Donald Cameron of Lochiel(c. 1700–1748)

Donald Cameron of Lochiel was born at Achnacarry in Lochaber around 1700, eldest son of John Cameron of Lochiel (the XVIII Chief, the Old Lochiel who had fought for King James VII at Killiecrankie in 1689) and Isabel Campbell of Lochnell. He was raised at Achnacarry on the Cameron policy of education and prudence, was sent for two years to study with the Catholic Camerons in France, and on his father's effective forfeiture and exile took up the management of the Lochaber estate around 1719. He was known across the Highlands and beyond as the Gentle Lochiel, the cognomen earned by his abolition of the heritable jurisdiction of pit-and-gallows on the Lochaber estate, his prohibition of the cattle reiving that had been part of Cameron tradition, his founding of the Achnacarry school of estate management, and his cultivated, polished, French-educated manner.

The rising of 1745 turned on him personally. Charles Edward Stuart landed at Loch nan Uamh on the twenty-fifth of July 1745 with seven companions, no army and no certainty that a single Highland chief would come out for him. The chiefs who had been willing to rise in 1715 and 1719 were now older, settled, and unwilling to commit. Lochiel rode to meet the Prince at Borrodale; the conversation between them on the twenty-second of August 1745 was, by the contemporary account of Lochiel's brother John Cameron, the chaplain, the hinge of the rising. Lochiel argued for caution and delay; the Prince argued that if Lochiel would not come out, the cause was over before it had begun. Lochiel agreed, on the condition that if the rising failed the Stuart court would compensate the Cameron estates. The Prince gave his word.

Lochiel brought out seven hundred Cameron men of Lochaber at Glenfinnan three days later, on the nineteenth of August 1745, the largest single contingent of the small army that marched east. The other western chiefs followed on the strength of the Cameron commitment. Lochiel commanded the Cameron regiment at Prestonpans on the twenty-first of September 1745, at Clifton Moor in Westmorland on the eighteenth of December, at the storming of Carlisle, at the relief of Stirling and the Battle of Falkirk in January 1746, and at Culloden Moor on the sixteenth of April 1746, where his regiment held the centre of the Jacobite line in the charge that broke under the Hanoverian artillery and grape-shot.

He was struck in both ankles by a musket-ball at Culloden, was carried from the field on a Highland plaid, was hidden through the summer of 1746 in the Cameron country of Lochaber by his own tenantry, and on the twentieth of September 1746 sailed from Loch nan Uamh on the French frigate L'Heureux with Prince Charles. He was given command in the French service of the Régiment d'Albanie at Saint-Omer, was made a Brigadier of the Armies of France by Louis XV, and died at the regimental garrison at Bergues in French Flanders on the twenty-sixth of October 1748 from typhoid fever contracted at the camp. His son John was given the colonelcy of the regiment in succession. Achnacarry House was burnt by Cumberland's troops in 1746 and the Lochaber estate forfeited; the estate was restored to the family in 1784 and Achnacarry rebuilt by the XXIII Chief in the early nineteenth century. The Cameron name in modern Highland memory carries the weight of the decision the Gentle Lochiel made at Borrodale on the twenty-second of August 1745.