Death at Glencoe
By ERIC LINKLATER
ON February 1, 1692, Captain Robert Camp- bell of Glenlyon marched into Glencoe at the head of two companies of Argyll's Regiment. He was a handsome man of sixty, but nowadays would be described as a compulsive drinker and gambler—and he was bankrupt. For his poverty he could blame, not only cards and strong drink, but that sept of Clan Donald which lived in the invaded glen. Less than three years earlier, the whole of Glen Lyon had been pillaged, with merciless efficiency, by the men of Glencoe, who, much depleted in number, were on their way home from the savage little battles of Killie- crinkle and Dunkeld. But Robert Campbell's purpose was not revenge. He intended no harm, he said, but had come to ask for temporary quarters because the rough tenements of Fort William were overcrowded.
With Highland hospitality he and his men were made welcome, and for a fortnight the King's soldiers and the people of the little clan lived together, not merely in peace, but in the gaiety of generous entertainment. And then, in the early morning of the thirteenth, the soldiers turned on their sleeping hosts and began the slaughter.
Glenlyon's orders were `to put all to the sword under seventy.' He was adjured `to secure all the avenues that no man escape,' and warned that this punitive operation had been undertaken `by the King's special command, for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants be cut off root and branch.' In this dreadful intention he was unsuccessful, and out of a population that may have numbered 400, only thirty-eight men, women and children were murdered. That the others escaped, into the howling white refuge of a February blizzard; may have been due to the fact that many of the soldiers were unwilling to obey their orders; or that some of them had warned their hosts of what was afoot; or that an elderly drunkard failed to make the proper dispositions. It is pos- sible, too, that Glenlyon himself was double- crossed. His immediate senior was a Majoi .Duncanson, and Duncanson's orders were to march from Fort William, close the lanes of escape from the glen, and begin the massacre at seven o'clock. But Duncanson had told Glen- lyon to start his bloody task at five; in the hope, presumably, that he would receive the Govern- ment's thanks while Glenlyon got the general odium.
In his absorbing new books Mr. Prebble describes, with masterly assurance, the plots and policies that preceded the massacre, and the dis- concerting company of those most closely involved in them. Some Scottish historians have made light of the vital differences between High- lands and Lowlands, and it is much to Mr. Prebble's credit that he sees so clearly, and writes so convincingly, of the deep division that separated one from the other. That division, both ethnic and social, was the underlying cause of the massacre, and when William the Dutch- man succeeded to the throne of England the cross-purposes in his neighbouring kingdom of Scotland became an embarrassment that had to be removed.
Little can be said in favour of either William or his royal predecessor, James 11; but James, though he had been no friend to the High- landers, gained their good will when he became an exile, and William, to counter Jacobite ac- tivity, made use of a Highland magnate of devious purpose and unscrupulous habit, and a gifted Lowlander of noble family and detestable character. John Campbell, Earl of Breadalbane, `grave as a Spaniard, cunning as a fox,' was equally at home with double dealing and naked violence; while Sir John Dalrymple, called the • GLENCOE. By John Prebble. (Seeker and War- burg, 42s.)
Master of Stair, the King's Secretary for Scot- land, was alternatively a turncoat or trimmer, whose cold intelligence was discoloured by in- trinsical hatred of the clans and their way of life. It was they who concocted a device for the subjugation of the Highlands, and when their plans had to be reduced to a murderous plot for the extirpation of Alasdair Macdonald of Glencoe and his people, they got the King's authority for it.
How well Mr. Prebble illumines the course of events with his pictures of the men who directed it! Politics became a small and deadly drama, and all his dramatis personae are clearly drawn and firmly judged. Old Alasdair, chieftain of Glencoe, a giant of a man who was murdered as he rose to fill his assassin's glass; the gentle Englishman, Colonel Hill, in command of deso- late Fort William, unpaid and neglected by the government to which he was so profoundly loyal; the ruthless professional soldiers, implacable politicians and irresolute politicians—they move at their own pace, and in their own style, to animate the landscape. 1 think Mr. Prebble is at fault in his belief that Glenlyon did not get his murderous order till the evening before the massacre, for he must have been chosen as a man who would not shrink from the deed, and to gamble on his acceptance of so fearful an order would have been rash, unless an understanding had been reached and his agreement promised.
But Mr. Prebble's conclusion to an admirable essay disarms criticism, for in his coda he reveals, most engagingly, the stubborn continuity of our national institutions and of life itself. The expiring Parliament of Scotland demanded an inquiry, and public inquiry disclosed nothing but concealed a good deal; while the Mac- donalds of Glencoe survived their death sen- tence and were recalcitrant to the last. They fought on the Jacobite side in the rebellions of 1715 and 1745.
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