About this time Rob would seem to have visited England.
It is also said that he went so far south as London, as a protégé of the Duke of Argyle, who was then in the zenith of his military and political influence. The story adds, that the duke requested Rob, in his full Highland dress and arms, to promenade for some time before St. James's Palace, where the attention of George II. was drawn to him—his garb being somewhat unusual in such a locality, and more especially in those days.
Some time after, when Argyle attended a royal levee, the king observed that he had "lately seen a handsome Scots Highlander near the palace."
"He was Robert MacGregor," replied the duke; "the identical outlaw who has long kept the Highlands of Perthshire in a turmoil by his resistance and resentments."
At this reply the king was very much incensed; but be the story as it may, there appeared in London, about this time, a pretended memoir of Rob, under the flattering title of The Highland Rogue. "It is," says the groat novelist, "a catch-penny publication, bearing in front the effigy of a species of ogre, with a beard a foot long, and therein his actions are as much exaggerated as his personal appearance."
It was during his absence in the south that Helen MacGregor enacted the only bold and masculine part she is known to have played on the stage of real life.
The proprietor of Achenriach, near the clachan of Campsie, having refused to pay his arrears of black-mail, Helen, as her two eldest sons were absent, being lieutenants in the Highland Watch under Glune Dhu, mounted on horseback, with a pair of loaded pistols at her saddlebow, and attended by Greumoch and twelve tall gillies fully armed, with targets on their backs and long muskets sloped on their shoulders, crossed the Campsie Fells, and presenting herself at the gate of Achenriach, demanded of the laird the tax which was due to her absent husband.
He speedily came forth with the money, saying, "Madam, I can refuse a lady nothing—neither would I have the hardihood to oppose you."
In this district Rob's nephew levied black-mail till within little more than a hundred years ago.