by John Prebble
... we declare to you and all the world, we scorn your usurper and the indemnities of his government; and to save you further trouble by your frequent invitations, we assure you that we are satisfied our king take his own time and way to manage his dominion and punish his rebels. We will all die with our swords in our hands before we fail in our loyalty and sworn allegiance to our sovereign.
They then marched upon the city of Perth, thirty-five miles to the south. Between them and this ambitious objective was the cathedral town of Dunkeld, held for Mackay by a single regiment, the Earl of Angus's Foot. But this was no ordinary battalion of men. They called themselves Cameronians, being devoutly attached to the teachings of Richard Cameron, a Covenanting field preacher who had been killed when the Episcopacy harried the West, nine years before. Their young Lieutenant-Colonel was William Cleland, student of St Andrew's, writer of doggerel verse, and now a soldier of the Lord. When the Cameronians heard the screaming of Clan Donald's pipes, and saw the flame of banners on a hill to their north, they sang a psalm, blew on their matches, and waited in quiet courage.
With rare foresight, Cannon sent two troops of horse about the town to block any retreat across the River Tay. Cleland had no intention of retiring, however. He posted his men in ditches, in the cathedral and steeple, behind the walls of parks and gardens. At seven o'clock on a Sunday morning, the Highlanders advanced. The MacDonalds were fiercely eager to avenge their kinsmen who had died on the redcoat line at Killiecrankie, although one of them, Donald of the Blue Eyes, the son of Black Alasdair of Glengarry, had taken payment for his own death by killing eighteen of Mackay's men before he was cut down. They drove in the Cameronian outposts without difficulty, but a town was no battlefield for the clans. Against the entrenched ditches, the stone of the garden walls and the cathedral, their broadswords and their bows, their dirks and axes were useless. They stumbled through the musketry, fired their own weapons, and then rushed on to be impaled by pikes or hewn down by halberds. Dying from a bullet in his liver, and another wound in his head, young Cleland tried to reach Dunkeld House so that his men might not see him die, but he was dead before he got to the door. This loss, however, strengthened the stubborn resistance of the Cameronians. The battle lasted three hours, and then the clans retreated sullenly before the advance of the Angus pikemen. Some took shelter in the houses, but the Cameronians turned the keys in the doors and set fire to the buildings. In this way the whole town burned. Though they had gathered at Dalcomera like giants of the Feinn, and had been an irresistible wave at Killiecrankie, the Highlanders were driven from Dunkeld by one resolute regiment strong in the righteousness of the Lord. That afternoon, as the clans looked back at the burning town, they heard the voices of the Cameronians singing psalms.
Among the three hundred dead the Jacobites had left in the streets were many men of Glencoe.
Six days later, twelve chiefs met at Blair Castle, still firm in their resistance to William of Orange, but uneasy now about the future. They wanted to go home but, as if ashamed of this, they promised to gather again when any one of them needed the protection of all. ‘We do all solemnly promise,’ said their bond, ‘to assist one another to the utmost of our power….’ Five MacDonald chiefs signed the bond, including MacIain, and the other seven signators were the chiefs of the Camerons, Stewarts and MacGregors, MacNeills, Robertsons, Farquharsons and Macleans. Against their names were set the number of men whom each promised to bring into the field should their common safety or King James's cause require it. The total was no more than eighteen hundred. Lochiel offered two hundred only, Keppoch and Maclean a hundred, and MacIain could promise less than half the hundred or more he had led to Dalcomera. Their losses in the brief summer war had been bitter, and all were reluctant to risk more on an uncertain future.
The MacDonalds of Glencoe travelled home with their friends of Keppoch. They went westward through Breadalbane, determined to take their soldier's pay from this Campbell country. The Earl of Breadalbane had played a cautious game since the fall of James II, watching how the wind took great men's loyalties, and keeping his own to himself. His kinsmen, like Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, waited with him. The Jacobite leaders, knowing that the Earl coveted his nephew Argyll's leadership of Clan Campbell, believed that he would in time declare for King James, but the Glencoe and Keppoch men had no time for such political subtleties. That October they raped the valley of Glen Lyon, from its narrow mouth at Fortingall twenty-five miles on to its last twist into the southern wall of Rannoch Moor. After a summer spent in arms, they said, this was the way to gather their winter mart, the cattle customarily killed and salted at Martinmas.
It was the greatest raid the Lochaber men ever made into Breadalbane. It was also the safest. There was no bloody opposition as there had been at Sron a' Chlachain and Glen Meran in their fathers' youth. The Glen Lyon women were scarcely home from the shielings, and the men were still dispersed at the harvest. The MacDonalds pillaged and burned without let. They drove off fifteen hundred head of cattle, horses, sheep and goats. From the houses and cottages they took everything that could be carried, even, said a Glen Lyon chronicler, a blanket and cradle from beneath a child. The value of their plunder was said to be over £8,000 Scots.
Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, crippled by bankruptcy, owned nothing in the glen now but the house and policies of Chesthill, but what he did have was taken from him by the Glencoe men in one afternoon: six great English mares and three plough-horses, 208 cows, 169 sheep, 10 goats, and a splendid brown stallion worth £200. His pleasant, grey-stone house was plundered of ‘several plenishings such as rack-spits, plates, trenchers and candlesticks, and other things estimate to £40 Scots’. His full loss was just under £3,000 Scots. The Keppoch men looted Cambuslay, the house and estate belonging to Glenlyon's brother Colin, taking stock and goods worth £2,283 Scots.
Slowly the MacDonalds went home through the golden October days, by Loch Lyon and Glen Meran, round the brown shoulder of Beinn a' Chreachain to the Water of Tulla on Rannoch Moor. They turned westward along the shallow stream for five miles to Achallader. Here, where MacIain had charmed old General Drummond six years before, was one of the Earl of Breadalbane's holdings. Fearing that it might be used as a garrison by Mackay, Alexander Cannon had given the MacDonalds orders to destroy it. They pulled down what they could of the castle, burnt the roof-trees of the cottages and drove off all the stock. And this they would have done, no doubt, without Colonel Cannon's order.
Parting company with the Keppoch men, MacIain gathered his women from the shielings on the Black Mount, passed through the shadows of the Great and Little Herdsmen, and came home to Glencoe. It was the Feast of Samhain and the end of Summer. Within a week or two snow fell on the Highlands, and the world was white, and black, and silent.
It was a hard winter. In November, News Letters from Edinburgh to London reported that ‘the Highland rebels, according to their ancient custom and practice in this season of the year, have been to make a visit to some of their neighbours in the Lowlands’. Six hundred clansmen had come down as far as Glasgow, at the invitation of Jacobite sympathizers inside the city, it was said. They were boldly encamped six miles outside the gates, molesting travellers, robbing the Post, and terrorizing farmers.
The Glencoe men were not with them. Content with the booty of Glen Lyon, they stayed at home. There were proclamations out against them, as there had been at every Mercat Cross since July, declaring them to be murderers, traitors and rebels. But a word is only a word, and in Clan Donald's opinion those who called them traitors were quite plainly rebels themselves. If the true King were to return, said Iain Lom, just men would think no more of cutting off William's head than they would of slicing an ear from a rat.
2
THE BLACK GARRISON
‘The time is short, the time for action is near’
IN March 1690, Colonel John Hill arrived in Edinburgh from Ireland. He lodged himself modestly in one of the wynds, close to the houses of
the great gentlemen whose influence he earnestly desired. It was at the invitation of some of them that this old English soldier had returned to Scotland after thirty years, and his wish to be of service to the new régime sprang as much from honest zeal as it did from a too-slender purse. He was a simple, uncomplicated man with no impressive claim to blood or lineage, and nothing is known of his ancestry or his descendants. He was skilled in soldierly diplomacy, strong in the Protestant faith and well versed in the classics and the Scriptures, both of which he found a comfort in trouble and adversity. He was approaching his seventieth year and his health was poor, but he had two spinster daughters to support in London, and no income except that which his wits and experience might still earn him.
As a young man he had been a foot-soldier in the army of the Commonwealth, one of those plain, russet-coated captains who knew what they fought for and loved what they knew, according to their Lord Protector. A major of Colonel Fitch's Regiment, he served in Ireland against the Papists, and in June 1654, was one of the thousand men sent to the Highlands to garrison the forts which General George Monck intended to build there, now that all support for the monarchy had been crushed. Hill probably welcomed this service. The great wars were over, and only in the mountains might a young and ambitious officer find opportunity for action and advancement. These Cromwellian soldiers were members of the finest army ever created by England. They did their work well, with firmness, common sense, and a rough compassion. ‘A man may ride all over Scotland with a switch in his hand and £100 in his pocket,’ reported Monck proudly, ‘which he could not have done these five hundred years.’ The pacification of the Highlands by the Commonwealth was done without stripping the clans of their dignity and pride of race, without the hanging and burning, the proscription of dress and tartan, and the deliberate attempt at extermination which later British governments thought necessary.
Monck placed his most important fort on the shore of Loch Linnhe below Ben Nevis, and the Highlanders called it Gearasdan dubh nan Inbhir-Lochaidh, The Black Garrison of Inverlochy. It was built by those thousand infantrymen from Ireland, under the direction of Colonel William Brayne and Major John Hill. It was protected on three sides by the water of the loch, and on the other by marshy ground. With more concern for present security than future needs, Brayne cut down all the timber in the neighbourhood to build his ramparts and ravelins, and to give himself a clear field of fire. His successors were to complain bitterly that they had to rely on seaborne ships for their fuel.
In the beginning the strength of the garrison was formidable, ten companies of Foot drawn from every regiment in Scotland, with Brayne as Governor and Hill as his deputy. Monck, the good soldier, insisted that there should never be less than seven days' provision and ammunition in the fort, and that every man should carry with him at all times his Twelve Apostles, a dozen tubes containing powder and ball for his matchlock. There was sense in this. The land about the fort was Cameron country, and young Lochiel, with Montrose ever in his mouth, was anxious for sport and battle. Now and then he and his clansmen attacked wood-parties and patrols, and it was on one of these occasions that he tore the throat from an English officer with his teeth. It was, he said, the sweetest bite he had ever taken.
By 1656, when John Hill succeeded Brayne as Governor of Inverlochy, soldiers and clansmen lived side by side in amiable, if watchful, peace. Hill's garrison now consisted of 250 men, a gunner, a store-keeper, and a preacher. With only this handful to support him as Lieutenant-Colonel and Governor, he had full civil and military power over Lochaber, but he must have used his powers wisely, for he had no serious trouble with the clans. Both Lochiel and MacIain became his friends, though the attachment of one to the Episcopacy and the other to Rome must have troubled his Nonconformist conscience. His officers hunted and fished with the Cameron and MacDonald gentry, and it was on a stag-hunt that Hill persuaded the yellow-haired Lochiel to acknowledge the authority of the Protectorate. With his growing understanding of Highland pride and vanity, perhaps it was Hill who suggested that the Camerons' submission should be made in a flattering and tactful ceremony. Led by his pipers, Lochiel brought his clan into the fort one morning and surrendered his arms as a servant of Charles II. The Camerons then marched once round the parade-ground and picked up their weapons as peaceful citizens of the Commonwealth. Thereafter Englishmen and Highlanders met freely, but on Hill's strict orders, and on pain of flogging, the soldiers were not allowed to drink with the clansmen.
The most gratifying friendship which John Hill made in those days of his youth was with the Forbes family of Culloden. He met them first when he waited at Inverness for orders to go to Inverlochy. John Forbes, the laird, was a Member of Parliament and a supporter of the Commonwealth, and he warmly welcomed the young Englishman to his home on the Moray Firth. On furlough from the spartan life of Inverlochy, Hill was grateful for the hospitality and comfort of Culloden House, and enjoyed the gentle arguments he had with John Forbes on the precise interpretation of the Scriptures, or the particular reference which the classics might have to their times. He also became affectionately attached to the laird's sons. He called the Forbes family ‘the House of Duncan, my good friends’, and meant it deeply.
When the news reached Inverlochy in 1658 that Oliver Cromwell was dead, John Hill proclaimed his son, Richard, as the new Lord Protector. He stood in the square with his red-coated garrison drawn up behind him, and before him a great gathering of the Lochaber chiefs and their followers – Lochiel and Glengarry, Keppoch and Glencoe. The October day ended with a banquet, with songs, piping and dancing, but nobody can have truly believed that the Commonwealth would now endure. Within a few months John Hill was a Governor of nothing, and a Lieutenant-Colonel in no army. On the same parade-ground he handed the keys of Inverlochv to Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, who accepted them on behalf of King Charles II. When Hill was gone down Loch Linnhe, the exulting Camerons pulled the Black Garrison to pieces, stone by stone, and they burned its timber in a joyful celebration of the Restoration.
For the next thirty years little is known of John Hill. Commonwealth officers who had done their duty, who had not had the wit or guile to change their coats when the wind blew strongly from another direction at Oliver's death, could not hope for position or preferment in the King's army. George Monck was now Duke of Albemarle, having changed his coat most handsomely, but he still had some loyalty to his old comrades, and it may have been his influence that secured for Hill the return of sixty pounds which the Governor had advanced from his own pocket to pay the preacher at Inverlochy. And that was all that Hill got from the Restoration. He married, his daughters were born. He went to Dublin and there secured the favour of the Capels. He became Comptroller of the Household to the most powerful member of the family, the Earl of Essex, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In Dub'in Castle his life was comfortable and his duties not too burdensome. But he grew old, and his health changed from robust good feeling to an endless succession of nagging maladies. His eyes troubled him with incessant soreness, his limbs with persistent aches and stiffness. His greatest comfort was his memory of the Highlands and his correspondence with John Forbes of Culloden. ‘I am sorry to hear you tell of growing crazy,’ he once wrote to the Laird. ‘God grant our elder may be our best days (though not in reference to this world, yet as to a better).’
Having no sons of his own, he fussed with concern for Culloden's. Duncan the heir and his brother John. He offered to use what little influence he had with the Capels on their behalf, should Forbes wish to send them to Ireland. And all the time he longed to meet his friend again. ‘What joy it would be to see you; but the distance being so great, and the sea intervening, puts me to great doubt of being made so happy. I commend you to the care of our good God, and remain in the old manner your truly loving and humble servant.’ But old John Forbes died before they might have been re-united.
When the Earl of Essex became the victim of his many enemies and was removed by Royal command to the Tower of
London (where he was found one morning with his throat cut), Hill was not without other friends in Ireland. Six years later, in 1689, a widower and well over sixty, he was Constable of Belfast, defending this very English town against the wild Irish of the south who came to destroy it for James II. The Protestant Revolution must have seemed like a miracle to the old Cromwellian. Not only did it represent, to him at least, a triumph for the causes of his youth, but it also offered him a real opportunity to return to a career that had been abruptly ended by the Restoration. He was not the first, or the last, old soldier to believe that a new war was but a resumption of the last, or that a long interbellum did nothing to a good officer's wits and arteries. At the beginning of 1690 he moved himself busily to obtain what he most desired: a return to the Highlands in a position of authority, and a regiment to give substance to his long-empty title of Colonel. To help him with his petitions, he asked the burgesses of Belfast for a Certificate of Recommendation. Though these gentlemen had not thought of paying him the money he had taken from his own purse to buy off some of the Irish kerns, they gave him his certificate with the paper-gratitude of men who had lately expected to be paupers themselves.
Colonel John Hill hath for several years late past resided in this place in the station of Constable of the Castle, in which station he acted to the great satisfaction of all concerned, and to the advantage and benefit of this Corporation; and more especially in March last when the Irish came down into the North and possessed themselves on this country and town, he did appear zealous for the interest of their now Majesties King William and Queen Mary, in giving advice and direction to the inhabitants how to behave themselves with the enemy; and by his great expense upon their officers, and prudent converse with them until the arrival of their Majesties' army from England, did (under God) prevent the firing and ruin of this place and country adjacent….