In November 1752, April 1753, we have the affair of the Elibank Plot. On one side is Pickle, who is to lead Highlanders in London; Pickle, without whom his clan, and the North, can do nothing; Pickle, a friend of Prince Charles, and a correspondent of the exiled King in Rome; Pickle, who is ‘very weake’ after a serious illness in Paris (February-March, 1753); Pickle, the constant associate of the Earl Marischal; and on the other side is Glengarry, who claims every one of these notes for himself. Both Pickle and Glengarry are friends of Baron Kennedy’s. Glengarry is known to Government to be a trafficker with France, and with the dreaded envoy of Prussia, the Earl Marischal, but Government consults Pickle in place of arresting Glengarry. Pickle has had great promises made to him by his employer, Henry Pelham, so has Glengarry. Both complain of the breach of these promises after Pelham’s death. Pickle comes and goes to Prince Charles in France in August 1753. Glengarry is accused, to Government, of visiting France at the same time as a Jacobite agent. Jacobites are being arrested all over the country, but not a finger is laid on Glengarry.
Pickle and Glengarry both leave London for Edinburgh on the news of Old Glengarry’s death, both are then bereaved young chiefs going to their northern estates near Fort Augustus. In this capacity Pickle, for some six weeks, is the centre of military attention in Edinburgh. Pickle wishes Bruce to assist him in drawing up a judicial rent-roll. Bruce surveys the lands of Glengarry. Pickle now, like Glengarry, remains in the North, where both are magnates, but both are poor. Pickle offers to raise a Highland regiment, and asks the Duke of Newcastle to direct his answer to Glengarry. The spelling of Pickle and Glengarry is identical in a score of peculiarities, and Pickle’s handwriting is that of Glengarry in a simple disguise.
What makes Pickle’s design to raise a regiment especially interesting is the fact, now to be proved, that Glengarry entertained the same wish at the same moment. He wrote to the Duke of Atholl to that effect, on April 5, 1760, and his letters are printed in the Duke of Atholl’s ‘Chronicles of the Atholl and Tullibardine Families’ (iii. 476-477). Thus Pickle and Glengarry were inseparable to the last.
Whoever is unconvinced by this array of circumstantial evidence against Glengarry must, at least, suggest an alternative hypothesis which will colligate the facts. The hypothesis of a personation of Glengarry by Pickle has been proved absurd and impossible. Recent research, after the publication of ‘Pickle the Spy,’ has added to the original evidence proof of Glengarry’s insincerity as a Jacobite; the Glenevis affair; the promises made to Glengarry, as to Pickle, by Henry Pelham; the identification of ‘Cromwell’ (Bruce); the relations of Glengarry with Pickle’s friend, Baron Kennedy; a few new similarities of Pickle-Glengarry spelling; the identity of their handwriting; and their simultaneous desire to raise a regiment. All these facts confirm the previous conclusion. A false hypothesis is not apt to be strongly confirmed by facts unknown when it was framed, nor would a jury regard the charge against Glengarry as ‘without any proof in the world.’ To say so, as has been audaciously done, is to illustrate prejudice, not to enlighten criticism. In truth, the game was up as soon as the person calling himself Pickle offered to raise a clan regiment, and asked the Duke of Newcastle to reply to Glengarry. More than one interpretation of that fact there could not logically be. But what is logic? A Lowland pedantry!
XII
OLD TIMES AND NEW
Some years ago, when fishing in Loch Awe, I found a boatman, out of Badenoch, who was a charming companion. It may be the experience of others also that an English keeper usually confines his conversation, at least with strangers, to the business in hand, whereas a Scottish or Highland attendant will talk about Darwinism, Mr. Herbert Spencer, history, legend, psychical research, religion, everything. The boatman had a store of legends, and one day we fell to conversing on the old times, in the Highlands, and the new. He voted for the old. Among the advantages, he mentioned the game; and then, with sparkling eyes, the plunder! Property, of old, had been les vaches d’autrui, the cattle of Lowlanders and of other clans.
Often, since that day, one has reflected on the old times and the new. The old were not wholly what is supposed. Thus Mr. Mackenzie, in his ‘History of the Camerons,’ contrasts the manly sport of the past with the modern driving up of deer to be shot down by ‘drawing-room’ gunners. Stalking is more common now, but the drawing-room way was the old way! ‘The tenants drive everything before them, while the laird and his friends are waiting with their guns to shoot the deer.’ So writes Burt, between 1726 and 1740. ‘When the chief would have a deer only for his household,’ he does not stalk it himself; ‘the gamekeeper and one or two others are sent into the hills, ... where they often lie night after night to wait an opportunity of providing venison for the family.’[159]
I have seen in the Highlands heart-breaking destitution. I have seen an old shivering woman gathering nettles for food near Tobermory. On one side of a river I have seen scantily clad girls hanging about listless, in the rain, beside hovels more like the nests of birds than human habitations. On the other side of the water were comfortable cottages and thriving crops. The former was the Protestant, the latter the Catholic side of the stream, which the Reformation did not cross. In the bleak cold of June, on Haladale, I have said, ‘Who would stay here that could go away?’ The gillie observed that he had been in America, running the blockade, but he vastly preferred Haladale. He numbered his horses and kine; he was a man of substance. But, poverty for poverty, give me nettles and shell-fish in the North, before fried fish (and too little of that) in the New Cut.
Moved by the extreme wretchedness in which some Highland cotters seem to live, by the cry of ‘congested districts,’ by the laments of the evicted, and by the belief in ‘good old times’ behind the Forty-five, a Lowland observer naturally asks himself if the old times were really so good? In one respect, and that essential, they bear the palm: the people, as a rule, loved and revered their Chiefs, and the Chiefs adopted at least the airs of popularity among the people. Even Young Glengarry, not a model Chief, resented the oppression of tenants falsely accused, as he maintained, of being deserters.[160] Moreover, the poor did not live, generally speaking, in view of the luxurious rich. Clanranald and Glengarry had castles which must have been built at the expense of the undefined ‘services’ of their people long ago; but the warrior Glengarry of Killiecrankie discouraged refinement and delicacy of living. The smaller lairds lived plainly, even poorly. Occasional feasts were given to the Clan. Every man ‘was treated as a blood relation.’ Consequently, if destitution existed, it did not provoke social hatred and discontent. This, at least, is quite certain.