Clan Cameron · 1745
The Gentle Lochiel
In late July 1745, Charles Edward Stuart landed at Loch nan Uamh in the western Highlands with seven companions, a hundred broadswords, and no army. The chiefs he had counted on read the situation cleanly and sent him back letters of refusal. Without Donald Cameron of Lochiel, called the Gentle Lochiel for his unwillingness to send his men against odds, no one would come. Lochiel rode to Borrodale in the first days of August to talk the prince out of it. He was the most respected chief in the western Highlands. The conversation that followed at Borrodale, in a small farmhouse over a single meal, was the conversation in which the rising of 1745 was made.
Some risings are made by the man who lands on the beach with a sword and a flag. More of them are made, quietly, in a back room a day or two later, by a older man who has ridden a long way to say no and finds at the last moment that he cannot.
THE CHIEF WHO COUNTED
Donald Cameron of Lochiel, twenty-seventh of his line, is forty-five years old in the summer of 1745 and has been chief in Lochaber for fifteen of those years. His clan call him the Gentle Lochiel, and a stranger hearing the byname mistakes it for softness. It is not softness. It is arithmetic. He is gentle because he does not waste his men: he counts the muskets, he counts the broadswords, he counts the meal in the girnel at Achnacarry, and he commits only when the sum comes out. Other Highland chiefs in his lifetime have thinned their names in lost causes. The Camerons in his time have remained whole. His father, the old chief in exile at Saint-Germain, told him at fifteen that the firmest friend the Stuart cause had in Lochaber was the Cameron of Lochiel, and told him before he was twenty that he was that man. He has carried the sentence ever since, the way another man carries a debt.
THE RIDE TO BORRODALE
Word comes up the loch in the last week of July. The prince has landed at Loch nan Uamh with seven companions, a hundred broadswords, no French regiments behind him, no English signal, no fleet. The chiefs along the western seaboard read the landing the way Lochiel reads it: a young man arrived without his army, expecting to find one already drawn up on the shore. MacDonald of Boisdale has already told him on Eriskay to go home. MacDonald of Sleat has sent his refusal by letter. Lochiel writes his own letter, in plain Cameron Gaelic, telling the prince to take ship for France this evening, and then, because a letter of refusal carried by a servant is not the same as a refusal spoken across a table, he saddles his horse and rides to deliver it in person. The road from Achnacarry to Borrodale is fifty miles by the way he rides it. He sleeps rough one night in the heather above Loch Arkaig, and a second in a shieling above Loch Eil. He arrives on the third of August in his second-best riding coat, with his brother Archibald and a single piper, the letter folded in the breast of the coat.
THE FARMHOUSE
The farmhouse at Borrodale is one room with an inglenook and three small windows looking south towards the sea. The prince is inside, eating smoked salmon and an oatcake and drinking the local whisky, in a French naval officer's coat over a Highland shirt of gentleman's quality. He is twenty-five. The seven of the landing are ranged on the benches against the walls: the Marquis of Tullibardine, who was out for the fifteen and is dying; the Reverend George Kelly; John O'Sullivan, who will be staff officer; John Murray of Broughton, up from Edinburgh with the secretarial papers; the Duke of Atholl's brother; a French naval officer. The room smells of peat smoke and wet wool. Lochiel comes in. The prince stands. They embrace. Lochiel sets the letter aside unopened on the table and speaks the argument it contains in the careful diplomat's tone he has been practising on the road. The chiefs have not come. The English Jacobites have not signalled. The French fleet has not landed. With seven companions the cause cannot be raised, and to attempt it now is to ruin the men whose names are still on the lists.
A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY
The prince listens. He sets the oatcake down on the wooden trencher and answers in the tone of a man who has lain awake one night working out the line. In a few days, with the few friends I have, I will erect the royal standard, and proclaim to the people of Britain that Charles Stuart is come over to claim the crown of his ancestors, or to perish in the attempt. Lochiel, who, my father has often told me, was our firmest friend, may stay at home, and learn from the newspapers the fate of his prince. The sentence is recorded long afterwards by John Home of Athelstaneford, in the History of the Rebellion he writes when he is an old man. Whether the prince said it in those exact words, or whether Home polished the cadence, Lochiel hears it in the room as it has been written down ever since. Lochiel does not answer for several seconds. He looks at his brother Archibald against the wall. He looks at the door, and at the piper outside the door, and down at the sword on his belt. The line about the newspapers was prepared, he sees that; the young man said it as he would have said it had Lochiel come to say yes, and he has rehearsed it before some mirror in Rome. But a sentence rehearsed in Rome can still be true in Lochaber. If he leaves the room having said no, he will read in the news-letter from Edinburgh next month that the prince landed, was abandoned, was hunted, was killed in a corrie above Loch Shiel, and that the firmest friend of the cause in Lochaber refused him at Borrodale. His father's sentence comes up under it like a flagstone under a thin layer of turf. He weighs, in the small private way he has weighed everything for fifteen years, what the cause holds and what it does not. If he commits, Keppoch comes. If Keppoch comes, MacDonald of Glencoe comes, and the smaller western clans behind them. If they come, the rising has its army; if it has its army, it has the chance his father was promised it would have, perhaps one in ten. The chance is not zero, and the cost of refusing the chance is the name. He looks once more at the unopened letter on the table. He says, in Cameron Gaelic, and then in English, Highness, I will raise my clan. The prince embraces him a second time. Lochiel sits down to the salmon.
GLENFINNAN AND AFTER
He is as good as his word. Inside three weeks the Cameron men are on the brae at Glenfinnan, eight hundred of them in three columns, and the standard is raised in the August afternoon to the sound of the Cameron pipes. Once Cameron is in, Keppoch comes; once Keppoch comes, MacDonald of Glencoe comes, and the smaller western clans behind them. Edinburgh falls in September. Prestonpans is won in fifteen minutes on a misty morning at the foot of the Tranent escarpment. By December the army is at Derby, a hundred and twenty-five miles from London, and London is packing its plate into wagons. Lochiel commands the Cameron regiment through the whole campaign. At Falkirk in January the Camerons go through the government line at the run. At Culloden in April, on the moor above Inverness, he is struck in both ankles by grapeshot at the moment the charge breaks forward, and is carried from the field by two of his men.
THE PRICE OF THE NEWSPAPERS
The clan pays, as he had warned at Borrodale it would. Achnacarry is burnt to the stone by Cumberland's men in May 1746; the great avenue of beeches the chief had been planting along the drive is felled. The Cameron tenants are dispossessed, the country put under military road and garrison. The chief's title is forfeit and is not restored for thirty years. Lochiel himself, hidden in the hills above Loch Arkaig with the price of thirty thousand pounds on his head, gets off at last with the prince from Loch nan Uamh in September 1746, from a beach a mile from the one on which he had argued against the landing thirteen months before. In France he is given a regiment of foot in the French service. He dies at Bergues, in Flanders, in October 1748, aged forty-eight, of a fever the regimental surgeon cannot name.
RETURN
The line he had weighed in the farmhouse is the line on which the Cameron Highlanders are raised in 1793, by a Britain at war with revolutionary France: the recruits are largely the grandsons of the men of Glenfinnan, and the regiment they form will carry the name through two more centuries of British wars. Achnacarry stands again, rebuilt in the long peace that followed the Forty-Five; the avenue of beeches grew back. At Bergues, on the inside wall of the parish church of Saint Martin, there is a small plaque to Donald Cameron of Lochiel, twenty-seventh chief, the Gentle Lochiel of the rising. A rising is not made by the man who lands on the beach. It is made, in the end, by the older man who rides fifty miles to refuse him and, in the long second between the sentence about the newspapers and his own answer, decides that the price of the news-letter is higher than the price of the field. The letter he had carried in his coat from Achnacarry was never opened. It stayed on the table at Borrodale, beside the half-eaten oatcake and the bottle of the local whisky.