“ His father was John, 12th chief of Glengarry, a violent and brutal man, who is said to have starved his first wife, Alestair’s mother, to death on an island in the Hebrides. Alestair ran away to France while a mere boy in 1738, and there entered the Royal Scots, a regiment in the French service. In 1743 he commanded a company in it, and in 1744 was sent to Scotland as a Jacobite agent. ”