CHAPTER X.
Dundee had ridden out of Edinburgh with no clear plan of action before him. Balcarres afterwards declared that his friend had no intention of making for the Highlands till he learned that warrants were out for his apprehension. Yet it is probable that the idea of a Highland campaign had already begun to take shape in Dundee's mind before Mackay's advance forced him over the Grampians. His orders were, in the event of the Estates declaring for William, to keep quiet till the arrival of a regular force from Ireland should enable him to take the field with some chance of success. And, indeed, he had at that time no alternative. It was clear to him that the game was lost in the Lowlands, but it was not yet clear to him that anything was to be gained in the Highlands. The example of his famous kinsman might indeed serve to fire both his imagination and his ambition; but it could hardly serve to make him hopeful of succeeding with the weapons which had failed Montrose. A few thousand claymores would no doubt prove a useful supplement to the small body of troops James might be able to spare from Ireland; but even a mind so ardent and sanguine as Dundee's might well have shrank from facing the chances of war with no other resources than a handful of troopers and a rabble of half-armed, half-naked, and wholly undisciplined savages. And in truth experience had shown that these fierce and jealous spirits were little less dangerous as allies than as enemies. Every clan had its hereditary feud, and no one could say that on the day of battle the claymores might not be drawn against each other instead of against the common foe. Branches even of the same stock did not conceive themselves inevitably bound by the tie of blood, though it was a claim never forgotten when it was convenient to make or allow it. Sometimes a few of the smaller clans would make common cause against the oppressions of a more powerful, or the cattle of a wealthier neighbour; but it was rarely that friendship went beyond the conditions of an armed neutrality. Though the feudal system had long prevailed in many parts of the Highlands, it had never superseded the older patriarchal system. The chief of the clan might pay homage to a great lord like Argyle or Athole; but in the clan he was king, and his word was law. Moreover, brave as the Highlanders undoubtedly were, they were not a warlike race. They would rise to the signal of the fiery cross, without questioning the cause; and they would on occasion fight for their own hand, for revenge or plunder. But the long service of a regular war was little to their taste. Of military science and military discipline they knew nothing. To win the battle with the rush of the first onset, and when the battle was won to make off to their homes with all the plunder they could lay hands on,—this was their notion of warfare, and it was a notion which the chiefs were too ignorant or too prudent to interfere with. What chance could there be of inducing such spirits as these to combine in one great confederacy, and to undertake a long and desperate struggle for the sake of a king of whom the most part had never heard, and of a cause which they could not understand?
But Dundee had learned something at Dunblane which had given him fresh views. During the few hours he had passed there he had talked much with a Highland gentleman, Alexander Drummond of Bahaldy, son-in-law to Sir Ewan Cameron of Lochiel, the great chief of the clan Cameron. Drummond told him that Lochiel had been busy all the winter among his neighbours, that they were now ripe for war, and were only waiting a leader and some succours of regular troops and ammunition; that James had been communicated with, and had approved their plan in a letter written with his own hand to Lochiel; and that an early day had been appointed for a rendezvous of the clans in Lochaber, the headquarters of the Camerons.
It is now generally acknowledged that on this occasion, however it may have been in the next century, the action of the Highland chiefs was not inspired by devotion to the House of Stuart. Lochiel himself may indeed have been moved by some personal consideration for the exiled King. He had fought bravely under Montrose for Charles the First, and under Middleton for Charles the Second. From the latter King he had received more than one letter full of those flattering assurances Charles knew so well how to make. By James he had been graciously welcomed at Whitehall, and had received the honour of knighthood from the royal hand. He was brave, wise, generous, and faithful, and, even in a less rude society than that in which his lot was cast, his manners would have been called agreeable and his education certainly not contemptible. But even Lochiel's loyalty was not suffered to run counter to his interests. In Lochaber the name of James was as nothing compared with the name of Evan Dhu, and the law of the King of England gave place to the law of the great Chief of the Camerons. As for the rest, the dispute between Whigs and Jacobites was no more to them than the dispute between the Guelphs and Ghibellines had been to their ancestors. They cared not the value of a single sheep whether James or William sat on the throne of Great Britain, so long as neither interfered with them. No later than the previous year the authority of James had been insulted and his soldiers beaten by one of these independent lordlings—Colin Macdonald of Keppoch, familiarly known as Coll of the Cows, for his skill in tracking his neighbour's cattle over the wildest mountains to the most secret coverts.[78]
But for what loyalty to the House of Stuart was powerless to effect a motive was found in the hatred to the House of Argyle. Nearly all the chiefs of the Western Highlands were vassals to Mac Callum More, the head of the great clan of Campbell. The numerous branches of the Macdonalds, who had once been lords of the Hebrides and all the mountain districts of Argyleshire and Invernessshire, the Camerons, the Macnaghtens, the Macleans, the Stuarts of Appin, all these paid tribute (it would be probably more correct to say owed tribute) to the Marquis of Argyle, and all were ready to welcome any chance of freedom from that odious bondage. The early loyalty of Lochiel had probably been as much inspired by the fact that he was fighting against an Argyle as for a Stuart, as it is possible had been the loyalty of Montrose himself. In 1685 he had cheerfully summoned his clan to repel the invasion of another chief of that hated House; and now the Revolution had brought back from exile yet another to exercise the old tyranny. This was enough to make the Revolution a hateful thing in the eyes of Lochiel and his neighbours. But it was also believed that James had conceived the idea of buying up from the great Highland nobles their feudal rights over the clans, and had only been prevented from carrying his idea into effect by the Revolution. In the minds of these Western chiefs, then, William was the oppressor and James the deliverer. Throughout the winter they had watched eagerly for news from the South. At length they learned that the Estates had declared for William; that their prime enemy was restored to favour and power; and that Dundee, whose exploits against the party of which for three generations an Argyle had been the acknowledged head were well known to them, was an outlaw and a fugitive. In him they at once recognised the leader for whom they waited. Drummond was accordingly sent to invite him to their councils, and to promise that a sufficient escort should be ready at the proper time to convey him to the appointed meeting-place.
Meanwhile it had become necessary for Dundee to look to his own safety. A more dangerous enemy than Leven was now in the field against him. As soon as William had learned the decision of the Estates he had despatched a body of troops into Scotland under General Mackay. Hugh Mackay, of Scourie, was himself of a Highland stock. Like Dundee, he had learned the art of war first in France, and afterwards in the Low Countries, where he had risen to the command of the Scots Brigade, as those regiments were called which upwards of a century before the new Protestant enthusiasm of England had raised to support Holland against the tyranny of Spain. He was a good man, a brave if not a dashing soldier, a prudent tactician, and well skilled in all the machinery of war.
Mackay at first contented himself with sending Livingstone and his dragoons after Dundee, while he turned his attention to Gordon, who was still maintaining some show of resistance in the castle. But Livingstone was too late. He found the nest warm, but the bird had flown. Dundee had gone northwards over the Grampians into the Gordons' country, where the Earl of Dunfermline, the Duke's brother-in-law, at once joined him with a most welcome addition to his little band of troopers. Mackay foresaw that the Highlands were to be the real scene of operations, and that no danger need be apprehended from the vapouring Gordon. He sent word, therefore, to Livingstone to await him in Dundee, and marched himself for that place with some two hundred of his own brigade and one hundred and twenty of Lord Colchester's dragoons.[79]
It is as difficult for the reader to follow Dundee through these April days as Mackay found it. In the sounding hexameters of the "Grameis," his movements are indeed described with more labour than lucidity; but at this early stage of the campaign it is not necessary to track him over every mountain and river, and by every town and castle.[80] It will be enough to say that in an incredibly short space of time he beat up for recruits the greater part of the counties of Aberdeen, Inverness, and Perth, while the bewildered Mackay, whose training and troops were alike unfitted to this sort of campaigning, toiled after him in vain. He also found time for a flying visit to Dudhope, where his wife had been safely delivered of a son. He can have stayed with her but a day at most; and when he left her, he was to see her face no more.