Chapter II: Macleod 294 (8)

The old times were not so good; the peasants, who protected and concealed him, could not give Lord Pitsligo salt to his porridge: ‘Salt is dear.’ But people who have seen nothing better are not discontented. The gentry—not chiefs, but tacksmen—as we have said, did not live luxuriously. Examples may be given. ‘Although they have been attended at dinner by five or six servants, they have often dined upon oat-meal varied several ways, pickled herrings, or other such cheap and indifferent diet.... Their houses are _sometimes_ built with stone and lime’ (like Barisdale’s palace), but other houses of the gentry ‘are built in the manner of the huts.’ Burt mentions one such house, with beasts dwelling under the roof of the owner, or tacksman. For many years Old Glengarry dwelt in a hut, his castle being occupied by an English commercial gentleman. The laird’s children were ‘dirty and half naked’—this is on hearsay—and it was a common proverb that ‘a gentleman’s bairns are known by their speaking English.’ Glengarry’s niece, daughter of Æneas, shot at Falkirk, ‘had no English,’ when she could not have been under thirteen years of age.[170]

Thus there was no very great gulf, in some cases, between gentry and peasantry, where comfort was concerned. The difference of appearance between them, as between beings ‘of a different species,’ is the less intelligible. But herrings and game are more nutritious than nettles, cows’ blood, and shell-fish, especially where all are scarce.

As to rents, payments to chief or tacksman, how did things fare? Conservatives, like Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott, have written about the chiefs ‘degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords.’ The Duke of Argyll, on the contrary, speaks of the sub-tenants, in the good old times, as ‘holding at the will of the lease-holders or tacksmen, and complaining bitterly of the oppressions under which they laboured.’ This is on the evidence of Sheriff Campbell of Stonefield, speaking of Mull, Morven, and Tyree, in 1732.[171] ‘It was only beginning to be felt these poor people that even a bare subsistence could not be secured when plunder had been stopped, and before industry had begun.’ What were the ‘oppressions,’ not including, of course, such exceptional outrages as those of Barisdale? Well, Burt tells us that a tenant’s improvements, in 1730-1740, meant an instant rise of rent. ‘What would the tenant be the gainer of it’ (enclosures and improvements on his farm), ‘but to have his rent raised, or his farm divided with some other?’[172] The division would serve to recruit another swordsman for the Chief. 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. ‘Some of the substantial Tacksmen play the merchant, and supply the common people.... As the poor ignorant people have neither knowledge of the value of their purchase, nor money to pay for it, they deliver to these dealers (the tacksmen) ‘cattle in the beginning of May for what they have received; by which traffick the poor wretched people are cheated out of their effects for one half of their value.’ This is a mournful aspect of the good old times. The MS. 104 confirms the statements, and describes the thriftless agricultural methods.

Each of these (the tacksmen) ‘possesses some very poor people under him, perhaps five or six on a farm, to whom he lets out the skirts of his possession, these people are generally the soberest and honestest of the whole. Their food all summer is milk and whey mixed together without any bread, the little butter or cheese they are able to make is reserved for winter provision, they sleep away the greatest part of the summer, and when the little Barley they sow becomes ripe, the women pull it as they do flax, and dry it on a large wicker machine over the fire. Then burn the straw, and grind the corn upon Quearns or hand mills. In the end of Harvest, and During the winter they have some Flesh, Butter, and cheese, with great scarcity of Bread. All their business is to take care of the few Cattle they have. In spring, which is their only season in which they work, their whole food is bread and gruel without so much as salt to season it.

‘About twenty years ago Lochiel erected two or three Water Mills, but by reason of the great distance of many of the people from them, and their natural Laziness, with the prejudice in favour of the old Custom of burning the straw, they were made very little use of. The custom has been given up some time except by the Camerons and Macdonalds, some McLeans, and some of the people of Skye.’

It is not safe, of course, to argue from a report about the state of the people in one part of the Highlands to a conclusion about their condition everywhere. A river may divide comfort from destitution. And it is certain that reports by Lowlanders, Englishmen, or Highlanders, like the famous Forbes of Culloden, who practically defeated the Rising of 1745, will not please some Highland reasoners.[175]

Forbes reported in 1737 on the Duke of Argyll’s lands in Morven, Mull, and Tyree. He speaks of the ‘tyranny’ and ‘unmerciful exactions’ of the tacksmen, large leaseholders who sub-let to smaller tenants. Hence the lands lie waste, and ‘above one hundred families have been reduced to beggary and driven out of the island.’ This is precisely the modern complaint against the bad new times, a complaint with which we all sympathise. Tacksmen, according to Culloden, were as bad as factors.

Culloden, therefore, suggested the granting to the sub-tenants of nineteen years’ leases if they would ‘offer frankly for their farms such rent as fairly and honestly they could bear.’ Such leases he had power to offer, and did offer. ‘No takers!’ Culloden was surprised, but he need not have been. The weight of the tacksmen would be against him; also the conservatism of the people. A fixed rent was a new crude hard thing: a system of shuffling along, above all as the general policy was to find room for swordsmen—was an old endurable thing. Culloden, however, persuaded some sub-tenants to offer. On the tacksmen he put pressure. He had with him some tacksmen from the mainland, better acquainted with farming methods. _They_ offered for the insular tacksmen’s farms, whereon the insular tacksmen also offered. Fixed now were rents, and fixed the duration of tenancy.

One Culloden lease to a kind of village community of six people in portions of land of different sizes is dated April 18, 1739, from Stoney Hill.[176] The lease of 1739 is for nineteen years, ‘and that in full satisfaction of all casualitys, and other prestations and services whatsomever,’ except for services in repairing harbours, mending highways, or repairing miln-leads, for the general benefite of the Island (Mull). The tenants were to pay cesses, ministers’ stipends, schoolmasters’ salaries, &c., ‘freeing and relieving the Duke’ from these burdens. Failure of rent meant removal, and made the lease null and void; the tenants having leave, however, to take over the share of a defaulter or choose a substitute for him.

What the sub-tenants gain is freedom from a tacksman, secure possession while they pay, and freedom from all but the stated customary services and ‘casualties.’ One of these was military service in a Jacobite rising. A tenant in Mull could not now lose his holding if his tacksman ordered him to join the Prince and he refused. As to the other ‘services,’ the Duke of Argyll regards them as indefinite and oppressive. He selects examples from Sinclair’s paper for the Board of Agriculture in 1795. Rent was mainly paid in kind, chickens, cattle, grain, _plus_ ‘tilling, dunging, sowing, and harrowing a part of an extensive farm in the proprietor’s’ (or tacksman’s) ‘possession.’ Peats, thatching, weeding, cartage, harvesting, and so forth, were exacted, with implements, eggs, butter, cheese, a tithe of fish and oil, woollen yarn, and so forth. These services might easily be made oppressive, and did not conduce to improvement in agriculture.

The exact weight and money value of these services must have varied widely. The author of MS. 104 proposes that, in future, all services shall be definitely stated in writing when a tenant takes a farm. ‘Extravagant services are still required’ (_circ._ 1750) ‘and performed, which the landlord would be ashamed to commit to writing.’ He also, like Culloden, advocates the compulsory granting of leases for not less than twenty years. But he has already said that the people, accustomed to hereditary entry on farms from father to son, refuse to take written leases.

As to ‘services,’ Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, on the other side, tells us how the Lochiels, in exile, ‘regularly received part of the rent.’ That he only sent 100_l._ to Lochiel’s children in France, and made the tenants work on his lands instead of on the county roads, is a charge made by Colonel Crawfurd against Lochiel’s brother, Fassifern.[177] Mr. Fraser Mackintosh comments on the loyalty of Lochiel’s tenants, but adds ‘in former times rent in the form of money was a minor easy consideration, the real burden or tax being services’—especially ‘the almost intolerable burden’ of war. Thus the exile of the Chief became ‘really no hardship to the people,’ enabling them ‘to pay a double (money) rent now and then with comparative ease.’[178]

Thus, in this author’s opinion, ‘the real burden or tax’ was ‘services,’ not money rent. Happily he gives a case of commutation of services for money on Glengarry’s estate. The commutation was ‘apparently quite disproportionate and oppressive. For instance, in the case of Dugald Cameron, late cowherd to Glengarry, afterwards tenant of Boline, while his rent was 11_l._ 4_s._ 3_d._, the converted services amounted to 3_l._ 2_s._ 8_d._’ Well, if services were ‘the real burden,’ where is the ‘oppressive disproportion’?[179] This seems absurd.

If it be agreed that ‘services’ were the main part of rent, how oppressive a hostile tacksman, say Barisdale, might make them is easily conceived.[180] Whatever we may think of the advantages of a definite Culloden rent, it is pretty plain that the people did not like it. But the old kind of rent and services was of scarce any value to a probably non-resident proprietor, who could get high returns on the new system from large farmers or graziers. He did not want hens and cheese, and had now no use for claymores. The consequences were raised rents, emigration, evictions, the Highland grievances.

But were there no evictions, and removals, and forced migrations in the good old times?

Mr. Fraser Mackintosh says, ‘The Commissioners on the Forfeited Estates, or, more properly, their Factors, were the first evictors in the Highlands, and they were guilty of favouritism to such a degree in favour of strangers, that many of the tenants emigrated voluntarily.’

Indeed, Glenure was shot, by Allan Breck or another, because, as factor for the forfeited estates of Lochiel and Ardsheil, he had evicted Cameron or Stewart tenants, and preferred Campbells. But Mr. Fraser Mackintosh ought to know that the Commissioners were _not_ the first evictors. Who drove a hundred families from Mull and Tyree about 1738, as Culloden tells us? Who ‘removed’ James Stewart of the Glens before Campbell of Glenure did? Why Ardsheil, whose bastard brother he was. Who evicted some and threatened to evict all Macphersons from the Duke of Gordon’s lands in Badenoch in 1724? Why the Duke and his factor, Gordon of Glenbucket.

The story is told in a letter of Cluny to the Earl Marischal.[181] The Macphersons held lands in Badenoch ‘as feuars, woodsellers, or kindly tenents to the Duke of Gordon.’ He however ‘vexes and reduces us by perpetuall lawsuits,’ and ‘_has taken it into his head to root us intearly out of our own country_.’ He therefore feued most of his Badenoch lands to Glenbucket ‘for the half of its value, or, I may say, a third, meerly out of design to take it out of the hands of the Macphersons.’ Glenbucket, ‘in order to begin the work of extirpating us, has turned out the tenants of six farms.’ Their high offers of rent were refused, so they dirked Glenbucket, ‘in a most barbarous manner.’ The operation can scarcely be performed in a gentle fashion. ‘They very luckily missed their aim by the favour of a buff belt he had about him,’ also by the favour of a claymore that, was lying convenient. The Duke now threatened to ‘extirpate’ or evict ‘the whole name of Macpherson,’ which he proceeded to do ‘with a body of a thousand men, foot and horse.’ All parties were Jacobites, and King James settled _hæc certamina tanta_. _He_ had no objections to eviction. He writes to the Duke of Gordon, ‘I am far from blaming you for any steps you may have taken which are authorised by the law of the land, but there are only a few offenders, and, politically, the _eviction_ disunites loyal clans.’[182]

Indeed the more one thinks of Mr. Fraser Mackintosh’s assertion that the Commissioners were the first evictors in the Highlands, the more grotesque does it appear. We turn to the manuscript ‘Letter of a Gentleman’ whose sympathies are with ‘the wretched commons,’ not with the Chiefs.[183] ‘The gentlemen of the name of Mackenzie,’ says our author, ‘are frugal and industrious.... They have screwed up their rents to an extravagant height, which they vitiously term improving their estates, without putting the tenants upon a proper way of improving the ground, to enable them to pay that rent, which makes the common people little better than slaves and beggars.’

No ‘screw’ but eviction could be used by these Mackenzie landlords, frugal and industrious.

Here is a case among the Camerons from the same MS.:—

‘To shew the present disposition of that Clan,’ described as ‘lazy, silent, sly, and enterprizing people,’ ‘I will relate an instance of their barbarity which happened since the year 1725. The possessor of a farm belonging to the Duke of Gordon, of the tribe of the Macmartins, about three miles to the North of Fort William, demanded an abatement of the usual rent, which the Duke refusing, he left the farm, boasting that no man would dare to succeed in it. For some years it was untenanted, till at last the Duke prevailed on Mr. Skeldoich, who was then minister of the parish, who could not find a place to reside in, to take this farm. The former possessor lay still till the minister had plentifully stocked the farm with cattle and built a house on it, then, with some other rogues, finding that the cattle were carefully watched, went to the place where the calves were kept, and with their durks cut off their heads, and cut the skins so that they would not be of any use.’

They also destroyed the Duke’s salmon nets on the Lochy. Later, watching till the minister chanced to be away from home, ‘they pulled down part of his house, and fired several shots towards the place where his wife lay.’ The worthy clergyman then thought it time to move into Fort William. Our author adds that cadets of Highland houses have possessed farms ‘for ages’ without leases, and when they are not able to pay their rents, _and are turned out_, they look upon the person who takes the farm after them as usurping their right. These people have often refused to take a written lease, thinking that, by so doing, they gave up the right of possession.

All this, written about 1749, is hardly congruous with Mr. Fraser Mackintosh’s bold statement that the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates were the first evictors in the Highlands. We learn that, ‘by reason of the great poverty and slavery of the commons,’ on the Mackenzie estates, out of the clan levy of 3,000 men, ‘a third are but dross.’ Let us add that the Campbells evicted the Macdonalds from Kintyre, by cutting their throats; that every defeated clan was likely to be, more or less, evicted; and that all the Macgregors were evicted. These were operations of clan warfare, though not much more enjoyable for that. But when a sub-tenant held from a tacksman, on a ‘precarious tenure,’ does Mr. Fraser Mackintosh maintain that he was never evicted? Why did Robin Oig shoot Macfarlane at the plough tail? He did so simply for the old agrarian reason.

In Prestongrange’s speech for the Crown, at the disgraceful trial which ended in the judicial murder of James Stewart of the Glens, he says that ‘a delusion in a peculiar manner prevailing in the Highlands,’ is that ‘a cause of mortal enmity arises if a man should be removed by another from his farm or possession which he hath no manner of title to hold or retain.’[184] ‘The delusion,’ he says, ‘prevails elsewhere,’ but is ‘in a particular manner prevalent in the Highlands.’

How could a popular delusion of this kind come into existence if the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates were ‘the first evictors in the Highlands’? Demonstrably they were nothing of the kind. There were evictions in the good old times.

On the other hand, evictions had probably not been much practised with a view to obtaining higher rents or making improvements, but for other reasons. Claymores, not money, had been in request from tenants before 1745.

Once more, according to Burt, a Lowland authority, the Chief ‘must free the necessitous from their arrears of rent, and maintain such who, by accidents, are fallen to a total decay.’ Far from throwing a lot of small farms into a large one, or a sheep-walk, ‘if, by increase of the tribe, small farms are wanting for the support of such addition, he splits others into lesser portions, because all must somehow be provided for.’[185]

This policy is the precise reverse of the Culloden lease, which terminates, _ipso facto_, when rent falls into arrears. A Chief, bound by consanguinity to treat all his tenants as gentlemen, might practise shooting at them, like Clanranald with his famous piece, ‘the Cuckoo,’ but certainly was not apt to evict often for arrears of rent. He lived at home, he built a great castle like Glengarry’s (probably by aid of ‘services’), he fed on the sheep, kine, butter, milk, of his tenants, but he shook them by the hand, perhaps forgave arrears, held clan feasts, and was a god on earth. When he raised rents, united farms in one hand, did not shake that of every clansman, but rather evicted them, discontent was natural, inevitable. Holders of land, proud free men, must emigrate, or become labourers or artisans in towns. Who does not sympathise with their emotions?

On the other side, the Chief must subdivide and subdivide, in the good old times, ‘because all must somehow be provided for.’ But all could not be and were not ‘provided for.’ We have seen the pictures of cruel exquisite poverty from Franck in 1654, to the Gartmore MS. in 1747, and the Culloden Report in 1738, and the ‘Life of Barisdale’ in 1754, and Burt’s Letters of about 1735. It seems reasonable to suppose that all arable lands were eagerly cultivated as far as the implements and skill of the people availed to cultivate them. It was the interest of the chiefs to increase their bands of warriors and the sentiment, if not the interest, of the clansmen urged them to stay on the land.

But the land could not maintain them! The younger gentry pushed their fortunes abroad as men of the sword or in commerce. But the commons were often at the starving point; we hear of famines. Glengarry writes of a great scarcity, when meal had to be bought in the Lowlands. Burt tells of no meal in Inverness. ‘A house, grass for a cow or two,’ and ‘as much land as will sow a boll of oats,’ rocky land, needing spade culture, was a cottar’s ‘only wages of his whole labour and service,’ says the Gartmore MS. The author reckons that there is not in the Highlands employment for more than half the population, even when land has been remorselessly sub-divided. Many earned a harvest wage in the Lowlands. Others ‘sorned’ on their kindred. Armies of tramps were supported by the generosity of the poor; nay, Lowland beggars came North, allured by the open hands of the Highlanders. Whisky shops were everywhere; here men sauntered and drank. Plunder was habitual; a captain of a ‘Watch’ like Barisdale was at once thief and thief-taker. ‘They live like lairds, and die like loons,’ says Franck, speaking not of all the Highlands (as Macaulay quotes him), but chiefly of Lochaber. ‘Upon this fund’—blackmail—the Captain ‘employed one half the thieves to recover lost cattle, and the other half of them to steal.’ Lochiel laboured to reform his clan in this respect. The exactions of tacksmen, ‘sub-letting farms to a much greater number than they can maintain, and at a much higher rent than they can pay, obliges these poor people to purchase their rents and expences by theifts and robberys,’ of cattle; for the Highland honesty about portable property is extolled by Burt.

As to the moral iniquity of cattle robbing, all morality is local, and a man who does not sin against the local standard is no extreme criminal. The Macdonalds held a simple creed of communism. ‘They say that the Cattle are God’s creatures, made for the use of man, for which the earth yields grass and herbs in plenty, without the labour of man, and that therefore they Ought to be common’—that is, ought to belong to the Macdonalds.[186] The same ideas had prevailed on the Border:

If every man had his ain cow,
A richt poor clan Buccleugh’s wad be.

Dr. Carlyle shows that Border cattle thieves, though not encouraged by the gentry, were a powerful class about 1740.

This is not a picture of a golden age, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, in ‘Rob Roy,’ sums up this theory of what the age was really like. But, if we turn to Stewart of Garth,[187] we find the real condition of the Highlands in times past revealed in a rosy haze. Blackmail is only extorted from _Lowlanders_, as if Barisdale had Lowland neighbours![188] The game and fish were ‘free to all’—a palpable error as regards salmon, at all events, while one doubts if every clansman was made free of Cluny’s forest. We do not read of grouse and venison in cotters’ huts. ‘Cottagers and tradesmen were discouraged from marrying.’[189] Yet the surplus population was very large. A young amorous Highlander set himself up for marriage by ‘thigging’—that is, by begging among friends for cows, sheep, and seed-corn.[190] They did not discourage him. ‘The extinction of the respectable race of tacksmen ... is a serious loss to the people.’[191] Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, however, speaking of Skye, says, ‘large tacksmen ... could be relied on to assist (each other) or keep aloof, if the oppressed were below their class or set.’[192] The author of MS. 104 would reduce the power of tacksmen by making all tenants leaseholders for terms not under twenty years, and would pay off all wadsetts on forfeited estates, ‘because the gentlemen who had them were great oppressors of the Poor, and most of them, though they did not themselves take arms, were very active in forcing the people into the late Rebellion.’

An association had been made by Sutherland farmers in General Stewart’s time to suppress sheep-stealing. He objects to the new social state which made this association necessary. Previously ‘crimes had been so few that, from 1747 to 1810, there was only one capital conviction for theft.’ This may have been so in Sutherland, and the MS. Letter already cited makes it probable. ‘The Mackays of Lord Reay’s country,’ though previously reckoned ‘the wickedest clan,’ now ‘abhor thieving.’ But ‘the common people who dwell along the East Coast are next to the Caithness people for poverty, slavery, and dwarfish stature, while the people further up the country towards Strathnaver’ (where Franck found them bleeding their cattle for food) ‘live better.’ A third of the Earl of Sutherland’s levy ‘are mean, despicable creatures.’ Thus one county showed very different conditions: however, like the Mackenzies, the Sutherland men ‘abhor thieving.’ Elsewhere in the Highlands, hangings for theft occupy a good deal of the old _Scots Magazine_. 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. Much land could be and was cultivated, he says, which is now pasture, the harvest only failing ‘in cold and wet autumns.’[194] These not being unknown in the Highlands, but, on the other hand, very common, famines followed often, notably in 1782.

If the Lowlanders, the English, and the Anglified Highlanders, like Culloden, paint too gloomy a picture of the good old times, General Stewart may be regarded as erring in the opposite direction. His charge against the new Chiefs and landlords is the callous hurry with which they seized their pecuniary advantage, ‘which proved ruinous to their ancient tenants.’[195] This is also Scott’s opinion, in his _Quarterly Review_ article of 1816. He, too, a Tory of the Tories, condemns the heartless greed of evicting landlords.[196] General Stewart records cases of delicate consideration and honourable sagacity on the side of the landlords. But often we find either a well-meaning hurry to make sweeping ‘improvements,’ and benefit people in a way they detest and do not understand (as by giving them leases), or a mere hasty desire to save such a ruined estate as war had left to Glengarry, by raising rents, causing, with the aid of frequent famine years, wholesale emigration. This policy was, indeed, far unlike what Burt reports: ‘the poverty of the tenants has rendered it customary for the Chief, or Laird, to free some of them every year from all arrears of rent; this is supposed, upon an average, to be about one year in five of the whole estate.’

These habits vanished with the change in the Highlands; the old ‘arts of popularity’ were no longer practised by the Chiefs: clan affection became clan hatred. 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 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. Twenty years later the lack of money hardened the hearts of Chiefs (which had not been so very soft before). Clansmen had to emigrate, and they were wisest who sailed first from a land of famine. 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.

On the whole, a distressed Highlander need not, it seems, conceive that the old times were free from distress, or that Chiefs were really always humane. They acted in accordance with their immediate interests. They kept rents low when it paid to have a following, and they screwed rents up when money was more desirable than men. The two policies might be contemporary; this among Mackenzies, that among Macdonalds. Ensign Small reported[197] that, among the Macdonalds, ‘the gentry are fond of a rising, the commoners hate it.’ The author of MS. 104 represents the Macdonalds as ‘cursing their Prince and their Chiefs.’

The world, to its disadvantage, allows interest to override sentiment, which we only find here and there, as in the noble words of Lochiel. When he arrived with Prince Charles in France, in the autumn of 1746, he was, of course, very poor. The Prince, according to Young Glengarry, in a conversation with Bishop Forbes, was obliged to give Lochiel a full security for his estates before the Chief would raise his clan. Consequently Charles felt bound, said Glengarry, to secure a French regiment first of all for Lochiel. This, in Lochiel, would have been a singular piece of caution! But let us hear his own words, in a letter to King James.[198] ‘I told H.R.H. that Lord Ogilby or others might incline to make a figure in France, but my ambition was to serve the Crown, and serve my Country, or perish with itt. H.R.H. say’d he was doing all he could’ (to return with forces to Scotland), ‘but persisted in his resolution to procure me a Regiment. If it is obtained, I shall accept it out of respect to the Prince, but I hope Yr. M. will approve of the resolution I have taken _to share in the fate of the people I have undone_, and, if they must be sacrificed, to fall along with them. It is the only way I can free myself from the reproach of their blood, and shew the disinterested zeal with which I have lived, and shall dye, Your Majesty’s most humble, most Obedient, and most faithfull subject and servant,

‘DONALD CAMERON.[199]’

There speaks a man who makes real the ideal of the Clan system. But the ideal, though a hundred times illustrated in the conduct of the commons, has left less conspicuous examples in the behaviour of some Chiefs. ‘My brother-in-law, Major Grant, pretended that the man,’ (a recruit) ‘I sent from this country, _I sold_, which is false,’ says Old Lovat to Cluny.[200] Major Grant, his brother-in-law, knew Old Lovat. He, like Barisdale, was an example of the kind of chief who, till after 1745, was not impossible. He throve wickedly on the survival of a kind of society, the tribal society with its usages, which was in no sense exclusively Celtic, but originally prevalent all over Europe. In parts of the Highlands tribal society outlived its day, and gave to Lovat the opportunities which he abused.