About this time Rob Roy’s refuge appears to have been in the Breadalbane country. Now, at all events, he made up a feud with the Campbells, that had been chronic or intermittent in earlier days, when he ducked one laird of that name in the pool of Strath Fillan. His quarrel with Montrose drove him into a new alliance, and he is presently found attaching himself to the Duke of Argyll, for the sake of a clandestine protection extended to clients of the rival magnates. With the Campbell country to fall back on, he made guerrilla raids against the Grahams, by way of settling accounts which this unsuccessful cattle-dealer maintained to be in his favour. His mother is said to have been a Campbell, as also his wife, though another account makes her a Macgregor by birth, who may have passed under the Campbell name.
That private war was interrupted by the rising of 1715. Rob would hardly have been a Macgregor had he not “gone out” at such a time; but most accounts of the campaign represent him as fighting or foraying too much for his own hand. He took the field as guardian of his young nephew, the chieftain of Glengyle, bynamed Ghlune Dhu, “Black Knee,” from a mole shown below his kilt; then to this scion of the house Rob seems to have set no chivalrous example. The battle of Sheriffmuir proved an indecisive one mainly through his refusing to lead the Macgregors to the charge; and his best part in the fight was plundering the baggage and the dead. He would not be the only Highlander in those wars who fought “not for King Shordy nor King Hamish, but for king Spulzie.” Balhaldie, head of another branch of the Macgregors, distinguished himself more at this battle fought close to his home.
The attitude of “sitting on the fence” which Rob kept in this Jacobite rising, is thought to have been inspired by his connection with Argyll, the leader of the Hanoverian party in Scotland. But he was active enough on creaghs, pushed as far as Falkland Palace in Fife. His own country, at the outset, had been beaten up by the enemy. The Macgregors’ first act of war was to seize the boats on Loch Lomond. To recover them, a force of Dumbarton and Paisley volunteers with a band of Colquhoun Highlanders marched to Inversnaid, waked the mountain echoes with a great din of drumming and shooting, by which they boasted to have “cowed and frighted away” the Macgregors, whose captain, indeed, appears seldom forward to fight unless where something was to be got by it.
It was about this time that Rob paid a visit to Aberdeen, sent by Mar, it is supposed, to raise part of his clan settled in that region. Here he was guest of an imperfectly congenial kinsman, Dr. James Gregory, a Macgregor who had changed his name and his nature to become a professor of medicine at the University, one of a line of men of science and healers who by “Gregory’s powder” and other remedies did much to stanch their ancestors’ blood-letting. That alarming cousin from the hills, in return for the hospitality shown him, offered to take to the Highlands one of the professor’s sons with the view of making a man of him. It was difficult to explain to him how this course of education seemed no favour; he is said to have threatened to carry off the boy by force from the unworthy fate of becoming a bookworm, and the father was fain to temporise with such pressing kindness by a promise to talk of the matter later on, when his son had grown stronger. In the end young Gregory was allowed to follow his destiny to medicine; but Rob did visit the family once more, when his stay was cut short by hearing the drums beat in the barracks. “If these lads are turning out, I must be off,” quoth the prudent outlaw, and took sudden leave of his host. The story of his leaping the water at Culter and shaking his fist in the face of his pursuers seems to be a mere fancy piece, like the statue that commemorates it. Rob Roy’s authentic exploits were far from Deeside.
After the dispersal of the Jacobite army, Rob could not prevent his own country being raided by the soldiers. Two houses of his were burned and plundered, one of them before the angry eyes of the outlaw, who could only fire a few shots at the Swiss mercenaries brought from their own Alps to do such work in Highland glens. It seems to have been at an earlier date that he seized the fort building at his Inversnaid home. About this time fell some of the incidents used in Scott’s Rob Roy. The lurking hero became a prisoner to Montrose, but escaped by cutting the girth of his horse, as told in this novel. Again he was captured by Atholl and sent to jail at Logierait, but before he could be handed over to the military, he had given his keepers the slip after making them drunk with aqua vitæ, which now begins to play a potent part in Highland frays.[1] For the moment these noblemen were hunting him in company, united by jealousy of Argyll, all three made dukes about the same time. Wonderful stories are told of the pranks he played with soldiers, for whom he was as hard to catch as an eel or a hedgehog. At Tyndrum, for instance, he is said to have joined a detachment in the disguise of a jovial beggar, who undertook to betray himself as Menteith betrayed Wallace, but so managed the matter that on entering the house where they were to find Rob Roy, the redcoats found themselves seized in the dark, each file pinioned and gagged in turn, to be set free in the morning with a good breakfast, but without their arms.
[1] The first mention of usquebaugh which I know in English books, is Lord Hervey’s statement as to this strong Scotch spirit being tried as cordial for the dying Queen Caroline. In The Highlands and Islands were given reasons for taking whisky to be not of immemorial antiquity on the heather.
One slight glimpse of Rob we have as enjoying himself at home not very long after Sheriffmuir. In 1804 there died a great-nephew of his, Alexander Graham, who believed himself to have reached the age of a hundred and five. Before registration days, indeed, the years of those oldest inhabitants were apt to be loosely calculated; and perhaps this patriarch’s recollection should be dated a little later. He related to the minister of Aberfoyle how when about eighteen he tramped up to Balquhidder on a visit to his granduncle, whose house was near the church of that parish. On the way, oppressed by heat, the lad stopped to bathe in every lake and stream. Having reached Balquhidder, and no doubt having found warm hospitality, he was still so feverish that several times through the night he got up to cool himself in Loch Voil. Next day, as he remembered, he felt too unwell “to bear the merriment that was going on
in his uncle’s house,” so he set out homewards, still continuing his hydropathic treatment, till at Inversnaid he broke down with what turned out to be an attack of smallpox. Had he remained with his roistering relatives, he might have had the same experience as that other young man Scott tells of on the authority of the Macnab, who, carried off by caterans on his bridal day to a cave on Schiehallion, took the smallpox before his ransom was paid, and got through it so well in this good air that he always looked on the robbers as having saved his life.