Hae tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.’[51]
Barisdale knew what was right; his following knew only his will. He was the blackest of traitors; they were true as steel.
The specially robber tribes in 1715-45 were those of the dispossessed Macgregors, whose hand was, necessarily, against every man’s hand; of the Macdonnells in Knoydart; and of some of the Camerons in Lochaber and Rannoch. Old Lovat, too, discouraging schools, kept up sedulously the ancient clan ideas. No other sections of the Highlanders are accused, even by Whigs, of robbery. Mackays, Mackenzies, Grants, Mackintoshes, Macphersons, Macleans are not blamed, and such gentlemen of the Camerons and Macdonnells as Lochiel, Scothouse, and Keppoch are specially exculpated. Lochiel was a reformer within his clan. The gallant Keppoch had forsworn the predatory habits which, in 1689, made his people threaten Inverness. Of Scothouse we shall hear the most excellent report. Now, it cannot be by a mere fortuitous coincidence that all the Highland traitors, James Mohr, Old Lovat, Glengarry, Barisdale, and some others, come precisely from the homes of cattle thieves, and from a factitious hothouse of old clan ideas; from the Macgregor country, Knoydart, the worst part of Lochaber, and Rannoch. Yet, so strange was the condition of the North, that we find Barisdale, the meanest wretch of all, recognised as an acquaintance by so high a Lowland dame as the ‘Great Lady of the Cat,’ the Countess of Sutherland.
We now proceed to the story of the chief who loved a Virgilian quotation.
In the army of Charles Edward there was no man more detested and feared than Col Macdonell of Barisdale. According to a curious tract, ‘The Life of Archibald Macdonell of Barisdale, who is to Suffer for High Treason on the Twenty Second of May, at Edinburgh, By an Impartial Hand,’[52] Col of Barisdale was son (? grandson) of the second brother of Alastair Dubh Macdonnell of Glengarry, the hero of Sheriffmuir, being thus a cousin of Glengarry. He was a man of prodigious muscular force, six feet four inches in height. He is said to have caught and held a roedeer; and, on one occasion, to have heaved a recalcitrant cow, probably stolen property, into a boat. There lay, in the present century, on the gravel-drive before Invergarry House, a large boulder, and beside it a short pin of iron was fixed into the ground. Only a very powerful man could lift the boulder on to the pin, a few inches in height, but Barisdale could heave it up to his knees. So write, from tradition, the two ‘Stuarts d’Albanie,’ in ‘Tales of the Century’ (1847). They add that Barisdale’s courage did not match his strength, and that he yielded in single combat to Cluny.
Returning to our ‘Impartial Hand’ (by his minute local knowledge a native of Ross or Moray), we find him nowise partial to Barisdale. ‘Colonel Ban,’ as he calls him, married a Miss Mackenzie of Fairburn, and, having a small estate in Ross-shire, could raise two hundred of the clan. He thus, says Murray of Broughton, declared himself independent of Glengarry, his chief, an indolent drunkard. Being acquainted with the Mackenzie estates, he used his knowledge in the surreptitious acquisition of cattle. He would then throw the blame on the Camerons; and that, says our author, is precisely the cause of the bad name for cattle-stealing which the Camerons have unhappily acquired. One day Barisdale, with his Tail, met Cameron of Taask, with his Tail, and was charged by Cameron with his misdeeds. Words grew high, claymores were drawn, and a finger of Cameron’s left hand was nearly lopped off. The intrepid chieftain, acting on the Scotch proverb, ‘Better a finger off than aye wagging,’ tore the injured limb from his hand, bound the wound with a handkerchief, ‘and so fell to work on Barisdale,’ whom he sliced on the pate. ‘The skin and a lock of his hair hung down,’ and their devoted tenants, anxious observers of the fray, separated the infuriated chieftains. Barisdale was presently arrested on a charge of theft, but his Tail perjured themselves manfully, and he got off on an alibi.
The neighbours, finding the hero so stubborn, paid him ‘black meal’ (sic), in return for which he promised to protect their herds. But his genius pointed out to him a more excellent way, and Barisdale became the Jonathan Wild (as Waverley says) of Lochaber and Knoydart. He was a thief-catcher, and also an accomplice of thieves, as interest directed or passion prompted.[53] He kept his tenantry, or gang, in rare order, and ‘had machines for putting them to different sorts of punishment.’ One machine was merely the stocks, where, outside of the chieftain’s drawing-room windows (which commanded a fine view of the sea), many a poor thief sat for twenty-four hours, with food temptingly placed just out of his reach. Thus Barisdale struck terror, inspired respect, and accumulated wealth.
A more cruel engine than the stocks had Barisdale, a triumph of his own invention. In ‘The Lyon in Mourning,’ Mackinnon, who helped Prince Charles to escape from Skye, says that Captain Fergusson (noted for his ferocity) threatened him with torture. ‘The cat or Barisdale shall make you speak,’ said the Captain. The engine is described as one in which no man could live for an hour. The Impartial Hand’ gives this account of it: ‘The supposed criminal’ (that is, any man who would not give Barisdale a share of his booty) ‘was tied to an iron machine, where a ring grasped his feet, and another closed upon his neck, and his hands were received into eyes of iron contrived for that purpose. He had a great weight upon the back of his neck, to which, if he yielded in the least, by shrinking downwards, a sharp spike would infallibly run into his chin, which was kept bare for that very purpose.’ Barisdale was also apt to waylay herring-fishers, and make them pay, as toll, a fifth of what they had captured, alleging certain seignorial rights.
‘It is well known,’ says the author of 1754, ‘that, from the month of March to the middle of August, some poor upon the coast have nothing but shell-fish, such as mussels, cockles, and the like, to support them. Poverty reigns so much among the lower class that scarce a smile is to be seen upon their faces.’ Barisdale also reigned upon the coast.