Such is the story, and it needs no embellishment. Flora’s services to the Prince were matchless; she saved him at the moment when General Campbell with his militia and a naval expedition were on the point of capturing him. She herself was taken prisoner a few days later.[81]
At Portree Neil Maceachain also said farewell to Prince Charles, who with Malcolm and Murdoch Macleod went that night to the island of Raasa. The following day the Prince returned to Skye, and left two days later for the mainland. Thus finished his wanderings in the Hebrides.
Neil evaded capture after the escape of Prince Charles from Skye; in September he rejoined him at Arisaig, and in the ship L’Heureux accompanied the Prince to France. There he joined the French army, at first as a lieutenant in the Regiment d’Albanie, of which the command was given to Lochiel, and afterwards in the Scots regiment of Lord Ogilvy, the Jacobite exile. Ogilvy’s regiment was disbanded after the Peace of Paris in 1763, and Neil passed the rest of his life, first at Sedan and afterwards at Sancerre, in the province of Berry, on a pension of three hundred livres (about £30). He died at Sancerre in 1788. When he left Scotland Neil dropped the name of Maceachain, retaining only that of Macdonald.
His only son became famous as one of Napoleon’s generals—Marshal Macdonald, Duke of Tarentum.
NARRATIVE OF LUDOVICK GRANT OF GRANT
In 1745 Sir James Grant was the head of the family. His father at the Revolution had taken the side of King William, and had been a member of the Convention of Estates which declared King James’s forfeiture. He had raised a regiment and had incurred heavy expenses in the service of the new Government, but in spite of frequent applications no repayment had ever been made to him. Sir James’s elder brother, Alexander, succeeded his father. He was a distinguished soldier, who served the Government faithfully, and rose to the rank of Brigadier-General. In the ’Fifteen he was Lord-Lieutenant of Banff and Inverness, and was appointed Captain of Edinburgh Castle. In 1717 he was informed that the Government had no further occasion for his services. He died in 1719, and was succeeded by his brother James, who by a special grant inherited the baronetcy of his father-in-law, Sir Humphrey Colquhoun of Luss. Sir James Grant was member of parliament for the county of Inverness from 1722 to 1741, when a quarrel with Duncan Forbes of Culloden forced him to relinquish the constituency. He then became member for the Elgin burghs, for which he sat until his death in 1747. Although Sir James was a Whig in politics, it may be that at one time he had dealings with the Jacobite Court. It is remarkable that in 1721, while the Atterbury Plot was being hatched, and at the very time that Christopher Layer was in Rome on that business, Sir James Grant was created a peer by the Chevalier.[82]
On his arrival in Scotland, Prince Charles wrote to Grant requesting his co-operation in much the same terms as he wrote to known Jacobite adherents.[83] Sir James, who was now sixty-six years old, determined to keep out of trouble. He handed over the management of his clan and property to his eldest son, Ludovick, and on the pretext of attending to his parliamentary duties, he went to London, where he remained throughout the Rising.
Before leaving Scotland, Sir James pointed out to his son that the family had received scant reward for eminent services in the past, and he advised him that whatever happened the clan should not be subdivided. He strongly opposed Duncan Forbes’s scheme of independent companies. The clan should remain passive, prepared to defend its own territory, and only act in the event of its being attacked. This policy Ludovick carried out, and in doing so incurred the grave suspicion of the Government. It is indeed difficult to believe that, until the final retreat of the Jacobites and the approach of Cumberland, the acting Chief of the Grants was not sitting on the fence.
The Grant estates were in two distinct portions, those around Castle Grant in Strathspey and those in Urquhart and Glenmoriston on the western side of Loch Ness. Although the Strathspey Grants were accounted a Whig clan, the Grants of Urquhart and Glenmoriston were notoriously Jacobite. When the Rising took place, Ludovick Grant wrote to his outlying retainers, not forbidding them to join the Prince, but peremptorily forbidding them to move without his sanction. Eventually they went ‘out’ in spite of his orders, but the Strathspey men stood loyally by their chief.
The whole story of the rising in Urquhart and Glenmoriston and the action of Ludovick Grant towards the Government and his clansmen has been told within recent years in a most interesting volume by Mr. William Mackay,[84] to which the reader is referred. The narrative printed here is Grant’s own apologia to the Government, prepared with legal assistance after the Rising. The text tells its own story, but four points may be referred to here, points which it gave Ludovick Grant much trouble to explain. First, when Sir John Cope marched north in August 1745 he passed within ten miles of Castle Grant, yet the young chief neither visited him nor sent him assistance.[85] Second, when President Duncan Forbes asked him to furnish two independent companies for the service of Government, he declined, on the ostensible ground that two companies were too insignificant a contingent for so important a clan as the Grants. He eventually was persuaded to send one company,[86] whose only service was to garrison Inverness Castle under Major George Grant, Ludovick’s uncle. The castle surrendered to Prince Charles in February after two days’ siege, and the commandant was dismissed the service. Third, Grant marched his men to Strathbogie to attack Lord Lewis Gordon’s men in December without orders from Lord Loudoun, then commanding in the north,[87] for which he incurred Lord Loudoun’s censure. Fourth, when Grant had gone to Aberdeen in March, five of his principal gentlemen made a treaty of neutrality[88] with the Jacobites under Lord George Murray and Lord Nairn, by which the Prince’s people were to get supplies from the Grant country in return for protection from raiding.