Struan joins the prince at Glenfinnan

A cause is rarely revived by the young alone. More often it is revived when an old man, who carries in his body the memory of the last attempt, walks out of his house one morning and sets his face toward the same hill again. He brings with him no fresh argument, only the proof that a thing once tried has not yet been let go.

THE MAN FROM STRUAN

Alasdair Ruadh Robertson, fourth of Struan, chief of Clan Donnachaidh, was seventy-five years old in the August of 1745. His hair, the red that had given him the patronymic, was white. He had come out for the Old Pretender at Braemar in 1715, taken a wound at Sheriffmuir, been carried into exile, been pardoned, and been restored to his estates above Loch Rannoch in 1731. He had then lived fourteen years in his own house, reading Horace in the library at Carie, writing Gaelic verse, drinking claret in the long evenings, and waiting. He was a man who had already done the thing once. The country had not been ready. He was now told, by a letter brought up from Borrodale by a Cameron runner, that a son of James VIII had landed at Eriskay with seven men and was walking north through Moidart with the standard rolled in oilcloth, gathering Cameron and Clanranald and Glenaladale on the strength of a name. He sent word to his factor. He put on plaid over a shirt of fine linen. He called out four hundred men of the lower glens, and he started walking west.

THE WALK TO THE LOCH

The road from Struan to the head of Loch Shiel is fifteen miles by the hill paths above Acharacle, and he took it in two days, with his column of Donnachaidh behind him. The gout had been in his right knee for a week. By the morning of the nineteenth of August it was, as he confessed in a private letter to his factor at Struan, unbearable. He did not tell the men. He walked at the head of the column on the broadsword he carried as a chief, using it as a stick when the path narrowed and the bracken closed in over the boots. The weather was bright. Loch Shiel ran south-west between its hills like a long blade of slate water. By midday on the nineteenth they were on the grass shelf above the head of the loch, and Cameron of Lochiel came to him there with the word that the prince would be up the slope by half past four, and that a chief was meant to be ready for the raising.

A QUARTER PAST THREE

At a quarter past three he stood with the targe slung at his back and the broadsword at his side, and the pain came up the bone of the thigh in a wave, and he set his weight on the sword and waited for it to pass. I was on this same hill thirty years ago, he thought, in spirit if not in body, when Mar raised it at Braemar. He had been forty-five then. He counted, as the wave receded, what he carried that no other man on the slope carried: the smell of the powder at Sheriffmuir, the cold of the crossing into France, the long quiet of Carie, the wait. The prince was twenty-four years old. The prince had come with seven men. That was a thinner case than Mar had brought to Braemar, and yet here was Lochiel, here was Glenaladale, here was Keppoch coming up the lochside. The country, perhaps, had taken thirty years to be ready. He looked along the line of the gathered men, four hundred of his own among them, and he understood with a clarity the gout could not displace that he was the oldest man on the hillside, and that the memory of 1715 in this assembly was carried in his body alone. The men could not see him down. He would be on the hill at five o'clock when the standard went up, and he would go to the prince's hand on his own feet.

THE STANDARD

The prince came up the bracken at twenty past four, in tartan trews and a coat of plain blue. Beside him walked William Murray, Marquess of Tullibardine, the attainted Duke of Atholl who had lived thirty years in exile, sixty-six now and arthritic, helped up the slope by two of his Atholl men. The standard was a square of blue silk on a long shaft, white roundel, red cross of St George. Tullibardine raised it at half past four. The prince made his speech in English, committing himself to the cause of his father and his country, and calling upon the gentlemen of Scotland to stand with him. Then he walked the line of the chiefs in turn. Struan was the third or fourth man he came to. The prince, by his own account in the Stuart Papers, took both of the old man's hands in his and said Mr Robertson, you fought for my father at Sheriffmuir. I am not going to let you walk back to Struan. The old man, leaning on his broadsword as a stick, answered by Lochiel's witness: Your Royal Highness, I will go where the standard goes. The prince laughed. About twelve hundred Highlanders were on the hillside by sunset.

PRESTONPANS AND THE COACH

Six weeks later, on the twenty-first of September, the Jacobite army caught Sir John Cope's government force in the stubble fields east of Edinburgh, and broke it in five minutes of close-range Highland charge. Among the equipment taken on the field was Cope's personal berlin, four-wheeled, leather-lined. The prince gave it to the chief of Clan Donnachaidh by the tradition of Atholl and Strathearn, with the words to take you home, Mr Robertson, since you walked from Struan to find us. Struan rode the coach to Atholl after Prestonpans. He could not take the field with the army on the march south into England. His clan went on without him under his kinsmen. He was at Falkirk in January 1746 in a chair wheeled to the lee of a stone wall, and was taken back to Struan after the engagement. He was not at Culloden in April. His men were.

CARIE OF RANNOCH

He lived three years and three days after Culloden, in the house at Carie of Rannoch, while the Penal laws after the rising set about the dismantling of the public Gaelic and Catholic life of the Highlands, the proscription of the plaid, the breaking of the heritable jurisdictions, the redrawing of the country into shires that knew nothing of clan. He died on the twenty-eighth of April 1749, seventy-nine years old, and was buried in the Robertson burying-ground at Dunalastair on Loch Rannoch, ten miles from his birth-house at Struan. The coach was kept by the chiefs of Struan for several generations, and was sold off in 1810 by a financially distressed heir; what became of it after is not known.

THE HILL

A cause is rarely revived by the young alone. The Glenfinnan monument went up on the grass shelf in 1815, by the bequest of Alexander MacDonald of Glenaladale, in white granite, on the spot where the standard had been raised. The four hundred names of the men who came out of the lower glens of Atholl with the chief of Donnachaidh are not on the stone. The standard itself, lost on the field at Culloden in the April of 1746, is in the National Museum of Scotland, blue silk, faded, with the staple-holes of the shaft still cut into the linen along the edge.