Rob Roy MacGregor

A man who has spent his life outside the law learns early that the law is a posture, not a fact. He learns to carry his own bearing, his own court, his own sentence. When the end finally comes for such a man, it does not come as surrender; it comes as one last piece of business to be set in order, on his own ground, in his own tongue, before the door is closed.

THE NAME UNDER PROSCRIPTION

Robert Roy MacGregor was born at Glengyle on Loch Katrine in 1671, third son of Donald Glas of the Glengyle line, into a clan that was forbidden by Act of the Scots Privy Council to call itself by its own name. The proscription of 1603, renewed and sharpened across the seventeenth century, set out to erase the MacGregors from the public record of Scotland: no man of the blood could sign that surname to a deed, stand to it in court, or hand it to his children at the font. Rob Roy had been christened Campbell on paper for that reason, and grew up answering to it, and never once in his life believed it. He was red-haired, broad in the chest, long in the arm, fluent in Gaelic and competent in Scots and Latin enough for a tack. He learned the cattle trade through Breadalbane and the Lennox before he was twenty, and by thirty he was the man the lairds of the southern Highlands paid to keep their herds whole through the dark months. The protection trade was a closed circle: the man who was paid to guard the beasts was very often the man best placed to lift them, and Rob Roy worked both sides of the circle with the courtesy of a banker.

THE LOAN AND THE EVICTION

In the autumn of 1712 he took a thousand pounds Scots from James Graham, first Duke of Montrose, against a drove to be brought south in the spring. The money was given to one of his head drovers and the drover went off the face of the earth with it. Whether the man absconded, or was killed for the purse on a hill road, or whether Rob Roy himself had a quieter use for the silver, no court ever settled. Montrose, who was a politician before he was a creditor, called the loan in full, declared Rob Roy a bankrupt and a thief, and sent his factor John Graham of Killearn with a body of men to Inversnaid. They put Mary MacGregor and the children out of the house in the snow and burned the roof. Rob Roy was on the hill when it happened. He came back to a black timber and a wife who had carried two boys six miles down the glen in her arms. From that hour the duke had a private war on his hands and did not yet know it.

THE LONG RAID

For twenty-two years Rob Roy lived as the Highland answer to a writ. He raided Montrose's grazings, drove off his rents, lifted his factor Killearn out of an inn at Chapellaroch and held him a fortnight on an island in Loch Katrine until the duke paid for his return. He fought on the Jacobite wing at Sheriffmuir in 1715 and pulled his men off the field before the day was decided, which is one of the things a Highland captain is allowed to do and a Lowland general is not, and he was remembered for it more than for any clean victory. He moved between the protection of the second Duke of Argyll, who valued an enemy of Montrose more than he valued the law, and the deep glens of Balquhidder and Glen Dochart, where a man who knew the ground could be unfindable for as long as he chose. He was outlawed, indicted, declared rebel, and at length, in 1725, pardoned. He came in off the hill at fifty-four. He had not lost a son, he had not lost his wife, he had not lost the name his clan was forbidden to use. By the standard of a MacGregor in that century, he had won.

THE LAST WAKEFUL HOUR

It is the last week of December 1734 at Inverlochlarig at the head of Balquhidder Glen, and the snow on the kirk roof six miles down is six inches deep. The house is three rooms of turf and stone above the byre. They have moved him to the inner room because the outer room is colder. His hands are cold to the wrist and the cold is climbing into his shoulders and he knows what that means; he has watched enough men die in the open to know the order in which a body lets go. Mary is in the kitchen with the piper, a younger man of the Loch Katrine line who has played at every christening and burial in the family for fifteen years and is drying his chanter against the heat of the peat. Two of the sons are asleep in the byre across the yard after a long ride down from Glen Dochart. He has been drifting since first light, in and out of the wakeful hours, and he is in a wakeful hour now, and into the wakeful hour comes the sound of a horse on the frozen track up from Strathyre, and he knows the step of the horse and he knows whose horse it is, and the cattleman's ear in him, the ear that has counted hooves in the dark on a hundred drove roads, tells him before any other sense tells him that the visitor at the gate is a man with whom there is unfinished business, and he understands at once, with the clear small understanding a dying man is sometimes given, that he will not be permitted to die before he has dealt with it; and so he calls Mary in, and says, quietly, in the Gaelic, using only the breath he can spare, that the man at the gate is to be brought in, and that she is to comb his hair and set him up against the bolster, because he will not be found lying down by anyone who has come this far up the glen in winter to find him.

THE VISITOR

Mary, who has been a chief's wife for forty years and is in no state of mind to ask, combs his hair and sets him up against the bolster and brings the visitor into the bedchamber and goes out to the kitchen to wait with the piper. The visitor sits on the stool by the bed. Tradition gives this man different names: a MacLaren of Invernenty with an old grievance over a holding at Wester Invernenty, or a kinsman of one of the Killearn men, or one of the long line of cousins to whom Rob Roy had at some point been less than fair. The tradition agrees on the only thing the tradition needs to agree on. He sat up. He spoke clearly, the few sentences the visit required. He did not give the man the satisfaction of any unfinished business, nor of any business begun in his absence. When the visitor was out of the door and on his horse and gone back down the track to Strathyre, Rob Roy lay back on the bolster, and he said to Mary in Gaelic, Tha e seachad a nis. Leig leis a' phìobaire seinn. Cha till mi tuille. It is over now. Let the piper play. I will not return.

THE PIPER WALKING IN

The piper sets the chanter to his lips in the kitchen and starts the lament. Cha Till MacCruimein is the piece, the lament that goes back through the Highlands a long way, the one a piper plays for a chief at his last hour. He plays it standing in the kitchen and then walks slowly through the doorway into the bedchamber as he plays, and he is at the foot of the bed when Rob Roy stops breathing. Mary stands at the head of the bed with her hands folded into her apron. The two sons come over from the byre when they hear the pipes and stand in the doorway in their stocking feet. The fire in the kitchen burns down. Outside, the snow on the high ground above Inverlochlarig is unmarked except by the tracks of the visitor's horse going back down the glen.

THE STONE AT BALQUHIDDER

He was buried in the kirkyard at Balquhidder under three flat slabs cut with the pine of the MacGregors and the words MacGregor Despite Them. Despite them was the proscription, by then a hundred and thirty-one years old and another forty years from being lifted by Act of Parliament in 1774. Mary outlived him by some years and is buried beside him. Walter Scott's novel of 1817 made the man a figure of world literature, and the film of 1995 made him a familiar one to people who had never heard of Inversnaid or Killearn or the cattle trade through Breadalbane. The historical Rob Roy was thinner and harder than the novel: a Highland businessman with a long memory, a private army of cousins, and a name he was forbidden to sign and signed anyway. A man outside the law spends his life arranging the terms of his own death; the favour fate did Rob Roy was to give him the wakeful hour in which to do it, and the breath for the one Gaelic sentence that closed the account. The stone at Balquhidder still carries the four words he wanted on it, cut deep into the slab, legible in any weather, in winter under snow and in summer under the long northern light.