It is generally admitted that Rob Roy was a man of good birth and connections, though belonging to a family or clan which for upwards of a century had been under proscription, and obliged to live a rather skulking kind of life. He had become possessed in an honourable manner of certain lands on the skirts of Ben Lomond, in the county of Stirling, composed wholly of mountain-ground, and of little annual value, yet sufficient to maintain him, the principal place being Inversnaid, on the isthmus between the Lochs Lomond and Katrine, where hundreds of tourists now pass every summer-day, but which was considered a very outlandish situation in the time of Queen Anne. His family name being illegal by act of parliament, he had adopted that of Campbell, in compliment to the Argyle family, which patronised him. The business of purchasing Highland cattle at the Crieff and other markets, and getting them transferred to England, where they were to be fattened and consumed, was for some years after the Union a favourite one amongst gentlemen of good rank, and it attracted the sagacious and active mind of Robert Macgregor Campbell. With some funds supplied by his neighbours, and part of which, at least, is said to have come primarily from the Duke of Montrose, on an understanding that the lenders were to share in the profits, he entered on the traffic with spirit, and conducted it for a time with success; but the defalcations of a subordinate agent or partner, named Macdonald, cut short his |1712.| career in trade, and left him in serious pecuniary difficulties. The aspect which the affair took at the Court of Session in Edinburgh was, that Robert Macgregor Campbell drew bills on Graham of Gorthie and other gentlemen for cattle he was to buy for them, realised the money, and then ‘did most fraudulently withdraw, and fled, without performing anything on his part, and thereby became unquestionably a notour and fraudulent bankrupt;’[[449]] while in reality he was probably only the victim of a fraud, and obliged to keep out of the way in consequence of the unreasonable severities of the law towards men in his situation. It was a sufficiently barbarous measure to advertise an unfortunate man as a fraudulent bankrupt seeking to screen himself from justice; but the Duke of Montrose—in some other respects but a poor representative of his illustrious great-grandfather—went further: he caused his factor, Mr Graham of Killearn, to fall upon Macgregor’s poor little holding of Craigrostan and Inversnaid, and thrust out from it the wife and family of the late owner.

This treatment turned the milk of Macgregor’s nature to bitterness, and it is not surprising, when the general condition of the country, and the ordinary strain of men’s ideas in that age are considered, that he sought in a wild and lawless way to right himself with his oppressors—above all with the Duke of Montrose. From the rough country round Ben Lomond, he could any night stoop upon his Grace’s Lowland farms, and make booty of meal and cattle. Strange to say, while thus setting the law at defiance, he obtained a certain steady amount of countenance and protection from both of the great Campbell chiefs, Argyle and Breadalbane. The government made an effort to impose a check upon his career by planting a little fort at Inversnaid;[[450]] but Rob Roy, nevertheless, continued in his lawless course of |1712.| life. On the side of Loch Lomond, near Inversnaid, there is a cave formed by a flexure in the stratification of the mountain: here Rob occasionally took refuge when hard pressed. It is curious to reflect that this strange exemplification of predatory life was realised in a not very remote part of our island, in the days when Addison and Pope were regaling the refined people of London with the productions of their genius. Rob is described as a short, robust man, with bushy hair and beard, and legs covered so thickly with red hair as to resemble those of a Highland bull. His cognomen ‘Roy’ expresses his ruddy complexion. It is admitted that, amidst his wild life, he was not without humanity or feeling for the unfortunate, and, what is perhaps more strange, that he was a sagacious and politic sort of person, who never would go into any quarrel or contention which was not likely to result in some practical benefit or advantage. It was probably owing to this cool temperament, that, though he mustered a body of clansmen for the Stuart cause in 1715, he yet stood neutral at the battle of Sheriffmuir, alike afraid to offend King James, on the one hand, and his patron, the Duke of Argyle, on the other.

June.

A singular and not very decent lawsuit took place at this time between the Earl of Bute and his stepmother, the Dowager Countess, widow of the first earl, by whom this family was first raised to any considerable distinction. When the deceased peer went to Bath in the spring of 1710, a few months before his death, he granted a liferent of 3300 merks (£183, 6s. 8d. sterling) to his lady. The present peer—father, by the way, of George III.’s celebrated minister—refused to pay this annuity, and the countess raised an action against him for it, and also for the annual rents of her own son’s patrimony. The only objection presented by the earl in his defence was, that the lady had profited unduly already out of her husband’s property, having at his death appropriated large sums of ‘lying money.’ The matter being referred to her oath, she acknowledged having had in hand at her lord’s death forty pounds, with a purse containing ‘sundry medals and purse-pennies given by the earl and others to her and her son, in which number there were some guineas; and the whole might be about £60 sterling.’ She averred that ‘she had nothing as the product of any trade she drove, except two or three ells of alamode;’[[451]] |1712.| she had made nothing in her husband’s lifetime by lending money; there had been presents from the tenants in kind and in money, and her husband had given them to her. The peer seems to have gained nothing by challenging the claims of his stepmother beyond the forty pounds of ‘lying money.’[[452]]

July 23.

The stricter Presbyterians, commonly called Cameronians—the people chiefly involved in the persecutions of the Stuart reigns—had been left unsatisfied by the Revolution, and were now as antagonistic to the presbyterian church as they had ever been to the late episcopacy. For years they held together, without ministers, or the means of getting any trained in their peculiar walk of doctrine; but at length one or two schismatics cast off by the church put themselves at their head, the chief being Mr John Macmillan, formerly minister of Balmaghie in Galloway. Oaths to the state, neglect of the Covenant, and general compliances with the spirit of the times, were the stumbling-blocks which these people regarded as disqualifying the national establishment for their allegiance.

The Cameronians chiefly abounded in the counties of Lanark, Dumfries, and Kirkcudbright, and their Canterbury was the small burgh of Sanquhar in Nithsdale. Whenever any remarkable political movement was going on in the country, these peculiar people were pretty sure to come to the cross of Sanquhar and utter a testimony on the subject. The last occasion when this was done was at the Union, a measure which it pleased ‘the Antipopish, Antiprelatic, Antierastian, Antisectarian, True Presbyterian Church of Scotland’ (for so they styled themselves), to regard as ‘sinful,’ because it involved a sanction to that English prelatic system which the Solemn League and Covenant had bound the Scottish nation to extirpate.

While still brooding over the ‘land-ruining, God-provoking, soul-destroying, and posterity-ensnaring-and-enslaving Union,’ the act of toleration, so manifestly designed for a relief to the prelatists, came like a bellows to blow up the fire. Sundry meetings were held, and at length a general one at the upland village of Crawford-John (26th of May 1712), where it was finally decided on that the faithful and true church should renew the Solemn League and Covenant.

It was at a place called Auchensaugh, on the top of a broad |1712.| mountain behind the village of Douglas, that the meeting was held for this purpose. The transaction occupied several days. On the first, there was a prayer for a proper frame of spirit, followed by a sermon, as this was again by an engagement to duties, amongst which the uprooting of all opinions different from their own was the most conspicuous. The people were dismissed with an exhortation from Mr Macmillan upon their ‘unconcerned carriage and behaviour.’ On the second day, it was reckoned that about seventeen hundred were present, including, however, many onlookers brought by curiosity. There was now read an acknowledgment of sins, and the people were invited to clear their consciences by declaring any of which they had been guilty. One confessed having made a rash oath; another that he had attended the Established Church; several that they had been married by the Erastian clergy. One, hearing of the sinfulness of tests and oaths, rather unluckily confessed his having sworn the Covenant at Lesmahago. A number had to deplore their having owned William and Mary as their lawful sovereigns. Mr Macmillan seems to have been a little perplexed by the innocent nature of their sins. After all this was at an end, the Solemn League was read and sworn to, article by article, with uplifted hands. A day of interval being allowed, there was a third of devotion. On the fourth, a Sunday, there was an administration of the communion, which must have been a striking sight, as eight tables were set out upon the moor, each capable of accommodating sixty persons. ‘It was a very extraordinary rain the whole time of the action.’

Even Wodrow, who has taken such pains to commemorate the sufferings of these people under prelacy, seems to have been unable to look with patience on their making such demonstrations against the church now established.[[453]] Such earnestness in intolerance, such self-confidence in opinion, cannot be read of in our age without strange feelings. After all, the Covenanters of Auchensaugh were good enough to invite the rest of the community to join them, ‘being anxious to get the divisions which have long wrecked this church removed and remedied;’ nay, they were ‘willing, for peace and unity, to acknowledge and forsake whatever we can rationally be convinced to be bad in our conduct and management,’[[454]] though it would have probably been a serious |1712.| task for a General Assembly of angels to produce such a conviction.