The Massacre of Glencoe

There are killings a people can hold in its mouth, and there are killings it cannot. The difference is rarely the number of the dead. It is the law that was broken to reach them. Some laws are written, and the breaking of them is work for magistrates. Others are older than writing, kept by no court, enforced by nothing but the memory of every household that has ever lit a fire and set out bread. To break one of those is to do a thing the centuries cannot tidy. The name that suffers it carries it forward like a stone in the throat.

THE CHIEF AND THE OATH

Alasdair MacDonald, twelfth of Glencoe, called MacIain by his people, is by the winter of 1691 an old man with a long beard and a bad chest. He has fought for the Stuarts at Killiecrankie. He has raided Campbell cattle from Argyll to Breadalbane and back, and the Campbells know it. His glen is a narrow corrie running west from Rannoch Moor to the sea-loch at Ballachulish, perhaps a hundred and fifty souls in seven townships of longhouses. In August the King's proclamation goes out from Edinburgh: every Highland chief who has been in arms for King James must swear the oath of allegiance to King William before a sheriff by the first of January 1692, on pain of fire and sword. The Jacobite court at Saint-Germain delays its permission to take the oath. The clans wait. Permission arrives only in mid-December. MacIain sets out on the thirtieth.

THE RIDE TO INVERARAY

At Fort William, Colonel John Hill receives the old chief courteously, gives him bread and a glass, and tells him the oath cannot be sworn at a garrison. It must be sworn before the sheriff of the shire, and the sheriff of the shire is at Inveraray, sixty miles south, over the Black Mount in deep snow. Hill writes a letter for him to carry, explaining the case. MacIain rides. He is past seventy. The road takes him three days through blizzard. At Inveraray the sheriff, Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglas, is at his New Year and not at his desk. MacIain waits in the town. He swears on the sixth of January. The sheriff writes to the Privy Council that the oath has been taken; it is six days late. He writes that the old man wept in the swearing of it. The certificate is lodged. In Edinburgh, the certificate is found, and quietly destroyed.

A LETTER FROM LONDON

Sir John Dalrymple of Stair, Secretary of State, has wanted this for months. From London on the eleventh of January he writes to the commander-in-chief in Scotland that the chief has not come in, that it will be a proper vindication of the public justice to extirpate that sept of thieves. The word is extirpate, plain on the page. He writes again that it is a great work of charity to be exact in rooting out that damnable sept, the worst in all the Highlands. The King countersigns the orders without reading the names. The instrument is to be Argyll's Regiment, raised on Campbell ground. The hand on the trigger is to be a Campbell hand. The thing is to be done not by an army marching in but by men billeted under the roof.

THE GUESTS AT THE DOOR

On the first of February, one hundred and twenty soldiers march up Glencoe from the south under a captain, Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, sixty years old, a debtor, uncle by marriage to the chief's younger son's wife. They give out that they have come to collect the hearth tax and need quarter. MacIain stands at the door of his longhouse at Carnoch and looks at them in the grey afternoon light. Glenlyon is family by marriage; the soldiers are armed men of a hostile name. To turn them away at the door is to put the glen in arms against the government, on the day the government has been waiting for. To take them in is to set the code of his fathers against the new law in Edinburgh. He has slept under more roofs than there are Campbells in the regiment. He knows what hospitality is for. It is the thing that lets enemies sleep in the same valley without cutting each other in the dark; the law that holds the country together when no other law reaches it. He thinks of the paper Ardkinglas lodged for him at Inveraray, the King's word that he is at peace. He stands aside from his own door. He calls for a dram. Failte don taigh, welcome to the house, is what is said at a Highland door, and it is said now. He gives the soldiers his fire, his board, his straw, his daughters-in-law to set down their plates. The thing is done. The older law has its answer.

For twelve nights the soldiers eat MacDonald beef and play at cards with the chief's sons. Glenlyon loses four games to Alasdair Og in a single evening and laughs about it at breakfast. The chief's chest is bad. He coughs in the dark and his wife brings him whisky and water. Glenlyon takes his dram with the old man by the fire on the evening of the twelfth and bids him good night.

THE FIFTH HOUR

The orders from Major Robert Duncanson reach Glenlyon by hand that same night, sealed. You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the McDonalds of Glenco, and put all to the sword under seventy. You are to have a special care that the old fox and his sons do upon no account escape your hands. Five of the clock precisely on the morning of the thirteenth. A relief column under Hamilton is to come down from the north at the same hour and seal the passes. Glenlyon reads the paper. He does not refuse it. He gives the orders to his lieutenants at three.

Lieutenant Lindsay kicks the chief's bedchamber door at five. MacIain is rising; he is half into his breeches. He calls for a dram for his guests, which is the thing a host calls for when soldiers come to his bedchamber in the dark, because there is no other thing to call for. Lindsay shoots him in the back as he turns to fetch it. A second ball takes him in the head before he reaches the boards. His wife is stripped where she lies; the rings are pulled from her fingers, and one is bitten off when it will not come. She is put out into the snow and dies on the ground of her own glen before the day is out. In the other longhouses the same. Boys are shot beside their fathers. A child of two is killed on her mother's lap. Roughly thirty-eight die in the village. Women, children, the old, run half-clothed up the corries into a blizzard, and on the slopes above an unknown further number die of cold in the days that follow. By the time Hamilton's column comes down from the Devil's Staircase the longhouses are burning. MacIain's two sons, John and Alasdair Og, are gone over the pass into Appin with some sixty of their people. The line is not ended. The houses are.

THE COMMISSION

The story moves faster than the army. Within weeks the Jacobite presses at Saint-Germain and in Paris are printing it across Europe; within months, broadsheets in Edinburgh. With the Highlands in slow uproar, the Scots Parliament in 1695 appoints a Commission of Inquiry. It reports that summer. It names what was done in Glencoe murder under trust, the gravest category known to the old Scots law, the killing of a man by one who has eaten at his table. It names Stair the contriver. It names Glenlyon the executor. It calls for prosecutions. King William, in London, reads the report and lays it aside. Stair keeps his office and is later made an earl. Glenlyon dies six years on, a debtor still, in a tavern in Bruges. No man hangs for Glencoe.

THE THING THAT KEPT

The MacDonalds came back to the glen. The roof-trees were set again at Carnoch and Achnacon and Inverigan, and children were born again under them. What did not come back was the easy walk of a Campbell down the glen road. You can be killed by your enemy and the country mends, in time. You cannot be killed by the man who has eaten your bread. That is the older law, and it does not have a court because it does not need one. For three centuries afterwards MacDonald carried Glencoe in its mouth the way some names carry a wound, and the Campbells carried it too in a different way, knowing what their name had been the instrument of. There are MacDonald families today who will not sit at table with a Campbell, will not drink with one, will not let one stand drinks at the bar. At the foot of the glen, on the door of the Clachaig Inn, there is a small white sign that has been there longer than living memory. It reads No hawkers or Campbells. It is not, strictly, a joke. It is the older law, kept by the only court that ever kept it, which is the memory of the house that set out the bread.