Andrew Lang

“ The history of Scotland, till after the Reformation, is full of examples in which Lowlanders unscrupulously used the worst weapons of the weak. Historical conditions, not race, gave birth to the Douglases and Brunstons whom Barisdale, Glengarry, and others imitated on a smaller scale. These men were the exceptions, the rare exceptions, in a race illustrious for loyalty. I have tried to show the historical and social sources of their demoralisation, so extraordinary when found among the countrymen of Keppoch, Clanranald, Glenaladale, Scotus, and Lochiel. ”

“ But his vacillations were extreme, and if he really helped to corrupt Barisdale, his behaviour is without excuse. ‘Were I to enumerate the villains and villainies this country abounds in I should never have done,’ wrote Cumberland to the Duke of Newcastle. ‘Some allowance must be made for Sir Alexander’s behaviour in the Forty Five,’ says Mr. Fraser Mackintosh. It was not precisely handsome. The epigram on his death, which has variants, ran thus:
If Heaven be glad when sinners cease to sin,
If Hell be glad when traitors enter in,
If Earth be glad when ridded of a knave,
Then all rejoice! ”

“ There must have been something in Charles, beyond his misfortunes, to win so much devotion from a woman of the highest intellect.
Mlle. Ferrand died, after a long illness, in October 1752. Her memory is preserved only by a note in Grimm’s correspondence, by the touching tribute of Condillac, and by the discovery of her kindness to a proscribed Prince. While she protected and advised him, she was inspiring a renowned philosopher, and keeping a secret which every diplomatist in Europe was eager to learn. ”

“ We may drop a tear over old romance, but reality has its alleviating features. There is absolutely no kind of villainy of which Col of Barisdale was not eminently guilty. Oppression, cruelty, cowardice, theft, and treachery were all among his qualities, were all notorious, yet, till after Culloden, Col could laugh at the law, and was not shunned by society.
We have seen that Col accuses Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat of corrupting his honour, and advising him to sell himself. ”

“ I am no expert in handwriting, and I offer no opinion, except that Pickle’s confessedly feigned hand is more like Glengarry’s careful hand, in the Stuart Papers, than like his sloping scrawl, meant only for his own eyes (and these nearly blind) in his Letter Book. The Duke of Atholl has compared letters from Glengarry, in his possession, with those of Pickle, and has arrived at the same conclusion as Mr. Millar. Pickle’s hand is Glengarry’s, disguised. ”

“ In London Traquair did nothing. He never wrote to the party in Scotland, and he brought back nothing but the names of the English leaders, the Duke of Beaufort, Lord Orrery, Lord Barrymore, Sir John Hinde Cotton, and Sir Watkin Williams Wynne. When Murray, in turning informer, divulged these names, except that of Beaufort, he told Government nothing which every man who cared did not know. But the English were thrown ‘into a mortal fright,’ as Balhaldie found so late as 1749. They were always in a mortal fright, always insisted that their Scottish allies should not even know who they were. ”

“ Lord John Drummond suggested to James’s secretary, Edgar, that the Earl should supersede Balhaldie, ‘who had been obliged to fly the country in danger of being taken up for a Fifty pound note.’ Lord John’s advice was excellent. The Earl, and he alone, was the right man to deal with the party in Scotland, who could trust his sense, zeal, and honour. But James, far away in Rome, could never settle these distant and embroiled affairs. ”

“ About the Earl’s first years in the company of the great Frederick little is known or likely to be known. Deus nobis hæc otia fecit, he may have murmured to himself while he refused the Prince’s insistent prayers for his service, and put his Royal Highness off in a truly Royal way, with his miniature in a snuff-box of mother-of-pearl. The old humourist may have reflected that men had given lands and gear for the cause, and now, like the representative of Lochgarry, have nothing material to show for their loyalty, save an inexpensive snuff-box of agate and gold. ”

“ It is physically impossible that, both in London and Edinburgh, many men who knew Young Glengarry should have supposed another person—Pickle—to be that hero. Yet, if the personation was played off, it was not discovered, then or later; for Pickle continued to be the informer, and to be the shadow of Glengarry. As soon as it is admitted that Pickle is feigning to be Glengarry, the case for that Chief’s innocence is given up. The personation, among people who knew Glengarry intimately well, is impossible. ”

“ If there was a conspicuously honest man in the eighteenth century, one ‘whose conscience might gild the walls of a dungeon,’ as an observer of his conduct declared, that man was the Earl Marischal, George Keith. The name of the last Earl Marischal of Scotland haunts the reader of the history of the eighteenth century. He appears in battles for the Stuart cause in 1715 and 1719, he figures dimly in the records of 1745, and of Charles Edward, after the ruin of Culloden. We find him in the correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, and Frederick the Great, and even in Casanova. ”

“ A false hypothesis is not apt to be strongly confirmed by facts unknown when it was framed, nor would a jury regard the charge against Glengarry as ‘without any proof in the world.’ To say so, as has been audaciously done, is to illustrate prejudice, not to enlighten criticism. In truth, the game was up as soon as the person calling himself Pickle offered to raise a clan regiment, and asked the Duke of Newcastle to reply to Glengarry. ”

“ We do not trust the Impartial one where we have not corroboration, and, to his fair prisoner, Lady Sutherland, Barisdale certainly displays a tender gallantry. But she may not have regretted that her Barisdale was occasionally absent. Cumberland was approaching, and, on the eve of Culloden, Lord Cromarty was captured in ‘The Battle of Golspie,’ while dallying over his adieux to ‘his favourite Amazon,’ the Countess of Sutherland, as the Impartial one invidiously declares. ”

“ Always scrupulously honest (except when diplomatic duties forbade, and even then he hated lying) , the Earl told his brother that he found the Jacobite Court at Rome no place for an honest man. He does not give details, but he seems to hint at some enterprise which, in his opinion, was not honourable. James, moreover, was sunk in devotion, weeping and praying at the tomb of Clementina. From this uncongenial society the Earl departed, and took up his abode at the Papal city of Avignon, where Ormonde now resided. ”

“ Murray is said to have justified Stonor’s letter, already cited, by dying in a madhouse, on December 6, 1777. He was sane enough, certainly, when he wrote his ‘Memorials.’ Such was Murray of Broughton, in spite of his treachery a devoted believer in the Cause; till his [91] capture, a brave, loyal, and constant supporter of the Cause; a man by nature honourable, and a lover of honour in others, as in Lochiel and the Duke of Perth. He sinned, when he did sin, in violation of every tradition of education, and, in turning Informer, wrenched every fibre of his moral nature. ”

“ No man can put confidence in another: each neighbour may have been bullied or bribed into babbling, and, when the laird sees the English colonel saunter along the avenue, Highland hospitality struggles in his heart with a natural inclination to drop out of a back window, and steal up the glen into the hills. ”

“ We are obliged to follow him by aid of slight traces in historical manuscripts, biographies, memoirs, and letters, published or unpublished. Even in this unsatisfactory way, the Earl is worth pursuing: for if he left slight traces on history, and was never successful in action, he was a man, and a humourist, of singular merit and charm, a person almost universally honoured and beloved through three generations. This last of the Earls Marischal of Scotland was certainly one of the most original and one of the most typical characters of the eighteenth century. ”

“ Their descendants, or some of them, dwell happily in a realm of forests, hills, and streams, deer and salmon, still retaining Highland courtesy, Highland speech, Highland courage, and Highland hospitality. They seem to have chosen the better part, and to be more fortunate than their cousins in the new times, or their fathers in the old days that were not really golden. ”

“ Barisdale was anxious to burn the house of Ross of Balnagoun, but Lochiel, who had arrived with Lord George Murray, intervened. At Dornoch, Barisdale went to church, where the Rev. Mr. Kirk, a gentleman connected with the Duke of Argyll, had the courage to pray for King George. Barisdale leaped up, swaggered, fumed, and, it is rather absurdly said, threatened to put Mr. Kirk in his famous engine of torture. The chivalrous Duke of Perth protected Mr. Kirk, saying that all brave men were his friends, and asked the clergyman to dinner. ”

“ Conquering his ‘great inclinations to cry,’ with an effort, Rousseau admired the Earl’s ‘open, animated, and noble physiognomy.’ Without ceremony, and acting as a Child of Nature, Jean-Jacques went and sat down beside the Earl on his sofa. In his noble eye Rousseau detected ‘something fine, piercing, yet in a way caressing.’ He became quite fond of the Earl. Wordsworth has justly remarked that you seldom see a grown-up male weeping freely on the public highway. ”

“ You, Madame, will share the pleasure with me, you who will not cease to regret her while you live.’ The philosopher speaks of ‘the intellect, the loyalty, the courage, which formed these ladies for each other.’ Loyalty, courage, wit, these women laid them at the feet of a Prince not their own, and solely recommended to their tenderness by his misfortunes. ”

“ The truth is that a life of plunder, however romantic and however little regarded as immoral or degrading by Highland opinion, really did foster, in educated men, the most astonishing perfidy. This is the last vice we look for in the generous cateran; and, indeed, the outlaws of Glen Moriston were as loyal to their Prince as Lochiel. But the prevalent opinion that robbery, sanctioned by tradition, does not degrade the general character, can be proved to be an error. We read about Cluny that, in 1742-5, he held the usual belief. ”

“ Thus Glengarry undeniably frequented the old Earl Marischal, no less than Pickle did, and the English Government knew it. Yet they did not arrest him, as they arrested Glenevis, Downan, Fassifern, Archy Cameron, and tried to arrest Lochgarry, on all of whom Pickle had informed. Moreover Glengarry, in Paris, is not starving, but has a servant out of livery, and two in livery, keeps or hires a carriage, or uses that of the Earl Marischal. ”

“ Fitzroy Bell has edited, with reinforcements from the Stuart MSS., the papers in the Record Office, and the archives of the Quai d’Orsay. In these we find a spectacle which is rare: a traitor convicted, exposed, detested, yet still clinging to the Cause which he wrought for and sold, still striving to batter himself into his own self-respect, and to extenuate or bluster out his own dishonour. ”

“ If we may believe a tithe of our Whig or Lowland information, it should have done so long before 1745. Cattle, sheep, red-deer, grouse, now [285] occupy the place of the swords of the North: the banker, brewer, or upholsterer shoots the Chiefs game, or misses it.
Truly money is the root of all evil. When specie was scarce in the North, a guinea a thing seldom seen, the fatal treasure of Loch Arkaig produced, or evoked, the moral consequences of hatred, malice, treachery and slander. ”

“ Thus Barisdale struck terror, inspired respect, and accumulated wealth.
A more cruel engine than the stocks had Barisdale, a triumph of his own invention. In ‘The Lyon [103] in Mourning,’ Mackinnon, who helped Prince Charles to escape from Skye, says that Captain Fergusson (noted for his ferocity) threatened him with torture. ‘The cat or Barisdale shall make you speak,’ said the Captain. The engine is described as one in which no man could live for an hour. ”

“ But Sir Alexander not only did not come out, he was won over by Forbes of Culloden to the Hanoverian Cause. ‘I should be sorry,’ says Murray, ‘to have so bad an opinion of mankind as to think any of them cappable of attempting an apologie for him.’ Murray, in his examination, lied in Sir Alexander’s interests, saying ‘he always absolutely refused to have anything to do with the Pretender.’ But, after Preston Pans, Sir Alexander, moved by that victory, said, in the hearing of Malcolm Macleod of Raasay, that he would now raise 900 of his clan and march south to fight for King James. ”

“ The modern autobiographical romance of adventure has perhaps been overdone. The hero is always very young and very brave; he is mixed up with great affairs; he is a true lover; he marries the heroine, and he leaves his Memoirs (at six shillings) to posterity. Stereotyped as is the method, and mechanical as are most of the novels thus constructed, it is interesting to compare with them a set of genuine Memoirs, which actually are what the novels pretend to be.
Colonel John Macdonell, the author of the Memoirs, was of the Scottos family, a branch of the House of Glengarry. ”

“ Many pretty men ‘died for the law,’ as every one knows.
General Stewart, objecting to the new farmers’ association, seems not to have observed that blackmail and ‘Highland Watches’ were old-fashioned associations for protecting property.’ Complaints are made by him of ‘cutting down farms into lots,’ as if the old Chiefs had not infinitely subdivided the soil. [193] The old extreme poverty is left out of notice by General Stewart, with the old tippling, loafing, ‘sorning,’ thieving, ‘thigging’ habits. ”

“ Hume tells us that the Earl Marischal and Helvetius thought they were ascribing an excellent quality to Prince Charles when they said that he ‘had learned from the philosophers at Paris to affect a contempt of all religion.’ It seems improbable that the Earl was more ‘emancipated’ than Hume, but his wandering life had made him acquainted with the extremes of Scottish Presbyterianism, with the Inquisition in Spain, the devotions of his King in Rome, the levities of Voltaire and Frederick, and all the contemptuous certainties of the Encyclopédistes. ”

“ The writer of a MS. of 1747, in the possession of Graham of Gartmore, [173] says, ‘The practice of letting many farms to one man’ (the tacksman, say Lochgarry or Barisdale) , ‘who, again subsetts them to a much greater number than these can maintain, and at a much higher rent than they can afford to pay, obliges these poor people to purchase their rents and expences by theifts and robberys.’ [174]
In the good old days, something like the iniquitous Truck System existed, we learn from the same authority, on some Highland estates. ”