by John Prebble
When he became the Twenty-sixth Chief, Duncan Chisholm went south to London to enjoy his rents and to nurse the chronic ill-health which he had inherited from his father. He did not live long, and the old bard of Glen Affric got an answer to the passionate cry he had uttered as he stepped aboard an emigrant ship: ‘May a shroud be spun for the chief who runs after money!’ He was the last chief of the direct line, and when he died in 1858 the title of An Siosalach, for what it was now worth, passed to Mary Chisholm's descendants (who dropped the Gooden and became Chisholms). It was said that in the year of his death he would have been unable to muster more than six tenants of his own name in the whole of Strathglass. In 1878 there was one only, Colin Chisholm, who had waited by the Inn at Cannich forty-five years before, said of this single survivor: ‘He is paying rent as a middle-class farmer to the present Chisholm for nearly twenty years, and paid rent in the same farm to the two preceding Chisholms. This far he has satisfied the demands of four proprietors and seven successive factors on the same estate…. He is obeying the spiritual decrees of the fifth Pope, protected by the humane laws of the fourth Sovereign, and living under the well-meaning but absent fourth chief.’
To the west of Strathglass were the wide lands of the Macdonells of Glengarry, and here the bitter story of eviction and emigration had begun thirty years before the Year of the Sheep. It continued for almost a century, and when it was over there were twenty thousand Macdonells in Upper Canada and next to none in Glengarry. In the years immediately following Culloden this Macdonell country was still one of the largest estates in the Highlands, ranging westward from Loch Lochy to the broken coast and white sands of Knoydart. A thousand young men were its warrior rent-roll, but the contribution in coin to their chief's purse was little more than £300 a year. Under the pressure of increased rents or unrenewed leases, Macdonell tacksmen began to take their sub-tenants to British North America soon after Culloden. Like the Chisholms, they were Catholics, and a stubborn adherence to their faith was a contributory cause of their exile. Year by year the small ships that sailed down Loch Linnhe from Fort William took a dozen, a score, and sometimes a hundred Macdonells in their poisonous holds.
In 1782 Thomas Gillespie came to Glengarry with his partner, Henry Gibson. They came, as seems to have been the way with them, at the invitation of a woman, Marjorie, the wife of Duncan Macdonell of Glengarry. She was the mother of Elizabeth Chisholm, and although she was known as Marsailidh Bhinneach, Light-headed Marjorie, she was a shrewd and ambitious social climber. Three hundred pounds a year in rents may have seemed little reward for the £2,000 she brought her husband in her dowry. She gladly accepted, on her weakling consort's behalf, Gillespie's handsome offer for the lease of a sheep-walk along Loch Quoich, provided the five hundred people living there were removed. The contract was concluded quickly, though not quickly enough for the impatient Gillespie, who was soon writing to Glengarry ‘begging of him to write us as soon as he receives our letter, that we may take the proper measures for building houses for the reception of our herds’.
The evicted tenants left for Canada aboard the ship Macdonald in the summer of 1785, and although the nineteen cabin passengers (tacksmen and their families) may have enjoyed the voyage, it must have been a sickening hell for the five hundred and twenty sub-tenants and cotters crammed below decks. They were leaving one Glengarry for another, for this was the name given to a Canadian settlement made by earlier Macdonell exiles who had left the United States at the end of the American Revolution. Travelling in the Macdonald with his parish was the Reverend Alexander Macdonell, an iron and devoted man in the tradition of those Catholic priests who had stood in line with the clansmen at Culloden. He built his own church of Canadian timber, called it the Blue Chapel, preached and prayed in the Gaelic, and stayed with the exiles until he died.
Light-headed Marjorie evicted more tenants in 1785, and more in 1787, and more still in 1788, when her husband died on his way to take the waters at Peterhead, too late to discover whether they would cure him of whatever it was that ailed him. There was little weeping among his people at his death, although there was great drunkenness as custom demanded. There was even less approval when Marjorie Macdonell went to great expense to erect a tasteless mausoleum over his corpse. For the next four years, until her own death, she concerned herself with spoiling the already overspoilt heir to the title and lands of Glengarry.
This was Alistair Ranaldson Macdonell. Freed from the control of his mother, as much by his majority as by her subsequent death, he shot into the air like a bright rocket that illuminates nothing while it entertains all. He was an absurd, heroic, impossible man who seems about to strut from the superb portrait which Raeburn painted of him. While other young men of his age were thinking of steam-engines, roads, canals, consols, the cultivation of turnips or seats at Westminster, Alistair Ranaldson behaved as if the world had received an order to mark time in 1745 and had not yet taken a forward pace. He was the rich inspiration of Fergus MacIvor in Scott's Waverley, the young Highland chieftain, but if other chiefs of his time were abandoning the role of Ceann-cinnidh, Glengarry overplayed it. He lived and behaved like his ancestors, was as proud and as sensitive about his honour as he believed them to have been. He challenged Flora Macdonald's grandson to a duel, killed him, and was more offended by the impertinence of his trial for manslaughter than he was relieved by his acquittal. He wore nothing but Highland dress, kilt, plaid and bonnet, strapped himself with barbaric arms at every opportunity, and went nowhere without a chief's ancient tail of henchman, bard, piper and gillies. When the Highland chiefs held a theatrical gathering of their clans to celebrate the visit of a fat and tartaned George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, the city's cobbles seemed covered by a great contingent of Glengarry Macdonells. They made the wretched handful of Sutherlanders whom James Loch had reluctantly sent look like a band of gipsies.*
Though his preoccupation with the martial glories of his race was constant, Glengarry never put it to present use by raising a line regiment from his people, or by going on arduous campaigns himself. His brother James did the actual fighting for the family. But Alistair Ranaldson did muster the Glengarry Fencibles in 1794, making himself their Colonel, clothing them in his tartan and in a bonnet which is about all the British Army now remembers of him. The men were raised in the old way, of course. Every township on Glengarry lands was told the number of young men the chief expected it to supply. Parents who were reluctant to release their sons were threatened with eviction. Some young men, lacking Glengarry's passion for this military play-acting, took to the hills and remained there. Glengarry was not particular where he got his recruits, and was inclined to think that he had rights of enlistment on other men's lands. The Widow Kennedy, for example, though she was a tenant of Cameron of Lochiel, found Macdonell's recruiters at her door one day, gave them one son, and was only saved from parting with another later by the intervention of a Cameron tacksman.
When the Fencibles were disbanded in 1802, more evictions began again in Glengarry, and there was another great emigration to Canada. This time the holds of three ships that sailed from Fort William were for the most part filled with disgruntled young men who had come home from service with the Fencibles to find that Alistair Ranaldson was busy removing their parents. Glengarry had little choice; his debts were mounting toward the astronomical figure of £80,000 which they would reach before his death, and although his rent-roll was far greater than his father's had been, it was still only £5,090 a year, and this scarcely supported his dignity, let alone his dreams. Yet such was the paradox of the man that, although he was evicting his tenants, he was angered by their decision to emigrate, though he did not say where else they might go. He tried to stop them, and was promptly denounced by Burns, who called him a tyrant for preventing the escape of his people from slavery. Alistair Ranaldson probably thought the opinion of a Lowland ploughman beneath his attention, but it does show that even Burns could be wrong where Highland commonality were concerned,
and could believe with the gentry that the people were going willingly and happily to the other side of the world.
Glengarry could have told him that eviction was not always as easy as it appeared, that his people sometimes showed a fierce attachment to their land, slavery or no. When his factor tried to evict Archibald Dhu Macdonell from his holding at Kinlochnevis, and to impound his stock against some debt, the old man called up his seven stalwart sons, armed himself with a broad-sword which his grandfather had carried at Culloden, and defied both the Law and his Chief. That one of his own people should ‘so maintain illegal and unwarrantable possession of my property by violence’ was not something Glengarry could stomach for long. By 1817 he had found a way to clear Kinlochnevis of Archibald Dhu, his seven sons and his broadsword, and to put a Lowland sheepman in their place.
Not that Alistair Ranaldson liked sheep-farmers. He quarrelled with all of them, and tried to stop them from burning pastures in the spring, saying, with some justice, that they were killing the birch and oak that had cloaked the hills in his youth. He took their rents, but saw no reason to accept them socially. One of them who addressed him on equal terms was icily reminded of the fact that when he had come to Glengarry he had been bare-footed, that he had lived for three years with a common fox-hunter, ‘taking his porridge out of the same cog’.
Alistair Ranaldson also hated the Caledonian Canal, and made its promoters pay handsomely for that part of his land they cut. Since he lived in the past, he thought that the Canal's saw-pits, timber-piles and brick stocks were his to raid when he chose, and took delight in leading his men on forays against them. When the Canal Commissioners challenged him with theft, he plucked justification from the past and said: ‘I would be exceedingly sorry to deprive the complainers or any person of their property, but it is a well-attested fact that a Highlandman is not accustomed in practice to such refined notions of property as to lead him to suppose that he is committing a crime of theft when he finds a stick of little value seemingly neglected by everybody.’
The Commissioners abandoned the complaint in bewildered disgust, but they were less tolerant the next time Glengarry made an assault on their works, accompanied, so their complaint alleged, ‘by several persons all armed with fire-arms, saws, hatchets or axes’. Alistair Ranaldson threatened the workmen with their lives if they continued to cut the Canal through one of his lochs, and then carried a boat off to Invergarry House in triumph. The case cost him a great deal before it was settled, and Thomas Telford, bitter and angry at being fleeced and badgered by men like Glengarry, said that Highland landlords were the most rapacious in Europe. Alistair Ranaldson saw the situation in quite another light. ‘A Highlander,’ he said, ‘is naturally generous as well as brave, and an enemy to anything wearing the semblance of oppression.’ By oppression he meant the cutting of canals through a man's land, not the eviction of people from it.
When he was approaching fifty, he was not only able to make a reality out of his fanciful dreams of romantic Gaeldom, but managed to persuade others to believe in them too. On 23 June 1815, the Inverness Journal reported that at a meeting by Inverlochy earlier that month a number of Highland gentlemen had formed themselves into ‘a pure Highland Society in support of the Dress, Language, Music and Characteristics of our illustrious and ancient race in the Highlands and Isles of Scotland, with their genuine descendants wherever they may be’. Membership of the Society would not have included the men and women of Kildonan who took ship for Canada that same month, nor the hundreds of common tenants who had been leaving Glengarry's lands since the days of his grandfather. This was an exclusive organization for the duine-uasal and bean-uasal, the Highland gentleman and lady, thoroughly anglicized now, but happy to play-act their ancestors while the summer sun lasted.
To Alistair Ranaldson, however, it was all a serious dream. It was he who had brought the ninety-seven gentlemen of birth and property to Inverlochy, to a green grass field where the Highlanders of Montrose had broken the regiments of Clan Campbell in a bloody battle one hundred and seventy years before. And it was he, no doubt, who formulated most of its rules: that all real chiefs were to be hereditary, that the Society's President was to be chosen annually from among the vice-presidents ‘be he in or out of the peerage’, that all proceedings were to be conducted in Gaelic (which must have been a hardship for some of the members). Absent from the acclamations and the speeches, the gossip over the cold collations, was the voice of Alan MacDougal, Ailean Dall the blind bard of Glengarry. ‘Thàinig oirnn do dh' Albainn crois…’
A cross has been placed upon us in Scotland.
Poor men are naked beneath it.
Without food, without money, without pasture,
the North is utterly destroyed.*
The Society of True Highlanders flourished for some years, as long as Alistair Ranaldson could give movement to its sawdust limbs. Waverley had been published the year before its birth, and Walter Scott continued to feed its members with pictures of a never-never Highland past, peopled with proud and noble gentlemen, and an amusing and simple peasantry that gave its betters the right amount of service and devotion. Glengarry was Ceann-suidhe, the chairman of the Society's meetings at Fort William, and the gentlemen would drink toasts with their feet on the table, flirt with Jacobite thoughts, boast of the Highland dead which their levies had left in Spanish valleys and French ditches. The appearance of Alistair Ranaldson at these meetings, in full Highland dress, always accompanied by his piper and bard, and sometimes by his brother James, the hero of Hougomont, was greeted with shouts of ‘Slainte!’ and a hammering of dirk-hilts on the board.
With their glens emptied and their land under sheep, the lairds had time and money to spend on the Society's theatricals. They held grand balls, at one of which, said the Inverness Journal, David Stewart of Garth ‘wore large round Cairngorm buttons richly set; others had the globular silver buttons of their ancestry, and the highly-finished pistols, dirks and powder-horns, and other paraphernalia, gave an air of magnificence to the whole scene’. They revived the Ancient Caledonian Hunt, calling it The True Highlanders' Fête, three days of bucolic delight during which the ladies and gentlemen danced on the heather and dined on roe-deer brought down from the hills. The lesser gentry were overcome by the presence of the greater. ‘Such was the enthusiastic feeling abroad,’ said the Journal, ‘that a gentleman named Macintyre took a silver dirk from his own side and presented it to the young heir of Glengarry, and when the boy refused, the gentleman sent it on to Glengarry, begging him to accept it on behalf of his son, as the Macintyres claimed the chief of the Macdonells as the chief of their blood likewise, and the author of their race.’
Alistair Ranaldson's Highland Games were always barbaric. At one three cows were torn to pieces, after they had been felled by a hammer. The Inverness Courier, less awed by Glengarry than the Journal, found this highly amusing. ‘Even the most expert of the operators took from four to five hours in rugging and riving, tooth and nail, before they brought off the limbs of one cow. This achievement was paid at the rate of five guineas per joint, so we hope this rise in the value of black cattle will make the Glengarry men some small amends for the fall of ewes and wedders at Falkirk Tryst, lately noticed by their chief.’
If Walter Scott thought Alistair Ranaldson was a ‘treasure’, Robert Burns despised him for his arrogance and his indifference to the true condition of the people. Yet it is the myth created by Glengarry and by Scott that inspires many of those who drink to the poet's immortal memory every January.
Towards the end of his life Macdonell took on another complicated law suit, this time to prove that he was the lawful heir in blood of the line of Clanranald. The case floundered in charges and counter-charges of bastardy, and left Glengarry more in debt than ever. His death was a spectacular irony. When leaping from the wreck of one of the canal steamers he despised, he fell and killed himself.
He was buried in a thunder-storm and a double coffin of lead and wood, escorted to
his grave by four Highlanders with flaming torches. ‘Blessed the corpse that the rain falls upon!’ sang his blind bard. One hundred and fifty members of his True Society sat down in his house to enjoy his funeral meats, below candles stuck in the white skulls of the stags he had killed. His young son, with an eagle feather and crepe in his bonnet, stood beneath the yellow banner of the clan and shouted its slogan, ‘Creagan-an-Fhithich’. Outside in the rain fifteen hundred of the commonality were given bread, cheese, and whisky. The Inverness Courier was happy to report that the solemn occasion had not been marred by the riot and drunkenness which customarily launched a Highland chief into Valhalla. This was no doubt due ‘to the better sense of propriety which begins to prevail in the Highlands’.
The evictions would continue. Within thirty years no descendant of Alistair Ranaldson would hold land in Glengarry, and few clansmen of his name would be left between Loch Oich and the sea.
‘Is it possible that there are people living yonder?’
FOR twenty years after Strathnaver and Culrain there were no more great Clearances. Within the span of one man's youth and middle age from one-half to two-thirds of the Highland people in Caithness, Sutherland, Ross and Inverness had been uprooted and dispersed. The proportion may have been more; no one can now calculate it. In 1831 the population of the parish of Kildonan was one-fifth of what it had been in 1801, and although the figures for other parishes show a slight increase (of a score, fifty or a hundred), this increase was far, far below the national figure and does not explain that the people were now crowded into small coastal townships and that the glens they had once occupied were filled with half a million sheep. For twenty years the mountains rested after the great disturbance, and the evictions that continued to take place were small erosions as the small lairds aped their superiors, leased their land to sheepmen and took their gentility southward to the terraces of Edinburgh or the squares of London. The Lowland shepherd, the ‘grey shepherd’ despised by Donnachadh Buidhe, became the new Highlander, picturesquely posed against a Gothic landscape by Edwin Landseer. His image was fixed for ever in the minds of Lowland Scots and English, balancing humble and industrious virtues against that other dramatic irony, the loyal Highland soldier.