Clan Graham

In April 1689 the Convention of Estates declared the throne of Scotland forfeit and offered the crown to William and Mary. James VII and II, lately deposed, had one party in Scotland that would not accept the change: the Highland clans. The man who raised them was John Graham of Claverhouse, recently created Viscount Dundee, called Bonnie Dundee in the country and Bluidy Clavers in the kirk. By July 1689 he had two and a half thousand Highlanders at his back, against four thousand government foot under Major-General Hugh Mackay. They met at the Pass of Killiecrankie above the River Garry on the evening of the twenty-seventh of July. The Highland charge that came down the slope decided the field in ten minutes and lost the war in the same minute.

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On the twenty-first of May 1650, James Graham, fifth Earl and first Marquess of Montrose, by general assent the most brilliant Royalist commander of the Scottish civil wars and the architect of the annus mirabilis of 1644–45, was hanged at the Mercat Cross at the head of the High Street in Edinburgh on a thirty-foot gibbet. He had been captured at Ardvreck Castle in Sutherland three weeks earlier, after the failure of his Royalist landing in support of Charles II at the head of Loch Eriboll. He was thirty-seven years old. The Earl of Argyll, his old enemy, watched from a window of the Marquess's lodging on the Royal Mile as the cart went up. The crowd that had been ordered to spit on him as he passed was, by every contemporary report, silent and weeping. He went to the gallows in a black suit Argyll had refused to let him replace with the scarlet of his Order of the Garter. He carried his copy of George Wishart's biography of him around his neck on a string, in a parchment volume bound in calf, and the gibbet rope was placed over the volume. After the execution his body was quartered, the head spiked at the Tolbooth where it remained for eleven years, the limbs sent to Glasgow, Stirling, Perth and Aberdeen. In May 1661, after the Restoration, the body parts were collected and reassembled and the funeral he had not had was held at St Giles. He is buried in the abbey of the Knights of St John, by the south transept of St Giles, ten yards from where his head had stood.

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