In after years they thought less hardly of the cause of the Stuarts; and I have heard some of their old men relate stories of the poor people who suffered at this time, with a good deal of feeling. There was a Highlander named Robertson, a man of rare wit and humour, who had been crippled of an arm at Culloden. He used, in after years, to come to the place as a sort of travelling merchant, and always met with much kindness from them. So much attached was he to the Prince that he would willingly have lost the other arm for him too. Another Highlander, who had also been wounded on the moor, was a great favourite with them likewise. On seeing the battle irretrievably lost, and further resistance unavailing, he was stealing warily out of the field, when two English dragoons came galloping up to him to cut him down. He turned round, drew a pistol from his belt, shot the foremost through the body, and then hurled his weapon at the head of the other, who immediately drew rein and rode off. The sword of the dying man wounded him in its descent in the fleshy part of the hand, between the thumb and the forefinger; and he retained the scar while he lived. There was another Highlander who resided near Kessock, who had vowed, immediately after the battle of Preston, that he would neither cut nor comb the hair of his head until Charles Stuart was placed on the throne of his ancestors. And he religiously observed his vow. My grandfather saw him twenty years after the battle. He was then a strange, grotesque-looking thing, not very unlike a huge cabbage set a-walking; for his hair stuck out nearly a foot on each side of his head, and was matted into a kind of felt. But truce with such stories! Fifty years ago they formed an endless series; but they have now nearly all passed away, or only live, if I may so express myself, in those echoes of the departed generations which still faintly reverberate among the quieter recesses of the present. Of all the people who witnessed the smoke of Culloden from the hill of Cromarty I remember only three.
About eighteen years ago, when quite a boy, I was brought by a relation to see a very old man then on his deathbed, who resided in a small cottage among the woods of the hill. My kinsman for the twenty preceding years had lived with him on terms of the closest intimacy, and had been with him, about ten months before, when he met with an accident from a falling tree, by which he received so serious an injury that it proved the occasion of this his final illness. A thick darkness, however, had settled over all the events of his latter life, and he remembered neither his acquaintance of twenty years nor the accident. His daughter named the father of my friend, in the hope of awakening some early train of thought that might lead him into the more recent period; but his knowledge of even the father had commenced during the forty previous years, and his name sounded as strangely to him as that of his son. “He is a great-grandchild,” said the woman, “of your old friend Donald Roy, the Nigg elder.” “Of Donald Roy!—a great-grandchild of Donald Roy!” he exclaimed, holding out his hard withered hand; “oh, how glad I am to see him! How kind it is of him,” he added, “thus to visit a poor bedridden old man! I have now lived in the world for more than a hundred years, and during my long sojourn have known few men I could compare with Donald Roy.”
The old man raised himself in his bed, for his strength had not yet quite failed him, and began to relate to my friend, in a full unbroken voice, some of the stories regarding the Nigg elder, which I have imparted to the reader in a former chapter. His mind was full of the early past, and he seemed to see its events all the more clearly from the darkness of the intervening period—just as the stars may be discerned at noonday at the bottom of a deep mine, impenetrably gloomy in all its nearer recesses, when they are invisible from the summit of a hill. He ran over the incidents of his early life. He told how, in his thirtieth year, when the country resounded with the clash of arms, he had quitted his peaceful avocations as a gardener, and joined the army of the king. He fought at Culloden, and saw the clans broken before the bayonets of Cumberland. His heart bled, he said, for his countrymen. They lay bleeding on the moor, or were scattered over it; and he saw the long swords of the horsemen plied incessantly in the pursuit. Still more melancholy were his feelings, when, from a hill of Inverness-shire, he looked down on a wide extent of country, and saw the smoke of a hundred burning cottages ascending in the calm morning air.—He died a few weeks after our visit, aged a hundred years and ten months. His death took place in winter;—it was an open, boisterous winter, that bore heavy on the weak and aged; and in less than a month after, two very old men besides were also gathered to their fathers. And they, too, had had a share in the Forty-five.
The younger was a ship-boy at the time, and the ship in which he sailed was captured with a lading of Government stores, by a party of the rebels. He was named Robertson, and there were several of the Robertsons of Struan among the party. He was soon on excellent terms with them; and on one occasion, when rallying some of the Struans on their undertaking, he spoke of their leader as the Pretender. “Beware, my boy,” said an elderly Highlander, “and do not again repeat that word; there are men in the ship who, if they but heard you, would perhaps take your life for it; for remember we are not all Robertsons.” The other old man who died at this time, had been an officer, it was said, in the Prince’s army; but he was a person of a distant, reserved cast of character; and there was little known of his history, except that he had been bred to the profession of medicine, and had been unfortunate through his adherence to the Prince. It was remarked by the town’s-people that his spirit and manners were superior to his condition.
Among the old papers in Sandison’s scrutoire, I found a curious version of the 137th Psalm, the production of some unfortunate Jacobite of this period. It seems to have been written at Paris shortly after the failure of the enterprise, and when the Prince and his party were in no favour at court; for the author, a man apparently of keen feelings, applies, with all the sorrowful energy of a wounded spirit, the curses denounced against Edom and Babylon to England and France.
JACOBITE PSALM.
PSALM CXXXVII.
By the sad Seine we sat and wept
When Scotland we thought on;
Reft of her brave and true, and all