Camerons & Jacobite Risings

….. The Jacobite army also contained men of upright life and proven honour attracted to its standard by a loyalty rooted in firm conviction. The outstanding example here is Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, the sixty-year-old beau ideal of Highland chieftainship, who had fought for the royal house of Stewart since the 1650s. Active in Glencairn's rising against the Cromwellian occupation forces in Scotland, Lochiel had once bitten out the throat of an English officer rash enough to grapple with him during the aftermath of that rising. Clan Cameron was an unusually cohesive and compct unit, partly because it was continually hammered together by attacks from outside, notably by the Macintosh of Mackintosh. Formed for defence, and deliberately eschewing claims to marginal areas of dubious loyalty on the fringe of the Cameron heartland, this could never be a large clan. All the big, expanding ones, in defiance of the solid blocks of colour ascribed to their names by modern tourist maps, had to incorporate many smaller peoples. By the side of Lochiel at Killecrankie there fought several chiefs of not dissimilar status and outlook. Sir Donald Macdonald of Sleat, a man of notably upright life and the head of one of the many independent branches of the long-divided Clan Donald, brought a contingent to the battle, where he lost five close relatives. The Macdonalds of Clanranald also formed part of the Jacobite line of battle. Allan Macdonald, twelfth of Clanranald, was a minor in his teens and although he was in attendance on Claverhouse during the campaign and went into temporary exile in France afterwards, command of the clan regiment went to his guardian Donald Macdonald of Benbecula, Tutor of Clanranald.. Another very young chief involved in the campaign was Sir John Maclean of Duart, a youth of nineteen whose seat, Duart Castle, and principal territorial interests were concentrated in the island of Mull. There the Macleans were under heavy pressure from the expanding Argyll Campbells…..

….. It is fashionable to argue that many Highlanders fought for the Stewarts primarily because they hated the Campbells, at once the stauchest of Whigs, and the most aggressive of clans. In fact the latter title could be hotly contested by the Mackenzies or Gordons, and the hostility of many Jacobites to the Campbells can be grossly exaggerated. Lochiel's mother was a Campbell of Glenorchy and he had been brought up by 'Gillespie Grumach', the great eighth Earl of Argyll. Although he rejected his guardian's Covenanting politics, Lochiel remained on social terms with the house of Argyll during the Restoration…………Alexander Drummond of Balhadie, who fought with distinction for the Jacobites at Killecrankie, was in fact a MacGregor and in 1715 claimed to be chief of his clan, but it is naïve to see him as pursuing an hereditary feud with the Campbells of Breadalbane. Clan Gregor had lost that war generations earlier, and the most significant relationship in Balhadie's life was undoubtedly his marriage to Lochiel's daughter in 1688…..

….. Most men of standing who supported Claverhouse seem to have done so out of genuine attachment to James VII. Some, of course, had particular reasons for doing so. Lochiel had been knighted by James, then Duke of York, in 1682, and James both appreciated Lochiel's outstanding loyalty and gave his appreciation concrete expression. In order to buy off the persistent claims of the Mackintosh of Mackintosh, Lochiel borrowed money from Argyll, agreeing to hold Glen Loy and Loch Arkaigside from Argyll as his feudal superior. This involved only the rendering of a token annual feu duty, and an obligation to furnish a hundred men in arms when required. This last provision was never enforced, so when Argyll was temporarily eliminated by his flight and rebellion in 1684-5, no great burden was lifted from Lochiel's shoulders. On the contrary, the eclipse of Argyll tempted the Duke of Gordon to advance claims of feudal superiority over Lochiel. At this point James VII intervened in person to protect the interests of the Camerons.

….. At the opposite end of the scale to the variegated human structure of the larger Highland political units such as Atholl, or the Campbell or Mackenzie empires, lay a small homogeneous group inhabiting a compact block of territory like Clan Cameron in Lochaber. Clan Cameron was, however, an exception which proves the rule. Locked in interminable dispute, mostly with the Mackintosh of Mackintosh, as to the validity of conflicting charter rights over their territory, the Cameron leaders deliberately stripped down their territorial ambitions and tried to uphold them with a solidly loyal Cameron tenantry whose stout hearts and sharp swords had to compensate for a lack of an umambiguous title to jurisdiction.. For every Highland clan the hereditary right or power to do justice was the indispensible key to discipline, cohesion and effectiveness….. …..Thus Campbells stood in the Jacobite ranks with such clans as the Camerons whose anti-Campbell tendencies have been much exaggerated. Their aged chief Ewen, sventeenth of Lochiel, who had at the age of sixty led barefoot the victorious Jacobite charge at Killecrankie, had been born of a Campbell mother in a Campbell castle. His elder son John, who led the clan out in 1715, also married a Campbell. The Lochiel chiefs differed from Argyll in politics, but the mortal enemies of the Camerons were Huntly and the Mackintosh……

…..There is little doubt that Scottish Jacobites such as Cameron of Lochiel and Lord Traquair were extremely unhappy at the thought of a rebellion unsupported by a substantial well-prepared French expeditionary force. There was always a sense in which Charles Edward throughout his campaign remained encapsulated in that curious Franco-British exiled world which had launched him into the '45…..

…..Had only 300 Macdonalds (of Keppoch) turned up for the raising of the Jacobite standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August, even Charles might have accepted the need to devise means of (going back to France). That the adhesion of Cameron of Lochiel with his 700 fighting men turned a sensational incident into a rebellion is generally agreed, but this fact plunges the enquirer into the problem of the nature of the support for the '45. Was it the last stand of a dying civilisation, the final armed protest of the uncommercialized Gael against the impact of an aggressive, money-grubbing Anglo-Saxon civilisation?

Cameron of Lochiel alone knocks that idea on the head. 'Young' Lochiel was a brisk and enterprising business man very much involved in the most advanced and far-flung developments of his day. He managed his woods as a commercial asset, taking care that when he sold timber it was cut in a fashion which ensured the natural regeneration of the trees. For example in 1722 he sold to an Irishman called Murphy the birch and ash timber of several woods along with the oak bark (valuable for tanning) and alder of another (wood). Murphy was obliged to stack his cut timber neatly in one place 'and to cull the same close to the ground for the benefit of the young growth'. Murphy was also a member of a co-partnery for the carrying on of an ironwork which bought the timber of several of Lochiel's woods in 1722, for the sake of the charcoal fuel which was vital for early iron furnaces, and promptly fell foul of the Cameron chieftain who alleged that they were culling his woods in a rambling and undisciplined way calculated to check regeneration. The man of law consulted by Lochiel suggested a resort to the sheriff to secure an injunction against malpractices.

Lochiel was a sophisticated man, socially and economically very much in touch with the contemporary Lowlands. His finances seem to have rested on a very complex net of bills of credit, a net which involved his uncle and business associate, the Jacobite agent Drummond of Balhaldie. When Lochiel's brothers John and Sandy were to be sent abroad to earn their fortunes, Balhaldie's son Euan was consulted and seems to have gone abroad with them. Indeed, some fascinating letters survive from Euan to his father, written in Annapolis and New York. It is quite clear from them that Euan was speculating in American land, trying to secure profits by quick resale and returning money to his father and Lochiel by bills of exchange. Lochiel's interests in the Americas were by no means confined to North America. He was involved in the West Indies trade…..

…..The 'Gentle Lochiel' of the '45 was a hard man who ran his territorial empire with an iron fist. It is far too easy, on the strength of a much-read passage in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations published in 1776, to see him as the simple, just patriarch shepherding his people through life on a rent roll of a mere £700 per annum. He was in no position to rack rent them because his legal claims to his estates were disputed, and he needed their swords to defend the territorial base essential to his social prestige and business ventures. Social discipline he maintained ruthlessly. Men were hung for thieving, which fact no doubt added edge to Lochiel's threat to hang Allan Cameron of Callart when the latter tried to back out of the '45. Even the vaunted solidarity of Clan Cameron concealed inner tensions and submerged groups. Probably 300 or more of the men whom Lochiel led so proudly to the royal standard in Glenfinnan did not think of themselves as Camerons. MacMartins were pretty well compelled to assume the name Cameron, as did more willingly 'broken men' who had migrated into Lochaber, but there were MacPhees of Glendessary and several other smaller groups whom outside commentators habitually confused with true Camerons.

Early Highland adherents who were less securely placed than Struan or Keppoch and who had something to lose seem to have, very sensibly, taken security for their main assets before they were willing to commit themselves. The classic example is Cameron of Lochiel. His brother, John Cameron of Fassiefern, an astute if unscrupulous West India merchant and burgess of Glasgow, tried to dissuade him from even seeing Prince Charles. Fassiefern urged Lochiel to write a letter telling the young man to go home. Lochiel went to see Charles and succumbed, probably not so much to his charm as to his apparent sensibleness, his lavish assurances of coming French aid, and thinly-veiled threats. Even so Lochiel took full security from Prince Charles for the value of his estates, in the event of the rising proving abortive.

For once in his life Charles honoured one of the political promises with which he was so free. In exile Lochiel was given a French regiment worth more per annum than his Highland rent roll…..