Then followed the famous battle in that “Glen of Sorrow,” which the Macgregor historian shows to have been fairly fought and won by the courage and strategy of the Macgregors and their allies, who had taken the initiative against a hostile force advancing to attack them. As for the legend of the slaughtered scholars, she justly insists that this story does not enter into the legal charges formulated against her clan, from which such an atrocity would hardly fail to be omitted if it could be brought home to them. She quotes another tradition as to this crime being the work of a monster or madman of uncertain name; and she is able to show that a few years later a highlander of Glencoe was accused before the Privy Council of having “with his own hand murdered without pity the number of forty poor persons who were naked and without armour,” probably those scholars or other sightseers who had come out from Dumbarton to see the battle, and whom the Macgregor annals represent the chief as placing in a church out of harm’s way; he is also said to have expressed the utmost horror at their unhappy fate. Furthermore, the Macgregors’ plea includes a charge, founded on the dying declaration of their resentful chief, that sly Argyll had a hand in the whole quarrel, who, while professing to keep the peace of the Highlands, was not above secretly setting two hostile clans by the ears that they might destroy one another like Kilkenny cats, at the same time, perhaps, throwing into relief the need for the services of a powerful lord-lieutenant on the Highland border. For myself, I will only say that in the whole affair there appears no evidence to call a blush to the cheek of modern Macgregors; and that I regret having hurt any clan feeling by my slight account of this battle long ago. The Colquhouns’ story has been set forth by Sir William Fraser; and that clan counts among its daughters a distinguished author who might draw the pen against the Macgregor historian, if so disposed. As for the Argyll family of to-day, they are all authors, so I leave it to them to controvert the many hard things that have been said against their forbears.
Glenfinlas and Glenfruin, in one or both of which fights Dumbarton citizens were involved, raised such a noise in the Lowlands that, for the moment, anything would be believed against the Macgregors. James’s parting legacy to them was a persecution that aimed at exterminating the “viperous clan,” as a Campbell styles them in a letter to the king. Their very name was prohibited. They were forbidden to carry any arms but a pointless knife for eating their victuals. Not more than four of them might be suffered to show themselves together. Other offenders were offered pardon on condition of quelling Macgregors, whose heads, in one instance at least, were put to a price like wolves’. Within a year after Glenfruin, more than thirty of them had been executed at Stirling alone. The chief was hanged at Edinburgh; after one daring escape from treacherous arrest, he had fallen into the hands of Argyll, who is said to have promised to send him to England, a promise kept to the letter by taking the captive over the Border, but at once bringing him back to his doom. Hostile clans were set to hunt down the sons of Alpin, as Uncle Sam has employed Cheyenne scouts against the Sioux. As with runaway slaves, bloodhounds were employed in the chase of the proscribed rebels, some of whom took refuge on an island of Loch Katrine, no doubt the same as figures in the _Lady of the Lake_. Severe penalties were denounced against “resetters” of those outlaws, and all holding friendly intercourse with them. They did not want for sympathisers as well as persecutors. It had to be expressly forbidden to ferry any of the fugitives across the lochs to the south of their country, where they might else seek refuge in the wilds of Dumbarton and Argyll.