The fruit of this victory was a large quantity of booty, which the victors divided the same day; but the avarice of the men of Assynt, induced them to instigate John Mackay to resolve to commit one of the most perfidious and diabolical acts ever perpetrated by men who had fought on the same side. The design of the Assynt men was, to cut off Robert Sutherland and his whole party, and possess themselves of their share of the spoil, before the Earl of Sutherland could learn the result of the battle, that he might be led to suppose that his uncle and his men had all fallen in the action with the Rosses. When this plan was divulged to Uilleam-Dubh-Mac-Iain-Abaraich, he was horrified at it, and immediately sent notice to Robert Sutherland of it, that he might be upon his guard. Robert assembled his men upon receipt of this extraordinary intelligence, told them of the base intentions of John Mackay, and put them in order, to be prepared for the threatened attack; but on John Riabhaich Mackay perceiving that Robert and his party were prepared to meet him, he slunk off, and went home to Strathnaver.[161]
The lawless state of society in the Highlands, which followed as a consequence from the removal of the seat of government to the Lowlands, though it often engaged the attention of the Scottish sovereigns, never had proper remedies applied to mend it. At one time the aid of force was called in, and when that was found ineffectual, the vicious principle of dividing the chiefs, that they might the more effectually weaken and destroy one another, was adopted. Both plans, as might be supposed, proved abortive. If the government had, by conciliatory measures, and by a profusion of favours, suitable to the spirit of the times, secured the attachment of the heads of the clans, the supremacy of the laws might have been vindicated, and the sovereign might have calculated upon the support of powerful and trustworthy auxiliaries in his domestic struggles against the encroachments of the nobles. Such ideas appear never to have once entered the minds of the kings, but it was reserved for James IV., who succeeded to the throne in 1488, to make the experiment. “To attach to his interest the principal chiefs of these provinces, to overawe and subdue the petty princes who affected independence, to carry into their territories, hitherto too exclusively governed by their own capricious or tyrannical institutions, the same system of a severe, but regular and rapid, administration of civil and criminal justice, which had been established in his Lowland dominions, was the laudable object of the king; and for this purpose he succeeded, with that energy and activity which remarkably distinguished him, in opening up an intercourse with many of the leading men in the northern counties. With the captain of the Clanchattan, Duncan Mackintosh; with Ewan, the son of Alan, captain of the Clancameron; with Campbell of Glenurqhay; the Macgilleouns of Duart and Lochbuy; Mackane of Ardnamurchan; the lairds of Mackenzie and Grant; and the Earl of Huntley, a baron of the most extensive power in those northern districts--he appears to have been in habits of constant and regular communication--rewarding them by presents, in the shape either of money or of grants of land, and securing their services in reducing to obedience such of their fellow chieftains as proved contumacious, or actually rose in rebellion.”[162]