A lone pedestrian with a scanty freight,
Wished-for, or welcome, wheresoe’er he came
Among the tenantry of thorpe and vill.
But I would bet all Whiteley’s stock against the poet laureate’s butt of sherry, that Wordsworth’s Wanderer spake not with the accent of Atholl but of Paisley or Kirkcudbright.
Having thus criticised an English poet, I venture to raise some doubt as to whether a native school of minstrels had gone deep into the matter, when they made lads with the philibeg come down from Atholl, chanting such ditties as—
The crown was half on Charlie’s head,
Ae gladsome day, ae gladsome day;
The lads that shouted joy to him,
Are in the clay, are in the clay.
The Atholl men had been notably full of fight in older days: when Mackay’s bayonets were swept away at Killiecrankie, they no doubt took keen part in the chase; and in the ’15 they gave their quota of slippery recruits to Mar’s army at Perth. Not that even then all tartans, nor all fellow-clansmen, were under the same standard. At Killiecrankie a chasm bears the name of the Soldier’s Leap, the tradition about it being that a Highlander of Mackay’s army, flying before his own brother’s claymore, sprang nearly a dozen feet from rock to rock, and, when thus put in safety, jeeringly flung back his snuff-mull to the pursuer as a fraternal farewell. In the upper ranks of clandom such oppositions were more marked. When Dundee marched to Killiecrankie, Blair Castle was defended against the Revolution by a Jacobite factor, while the shifty Marquis of Atholl took the Bath waters as excuse for being out of the way. The first duke intrigued with the Jacobites, but proclaimed King George; then his heir having been attainted for loyalty to the Old Pretender, a younger son, James, held the dukedom, who in the ’45 could not but stand by the House of Hanover, or at least kept himself snug in London, while three of his brothers were out for Prince Charlie. There were notable instances at that time of father and son, husband and wife, taking opposite sides; sometimes, it is understood, by politic arrangement through which, in any case, the estate might be kept in the family. There would also be the case of rival claimants to chieftainship, like that one who provoked Fergus MacIvor’s ambition.
What with the puzzling division of opinion among their chiefs, and with a growing civilisation beside the Lowland border, the Atholl men might well halt between two opinions; and many of them had no more mind to die for Prince Charlie than for the “German lairdie.” The exiled Duke William, on the retreat to Culloden, turned out some couple of hundred men only by the strong measure of burning their houses over their heads. Lord George Murray, making a raid into his own country, gathered another force by sending round the Fiery Cross, for the last time on record, according to Mr. Walter Blaikie; but the heather thus set on fire soon smouldered out. The tenant of a snug farm in Strath Tay or Strath Tummel, within reach of market towns, had been somewhat fattened out of the ancestral taste for bloodshed, and was more inclined to look on at a game now played by professionals. But in such a time of transition, would-be spectators could not yet look on at ease, like the newspaper audiences of our distant wars. A good deal of plundering and burning came about, requisitioning of horses and vivers on both sides, both alike in a want of pay, when men were pressed into the service of one or the other, sometimes of both in turn, then naturally took the first excuse to desert.
Here is one specimen of the seamy side in that last romantic episode of our history. Its prosaic hero was a Glenalmond farmer, one Gregor Macgregor, who, his own clan being proscribed, had taken the name of Murray on coming under the patronage of Atholl. Arrested as a rebel after Culloden, from the Dunkeld tolbooth he pitifully makes affidavit, that may or may not be the whole truth, but represents the straits to which many Atholl men would be put in times to try men’s souls, and also their speculating judgment. He declares that, as a peaceable subject and a faithful tenant, he raised a force of his neighbours to join Cope’s army, with which he marched north for several days, “each living on his own pocket,” till the deponent for one was reduced to a sixpence, and no more pay being forthcoming, “the men withdrew and dispersed themselves.” He then lived quietly at home “till attacked” by Duke William, “who, as the elder brother assuming a right to us, made several insinuations and we as many refusals; at length threatened with military executions and devastation, I, to eschew these impendent threatenings, took up arms and witnessed the raising of the men, and with reluctancy marched, and all the journey was to Crieff, about two miles from our own country, where we gradually dispersed.” When “orders upon orders came to raise and rally again ... so often did we at times make a show and at other times wink at.” Duke William, coming by once more after Falkirk, “set us again on foot, and in a march for Perth; where I gave it as advice every man to make way for himself, upon which we again dispersed and ever since continue peaceably at home. And when His Gr/s orders were issued to bring in all our arms in or before 24 Feb. current, my resolution was and can be made appear, I intended to obey that day. But was intercepted by a party on the 22,”—and so unworthily lie in prison, who deserve rather reward from the winning side.
Other Perthshire lairds had the same complaint to make of their tenants as wanting in chivalry at this time; and several legal depositions might be quoted to show what force was put upon such reluctant warriors. The ladies of Jacobite families seem to have been especially active in sticking white cockades “into the bonnets of such as would allow them.” It was easy for the minstrel of Gask to make Charlie a darling in retrospect; but he may well have seemed a nuisance to tenants whom the Lady Nairne of the ’45 is described as ordering to turn out on pain of eviction and seizure of their cattle; and the Duchess of Perth abused the Whiggish Crieff folk as “d—d Judases to their master, the Duke.” At farm towns, as well as kirk towns, men were now beginning to question hereditary masterships. Of course unwillingness to take arms on the beaten side would be made the most of immediately after the Rebellion; but it seems to have been quite as genuine a sentiment as that of the ladies and gentlemen who in our day sing so sweetly of dying for the young Chevalier, not to speak of stronger enthusiasts who have devised a postage-stamp bearing the
