Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

—Muckle-Vennel Translation.

WARS OF THE TOWN’S-PEOPLE.

It is well for human happiness in the ruder ages, that cowardice is rarely or never the characteristic of a people who have either no laws, or laws that cannot protect them; for, in the more unsettled stages of society, personal courage is a necessary policy, and no one is less safe than he who attempts to escape danger by running away. During the early part of the last century, Cromarty was well-nigh as rude a village of the kingdom as any it contained. The statute-book had found its way into the place at a much remoter period, but its authority had not yet travelled so far; and so the inhabitants were left to protect themselves by their personal courage and address, in the way their ancestors had done for centuries before. It was partly a consequence of the necessity, and partly from the circumstance that two or three families of the place were deeply imbued for several generations with a warlike spirit, which seemed born with them, that for years, both before and after the Rebellion, the prowess of the people, as exhibited in their quarrels with folk of the neighbouring districts, was celebrated all over the country. True it was, they had quailed before the rebels, but then the best soldiers of the crown had done the same. On one occasion two of them, brothers of the name of Duff—gigantic fellows of six feet and a half—had stood back to back for an entire hour in the throng of a Redcastle market, defending themselves against half the cudgels of Strathglass. On another, at the funeral of a town’s-man, who was interred in the burial-ground of Kilmuir, a party of them had fought with the people of the parish, and defeated them in their own territories. On a third, after a battle which lasted for several hours, they had beaten off the men of Rosemarkie and Avoch from a peat-moss in an unappropriated moor; and this latter victory they celebrated in a song, in which it was humorously proposed that, as their antagonists had been overpowered by the men of the parish, they should, in their next encounter, try their chance of war with the women. In short, their frays at weddings, funerals, and markets, were multiplied beyond number, until at length the cry of “Hiloa! Help for Cromarty!” had become as formidable as the war-cry of any of the neighbouring clans.

But there are principles which are good or evil according to the direction in which they operate; and of this class is that warlike principle whose operations I am attempting to describe. It was well for the people of Cromarty that, when there was no law powerful enough to protect them, they had courage enough to protect themselves; and particularly well at a period when the neighbouring Highlanders were still united by the ties of clanship into formidable bodies, ready to assert to a man the real or pretended rights of any individual of their number. It was not well, however, that these men of Cromarty should have broken the heads of half the men of Kilmuir, for merely insisting on a prescriptive right of carrying the corpse of a native to the churchyard when it had entered the limits of their own parish, and such was the sole occasion of the quarrel; or that, after appropriating to themselves, much at the expense of justice, the moss of the Maolbuoy Common, they should have deemed it legitimate sport to insult, in bad rhyme, the poor people whom they had deprived of their winter’s fuel, and who were starving for want of it. Occasionally, however, they avenged on themselves the wrongs done to their neighbours; for, though no tribe of men could be more firmly united at a market or tryst, where an injury done to any one of them was regarded as an injury done to every one, they were not quite so friendly when in town, where their interests were separate, and not unfrequently at variance. Their necessities abroad had taught them how to fight, and their resentments at home often engaged them in repeating the lesson. Their very enjoyments had caught hold of it, and Martinmas and the New-Year were not more the festivals of good ale than of broken heads. The lesson, sufficiently vexatious at any time, except when conned in its proper school, became peculiarly a misfortune to them upon the change which began to take place in the northern counties about the year 1740, when the law of Edinburgh—as it was termed by a Strathcarron freebooter—arrived at the ancient burgh of Tain, and took up its seat there, much to the terror and annoyance of the neighbouring districts.

MACCULLOCH THE LAWYER.

Subsequent to this unfortunate event, a lawyer named Macculloch fixed his place of residence among the people of Cromarty, that he might live by their quarrels; and, under the eye of this sagacious personage, the stroke of a cudgel became as potent as that of the wand of a magician. Houses, and gardens, and corn-furrows vanished before it. Law was not yet sold at a determined price. It was administered by men who, having spent the early part of their lives amid feuds and bickerings, were still more characterized by the leanings of the partisan than the impartiality of the judge; and, under these men, the very statute-book itself became a thing of predilections and antipathies; for while in some instances justice, and a great deal more, cost almost nothing, in others it was altogether beyond price. Macculloch, however, who dealt it out by retail, rendered it sufficiently expensive, even when at the cheapest. Fines and imprisonments, and accounts which his poor clients could not read, but which they were compelled to pay, were only the minor consequences of his skill; for on one occasion he contrived that almost half the folk of the town should be cited, either as pannels or witnesses, to the circuit court of Inverness; where, through the wrongheadedness of a jury, and the obstinacy of a judge, a good town’s-man and powerful combatant, who would willingly harm no one, but fight with anybody, ran a very considerable risk of being sent to the plantations. The people were distressed beyond measure, and their old antagonists of Kilmuir and Rosemarkie fully avenged.

In course of time, however, they became better acquainted with law; and their knowledge of the lawyer (which, like every other species of knowledge, was progressive), while it procured him in its first stages much employment, prevented him latterly from being employed at all. He was one of the most active of village attorneys. No one was better acquainted with the whole art of recovering a debt, or of entering on the possession of a legacy—of reclaiming property, or of conveying it; but it was ultimately discovered that his own particular interests could not always be identified with those of the people who employed him; and that the same lawsuit might be gained by him and lost by his client. It was one thing, too, for Macculloch to recover a debt, and quite another for the person to whom it had been due. In cases of the latter description he was an adept in the art of promising. Day after day would he fix his term of settlement; though the violation of the promise of yesterday proved only a prelude to the violation of that of to-day, and though both were found to be typical of the promise which was to be passed on the morrow. He had determined, it was obvious, to render his profession as lucrative as possible; but somehow or other—it could only be through an excess of skill—he completely overshot the mark. No one would, at length, believe his promises, or trust to his professions; his great skill began to border in its effects, as these regarded himself, on the opposite extreme; and he was on the eve of being starved out of the place, when Sir George Mackenzie, the proprietor, made choice of him as his factor, and intrusted to him the sole management of all his concerns.

Sir George in his younger days had been, like his grandfather the Earl, a stirring, active man of business. He was a stanch Tory, and on the downfall of Oxford, and the coming in of the Whigs, he continued to fret away the energies of his character, in a fruitless, splenetic opposition; until at length, losing heart in the contest, he became, from being one of the most active, one of the most indolent men in the country. He drank hard, lived grossly, and seemed indifferent to everything. And never were there two persons better suited to each other than the lawyer and Sir George. The lawyer was always happiest in his calculations when his books were open to the inspection of no one but himself; and the laird, though he had a habit of reckoning over the bottle, commonly fell asleep before the amount was cast up. But an untoward destiny proved too hard for Macculloch in even this office. Apathetical as Sir George was deemed, there was one of his feelings which had survived the wreck of all the others;—that one a rooted aversion to the town of Cromarty, and in particular to that part of the country adjacent which was his own property. No one—least of all himself—could assign any cause for the dislike, but it existed and grew stronger every day: and the consequences were ruinous to Macculloch; for in a few years after he had appointed him to the factorship, he disposed of all his lands to a Mr. William Urquhart of Meldrum—a transaction which is said to have had the effect of converting his antipathy into regret. The factor set himself to seek out for another master; and in a manner agreeable to his character. He professed much satisfaction that the estate should have passed into the hands of so excellent a gentleman as Mr. Urquhart; and proposed to some of the town’s-folk that they should eat to his prosperity in a public dinner, and light up a constellation of bonfires on the heights which overlook the bay. The proposal took; the dinner was attended by a party of the more respectable inhabitants of the place, and the bonfires by all the children.

A sister of Sir George’s, the Lady Margaret, who a few years before had shared in the hopes of her attainted cousin, Lord Cromartie, and had witnessed, with no common sensations of grief, the disastrous termination of the enterprise in which he had been led to engage, was at this time the only tenant of Cromarty Castle. She had resided in the house of Lord George previous to his attainder, but on that event she had come to Cromarty to live with her brother. His low habits of intemperance proved to her a fruitful source of vexation; but how was the feeling deepened when, in about a week after he had set out on a hasty journey, the purpose of which he refused to explain, she received a letter from him, informing her that he had sold all his lands! She saw, in a step so rash and unadvised, the final ruin of her family, and felt with peculiar bitterness that she had no longer a home. Leaning over a window of the castle, she was indulging in the feelings which her circumstances suggested, and looking with an unavailing but natural regret on the fields and hamlets that had so soon become the property of a stranger, when Macculloch and his followers came marching out on the lawn below from the adjoining wood, and began to pile on a little eminence in front of the castle the materials of a bonfire. It seemed, from the effect produced on the poor lady, that, in order entirely to overpower her, it was only necessary she should be shown that the circumstance which was so full of distress to her, was an occasion of rejoicing to others. For a few seconds she seemed stupified by the shouts and exultations of the party below; and then, clasping her hands upon her breast, she burst into tears and hurried to her apartment. As the evening darkened into night, the light of the huge fire without was reflected through a window on the curtains of her bed. She requested her attendant to shut it out; but the wild shouts of Macculloch’s followers, which were echoed until an hour after midnight by the turrets above and the vaults below, could not be excluded. In the morning Lady Margaret was in a high fever, and in a few days after she was dead.

The first to welcome the new laird to his property was Macculloch the factor. Urquhart of Meldrum, or Captain Urquhart, as he was termed, had made his money on sea—some said as a gallant officer in the Spanish service, some as the master of a privateer, or even, it was whispered, as a pirate. He was a rough unpolished man, fond of a rude joke, and disposed to seek his companions among farmers and mechanics, rather than among the people of a higher sphere. But, with all his rudeness, he was shrewd and intelligent, and qualified, by a peculiar tact, to be a judge of men. When Macculloch was shown into his room, he neither returned his bow nor motioned him to a seat, though the lawyer, no way daunted, proceeded to address him in a long train of compliments and congratulations. “Humph!” replied the Captain. “Ah!” thought the lawyer, “you will at least hear reason.” He proceeded to state, that as he had been intrusted with the sole management of Sir George’s affairs, he was better acquainted than any one else with the resources of the estate and the character of the tenants; and that, should Mr. Urquhart please to continue him in his office, he would convince him he was the fittest person to occupy it to his advantage. “Humph!” replied the Captain; “for how many years, Sir lawyer, have you been factor to Mackenzie?” “For about five,” was the reply. “And was he not a good master?” “Yes, sir, rather good, certainly—but his unfortunate habits.” “His habits!—he drank grog, did he not? and served it out for himself? So do I. Mark me, Sir factor! You are a —— mean rascal, and shall never finger a penny of mine. You found in Mackenzie a good simple fellow, who employed you when no one else would; but no sooner had he unshipped himself than you hoisted colours for me, —— you, whom, I suppose, you could tie up to the yard-arm for somewhat less than a bred hangman would tie up a thief for;—ay, that you would! I have heard of your dinner, sir, and your bonfires, and of the death of Lady Margaret (had you another bonfire for that?) and now tell you once for all, that I despise you as one of the meanest —— rascals that ever turned tail on a friend in distress. Off, sir—there is the door!” Such was the reward of Macculloch. In a few years after, he had sunk into poverty and contempt; one instance of many, that rascality, however profitable in the degree, may be carried to a ruinous extreme, and that he who sets out with a determination of cheating every one, may at length prove too cunning for even himself.