In spite of the Duke of Montrose, he had re-established himself again at Craigrostan, from whence he never went abroad attended by less than twenty or thirty well-armed men, including his henchman and Greumoch.
These were his Leine Chrios, or body-guard.
Some of the Grahames of Montrose, and others who were obnoxious to himself or to the cause of the exiled king, he confined occasionally in a place which is still named Rob Roy's prison.
This is a mural rock, the eyry of the osprey or water-eagle, which rises to the height of thirty feet on the north-eastern shore of Loch Lomond, about four miles from Kowardennan.
Slung by ropes, he occasionally lowered them from the summit, and after permitting them to swing in mid-air for a time, would give them a severe ducking in the loch below and compel them to shout—
"God save King James VIII."
They were then permitted to depart amid the laughter of his followers; and it must be borne in mind that this was very gentle treatment when compared with that to which the MacGregors were subjected when captured by the same people.
As the old Highland proprietors or heads of septs held their lands in virtue of an occupancy coeval with the first settlement of the tribes in Scotland, and consequently disdained to hold possession by virtue of a skeepskin rather than by their sword-blades, in later years, a system of suppressing the smaller lairds by force of arms had long been pursued with success by the house of Argyle in the west.
A powerful landowner of that name, who had recently been created a baronet, seized at the point of the sword a small estate in Glendochart, and expelled the proprietor with all his family and kindred.
MacGregor, who could not permit an act of such injustice to pass unpunished, sent Greumoch with forty men to the Braes of Glenorchy, with orders to "bring this oppressor of the poor a prisoner before him."