‘Dear Macleod,—I thought to have had the pleasure some months ago of drinking a glass with you at White House. But a Severe fitt of sickness of which I am now getting the better prevented me. I have settled my affairs in the country as well as my present situation and the circumstances of my tenants could admitt, but as their whole [property] was once destroyed, and that they have not recovered yet quite in their stock I was oblidged to give them a longer delay than I expected.’
He therefore asks Macleod to ‘go conjunct with me in security for borrowing 400l.’—an invitation which Macleod declined. If Macleod will not help him, ‘I cannot be active in making aplication to be discharged of the claims the Government has against my estate, which I was once made sure of, but that vanished with those then at the helme.’
Such a promise, broken on the change of the hand at the helm, is several times referred to—by Pickle. He writes to the Duke of Newcastle, ‘he bitterly complains that nothing has been done for him, of what was promis’d him in the strongest terms, and which he believes had been strickly performed had your most worthy Brother (Henry Pelham) his great friend and Patron, survived till now.’[116]
Among the many odd coincidences between Pickle and Glengarry, this is not the least curious. Both the spy and the chief entertained great expectations from Government, and both confess that these hopes ‘vanished with those then at the helme,’ obviously, that is, with Henry Pelham’s death.
Glengarry goes on, in his letter to Macleod, ‘but to be explicit on this’ (namely, on his ‘being made sure’ of the abandonment of Government’s claims on his estate) ‘and the confusion my father and the late unluckie troubles left this estate would draw to tow great lenth, I will therefore reffer it till meeting.’ He ends with compliments ‘to Lady Macleod, and the two lovely little Misses.’
It would have been pleasant to hear Glengarry when, over a bottle, he was ‘explicit’ on the reasons for which Henry Pelham promised to abate the demands on his estate. Government knew that Glengarry was in the affair of Loch Arkaig. They arrested his accomplices in 1751, but left him free. Government knew, by their spies, that Glengarry frequented the Earl Marischal in Paris in 1752, and that, in 1753, he was perpetually running over, as a Jacobite agent, to Paris. But they then arrested Glenevis and Fassifern, while they promised to abate their claims on Glengarry’s estate! To explain all this to Macleod ‘over a magnum,’ as Glengarry elsewhere convivially remarks, could not be an easy task. His letter, in the draft, is undated, but on the same page is a letter to his solicitor, Mr. Orme, W.S., dated ‘Greenfield, 21 June, 1758.’ In this letter he speaks of that just cited as having been sent ‘by this very post.’ Macleod was in Edinburgh, but left before Glengarry’s appeal could reach him. Now, without the 400l. the Chief could not go to town. He therefore wrote again to Macleod, repeating his supplication, and being ‘explicit’ indeed as to his former patron in the Government, though not as to the reasons for his patronage.
‘An absolute discharge of the heavie claim the Government has against me I was once promised, but those that was then at the helme are no more.’
The only person of those ‘then at the helme’ who was now, in 1758, ‘no more’ was precisely Henry Pelham. He died in March 1754. Pickle was his ‘man.’ Pickle had received promises from him which were never fulfilled. So, oddly enough, had Glengarry! We know what Pickle’s services to Henry Pelham had been; we can guess at those of Glengarry. But after Henry Pelham’s death—in fact, at the very time of his death—Prince Charles’s party broke up for ever in England, and the Earl Marischal quarrelled irreconcilably with the Prince. The services of Pickle were therefore no longer needed. Pelham’s engagements with him were not kept, and the promise to Glengarry, by a coincidence, was also broken by the faithless English Government.
People who maintain that Glengarry was not Pickle may be asked to produce a theory which will account for the singular series of coincidences in the fortunes of the Chief and the spy. Even in this new coincidence alone, it will be interesting to see how they explain the circumstance that Glengarry, like Pickle, found his expectations blasted, and the promises made to him unfulfilled, in consequence of the death of Pickle’s employer, the brother of the Duke of Newcastle. What possible claim could a professed Jacobite agent, known for such to Government, as young Glengarry was, have on the good offices of the First Lord of the Treasury? It has been fondly suggested that Pickle was an unknown miscreant, personating Glengarry. That will be shown to be physically impossible; but, granting the hypothesis, why was Glengarry, no less than Pickle, favoured by Henry Pelham? No other person can be meant by the phrase ‘those at the helme,’ now ‘no more.’ Newcastle, indeed, was out of office in 1756, if ‘no more’ is explained as ‘out of office.’ But when Glengarry wrote to Macleod in 1758 Newcastle was again at the Treasury.