A GAME OF DRESS UP
In early December 1746, well after the active threat of the last Jacobite rising had waned, the British government was still collecting intelligence about known rebels who had not yet been apprehended. A report from Alexander Robertson of Straloch in that month, presumably sent to the duke of Newcastle, is especially notable for two specific reasons. First, it explicitly calls out the forceful tactics of impressment used against allegedly unwilling tenants on the earl of Arlie’s estate in Angus. Second, within the report Straloch proposes an elaborate plan to trick lurking Jacobites into revealing themselves – a plan that is both calculated and impressively devious.
Known informally as Baron Reid, Robertson of Straloch was a gentleman from the Strathardle area of Perthshire whose family had long been aligned with the house of Argyll and the Hanoverian government of
