Within the year she died at Glasgow, from smallpox, by popular account; what she had gone through might well have made her an easy victim to any illness. She had refused to see her husband again; and when, on the way to Glasgow, one of her escort remarked that a lonely stretch on the road was just the place for the wild Macgregors to appear, “God forbid!” she exclaimed, “the very sight of them would kill me.” Her experience had clearly not been that of the bride as to whose case an old lady warmly assured Scott: “My mither never saw my father till the night that he carried her awa’ wi’ ten head o’ black cattle, and there wasna a happier couple in a’ the Highlands.”
For a year or two the brothers eluded justice. James was the first to be caught and brought to trial on a charge of abduction and of what in Scotland is the capital crime of hame-sucken, using violence to a person in his own house. The evidence was contradictory, and the verdict turned out rather vague, the jury recognising the abduction but inclining to look on the subsequent proceedings as condoned by consent. While the Court still sat discussing the effect of this verdict, James Mhor made a bold escape from Edinburgh Castle, to which he had been transferred from the Tolbooth for greater security. Here his daughter visited him, smuggling in a disguise turned to account as told in the Scots’ Magazine of November 1752:—
He dressed himself in an old tattered big coat put over his own clothes, an old night-cap, an old leather apron, and old dirty shoes and stockings so as to personate a cobbler. When he was thus equipped, his daughter, a maid servant who assisted, and who was the only person in the room, except two of his young children, scolded the cobbler for having done his work carelessly, and this with such an audible voice as to be heard by the sentinels without the room door. About seven o’clock, while she was scolding, the pretended cobbler opened the room door, and went out with a pair of old shoes in his hand, muttering his discontent for the harsh usage he had received. He passed the guards unsuspected, but was soon missed and a strict search made in the Castle, and also in the City, the gates of which were shut, but all in vain.
The same authority tells us how two subalterns commanding the guard that night were cashiered, the sergeant who had the key of the prisoner’s room was reduced to the ranks, and the porter was whipped, to enforce greater vigilance for the future. The story is best known to our generation by its dubious hero’s luck to get a vates sacer in R. L. Stevenson.
James having made good his escape to France, his brother Duncan was tried and acquitted of the same charge, finding a jury ready to believe it not proven that he had intended to take part in a crime. Another brother, Ronald, managed to keep out of the way. But in 1753 Robin Oig himself was at last brought to justice. For him it was pleaded that the kidnapped woman’s distress moved him to relenting, overborne by the harder-hearted masterfulness of his brother James. All that could be said, however, did not save Robin’s neck. He died with edifying firmness, confessing his offence, and attributing it to going astray from the Roman Church, to which he now adhered. The body, carried off by friends to Balquhidder, was met at Linlithgow by a band of Macgregors, who conveyed it onwards with the coronach and other signs of Highland mourning.
James Mhor was mixed in other ugly affairs that bring him into Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona, in connection with Alan Breck Stewart, suspected of the murder of a Campbell factor for which James Stewart appears to have been unjustly condemned by a Campbell jury. It is more than suspected that Rob Roy’s shifty son sought to make his peace with the Government by betraying Alan Breck and by playing the spy on Jacobite exiles. In any case his character seems beyond whitewashing; and we may pass over those obscure intrigues as taking us too far from the heart of Scotland. He died at Paris, 1754, in miserable poverty, his death-bed redeemed from contempt by a touching message to the fellow-exile whom he owned as chief, begging the loan of bagpipes on which to comfort his last hours by “some melancholy tunes,” that might wake memories of the loch and the heather.
James Mhor, who at least fought like a man at Prestonpans, died thus far from his kin. Rob Roy is understood to be buried at the Kirkton of Balquhidder, his grave marked by a timeworn stone, sculptured in some more hoary age. There are tombs in better case ascribed to his wife and to one of his sons. Another ancient slab is said to commemorate the first Christian missionary of these glens that were so slowly lit by the spirit of the new faith, where the most binding oath was on the dirk, yet a man feared to break vows made on the tomb of this shadowy St Angus. A more pretentious monument recalls the Maclarens, those older lords of Roderick Dhu’s country, where yet a Gaelic rhyme boasted that “the hills, the waters and the sons of Alpin were the three oldest things in Alban.”
The stage of such stirring lives has become a favourite tourist scene of Scotland, visited not only by bailies from the Saltmarket, but by stockbrokers from Capel Court, and by bosses from the United States, who have nothing to be afraid of but the chance of not finding room in the trains, coaches, and places of entertainment that now open up this land of lovely lakes and streams. If any of Rob Roy’s descendants be alive to-day, they are like to present hotel bills instead of sword points to the Osbaldistones and Captain Thorntons of our generation. Some of them may be thanking Sassenach sportsmen for tips; and some, with more fidelity than the Dougal cratur, may be tramping the streets of Glasgow as policemen. Times are indeed changed. We no longer carry off our neighbour’s cattle, nor his wife, nor his widow, nor anything that can be protected by the police. We harry him only under forms of law; we get the best of him in the market; we cheat him by tricks of trade; we peacefully poison him with quack drugs and adulterated drink; then we can complacently give thanks that we are not as those bare-shanked publicans who made blood flow into Highland waters almost as freely as lying advertisements stain the columns of our newspapers.
As yet “glad innocence” has never reigned among sons of Eve nursed upon the “Braes of Balquhidder,” any more than about the banks of Cheapside. But a time may come when our customary misdoings as well as Rob Roy’s will seem—
Monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past,
That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
As would the saurians of the age of slime.