[1233] Boyse, p. 169.
[1234] The booty taken must have been considerable, as in one instance, that of Glengarry House, the party who plundered it, consisting of 200 men, had the following allowances made as their shares, viz., every captain, £11 5s.; each subaltern, £5 18s.; a sergeant, £1 10s.; a corporal, £1; and every common soldier, 15s., clear of all deductions.—Boyse, p. 169.
[1235] “Colonel Grant of Moy, who died in April, 1822, in his 90th year, was walking along the road with a gun on his shoulder when Culcairn was shot. A turn of the road concealed him from the soldiers at the moment, but when he came in sight with his gun, they immediately seized him upon suspicion, and carried him to Fort William. After a short confinement he was released. Colonel Grant entered the 42d as a volunteer or soldier of fortune, and afterwards got a cadetship in India, from which he returned with a handsome fortune nearly fifty years ago.”—Stewart’s Sketches, vol. i. note p. 280.
[1236] Scots Magazine, vol. viii. p. 287.
[1237] How far any remonstrance on the part of the president would have been attended to may be judged from the following statement:—“When he visited London in the end of the year, (1746,) for the purpose of settling the accounts he had run with the loyal Highland militia, he, as usual, went to court. The king, whose ear had been offended with repeated accounts of the conduct of the military, thus addressed him:—‘My lord-president, you are the person I most wished to see. Shocking reports have been circulated of the barbarities committed by my army in the north; your lordship is, of all men, the best able to satisfy me.’ ‘I wish to God,’ replied the president, ‘that I could, consistently with truth, assure your majesty that such reports are destitute of foundation.’ The king, as was his custom, turned abruptly away from the president; whose accounts, next day, were passed with difficulty; and, as report says, the balance, which was immense, never fully paid up.”—Antijacobin Review, vol. xiii. Review of Home’s History of the Rebellion.
[1238] A letter from Fort Augustus, dated June 27, 1746, which made the round of the public journals at the time, thus describes these pastimes:—“Last Wednesday the duke gave two prizes to the soldiers to run heats for on bare-backed Galloways taken from the rebels, when eight started for the first, and ten for the second prize. These Galloways are little larger than a good tup, and there was excellent sport. Yesterday his royal highness gave a fine Holland smock to the soldiers’ wives, to be run for on these Galloways, also bare-backed, and riding with their limbs on each side of the horse like men. Eight started, and there were three of the finest heats ever seen. The prize was won, with great difficulty, by one of the Old Buff’s ladies. In the evening, General Hawley and Colonel Howard run a match for twenty guineas on two of the above shelties: which General Hawley won by about four inches.”
[1239] Jacobite Memoirs, p. 300. William Jack, one of the prisoners, in a letter to his friends in Elgin (Memoirs, p. 299), says that the sailors used to amuse themselves by hoisting the prisoners up to the yard-arm and dropping them into the sea, and that they would tie them to the mast and flog them; that for several months they had no bed-clothes, and that they used to dig holes among the ship’s ballast, consisting of black earth and small stones, to keep themselves warm. John Farquharson of Aldlerg, himself a prisoner, in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Forbes, published among the Forbes papers, gives an appalling description of the miseries of his fellow prisoners on their voyage from Inverness to London. He says that from hunger, bad usage, and exposure “to all weathers, they were seized with a kind of plague which carried them off by dozens;” and that “a good many of those who would have outlived their sickness, were wantonly murdered by the sailors, by dipping them in the sea in the crisis of their fevers.” After arriving in the Thames, the common prisoners were put into Tilbury Fort, and would have perished for want had not some humane people supported them. The officers were marched rank and file to Southwark jail, amid the hootings of a tumultuous mob, who loaded them with scornful epithets, and assailed them with brickbats, stones, and other missiles.
[CHAPTER XXXVII.]
A.D. 1746.