Dundee allowed the whole of Mackay’s army to emerge from the pass, and even to form in order of battle, before he began the attack. It was an hour before sunset that the highlanders advanced. They fired their muskets only once, and throwing them away, with fierce shouts they rushed down with broadsword and target. Mackay’s line was broken by the onset. When it came to disordered ranks, and the clash of hand to hand combats, the superior discipline of the royal troops was of no account. Agility, hardihood, and the confidence of assured victory were on the side of the clansmen. It was soon a rout; but with such a narrow gorge for retreat it became a massacre. Two thousand of Mackay’s troops were slain. The highlanders’ loss was eight hundred; but amongst these was their gallant leader. Near the end of the battle, Dundee, on horseback, was extending his right arm to the clan Macdonald, as directing their movements, when he was struck by a bullet under the arm-pit, where he was unprotected by his cuirass. With him perished the cause of King James in Scotland. After his death his army melted away, and both highlands and lowlands submitted to the Government of William.
General lenity and toleration were the watchwords of William’s policy. The episcopal church was to be maintained in England, and the presbyterian in Scotland; but neither were to ride rough-shod over dissenters. In Scotland, much against the desires of the more rigid, as the Cameronians, there were to be no reprisals for former persecution and oppression. Even obnoxious officials were maintained in their old places. When the Jacobite rising in Ireland was quelled by the surrender of Limerick, a treaty was there made by which Catholics were to be allowed the free exercise of their religion. William endeavoured to get parliament to ratify this treaty, but two months after it had been entered into, the English Parliament imposed a declaration against Transubstantiation on members of the Irish parliament, and this parliament, entirely composed of Protestants, whilst giving nominal confirmation, really put the Catholics in a worse condition than they were before. The Irish Catholics have since then called Limerick, “the town of the broken treaty.”
The Massacre of Glencoe.
To counteract the spirit of disloyalty which was still lurking amongst the Highland clans, the Earl of Breadalbane, cousin to the Duke of Argyle, was entrusted with £16,000, to be distributed among the various chieftains, conditionally on their making submission to William and Mary. The Earl did not make an impartial distribution of the money; the leading chiefs were bought off, the lesser were intimidated by threats. A branch of the clan MacDonald were settled in a wild valley, Glencoe, in north Argyleshire; a small river, the Coe (the Cona of Ossian—a name which sounds musically sweet—calling up thoughts of serenity and peace,) runs through the valley towards Lochleven—the arm of the sea which separates Argyleshire from Inverness-shire. The valley spreads flatwise to the bases of the surrounding hills, which seem to stand as fortressed walls to guard it from all danger. But in this secluded spot—shut off as it seemed from the outer world—was enacted the basest of all the acts of treachery and barbarity which disgrace this seventeenth century.
MacIan, the chief of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, was an old man, stately, venerable, sagacious. He now charged Breadalbane with having defrauded him of his share of the government money; the earl retorted that MacIan and his tribe had been persistent marauders over his Campbell clansmen’s lands round Glencoe, which was probably true enough, as there had been a feud of long standing between the clans. A proclamation had been issued that—under severe penalties for non-compliance—submission had to be made before the 1st of January, 1692; MacIan, out of a spirit of contrariness, put off taking the oath, and the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Master of Stair, a friend of Breadalbane’s, reported officially to the government that the MacDonalds were not making submission, and that they were an incorrigibly lawless tribe of thieves and murderers.
On the 31st of December, MacIan and several of his leading clansmen went to Fort-William, and proffered to take the oath of allegiance before Colonel Hill, the commanding officer. Not being a civil official, the Colonel was not empowered to administer the oath, but, moved by the distress of the old man, who saw the danger to which his obstinacy had exposed his people, he gave him a letter to Sir Colin Campbell, the Sheriff of Argyleshire, requesting him to receive, although after the official date, the submission of the chief. With this letter MacIan hastened on, through snowstorms, by swollen streams, and rugged mountain paths, to Inverary. The road passed near his own home, but he was now in such haste that he went right on; but it was the 6th of January, before he had accomplished the weary fifty miles, and presented himself before the sheriff. The sheriff, considering all the circumstances, administered the oath; he gave MacIan a certificate, and wrote to the Privy Council, detailing the facts, and giving explanatory reasons for his own conduct in the matter.
But the secretary had hoped to have had MacIan in his power, and was chagrined by the submission; so the sheriff’s letter was suppressed, and the submission deleted from the records of the council. On the 16th of January, the secretary obtained the king’s signature to the following order, addressed to the commander of the forces in Scotland:—“As for MacIan of Glencoe, and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the rest of the Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves.” Burnet says that William did not read the order, but signed it, thinking it was only a detail in ordinary business. Another explanation is, that the fact of MacIan’s submission being treacherously withheld from William, he thought that the extirpation meant by the order was, that as a “set of thieves” they were to be broken up, and brought under ordinary law. William could not have meant to order or to sanction the horrible event which followed; but still the name of Glencoe ever sounds as a blast of judgment against the fair fame of the Deliverer.
And now, as under the royal order, the secretary gave explicit instructions for the indiscriminate butchery of the whole “damnable race.” The passes were to be guarded to prevent any escape. “In the winter,” he wrote, “they cannot carry their wives, children, and cattle to the mountains. This is the proper season to maul them, in the long dark nights.” A detachment of troops, belonging Argyle’s regiment, under Campbell of Glenlyon, were sent into the glen. They were hospitably received, and were quartered amongst the inhabitants. A niece of Glenlyon’s was married to a son of MacIan’s, and for twelve days there was hunting by day, and feasting, card-playing, and healths-drinking in the long evenings. Glenlyon and a party accepted an invitation to dine with MacIan on the 13th of February, but, as had been previously arranged, at four o’clock of the morning of that day, the work of blood began. The old chief was shot in his bed; his wife was stripped naked, and died next day from terror and exposure. The two sons of MacIan were aroused by the musket shots, the shouts of the murderers, and the screams of the victims; they, with many others, men, women, and children, fled, half-naked, in darkness, snow, and storm, into the less savage wilderness. The falling snow proved fatal to several of the fugitives, but it was the salvation of the others, for it prevented the troops, who were to have guarded the passes, from arriving at the time appointed, to intercept and slay all who had escaped from death in the glen. It was mid-day when these troops, by the several passes entered the glen, and they found no MacDonald alive but an old man of eighty, and him they slew. Every hut was burned, the cattle and horses of the tribe were collected, and driven to the garrison of Fort-William.
Thirty-eight victims: Was Secretary Stair satisfied? Not he; he was mortified that his plans for total destruction had failed. “I regret,” he wrote, “that any got away.” It is said that two men—one engaged in the contrivance of the massacre, and the other in its execution—Breadalbane and Glenlyon—did feel the stings of conscience, the heart-gnawings of remorse, and were never the same men afterwards.