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
[Illustration: THE MACGREGOR COUNTRY]
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!
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
[Illustration: LOCH ACHRAY]
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.