THERE WERE, OF course, two contenders for the crown. James, still in France and already proclaimed by some to be James III and VIII, now a gloomy young man of 26; and George, Elector of Hanover, a distant cousin, son of the Electress Sophia who was a granddaughter of King James I and VI. Neither was much of a catch, as kings went – and George could not even speak English; indeed he had never learned to do so. He did not particularly want to be king, or even to leave Hanover. But he was a Protestant, and James was a Catholic. Under the Treaty of Union of 1707 it had been declared that if Queen Anne left no heir, the Electress Sophia of Hanover should succeed to the throne. Sophia died shortly before Anne, and the Privy Council in London decided to invite George to be king. There was great disappointment at this, amongst the English Tories as well as in Scotland, for Queen Anne was known to have hated George, and asserted to have left instructions that her brother James was to succeed her. However, George came, though apparently reluctantly, and James tarried in France. George had been hastily proclaimed king in Edinburgh on August 5th, 1714, Elsewhere in Scotland, however, particularly in the Highlands, James was also being proclaimed – even though he seemed to be in little hurry to stake his own claim.
So once again the plotting, the intriguing and secret arming began – and Rob Roy was one of the first to be involved. Now he was in a better position than ever to help the Jacobite cause, for he had little or nothing to lose, and he had his contacts everywhere. He did not have to be a secret Jacobite this time. We read of him drinking toasts to King James openly in Crieff town, outlaw as he was, before crowds at the cross, with the Town Guard looking on, in October. In February, 1715, we hear of him leading an attack on a customs official who had confiscated some Highlanders’ smuggled brandy, before marching, with a great crowd of clansmen, pipes skirling, to the town cross once again, to lead three cheers for King James, while the brandy went round and round, no-one either wishing or daring to interfere.
But Rob was doing much more useful and effective work for the Jacobites than this sort of thing. £4,000 at last arrived from James’s headquarters in France to assist in the mobilisation of the clans for a rising, and it was Rob Roy who conveyed the gold safely to the chiefs. This may seem a relatively small sum today, but in those times, especially in the Highlands where gold was seldom seen, it represented a vast amount of money. Arms and ammunition were being smuggled into the country, and in this Rob and his MacGregors were very active. Couriers had to be escorted through hostile areas, and messages carried through the Highlands. In all this Rob was of the greatest use, and he now brought young Gregor of Glengyle into the forefront of things again. The Glengyle Regiment was reformed, and everywhere the Highlands were stirring.
It has been suggested that Rob was not really a sincere Jacobite, and that his heart was not in this planned rising, after the debacle of the last one. Some historians and even Sir Walter Scott profess to see his later conduct at the Battle of Sheriffmuir as proof of this. I do not accept such an interpretation, and shall deal with Sheriffmuir later. Even though Rob had less to lose, those near and dear to him had, and yet he involved them deeply in the Jacobite cause. None doubted his love for his clan and for Gregor Black Knee his nephew: yet he committed both wholly to the enterprise. One of the authorities quoted as spreading the word that Rob was even playing a double game was none other than the ailing Duke of Atholl, our old friend and expert at double-dealing, Lord Murray, whose own sons were now turning Jacobite while he sought at all costs to retain the favour of the government. None can rely on the word of such a man when he wrote to the Lord Justice Clerk that Rob Roy, he was sure, knew much of the (Jacobite) transactions in the Highlands, but that he believed that he imposed on both parties.
It looked, for long enough, as though this rising was going to be bedevilled by the same hopeless delays and hesitations on the part of James and his advisers as had been that of 1708. However, in the middle of 1715, a new star appeared upon the scene – John Erskine, Earl of Mar. His accession to the cause was unexpected indeed. Though a Tory, he had never been a Jacobite and had in fact supported Queen Anne, being Secretary of State at the time of her death. A Whig government took over in London when George I was brought from Hanover. Mar, though now out of office, was still anxious for preferment and position, for he too was an ambitious man. He went to Greenwich to welcome the new monarch as he came ashore and had the humiliation of being publicly snubbed, George rudely turning his back on him. Presumably somebody had poisoned the king’s mind against him. Mar was both furious and grievously disappointed. He hurried back to Scotland, secretly – actually sailing as a deck-hand on a coal-boat to Fife, in most extraordinary and dramatic fashion – and startled Scotland by proclaiming himself for King James, urging immediate action. He called for a council of war, another tinchel or hunting-match to be held on his own lands in the Braes of Mar, to make the arrangements for a rising. At last things were moving, however doubtfully James, still in France, may have looked upon this belated and impetuous recruit. Mar had the nickname of Bobbing John – partly on account of his jerky gait, and partly because he was known to be something of a changer-of-sides.
Rob Roy was amongst the 26 Highland chiefs present at the famous gathering on the Braes of Mar on August 27th, 1715, with a great many Lowland noblemen and lairds. Mar was very much in charge of it all, although he was far from popular with most of those present, who doubted his new-found enthusiasm for Jacobitism. But he had the authority of a minister of the late queen, and he was obviously prepared to commit himself to the attempt, prepared to act where so many in high position temporised. The Lowlanders would never serve under a Highland leader anyway, and Mar was the most experienced figure in politics amongst the Lowlanders present even though he had done no soldiering. The Duke of Berwick, half-brother to King James, who was a Marshal of France, was said to be the king’s appointed Commander-in-Chief, and no doubt James would bring him when he at length landed in his ancient kingdom. Meanwhile, it was agreed that the Earl of Mar should be in control. The standard of revolt was to be raised in only a week’s time.
So, at last, words and intrigues and plans gave place to action. On September 6th, the royal standard of the House of Stewart was unfurled amidst tremendous enthusiasm at Braemar, close to where the present queen’s castle at Balmoral now stands.
Scotland was grievously divided in this matter of loyalty. Still seething with discontent over the Union with England, her Protestant people were yet highly suspicious of the Catholic James as king. By and large, the Highlands and the north-eastern Lowlands, with some of Dumfriesshire and Galloway in the southwest, were for James, and rallied fairly well to his cause; the rest of the populous Lowlands, including the great cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, plus the Campbell Highlands of Argyll, were for King George. In England, although there was some Jacobite sympathy, especially in the north-west, there was little real enthusiasm for a rising.
Rob and Gregor MacGregor were in it to the hilt, of course. Gregor hastened south to put the Glengyle Regiment on a war-footing and to man the strategic passes of Aberfoyle and Balmaha with 200 well-trained Gregorach fighting men. Rob went on a special mission to the Aberdeen district to raise a battalion there, based on a colony of MacGregors who had been established in the area nearly a century before by his grandfather, as part of a phase of clan warfare.
All over the north the clans were marching. Success at first was with the Jacobites. But it took a little while to make an army out of the innumerable small clan and Lowland units, however good their fighting material. The Scots have always been a fiercely individualistic and independent race, difficult to unite in any enterprise. Mar had taken on no light task. It would have been different if King James’s authoritative presence had been there to impose allegiance – but James still delayed.
The clans were divided by blood feuds and animosities stretching back over centuries. Their members would serve only under their own chiefs, and were quite as ready to come to blows with other clansmen as with the common enemy. MacDonalds from Glen Garry and Moidart would have nothing to do with Mackintoshes and Macphersons from Badenoch; Camerons from Lochaber were at permanent feud with the Frasers; MacLeans from the Isle of Mull looked with gravest suspicion at the MacNeils from the Isle of Barra, and so on. Units of 50 from some small clan were as fiercely proud as larger bodies, and would by no means be brigaded with, say 2,000 MacDonalds.
Besides, the Lowlanders hated the Highlanders, and would not mix with them. They did not speak the same language even, each despising the other. Finding junior officers was not difficult, for this was a concentration of splendid guerilla warfare material; but senior officers, to command groups of the army, represented a headache indeed – for proud chiefs and nobles would serve under none but their own choice. The Jacobite army contained some of the best fighting men in the world – but the most difficult to regiment.
However, Mar did march out of the north within two weeks of raising the standard – which must be accounted in his favour. On September 22nd, his advance guard took Perth, almost without opposition. Wisely, no doubt, he had not waited for the arrival of King James.
The government position in Scotland was very weak. London was in a panic, and refused to send troops north, fearing risings in England. Scotland was now being ruled by Montrose, as Secretary of State, with the Duke of Argyll as Commander-in-Chief. Argyll was an experienced and able soldier, a Major-General – but he had ridiculously few troops to hold down a restive country. His total force of regulars consisted of eight units: four regiments of infantry – the Buffs, the Devonshires, the Scots Fusiliers and the Edinburgh Regiment; and four of cavalry – the Scots Greys, the 6th Inniskillings, Carpenter’s Dragoons, and Kerr’s Dragoons. Altogether these amounted to fewer than 2,000 men. There were irregular and militia forces scattered about the country, of course, but these were fit only to keep down the Jacobites of their own areas, if that. Red John of the Battles, as the Highlanders called John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, had an even more difficult task than had Mar. Moreover, his Scottish troops were scarcely to be trusted when it came to fighting their fellow-countrymen in a civil war.
In these circumstances, the Jacobites’ obvious tactics were to strike hard and fast. But this is where Mar’s lack of any military and warlike training failed miserably. He sat fast in Perth, waiting. He waited for King James and the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Berwick, to arrive; for reinforcements from the remote Western Highlands and Islands and south-west Scotland; for a sympathetic rising in England. He did send out skirmishing forces and sallies to Fife and Kinross and elsewhere. These minor operations were on the whole successful. But the main army, despite protests from the fiery Highlanders, remained inactive at Perth week after week, while internal jealousies and bickerings grew and grew. The Duke of Argyll dug himself in at the strategic town and river-crossing of Stirling, near where half the battles of Scotland have been fought. He must have sighed with relief, if not chuckled. Every day improved his chances and damaged those of the Jacobites – for reinforcements were on their way to him from Ireland and the Continent, and people all over the Lowlands were recovering from their startled fright at the rising.
Rob Roy, a born fighter and instinctive tactician, must have been appalled at the delay, for he was never a very patient man. But he himself was far from inactive at this time. He brought his Aberdeenshire recruits down to Perth, and then seems to have hurried back to his own countryside for a brief visit to Gregor and the Glengyle Regiment.
Gregor was still holding the passes, and thereby performing a most useful function, keeping Mar’s back door shut, as it were. But as well as this, he had been raiding around a bit, in typical MacGregor fashion, and we read that on September 27th, MacGregors under Glengyle attacked the Duke of Montrose’s tenants a little above Aberfoyle, defeated them, and seized 20 or 30 guns.
This indication of Montrose’s tenantry now being armed is thus explained. Argyll, at Stirling – a mere 20 miles from Glen Gyle and Inversnaid – was worried about his own left flank, as well he might be. He did the best that he could, encouraging the lairds of the area between Stirling and Glasgow, the Lennox as it is called, to muster their men and arm them at the government’s expense, seeking to establish a series of strong points facing the Highland Line. Gregor made a systematic assault on these places, using Rob’s old methods and his famed information services. The favourite activity was to raid these selected strong points just as the loads of guns and ammunition from Argyll were arriving, and to confiscate the lot thus both grievously discouraging the local defence levies and turning the Gregorach into the best armed units of the entire Jacobite army. Indeed Rob was soon in a position to do a profitable trade in selling cheap government arms to less enterprising leaders.
Rob, however, with only a day or two before he had to return to Mar’s headquarters at Perth – for he seems to have been acting as a sort of aide-de-camp, leaving Gregor in command of the Glengyle Regiment – had a more ambitious operation of his own to carry out. This has been represented as a typically wild and individualistic exploit, picturesque but without real military significance, a mere Rob Roy-ish gesture. It was far from that. It was a carefully thought-out action, designed to weaken the left flank of Argyll’s army, and to force him to draw away desperately needed troops from the Stirling vicinity. In this, no doubt, he was highly successful.
At dusk on September 29th, Rob took 70 of Gregor’s men, and in a fleet of small boats set off down the loch from Inversnaid. Loch Lomond is 22 miles long, and though narrow at its head, at its foot it widens out to four miles. At this part, where it is well clear of the mountains and out into Lowland country within 12 miles of Glasgow, lies the large wooded island of Inchmurrin. Here the boats hove-to in the dark, assembled, and at midnight headed out purposefully towards the populous low-lying area south and east of the loch. This was all Graham country. The thought that Montrose’s own home, Buchanan Castle, was a mere three miles away, may not have been wholly absent from Rob’s mind.
For 70 men, the Gregorach seem to have made a prodigious impact that September night, and covered a lot of ground. It was not the intention to do major damage, to fight on any large scale, or to collect booty. The purpose was to spread the maximum of fear and chaos. In this Rob could hardly have been more successful. Soon church bells were ringing wild alarm over a wide area, and even the cannon of the fortress of Dumbarton Castle were shattering the night air. Certain historians have suggested that Rob Roy failed to surprise Dumbarton Castle, and had to content himself with terrorising the countryside. But this is surely ridiculous, for even Rob would never have attempted to capture the principal fortress in the West of Scotland with 70 men – or could possibly have held it had he done so. The object of the exercise was to create alarm and despondency, and so to force Argyll to weaken his position by detaching forces to the area.
The other objective now revealed itself. The MacGregors streamed back to Loch Lomond with the dawn, and split up, making in twos and threes for every little bay, beach and landing-place on the wide and populous loch-shore from Balloch to Balmaha, and from Rowardennan to Luss. Soon innumerable little convoys of boats began to head up the misty morning waters, each convoy consisting of one boat, lustily rowed by MacGregors, towing behind it a string of others, great and small. Every boat that would float around Loch Lomond was taken, and those which could not be moved were sunk or made useless. The entire boat-population then was towed away northwards to Inversnaid and the head of the loch, there to be dispersed and hidden. Rob had learned the lesson of Killearn and the Fort. With Gregor holding the entry passes, none could use the loch as a highway into Jacobite territory without somehow finding a vast number of boats. Moreover, all these stolen boats, waiting for Mar’s troops, represented a new and dire threat to Argyll’s left.
Rob was back at Perth next day, and was soon sent off to Fife and further local activities. It is worth mentioning at this stage what did happen later in this Loch Lomond affair. Argyll was forced to act, and it was no fault of Rob’s that the Jacobites did not gain the full advantage of the situation, owing to Mar’s chronic delays. A large government expedition was organised, taking two weeks to mount. On October 13th, Argyll was ready. He assembled quite an impressive force, mainly of militia and volunteers from Paisley and other towns of the West of Scotland, to add to those of Dumbarton and the Lennox generally. At Dumbarton itself the force was joined by 100 navy men, ‘well-hearted and well-armed’, from warships lying in the Clyde there. These brought their ships’ boats with them, and dragged them up the River Leven to the foot of Loch Lomond. Here they were reinforced by Sir Humphrey Colquhoun of Luss and a contingent of his clan, inveterate enemies of the MacGregors, and the entire expedition set off up the loch. Part of a contemporary account of this colourful affair – from Rae’s History of the Rebellion – is probably worth quoting:
When the pinnaces and boats being once got within the mouth of the loch, had spread their sails, and the men on shore had ranged themselves in order, marching along the side of the loch for scouring the coast, they made altogether so very fine an appearance as had never been seen in that place before, and might have gratified even a curious person. The men on shore marched with the greatest order and alacrity the pinnaces on the water discharged their patteraries* and the men their small arms, made so very dreadful a noise through the multiplied rebounding echoes of the vast mountains on both sides of the loch, that perhaps there was never a more lively resemblance of thunder.
* Old gun for shooting with stones, pieces of iron, etc.
Having given such warning that they were coming, it is hardly surprising that when they reached Rowardennan they found nobody there to confront them. They mounted the rocky bank of the loch to the top of a hillock, and forming up as well as they could, beat their drums for an hour in noisy challenge. Nobody appearing, they went down again, re-embarked and proceeded further up the loch. Some accounts say they then went on to Inversnaid itself, others say they went merely to Craigrostan (which is a name for the whole great property, of course, not a place), went ashore, climbed another hill, and beat more drums, this time also letting off artillery. No MacGregors forthcoming, they were departing when, by the merest chance, they stumbled over some of the hidden boats. Taking some of these in tow, and destroying others, they set sail again down the loch, duty done, announcing to the world that they had so terrified the fierce MacGregors as to force them out of their fastnesses and cause them to flee to the general camp of Highlanders in Strathfillan. No account indicates that a single MacGregor was seen. What Argyll thought of this ‘victory’ is not reported.
The mention of the general camp of the Highlanders in Strathfillan – the same place where Rob had recovered the Bond of Association – refers to a new development. At last the waited-for reinforcements from the North-west Highlands had arrived. A large contingent of clansmen had gathered from the remoter glens and islands, had been marching south and had now reached west Breadalbane. Under an experienced soldier, General Gordon, they included the great chiefs MacDonnell of Glengarry, the Captain of Clanranald, and the veteran Sir John MacLean of Duart, with large bodies of their men. At last, with all this on his doorstep, the crafty Earl of Breadalbane was forced to commit himself. Reluctantly he sent 400 Breadalbane Campbells to join King James’s army. Gregor of Glengyle, with his 200 highly-trained and experienced fighters, now joined this corps, and was brigaded with MacIan of Glencoe’s MacDonalds.
Argyll must now have been an anxious man indeed. Meanwhile, Rob Roy himself was in Fife, where he seems to have been highly successful in gathering in provisions, fodder, horses, arms and recruits for the Jacobite army at Perth. He was the ideal man for the task, of course even though he himself believed that he could and should have been better employed in attacking Argyll’s thin red line.
One or two diversions were being created from Fife. Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum, a very able soldier, was detached to lead an expedition by boat across the Forth to Lothian, to try to threaten Edinburgh from the rear and if possible to link up with the Jacobite insurgents in the south of Scotland and north of England. This attempt was reasonably successful in itself, though it failed to surprise Edinburgh. The force did join up with the south-country Jacobites and eventually marched over the Border into England, getting as far as Preston, before it was stopped by government troops and forced to surrender. But though this did undoubtedly cause much alarm to the Hanoverians and authorities generally, it did not draw Argyll after it; it was a grave weakening of Mar’s main force and served little good purpose. A more valuable exploit was the capture of a shipload of government arms, in the harbour of Burntisland in Fife, by the Master of Sinclair. Rob Roy is thought to have had a hand in this.
We know that Rob was back in Perth on October 14th, and had an interview with Mar, urging him to attack, and offering to guide an outflanking attempt on Stirling over and through the supposedly impassable morasses of the Flanders Moss through which he had driven those captured cattle after his first exploit at Buchlyvie, 24 years earlier. But Mar still put this off. He sent Rob instead as courier to General Gordon’s Highland Division in Strathfillan, ordering it to make another diversion – not against Argyll’s vulnerable west flank, but much further west still, to attack Inveraray town and castle, Argyll’s own home, away on the sea loch of Fyne. This may have been an enjoyable episode for many who hated the Campbells – but it was another and most foolish weakening of the main effort, and a waste of time.
So October passed into November. King James and the Duke of Berwick did not appear. Mar did not move. Argyll’s reinforcements arrived from Ireland. Mar was now waiting for the Earl of Seaforth, the head of the great clan of Mackenzie, with the sub-clan of MacRae, which had belatedly taken the road south from far Wester Ross. These, with more MacDonalds, MacKinnons, Frasers and Chisholms, reached Perth early in November. At the same time, Gordon’s Division from the west marched back from harried Inveraray and camped in the Perth vicinity also. Now the Jacobite army had probably reached its maximum strength of about 15,000 men. All were clamouring for action. Mar could delay no longer.
He wrote to General Gordon on November 4th, requesting him to send Rob Roy MacGregor to him immediately at Perth.