The Heart of Scotland

by A. R. Hope Moncrieff

This incident, indeed, belongs to a later period of clan history, which we take up at the time when the Macgregors are seen forced apart into two main bodies in the north and south of western Perthshire, while not entirely uprooted from the central glens. Under James III., a chief known as Gregor Mhor flourished so well as to recover part of the clan territory from its oppressors, and to raise its head in the world. A younger son of his, Duncan, surnamed the Hero, also gained renown and such social advantage as went with a Campbell bride; but he fatally fell out with the head of the Breadalbane family. More than one chief of this period might have answered to Roderick Dhu’s reputation. We read of James IV. making a hunting expedition to Balquhidder; and on another occasion it is said that this king rode alone from Stirling to Perth by the wild borders he

congratulated himself on having pacified for a time. James V. also, in historic record as well as in romance, trusted himself on hunting trips into the Perthshire Highlands, when the troubles that had gathered head during his minority made such visits more truly adventurous. At this time one Duncan Macgregor, surnamed Laideus, who seems a prototype of Rob Roy in a ruder time, became for half a century the bugbear of the central Highlands, sometimes driven into far Lochaber, but returning to work havoc and slaughter, till at last he was caught and executed by the Campbells.

By fits and starts, the later Jameses were able to bring a rough machinery of repression to bear upon the disorders of the Highlands. The Macgregors were not worse than a dozen other clans; but they were within shorter reach than those western and Hebridean stocks, who yet proved not beyond the arm of law as put in force on James V.’s voyage to what had long been the quasi-independent domains of the Lords of the Isles. Then the sons of Alpin had the misfortune to play the reiver too near the half-settled Highland line, where the noise of their exploits echoed in Perth and Stirling; and the king could not follow his sport through “lone Glenartney’s hazel shade” without a chance of perilous encounter. Their most powerful foes, moreover, were close at hand to carry out the rough justice of the border. Once and again we hear of the Macgregors being “put to the horn” and of “letters of fire and sword” granted against them, usually to the Campbells, who, adapting themselves better to new conditions, extended their possessions and influence at the expense of less prudent neighbours. To be at odds with the law is in itself demoralising; and the harassed clan grew but more reckless and insolent in the persecutions brought on them by their repeated offences. All through the sixteenth century they appear drawing towards that doom that left them landless and nameless.

The troubles of the Reformation relaxed the process of turning a proud clan into broken men; and Queen Mary seems to have had a soft place in her heart for the much-abused Macgregors. But when James VI. got well settled upon his uneasy throne, his horror of violence dictated a policy of repression which was steadily carried out in the latter half of his reign. In 1586, “letters of horning” were recorded at Perth against over a hundred Macgregors and their abetters. Soon after this even the feelings of a callous generation were shocked by one deed charged upon the Macgregors, the barbarous slaughter of John Drummond-Ernoch, a descendant of that fugitive to Ireland who figured in the burning of Monzievaird kirk. This man, employed as the king’s forester in Glenartney, was procuring venison for the marriage festivities of James and his Danish bride, when a band of outlaws fell upon him, as related by Scott in the introduction to the Legend of Montrose. “They surprised and slew Drummond-Ernoch, cut off his head, and carried it with them, wrapt in the corner of one of their plaids. In the full exultation of vengeance, they stopped at the house of Ardvoirlich and demanded refreshment, which the lady, a sister of the murdered Drummond-Ernoch (her husband being absent), was afraid or unwilling to refuse. She caused bread and cheese to be placed before them, and gave directions for more substantial refreshments to be prepared. While she was absent with this hospitable intention, the barbarians placed the head of her brother on the table, filling the mouth with bread and cheese, and bidding him eat, for many a merry meal he had eaten in that house. The poor woman returning, and beholding this dreadful sight, shrieked aloud, and fled into the woods, where, as described in the romance, she roamed a raving maniac.”

It is but natural that Miss Murray Macgregor would fain believe this crime “to have been perpetrated by men of another name.” She brings forward a tradition in the clan that it was really the work of MacIans of Glencoe, a name which has lived in the breath of historic sympathy. Two young lads of this race, we are told, had been caught poaching in Glenartney, as a punishment for which the forester clipped their ears. Insulted kinsmen vowed revenge for that injury; and the picturesque circumstance is added that their first step was the employment of a local witch, who threw such a spell over Drummond that the MacIans were invisible to him as they approached on their cruel errand. The Macgregor chief’s only part in the matter, we should believe, was harbouring those “Children of the Mist”; or, for some reason or other, it is admitted, he may be understood to have taken the responsibility of the crime upon himself. What came to be believed at the time was that the murderers carried Drummond’s head—his hand in another story—to the Macgregor chief, who, assembling his clan at the church of Balquhidder, made them lay their hands upon the gory trophy, and swear to defend the authors of the deed, as done by their common determination. Sir Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson’s acolyte, has told the story in Clan Alpine’s Vow, a poem that reads like an attempt to catch the wind of the Lady of the Lake’s popularity.

The Privy Council made no doubt of the real culprits. Proclamation went forth against the “wicked Clan Gregor, continuing in blood, slaughters, hership, manifest reifts and storths committed upon His Highness’ peaceable and good subjects.” A Commission was issued to several noblemen and gentlemen, empowering them for three years to hunt down the Macgregor chief and a long list of his followers as specified by name. One account tells of thirty-seven Macgregors slain by a party which the murdered man’s brother had raised under this commission; another makes seventeen of the clan hanged upon one tree at Balquhidder, as a round dozen are said to have been at the end of Loch Earn. Against these statements their faithful historian can bring no more satisfactory disproof than depositions of old men in the early part of last century, who had the story in a form more favourable to the Macgregors, and thought it unlikely that such wholesale executions could have taken place without figuring in their traditions. Miss Murray Macgregor makes a stronger point by showing how, when little more than a year had passed, her ancestor the chief and his followers were formally pardoned for whatever share they may have had in Drummond’s murder. It was not always convenient, indeed, to hold on foot the volunteer police of the border line, where the King’s deputies often proved apter to look to the grinding of their own axes than to keeping keen the sword of justice.

In 1596 Macgregor appeared at court, like Roderick Dhu at Holyrood, to give pledges and promises for the good behaviour of his hornet hive. But a few years later came an outbreak that seemed to fill the cup of their offences. There was an old smouldering feud between them and their neighbours, the Colquhouns of Loch Lomond, which flared up into open war just before James succeeded to the English crown. In The Highlands and Islands, I gave the traditional version of the Glenfruin fight. Miss Murray Macgregor points out that there were two fights at a few weeks’ interval, one in Glenfinlas, the other in Glenfruin. It was after the first affair, described as a “raid,” that the procession of widows carrying the bloody shirts of the slain stirred James into commissioning Colquhoun of Luss to repress the Macgregors.

Then followed the famous battle in that “Glen of Sorrow,” which the Macgregor historian shows to have been fairly fought and won by the courage and strategy of the Macgregors and their allies, who had taken the initiative against a hostile force advancing to attack them. As for the legend of the slaughtered scholars, she justly insists that this story does not enter into the legal charges formulated against her clan, from which such an atrocity would hardly fail to be omitted if it could be brought home to them. She quotes another tradition as to this crime being the work of a monster or madman of uncertain name; and she is able to show that a few years later a highlander of Glencoe was accused before the Privy Council of having “with his own hand murdered without pity the number of forty poor persons who were naked and without armour,” probably those scholars or other sightseers who had come out from Dumbarton to see the battle, and whom the Macgregor annals represent the chief as placing in a church out of harm’s way; he is also said to have expressed the utmost horror at their unhappy fate. Furthermore, the Macgregors’ plea includes a charge, founded on the dying declaration of their resentful chief, that sly Argyll had a hand in the whole quarrel, who, while professing to keep the peace of the Highlands, was not above secretly setting two hostile clans by the ears that they might destroy one another like Kilkenny cats, at the same time, perhaps, throwing into relief the need for the services of a powerful lord-lieutenant on the Highland border. For myself, I will only say that in the whole affair there appears no evidence to call a blush to the cheek of modern Macgregors; and that I regret having hurt any clan feeling by my slight account of this battle long ago. The Colquhouns’ story has been set forth by Sir William Fraser; and that clan counts among its daughters a distinguished author who might draw the pen against the Macgregor historian, if so disposed. As for the Argyll family of to-day, they are all authors, so I leave it to them to controvert the many hard things that have been said against their forbears.