by John Prebble
A child ran out of the darkness, a boy of twelve or thirteen, and he clawed at Glenlyon's legs, crying that he would go anywhere with the Campbell if his life were spared. Glenlyon could say nothing, and the boy was shot on Captain Drummond's order.
In the township of Inverrigan the soldiers also killed a woman and a boy of four or five. They bayoneted men in their beds, or dragged them outside and shot them on the dungheaps. They drove cattle, sheep and goats from the byres, looted the houses and burned the thatch and timber. They were shrieking shadows against the smoke, the snow and the flame. ‘I saw my two brothers killed,’ said a man who escaped them, ‘and three men more, and a woman, who were all buried before I came back.’
At Achnacone, by the mouth of Gleann Leac and a mile and a half eastward from Inverrigan, Sergeant Robert Barber had drawn out his men before five o'clock and told them what they were to do. They marched off by sections to all the houses of the township, and Barber took eighteen of them to the home of MacDonald of Achnacone who had been his kindly host for thirteen days. The soldiers' early rising had awoken the people of the house, and nine of them were now gathered drowsily about the fire, taking a morning's dram against the cold. John MacDonald of Achtriachtan was there, having spent the night with his brother of Achnacone, and they were seated together when Barber's men burst in the door and thrust their muskets through the windows. Achtriachtan's servant, a man called Kennedy, threw himself between his master and the soldiers. Eighteen shots were fired, almost at once, filling the small room with terrible noise and a fog of white smoke. Achtriachtan and Kennedy were killed instantly with three others, the remaining four were wounded and pretended to be dead. His anger raised, Barber groped in the smoke for Achnacone's shoulder, turning the tacksman on his back. ‘Are you still alive then?’
‘I am alive,’ said Achnacone, ‘and if I am to be killed by you I would rather it were not beneath my own roof.’
‘I've eaten your meat,’ said Barber, enjoying the jest against a Highland custom, ‘so I'll do you the favour and kill you without.’
Achnacone was carried outside, where the Argyll men were biting open fresh cartridges and ramming powder and ball into their muskets. He was placed against the wall of his house, and the black-lipped soldiers moved close to him, their pieces almost touching his body. He flung his plaid over their heads and ran. Inside the house the other wounded men broke through a back wall and escaped, and none of them could be followed in the snow and the dark. The body of John MacDonald of Achtriachtan, who had also been given Colonel Hill's protection, was thrown on a midden with Kennedy and the other dead. Barber urged on his men with fury. They stabbed, hacked and shot as the frightened MacDonalds ran from their doors, and it was said that when the soldiers were too weary to lift their arms they burned fourteen people alive in one cottage. They killed an old man of eighty. They killed a small child, and nothing was found of the boy but a bloody hand on the snow.
On the side of Meall Mor, fifteen hundred feet above the Field of the Dogs, Murdoch Matheson listened to the shooting and the cries…. How pure was the blood that was poured on the earth! King of Angels, Creator of the elements, have pity on these poor souls!
There was more killing at Achtriachtan, the village of poets. Here in the smooth hollow between Aonach Eagach and Bidean nam Bian the snow was sometimes so thick that a man could not see his extended hand, and sometimes the wind sucked it upwards, leaving the air empty and strangely still. Among the soldiers quartered there, under Sergeant Hendrie or Sergeant Purdie, was a Breadalbane man from Glen Lyon who was said to have been maddened by the memory of the Glencoe raids on his own country. With each shot, each thrust of his bayonet he shouted ‘There's for Catherine's blanket!’ and ‘That's for Colin's cows!’ If Ranald of the Shield were still alive, and a very old man, he was killed by the Campbells that morning in Achtriachtan, though his sons escaped. Another respected bard, Iain MacRaonuill Og, was carried away on the back of his son, and a third poet who escaped was Aonghus MacAlasdair Ruaidh, a member of the tacksman's family who had fought at Killiecrankie and glorified it in a long epic poem.
The people who ran from the soldiers at Achtriachtan had nowhere to go but eastward up the glen. To the west was the loch, the firing of guns and the dull blot of flames. North and above them was the sheer escarpment of Aonach Eagach, three thousand feet high, and to the south was another wall of mountains, swirling with snow. Even in the east the glen narrowed to a great fall of rock, cased in ice, and to cross this would have been almost impossible for half-naked women and children. Some of the young men went that way, perhaps, and down Lairig Gartain to Dalness and Appin, but the rest can only have gone to Coire Gabhail, the Hollow of Capture, a mile and a half from Achtriachtan, climbing three hundred feet to its narrow entrance and blocking it with a tree.
At dawn the snowstorm was gone from the floor of the glen. By the chief's house, now in flames, Lieutenant John Lindsay heard the approach of Duncanson's companies. He saw them on the lochside, a column of red and yellow swinging to a drum-beat, the Major mounted and wrapped in his cloak. The killing was over, and it is said that Glenlyon's piper, Hugh Mackenzie, was playing a Breadalbane rant in triumph.
Listen, then, to my pibroch,
it tells the news and tells it well
of slaughtered men
and forayed glen,
Campbell's banners and the victor's joy!
For three of the Argyll men, it was said, there was no joy and no victory. As they stumbled after some fugitives, below the trenches Fionn MacCumhail had dug on the Cliff of Feinn, the MacDonalds turned on them, dirk in hand. The Campbells were buried where they died, beneath cairns of stones and a stunted blackthorn tree.
Duncanson looked down from his saddle at MacIain's corpse and asked for news of the old fox's cubs. No one had seen their bodies, and he rode on to Inverrigan in an ill temper. Between Achnacone and Loch Leven the valley was a sluggish river of smoke, and the air was filled by the melancholy lowing of cattle waiting to be fed. Blood on their coats, their faces blackened by powder, some of Glenlyon's pikemen were prodding sheep and cows to a meadow in an ox-bow of the river. They waved their bonnets and shouted to the fresh companies marching by. At Inverrigan, before the tacksman's burning house and by the bodies on the dung-hills, Duncanson asked again for news of MacIain's sons. They had not been killed, they had not been seen. He told Glenlyon and Drummond to drive all the MacDonalds' stock to Invercoe, and he looked anxiously eastward for a sign of the companies from Fort William.
James Hamilton had left Inverlochy shortly after writing his order to Duncanson. His four hundred men had twenty miles or more to march, seven of them southward from the fort on the high drove-road to the shoulder of Meall a' Chaoruinn, then eastward for another seven to the head of Loch Leven. This Hamilton reached some time during the night when the blizzard was blowing its worst. His staggering, shivering, cursing men were exhausted, in no condition to go over the Devil's Staircase even had the weather made it possible. They took what shelter they could, in the open or in the cottages of a little township by the loch, and they waited for the storm to drop. It is hard to believe that Hamilton ever thought he could finish the march, at night, in that weather, and over some of the cruellest country in the Highlands. He too, perhaps, was as uncertain of the future as Duncanson. John Forbes, his second-in-command, welcomed the delay with relief. This was not the work he had meant when he told his brother that for all his pains he asked no more than an opportunity to serve his King and country. Two lieutenants of the battalion companies broke their swords when they heard what they were to do in Glencoe. They were put under arrest, and Hamilton sent them to Glasgow within the week. They may have been Francis Farquhar and Gilbert Kennedy, for both these officers of Hill's Regiment later gave evidence against their lieutenant-colonel.
The command left Kinlochleven when the blizzard dropped at dawn. Its march south over the Staircase was slow and difficult. A fog of snow and cloud was low on th
e hills, the wind still blowing, and the track hidden by great drifts. At eleven o'clock the struggling companies climbed over the gorge at the Meeting of the Waters and came down to Achtriachtan. Westward, the pass between the Cliff of the Feinn and the spur of Bidean nam Bian was closed with smoke. They marched towards it, watched by the MacDonalds from Coire Gabhail. They marched without hindrance. At Achtriachtan they burned the cottages still standing, and they shot an old man who started from the ruins and ran to the river. They drove in the cattle and sheep they found, and at the bend of the glen they made contact with Duncanson's wandering patrols. Except for that stumbling, frightened old man, and the bodies on the midden at Achtriachtan, the companies from Fort William saw none of the people of Glencoe.
And Hamilton was as angry with Glenlyon as Duncanson had been, when he discovered that MacIain's sons were not dead.
By late afternoon that Saturday the soldiers were gone. The cottages still burned, and the trampled snow about them was red. At Achnacone and Inverrigan, Carnoch and Brecklet, the Argyll men had killed a steer or a sheep for their breakfast, and what they had left of the carcasses lay by the bodies of the men they had also killed. There was a smell of death, and the sweet hospitable smell of burning peat. There were no voices, and there was no lowing of cattle. The soldiers had taken with them nine hundred cows, two hundred horses, and a great many sheep and goats. They also took what they could carry from the houses: plaids and shoes, pans and kettles, brooches, buckles, belts and women's combs. They took plates and cups, spits and girdles, meal and whisky, herring and salmon from the roof-beams, hides, fleece and blankets from the beds. They took such things as the Glencoe men had once taken from Breadalbane and Argyll, from Glen Lyon and Kilbride, from Cowal, Lorn and Rosneath. In the opinion of many of them, an outstanding debt had at last been paid. And Robert Campbell may have recovered his fine red stallion from the stable at Carnoch, his wife's copper kettle from the kitchen.
‘For a just vengeance and a public example,’ the Master had told John Hill, ‘the thieving tribe of Glencoe may be rooted out to a purpose.’ Duncanson had repeated this, ordering Glenlyon to ‘cut off root and branch’. Glenlyon failed. When he reported to Hamilton outside Inverrigan at noon on Saturday, he said that his command had killed MacIain and thirty-six of his men, although it cannot be known whether he included in this number the women and children who had been shot. With the old man killed on Hamilton's march, the final figure accepted was thus thirty-eight, a tenth or less of MacIain's people.
One reason for Robert Campbell's failure to do as he was ordered lay in his own character, in a mind fuddled by drink and self-indulgence, in his indecision, in a professional incompetence that put no proper guards on the southern passes. But the principal reason was the weather, the blinding snowstorm that made pursuit and hunt impossible, that hid a wounded man like Achnacone, or women crouching like hares beside the dry-stone walls.
One more reason must be considered. Had other men been sent to Glencoe at the beginning of February, two of Hill's ruffianly companies for example, the clan-hating Cameronians or other Lowlandmen from Stirling, it is probable that more of the MacDonalds would have been killed, despite the weather. Fifty years later, after Culloden, Lowland regiments would be thorough and merciless in the killing of Highland men and women for whom they felt no respect and no kinship of race. The Campbells of Argyll's Regiment were Highland, and the inviolability of hospitality was as sacred to them as to any other clan, murder under trust was as great a sin. This is remembered in the stories which the Glencoe people told for another hundred and fifty years. Confused and contradictory though the legends became, they do record the truth that some of the Argyll men were revolted by the orders given them, and that within the oath of obedience they had taken they attempted to warn the people. In this, perhaps, they showed more humanity than John Hill. And for each warning remembered by the MacDonalds, there may have been another forgotten. When the order was given two hours before dawn on Saturday, there were soldiers who killed no one, who turned their backs on running shadows, who heard no frightened breathing in the dark.
A woman of Inverrigan, it was said, took shelter with her child and a dog beneath the bridge that crossed the burn of Allt-na-Muidhe. The crying of the child was heard, and a soldier was sent to kill it. He came to the bridge, and saw the woman holding her plaid over the child's mouth to stifle its cries. He bayoneted the dog and went back, holding up the wet steel. ‘That's not human blood,’ said the officer, though the story does not explain how he knew. ‘Kill the child, or I'll kill you.’ So the soldier went back to the bridge. He drew his hanger and he cut the little finger from the child's hand, smearing its blood on his sword.*
Before nightfall, some of the MacDonald men came down from the corries to bury the dead, or to hide them beneath cairns of stones against the day when they could be properly interred on Eilean Munde. At Invercoe, Archibald MacDonald came cautiously to the black ruin of the chief's house, and he saw the old man's body lying on its face by the door. Close by were two of his servants, and Duncan Don from the Brae of Mar, who still lived. Archibald MacDonald sat by him, and spoke to him.
Ronald MacDonald came back to his own house by Carnoch. That morning he and his father had been awoken by the sound of firing and the cries of their neighbours. Although Ronald MacDonald escaped, the old man was dragged from his bed to the door and there clubbed with musket-butts. When the soldiers were gone, he crawled to another house, and in this he was burnt to death. Now, at dusk, Ronald MacDonald gathered his father's bones from the smouldering wood and buried them. He walked on to Achnacone where, he said later, ‘I saw the body of Achtriachtan, and three more, cast out and covered with dung’.
Murdoch Matheson climbed to the top of Signal Rock, and there he composed his lament. He saw the cowl of smoke above the little loch in the east, the black embers of the snow, and the thought of treachery, he said, was like a cry of distress. Oh, God I am filled with gloom as I see these hills! The foray had come upon his friends as a rock comes down the hill. Given equal odds between them and the Lowland band, the feathered birds of the mountains would have screamed from their enemies' corpses. He thought with sorrow of the young hunters who were dead, who had killed the stag in the high forests and now were dead. They were not cowards, these men who will sleep on the Isle of Munda…
Somewhere at this time, MacIaini's sons must have found their mother, for it was from her, they said, that they learnt how the chief had been killed. They bandaged the fingers the soldiers had gnawed, they wrapped her in a plaid and took her away with them to the hills. No one knows what happened to the body of Alasdair MacDonald, twelfth Chief of Glencoe, though it is said to lie beneath the weeds and the corroded stones of Saint Munda's roofless chapel.
Because they believed that the soldiers would return, the MacDonalds did not remain in the glen. John MacDonald, who was now MacIain and the thirteenth of the name, gathered those he could and took them over into Appin, by way of Gleann Leac or Gleann an Fiodh. Some young men hid in the caves and the corries below the Pap of Glencoe, or went beyond Kinlochleven to Keppoch's people on Loch Treig. Some, from Achtriachtan, came down from Coire Gabhail and went out to Rannoch and their cold shielings on the Black Mount. Clan Iain was scattered, and would live or die like the cat, the eagle and the deer until summer. Many of the fugitives, the very young and the very old, did not survive the first night, for at dusk the wind rose again and there was more snow. It was said that old MacIain's wife died then. The suffering of the rest was told to their friends in Appin, who told it to others, who sent news of it to Edinburgh, from whence it went to London where the pamphleteer Charles Leslie put it into print.
How dismal may you imagine the case of the poor women and children was then! It was lamentable, past expression. Their husbands and fathers, and near relations, were forced to flee for their lives. They themselves almost stripped, and nothing left them, and their houses being burnt, and not one house nearer than six m
iles. And to get thither they were to pass over mountains, and wreaths of snow in a vehement storm, wherein the greatest part of them perished through hunger and cold. It fills me with horror to think of the poor stripped children and women, some with child, and some giving suck, wrestling against a storm in mountains and heaps of snow, and at length to be overcome, and give over, and fall down, and die miserably.
Some days after the massacre, a man came to Appin from Loch Tay. When those he spoke to were satisfied that he could be trusted, he was taken to where John MacDonald was in hiding. He said that he had been sent by Alexander Campbell of Barcaldine, chamberlain to the Earl of Breadalbane. He said that if John MacDonald of Glencoe, and Alasdair Og MacDonald his brother, would swear and write under their hands that the Earl was innocent of the slaughter, then Breadalbane would use his influence to secure them full pardon and restitution.
5
UNDER THE BROAD SEAL
‘For there was much blood on these people's hands’
BY the end of March, Argyll's officers were in Edinburgh. Their regiment was quartered on Leith, awaiting tents and transports for Flanders. Any day Glenlyon could be seen in the Royal Coffee-house by Parliament Close, his back against a wall, his red coat open, and his dark eyes burning in his white face. Men came to stare at him above a dish of chocolate, and their macabre curiosity was dramatically satisfied. ‘I would do it again!’ he shouted, ‘I would dirk any man in Scotland or England, without asking cause, if the King gave me orders!’ And then, challenging their hostile faces, ‘So should every good subject of His Majesty!’ There was another side to his vain-glory, which may have been more sincere. He told some men privately that he had liked none of the business. He had killed Inverrigan with regret. He would have refused the order, but he feared a council of war, and what man could honestly say he would have done otherwise? He showed Duncanson's order to those who asked, and the Jacobites in the city made good use of the wretched man's indiscretion. They left copies of the letter in all the coffee-houses, and they spread a rumour that Glenlyon had petitioned the Privy Council for a reward.