The Battle of Glen Fruin

A kingdom on the eve of departure has no patience for noise on its northern border. The sovereign who is about to ride south for a larger throne wants the country he leaves to look quiet from a distance, and a quiet country is one in which the loudest grievance has already been answered. Into that narrow hour, when a king's attention is half abroad and his signature still at hand, a Highland chief walks down a glen with four hundred men and changes the arithmetic of his own name for one hundred and seventy-one years.

THE NAME UNDER SUSPICION

Alasdair MacGregor of Glenstrae stands at the head of a kindred the crown has refused to recognise. Since the Reformation, royal papers have written the MacGregors out of the polity of clans and into a vaguer register, calling them broken men, sorners, limmers of the Lennox. The name predates the writing. The MacGregors hold that they descend from the royal house of Alpin, and the chiefs of Glenstrae have for two generations carried the motto Is rioghal mo dhream, my blood is royal, as a private answer to a public dispossession. The land they once held in Glenorchy has been taken piece by piece by the Campbells, by charter, by sasine, by force of court paper. What is left to a chief without a charter is the loyalty of his men and the cattle on his neighbour's hill. The neighbour, on the south side of Loch Lomond, is Sir Humphrey Colquhoun of Luss, whose pasture has fed a feud for a decade.

THE MORNING OF GLEN FRUIN

On the seventh of February 1603, with sleet in the air and the lochside frozen in patches, Alasdair brings four hundred men down the length of Glen Fruin. The Colquhouns, warned, have mustered something near five hundred horse and foot, with townsmen out of Dumbarton and a party of Buchanans married into the house of Luss. They have a royal commission of lieutenancy in their pocket, granted in December by the Privy Council, which makes the encounter, in law, a battle between the king's officer and a band of outlaws. The MacGregors have neither commission nor charter. They have the ground. Alasdair divides his force, sending his brother John round the southern lip of the glen with two hundred men to come in behind the Colquhoun line, and holds the head of the valley with the rest. The trap closes between nine and ten in the forenoon. The Colquhoun horse cannot turn in the soft ground. The foot break and run for the burn.

A SECOND ON THE FIELD

It is the second hour of the afternoon and the sleet has stopped. Alasdair walks the floor of the glen with his sword in its scabbard and his bonnet under his arm. The dead of Luss are being dragged out of the heather and laid in rough lines along the burn, and the dead of his own kin are being carried up the slope to the cairn his lieutenants have begun. He counts twelve Colquhoun gentlemen before he stops counting. Sir Humphrey himself has escaped the field; his cousin lies by the water with two pike wounds and a blow that has taken half the skull. The old chamberlain of Luss is dead. A young Buchanan married into the line is dead. There are perhaps seven score altogether.

He has come down today to take cattle and to teach a feud, and somewhere in the morning the second purpose has eaten the first. He knows the arithmetic of a raid: a dozen dead, a hundred head of beasts, a Privy Council fine, a feud carried into the next generation. He does not know the arithmetic of seven score. The king is in Edinburgh. The king is in Edinburgh until the Saturday after next and then the king is on the road for London. The widows will ride; the widows always ride. He sees the shirts before they are cut, a hundred Colquhoun women on a hundred small Lowland ponies crossing the Endrick water at the bridge below Drymen, the shirts tied to long willow rods so the king will see them above the heads of the crowd at Stirling, each shirt slit at the front where the wound was in the man. A hundred shirts and one king, and a king two weeks from leaving the country he has ruled all his life for the country he means to rule now, and who needs to leave this one quiet behind him. It will not be cattle this time. It will be the name. He lights his pipe. His nephew comes up beside him with a question. He does not answer. He looks back across the glen at the Colquhouns laid out by the burn and the Highland clouds coming up the lake from the west.

THE RIDE TO STIRLING

The widows ride within the week. Sixty of them, by one chronicler's count, each carrying her husband's bloodied sark on the point of a spear, in procession through the streets of Stirling and up to the castle gate. James VI receives them on the steps. He is forty-six days from leaving for London. He has spent the winter rehearsing the language of a united crown, has had Cecil's letters read to him at table, has practised the signature he means to use on English warrants. The shirts are presented in silence and then in a great Lowland keening that the court remembers for a generation. Within the month the Privy Council has drawn the act. On the third of April 1603, two days before the king sets out for the south, the proscription is signed. The whole name and clan of MacGregor is to be altogidder abolisheed; no man of the surname may use it, on pain of death; any man bearing it may be hunted by any subject of the king without process; the wives and bairns may be transported. It is the most total sentence ever passed on a Scottish kindred. The king crosses the border on the fifth.

THE PROMISE AT BERWICK

Through the summer Alasdair holds out in the hills above Balquhidder while the commissions of fire and sword burn his townships. In the autumn Archibald Campbell, seventh Earl of Argyll, sends word that he will receive the chief's surrender and convey him out of Scotland under written safe-conduct. Alasdair comes in. Argyll rides him south to Berwick, the agreed border, lets him set one foot on English ground so the letter of the promise is kept, and then turns him about in irons and brings him back to Edinburgh. On the twentieth of January 1604, Alasdair MacGregor of Glenstrae is hanged at the market cross with eleven of his closest men. His head is set on a spike at the Tolbooth, theirs on lower spikes around it. On the scaffold he is reported to have said that he had been deceived by the Earl of Argyll, and that his death was the price of another man's word.

THE LONG PROSCRIPTION

The act of 1603 was renewed under Cromwell, again after the Rising of 1715, and again after the '45. It stood for one hundred and seventy-one years and was finally repealed in 1774. In the proscription years members of the name took any cover they could find, calling themselves Stewart and Murray and Drummond and Grant, and went home to be MacGregor again only when a particular law allowed. Rob Roy, born in 1671, lived the whole of his outlaw life without legal title to his own surname. The motto held under because the motto was older than the law that suppressed it. A chief stripped of charter, of land, of name on the page, kept one thing his court could not reach: the four words he taught his sons, Is rioghal mo dhream, my blood is royal, said quietly indoors, in a kitchen on the wrong side of a king's signature.

THE NAME AFTER

A name suppressed by statute behaves differently from a name lost to time. It travels in disguise, it keeps its own counsel, it learns to answer to several Lowland surnames at once and to lift its head only in the company of those who know. When the proscription was lifted in 1774 the MacGregors who came back to the register were not the same people who had gone into it, and yet the name was. The shirts at Stirling closed an age of Highland raiding by making one example so total that no later king needed to repeat it. The example outlived the king who signed it, the earl who broke his word at Berwick, and the chief who walked the floor of the glen with his bonnet under his arm. What survives in the catalogue is shorter than any of them: four words on a coat of arms, cut in stone above a kitchen door in Balquhidder.