Rob Roy MacGregor(1671–1734)

Robert Roy MacGregor (the byname Roy from the Gaelic Ruadh, red, for his auburn hair) was born at Glengyle at the head of Loch Katrine on the seventh of March 1671, fifth son of Lieutenant-Colonel Donald MacGregor of Glengyle and Margaret Campbell of Glenfalloch. He was born into the proscribed Clan Gregor: the name MacGregor had been outlawed in 1603 by act of the Scots Privy Council in punishment for the clan's part in the Battle of Glen Fruin against the Colquhouns, and the family in Rob's generation lived legally under the borrowed surname Campbell. He grew up at the head of Loch Katrine in the Trossachs, the densest network of glens and lochs in the south-central Highlands, perfectly suited to the cattle trade and to the cattle raid alike.

He fought in his twentieth year at Killiecrankie in 1689 in the regiment of Lochiel of the Camerons, the Jacobite victory of the first Stuart rising. Through the 1690s and 1700s he built the leading drove-cattle business in the central Highlands, taking the long droves of Highland black cattle south every autumn over the Trossachs passes and the Endrick crossings to the great cattle trysts at Crieff and Falkirk, where they were sold on to the Lowland and English buyers. By 1707 he was the principal cattle dealer of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs country, with a herd of his own at Inversnaid and the chiefship of his own sept of the MacGregors of Glengyle.

In 1712 a herdsman of his absconded with a thousand pounds of working capital that Rob had borrowed from James Graham, the first Duke of Montrose, on the strength of an autumn drove. Rob was declared a defaulting debtor by Montrose, his lands at Craigrostan were forfeited, his cattle were seized, and he was outlawed by the Court of Session. From that moment forward he ran the central Highlands as a kind of private power. He raised his own armed company of about thirty MacGregor and Stewart kinsmen, set up his headquarters at Inversnaid above Loch Lomond, raided the Montrose lands at Buchanan and elsewhere in retaliation, levied black-mail (the protection rent paid in cattle by Lowland farmers in exchange for protection from raids), and defended a great many of the small Highland tenants of the Trossachs against the new agricultural improvers and their factors.

He fought at Sheriffmuir in November 1715 in the Jacobite army of the Earl of Mar, was captured in 1717 by Montrose's men at Balquhidder and twice escaped from his guards on the journey south (the second time by leaping from his horse and swimming the Forth at Stirling in spate), survived a long campaign of redcoat garrisons posted at Inversnaid through the 1720s under Field-Marshal Wade, and at the end of his life in 1734 came in under a pardon from George the First. He died peacefully in his bed at Inverlochlarig in Balquhidder on the twenty-eighth of December 1734, in his sixty-fourth year, and was buried in the kirkyard at Balquhidder where his grave is still marked by a plain stone slab with the Highland sword and the Latin Dum Spiro Spero (While I breathe, I hope).

His reputation in his own lifetime ran on both sides at once: a defaulting debtor to the Whig court, a folk-hero defender to the Trossachs glens. After his death the romantic literature took him over: Daniel Defoe wrote a partly-fictional Highland Rogue in 1723, and in 1817 Walter Scott published the novel Rob Roy that fixed his name into the English-language imagination of the Highlands. The proscription of the name MacGregor was lifted in 1774, forty years after Rob's death; the clan resumed its legal name and Rob's grave at Balquhidder became one of the most-visited Highland literary sites of the nineteenth century. The Trossachs from Aberfoyle to the Falls of Leny, the Loch Katrine steamer, the Sir Walter Scott pleasure-boat, the Rob Roy Way long-distance footpath, the Inversnaid road and the cattle-droving tracks of the central Highlands all carry his memory. He is the MacGregor in whose name the clan name itself returned to Scotland.