History of England, from the Accession of James II - (Volume 3, Chapter 13) — Chapter XIII, Part 7

In studying the history of our civil contentions, we must never forget that the same names, badges, and warcries had very different meanings in different parts of the British isles.

We have already seen how little there was in common between the Jacobitism of Ireland and the Jacobitism of England.

The Jacobitism of the Scotch Highlander was, at least in the seventeenth century, a third variety, quite distinct from the other two.

The Gaelic population was far indeed from holding the doctrines of passive obedience and nonresistance.

In fact disobedience and resistance made up the ordinary life of that population.

Some of those very clans which it has been the fashion to describe as so enthusiastically loyal that they were prepared to stand by James to the death, even when he was in the wrong, had never, while he was on the throne, paid the smallest respect to his authority, even when he was clearly in the right.

Their practice, their calling, had been to disobey and to defy him.

Some of them had actually been proscribed by sound of horn for the crime of withstanding his lawful commands, and would have torn to pieces without scruple any of his officers who had dared to venture beyond the passes for the purpose of executing his warrant.

The English Whigs were accused by their opponents of holding doctrines dangerously lax touching the obedience due to the chief magistrate.

Yet no respectable English Whig ever defended rebellion, except as a rare and extreme remedy for rare and extreme evils.

But among those Celtic chiefs whose loyalty has been the theme of so much warm eulogy were some whose whole existence from boyhood upwards had been one long rebellion.

Such men, it is evident, were not likely to see the Revolution in the light in which it appeared to an Oxonian nonjuror.

On the other hand they were not, like the aboriginal Irish, urged to take arms by impatience of Saxon domination.

To such domination the Scottish Celt had never been subjected.

He occupied his own wild and sterile region, and followed his own national usages.

In his dealings with the Saxons, he was rather the oppressor than the oppressed.

He exacted black mail from them: he drove away their flocks and herds; and they seldom dared to pursue him to his native wilderness.

They had never portioned out among themselves his dreary region of moor and shingle.

He had never seen the tower of his hereditary chieftains occupied by an usurper who could not speak Gaelic, and who looked on all who spoke it as brutes and slaves; nor had his national and religious feelings ever been outraged by the power and splendour of a church which he regarded as at once foreign and heretical.

The real explanation of the readiness with which a large part of the population of the Highlands, twice in the seventeenth century, drew the sword for the Stuarts is to be found in the internal quarrels which divided the commonwealth of clans.

For there was a commonwealth of clans, the image, on a reduced scale, of the great commonwealth of European nations.

In the smaller of these two commonwealths, as in the larger, there were wars, treaties, alliances, disputes about territory and precedence, a system of public law, a balance of power.

There was one inexhaustible source of discontents and disputes.

The feudal system had, some centuries before, been introduced into the hill country, but had neither destroyed the patriarchal system nor amalgamated completely with it.

In general he who was lord in the Norman polity was also chief in the Celtic polity; and, when this was the case, there was no conflict.

But, when the two characters were separated, all the willing and loyal obedience was reserved for the chief.

The lord had only what he could get and hold by force.

If he was able, by the help of his own tribe, to keep in subjection tenants who were not of his own tribe, there was a tyranny of clan over clan, the most galling, perhaps, of all forms of tyranny.

At different times different races had risen to an authority which had produced general fear and envy.

The Macdonalds had once possessed, in the Hebrides and throughout the mountain country of Argyleshire and Invernessshire, an ascendancy similar to that which the House of Austria had once possessed in Christendom.

But the ascendancy of the Macdonalds had, like the ascendancy of the House of Austria, passed away; and the Campbells, the children of Diarmid, had become in the Highlands what the Bourbons had become in Europe.

The parallel might be carried far.

Imputations similar to those which it was the fashion to throw on the French government were thrown on the Campbells.

A peculiar dexterity, a peculiar plausibility of address, a peculiar contempt for all the obligations of good faith, were ascribed, with or without reason, to the dreaded race.

"Fair and false like a Campbell" became a proverb.

It was said that Mac Callum More after Mac Callum More had, with unwearied, unscrupulous, and unrelenting ambition, annexed mountain after mountain and island after island to the original domains of his House.

Some tribes had been expelled from their territory, some compelled to pay tribute, some incorporated with the conquerors.

At length the number of fighting men who bore the name of Campbell was sufficient to meet in the field of battle the combined forces of all the other western clans, [324] It was during those civil troubles which commenced in 1638 that the power of this aspiring family reached the zenith.

The Marquess of Argyle was the head of a party as well as the head of a tribe.

Possessed of two different kinds of authority, he used each of them in such a way as to extend and fortify the other.

The knowledge that he could bring into the field the claymores of five thousand half heathen mountaineers added to his influence among the austere Presbyterians who filled the Privy Council and the General Assembly at Edinburgh.

His influence at Edinburgh added to the terror which he inspired among the mountains.

Of all the Highland princes whose history is well known to us he was the greatest and most dreaded.

It was while his neighbours were watching the increase of his power with hatred which fear could scarcely keep down that Montrose called them to arms.

The call was promptly obeyed.

A powerful coalition of clans waged war, nominally for King Charles, but really against Mac Callum More.

It is not easy for any person who has studied the history of that contest to doubt that, if Argyle had supported the cause of monarchy, his neighbours would have declared against it.

Grave writers tell of the victory gained at Inverlochy by the royalists over the rebels.

But the peasants who dwell near the spot speak more accurately.

They talk of the great battle won there by the Macdonalds over the Campbells.

The feelings which had produced the coalition against the Marquess of Argyle retained their force long after his death.

His son, Earl Archibald, though a man of many eminent virtues, inherited, with the ascendancy of his ancestors, the unpopularity which such ascendancy could scarcely fail to produce.

In 1675, several warlike tribes formed a confederacy against him, but were compelled to submit to the superior force which was at his command.

There was therefore great joy from sea to sea when, in 1681, he was arraigned on a futile charge, condemned to death, driven into exile, and deprived of his dignities.

There was great alarm when, in 1685, he returned from banishment, and sent forth the fiery cross to summon his kinsmen to his standard; and there was again great joy when his enterprise had failed, when his army had melted away, when his head had been fixed on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and when those chiefs who had regarded him as an oppressor had obtained from the Crown, on easy terms, remissions of old debts and grants of new titles.

While England and Scotland generally were execrating the tyranny of James, he was honoured as a deliverer in Appin and Lochaber, in Glenroy and Glenmore, [325] The hatred excited by the power and ambition of the House of Argyle was not satisfied even when the head of that House had perished, when his children were fugitives, when strangers garrisoned the Castle of Inverary, and when the whole shore of Loch Fyne was laid waste by fire and sword.

It was said that the terrible precedent which had been set in the case of the Macgregors ought to be followed, and that it ought to be made a crime to bear the odious name of Campbell.

On a sudden all was changed.

The Revolution came.

The heir of Argyle returned in triumph.

He was, as his predecessors had been, the head, not only of a tribe, but of a party.

The sentence which had deprived him of his estate and of his honours was treated by the majority of the Convention as a nullity.

The doors of the Parliament House were thrown open to him: he was selected from the whole body of Scottish nobles to administer the oath of office to the new Sovereigns; and he was authorised to raise an army on his domains for the service of the Crown.

He would now, doubtless, be as powerful as the most powerful of his ancestors.

Backed by the strength of the Government, he would demand all the long and heavy arrears of rent and tribute which were due to him from his neighbours, and would exact revenge for all the injuries and insults which his family had suffered.

There was terror and agitation in the castles of twenty petty kings.

The uneasiness was great among the Stewarts of Appin, whose territory was close pressed by the sea on one side, and by the race of Diarmid on the other.

The Macnaghtens were still more alarmed.

Once they had been the masters of those beautiful valleys through which the Ara and the Shira flow into Loch Fyne.

But the Campbells had prevailed.

The Macnaghtens had been reduced to subjection, and had, generation after generation, looked up with awe and detestation to the neighbouring Castle of Inverary.

They had recently been promised a complete emancipation.

A grant, by virtue of which their chief would have held his estate immediately from the Crown, had been prepared, and was about to pass the seals, when the Revolution suddenly extinguished a hope which amounted almost to certainty, [326] The Macleans remembered that, only fourteen years before, their lands had been invaded and the seat of their chief taken and garrisoned by the Campbells, [327] Even before William and Mary had been proclaimed at Edinburgh, a Maclean, deputed doubtless by the head of his tribe, had crossed the sea to Dublin, and had assured James that, if two or three battalions from Ireland were landed in Argyleshire, they would be immediately joined by four thousand four hundred claymores, [328] A similar spirit animated the Camerons.

Their ruler, Sir Ewan Cameron, of Lochiel, surnamed the Black, was in personal qualities unrivalled among the Celtic princes.

He was a gracious master, a trusty ally, a terrible enemy.

His countenance and bearing were singularly noble.

Some persons who had been at Versailles, and among them the shrewd and observant Simon Lord Lovat, said that there was, in person and manner, a most striking resemblance between Lewis the Fourteenth and Lochiel;

and whoever compares the portraits of the two will perceive that there really was some likeness.

In stature the difference was great.

Lewis, in spite of highheeled shoes and a towering wig, hardly reached the middle size.

Lochiel was tall and strongly built.

In agility and skill at his weapons he had few equals among the inhabitants of the hills.

He had repeatedly been victorious in single combat.

He was a hunter of great fame.

He made vigorous war on the wolves which, down to his time, preyed on the red deer of the Grampians; and by his hand perished the last of the ferocious breed which is known to have wandered at large in our island.

Nor was Lochiel less distinguished by intellectual than by bodily vigour.

He might indeed have seemed ignorant to educated and travelled Englishmen, who had studied the classics under Busby at Westminster and under Aldrich at Oxford, who had learned something about the sciences among Fellows of the Royal Society, and something about the fine arts in the galleries of Florence and Rome.

But though Lochiel had very little knowledge of books, he was eminently wise in council, eloquent in debate, ready in devising expedients, and skilful in managing the minds of men.

His understanding preserved him from those follies into which pride and anger frequently hurried his brother chieftains.

Many, therefore, who regarded his brother chieftains as mere barbarians, mentioned him with respect.

Even at the Dutch Embassy in St. James's Square he was spoken of as a man of such capacity and courage that it would not be easy to find his equal.

As a patron of literature he ranks with the magnificent Dorset.

If Dorset out of his own purse allowed Dryden a pension equal to the profits of the Laureateship, Lochiel is said to have bestowed on a celebrated bard, who had been plundered by marauders, and who implored alms in a pathetic Gaelic ode, three cows and the almost incredible sum of fifteen pounds sterling.

In truth, the character of this great chief was depicted two thousand five hundred years before his birth, and depicted,--such is the power of genius,--in colours which will be fresh as many years after his death.

He was the Ulysses of the Highlands, [329] He held a large territory peopled by a race which reverenced no lord, no king but himself.

For that territory, however, he owed homage to the House of Argyle.

He was bound to assist his feudal superiors in war, and was deeply in debt to them for rent.

This vassalage he had doubtless been early taught to consider as degrading and unjust.

In his minority he had been the ward in chivalry of the politic Marquess, and had been educated at the Castle of Inverary.

But at eighteen the boy broke loose from the authority of his guardian, and fought bravely both for Charles the First and for Charles the Second.

He was therefore considered by the English as a Cavalier, was well received at Whitehall after the Restoration, and was knighted by the hand of James.

The compliment, however, which was paid to him, on one of his appearances at the English Court, would not have seemed very flattering to a Saxon.

"Take care of your pockets, my lords," cried his Majesty; "here comes the king of the thieves."

The loyalty of Lochiel is almost proverbial: but it was very unlike what was called loyalty in England.

In the Records of the Scottish Parliament he was, in the days of Charles the Second, described as a lawless and rebellious man, who held lands masterfully and in high contempt of the royal authority, [330] On one occasion the Sheriff of Invernessshire was directed by King James to hold a court in Lochaber.

Lochiel, jealous of this interference with his own patriarchal despotism, came to the tribunal at the head of four hundred armed Camerons.

He affected great reverence for the royal commission, but he dropped three or four words which were perfectly understood by the pages and armourbearers, who watched every turn of his eye.

"Is none of my lads so clever as to send this judge packing?

I have seen them get up a quarrel when there was less need of one."

In a moment a brawl began in the crowd, none could say how or where.

Hundreds of dirks were out: cries of "Help" and "Murder" were raised on all sides: many wounds were inflicted: two men were killed: the sitting broke up in tumult; and the terrified Sheriff was forced to put himself under the protection of the chief, who, with a plausible bow of respect and concern, escorted him safe home.

It is amusing to think that the man who performed this feat is constantly extolled as the most faithful and dutiful of subjects by writers who blame Somers and Burnet as contemners of the legitimate authority of Sovereigns.

Lochiel would undoubtedly have laughed the doctrine of nonresistance to scorn.

But scarcely any chief in Invernessshire had gained more than he by the downfall of the House of Argyle, or had more reason than he to dread the restoration of that House.

Scarcely any chief in Invernessshire, therefore, was more alarmed and disgusted by the proceedings of the Convention.

But of all those Highlanders who looked on the recent turn of fortune with painful apprehension the fiercest and the most powerful were the Macdonalds.

More than one of the magnates who bore that widespread name laid claim to the honour of being the rightful successor of those Lords of the Isles, who, as late as the fifteenth century, disputed the preeminence of the Kings of Scotland.

This genealogical controversy, which has lasted down to our own time, caused much bickering among the competitors.

But they all agreed in regretting the past splendour of their dynasty, and in detesting the upstart race of Campbell.

The old feud had never slumbered.

It was still constantly repeated, in verse and prose, that the finest part of the domain belonging to the ancient heads of the Gaelic nation, Islay, where they had lived with the pomp of royalty, Iona, where they had been interred with the pomp of religion, the paps of Jura, the rich peninsula of Kintyre, had been transferred from the legitimate possessors to the insatiable Mac Callum More.

Since the downfall of the House of Argyle, the Macdonalds, if they had not regained their ancient superiority, might at least boast that they had now no superior.

Relieved from the fear of their mighty enemy in the West, they had turned their arms against weaker enemies in the East, against the clan of Mackintosh and against the town of Inverness.