Macleod would not back Glengarry’s bill for 400l. His agents advised him against this measure. In February 1760 Pickle, who was anxious to go to London, asked the Duke of Newcastle to send him a bill, payable at sight, ‘for whatever little sum is judged proper for the present.’ The Duke’s answer, with the bill payable at sight for the little sum to defray Pickle’s travelling expenses, is to be directed by his Grace
‘To Alexander Mackdonell of Glengary by Foraugustus.’
Apparently, then, Pickle had some means of getting at Glengarry’s correspondence. The two gentlemen spell ‘Fort Augustus’ in the same singular way. On September 11, 1758, Glengarry wrote to Mr. Orme’s subordinate:—
‘Will you dow me the favour to order me the “Calledonian Mercury” regullarly every post to the care of Mr. William Fraser, merchant at forAugustus?’
The almost unvarying uniformity in bad spelling which marks Pickle and Glengarry will be commented on later.
The last years of Glengarry were disturbed by the legal results of an early piece of domestic slyness. His father, old Glengarry, commonly described as a weak, indolent man, married, first, a lady named Mackenzie, of the Hilton family. As his eldest son was not of age in January 1745 the marriage may have been in 1723 or 1724. After bearing a second son, Æneas, and apparently a daughter, Isobel, Lady Glengarry died (1727). In a deed of 1728 we find Old Glengarry already remarried to a daughter of Gordon of Glenbucket, who in 1724 was nearly murdered by evicted Macphersons. The stepmother of Young Glengarry was a managing woman, and ‘factrix’ of her husband’s estates. Now, in 1738 Old Glengarry pawned or ‘wadsetted’ his lands of Cullachy to his kinsman Lochgarry. The wadsetter paid 2,000 merks in money and gave bills for the rest. But in January 1745, when Alastair was in Scotland on furlough from his French regiment, Old Glengarry formally ‘disponed’ his estates to his eldest son. Doubtless this was done with an eye to the chances of a rising; in any case, the transaction was kept a secret from Glengarry’s wife and factrix.
Hence arose trouble, for the pawned estate of Cullachy had been redeemed. Lochgarry had been paid his 2,000 merks, or they were set off against another debt, but his bills were not returned to him. They lay in Lady Glengarry’s custody, and she could not be asked for them without revealing the secret transference of the whole property to Young Glengarry in 1745. He therefore gave Lochgarry a written promise that the bills should never be used against him. But Lochgarry being attainted, after 1745, and exiled, his possessions were forfeited to the Crown. Government therefore demanded, in 1758, that Glengarry should redeem from them Lochgarry’s wadset of Cullachy. He pleaded that it was already redeemed before 1745, but of this he could bring no evidence. He writes to his Agent on August 2, 1758, that he is not certain of the year of the wadset (really 1738), as he was not then in the kingdom; he was in France. ‘Lochgarry being more in debt to the familly than the [amount of the] mortgage, he delivered up his contract of wadsett, which I thought was all the seremony necessary; and the signature being tore from it was laid, according to custom, among the family papers, which were carried off, and are now in Sir Everard Falconer’s custody.’ He knows little of estate affairs, ‘as I was always abroad.’ His rental of 1744 was burned with the house of his factor, Donald McDonell, Younger of Scotus.
After the Rebellion, he did not meddle in matters of the property, till his father’s death (1754). ‘The tenants could hardly pay what would subsist him.’
‘Every tenant took possession of what farme he pleased.’ In 1746 ‘Mrs. Mc.Donell of Lochgary being destitute of all suport, having a numerous family of young children, came from Badenoch, took possession of Cullachy, and there lived untill she followed her Husband abroad.’