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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  GLENCOE

  John Prebble was born in Middlesex in 1915 but spent his boyhood in Saskatchewan, Canada. He became a journalist in 1934 and is now a historian, novelist, film-writer and the author of several highly praised plays and dramatized documentaries for BBC television and radio. During the war he served for six years in the ranks with the Royal Artillery and later wrote a war novel, The Edge of Darkness, based on his experiences. He is the author of Age Without Pity, The Mather Story, The High Girders, an account of the Tay Bridge Disaster, The Buffalo Soldiers, which won an award in the United States for the best historical novel of the American West, and Culloden, a subject he became interested in when he was a boy in a predominantly Scottish township in Canada. Culloden was subsequently made into a successful television film. His other books include The Highland Clearances (1963), Glencoe (1966), The Darien Disaster (1968), The Lion in the North (1971), Mutiny: Highland Regiments in Revolt (1975), John Prebble's Scotland (1983), The King's Jaunt (1988) and Landscapes and Memories: an intermittent autobiography for which he was awarded the McVitie Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, 1993. Many of his books are published by Penguin.

  JOHN PREBBLE

  GLENCOE

  THE STORY OF THE MASSACRE

  ‘Let it be secret and sudden’

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1966

  Published in Penguin Books 1968

  28

  Copyright © John Prebble, 1966

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-002897-3

  FOR JOHN ROSS PREBBLE

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  MAP OF THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS

  MAP OF GLENCOE

  1 THE GALLOWS HERD

  2 THE BLACK GARRISON

  3 GREY JOHN AND THE MASTER

  4 MURDER UNDER TRUST

  5 UNDER THE BROAD SEAL

  6 GLENCOE IN HIS FACE

  GENEALOGY

  APPENDIX

  Principal Characters

  Chronology

  ‘Major Duncanson's Christian Order’

  Glenlyon's Company

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  I HAVE written this book because its story is, in a sense, a beginning to what I have already written about Culloden and the Clearances – the destruction of the Highland people and their way of life. The Massacre of Glencoe is commonly thought to have been a bloody incident in a meaningless feud between Campbell and MacDonald, which it was not. On a higher level, it is also thought to have been incidental to the political events of its time, an accident of judgement almost, whereas it was the product of them. It can be understood only within a knowledge of the Highlander's resistance to an alien southern government. The quarrel between Clan Donald and Clan Campbell was a rivalry for the leadership of Gaeldom, embittered by the Campbells' growing support for that government.

  The Highland people were once the majority of Scotland's population, a military society that had largely helped to establish and maintain her monarchy. This society, tribal and feudal, could not change itself to meet a changing world, nor did it wish to. Its decline became more rapid in the second half of the seventeenth century, and within a hundred and fifty years its people had been driven from their mountains. By 1690 the Highlanders were already regarded by many Lowlanders as an obstacle to the complete political union of England and Scotland, and their obstinate independence of spirit – expressed in their customs, their clothes and their language – had to be broken and humbled. The MacDonalds of Glencoe were early victims of what the Highlanders called Mi-run mor nan Gall, the Lowlander's great hatred. Lowland leaders naturally despised what they wished to destroy, and therefore that destruction seemed to be a virtuous necessity. No Scots or English statesman would have thought of ordering the extirpation of a Lowland or English community, but a Highland clan, particularly one of the Gallows Herd, was a different matter. One of the principals involved in the Massacre said afterwards, ‘It's not that anybody thinks that the thieving tribe did not deserve to be destroyed…’ It was only regrettable that the murder of men, women and children should have been carried out in a dishonourable way.

  The same contempt for the Highlander was responsible for the brutalities that followed Culloden in 1746, and the same indifference to his way of life was shown when the Clearances began fifty years later. In the end Mi-run mor nan Gall was triumphant.

  The story has a relevance for us. Our age has seen a monstrous attempt at genocide, and we have had to determine the moral responsibility of those who carried it out under orders.

  October, 1965

  JOHN PREBBLE

  THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS

  GLENCOE

  1

  THE GALLOWS HERD

  ‘It will be a proper vindication of the public justice’

  THERE were boats on Loch Leven when John Forbes reached the narrows at Ballachulish. They lay like curled leaves on the dark water, high at the stem and stern, and almost motionless as the oarsmen pulled against the drag of the tide and the tug of the wind. They were ferrying soldiers across from Carness, and when Forbes saw the slant of pikes and the burnished barrels of muskets his memory stirred uneasily. At first there was nothing by which he could identify the soldiers, only the scarlet of their coats in the winter's grey light. Riding closer to the ferry he saw the boar's-head badge on their bonnets, the green plaids in which some of them were wrapped, and he recognized them as men of the Earl of Argyll's Regiment of Foot. When the first files waded through the shallows and formed up with their faces toward Glencoe he felt more uneasy still.

  Tired, and anxious to be at Fort William before nightfall, he waited impatiently for an empty boat to take him over to the north shore. The sky promised more snow. Bad weather had already delayed his passage from Edinburgh to the lonely garrison in the Great Glen. In the best of seasons it was not a ride he enjoyed. In winter it meant eight days or more in the saddle and was ‘the most troublesome journey that I ever take’. Wild men in the Central Highlands, outlaws or Rebels, made the shortest route hazardous, and he was forced to travel by way of Glasgow and Dumbarton, then northward across Loch Long and Loch Fyne, coming through Appin to Fort William like a tinker to the back door. Even thus, when he brought the garrison its pay (too infrequently, the semi-mutinous soldiers were always complaining), he had to rely upon the armed protection of Argyllshire lairds to see him safely through those glens infested with broken men of Clan Gregor or Clan Donald.

  An eager and ambit
ious man, with a beaked nose and pale, proud eyes, John Forbes was bitterly resentful of service in the Highlands when other young men had the good fortune to campaign in Flanders. For the most part he kept this hurt to himself, and when he did speak of it to his brother, the Laird of Culloden, he tempered it by adding ‘I pay my pains with the satisfaction of serving my King and Country’. Three years earlier, in the summer of 1689, there had been some substance to this satisfaction. Then, as a captain of an independent company, he had commanded Ruthven Castle for King William III and the Protestant Revolution. Besieged there by an army of Jacobite clans under Viscount Dundee he shouted boyish defiance from the walls, though probably in words less theatrical than those put into his mouth later by a classical-minded contemporary: ‘I, a Forbes, hold this castle for the Prince of Orange, and for him will I hold it while the gods permit!’ The support of the gods was no stronger than the slender resources of his garrison, but he enjoyed three days of such heroics before surrendering to Dundee's cannon and the scaling-ladders of the MacDonalds. Since that was a year when most of King William's Scottish soldiers were running in panic before those of his father-in-law King James, this brief stand at Ruthven was regarded as highly creditable. Yet it had required all the strenuous influence of the Laird of Culloden, and of John Hill the Governor of Fort William, to squeeze from the King a commission in Hill's Regiment. Now, as he dismounted by the ferry and frowned at the Argyll men, Forbes wore a major's crimson sash and white shoulder-knots beneath his blue cloak.

  There were, he estimated, a hundred and twenty of the Campbell soldiers: a grenadier company in fur caps, and a battalion company in bonnets. There was a piper, and there were Lowland sergeants shouting in English above the Gaelic of the private men. Stepping toward Forbes, and lifting his hat in greeting, was their commander, Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon. He was an old man but there was a curious, almost feminine youthfulness in his face, the flesh pink and full, framed in a fine gauze of fair hair. His nose was long, his lips red and thin, and above them his eyes were steady in the unnerving stare of an habitual drinker. He said that he was away with his command to find quarters among the MacDonalds in Glencoe, and what further unease this caused Forbes the major thought it prudent to keep to himself. He nodded shortly and led his horse on to the ferry.

  On the north shore he rode eastward for two miles along the lochside, his head turned now and then to watch the march of the Argyll men across the water. Their red coats and yellow hose were a trickle of colour against the white wall of hills, the ordered pikes a black hedge at the centre of each company. They were behind him, and still far from the mouth of Glencoe, when he turned away northward to climb the drove road to Fort William. He felt in need of John Hill's reassurance. Because of an old friendship for the Forbes family, the Governor treated the young man with affection, calling him his ‘dear child’ and placing trust in him. He sent him to Edinburgh three or four times a year, to plead with the Privy Council for the meal or the pay or the shoe leather which the wretched garrison always needed, and while there Forbes had the colonel's permission to open and read any dispatches that came from London, before sending them on to the Highlands. Some ten days ago he had opened two such letters, addressed to Hill by the Secretary of State for Scotland. They had come by flying pacquet in four days, and both were dated 16 January 1692. The first was a double of the instructions sent that day to the Commander-in-Chief in Scotland concerning the action to be taken against those Rebels who had failed to take the oath of allegiance within the time set, and the copy made it plain that in the original King William had signed his name at the head and the foot of these instructions. The second was a letter from the Secretary to Colonel Hill, and was concerned with the same subject in greater detail. It was the memory of the letters that had troubled Forbes when he first saw the red coats of the Argyll men, and echoing sentences from them troubled him still as he rode northward over the high snows.

  Towards nightfall he came down the brae to Inverlochy. Lights pricked the frosty dusk where the fort sprawled in a distorted, five-pointed star on a spit of land at the mouth of the River Nevis, looking across Loch Linnhe to the hills of Ardgour. To the west of the ramparts was the Royal town of Maryburgh, mean streets of turf and wattle cottages crouching close to the earth. To the south were the garden patches where John Hill grew summer vegetables in the hope of reducing the disease and despair that crippled two-thirds of his garrison. The men whose lives such efforts had failed to save lay in regimental rows, unmarked in the burial-ground on Forbes's left as he rode over a shallow burn of ice, passed the brewhouse and the Mercat Cross, forded another run of water and entered the fort by the main gate. It was full of soldiers, men of Hill's regiment, some of Argyll's, and kilted Highlanders of the independent companies from Clan Grant and Clan Menzies for whom Forbes, like most regular officers, had more contempt than respect. He rode along the rear of their wooden barracks and dismounted before the Governor's house at the south-east ravelin.

  The old Englishman was seated at his desk in the green-panelled drawing-room he used as an office. His skin was yellow from the fever that had plagued him since he came to the fort eighteen months before, and his face was a map that charted the weary struggles and disappointments that each had brought. But he smiled with warm pleasure, rising to embrace the young man and to welcome him back as a son. Forbes had no patience for the small-talk of reunion, and he told Hill that he had seen Glenlyon and the Argyll companies marching on Glencoe from Ballachulish. The smile on Hill's face faded, and he began to complain bitterly. He was the Governor of Fort William and the King's representative in the Highlands, but in the past few weeks it had become plain that His Majesty's Ministers had less than full trust in him. The Secretary for Scotland was writing to his deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton, asking his advice and giving him instructions and thereby violating common courtesy as much as military procedure. Hamilton made no secret of the fact that he had the Secretary's confidence. He showed the letters to Hill, deferentially, but knowing, perhaps, that the old man's pride would be wounded by the warm tone of them, by their promise that Hamilton could not be more certain of preferment were he the Secretary's kinsman.

  The reason for this soft wooing of Hamilton's conceit was now plain. Orders about the Glencoe men had come to Hamilton, and the Deputy-Governor had already arranged the whole affair with Major Duncanson of Argyll's. Like a man avoiding guilt by rejecting responsibility, Hill told Forbes that he had left the matter to the management of these two men, and when he saw the shock in the young officer's face he lifted his voice in protest against a crime he could not prevent and in which he must finally participate ‘I like not the business. I am grieved at it!’

  What that business would be both men knew as they faced each other in the candle-light. It was stated bluntly in Article Four of the King's instructions to the Commander-in-Chief: If M'Kean of Glencoe, and that tribe, can be well separated from the rest it will be a proper vindication of the public justice to extirpate that sept of thieves.

  ‘They bound their appetites by their necessities’

  GLENCOE has no melancholy except that which men bring to it, remembering its history.

  Running east to west along the northern border of Argyll, and eight miles in length, it is a deep scar left by the agony of Creation. It is an arm bent at the elbow, with sinews of quartz and muscles of granite. It is both fortress and trap, for the only natural entrances are at either end – across Rannoch Moor in the east and by Loch Levenside in the west, and the high passes to the north and south lead ignorant men to higher hills only. Before the building of a road the Rannoch gate was itself frequently closed by winter snows and summer storms. Since pre-history the moor has been a quaking floor of moss and heather, leaden lochs and the white skeletons of an ancient forest. Only the people of Glencoe, and the broken men of Clan Gregor who hid on its fringe, knew the paths across Rannoch.

  The northern wall of the glen is a rippling, saw-toothed escarp
ment called Aonach Eagach, the Notched Ridge. It is three thousand feet and more in height, and unbroken except in the west where it twists sharply toward Loch Leven, dips, and rises again in the black hill of Sgòr na Ciche, the Pap of Glencoe. At the eastern end of Aonach Eagach is the only path to Glencoe from the north, a narrow, crooked trail that climbs cautiously from the head of Loch Leven, flanks the escarpment for five painful miles and comes down at last to Rannoch through deer-grass and heather. It is rightly called The Devil's Staircase, and when a man reaches the foot of it he still has not entered Glencoe; he stands at the eastern door.

  On the south is a loosely clenched fist of mountains, five ridges joined to the great knuckle of Bidean nam Bian, the Pinnacle of Peaks, the highest mountain in Argyll. The first of these are the lonely and austere Buchaille Etive Mòr and Buchaille Etive Beag, the Great and Little Herdsmen of Etive, so named because their lower slopes once gave rich grazing to the black cattle of the MacDonalds. Between them, and opposite The Devil's Staircase, is Lairig Gartain, the green pass to Glen Etive in the south, and this too is no escape from or entrance to Glencoe, for the Great Herdsman stands outside the valley. Westward for five miles down the glen there are gaps between the fingers of Bidean nam Bian but they lead the climber nowhere. They end in high cauldrons of mist, in weeping cliffs, in a bitter snow line that lingers long into summer. Where Bidean nam Bian ends at the bend of Glencoe there is an opening southward, a fork of two valleys each with its stream of furious water. The first, named for the legendary warrior Fionn MacCumhail, is a broad slash narrowing to an almost impassable gorge. The second, called Gleann Leac na Muidhe, twists and climbs, and here men who know the path and their own strength may cross over into Appin, though few, perhaps, would attempt it at night in the numbing confusion of a February blizzard.