by John Prebble
It was before these men that John Hill was summoned at the end of May. ‘I shall give all ready obedience,’ he told them, ‘taking only two days to settle affairs and give the necessary orders here. I shall bring such of the officers as are upon the place, many of them being abroad getting up recruits.’ And perhaps he may have wondered if Hamilton, wherever he might be in Ireland, would be as willing to go to Edinburgh.
The Commission sat in Holyroodhouse during the last week of May and the first three of June, a bank of scarlet and white robes, nodding grey wigs, and the brittle flash of jewelled rings. Witnesses appeared before them under their protection, whatever charges might be against them. They heard John Hill and John Forbes, Francis Farquhar and Gilbert Kennedy. They heard depositions from Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglas and Colin Campbell of Dressalch, and they listened to James Campbell of Glenlyon's company, now a soldier in the garrison at Stirling. They examined Lord Aberuchil and Sir Gilbert Elliott, Clerk to the Privy Council. They called ten men of Glencoe before them, giving them protection against ‘all captions, arrests, or other diligences of that sort until the tenth of July next to come’. The MacDonalds walked boldly into the great hall of the black palace, where their sons and grandsons would one day dance before a young Stuart prince. They stood below the Commissioners with their plaids thrown back and their bonnets in their hands, and they told what they remembered of that dawn when their Campbell guests had turned upon them. They were
John MacDonald of Glencoe and his brother Alasdair
Alexander MacDonald the son of Achtriachtan
Alexander MacDonald the tacksman of Dalness
Ronald MacDonald an indweller of Leacantium
Ronald MacDonald in Inverrigan
Duncan MacEanruig in Inverrigan
Donald MacStarken in Laroch
Alexander MacDonald in Brecklet, and
Angus MacDonald in Strone.
But the Commissioners did not examine Major Robert Duncanson of the Earl of Argyll's Regiment. They did not hear Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, Captain Thomas Drummond, Lieutenant Lindsay or Ensign Lundie. They did not question Sergeant Barber or Sergeant Purdie, or any of the sergeants, corporals, drummers and sentinels, excepting James Campbell from Stirling Castle. The Argyll men were in the trenches before Namur, and it would seem that none of the Commissioners thought it advisable to ask the King to send some of them home. They did call Lieutenant-Colonel James Hamilton from Ireland, but he ignored the summons.
John Hill gave his evidence to the Commission on Saturday, 7 June, within a day of arriving by express from Fort William. He and the officers he brought from his garrison, Forbes, Farquhar and Kennedy, made a brave show of scarlet and gold in the dusky hall. He was plain and honest, and said what he knew and what he had done. He was content that judgement upon him would be guided by God's mercy. MacDonald of Glengarry was examined on the same day, and both he and Hill told the Commissioners about the Private Articles which Breadalbane had agreed with the chiefs at Achallader. Though these had been rumour and gossip for nearly four years, and though the King had been informed of them, the Commissioners now felt obliged to place them before Parliament. The Members scented blood. Breadalbane had no friends, and his enemies leapt baying from the kennels. They voted for his arrest, and ordered the Lord Advocate to prepare the charge of treason. The old man was lifted from his lodgings one morning, and taken up the cobbled street to the Castle. He was in sudden terror for his life, and believed that he would leave his prison only to die beneath the Maiden. Tweeddale was unhappy, and he asked the King what he should do to save Breadalbane from Parliament's vindictive fury. He got no immediate reply.
On 20 June the Commissioners signed their Report, and the next day it was sent to the King in his camp before Namur. Bad storms delayed the pacquet, and William did not receive the long and detailed account until late in the first week of July. By then its contents were known in Edinburgh, and had been hotly debated beneath the tapestries of Parliament Hall. To nobody's surprise perhaps, the King's loyal and beloved Commissioners decided that his orders had not authorized the slaughter, ‘even as to the thing itself, and far less as to the manner of it, seeing that all his instructions do plainly import that the most obstinate of the rebels might be received into mercy upon taking the oath’. As for his additional instruction of 16 January 1692 – that if the Glencoe men could be well separated from the rest it would be a proper vindication of the public justice to extirpate them – the Commissioners said this meant ‘they were only to be proceeded against in the way of public justice, and in no other way’. This unique definition of the verb to extirpate will be found in no dictionary.
Having begun with an exoneration of their Royal Master, the Commissioners continued by blaming his principal servant in Scotland. Stair's orders, they said, had exceeded the King's wishes, and had been ‘the only warrant and cause of the slaughter which, in effect, was a barbarous murder’. They would not allow him the excuse that he had not known of MacIain's journey to take the oath at Inveraray. They quoted his letter to Livingstone of 30 January, proving that he did know and that he was glad Glencoe had not come in within the time prescribed. Their condemnation of Glenlyon, Duncanson, Hamilton, and other soldiers, was implicit, and although they did not name Colin Campbell of Dressalch and Gilbert Elliott in their conclusions, the responsibility of these men was also made plain. The scoring of MacIain's name from Ardkinglas's certificate had been a great error, ‘and those who advised the not presenting thereof [to the Council] were in the wrong, and seem to have had a malicious design against Glencoe’. Those who had advised the not presenting thereof were almost all Campbells.
When the Members of Parliament heard that the Report was away to the King in Flanders they insisted upon seeing a copy of it, and all relevant papers, ‘for their satisfaction and full information’. Between two masters, Tweeddale surrendered to the most immediate and pressing, and gave the Members what they demanded. He told the King that they had been deliberately delaying the other business of Parliament until they got the Report, and he apologized for making it public, but it had seemed necessary ‘to vindicate the justice and honour of your government by laying the blame upon the instruments of so inhumane and barbarous a slaughter’. His choice of words was rarely felicitous, an instrument is but a tool in a responsible hand. Since he had not been able to refuse Parliament, he asked William for permission to extend the time it was to sit, ‘that your service may be done with cheerfulness and alacrity’. He was miserably aware that this would enrage the King, who was usually out of sympathy with the noisy self-importance of the Scots Parliament, and thought it could be of little service to him now that it had acknowledged him King of Scotland.
Parliament enjoyed itself. It had not had such power since the Convention of the Estates six years before when it had recreated itself. It was the responsible voice of Scotland, and it would not be heard again with authority for fifteen years, when it would then debate its own suicide. The Members listened to a reading of the Report and all the depositions of evidence, the cold voice of a clerk beating against the noise of the city beyond, telling the story of MacIain's death, of a child's bloody hand upon the snow, of the burning of houses and the lifting of cattle. There were several pleasant days of debate on whether Parliament should or should not send an Address to the King when it reached its conclusions. On 26 June it was at last in agreement, such an Address should indeed be sent. Wearily, and wondering what store of Royal resentment he was laying up against himself, Tweeddale again wrote to the King, asking for authority to extend the session for another fortnight. There was now another debate on a motion to send the Address immediately, without further discussion, and this was comfortably defeated, since the Address would mean nothing if it did not clearly determine responsibility. Was the Master of Stair to blame, or was… nobody mentioned the name. The old fox of Breadalbane was in the Castle, and now the Members fell upon the Dalrymples. In a long sitting of nine hours, w
ell into candlelight and well past a civilized man's supper-time, one question was furiously argued. Did Stair's orders exceed the King's warrant? The motion was at last put, whereupon the Earl of Argvll, who had been silent until now, decided to speak upon it, and was ruled out of order. What he wished to say can only be guessed at, a defence of his friend Stair perhaps, a plea for the honour of his regiment and the men of his clan who had been the executioners. He was the only one of the Master's few friends in Parliament who opened his mouth at this moment. The rest cautiously abstained, and the vote was carried. Stair had indeed exceeded the King's instructions, and had urged the destruction of the Glencoe men ‘with a great deal of zeal as a thing acceptable, and of public use’. In this way many Members repaid the Secretary for a wounding shaft of mockery or an ignored petition for preferment, for his lack of Presbyterian zeal, his cynical intelligence, and his brilliantly contrived success. He was not condemned for Glencoe so much as for what he had been all his life.
Parliament had not done with the matter, and was still in debate when July began. The sittings were sometimes rowdy, and sometimes charged with deep emotion and hatred. The dignity of the Members was outraged at the end of June by the publication of a pamphlet called Information for the Master of Stair, written by, or at the command of, the Secretary's younger brother Hew Dalrymple. It was a loyal attempt to defend him, arguing that he had given no direct orders, that he had merely used words like hope, and think, and believe. It laid the responsibility for the massacre upon Sir Thomas Livingstone, and condemned the officers and men of Argyll's Regiment for carrying it out. This latter charge was valid, and would still be so two and a half centuries later.
Though the command of superior officers be very absolute, yet no command against the laws of nature is binding; so that a soldier, retaining his commission, ought to refuse to execute any barbarity, as if a soldier should be commanded to shoot a man passing by, inoffensively, upon the street, no such command would exempt him from the punishment of murder.
The point had been debated by Parliament on 28 June, and the arguments it heard were reported by the writer of a News Letter.
It being objected that a Secretary might explain and order what he pleased, to which it was answered that the thing required by the Secretary must be lawful in itself, as the killing of any of the Highlanders that had refused the indemnity was, had it been the King's mind; but that if the Secretary had written to do a thing in itself unlawful, as the killing of men under trust, his letters, no more than the instructions could justify any man that obeyed them, because the laws of God and nature are above those of men. And therefore, whoever made quarter upon the Glencoe men in order to kill them, if they had any orders to produce, they could not be justified by them.
Though they were of one mind with Hew Dalrymple on this matter, the Members thought his pamphlet was impertinent. They declared it ‘false and calumnious’, and ordered it to be so marked. They summoned Hew Dalrymple before them, to explain why he had circulated such a vile paper when they were still in discussion. He apologized promptly, saying that it had been written and printed before Parliament began its debate, and that what was offensive in it was a mistake of judgement which he truly regretted.
On 10 July, Parliament drew up its Address to the King Touching the Murder of the Glencoe Men, and dispatched it to William. It was a far more emotional and critical document than the Commission's Report, and it condemned the slaughter as ‘Murder under Trust’. It exonerated the King, of course, since its declared objective was to vindicate the honour of Crown and Government. It also excused Thomas Livingstone on the ground that he had not known of MacIain's oath. This was special pleading, and a victory for Livingstone's friends in Parliament. The Commander-in-Chief certainly had not known of the tardy oath when he wrote to Hill and Hamilton on 18 January, ordering them to fall upon the rebels who had not submitted. He may not have known when he received the King's Additional Instructions of 16 January. But he did know on 23 January, admitting it in a letter to Hamilton of that date, telling the Deputy-Governor that it was none the less the Court's wish that the thieving nest of Glencoe should be entirely rooted out. He had had an opportunity to refuse his orders, like Kennedy or Farquhar, and he had done nothing. Whatever Parliament decided, his guilt is plain.
‘We proceeded to examine Colonel Hill's part of the business,’ said the Address, ‘and were unanimous that he was clear and free of the slaughter.’ Though orders had been sent to him, he had avoided them and had given no instructions to his officers ‘till such time as, knowing that his Lieutenant-Colonel had received orders, he, to save his honour and authority, gave a general order to Hamilton to take four hundred men and to put in due execution the orders which others had given him’. This too was special pleading, perhaps, and did not relieve the old man of the moral responsibility which two of his lieutenants had met by breaking their swords. But at least he had been honest, more concerned with duty and honour than self-preservation. He had remained in Edinburgh to give evidence before Parliament, and now he must have gone back to Fort William with a lighter heart.
Stair was the guilty man, and the Address bluntly stated its opinion that he had been ‘the original cause of this unhappy business’. Guilty, too, was Robert Duncanson of Argyll's, and Parliament regretted that it had not seen the original of his order to Glenlyon. Other ‘actors in the slaughter of the Glencoe men under trust’ were Captain Campbell of Glenlyon, Captain Drummond, Lieutenant Lindsay, Ensign Lundie, and Sergeant Barber, and Parliament asked the King to send these men home from Flanders for prosecution. But this was impossible, even had William felt obliged to meet the request. The Argyll Regiment was at that moment in the hands of the French, having been shamefully surrendered by its general officer at Dixemude.
The Address concluded with a charitable and honourable appeal to William.
We shall only add that the remains of the Glencoe men who escaped the slaughter, being reduced to great poverty by the depredation and devastation that was then committed upon them, and having ever since lived peaceably under your Majesty's protection, have now applied to us that we might intercede with your Majesty that some reparation may be made them for their loss. We do humbly lay their case before your Majesty as worthy of your Royal charity and compassion, that such orders may be given for supplying them in their necessities as your Majesty shall think fit.
John MacDonald of Glencoe, and his kinsman Alexander MacDonald, the son of Achtriachtan, had put a petition before Tweeddale and Parliament. Their widows and orphans, they said, were starving, and all were completely poor. They had lost all their clothes, money, houses and plenishings by plunder or fire. They had been robbed of fourteen or fifteen hundred cows, five hundred horses and many sheep and goats. This was a great deal more than the Argyll men were reported to have taken from the valley, but the difference in accounting is of no importance. Clan lain Abrach received no reparation.
Neither the Commission nor Parliament had been able to examine Lieutenant-Colonel James Hamilton. He had been summoned, and he had stayed where he was in Ireland. On 5 July he wrote to Annandale, explaining why he would not come. He had no doubt of the justice of the Commission, he said, but he was unwilling to expose himself to the spite and odium of others in Edinburgh. ‘I implore the Almighty God to judge my innocency. I beg your Lordship's and the Members' Christian charity, and shall hope for their judicious consideration of all…’
Parliament's interpretation of God's judgement and Christian charity toward Hamilton had taken another form. Angered by the wilful absence of this man ‘who was not clear of the murder of the Glencoe men’, it demanded his arrest. On 4 July, in an order signed by Annandale, he was ordered to appear before Parliament within forty-eight hours, failing which he would be denounced as a rebel and put to the horn. All officers of the Crown were told to apprehend him wherever he would be found, and to ‘incarcerate him ay and while he find caution for his compearing in manner and to the effect foresaid’.
/>
Toward the end of July a Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton did arrive in Edinburgh from Dublin, carrying letters to Tweeddale from Lord Capel, brother of the man who had once been John Hill's patron. He may have been the Hamilton so earnestly desired by Parliament, and now confident enough of powerful protection to risk a visit to Scotland. It is impossible to say, but this much is certain: on 20 July, Lieutenant-Colonel James Hamilton of Lindsay's Regiment, late of Hill's, was given a pass to go to Holland. The warrant was dated from Whitehall. In August he was in the King's camp at Waterloo. Robert Pringle, the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland who was then in Flanders, told Tweeddale that Hamilton had come to throw himself upon William's mercy. ‘I understand not what he proposes to himself by that,’ said Pringle coldly. ‘I do believe the King can have not leisure to consider his case. I think the King will not think it very fit that any denounced by his Parliament should come and stay avowedly and openly in his Army.’ Hamilton can have got little encouragement from Stair, he was probably driven away as a dog is kicked aside when it embarrasses his master, and there was no sweet talk now of kissing the King's hand, of forgiveness for past omissions. With one brief appearance later, Hamilton drops from history as mysteriously as he had come.