His lands were frequently wasted, and his cattle carried off, by bands of caterans from the mountains of Ross-shire and Sutherland; hence, for his own protection, he was compelled to maintain a party of well-armed and resolute followers, who, like himself, acquired great experience in war, with habits of daring.
With an open and manly countenance, his features, in youth, are said to have been pleasing and cheerful in expression; but, by the course of life upon which unjust laws and adverse fortune hurried him, they gradually acquired that grave, and even morose, aspect, which we find depicted in the portrait of him possessed by Buchanan of Arden; the brows are knit, the eyes stern, and the firm lips compressed. He has a moustache, well twisted up, and a short curly beard, neither of which were then worn in England, or the Scottish Lowlands. He wears a round, blue bonnet, with a black cockade, and has his weather-beaten neck without collar or cravat.*
* Two other portraits of Rob Roy are in existence. One belongs to the Antiquarian Museum at Edinburgh; the other to the Duke of Argyle, and it had a narrow escape from the fire which consumed the castle of Roseneath in 1802.
His hair, from the colour of which he obtained his sobriquet of Roy (a corruption of ruadh, or red), was of a dark, ruddy hue, with short frizzly locks, which he wore without powder—a foolish fashion that was seldom found among the Highlanders, who usually tied their hair in a club behind. The circumstance that MacGregor was named Red Robert, to distinguish him from others, is sufficient to show how false is the popular error which bestows hair of that colour upon every Highlander.
"In his conflicts," says Sir Walter Scott, in the introduction to the novel which bears our hero's name, "Rob Roy avoided every appearance of cruelty; and it is not averred that he was ever the means of unnecessary bloodshed, or the actor of any deed that could lead the way to it. Like Robin Hood of England, he was a kind and gentle robber, and, while he took from the rich, was liberal in relieving the poor. This might be policy; but the universal tradition of the country speaks of it to have arisen from a better motive. All whom I have conversed with—and in my youth I have seen some who knew Rob Roy personally—gave him the character of a humane and benevolent man."
As yet, however, he was neither a robber nor an outlaw; but simply a Highland country gentleman, a chieftain of a broken clan, living under the protection of his mother's name and kindred; farming his little estate of Inversnaid; dealing in cattle, then the chief wealth of our northern mountains; and, being of a warlike disposition, occupying himself as the collector of black-mail—the local tax then paid by proprietors, whose estates lay south of the Highland frontier, to certain warlike chiefs and chieftains, northward of that line, for the armed protection of their lands and goods from the irruption of such caterans as those MacRaes, who had stolen the cattle from Inversnaid, and of whom we left Rob and his men in hot pursuit.
And it was the collection of this duty, black-mail, which, in 1729, ultimately led to the embodiment of the Black Watch, or 42nd Highland Regiment; and it was continued to be levied by certain chieftains so lately as the middle of the last century—certainly until 1743. At the time we have introduced him to our readers Rob had been married for some time, to a daughter of MacGregor, the Laird of Comar.
Far from being the fighting amazon and fierce virago whom Sir Walter Scott has portrayed, Helen Mary, the goodwife of Inversnaid, was a kind, gentle, and motherly woman, who never flourished abroad with breast-plate, bonnet, and broadsword, as we see her on the stage, when opposing the bayonets of the redcoats; but who attended to her frugal household, her spinning, baking, and brewing; and who wore the simple kerchief and tonnac, or short plaid, which, until the close of the last century, formed the usual female costume in the Highlands; and never, save once, and then on a trifling occasion, did she act a stern and resolute part, in an episode to be narrated in its place.
The reader must bear in mind that Rob Roy was not a chief at the head of a clan, but merely the second son of a chieftain (the second rank) at the head of a branch of the Clan Alpine, called the line of Dugald Ciar Mhor (or Dugald with the mouse-coloured hair), and the men of this branch adhered to him, as being his immediate kinsmen and tenants.
Deeply in the heart of Rob Roy MacGregor rankled the story of the wrongs and oppression to which his clan had been subjected by the Scottish Government—wrongs which, after the accession of William III., were rather increased than diminished; and thus he burned for an opportunity of avenging them at the point of his sword, on their chief enemies, the Grahames of Montrose, the Colquhouns of Luss, and others; and ere long an ample opportunity came. But meanwhile let us return from this necessary digression, lest Duncan of the Forays escape with his spoil.