The naked and forlorn must feel
Devouring flames and murd’ring steel.”
Johnson does indeed speak of “the heavy hand of a vindictive conqueror.”[564] It was about this time, or only a little later, that Scott was learning “to detest the name of Cumberland with more than infant hatred.”[565] That an Englishman could travel in safety, unarmed and unguarded, through a country which only seven and twenty years before had been so mercilessly treated seems not a little surprising. For the next day or two he was to follow a course where fire and sword had swept along. Wolfe, whose “great name,” we boast, was “compatriot with our own,” who had so little of the savage spirit of war that he would rather have written Gray’s Elegy than take Quebec, even he exulted that “as few prisoners were taken of the Highlanders as possible. We had an opportunity of avenging ourselves. The rebels left near 1,500 dead.” Yet he did not think that enough had been done. The carnage-pile was not lofty enough. Surveying the battle-field five years later, he writes in a letter to his father, a general in the army, “I find room for a military criticism. You would not have left those ruffians the only possible means of conquest, nor suffered multitudes to go off unhurt with the power to destroy.”[566] Ruffians indeed they had shown themselves in their raid into England, but enough surely had been done in the way of slaughter to satisfy the most exacting military critic. How merciless our soldiers had been is proved by the letters that were written from the camp. A despatch sent off from Inverness on April 25, nine days after the battle, says that “the misery and distress of the fugitive rebels was inexpressible, hundreds being found dead of their wounds and through hunger at the distance of twelve, fourteen, and even twenty miles from the field.”[567] On June 5 an officer wrote from Fort Augustus: “His Royal Highness has carried fire and sword through their country, and driven off their cattle, which we bring to our camp in great quantities, sometimes 2,000 in a drove. The people are deservedly in a most deplorable way, and must perish either by sword or famine, a just reward for traitors.”[568]
THE FIDDLER’S WALK IN THE DRAWING ROOM, CAWDOR CASTLE.
THE HIGHLANDS LAID WASTE.
On July 26 another officer wrote from the same fort to a friend at Newcastle: “We hang or shoot everyone that is known to conceal the Pretender, burn their houses and take their cattle, of which we have got some 8,000 head within these few days past, so that if some of your Northumberland graziers were here they might make their fortunes.”[569] The author of a Plain Narrative of the Rebellion, tells with exultation how “they marched to Loch Yell, the stately seat of old Esquire Cameron,” the Lochiel of Campbell’s spirited lines. “His fine chairs, tables, and all his cabinet goods were set on fire and burnt with his house. His fine fruit garden, above a mile long, was pulled to pieces and laid waste. A beautiful summer-house that stood in the pleasure garden was also set on fire. From hence the party marched along the sea-coast through Moidart, burning of houses, driving away the cattle, and shooting those vagrants who were found about the mountains. For fifty miles round there was no man or beast to be seen.”[570] Andrew Henderson, in his History of the Rebellion, after admitting that in the rout several of the wounded were stabbed, and some who were lurking in houses were taken out and shot, urges by way of excuse that “the rebels had enraged the troops; their habit was strange, their language still stranger, and their way of fighting was shocking to the utmost degree.”[571] Besides the massacre after the battle and the executions by courts-martial, there were the hangings, drawings and quarterings, and beheadings by judge and jury. Seventy-six had been sent to the scaffold by September, 1747,[572] and above one thousand were transported.[573] Even George II. “said that he believed William had been rough with them.”[574] When it was proposed to confer on the duke the freedom of the City of London, an alderman was heard to say that it ought to be the freedom of the Butchers’ Company. So late as the summer of 1753 seven rebels were seized in a hut on the side of Loch Hourn, at no great distance from the way along which Johnson was to pass only twenty years later.[575] Nevertheless he everywhere travelled in safety. Among the chieftains, no doubt, “his tenderness for the unfortunate House of Stuart” was known, but to the common people he would only be an Englishman—a man of the race that had slaughtered their fathers and wasted their country. That both he and Boswell were not free from uneasiness they avowed when at Auchnasheal they were surrounded by the wild McCraas. In the memory of men not much past the middle age, tales of the cruel duke used to be told in the winter evenings in the glens of these Western Highlands. They have at last died away, and “infant hatred” is no longer nourished.[576]
INVERNESS.