‘I did not receive your note dated wednesday till Thursday 12 o’clock.’[154]
Thus, all Pickle’s movements at this solemn hour of Old Glengarry’s decease tally with those of Young Glengarry. Pickle is adulated by the army people, and goes North to his estates near Fort Augustus, whence the Governor reports on—Glengarry.
Can Pickle, then, while Glengarry is in Scotland, after his father’s death, be posing in Edinburgh as himself a young, newly orphaned chief, going to his lands near Fort Augustus; personating Glengarry, in fact—for no other Chief had just lost his father?
Mr. Millar says: ‘Whoever Pickle was, it was clearly his intention to personate Glengarry.... It is hardly possible to imagine that an impostor could have deceived the Edinburgh folks, to whom Glengarry must have been well known,’ and whom, hurrying to his father’s funeral, and to arrange his affairs, he must just have visited, for Old Glengarry died in Edinburgh. I venture to call such an impersonation a physical impossibility, prolonged, as it was, for some six weeks. It is physically impossible that, both in London and Edinburgh, many men who knew Young Glengarry should have supposed another person—Pickle—to be that hero. Yet, if the personation was played off, it was not discovered, then or later; for Pickle continued to be the informer, and to be the shadow of Glengarry. As soon as it is admitted that Pickle is feigning to be Glengarry, the case for that Chief’s innocence is given up. The personation, among people who knew Glengarry intimately well, is impossible.
Pickle’s day of usefulness had gone by. On April 24, 1755, an official gave in a report of a conversation with the Chief, ‘the head of a great Clan of his name,’ who wanted money.[155] In April 1756 Pickle again came to London, and dunned the Duke of Newcastle: ‘not the smalest article has been perform’d, of what was expected and at first promised. I am certain my first friend’ (Pelham) ‘mentioned me to the King....’[156] In an undated letter he speaks of being on an ‘utstation’ in the Highlands, and talks of Glengarry in the third person.[157] He tells of Glengarry’s greatness, of Jacobite overtures to him, and repeats his usual fond demands.
In 1758, 1759, we know, from his own letters, that Glengarry was eager to go to London, to make terms about the fines on his estate. But Macleod would not back his bill for 400l. On February 19, 1760, Pickle wrote the last letter to Newcastle extant in the Pelham Papers. He speaks of Pickle in the third person, but he writes in Pickle’s hand. Pickle wants to give information; Pickle wishes to raise a regiment (and so did Glengarry), if he gets ‘the Rank of full Colonel, the nomenation of his Officers, and suitable levie money:’ also ‘a bill payable at sight’ for travelling expenses. He ends, ‘Mack mention of Pickle. His Majesty will remember Mr. Pelham did, upon former affairs of great consequence. Direction—To Alexander Mackdonell of Glengary, by Foraugustus.’[158]
A reply from Newcastle directed to Glengarry would be opened by Glengarry, and then, if Glengarry did not write Pickle’s epistle of February 19, 1760, where is Pickle? Mr. Millar suggests that, ‘if Pickle were a traitor in Glengarry’s family, he must have been in a position to intercept the reply to this letter, or the whole plot would have been exposed.’ This is a romantic hypothesis. There is no trace of any gentleman (such as Pickle was) eternally in attendance on Glengarry. And why did the hypothetical traitor offer to raise a regiment, which only Glengarry could do? There is no conceivable motive for writing such a letter on the part of any one but Glengarry, who was terribly pressed for money, and could raise a regiment. Besides, the physical impossibility of Pickle’s supposed personation has already been demonstrated. Glengarry, who had long been in very bad health, died on December 23, 1761. The nature of his will has been explained.
The internal evidence of identity in the authorship of Pickle’s and Glengarry’s letters remains to be considered. Both write the same shambling style. In an age of bad spelling both have a long list of blunders in common. I give a few:—
Of these, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 14 occur, sporadically, in other Scotch writers of the age, as in the Gask Correspondence. Pickle combines them all. But I have not elsewhere met 7, 8, 9, 10, 15. ‘How’ for ‘who’ (11) I have met in Macleod of Raasay’s letters in the ‘Lyon in Mourning,’ and in one letter of 1725, while ‘howse’ for ‘whose’ occurs in a Scotch epistle in the Cumberland MSS. The accumulation of these fifteen mis-spellings is the common note of the orthography of Pickle and of Glengarry. It constitutes a note of identity of authorship.