by John Prebble
The Jacobites seized upon the Report and the Address with delight, determined to use it to injure both Throne and Government. Charles Leslie republished his Letter from a Gentleman in Scotland, in one pamphlet with a derisive and sometimes obscene examination of the Report.
Gallienus Redivivus or MURDER WILL OUT, ETC., Being a True Account of the DE-WITTING of GLENCO
By comparing William with the tyrant Gallienus, who ordered his soldiers to kill those who spoke against him, and by recalling the murder of the De Witt brothers in Holland twenty-three years before, Leslie's title promised the indictment of the King that appeared in the text, ‘Here is a precedent made, and that by Parliament, that the King may send his guards and cut any man's throat in the nation in cold blood…. What can you expect from him but to be Glencoed for your pains? He scorned to except the pitiful women, as Gallienus did. What need they be excepted? Why, he excepted nobody!’ Leslie laughed at Johnston's efforts to clear the King by the Inquiry, and he accused the Secretary of starting a hare by arranging Hamilton's escape.
There is one noble stroke of Secretary Johnston's behind whereby he thinks he has wiped his master clean from all imputation of the massacre; and that is, he has persuaded Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton to abscond for some time, and then to slip over to K.W. in Flanders, which he has done. This shows as if he were more guilty than the rest. He is made the scape goat, and all this sin laid upon his head. But if Hill gave his orders to Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton, why was it more criminal in Hamilton to hand down his colonel's orders to the next subaltern?
Qui Glencoat, Glencoabitur! said Leslie hopefully. But the scurrilous pamphlets which the Jacobites published on the same subject at this time entertained society more than they damaged the King. Pringle asked Tweeddale to send one of them, it may have been Leslie's, to the camp in Flanders, and when it reached there it was contemptuously dismissed as ‘very inaccurate, the work of some silly agent or serving-man’.
The King was out of patience with Tweeddale and Parliament, with the latter for sitting beyond its time, and with the former for giving it leave. He was irritated by the stir the Inquiry had caused, and he resented Parliament's advice on whom he should or should not punish. This concern over a handful of savage thieves, whose deaths nobody really grieved, seemed strangely irrelevant. The war was going badly, and the war was William's principal concern. He told Pringle to keep the Glencoe affair from him until he asked for the papers. This was not easy. Stair came to Flanders that August, bland and calm, and as smooth-tongued as ever. Breadalbane's son, Lord Glenorchy, came too, asking William to release his father from prison. The King would scarcely speak to Stair (who soon left for England again), but he listened to Glenorchy, not so much out of concern for Breadalbane, whose duplicity he understood better than most men, but because he considered Parliament's impeachment of Grey John an insufferable impertinence. He smiled on the Campbell, and pretended to believe that Breadalbane had agreed to the Private Articles in order to ingratiate himself with the Jacobites and thereby discover their plots.
In October the Army went into winter quarters, and the King came back to London. Stair had resigned the Secretaryship and retired to the country, cannily aware that he could do himself little good by coming to Court like a supplicant pauper. He was a superb tactician still, and although he gained no ground he lost none by refusing to defend it. A man who will not answer charges against him can sometimes make a stronger declaration of innocence than one who protests. Stair also understood the King, and he knew that William would be impressed by this silent suggestion that his opinion and his favour were all that mattered to Stair. Glenorchy was still tugging at the Royal sleeve, however, and the King at last signed an order for Breadalbane's release. Grey John came out into the golden smoke of an Edin-burgh autumn, and left for Loch Tay as soon as he could.
For nearly two months William refused to consider any State affairs, English or Scots. A widower now, he lived like an obstinate recluse in the cold rooms of Kensington, and his Court became ‘Glencoe desperate’. And then, on 2 December, he made his mind and his feelings plain. All those members of the Scots Privy Council who were in England were summoned to him, and they gathered like frightened or expectant schoolboys before a pedagogue. The winter mists that came up from the river at Chelsea choked the King's weak lungs, and he looked with sickly eyes on the worried faces, the fingers plucking nervously at lace cuffs, the silver-buckled shoes scraping on the floor of his chamber. He told the Scots that the massacre of the Glencoe men had filled him with horror, and that it ‘had lain very near his heart’ for a long time, which must have surprised them all. He astonished them further by saying that he had known little of the matter until eighteen months after the slaughter, when the Duke of Hamilton asked him if he had been given a true account of the business. James Johnston, who was taking discreet notes of the audience, was particularly surprised to hear this, for he remembered that at the same time he had been told on good authority that William was fully informed. A King was a King, however, and entitled to his peculiar view of the truth. Thinking of the future, Johnston decided to ‘take the middle way, to say just no more than was necessary’. And Stair may have smiled cynically, remembering how the King had known enough about the massacre to order the transportation of the survivors.
Now was the moment for the Master to speak in his own defence, since this display of royal innocence left him to bear all the guilt. He spoke with great passion and an advocate's skill, using all his talent for ridicule and supercilious contempt as he attacked his accusers, looking the while at Johnston. The Secretary was so stung by Stair's bitter tongue that he forgot to make any more notes, and the rest of this meeting was thereby lost to us. But he did remember afterwards that he told Stair that far from being the work of prejudiced enemies, the Commission of Inquiry had been proposed by Archbishop Tillotson and his successor Tenison, and that the Queen herself had also urged it. And he did not think it necessary to add that none of them might have been concerned had he not brought the matter before them.
This meeting, on a cold day in a December palace, was the end of the Glencoe affair. The King did nothing, he punished nobody, and it may be a charity to argue that he could not because he was aware of his own moral responsibility. Though he did not reinstate Stair, who had now succeeded to the viscountcy, or give him further office, he publicly exonerated him, and the wording he used may also have been an acknowledgement of his own responsibility, and an attempt to excuse it.
The Viscount of Stair, then Secretary of State, being at London, many hundred miles distant, he could have no knowledge nor accession to the method of that execution; and His Majesty being willing to pardon, forgive, and remit any excess of zeal, or going beyond his instructions by the said John Viscount of Stair, and that he had no hand in the barbarous manner of execution…
The massacre, said this pardon, had been ‘contrary to the laws of humanity and hospitality’, and those who should be blamed for it were the immediate actors, the soldiers and officers quartered upon Glencoe. None of these men was sent home for prosecution and punishment, as Parliament had desired. ‘If we had them again,’ wrote Charles Leslie bitterly, ‘how we would hang the rogues!’ But no one was hanged, though this was what the compassionate Queen, now dead, had once thought necessary for the nation's honour.
6
GLENCOE IN HIS FACE
‘I think you begin to forget me, or I live too long…’
FOR seven years the new Viscount Stair lived quietly on his western estates, further enriched by a Royal gift of the bishop's rents and feuduties of the barony of Glenluce. He did not embarrass the King by involving himself in public affairs, and he had too much contempt for the mob to give it the pleasure of throwing stones at his coach. And it was with the King's approval that he refrained from taking his seat in Parliament as a peer. For the moment he was content that the rewards of office would go to others of his family, to his loyal brother Hew, for example, who was appo
inted Lord President of the Court of Session in 1698. But he had not forgotten the great work yet undone.
In March 1702, William died, his weak lungs unable to survive a hunting accident, and Jacobite hagiology now included the mole whose earth had brought down his horse. The raddled, once-handsome Earl of Portland held the King's hand, and by the death-bed stood another Dutch favourite, Arnold Joost van Keppel, a boy of twenty-three who was already an earl, a Knight of the Garter and a major-general.* Princess Anne, the second daughter of James II, became Queen, a dropsical sentimentalist, a compulsive eater and card-player with a bizarre and painful history of miscarriages. She felt none of the guilt that may have troubled her brother-in-law, and having little regard for the opinions of her late father's supporters she welcomed Stair back to public life, making him a Privy Councillor. A year later, she rewarded his shrewd counsel and support with an earldom.
England was now ready and eager for the Union of the Parliaments, and Stair was one of the Commissioners sent from Edinburgh to negotiate the Treaty. It was almost a Dalrymple Commission, for Hew went with it as Lord President, and so did another of the family, Sir David, the Solicitor-General for Scotland. The English and Scots delegates met in Whitehall for the first time on 16 April 1706. On that same day, forty years later, the warrior strength of the clans, and the independence of the Highland way of life, would be bloodily destroyed at Culloden.
‘We are bought and sold for English gold!’ sang the Jacobite ballads, but it was the more corrupting influence of an ideal that persuaded Stair to work for the surrender of his country's political identity. For nine months he put a merciless strain on his mind and body. The Union was strongly resisted in Scotland, and the most effective voice of opposition in Parliament belonged to John Hamilton, Lord Belhaven. In a florid declamation, later called ‘Belhaven's Vision’, he pictured Scotland's ancient mother, Caledonia, expiring from the fatal blow of the Treaty and murmuring Et tu quoque mi fili! Stair used all his advocate's skill and eloquence to defeat this and other emotional appeals. On 7 January 1707, he went home late after a long day's debate on Article 22 of the Treaty, one of the last important clauses, determining the proportion of Scots representatives in the united Parliament. He died in his sleep. He was fifty-eight years of age, and the Union, not Glencoe, is perhaps his monument. His relatives and his supporters thought so. The memorial broadsheets they paid for, framed in black and decorated with ambiguous skulls, declared that The Union shall perpetuate his name, as long as there's an ear or mouth in fame!
His death stirred the bile of hatred in many Scots, and they were ready to believe that he had hanged himself in a fit of mad remorse, for the slaughter of Glencoe, for the murder of Scotland. They recalled the dark and extravagant rumours about his mother, his sisters, the death of his sons, and they enjoyed the epitaph suggested by a lampoon.
Stay, Passenger, but shed no tear,
A Pontius Pilate lieth here,
Got by Beelzebub on a witch…
Argyll was already dead, with ducal arms on his hatchment. One of William's last acts had been to raise MacCailein Mor to the highest rank in the country. He had made his family's titles and estates secure, he had received more from and given less to his country than either his father or his grandfather, and he never mounted the steps of the Maiden. He died in September 1703, and his countrymen were not surprised to hear a story that he had been mortally wounded in a brothel, though it was probably false. His obituaries were less concerned with his political life than his sexual adventures, and his mordant wit would have appreciated one called A Satire on the Duke of Argyll that died in his whore's arms in England.
Pluto did frown, but Proserpine did smile
In Hell to hear the knocks of old Argyll.
Pluto cried, Let no gates opened be!
If he comes here he'll surely cockle me.
To which the Queen replied with sighs and groans,
No fear, my Liege, for he's got bruised stones.
The libelled whore was Peggy Alison, in whose arms the Duke did indeed die at Cherton in Northumberland. His last hope was that his Duchess would allow his ‘dearest, dear Peggy’ to live there in peace with her cousins and brothers. But Argyll was no sooner in his grave than the Duchess was doing her best to get ‘that slut’ out of a house she now considered hers. To be exact, she did not wait until Argyll was dead. Four days before he vomited sixteen ounces of blood and died, she asked her lawyers to take the necessary steps for Mistress Alison's removal. They did so, and an order to quit was nailed to the door within a few feet of Argyll's coffin. It was probably Peggy, certainly not the Duchess, who paid an obituarist to write Let his memory to future ages be kept in record for zeal and piety. And that, too, would have amused Archibald Campbell of Argyll.
Grey John of Glenorchy obstinately survived. His few months in Edinburgh Castle in 1695 did not deflate his unctuous self-esteem. ‘I resolve upon my release,’ he told Barcaldine, ‘immediately to go home and make a progress, so that the poor wives of Glen Orchy may once again see me.’ Rejected by the world, as it seemed, it was a comfort to remind himself that he was still a great Highland chief, confident of the loyalty and love of his people. Back on Loch Tay, there were other reassurances. Argyll sent him word that the King still approved of his work, and that the fact that the Glencoe business had been brought into Parliament had angered His Majesty. He was safe.
He lived another twenty-one years. The greatness he had always coveted, and the leadership of Clan Campbell, escaped him. As the house of Argyll rose, so Breadalbane sank. He could never reconcile himself to this, and his bitterness released the latent Jacobitism that was behind almost all his public actions. He sympathized with the Jacobite Rising of 1715, though he cannily pleaded illness as an excuse for not going in person to the great clan gathering at Braemar. He was eighty, and the illness was real enough, as a Tayside minister testified. Grey John was ‘much troubled with Coughs, Rheums, Defluctions and other Maladies and Infirmities’. He allowed his people to go, and they fought with fury as a Breadalbane regiment at Sheriffmuir. After the collapse of the Rising, Hanoverian soldiers came to Finlarig and found him lying on his bed, a black-eyed, white-haired figure in a nightshirt, staring into the past. An officer touched his shoulder. ‘Sir, you are my prisoner!’
‘Sir,’ said Breadalbane, ‘I am the prisoner of the Almighty, and eighty-one years of age.’ He turned to a servant. ‘Duncan, take this poor man away and out of the country, before my people hear of the insult he has offered me.’
He was left in peace, and within the year he was dead. It was a MacDonald bard of Keppoch, of a clan that had often raided his rich lands, who sang a lament for him, wishing that it had been he who had led the Jacobite men at Sheriffmuir.
Oh, for thy wisdom, Breadalbane old!
Had age given up her withering claim
and restored thee one day thy manhood's frame,
thou would be the man
to propose the right plan!
But in truth, he had never proposed the right plan in all his life.
Robert Campbell of Glenlyon died at Bruges on 2 August 1696, a pauper and a debtor still. Since the day he went to Flanders with his regiment, helped by money from Breadalbane's purse, he had not returned to Scotland. Even by dying he placed himself in debt to others. His friend, Archibald Campbell of Fonab, a captain of Argyll's, attended to his funeral and drew up a list of the expenses incurred by his long illness and by his interment in an unknown grave far from the glen of the twelve castles. They amounted to £402 14s. At Chesthill in Glen Lyon, his wretched family made an inventory of the little property that could be sold against this and other debts.
… an old pair of virginals, twelve pound… a large looking-glass estimate to five pounds… two buttercans worth five shillings the piece… a pistol and a mortar of copper worth four pounds… a smoothing-iron worth twenty shillings…
A handful of stock in the field and the byres, horses, cows, sheep and hogs. A
few silver dishes and pewter plates, brass candle-sticks and kettles, washing-tubs, cogs and girdles…. They paid few debts. John Campbell, Glenlyon's first son and now the new Laird, was only twenty, and he wrote humbly to Breadalbane, asking for help which, he said, would ‘certainly preserve a family who have been upon all occasions serviceable to your Lordship's most noble predecessors, whose footsteps therein I resolve to follow and ever to continue’. Breadalbane gave some assistance, £22 10s. Scots, and declared himself the young man's ‘affectionate cousin’.