THE ISLAND OF RUM, FROM ARISAIG
It was not by chance of weather that Charles Edward landed in these parts, to start his Phaeton career from the Rough Bounds. Hence, if we take in Badenoch to the east and Lochaber to the south-east, came the strongest bodies of fighters in that lost cause, whose poet tells us how “the fiery cross was sped” with news that the “Prince had come again.” As a matter of prosaic fact, the fiery cross seems to have gone out of fashion by 1745, when the only mention I can find of it is in Perthshire, there used, not very successfully, as summons to arms both for and against the Prince. On the Dee and the Tay he found followers, not so numerous as his well-wishers; but within a day’s march from Glenfinnan was the first and the best recruiting-ground of “the clans of Culloden.” This second-hand phrase I have “lifted” from Mr. Henry Jenner’s series of articles in the Royalist, organ of the “White Rose League,” in which the subject is naturally treated with special sympathy. There is no lack of sympathy for those slain and scattered clansmen, their memory held in honour by that House that seems in little danger of being bowed off its throne by the “White Rose” ladies and gentlemen, when the top of Ben Nevis flared with bonfires to hail Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and King Edward’s Coronation. We are perhaps too ready to forget the coarse features of a life dressed in blood-stained tartans, and what might have come of Prince Charlie’s winning a kingdom whose liberties have thriven best under sovereigns making neither picturesque nor lovable figures in history. But if we wish to drop a tear for the last romance of Britain, it may well be done under the rainy sky of the Rough Bounds, that sent out so many champions to dye the White Rose in bootless blood.
It is not to be understood that all those bellicose clansmen were born in the allegiance to which they might be soldered on by choice or circumstances. As among the Red Indian tribes, there seems to have been frequent adoption of “broken men,” or fugitives from another name. We know how chieftains of the good old time were in the way of gathering about them adventurous banditti, whose bond of union was congenial bloodshed as well as kindred blood. The proudest Cameron of our day can be less sure of not having Campbell blood in his own veins than of its having stained his forefathers’ hands. The portion of a Highland heiress would sometimes be part paid in “a set of stout men,” who henceforth had to be loyal to the husband’s tartan. Another hint of how clans, themselves no thoroughbred stock, might become mixed together is found in that ugly story of two hundred Farquharson bairns, made orphans by Gordon and Grant swords, scrambling in a half-naked herd to be fed like pigs from a trough at Huntly Castle, till the softer-hearted Grant chief adopted them into his own tartan. When the “Stewarts of Appin” went out in 1745, more than half the dead and wounded of their contingent appear bearing the names of miscellaneous Macs, who, had they not gathered to this standard, might have been swallowed up with others among the loyal Campbells.
Lochaber was the country of the Camerons, whose leader, the “gentle Lochiel” of 1745, appears one of the noblest Highland nobles, as to whom, when he died a colonel in the French service, a poet on the other side of politics declared that he “is now a Whig in heaven.” He exerted himself to put down creagh raids among his clansmen; but the old blood was stronger in another Cameron of the French army, who, after Culloden, under the name of “Sergeant Mòr” became renowned as a Rob Roy of Lochaber. Lochiel’s brother, Dr. Cameron, betrayed and hanged in 1753, made the last martyr of Jacobitism. Sir Alan, son of one of the Camerons of Culloden, lived to raise three battalions for King George, whose fame and name have been inherited by the Cameron regiment, now perhaps enlisting no more Camerons than find their way into the Cameronian corps of such different origin. The most celebrated Cameron was the Lochiel of Cromwell’s time, Sir Ewen the Black, who came to the chieftainship as a boy, and died under George I., a doughty champion of the Stuarts through his long life. Argyll, his guardian, had sent him to school to be brought up in sound Whig principles, but, like other boys one knows of, he “preferred the sport of the field to the labours of the school.” Among the exploits attributed to him is the killing of the last wolf in Britain, an honour also claimed for a later Nimrod farther north. In his teens he was already at the head of the clan, a thorn in the side of Campbells, Covenanters, and English Roundheads; and after being the last royalist to submit to General Monk, he lived to fight beside Dundee at Killiecrankie, then to send his clansmen out in 1715, when he himself, it is said, came to be rocked in a cradle of second childhood; but another account describes him at ninety as able to read the smallest print and keeping all the teeth with which he had torn out the windpipe of one of Cromwell’s officers, as they locked in a deadly struggle like FitzJames and Roderick Dhu.[2] In the interval he had waged many private wars, notably with his neighbours the Mackintoshes, which luckily ended in a treaty wiping out the feud of centuries. The last clan battle in the Highlands appears to be that between the Mackintoshes and the Macdonalds of Keppoch, fought in Glenroy, 1688.[3]
[2]Mr. Drummond-Norie, in his Loyal Lochaber, records the amusing legend “of an incident that occurred during Sir Ewen Cameron’s visit to London many years later. He had occasion to go into a barber’s shop to get his beard and hair dressed. The garrulous barber having fixed him in position, and probably guessing from his accent that he was not born south of the Tweed, remarked: ‘You are from the north, sir, I believe?’ —‘Yes,’ answered Lochiel, ‘I am; do you know people from the north?’ —‘No,’ shouted the angry barber, ‘nor do I wish to; they are savages there. Would you believe it, one of them tore the throat out of my father with his teeth; and I only wish I had the fellow’s throat as near me as I have yours just now!’”—The end of the tale is that Lochiel never again trusted himself in the hands of a barber.
[3]In Bonnie Scotland I rather loosely spoke of the Campbell invasion of Caithness as the last private war, meaning by this term to exclude a collision between adjacent clans.
The Mackintoshes were a branch—with the fear of Cluny Macpherson before us, we must not say the senior branch—of that Clan Chattan that fought on the Inch of Perth, from which also appear to have sprung the Camerons, the Shaws, the Macgillivrays, the Farquharsons, and several other names. Their opponents, the Clan Kay, seem more shadowy. Those Mackintoshes are said to have been once at home about Lochaber; but the later world they bustled in was farther north, where they had for neighbours the Red Comyns of Badenoch, as once the Black Comyns of the Great Glen. The Comyns were a clan of Norman origin, at one time masters in Lochaber, as again for a time were the Gordons, whose head, Lord Huntly, vied with Argyll in playing chief policeman for the Highlands. There is a grim story of the Mackintoshes and the Comyns: the one clan bidden by the other to a feast at which, these cat-and-dog convives sitting alternately, the appearance of a boar’s head was to be signal for the hosts to stab each man his guest; but the guests had the very same idea, and carried it out with more prompt dexterity. Chroniclers strangely differ as to which clan here played the active and which the passive part; and the same story, with the same doubt, is told of my Forbes forebears and their Gordon neighbours. It must be feared that such treachery made part of Highland social amenities in the good old days. A record more honourable to the Clan Chattan is of a battle that left in the hands of the Murrays—mere Lowlanders disguised in tartan—some two hundred Mackintosh prisoners, from not one of whom could torture or shameful death wring the secret of their chief’s hiding-place. Another Mackintosh chief was not so lucky, who stooped to put himself in the hands of the Marchioness of Huntly, and as humiliating condition of forgiveness for injuries, even laid his head upon the kitchen block, when this dissembling dame had it struck off by the cook’s hatchet—so much for trusting a Gordon! In the ’45 the clan did not stand shoulder to shoulder, its chief, an officer in King George’s militia, falling prisoner to his own wife, “Colonel Anne,” who had taken the field on Prince Charlie’s side. In later times, after the benignant fame of Sir James the Reformer, this name’s most shining exploit has been the invention of an armour against rain, the enemy most to be feared among those mountains, where the Mackintosh of our degenerate days perhaps does not disdain to cover his gay tartan with a waterproof.
