Clan MacDonald · 1645
Inverlochy
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.
It is a quarter past five on the morning of the second of February, 1645, on the high shoulder of Meall an t-Suidhe above the head of Loch Linnhe, in heavy frost, with the lights of Inverlochy Castle showing on the loch shore three quarters of a mile below and the dark line of the Campbell encampment running from the castle gate north along the shingle to the mouth of the river Lochy. He is twenty-five years old, by the best estimate of his birth-year, although it may be twenty-eight; the records of his Antrim birth are imperfect. He is Alasdair MacColla MacDonald, son of Coll Ciotach (Coll the left-handed, last of the great Hebridean galley-captains), Major-General of the King's forces in Scotland under the Marquess of Montrose, in command of fifteen hundred men of the western clans and the Irish-Catholic brigade of Antrim he has brought across in the previous summer.
Behind him on the shoulder, in the dark, sit MacIain of Glencoe (whose grandson will be killed in his bed forty-seven years from this morning), the Captain of Clanranald, Donald MacDonald of Keppoch, John MacDonell of Glengarry, the Stewarts of Appin, the Camerons of Lochiel, the MacGregors and the MacLeans of Duart. Montrose is on the lower ledge with the standard. They have come over the Lairig Leacach in two days from Killiecrankie, thirty-six hours of climbing in snow without fires, with the men chewing oatmeal cold from their plaids. Argyll's army down on the loch shore, under General Duncan Campbell of Auchinbreck, has had no warning. The Campbell scouts up the Great Glen reported, two days ago, that Montrose was a hundred miles south.
He thinks: Argyll himself is on the galley off the castle. He has been there since yesterday evening. He is not on the field.
He thinks: Auchinbreck has the army. Auchinbreck is a careful soldier. Auchinbreck does not yet know we are above him.
He thinks: the line on the shore is three thousand men in three regiments. The right is on the river. The centre is opposite the castle gate. The left is on the shingle by the loch.
He thinks: the wind is off our backs. Our muskets will fire. Their muskets will fire into our faces and the smoke will hold their fire as we close.
He thinks: we have one volley each at thirty yards and then the targe and the broadsword for the rest.
He thinks: my father's people lost Islay to Argyll in 1614. My father's people have not had a winter on land of their own since. We are about to take it back in the next two hours.
Montrose gives the signal at first grey light, twenty past seven by his chronicler Wishart. The Highland line forms in three columns: the right under MacColla on the shoulder, the centre under Montrose with the Irish brigade, the left under the Stewarts of Appin and the Maclean. They come down off Meall an t-Suidhe at the run, in silence, with no pipes until the first volley. The Campbell pickets see them at three hundred yards in the new light and the whole line opens fire. The Highland line takes the volley standing and goes through the smoke, fires its own at thirty yards, drops the muskets, draws the sword and closes.
The Campbell right under Auchinbreck stands. The Campbell centre, by the testimony of the few prisoners taken afterwards, breaks at the first contact and runs east along the shingle. The Campbell left runs south. Auchinbreck and his Lochaweside Campbells are surrounded on the river bank within thirty minutes and cut down to the last gentleman; Auchinbreck himself, by the tradition, is killed by MacColla in single combat under the walls of the castle. Argyll, on the galley Caledonia offshore, watches it through a glass and gives the order to hoist sail and run for Inveraray. He is in his own waters, with a fair wind down Loch Linnhe, by mid-afternoon.
Of the three thousand Campbells on the field, by the careful tally of the parish registers of Lochaweside and Mid-Argyll, made in the years immediately after, about fifteen hundred did not return. The MacDonalds and the Highland-Irish lost fewer than ten dead and forty wounded by Wishart's count. The Campbell power in the western Highlands, which had been built by patient acquisition since 1493, was broken in two hours of the Candlemas morning. Montrose stayed in the field for the rest of 1645 and won five further pitched battles, of which the most extraordinary was Auldearn in May. The royalist-Highland year ended at Philiphaugh on the thirteenth of September when Leslie's covenanting cavalry caught Montrose with a remnant in the Borders. MacColla, who had separated from Montrose in the spring, was eventually killed at Knocknanuss in County Cork in November 1647 fighting the parliamentary force of Lord Inchiquin in another country's war. The Campbell recovery, under the eighth Earl's son and grandson, took two generations. The events of February 1692 in another glen further north were, by the candid private letters of the Master of Stair to Sir Thomas Livingstone in the autumn of 1691, undertaken in part because the Campbells of Argyll had a regiment available, the regiment had been raised in part to recover the family's after the catastrophe of 1645, and the order against the MacDonalds of Glencoe could be put through that regiment without institutional resistance. The morning of Candlemas 1645 is the morning the western MacDonalds remember when they sit down with a Campbell at a wedding. The Inverlochy field is now a recreation ground beside the new town of Fort William, with a single low cairn marking the place. The clans put the cairn there. They put it there in 1945, the three-hundredth anniversary, in iron-grey stone on a low concrete plinth, with an inscription in Gaelic that reads, in plain translation: Here ran the Campbells.
More stories of Clan MacDonald
- The Massacre of GlencoeIn 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.
- Flora MacDonald and the princeIn 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.
- Sir John A. Macdonald and the ConfederationOn 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.