‘Paris, May 3rd, 1747.
‘... Did you not own publickly, that upon his R.H’s. Approach to Inverness, you advertised the Lord President and the Lord Loudoun of the same, and advised them for their further Safety to retire from thence?... Did you not, without asking their Advice or Approbation, Surrender yourself to the Enemy, and enter into certain Articles with them?...
‘Whether, after receiving a Protection from the Enemy, you did not engage and promise to apprehend the Person of H.R.H. and deliver him up to them within a limited time?...
‘Whether or not you did not impose on several Gentlemen of Glengary’s Family, by asserting that he had promised to deliver them up to the Enemy, and that he was to receive 30l. sterling Premium for Each Gentleman he should put into their Hands? Did these gentlemen sign an information against Glengary? And were his letters ordering them to take up arms delivered up to Lord Albemarle, upon which your Cousine, Glengary, was apprehended?’
And now the whole truth is out, as concerns Col, third of Barisdale. His cruelties, his thefts, his swaggerings, have ended in deliberate treachery, and this worthy chieftain is found endeavouring to do what the humblest peasant disdained even to contemplate, to deliver up the fugitive Prince.
Barisdale took no profit by his iniquity. The Ross people, whom he had harried, burned his famous stocks, and his house, with its ‘eighteen fire-rooms, and many others without fires, beautifully covered’ (roofed) ‘with blue slates.’
He himself died in 1750, in Edinburgh Castle; six soldiers, with no mourners, carried his bulky and corpulent carcase to a grave ‘at the foot of the talus of the Castle.’
So says the Impartial Hand. Of Barisdale’s classical lore, and of his courtesy to a fair captive, we have seen proof. For the rest, a more worthless miscreant has seldom stained the page of history. It was time that such a career as his should be made impossible.
Young Barisdale skulked for years in the Highlands, a kind of Hereward, pursued by the English troops. He was usually accompanied by five or six of his Clan, armed, and in the prohibited Highland dress. He supported life in his father’s fashion, mainly by robbing the herring fishers of a fifth of their takes, under some pretence of a legal claim. His tenants, spoiled by the English troops, probably could contribute little to his maintenance. He is often mentioned in the Cumberland Papers, and, after he had been the guest of young Glengarry’s uncle, Dr. Macdonnell, that physician talked indiscreetly as follows.
On Sept. 30, 1751, Captain Izard, of the Fusiliers, writes: ‘Dr. Macdonald, brother of Glengarry, living at Cailles on Loch Nevis, told that young Barisdale lay at his house the Monday before, and took boat thence to carry his sister home, and he proposed going to the Isle of Skey’ (Skye).[66]