
they could hear only the smart pattering of musketry, and the tide of
battle seemed evidently sweeping towards Inverness. The cloud passed
from the moor; and when, at intervals, a fresh burst shot up through
the haze, it seemed to rise from among the fields in the vicinity of
the town. Anon all was silence; and the people, after lingering till
near nightfall, returned to their homes to tell that Duke William had
beaten the rebels, and to drink healths to the King. They spoke always
of the Duke’s army as “our folk,” and his victory as “our victory.” I
have heard an old woman of the place repeat a rude song, expressive of
their triumph on this occasion, which she had learned from her nurse
when almost an infant. My memory has retained only one of the verses,
and a horrible verse it is:--
Lovat’s head i’ the pat,
Horns and a’ thegither,
We’ll mak brose o’ that,
An’ gie the swine their supper.
[Sidenote: OLD JOHN DUNBAR.]
In after years they thought less hardly of the cause of the Stuarts;
and I have heard some of their old men relate stories of the poor
people who suffered at this time, with a good deal of feeling. There
was a Highlander named Robertson, a man of rare wit and humour, who
had been crippled of an arm at Culloden. He used, in after years,
to come to the place as a sort of travelling merchant, and always
met with much kindness from them. So much attached was he to the
Prince that he would willingly have lost the other arm for him too.
Another Highlander, who had also been wounded on the moor, was a great
favourite with them likewise. On seeing the battle irretrievably lost,
and further resistance unavailing, he was stealing warily out of the
field, when two English dragoons came galloping up to him to cut him
down. He turned round, drew a pistol from his belt, shot the foremost
through the body, and then hurled his weapon at the head of the other,
who immediately drew rein and rode off. The sword of the dying man
wounded him in its descent in the fleshy part of the hand, between the
thumb and the forefinger; and he retained the scar while he lived.
There was another Highlander who resided near Kessock, who had vowed,
immediately after the battle of Preston, that he would neither cut nor
comb the hair of his head until Charles Stuart was placed on the throne
of his ancestors. And he religiously observed his vow. My grandfather
saw him twenty years after the battle. He was then a strange,
grotesque-looking thing, not very unlike a huge cabbage set a-walking;
for his hair stuck out nearly a foot on each side of his head, and was
matted into a kind of felt. But truce with such stories! Fifty years
ago they formed an endless series; but they have now nearly all passed
away, or only live, if I may so express myself, in those echoes of the
departed generations which still faintly reverberate among the quieter
recesses of the present. Of all the people who witnessed the smoke of
Culloden from the hill of Cromarty I remember only three.
About eighteen years ago, when quite a boy, I was brought by a
relation to see a very old man then on his deathbed, who resided in a
small cottage among the woods of the hill. My kinsman for the twenty
preceding years had lived with him on terms of the closest intimacy,
and had been with him, about ten months before, when he met with an
accident from a falling tree, by which he received so serious an
injury that it proved the occasion of this his final illness. A thick
darkness, however, had settled over all the events of his latter life,
and he remembered neither his acquaintance of twenty years nor the
accident. His daughter named the father of my friend, in the hope of
awakening some early train of thought that might lead him into the
more recent period; but his knowledge of even the father had commenced
during the forty previous years, and his name sounded as strangely to
him as that of his son. “He is a great-grandchild,” said the woman,
“of your old friend Donald Roy, the Nigg elder.” “Of Donald Roy!--a
great-grandchild of Donald Roy!” he exclaimed, holding out his hard
withered hand; “oh, how glad I am to see him! How kind it is of him,”
he added, “thus to visit a poor bedridden old man! I have now lived in
the world for more than a hundred years, and during my long sojourn
have known few men I could compare with Donald Roy.”
The old man raised himself in his bed, for his strength had not yet
quite failed him, and began to relate to my friend, in a full unbroken
voice, some of the stories regarding the Nigg elder, which I have
imparted to the reader in a former chapter. His mind was full of the
early past, and he seemed to see its events all the more clearly from
the darkness of the intervening period--just as the stars may be
discerned at noonday at the bottom of a deep mine, impenetrably gloomy
in all its nearer recesses, when they are invisible from the summit
of a hill. He ran over the incidents of his early life. He told how,
in his thirtieth year, when the country resounded with the clash of
arms, he had quitted his peaceful avocations as a gardener, and joined
the army of the king. He fought at Culloden, and saw the clans broken
before the bayonets of Cumberland. His heart bled, he said, for his
countrymen. They lay bleeding on the moor, or were scattered over it;
and he saw the long swords of the horsemen plied incessantly in the
pursuit. Still more melancholy were his feelings, when, from a hill of
Inverness-shire, he looked down on a wide extent of country, and saw
the smoke of a hundred burning cottages ascending in the calm morning
air.--He died a few weeks after our visit, aged a hundred years and ten
months. His death took place in winter;--it was an open, boisterous
winter, that bore heavy on the weak and aged; and in less than a month
after, two very old men besides were also gathered to their fathers.
And they, too, had had a share in the Forty-five.
The younger was a ship-boy at the time, and the ship in which he
sailed was captured with a lading of Government stores, by a party
of the rebels. He was named Robertson, and there were several of the
Robertsons of Struan among the party. He was soon on excellent terms
with them; and on one occasion, when rallying some of the Struans on
their undertaking, he spoke of their leader as the Pretender. “Beware,
my boy,” said an elderly Highlander, “and do not again repeat that
word; there are men in the ship who, if they but heard you, would
perhaps take your life for it; for remember we are not all Robertsons.”
The other old man who died at this time, had been an officer, it was
said, in the Prince’s army; but he was a person of a distant, reserved
cast of character; and there was little known of his history, except
that he had been bred to the profession of medicine, and had been
unfortunate through his adherence to the Prince. It was remarked by
the town’s-people that his spirit and manners were superior to his
condition.
Among the old papers in Sandison’s scrutoire, I found a curious version
of the 137th Psalm, the production of some unfortunate Jacobite of
this period. It seems to have been written at Paris shortly after the
failure of the enterprise, and when the Prince and his party were in
no favour at court; for the author, a man apparently of keen feelings,
applies, with all the sorrowful energy of a wounded spirit, the curses
denounced against Edom and Babylon to England and France.
[Sidenote: JACOBITE PSALM.]
PSALM CXXXVII.
By the sad Seine we sat and wept
When Scotland we thought on;
Reft of her brave and true, and all
Her ancient spirit gone.
“Revenge,” the sons of Gallia said,
“Revenge your native land;
Already your insulting foes
Crowd the Batavian strand.”
How shall the sons of freedom e’er
For foreign conquest fight?
How wield anew the luckless sword
That fail’d in Scotland’s right?
If thee, O Scotland! I forget
Till fails my latest breath,
May foul dishonour stain my name,
Be mine a coward’s death!
May sad remorse for fancied guilt
My future days employ,
If all thy sacred rights are not
Above my chiefest joy!
Remember England’s children, Lord,
Who on Drumossie day,
Deaf to the voice of kindred love,
“Raze, raze it quite,” did say.
And thou, proud Gallia! faithless friend,
Whose ruin is not far,
Just Heaven on thy devoted head
Pour all the woes of war!
When thou thy slaughter’d little ones
And ravish’d dames shalt see,
Such help, such pity mayst thou have
As Scotland had from thee.