Glencoe and the End of the Highland War

By Paul Hopkins

Paul Hopkins, an authority on early Jacobitism, sets the Massacre of Glencoe in its true context. The book describes the tensions in the Highlands between the Restoration and the End of the Revolution and the influence on the Highlands of national politics.

Besides filling a blank in our knowledge of the Highlands in the decade following the Massacre, the book transforms our perspective on lowlands politics by showing that the Inquiry was part of a secret patriotic campaign to break the aristocracy’s political stranglehold and increase the Scottish parliament’s powers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Donald
• Release date: Mar 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781788853958

Paul Hopkins

Paul Hopkins was a Research Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Book preview

Preface to the Paperback Edition

This reprint enables me to mention very briefly important changes in the sources, and a few of my worst factual mistakes or omissions, discovered since the original publication. Over-compression and other faults of style, alas, and faults of interpretation must remain. I will, however, advise general readers that there is a good underlying story, though one with a large cast of main characters, clogged by the need to set events in a wide context and correct a thousand previous errors: they should skip ruthlessly, particularly in Chapter 11 between the two main climaxes.

In my most important source, the Breadalbane Papers (SRO GD 112), the sections I most used were GD 112/39 and /40, Correspondence, and /43, State Papers including more correspondence. Since 1986, Dr B.L.H. Horn has produced an excellent complete catalogue of GD 112, entirely rearranging and renumbering these sections in the process. A new GD 112/39 has been created, consisting of all the letters in the old /39 and /40, and the letters (but not orders) from /43 — the most important being Viscount Dundee’s letter of 20 July 1689 — rearranged in chronological order. The former reference numbers in the old /39 and /40 are included. The new GD 112/40 is the small section of royal letters, formerly /42; the present /42 consists of miscellanea. The one doubtful policy decision was to break up and disperse between sections the original bundles of letters and documents (in 112/43) assembled for different purposes by Breadalbane’s agents while defending him against the 1695 treason charge. The one significant document I used noticeably misplaced is Breadalbane’s original plan for a highland regiment, undated but certainly of 1685, catalogued among items of 1715.¹

This cataloguing of GD 112 has revealed much relevant material for a fuller picture, often left in unexpected bundles by the original estate managers. There is more evidence of the First Earl’s ruthlessness in family affairs. He was willing largely to disinherit both his sons by his first wife to strengthen his hold on Caithness by marrying its widowed Countess, reversing this only in 1686 after wedding his second son to an heiress. Thereafter, with her marriage contract ‘lost’, the Countess struggled to secure her and her son’s provision.² Predictably, many scattered items modify the picture of the complex relations between the Campbell of Glenorchy family and the Macdonalds of Glencoe. One striking example, with hindsight, is a 1657 bond signed by the future Breadalbane’s father and Alasdair MacIain, the chief killed in the Massacre, and other Glencoe Macdonalds, recalling the families’ friendship ‘past the memorie of men’, ignoring, most recently, a bloody 1646 conflict (p. 52). Its main feature is each side’s promise to warn the other of any harm they heard of being planned against them, and to give assistance.³ There were other forms of Campbell-Macdonald co-operation: one 1666 complaint listing Glencoe cattle-raiders included the son of one of Black Sir Duncan of Glenorchy’s many bastards.⁴ Predictably, none of the many sections contains a trace of the vital correspondence on Breadalbane’s 1691 negotiations and the Massacre which vanished between 1857 and 1872.

The Scottish Catholic Archive’s Blairs Letters have also been renumbered.

Other major private archives, as they become available, will modify the book in many details. Yet despite their size, the traces left by intrigues and secret activities may be fragmentary. In the Argyll family papers, for instance, only a later copy gives the instructions to and details of the negotiations of Archibald Campbell of Inverawe (MacConnochie), the 10th Earl’s agent, in October and November 1691, the crucial period before the deadline (pp. 312–13), with Sir John Maclean and Lochiel (who hid his dealings more successfully, but alienated Argyll by excessive demands). A reported conversation includes the suggestion that Tarbat might be involved in rival negotiations to Breadalbane’s, but leaves it unclear whether this was merely the latter’s suspicions or reality.⁵

Detached items may often be crucial. A letter from the father of the Jacobite. Mackintosh of Borlum, traditionally overlooked because it is in the British rather than the National Library, gives a detailed account of events surrounding the last private clan battle, at Mulroy in 1688 between Mackintosh and Keppoch (pp. 107–8). It helps explain the Council’s violent response by listing the formidable coalition which supported Keppoch in the field, allegedly more than double his 200 clansmen, and over half from other traditionally lawless clans: 200 Camerons and 80 Macmartins, 80 Glengarry and 60 Glencoe Macdonalds, 60 Ardgour Macleans, 30 Macgregors, 60 followers of Forbes of Skellater, even 20 Campbells under Keppoch’s brother-in-law.⁶

I made only limited use of official records not directly connected with the events; a systematic survey would tie up many loose ends. For instance, Colonel Sir John Hill, former governor of Fort William, died at Clockmilne (a little suburb northeast of Holyrood) in April 1701. £413 9s 3d sterling owed him by the government was still unpaid in 1717; but he had managed to marry one of his three daughters to a captain in his regiment.⁷ Irish official correspondence and Belfast town records, with Hill’s own letters and Williamite and Jacobite pamphlets, give details of his Irish career between his two periods commanding a garrison at Inverlochy; but his early life still remains to be traced in English records.

The worst omissions in works like this are often points so basic that the author takes knowledge of them for granted. One is that King William’s order to the Privy Council indemnifying all chiefs and other rebels who took the oath of allegiance by 31 December 1691 (p. 232) specified that this must be before the Council themselves or the sheriffs or sheriffs depute of their respective shires. The proclamation reproduced this; it was not stated but assumed that this should be at the head burgh of each shire. This was the crucial provision which made MacIain of Glencoe late in his last-minute hurry to submit.

Probably my worst mistake about the Macdonalds of Glencoe was the assumption (pp. 341n48, 359–60) that William’s triumph again made the Argyll family their direct superiors. This sprang from the clause in William’s 1691 financial concessions on the pacification, granting £150 to buy the superiority of Glencoe (it is not said from whom (pace p. 277), so that MacIain might hold his lands of the Crown, which would annex them to the (then non-existent) jurisdiction of Inverlochy.⁸ Several Argyllshire chiefs received charters after the 9th Earl’s forfaulture, invalidated by his son’s restoration. Glencoe, in contrast, had been sold by the 9th Earl, though to another Campbell. The future Breadalbane, who had also hoped to buy it, accepted that the Appin Stewarts might legitimately regain an interest there. By a contract of 10 April 1672 with their chief, he had agreed, if Argyll sold him Glencoe, to resell it to him for 22,000 merks. Glenorchy’s courts were to have jurisdiction there; Appin should attend him in war with 20 men and give him first refusal if he sold.⁹ Argyll probably preferred to sell it to Glendaruel (p. 44) mainly because he would receive payment, unlikely in any transaction with Glenorchy. The final purchaser after the forfaulture, John Stewart fiar of Ardsheal, Tutor of Appin, received sasine of the twenty merkland of Glencoe on 2 April 1687. Sasine of his grant of Larich to Stewart of Ballachulish was registered; similar feuings-out to Macdonalds were not (p. 86).¹⁰ The Tutor was fined for the Glencoe men’s plundering after the 1685 rebellion, and one inducement with which the 10th Earl of Argyll persuaded him to submit in 1690 was assistance in obtaining recompense from them (p. 248). The 1691 proposal, which separated the feudal superiority from the land, may perhaps have applied to Argyll’s ultimate authority as Appin’s and Ardsheal’s superior; otherwise, it is unclear whether it was intended to protect or undermine the Tutor, and it remains mysterious.

However, the correction further clarifies Breadalbane’s attitude to the Glencoe Macdonalds as the Massacre approached. In his grand scheme for a 4,500-strong highland militia, the main goal of his actions throughout, which he finally unveiled about February 1692 (p. 330), the Laird of Appin was set down for 50 men, the Tutor for 30 more. Had both contingents been Appin men, it would have been a ridiculously high quota from so small a clan; and there was no historical or practical pretext (as with the Macleans) for the division. Ardsheal’s men, then, would be drawn from the non-Stewart possession he held as landlord, Glencoe: this avoided naming the Macdonalds, whose reputation would have provoked protests. Breadalbane, therefore, was working to smuggle the Glencoe Macdonalds into the great militia with which he planned to dominate the Highlands — if only to avoid leaving them free to rob during crises — while Dalrymple and Livingston were organising their destruction.¹¹

After the Massacre, one early step in the recovery of Glencoe was a grant from the Tutor to the new chief lain MacIain under a charter of 17 February 1693 of the two merkland of Polveig, the two merkland of Carnoch, and Glen Lecknamoy (where the chief’s summer home was). Ranald Macdonald of Inverrigan, the settlement which had probably lost most men in the Massacre, granted sasine for him. Registration of this may have reassured the Macdonalds, inevitably suspicious, that the Tutor could not now legally evict their chief, even under government pressure, nor any enemy destroy, evidence of his rights (as may have happened during the Massacre). Other Macdonalds granted feus still preserved the deeds less formally — and less safely.¹²

The Tutor had acted throughout on his chief’s behalf, and, in a series of sasines in July 1701, Glencoe was transferred to Robert Stewart of Appin.¹³ His ability to count the Macdonalds among his followers made the disproportionate pension he received in Lord Treasurer Oxford’s 1711–14 highland scheme, a variant on Breadalbane’s, less ridiculous (p. 496). For the scheme, Iain MacIain in 1711 bought weapons to re-arm his clan, brought back from Darien, ironically by Captain Thomas Drummond’s brother; for it was claimed that their previous ones had been found and carried off during the Massacre.¹⁴ Forfaulted after the ’15, Appin protested at Argyll’s granting feus to Glencoe men, though it was done mainly to forestall any irrevocable grant of his estate to an outsider.¹⁵ In 1745, the then Argyll and Breadalbane, staunch Hanoverians, restored Robert’s son Dougal to his estate, including Glencoe. This doubtless made it easier, when another Ardsheal led the Appin regiment that autumn to join the Jacobites, to persuade the then MacIain of Glencoe (Appin’s brother-in-law) to be its lieutenant-colonel.¹⁶

My most serious omission, as to both the story and analysis, arose from failing, after a surfeit of the weaker side of John Prebble’s Glencoe,¹⁷ to read his next, better work, The Darien Disaster. He had shown, contrary to my assumption (p. 437) that there was a significant highland involvement in the Scottish East India Company’s two catastrophic expeditions to colonise ‘Caledonia’ on the Isthmus of Darien, in 1698–9 and 1699–1700; most relevantly, that the officers formerly of Argyll’s regiment in the first fleet included Glenlyon’s brutal second-in-command at Glencoe, Captain Thomas Drummond, who was transformed in Scottish eyes from villain to hero, and later, falsely, to martyr, by his involvement with three successive dark spots in Scottish history. There are other thematic connections. William’s reaction against the act establishing the Company had destroyed the last real hope of constitutional reform (p. 422); his hostile acts against the colony, again under pressure from increasingly uncontrollable English parliaments, earned him widespread Scottish hatred and discredited his ministries. As over Glencoe, Scottish denunciations have usually overlooked the international situation. William was attempting, by the secret Partition Treaties dividing the Spanish Empire, to save Europe (Scotland included) from another war, and dared not risk offending the Spaniards further by apparent selfish aggression. Yet enough remains to justify Scottish hostility towards him, and towards the English, when his colonial governors strove to enforce prohibitions against trade with the settlers. Disease, logistical problems, immense communications difficulties, Spain’s vital strategic need to control the Isthmus, and the Company’s almost supernatural ability to pick the wrong men for the highest posts (duly stressed by Prebble) would ultimately have doomed the colony; but the English imperial boycott made a fearful difference to the death-toll, still being largely enforced as, twice, leaky ships filled with sick and starving colonists abandoned Darien seeking to return home. As before Glencoe, the King’s orders had failed to provide for changed circumstances.

Comparatively few highlanders contributed to the £400,000 subscriptions — made in early 1696, when the Company was still considering many promising alternative means of improving the economy — apart from the Campbells, several branches of whom subscribed. Glenorchy, temporarily his family’s head, promised £2,000, £500 more than Argyll, though he actually paid little beyond the first one-quarter instalment, £593 6s 8d in all.¹⁸ Tarbat, who subscribed £1,000, vainly warned the directors in 1697 against committing all their funds to a full-scale colony.¹⁹ Tullibardine’s £500 was originally to enable him, like other ministers, to meddle on William’s behalf; but, after his dismissal, he realigned himself with his Hamilton in-laws, major contributors and firm supporters; and his ever-luckless brother Mungo died on service in Darien.²⁰ Several officers of Hill’s, the one regiment regularly paid, subscribed over £1,500, perhaps at the instigation of a former comrade, Major James Cunningham of Eickett (one of Hill’s confidants before Glencoe), a Councillor in the first expedition — and the first to desert.²¹ Many of the disbanded and unpaid officers and soldiers who formed most of the first expedition, disguised as ‘overseers’ and ‘planters’, were highlanders, including several officers of Argyll’s/Lome’s former regiment. A minister on the second complained that nearly a third of its members were ‘wild higlanders that cannot speak nor understand Scotch’.²²

Robert and Thomas Drummond, younger sons of a Perthshire family which had sunk from being medieval Stewards of Strathearn to landlessness, had their own way to make. Robert took to the sea. For eight years, he was a master in American waters, Boston his main base, probably as an interloper defying the English Navigation Acts. Thomas may have assisted him. He first appears, however, in August 1688 as gunner to Robert, who was master and part-owner of a Glasgow merchantman with 16 guns — needed against North African pirates — sailing from Amsterdam to Marseilles and chartered to bring back wine. The English Navy, facing William’s invasion, seized her at Dover for a fireship, and, after the Revolution, bought her for one.²³ Prudently, both brothers left the Scottish merchant marine, devastated during the war, for William’s expanded army. Thomas Drummond was a lieutenant in Argyll’s from at least November 1689, a captain from January 1691, of the crack grenadier company. Robert by 1697 was a lieutenant in Lord Jedburgh’s dragoons.²⁴

Thomas Drummond’s main enemy, James Byres, claimed that when he first approached the Company, they refused to employ him because of Glencoe. If so, the influence of Robert, whose American experience gained him promotion to command the great ship Caledonia on the first expediton, overcame this. However, in the constant feuding, in which both brothers joined vigorously, the reproach was revived: one opponent called them and ‘the present Gang’ a ‘Glencoe Council’, and years later, Robert was mistakenly nicknamed ‘Glencoe Drummond’.²⁵

At Darien, in early 1699, Thomas drove the sick, half-starved colonials ruthlessly to build Fort St Andrew, vital for the settlement’s survival — and its one solid relic. Unlike his brother, he strongly opposed the first expedition’s decision to abandon Caledonia, but, once it was taken, saved the cannon from the fort. Most of the survivors reached New York; Robert Drummond, though cruel to them, by his seamanship brought the battered Caledonia to Scotland. Thomas, determined to return from New York to Darien to assist any Scottish reinforcements to re-establish the colony, illegally obtained a sloop with provisions. An admirer declared that:

besides his capacity in giving good advice, his singular application to business, his indefatigableness in action and exercise, together with his universall mechanicall genius, with his particular skill in fortification, gunnery, and navigation, have carved him out purposely for this undertaking.²⁶

He was waiting with provisions when the second expedition arrived on 30 November 1699; but for this encouragement, they would probably have fled, and Byres, their usurping leader, never forgave him. Knowing that the Spaniards were certain to attack, Drummond proposed pre-emptive strikes, in alliance with the local Indian tribes. He was among the strongest supporters of friendship with them — ‘this I have seen, that he hath a greater strok with the Indians than all that are here’ wrote one observer — and denounced Byres for ‘vilipending’ them as monkeys.²⁷ When Byres claimed that the colony could not support its numbers, he offered to take 150 volunteers and live with the Indians. Byres had him imprisoned for an imaginary plot. Captain Alexander Campbell of Fonab, his old comrade of Lorne’s, arriving to command the Company’s armed forces on 11 February 1700, released him, and he took a leading part in planning the expedition in which Fonab, with Indian help, defeated the advancing Spaniards. Drummond left to defend himself against Byres in Scotland, but, when the enemy besieged the colony, he ran their blockade with two Company supply ships from Jamaica on 1 April, to find that the colonists had just agreed to surrender. He vainly urged them to fight on, since the Spaniards also were short of provisions, and denounced the latter for seizing the colony’s closest Indian ally. After the evacuation, he cruised to windward to warn any later provision ships.²⁸ He returned to Scotland a hero; in the 1700–1 parliament, Tullibardine, who had led the Glencoe inquiry, named him with Fonab (p. 469) in a resolve as having served the nation well.²⁹

In March 1701, Captains Robert Drummond and Stewart proposed an inexpensive scheme to the financially crippled company for a profitable trade in the Indian Ocean. Refitting the two supply ships Thomas had taken to Caledonia, they would exchange European goods with the mainly English Pirates who swarmed off Madagascar for stolen East Indian produce, and also ship black slaves from Madagascar to nearby European-owned plantation islands. Such voyages had been crucial in New York’s recent prosperity. They also hoped to found a trading post on the African mainland. With Thomas Drummond supercargo, they sailed in May 1701.³⁰ Pirates at St Mary’s Island off Madagascar supplied them with slaves for the plantations on Réunion. There, in June 1702, Robert Drummond unwisely proposed to a shipwrecked pirate, Bowen, a joint attack on an English East Indiaman, giving him ideas. He then sailed to Maratanga (modern Matatene) on Madagascar, where Thomas Drummond died. Bowen, pursuing, carried off both ships and their crews, leaving the captains stranded.³¹

What with distance arid pirates, the Scots remained unaware of this. Exasperated by fresh English provocation, they trumped up a charge that an English East Indiaman, the Worcester, whose cargo the Company wished to plunder, had pirated the ships and beheaded the Drummonds, and hanged three of its officers, despite last-minute evidence from seamen who had escaped from Bowen.³² A 1729 book by Robert Drury, a cabin-boy enslaved for thirteen years on Madagascar, published Robert Drummond’s real fate; but the modern literary mania for claiming that all interesting travel books or autobiographies by obscure figures are fictions by Daniel Defoe created doubts until one author found confirmation in the Cape Town Dutch archives. Captured by an inland chief, Drummond led the shipwrecked crew of another English East Indiaman in a daring escape attempt. He and Stewart slipped away rather than trust their pursuers’ promises of safe-conduct; those who did were massacred. But Drummond could not escape from Madagascar. Embarking on a pirate ship, as Stewart did, would make him legally a pirate. Other ships called haphazardly, and most charged high prices for passage. If he got word home, the Company probably preferred a dead hero to a live encumbrance. He sank into a beachcomber, and was killed by a black Jamaican.³³

A modern argument claims that attitudes towards Celtic peoples within the British Isles shaped colonialist treatment of other races in the Empire and American West. This wide-ranging story is a reminder that it can be applied too simplistically, especially in the early stages. Thomas Drummond slaughtered highland fellow-Scots. He allied himself closely with the Darien Indians, the wisest step in an infant colony. He treated some black Africans as commodities. Had the mainland trading post been established, he would have wooed others to buy Scottish cloth. Circumstances rather than fixed attitudes determined his actions; the parallel with Drake and Hawkins is close. The road from Glencoe to Wounded Knee or Amritsar is not straight and clear. Racial barriers are often more obvious, historians would admit, in preventing any idea of sympathy between fellow-sufferers. Drury used his painfully-acquired knowledge of Madagascar, his one asset, in the slave trade to the far crueller plantations.³⁴

The old view of the Massacre rested on mythical absolute polarisations, not only Campbells v. Macdonalds but Campbells v. Jacobites. This revisionist work’s fitting conclusion is therefore the ’15, in which Clan Campbell was split in two; and my qualifications (pp. 421, 498) on Breadalbane’s involvement should mostly be removed. His death in May 1717, like Campbell of Calder’s, saved his family from serious trouble. Admittedly, he had occasionally changed sides in Anne’s reign, and, like everybody, had submitted in 1714. He had formally transferred his estates to Glenorchy, who remained blamelessly in Caithness throughout; but, as so often, family political ‘balancing’ reflected personal hostility. Blanket destruction of correspondence merely leaves conspicuous Breadalbane’s October 1715 orders raising two battalions, one commanded by Barcaldine’s son, and urging them forwards on the western campaign. Setbacks and disappointments as to numbers sprang largely from last-minute defections by the then Campbells of Lochnell and Auchinbreck, and counter-measures by Glenorchy’s supporters. Duncan Menzies again acted for Breadalbane in the main camp.³⁵ Doubt of his initial commitment derives from the vivid description in the Master of Sinclair’s cynical Memoirs of his visit to the Jacobite camp at Perth while the rising floundered, ironically advising them, since they would not fight, to print propaganda, and with ‘a way of laughing inwardlie which was verie perceptible.’ Yet the laughter was probably largely directed at himself: to have stayed on the fence despite Dundee, and then, at eighty, to come off it for Mar, merited ridicule.³⁶

NOTES

All references to the Breadalbane Papers use the new numbering. Abbreviations will be found later in the book. Sources used only here are not in the bibliography.

1. SRO GD 112/43/25/3, Proposed regiment and auxiliaries, [1685].

2. Ib., /3/74/7, /3/75/1, 3, 5–6, /3/76/9–10, 12, /3/78/3–4, /3/84/7, 73/88/2.

3. Ib., /43/10/11, Bond, 21 Jan. 1657.

4. Ib., /2/141/36, Supplication by James Menzies of Shian, [1666].

5. Inveraray Castle, Argyll Papers, bundle 50, Argyll to cousin, 25 Nov. 1691; ib., bundle 473 no. 220, Copies of Instructions, etc., in Argyll’s 1691 transaction with Maclean, [copy after 1701]. (I owe these references to Major Nicolas Maclean Bristol.)

6. BL Add. 39,200 fols. 2–3, 4–8, W. Mackintosh of Borlum to Duke of Gordon, 17 Aug. 1688 + 19thc. copy.

7. SRO CC 8/8/86 fols. 322v–323, Testament dative, 20 June 1717.

8. CSPD 1690–1, 492, Financial concessions, 17/27 Aug. 1691.

9. SRO GD 112/43/12/3, Articles of agreement, Glenorchy the younger and D. Stewart of Appin, 10 Apr. 1672.

10. SRO RS 10/2 fols. 184–5.

11. Dalrymple, Memoirs, ii, 220, Breadalbane, ‘Proposals concerning the Highlanders’, [Jan.–Feb. 1692].

12. Macdonald, Clan Donald, iii, 217–18; SRO RS 10/2 fols. 382–3.

13. Ib., RS 3/79 fols. 296–303.

14. PRO SP 55/1, 28–31, A. Macdonald of Bracklett’s petition, and proceedings, Dec. 1713.

15. SRO GD 112/39/279/27, P. Campbell of Barcaldine to A. Campbell of Monzie, 25 Dec. 1720.

16. A. Stewart, ‘The Last Chief: Dougal Stewart of Appin (died 1764)’, SHR, [xxvi, (1977), 205&n. 13, 20&&n. 33.

17. For instance: even if the idea that the meaning of the name ‘Glencoe’ refers to ‘weeping’ is wrong, it is misleading to sneer at his — our — fellow non-Gaelic speaker Macaulay as having invented it from sentimentality. A priest who was there with Montrose in 1645, well before the Massacre, was told that it meant ‘moist, as with tears or rain.’ Prebble, Glencoe, 22; Forbes Leith Scottish Catholics, i; 317. No review pointed out my ignorance of The Darien Disaster.

18. Prebble, The Darien Disaster, (London, 1968), 57, 59; NLS MS Adv. 83.1.6 p. 27; The Darien Papers … 1695–1700, ed. J. Hill Burton, (Bannatyne Club, 1849), 391–2, 395–6, 401–2, 405.

19. Ib., 375, 378; NLS MS Adv. 83.7.4 fol. 58, Tarbat to Drumelziar, 3 Dec. 1697.

20. Prebble, Darien Disaster, 93, 163, 290, 310–11.

21. Ib., 59, 102, 150, 156; Darien Papers, 375, 385, 396, 416; NLS MS Adv. 83.1.6 pp. 3, 14, 24, 26–7; SRO GD 406/bundle 633, Hill’s deposition, 2 July 1695. However, Cpt. James Montgomerie, Councillor on the first expedition, was not one of Hill’s officers but a wartime deserter to the Jacobites in Flanders. Major John Lindsay, Councillor on the second, was not the Lt Lindsay who had taken part in the Massacre. Dalton, English Army Lists, iii, 44–5; Prebble, Darien Disaster, 110, 229n.

22. Ib., 91–2, 99–101, 250.

23. William Drummond Viscount Strathallan, The Genealogy of the Most Noble and Ancient House of Drummond, (Glasgow, 1883), 39–50; CTB, ix, 100, 137; Darien Shipping Papers, 1696–1707, ed. G. P. Insh, (SHS, 1924), 117; NLS MS Adv. 83.7.5 fol. 50, R. Drummond to Company, 29 Dec. 1699; ib., MS Adv. 83.7.3, nos. 1–4.

24. APS, xi, App., 61.

25. James Byres, A Letter to a Friend at Edinburgh from Roterdam, (1701), 151; Sir R. C. Temple, New Light on the Mysterious Tragedy of the ‘Worcester’ 1704–1705, (London, 1930), 319; SRO RH 4/135/1 (Journals of Company’s Court of Directors, microfilm)/1, pp. 395, 495; ib., GD 45/1/159, W. Murdoch to J. Anderson, 19 Oct. 1699 (apparently the origin of Prebble’s ‘the Glencoe Gang’, Darien Disaster, 103, 125 etc.)

26. Darien Papers, 156–7, S. Veitch to W. Veitch, 20 Sept. 1699; lb., 144–5, 152–6, 158–9, 181, 189, 192–5, 197–200; Prebble, Darien Disaster, 102–3, 110–11, 124–7, 131, 142, 150, 152, 156, 170, 184–92, 195, 198–202, 206, 208, 210–15.

27. Ib., 237–8; Darien Papers, 220, 233, 250.

28. Ib., 200–1, 203–6, 210–13, 218–28, 232–40, 250–1, 258–9, 302, 311, 313, 317–18, 322, 332, 353–4; Prebble, Darien Disaster, 238–6, 251, 264–5, 298–9, 301, 304–5, 327.

29. Ib., 310.

30. SRO RH 4/135/1/3, 1, 4 Mar., 18 Apr. 1701; Darien Shipping Papers, xxi; H. C. V. Leibbrandt, Precis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope: Letters Despatched 1696–1708, (Cape Town, 1896), 186–7; University of London Library, MS 63 no. 12, [anon] ‘Proposals to the Honourable Companie of Scotland … for Establishing a trade to Madagascar’, [c. 1700].

31. Temple, 134–7, 267, 271–3; A. W. Secord, Robert Drury’s Journal, (Urbane, Ill., 1961), 28–9.

32. Prebble, Darien Disaster, 1–9, 312–14.

33. For Defoe, see p. 224n49. Secord, 28–37, 43–4, 58–9.

34. Ib., 39–41; B. Lenman, The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glens, (London, 1984), 195–6, 199–200, 205; J. Hunter, Glencoe and the Indians, (Edinburgh, 1996), 52–3, 67, 73, 109–10, 123–6. This uses, ib., 60–1, the old rather than the true immediate context of the Massacre to bolster its argument.

35. SRO GD 112/39/272/25–6; ib., 112/43/25/1–2, 8–9; HMCR Stuart, iv, 17; lb., 46–9, 51, John Cameron of Lochiel’s paper, 24 June 1716.

36. Master of Sinclair, Memoirs, 185–7, 260.

Introduction: Sources and Acknowledgements

The Massacre of Glencoe has been much written about and little studied; and the state of the sources is both a cause and consequence of this.

The primary source for our knowledge has always been the Report prepared by the Scottish government in 1695 and unofficially published in 1703. Manuscript copies circulated of the two relevant orders signed by King William, the letters of Secretary Sir John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, and varying numbers of other letters produced before the 1695 Commission. However, the sworn depositions and other items it studied — including some which might otherwise survive among the Privy Council records — remained with Alexander Munro of Bearcrofts, Clerk to the Commission, whose uprooted descendants would scarcely keep irrelevant archives.¹ Besides giving fresh information, this material might indicate the Report’s real bias. It has always been assumed that its main political purpose (besides whitewashing William himself) was to discredit Dalrymple, and that evidence implicating the other main suspect, the Campbell Earl of Breadalbane, was merely incidental — and therefore the more damaging. In fact, it was the damning information about Dalrymple which was, in one sense, incidental. The Report was shaped to attack Breadalbane, and its framers communicated the suspicions they failed to prove to historians, who needed an Iago with private motives to remove the blame still further from William.² A counter-tradition of Jacobite propaganda portrayed the Massacre as typical of William, and, later, of the whole post-Revolution government in Scotland. Its first reports ensured that the Massacre would not go unnoticed outside the Highlands; but, after these, it provided no fresh information. With one exception: Prince Charles Edward during his occupation of Edinburgh published in the Caledonian Mercury not only existing Jacobite pamphlets but the 1695 parliamentary Address and minutes.³

The most comprehensive known copy of the orders and letters, possibly belonging to the Stair family, was acquired by an early nineteenth-century antiquarian, who made transcripts of other relevant items, chiefly from the Register House. In 1845, after his death, the Maitland Club printed his collection, with additions. The volume, including the 1695 Report, has been the central source for later writers; a dangerous one, telling a coherent story, leaving the illusion that no more major items remained to find, and overlooking some already printed which hinted at the less coherent truth.⁴

The other main source for the Massacre, as for many highland events, has been Gaelic oral tradition, which at its best can preserve not only the memory of major events but details unexpectedly confirmed by later research. This has almost always portrayed the Massacre as the result of Campbell clan hatred for the Macdonalds. Yet even the oldest tradition on the causes of an unforeseen treachery must be deduction rather than certainty. If the true cause was outside the knowledge of the stunned survivors, trying to understand why they had been singled out, they might, and their successors certainly would, shape events within their knowledge into a misleadingly logical pattern leading up to the horror.

Another nearby miscarriage of justice provides a clear example of this reshaping of the past. The judicial murder of James Stewart, ‘James of the Glens’, tried as accessory to the assassination of Campbell of Glenure before the Duke of Argyll and a Campbell jury, has obscured the fact that, until government orders forced Glenure to start evicting the tenants on the forfeited estates, he and James were friends. The prosecution’s papers show far more plausible suspects ‘remembering’ by degrees in prison threats James had allegedly made long before against Glenure. Yet these threats have passed into tradition and literature as exemplifying their relations.⁵ Hindsight affected the Glencoe traditions even of the events of the Massacre, with stories of soldiers warning their hosts long before, historically, they themselves knew of the plan. And, in telling and re-telling, other original memories received the satisfactory rounding-out of folklore. The relations of a clansman MacIain, the chief, had once killed happened to enlist in the company which was to commit the Massacre; the soldier who spared the baby had to cut off its finger, making possible a later recognition scene.

Even on subjects less controversial than Glencoe, the same problem in using tradition as a historical source exists, the gradual change in memories. ‘Tradition has no power of preserving History entire’, wrote one of the most constant and scrupulous highland collectors.⁶ When an event’s historical significance was obvious, constant re-telling may produce many, sometimes contradictory, variants. When its wider meaning could not be known locally, the vivid detail may be all the historical fact that survives: Mull tradition, which remembered that a marauding English frigate shipwrecked in 1690 drifted to her doom stern-first (a fact archaeology has confirmed), claims that she was sent from Spain to avenge the destruction of the Tobermory Galleon and was sunk by witches.⁷ Another element in this oral culture, the Gaelic poetry written by contemporaries, is historical evidence as good as most documents; but the traditions attached to poems, explaining and commentating on the events they treat, often contradict plain statements in the poems themselves.⁸

The distinction just made between written sources and tradition is, of course, a partly artificial one. The earliest and most valuable ‘traditions’ about the Massacre were taken down three years later to form the basis of the Report. The culture of highland gentry was, in a greater or lesser degree, written and Scottish as well as oral and Gaelic. Their views of Glencoe (and, through them, those of many ordinary highlanders) would be influenced by the Jacobite propagandists, who made it one of their staple topics, and by information from the Report and interested lowlanders. One of the most fruitful forms of historical research in the Highlands, the combining of written evidence and oral tradition, was already flourishing in the 1730s, when John Drummond of Balhaldie wrote the life of his grandfather Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, employing the family papers, clan traditions and poetry, some central government records — and a Latin epic on Dundee’s 1689 campaign, an example of another culture highlander and lowlander might share.

Yet Jacobitism and family piety gravely distorted Balhaldie’s work. He turned Lochiel, who during much of his long career preserved his and his clan’s prosperity by profitable balancing between the Stuarts and their enemies and between the Campbells and the Macdonald-Maclean coalition opposing them, into a constant loyalist and a straightforward, reliable supporter of his neighbours. The text sometimes revealed the strain.⁹ This also, unfortunately, became a tradition. Much writing on the highland past has been in the form of clan histories. These usually ignored the wider context of general changes in the Highlands, and partly as a result, many until comparatively recently were uncritical defences, minimising or simply ignoring unflattering evidence about the more dubious episodes, and relying excessively on the clan’s own favourable traditions.

Small-scale studies outside the clan strait-jacket were often more valuable. In 1886, a Glenlyon man combined the glen’s Gaelic traditions and some surviving papers of Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, the officer commanding at the Massacre, to throw lurid light on his and Breadalbane’s financial relations, and to find reasons for the Massacre in recent local grudges over Jacobite raids, rather than general Campbell-Macdonald hatreds — in his words ‘Some Historical Reasons why Campbell of Glenlyon and the Earl of Breadalbane hated the Macdonalds of Glencoe’. His book has provided the framework for every study since.¹⁰ Unfortunately, another collection of Glenlyon’s papers shows that the local traditions about his ruin and those responsible, though perhaps contemporary, were mistaken guesswork; and that in formally listing his Jacobite oppressors in 1690, he was capable of forgetting the Glencoe men.¹¹ The moral, that a study of fragmentary evidence may produce misleading results, is a platitude in historical study; but it is particularly important in dealing with highland history in the late seventeenth century, a period of extreme ruthlessness and cunning intrigue masked by vigorous protestations of honesty and legal forms. Individual sources may provide unique glimpses of plots and counter-plots unrecorded elsewhere.

As Breadalbane’s part in the affair is the most mysterious, one obvious place to seek a partial solution is his papers. Their existence and possible significance has been known since the later eighteenth-century historian Sir John Dalrymple published his Memoirs of Great Britain, printing vitally important documents from state and private archives. The Breadalbane items consisted largely of a selection fropi Secretary Dalrymple’s letters to Breadalbane in late 1691, ending with several expressing such intense hostility towards the highlanders that it seemed natural to assume that Breadalbane’s missing replies must have been equally violent to have provoked them.¹² Later historians’ treatment of the collection has been strange. The then Marquess of Breadalbane offered to let Macaulay use it for the passage in his History on Glencoe. Macaulay replied warning him that he had already formed his hostile view of the Earl, and, although he accepted the invitation, failed in the event to consult the documents. He gained permission for John Hill Burton to print two more of Dalrymple’s letters in his History of Scotland, but, as Hill Burton admitted, the relevant passages in his text were finished before he saw them.¹³ Macaulay’s account elaborated the standard Williamite interpretation in which the wicked Breadalbane from private vindictiveness secretly plied Dalrymple with accusations and misrepresentations against the Macdonalds until he was roused to a furious determination to punish them, unsuspected by William or other Scots.¹⁴ The collection was made available to the reviewer of Macaulay for the Edinburgh Review, who printed another selection of documents from late 1691 which made this view untenable — or would have done, if they had not been overlooked ever since.¹⁵

It was the last chance to consult the complete political correspondence, for, at some time before the Historical Manuscripts Commission studied the collection in 1872, a large proportion — how large is uncertain, for lack of a catalogue — was quietly creamed off and sold; and although items exist in Scottish public collections, the whereabouts of the rest, including nearly all previously printed letters, is unknown.¹⁶ The bulk of the collection is in the Scottish Record Office, including Breadalbane’s confidential letters to his Edinburgh writer. These were first used in 1938 by a local historian to question the accepted story.¹⁷ His lead has occasionally been followed; but, in comparison to the collection’s estate records, the correspondence has been neglected.

Elsewhere, also, there is evident this dead response to possible leads to new information, such as that in the 1887 Historical Manuscripts Commission report on the Duke of Hamilton’s manuscripts: ‘a few papers relating … to the Glencoe massacre’ — one of them the missing 1693 report.¹⁸ The strong emotions which Glencoe still arouses apparently find other expressions. With a few honourable exceptions, writers on it have been amateurs in the sense of not using academic historians’ methods, but not in the sense of feeling a burning personal determination to do the subject full justice. This has passed unnoticed largely because popular Scottish history has always rested more on a mingling of several exceptionally strong (though sometimes contradictory) popular traditions — (diluted) highland, Covenanting, border, pre-Enlightenment Edinburgh — than on documentation. One consequence of the nineteenth-century opening of archives was the ferocious battles over fundamental differences of interpretation — ‘Bloody Claver’se’ or ‘Bonnie Dundee’, for instance — between historians upholding popular traditions and opponents relying on newly unearthed documents, whose authority they often upheld with unhistorical literal-mindedness. The arguments over Glencoe often had their unconscious ironies: when Macaulay depicted the glen as a grim ‘valley of the shadow of death’, made for tragedy — the (unconscious) corollary being that it was his hero William’s bad luck that he was the man chosen to provide one — his chief opponent emphasised its prosperity and fertility by describing the loud bleating of the sheep.¹⁹ Yet both sides went to the Highland Papers for their basic facts, and the startling new material the disputes had uncovered went unnoticed. Even in recent years, academic historians have very seldom challenged the popular writers’ accounts of the Massacre or its background.²⁰ This is partly because William’s reign has been, until recently, a generally neglected and puzzling area; partly because academics have become, to a dangerous extent, ‘too proud to fight’; but mainly because the subject is so bound up with Jacobitism.

There are major difficulties in studying the first period of Jacobitism, from 1688 until the death of James II and VII in exile in 1701. The main archive for the period until 1713, deposited in the Scots College at Paris, was almost totally destroyed in the French Revolution.²¹ Except perhaps for one incident, the ‘Montgomerie Plot’, no independent Scottish printed collections match those for Anne’s reign, the ‘Scots Plot’ papers, Hooke’s Negotiations, Lockhart’s Memoirs. Yet the well-documented official biography of James, and a Scottish Undersecretary’s papers, the most important of which were printed by James ‘Ossian’ Macpherson, provide a focus round which large amounts of scattered material in Britain and France could be assembled to construct a fairly coherent picture.²²

However, English historians determined to defend the credit of politicians and other prominent persons involved in negotiations with the Jacobites have long denied the validity of the material, claiming that it is either forged — as is all the evidence government spies produced against them — or the groundless imaginings of optimistic Jacobites; or that the prominent figures were merely ‘reinsuring’ themselves by insincere advances in case of a restoration; for, after all, the Jacobite movement, except when foolish Scottish highlanders momentarily gave it life, was of no real political significance. Modified for some periods, this is still very much the orthodoxy for the 1690s. Examples certainly exist of false accusations and of insincere advances; they do not prove that all accusations were false or that other men’s advances — or even the same men’s, in radically different circumstances — were insincere; yet this is the convenient assumption made. Even if the early Jacobite movement was, ultimately, insignificant at a national level, it might be of vital importance for understanding a famous individual, a parliamentary session or a campaign. When, in these special cases also, the possibility is not even noticed and no knowledge is shown of the evidence, it becomes clear that the dismissive general judgements are not based on rational assessment, constantly checked against fresh findings, but on dogmatic, complacent ignorance. The normal research method to test unusual statements, checking other relevant source collections for any confirmation, is laid aside. These historians restrict themselves to Macpherson and the Life of James to make total dismissal of their (inevitably incomplete) evidence easier. To the new material which nevertheless occasionally appears, they apply the Maclean tactics of 1689–90 against pursuing cavalry — knock the facts individually on the head as they straggle up, rather than waiting for them to assemble in order before testing their strength.

In consequence, there has been almost no study of the Jacobite movement of the 1690s, and of its British and European context. This immediately devalues the Highland War of 1689–91, since it was largely that context which gave it meaning. The English, French and Irish Jacobite sources have remained largely uncharted; and it has inevitably been a hit-or-miss business whether Scottish writers on the war and the Massacre can discover the relevant material. It is tempting to assume that the only outside events of importance were those already known, and that everything can be explained in purely Scottish terms. As the evidence on the lowland Jacobite movement is buried in English sources, its intrigues, which several times crucially influenced highland events, must largely be omitted.

Even if such limitations are allowed for, no balanced study has been made of the war. The reasons are artistic rather than historical. Rather than mounting to some tragic Culloden for a climax, it petered out, so that the catastrophe of Glencoe scarcely seems connected with it; and the most important figure, Dundee, was killed almost at the start. His biographies have trotted round the Highlands at his horse’s heels, without explaining his more general strategy or hopes; and, after Killiecrankie, other accounts take a flying leap for the Massacre of Glencoe, with contemptuous glances downwards at the defeats at Dunkeld and Cromdale.

The explanation usually given for this gap is that the war was unimportant, since the Jacobite defeat was inevitable. This may well be true, but it should not remove the need for an account: defeat reveals truths about causes and their supporters which prosperity hides; and an investigation would at least throw new light on the preliminaries of Glencoe. Yet, even if the final outcome was certain, some historians show a desperate eagerness to declare the Jacobite cause stone-dead: from the start, after Killiecrankie, after Dunkeld and (with more justification) after Cromdale. This may be partly an understandable reaction against the might-have-beens of sentimental Jacobitism, and they make the same labour-saving assumption about other rebellions of the period, such as Argyll’s; but they emphasise the hopelessness of the Jacobite cause with alarming vehemence, and with some distortion of facts. Some imply that the supporters, ultimately inadequate to reconquer a kingdom, who joined Dundee were the only ones who ever could have joined him — as if, in one extreme case, an angel with a flaming sword would have checked Clan Chisholm’s march to join him if the collapse of his north-eastern campaign had not — without adding the necessary qualification that areas which had refused him recruits furnished them to his successors. They always accept a dismissive remark about Jacobite activity at face value, even when the circumstances of the utterer — for example, an outmanoeuvred general denying that his successful opponent’s plans were at all dangerous — make it suspect. They not only emphasise the Jacobites’ defeats, but argue, implausibly, that they had no logical reason for turning up at the battlefields. When the motives of one side are presented as continuously irrational, it indicates that no attempt has been made to understand them.

These historians’ arguments may be discounted for two reasons. The first is that they have not grasped the basic shape of the war. Certainly, as they mention, Dundee’s incompetent successors dealt the Jacobite cause devastating blows. But this was not a case, as in the months before Culloden, of the existing regime reviving in power as a rebellion declined. Instead, the Jacobite rebellion and the new, unpopular, impoverished Williamite regime declined in strength together, and it remained an open question until fairly late which of the two would collapse first. Many who would not join the Jacobite cause from support for James did so, after its worst defeats, from hostility to the ‘presbyterian’ government. The second is that too little basic research has been done until now on the war to give generalisations about it much value. The Highland Army’s main archives, for instance, captured at Cromdale, are in the Scottish Record Office, containing much evidence on the chiefs’ actions and attitudes after Killiecrankie: they have not been examined. One consequence of this lack of research is that, in a shooting war lasting for under two years and confined almost entirely to the highland areas of six or seven shires, historians have succeeded in totally or almost totally overlooking four campaigns. When the basic account of events contains such gaps, it is unlikely that the more difficult task of placing the Highland War and the Massacre of Glencoe in their real Scottish and European contexts has been carried out. The uncovering of new material is unlikely to change the consensus, for it is the emotional conviction, that the Jacobites could never have succeeded, which forms its real basis.

Study of Glencoe and its background must, then, be freed from three unconscious assumptions, two amateur, one academic; they may appear absurd when set out, but the warning is necessary, since the dangerous familiarity of the incident directs thought into well-worn channels. The first is that there was a Massacre of Glencoe scheduled months in advance for 13 February 1692, and that persons whose actions helped bring it about, even indirectly, must have performed them with that intention. The second is that documents which are in print and famous are automatically of superior authority to those of the same class still in manuscript or printed in obscure places; thus the deductions drawn from Dalrymple’s notorious letters to Breadalbane of how Breadalbane must have replied need not be modified by the recent discovery of the actual replies. The third is largely founded on the academic bias in favour of dullness: that because Dundee was a handsome man on a fine horse, he was obviously ‘romantic’ and impractical, and that therefore cunning politicians such as Breadalbane could never seriously consider joining him, even as one possibility among several; that his skilful exploitation of shoestring resources and sublimation of his own interests in tireless exertion for a cause could not even temporarily cast doubt on the final triumph of the various egomaniacs, bigots and embezzlers who ruled the roost at Edinburgh.

This introduction has unfortunately had to concentrate on shortcomings; and my own are also relevant. Dealing with a matter of emotional interest to Scots, I am not a Scot; I have very little personal familiarity with the Highlands; most serious of all, I know no Gaelic. The highlanders expressed their feelings on events primarily in their poetry, but I can study only those poems and extracts which others have translated. For this reason, there will doubtless be some inconsistency in my use of the conventions used for transliteration of Gaelic names into English, and my choice between these transliterated Christian names and their English equivalents: the murdered chief of Glencoe’s son and heir, for instance, is for the sake of easier recognition always called Iain MacIain, even though he inscribed J.M. for John Macdonald on his new house.

My first thanks must be to the Masters and Fellows of Peterhouse for electing me to a Stone Research Fellowship, which made possible the writing of this book; and to my late father, for financial and moral support during my first researches, when it seemed that enough unknown material might exist on Glencoe for a short article. I owe particular thanks to the staff of the Scottish National Register of Archives for the considerable time and trouble they have taken to help me; to the staffs of the Scottish Record Office, the National Library of Scotland, and other libraries and archives where I have worked; and to Trinity College Library, Cambridge, for allowing the long loan of books which I needed to consult constantly. For pointing out out-of-the-way sources to me, I thank Dr. Evelyn Cruickshanks, Dr. Jeremy Black, Ian Fisher, Mrs Zélide Cowan and (fiat justitia) Professor Edward Gregg. I am obliged to Dr. John Maclean for permission to use his translations of Gaelic poems, from his Ph.D. thesis ‘The Sources, particularly the Celtic sources, for the history of the Highlands in the seventeenth century’; and, for permission to use, cite and quote from the manuscripts, to the Duke of Atholl, the Dukes of Buccleuch and Argyll, the Marquess of Bute, the Earl of Moray, the Earl of Cawdor and the Trustees of the Portland Estate and Nottingham University Department of Manuscripts; and to Major-General Sir Humphry Tollemache (although, from lack of time, I have seen only the extracts in the typescript catalogue of his collection). One major collection, that of the Duke of Argyll, is at present unavailable to researchers.

I have made particular use of three previous books in writing this one. The first is David Stevenson’s Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in the Seventeenth Century. The second is P. W. J. Riley’s King William and the Scottish Politicians, from which I have borrowed the terms ‘presbyterian’ and ‘episcopalian’ as applied to members of the political factions using religion for their rallying-cry. The third, John Prebble’s Glencoe: the story of the Massacre, is the best and most influential of the popular histories, and therefore, ironically, the one whose statements I most often have to contradict; but Prebble first raised several very important questions, even though I often have to disagree with his answers.

Finally, I thank my typist, Mrs. Audrey Brooks, for successfully producing the typescript of this book, despite the Balzacian extent of my rewriting.

NOTES

1. Scottish Record Office (SRO) GD 406 (Duke of Hamilton) bundle 633, ‘Memorial of the proceedings in parliament in relation to the affair of Glencoe … 1695’; A. Mackenzie, History of the Munros of Fowlis (Inverness, 1898), 310–35.

2. G. Burnet, History of his own time, ed. M. J. Routh, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1833), iv, 157–61.

3. Recueil des Nouvelles Ordinaires et Extraordinaires (Gazette de France), 12 Apr. 1692(NS), 175–6, Edinburgh report, 23 Mar. (NS); C. Leslie, Gallienus Redivivus (‘Edinburgh’, 1695); Caledonian Mercury, Nos. 3899–3910.

4. For some reason, they omitted the last of Dalrymple’s letters to Hill. Papers Illustrative of the Political Condition of the Highlands of Scotland (Highland Papers), ed. J. Gordon (Maitland Club, 1845), iii–v, 52; Glasgow University Library (UL), MS Gen. 1274, W. Macgregor Stirling transcripts; ib., MS Gen. 1577, Contemporary copies of letters.

5. Lt-Gen. Sir W. MacArthur, ‘The Appin Murder’, The Stewarts, ix (1952), 88–90f, 93, 96, 102–5; The Dewar Manuscripts, Vol. I, trans. H. Maclean, ed. Rev. J. Mackechnie (Glasgow, 1964), 205, 208–9.

6. J. F. Campbell of Islay. Ib., 25–6.

7. See Chapter 7, pp. 248–9, 260n121.

8. For example, Iain Lom’s fiery poem of joy at the avenging in 1665 of the Keppoch murder makes it clear that he was still in exile after being driven from Keppoch for his calls for justice; but detailed traditions portray him as taking a leading part in the actual fight — a logical storyteller’s development. Orain Iain Luim, Songs of John Macdonald, bard of Keppoch, ed. A. M. Mackenzie (Edinburgh, 1964), 128–31, ‘An Ciaran Mabach’; Rev. A. & Rev. A. Macdonald, The Clan Donald, 3 vols. (Inverness 1896—1904), ii, 637, iii, 573.

9. His account of Lochiel’s part in Argyll’s feud with the Macleans, for instance, could not survive even a bare statement of its dates. J. Drummond of Balhaldie, Memoirs of Sir Ewen Cameron of Locheill, (Memoirs of Locheill), ed. J. MacKnight (Maitland Club, 1842), 165–6, 200–4, 308.

10. D. Campbell, The Lairds of Glenlyon. Historical Sketches relating to the district of Appin, Glenlyon and Breadalbane (Perth, 1886), 31–65; G. Gilfillan, etc., The Massacre of Glencoe (Stirling, 1912), 50.

11. SRO GD 170/133/117, Glenlyon’s petition to Parliament, 1690.

12. Sir J. Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1771–88), ii, ‘Appendix to Part II’, 210–21.

13. The Letters of T. B. Macaulay, ed. T. Pinney, v (Cambridge, 1981), 313–14, Macaulay to J. Hill Burton, 26 Feb. 1853; J. Hill Burton, A History of Scotland … 1689–1748, 2 vols. (London, 1853), i, 525–8.

14. T. B. Macaulay, A History of England from the Accession of James II, ed. Sir C. Firth, 6 vols. (London, 1913–15), v, 2143–66; Sir G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London, 1908), 503–4.

15. [Sir James Moncreiff], Review, A History of England … by … Macaulay, Vols. III and TV’, Edinburgh Review, ([Moncreiff], ‘Macaulay’s History’, ER), cv (Jan.–Apr. 1857), 172–8.

16. Collections containing items include SRO GD 50 (John Macgregor Collection), National Library of Scotland (NLS) MS 3134. Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports (HMCR) 4th Report, 513; SRO GD 112 (Breadalbane Collection) /43/1/1/49, list of papers on the Massacre and Breadalbane’s trial, 1872.

17. W. A. Gillies, In Famed Breadalbane (Perth, 1938), 166–71.

18. HMCR. Hamilton, 194.

19. Macaulay, History, v, 2146–7; Trevelyan, Macaulay, 497; J. Paget, The New Examen ([London], 1934), 42–3.

20. One odd exception has been the dispute between Ferguson and Prebble over the religion of the Glencoe Macdonalds. W. Ferguson, ‘Religion and the Massacre of Glencoe’, Scottish Historical Review (SHR), xlvi (1967), 82–7; J. Prebble, ‘Religion and the Massacre of Glencoe’, ib., 185–8; W. Ferguson, ‘Religion and the Massacre of Glencoe’, ib., xlvii (1968), 203–9. Prebble, the amateur, seems here to be right.

21. Some tiny fragments are in the Edinburgh Scottish Catholic Archives (SCA) Blairs Letters.

22. Life of James II, ed. J. S. Clarke, 2 vols. (London, 1816); J. Macpherson, Original Papers containing the secret history of Great Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1775).

1

The Highlanders and the Nation (1590–1660)

At Charles II’s restoration in 1660, the bulk of the nobility and greater gentry of Scotland, the nation’s traditional rulers, faced financial ruin. Even in the pre-war period, their indebtedness had been increasing. Then came nearly two decades of warfare, in which they equipped and maintained armies, directly or through loans and taxes, and often had their estates ravaged: the Bishops’ Wars, the armies in Ulster and England, Montrose’s campaigns, the Engagement, the resistance to Cromwell, Glencairn’s Rising — several of them civil wars in which Scottish resources were wasted on both sides. The Cromwellian regime deliberately set out to break their power. The rigorous laws of debt allowed ‘apprisings’, compulsory ‘wadsets’ (mortgages) of estates, which made the raising of redemption money very difficult, and it was the new judges’ enforcement of these which drove many nobles in despair to join Glencairn. The rising forced General Monck to modify the policy and allow them some share in government. Yet in 1658 Robert Baillie lamented:

Our Noble families are almost gone; Lennox hes little in Scotland unsold; Hamilton’s estate … is sold; Argyle can pay little annuel rent for seven or eight hundred thousand merkes, and he is no more drowned in debt than publict hatred, almost of all, both Scottish and English; the Gordons are gone; the Douglasses little better … many of our chief families states are crashing; nor is there any appearance of any human relief …¹

Even after Charles’s return restored their status, the problem remained. In the impoverished and humiliated nation to which they referred almost automatically as ‘poor Scotland’ and ‘our poor country’, with its comparatively backward agriculture, undeveloped economy and restricted overseas trade, few could reduce their debts to a safe level and secure their family positions by normal exploitation of their estates. One noble realistically prayed to be preserved from ill-gotten gain, ‘for if my hands once get it, my heart will never part with it’. Most of them heaped up further debts by large-scale rebuilding and purchase of luxuries, often imported at great expense from England: this was partly a conscious policy of re-establishing their status before the public through conspicuous consumption, but it further undermined their financial foundations.²

Immediately on regaining authority, this ruling class moved to crush anyone who might ever again threaten it. The presbyterian church, blamed as the root of all disorder, was replaced by episcopacy; and, when the bishops imagined that this gave them independent spiritual authority, an Act of Supremacy whipped them into place. The lesser gentry might again seek power, through Parliament: the government-controlled guiding committee, the Articles, was given almost total power over it. The royal burghs might show independence: dictatorial, corrupt Provosts were imposed on them. Besides fear, the ruling class felt anxiety to restrict access to three potential sources of fortune. The first was the profits of high office, which no other form of income could match. The second was repayment of wartime expenditure; as Charles had, at one time or another, recognised almost every regime as legitimate, this would be done by favour, not logic. The third, fines and forfeitures, must provide the bulk of the rewards for eager nobles, ‘mostly younger, bred in want, when their fathers were pinched by their creditors, … having no hope but in the king’s favour’. In Scotland, with its tiny revenue, they could not, like their English counterparts, hope for rewards from other sources (except, briefly, for commissions in a large permanent army to be employed in holding down the Presbyterians). They knew that they must ruin and destroy others, or be destroyed by their own debts, and the knowledge drove them constantly to instigate more prosecutions, for real and technical treasons, for ‘reset of (conversation with) traitors, for nonconformity — from which to obtain fines or forfeitures, sometimes promised to them in advance. Successful prosecutions for treason caused the most widespread suffering (and provided the richest pickings); landholding in Scotland was feudal, and when the feudal superior was ‘forfaulted’ (forfeited), his vassals lost all their rights