NOW ALL WAS totally changed with Rob Roy MacGregor. His fury at the perpetrators of the outrage knew no bounds. His wife, each time he looked at her, seemed to reproach him. He saw all men pointing the finger of shame and scorn at him – the great Rob Roy MacGregor who could not protect his own nearest and dearest! From being a genial, friendly, dashing Highland gentleman, influential, however unorthodox in his methods, he became an angry, determined, embittered outlaw, something of a brigand indeed, his hand forever against authority, thirsting for vengeance, the scourge of the settled Graham lands flanking the Highland Line.
Of course, his wrath was especially directed against Killearn and Montrose. The latter’s great estates he now put under what amounted to a sort of reign of terror. Montrose had ruined him; he would now do his best to ruin Montrose, and at the same time make Montrose keep him. From his Highland fastnesses, with a band of the toughest Gregorach, he raided and raided. No longer was there a Glengyle Highland Watch to preserve the peace and protect the Lowland farms. Rob had now nothing to lose. His Mary, although living with him in Glen Dochart, was now a changed woman – cold and unhappy. Even to his young sons he was no longer the great hero of former days. He was injured where it hurt most, in his pride.
If it was the grimmest period of Rob’s life, it was also the most active. His bitter hurt would not let him rest, and his temporary home held no happiness to keep him in it. He was determined to make Scotland realise that it still had Rob Roy to reckon with. I have no space here to recount in any detail his activities of the next three years. Whole books might be written about them. I can only summarise.
In the main, it was a personal campaign against Montrose and Killearn – he did not desire hurt to the actual tenants of the duke’s estates. So his activities usually took the form of uplifting what was the duke’s rather than the tenant’s property. In those days, rent was quite frequently paid in kind rather than in money – grain, sheep, cattle, poultry. The duke’s factor or his minions could not get round all the hundreds of tenants at one time to collect these rentals, and it was indeed a prolonged process. Rob, therefore, perfected a system of collecting the rents before the factor could do so. This was plain robbery, of course but he was always most meticulous about the procedure, taking only the exact amount of the rent and giving his own receipt for it to the frightened tenants. These receipts were carefully, even elaborately worded, declaring that Rob Roy MacGregor of Inversnaid had uplifted on behalf of himself and his partner, his Grace the Duke of Montrose, the following amount, being full and legal rent for the said holding for whatever was the period.
Besides infuriating Killearn and Montrose, this placed them in a position of great difficulty. The matter was extremely awkward for them to rectify. The tenants in most cases just did not have the wherewithal to pay twice over. Killearn could curse and storm as he liked when he arrived – but that did not produce another rent payment, whether in money or goods. Rob, moreover, proclaimed it far and wide that any iniquitous attempt to double the exactions of rent would meet with the punishment it deserved. On the whole, the tenants were more afraid of Rob Roy than of the factor or the duke.
Rob thought up an improved arrangement, better for all concerned – except Montrose. He approached the tenants to ask them if they believed their rents to be fair – for Montrose was a great rent-raiser and evictor. Needless to say, the alarmed tenants seldom claimed that they did. Whereupon Rob invited them to state what they did consider to be a fair rent. Then he would take this reduced amount – but give the tenant a receipt, in the duke’s name, for the full rent. Needless to say, this was apt to commend itself to the tenants.
Not that all of the tenants did lie down under the pressure, and co-operate. In one or two cases, groups of them banded together, possibly at the factor’s instigation, and handed in their tribute, in grain, beasts and so on, at central assembly points well before the due date, for later collection by armed estate parties. But when these stores were raided by Rob’s men, almost as soon as they were amassed and the entire tribute confiscated, and with no Rob Roy receipts for the tenants to show for their rents, they tended to have second thoughts.
Further to win over popular opinion, Rob began to use an ever greater proportion of the purloined rents to help the duke’s tenantry who were in need – and there was no lack of these. He lent and gave money and goods to those threatened with eviction, assisted the poor, the hungry and the unfortunate, and protected the weak. This had always been his habit – but now he did it on a large scale, looking for recipients of his bounty; and all at the duke’s expense! Before long he had the common people of a wide area almost on his side in this strange war; they were looking upon him as a benefactor against a hated and oppressive landlord.
A typical incident may be recounted briefly. A widow of the name of MacGregor tenanted a small farm near Balfron. She had had her rent abruptly raised to £20 Scots a year, and had not the money to pay. Rob’s intelligence service was always excellent, and knowing that this was merely a preliminary to the woman’s eviction, he came to Balfron secretly and gave her the necessary money. When Montrose’s bailiffs arrived to evict her, she was able to surprise them by paying in full and demanding her receipt. A little later, however, the bailiffs themselves were waylaid by an armed party of fierce Highlanders and relieved of the exact sum, being sent off unhappily with a receipt of £20 Scots for the use of Rob Roy MacGregor.
So it went on. As the Duke and Killearn took every sort of precaution open to them, every evasive action, so Rob adjusted his tactics and defeated them. The entire countryside was in an uproar – but since Rob confined his private war almost entirely to the Montrose estates, other lairds and landowners found themselves distinctly amused, for Montrose was unpopular and overbearing. The government could do little or nothing, even though the duke was Lord Privy Seal. Armed guards, even dragoons, were provided for the factor’s parties – but since Rob operated against the source of supplies, the hundreds of small crofts, farms and hamlets over a huge area could not possibly be protected.
Gradually the success of his campaign, the constant action, and the gratitude of so many poor folk began to have a healing effect on Rob’s bitterness. He began to enjoy life again. Indeed, he is reported to have declared to someone that he could hardly bear the duke any malice after all, considering the amount of excellent sport he had provided.
But he did not relent one iota towards Graham of Killearn. That was a different matter. Killearn had shamefully outraged Mary MacGregor, and had to pay for it. Rob was forever leaving messages for the factor, warning him that his time would come. Graham never dared move abroad save under powerful armed guard, and what with one thing and another, his life must have become a misery for him.
Montrose, after many fruitless attempts to catch Rob, with companies of armed estate employees, volunteer militia from Glasgow, and eventually regular army troops, decided that as Rob always escaped into the trackless mountains where the soldiers dared not penetrate for lack of bases, such bases must be set up. He could not involve the government in a full-scale war against one man, but he did get authority to establish one fort in the MacGregor area and one or two lesser outposts. Wisely enough, from his point of view, he chose to erect the fort at Inversnaid itself. Thus it could be provisioned and reinforced by boat from up Loch Lomond – and, sitting on his own ground, directly opposite the ruins of his own house, it would be a constant source of hurt to Rob’s famous pride. An Edinburgh building contractor, Naysmith by name, was given the task of erecting the fort, and provided with an armed guard for his workers. His contract stipulated that the place must be ready for the garrison by the end of that year, 1713.
Throughout the erection of the fort there was no real trouble, nothing really to upset the builders or the soldiers. Then one snowy night late in December, when Naysmith himself had come from Edinburgh to inspect the more or less finished work prior to handing over to the government, Rob struck. The guards, careless now after months of inaction, were decoyed away some distance by a ruse, and a lone traveller came knocking at the barred fort gateway, seeking shelter from the sleet. When the wicket-gate was opened, to inspect him, 30 armed Gregorach, hitherto hidden, burst in. The contractor and his workmen had no chance. They were expelled into the night, gunpowder charges placed in strategic positions throughout the building, and the entire fort blown up. The new bunks for the soldiers, just delivered, were piled up on to the burning building thereafter to make a bigger fire than even had blazed from Inversnaid House just across the Snaid Burn a year before. No doubt vengeance tasted sweet to Rob, as he slipped away into the dark hills illuminated by flickering flames that night.
It was not so easy to have the fort rebuilt. The contractor had lost enthusiasm, and workers were difficult to find now for such unpopular and dangerous work in the dreaded MacGregor country.
While the winter lasted, at least, the work was abandoned. Just when it was eventually completed and garrisoned, we do not know. At the start of the second Jacobite Rising, in 1715, it was not in use, whether this was because it still was not completed, or had been taken and again demolished by Rob, is uncertain. It is interesting to note that it was garrisoned and in good order 30 years later, in the succeeding Rising of 1745 – for it was in fact stormed and captured by one of Rob Roy’s sons. Its ruins, now known as the Garrison of Inversnaid, are still there, on its knoll, above the rushing burn, with part of the buildings turned into a farmhouse.
I have no space to detail or even hint at the remainder of Rob Roy’s stirring adventures during this outlaw period of just under three years. Suffice to say that he proved himself more than a match for both Montrose and the government, and established such a dominance over much of central Scotland that he was more feared and respected as a landless outlaw than he had ever been as Captain of the Watch, Laird of Inversnaid, and Tutor of Glengyle.
Only in one matter did he fail; he was unable to lay hands on the wily and cautious Graham of Killeam, who must have had his duties as principal factor enormously hampered by the ever-present threat of Rob’s reprisals and revenge. Perhaps Rob did not actually try very hard to capture him; it may be that he recognised that he was making the man’s life a pretty sheer misery anyway, and that the longer that went on before the final reckoning, the better.
But now more widespread and dangerous war clouds were once again banking up on Scotland’s troubled skyline. Six months after the blowing up of Inversnaid Fort, in the summer of 1714, the rather feeble Queen Anne died, leaving no direct heir to succeed to the thrones of England and Scotland. Once more a king had to be found.