Here and there, indeed, we find Macgregors, helped by other lawless bands, making bold to drive off the occupants of farms from which they had been themselves evicted; now and then emerges a record of “the good old rule, the simple plan,” leading one of them to the gallows; but at this date their historian can also quote a number of marriage contracts, wadsetts, sasines, bonds, and such-like deeds of Scots law going to show how the clan, on its outskirts at least, began more or less willingly to adapt itself to the conditions of modern life. In 1691, that old enemy Colquhoun of Luss comes forward to testify to the Laird of Macgregor as “a law-abiding man, regularly paying mail and duty,” while other members of the clan are still denounced as lawless loons, “who have little property or inheritance to be a pledge for them.”

A stumbling-block to those hereditary warriors in their new course was the campaign of Killiecrankie. However much set against the law, the Macgregors had always been ready to stand for the king when bloodshed and plunder were in question; and now a body of them, though not the chief, followed Dundee to his fatal victory. This defiance of the Whig Government, and the general disturbed state of the Highlands, prompted a renewal of the clan’s proscription. Perhaps at the instigation of Breadalbane, the special penal act against it was re-enacted early in William’s reign; then the Macgregors’ conduct in 1715 and 1745 did not invite its repeal.

For nearly a century now it was illegal to use the name of Macgregor. That had been a matter of less importance when every Highlander was known as the son of his father and of his own deeds; but now that even Macgregors had occasion to put their hands to documents and to be specified in records, it behoved them to answer to some convenient surname, while secretly cherishing their own proscribed patronymic. Some disguised it as Gregory, Gregorson, Grierson, and so forth. Some, since better might not be, took the names of neighbours or of the lords on whom they were now more or less dependent. Dr. Johnson understood that David Malloch, the poet, was a Macgregor by birth, that “beggarly Scotchman” who softened his assumed name to Mallet for London ears. Most of the clan seem to have submitted to adoption as Campbells, Drummonds, Grahams, and Murrays, names borrowed from the ducal houses, that, originally besetting the Macgregor country, had gradually squeezed themselves over it, where room was left by such encroachers as the Menzies and the Campbells of Breadalbane. Near the Trossachs country Rob Roy had to do with both Atholl and Montrose, as landlords and superiors; but, when on his good behaviour, he chose to call himself Campbell as recognising Argyll for his special patron. A good deal later, it was not uncommon to find Perthshire men who knew themselves as Macgregors, but passed before the world by other names. In the middle of last century, Professor Macdougall could tell how one of his Edinburgh students gave his name as Macgregor, then being asked to spell it, unconsciously did so as C-a-m-p-b-e-l-l.

Rob Roy’s life I propose to treat apart; and then something may be said of his clan’s part in the rising of 1715. In 1745 also, it can be taken as a matter of course that the Macgregors did not hold aloof from such a congenial chance of bestirring themselves, and in the débâcle after Culloden, their contingent was the last to disband, after boldly marching through the Highlands to Balquhidder. Two separate bodies of them had joined Prince Charlie’s army, as Scott states; but they seem to have run together in the heat of Prestonpans; then there arose a certain jealousy as to which chief had the best right to be colonel. For the clan, as well as the country, was distracted by a pretender, and by more than one. A dispute as to headship seems almost essential to the dignity of a Highland stock; and the troubled life led by the sons of Alpin for two or three centuries had helped specially to tangle the line of succession into knots which Miss Murray Macgregor is at much pains to unravel, her history being twisted, not to say encumbered, by such contentions. She is naturally concerned to exalt her own family, the Macgregors of Glenstray, above rival branches that during a confused time had usurped precedence in a name legally extinct.

The law of proscription, indeed, had now become a dead letter, the Macgregors being practically free to bear their own name if they pleased, though for a time not to wear their own or any tartan, unless along with the king’s coat. If some sons of the race went into exile after Culloden, some to the gallows, and some are already found seeking fortune across the Atlantic, others gained scope for their warlike energy in the new Highland regiments that did such good service to the Georges. Half-way between the two Jacobite risings, negotiations had been set on foot by the kindred clans Gregor and Grant for taking either Grant or Macalpine as their common name. This proposal wrecked on the question of which clan should supply the chief; but some gentlemen of both appear to have then dubbed themselves Macalpine. Half a century later, the name of Macgregor was no longer in disgrace, its loyalty so well proved that the Government could be called on to redress what made now a mere sentimental grievance.

“Gregor Macgregor, Cacique of Poyais,” whom I mentioned in Bonnie Scotland as no great credit to the clan, was grandson of Gregor, bynamed “Boyac” (the beautiful), who under the nom de guerre of Drummond enlisted in the Black Watch, was presented to George II., won a commission, and came to be adjutant of the West Middlesex Militia. He has the credit of drawing up a petition for the repeal of the laws against his clan, as was granted in 1774 by an act evoking warm professions of gratitude and loyalty from the now fully pardoned Macgregors. At the end of the century these sentiments were made good by the raising of a Clan Alpine regiment that, with a brother of its chief for colonel, fought abroad as bravely as at Glenfruin.

The dynastic question had then been settled in a deed signed by over 800 of the name, recognising as their true prince one long fain to lurk under the disguise of a Murray, as to whose essential Macgregorship I allowed myself to speak so lightly. The chief thus elected as representing the main line, was son of Evan Murray or Macgregor, who had been content to end his days as lieutenant of invalids at Jersey, far from the ancestral Glenstray; and the fortunes of the family seem to have been restored by that modern enterprise known as “shaking the pagoda tree.” His granddaughter duly informs me that “high appointments in India prevented Sir John Macgregor Murray, the first baronet, from fully resuming his own patronymic, although he came under obligations to his clan that his only son should do so at his death.” So the last four generations of Red Macgregors have been free to look the whole world in the face without alias or alibi, and flaunt their tartans up to the banks of Jordan, no man daring to make them afraid, an undertaking that seems always to have been beyond the power of most men.

VII
ROB ROY AND HIS SONS

The name of Macgregor now basks in all respectability and renown both at home and far from its native heath. A Buddhist monk, of British origin, who lately undertook to convert us Occidentals, dubbed himself Macgregor, a name that has little suggestion of Nirvana, but seems to accentuate apostasy from the Shorter Catechism. On the other hand Evangelical Christianity and philanthropy of no dreamy sort found a staunch upholder in a “Rob Roy” Macgregor of the last generation, who paddled that byname into fresh note. At South coast resorts, a few years ago, a portly personage attracted much attention by going decked in Macgregor kilt or hose; but scandal gave him out a mere Sassenach, of quite undistinguished name and prosaic occupation, who had the strange fad of posing as a belated chieftain in his holidays, and to intensify that effect donned the most flaring of all tartans, which Rob Roy must have been too canny to wear when his business brought him near excitable bulls. John Bull rather admires the Macgregor tartan, as the most easy to recognise. His sympathies can readily be called out for