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
[Illustration: THE RIVER TEITH]
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.
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
[Illustration: THE CRAGS OF BEN VENUE]
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.