I had not the slightest intention of doing injustice to this once much abused clan, and in proof thereof am half-inclined to propitiate them with the dearest sacrifice a kindly Scot can offer. In those bad old times, forbears of my own were living in the Macgregor country, as to whose intromissions there perhaps the less said the better. It is unlikely that those sons of Eve did not mix their blood with the MacHeths and other clans among which they would be in the way of exchanging vows both soft and stern. I myself feel at times stirred to a right Macgregor scowl, when I see Sassenach knaves advertising their bad whisky, tea, or what not as the “best.” When in future any black deed be associated with their name, let the sons of Alpin blame it on a taint of Moncrieff blood, and hold every true Macgregor incapable of murdering a mouse; then I shall not be at pains to contradict this view. The plain truth is that most Highlanders of those misty legends—not to speak of Lowlanders—appear to have been a fierce and bloody-minded brood—always excepting members of the U.F. Church—and none of us can uphold our kin as any better than their fellows. Having thus, I hope, made peace with the sons of Gregor, I am free to turn dirk and claymore against the Menzies historian who, before heaven and earth, has not scrupled to guess at the Moncrieffs as originally vassals or dependents of his clan, as to which I will only call back how a curse has been laid upon it, that no Sassenach can pronounce its uncouth name aright.
Honestly, I don’t think I have been unfair to the Macgregors, who managed to earn among their neighbours an ill-fame, which they have redeemed by indomitable loyalty to their name. But for any slip of respect towards this clan, one can best make amends by telling its story at more length, with the help of Miss Murray Macgregor’s goodly quartos and other mémoires pour servir that are not much in the way of the general reader. Such a story may need a good deal of boiling down to make porridge for that hasty reader’s taste. At the best, it must be a story too much coloured by the vivid red and black chequers of the clan tartan; and if any Macgregor look dark at what I have to tell, let me repeat what I said in the former sketch, that this name seems to have been more unlucky but not more guilty than others that wear their stains and glories in a less striking pattern. The great author, to whose sympathy they owe most renown, goes a little farther in commentating on their history—“The tricks of a bear that is constantly baited can neither be expected to be innocent nor entertaining.”
It has been already pointed out in Bonnie Scotland how this clan clearly stood as models for the Vich Alpines of Scott’s Lady of the Lake. They claim to be sons of Alpin, as descended from King Girig, Gregor, or Gregory, the heir of Kenneth MacAlpin, though his sonship seems a disputed point. At a very early period is found widely settled in the heart of Scotland a race claiming to be united by royal blood, their traditional descent not at first stereotyped in name. As yet, the Highlanders’ surnames sat as loosely as their garments: a man’s Christian name was supplemented rather by the name of his father, or by some agname taken from personal appearance or position. This clan shot out branches that might come to be known by other patronymics, the Macnabs, “sons of the Abbot”; the Grants, said to be descended from one Gregor graund, that is “the ill-favoured”; the Griersons, whose name suggests such descent; and the same origin is ascribed to the Mackays, the Mackinnons, and others, who may perhaps claim for themselves some still bluer blood of Adam. Of course there would be a good deal of miscegenation through the accidents of love and war; a small broken stock might be adopted into a more powerful one, with or without a change of name, and a Highland heiress might bring for her dowry not only cows but a tail of kinsmen to be adopted into her husband’s clan; then even mere Lowlanders have no doubt been absorbed as captives, runaways, or masters of useful arts. The Comanche Indians, it is said, have as much adulterated white as red blood in them; the Creeks and Seminoles were recruited by negro slaves; and the Tuscaroras were admitted bodily into the Iroquois League. A Highland clan of old days was in much the same social state as a Red Indian tribe. Often also a family interlaced itself with congenial neighbours by the exchange of foster-children, to be brought up in bonds that were sometimes drawn as close as those of blood.
As the Hurons in Ontario and the Iroquois in New York, the main stock of this clan seem to have been originally most at home in what came to be known as the Macgregor country—Glenorchy, Glendochart and Glenlyon—on the western side of Perthshire. Early in the twelfth century, its chief was Malcolm of Glenorchy, renowned for such strength of body as then made the surest title to rank and fame. Of him it is told that when the king’s life was in danger from a boar, or other savage beast, the doughty chief plucked up an oak by the roots and with this gigantic club made mincemeat of the monster. As reward, the grateful king ennobled his preserver, giving him as cognisance an oak-tree eradicate, now displayed by the clan, whose older emblem appears to have been a pine-tree, “Clan Alpine’s pine in banner brave.” This chief married a lady of royal blood, and was known as “Lord of the Castles,” by reason of several strongholds said to have been built by him from Kilchurn to Taymouth; but here tradition may be confusing him with a supplanting Campbell who had the same renown.
In the next century another Macgregor figures among the partisans of Bruce, delivering him from his enemy, Lorn, harbouring him in a cave, fighting by his side at Bannockburn, and elsewhere. But it seems that all the clan did not stand together, some siding with Baliol and thus exposing themselves to forfeiture, when his rival became settled on the throne. And even before this the sons of the mountain glens must have begun to feel the pressure of the feudal system, imposing duties and obligations, as well as conferring coats of arms and titles, along with charters of lordship that did not always take into account the rights of inheritance.
Swarms of Saxon and Norman adventurers hived themselves in Scotland, winning favour at court and grants of land from which the occupants had to be ousted by force, where they were not found willing to remain as vassals of the new lords. A proud and uncomplying race like the Macgregors was bound to come off ill in such a scramble; whose history, indeed, all through the Stuart period, is one of gradual intrusion into their country by strangers, notably the pushful Campbells, who at last drove them out of their fair glens to outlawed seclusion in fastnesses from which they looked with an angry eye on their old birthright.
Where dwell we now? See rudely swell
Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell.
Ask we this savage hill we tread
For fattened steer or household bread;
Ask we for flocks those shingles dry,
And well the mountain might reply—
“To you, as to your sires of yore,
Belong the target and claymore:
I give you shelter in my breast,
Your own good blades must win the rest!
Not all at once would this displacement take place, but fitfully, by waves that sometimes flowed in a spate of aggression, then again ebbed before some outbreak of determined resistance. The process may have been somewhat like what went on in Australia when “selectors” were empowered to “pick the eyes” of a squatter’s holding, here and there putting him to ransom in the name of law. Like Hengist and Horsa, the intruders might make good their settlement by taking sides in the local feuds, or by handling the arrows of Cupid as well as the sword of Mars. The Campbells were noted for being as ready with kisses for their foemen’s daughters as with cold steel for their sons. The Macgregors made alliances as well as creaghs among the newcomers. Some of their hacked and stripped branches shot out to take root in distant quarters, perhaps repeating there the violence that had driven them from their own ancient seats. Under the James kings, such branches appear at Braemar and the Gordon country; and there are hints of a Macgregor leader playing Roderick Dhu as far south as the English border, in company with his supposed cousins, the Griersons of Lag. But the main stock remained scattered over their native heath, from which a remnant of them was never thoroughly extirpated. Their headquarters shifted to be about Balquhidder, a knot of wild glens to the north of Loch Katrine, where a stone called the puderach was a palladium of the clan, the lifting of which made a test of strength for young men, and it gave a byname to the Macgregors of that branch. As far south as the Nun’s Island, Inchcailliach, on Loch Lomond, they had a burying-place; and their strongholds reached as far north as Loch Rannoch, where the chartered Menzies had more difficulty in ousting them than had the Campbells in Breadalbane, who there are well described as ploughing through the centre of the Macgregor country.
On this much-disputed ground, the sons of Alpin were in touch with many neighbours, more or less hostile, their relations with whom are darkly commemorated in such traditional tales of bloodshed, ravage, and treachery as too much stain the rags of Highland history. Some of these tales we have already come upon in passing through Breadalbane. For a time, the Macgregors seem to have shared Balquhidder with other clans, notably the Maclarens, an older stock of occupants, who claimed the right of being first to enter the parish church. This right of precedence is said to have been given up in return for the help of the Macgregors in a hot combat with a neighbour clan, that still darkens a pool of the Leny as “Linn of the dead”; but afterwards the pretension, again raised, led to a fray in the very church, when the priest, a Maclaren, was killed. In the end the Macgregors evicted their rivals, who mainly took refuge among the Appin Stewarts; yet so late as Rob Roy’s time, we shall see a Maclaren fall victim at Balquhidder to that ancient feud, to show how inveterately those clansmen clung to the soil beset by enemies, as well as to hereditary hatreds rooted among them for centuries.
Among so many memories of hate, one tradition stands in relief as illustrating the guest-right owned by Roderick Dhu. In a casual quarrel the Macgregor’s son had been slain by a young Lamont, who fled hotly chased through the night, and by dawn sought refuge at a house he knew not as the home of his victim. To the chief he confessed that he had slain an unnamed man, and was taken into sanctuary. Quick on his heels came the pursuers, their news filling the house with cries of rage and woe. But the weeping father would not let the guest suffer harm: “He has Macgregor’s word.” With an armed band he even escorted the slayer of his son to Inveraray, and there took leave of him with the warning: “No longer can I, or will I, protect you: keep out of the way of my clan.” As edifying sequel it is stated that when Macgregor came to be proscribed and hunted for his life, he in turn found asylum with the man whose life he had saved. In Spain, the same tale is told of Moorish and Christian foemen, as no doubt similar stories came to be passed round Arab camp-fires.