Clan MacDonald

In late 1691, the British crown demanded every Highland chief swear loyalty by the first of January, on pain of fire and sword. The MacDonalds of Glencoe missed the deadline by six days through no fault of their own. In response, the government quietly authorised the destruction of the family. For two weeks 120 government soldiers under a Campbell captain were billeted as guests in MacDonald longhouses, eating MacDonald food and playing cards with their hosts under the unbreakable Highland code of guest-right. Before dawn on the thirteenth of February 1692, the captain received written orders to fall on the village. What followed is remembered as the worst breach of guest-right in British history, and the reason the MacDonalds will not sit at table with a Campbell to this day.

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In June 1746, two months after the disaster of Culloden, Charles Edward Stuart was a fugitive in the Hebrides with a price on his head of thirty thousand pounds, the largest reward of the eighteenth century. Government patrols closed in around him on the islands of South Uist and Benbecula. The plan that came to him through an Irish Jacobite officer was to disguise him as an Irish spinning-maid and put him on a boat to Skye in the household of a young woman with a militia pass. Her name was Flora MacDonald. She was twenty-four years old. She had no political stake in the rising. The crossing made her name a synonym for the lost cause for the next two centuries.

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On the night of the thirty-first of January 1645, after a winter march of thirty-six hours from the south end of Loch Ness through Glen Tarbet and the high pass of the Lairig Leacach, James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, with the Highland-Irish brigade of Alasdair MacColla MacDonald and a force of about fifteen hundred men of the western clans, came down at first light on the second of February, the morning of Candlemas, on the Campbell army of Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl of Argyll, encamped under the walls of Inverlochy Castle at the head of Loch Linnhe. Argyll had three thousand men. The day broke in heavy frost. The Highland charge took the Campbell line in flank and rolled it down the loch shore. Argyll was put aboard his galley and rowed for Inveraray. Fifteen hundred Campbells died, by the careful estimate of the modern historians of the action, in two hours. The MacDonalds of Clanranald, of Glengarry, of Keppoch, of Glencoe, fought beside MacColla in the centre. The single most consequential reckoning between MacDonald and Campbell of the seventeenth century was won that morning by Montrose's tactical genius and the Highland charge in winter, fifty years and ten days before Glencoe, and reads, in Highland MacDonald memory, as the inverse of Glencoe.

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On the morning of the first of July 1867 the British North America Act came into force and the Dominion of Canada was constituted from the four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, on the basis of the Seventy-Two Resolutions agreed at the Quebec Conference of October 1864 and ratified by the colonial legislatures over the next two years. The architect of the deal, the man who had threaded its compromises between the Reformers under George Brown, the Bleus under Cartier, and the maritime delegations under Tupper and Tilley, was the Scottish-born Kingston lawyer John Alexander Macdonald, born at Glasgow on the eleventh of January 1815, brought to Upper Canada at the age of five, called to the bar in 1836, member of the legislature for Kingston since 1844. He was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada on the same morning the Act came into force, by Lord Monck the Governor-General, in the Senate Chamber at Ottawa. He held office for nineteen of the next twenty-four years.

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