This is Glencoe,
a Glen of exquisite beauty and
yet a valley of endless tears.
In its beauty there s a dark bloodstain
that ll never be wiped clean
A massacre of unwitting hosts,
a murder under trust.
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In the meantime let me tell you a story
If you re watching this then I m guessing you ve heard, at least, something
of the Glencoe massacre.
Campbells murdering MacDonalds
after enjoying their hospitality
in the Highlands, but surely
anywhere a deadly sin.
In one of the local inns to this day there s
a sign saying: No hawkers and no Campbells.
I think that s largely for effect,
but a trans-Atlantic cousin, of Scots decent, told me that at their Highland gatherings they
refuse to talk to adherents of Clan Campbell.
In fact that three-hundred-year-old
atrocity is so abhorrent, so unforgivable
that to this day they won t
even eat Campbell s soup.
Is that the way to think about it?
In the first two weeks of February 1692,
a group of soldiers under Robert Campbell
of Glenlyon had been billeted here with the MacDonalds of Glencoe.
When the troops arrived the MacDonalds were suspicious.
But Campbell presented papers requiring quarters to be given in lieu of taxes ,
and since Alastair MacIain, the chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds, had signed a submission to
King William s authority only a month before ,
he could hardly refuse.
The culture of Highland hospitality would have made refusal difficult anyway.
Soldiers and their clansmen hosts shared buildings like this reconstruction at the National
Trust for Scotland s visitor centre in Glencoe.
As the days passed, they lived hunted, ate,
drank, gambled and exchanged stories and songs.
Barriers slowly came down.
Then on 12th February 1692...
orders came down.
Ultimately those orders had come from London.
The MacDonald s of Glencoe were
to be wiped out entirely.
Slaughtered like the animals they were.
In truth the orders came earlier than this, but they had passed through a lot of hands...
and before he passed them on Colonel John Hill, Governor of the Garrison at Fort
William, questioned the orders
Alistair MacIain had come to the fort to
sign his submission to King William before the deadline date of 31st December.
Hall had reluctantly told him he had to head through howling Hogmanay snow to
sign in the Campbell town of Inveraray.
Bad weather, detention by government troops, and
a Sherriff who was on holiday then vacillated as to what to do, meant that the signature
wasn t actually taken till 6th January.
A month later, some larger
clans STILL haven t signed ,
and Colonel Hill has given both verbal AND
signed indemnities and assurances of protection to MacIain and some of his MacDonald clansmen.
Why carry out an inhuman act of terrorism against them?
In truth he knew.
To instil terror in those other
clans was exactly the purpose.
The MacDonalds of Glengarry
had castle walls to overcome.
Much easier here.
But what was Hill to do?
An elderly gentleman with two
spinster daughters and still waiting for money the government owed him
He was in no position to resign.
Plus, the authorities suspected over long
that Hill had treated these Highlanders with too much humanity
So they d placed under him the ruthless and ambitious Deputy Governor, James
Hamilton, with whom they could deal directly.
Under him they sent Major Robert Duncanson
leading half of the regiment of Argylls.
They could be relied on.
Eventually Hill passed the orders on to Hamilton. He had positioned troops at Inverlochy, whilst
Major Duncanson had his at Ballachulish.
Each of these forces would cut off one end of the
glen and set Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon to do his work inside.
As dusk fell Hamilton forwarded the order to Duncanson.
Fall on the Macdonalds at 7am
I ll take my troops over the pass and down the aptly named devil s staircase
to close the Glen from Rannoch.
Duncanson forwarded the orders with
a message to Campbell of Glenlyon.
Only now did Glenlyon find
out why he d been sent.
He was to fall on the MacDonalds,
not at 7am but 5 the next morning.
Duncanson wanted to get
there when it was all over.
If you were Alistair MacIain of the Glencoe
MacDonalds you would be in your bed at 5am.
Woken by a servant who tells you that
the soldiers you d hosted these last two weeks were at the door.
They d received their orders.
Assuming their orders were to move
off elsewhere, you tell the servant to organise some whisky so that they can
take some hospitality before they go.
It s as you re pulling on your
trousers that you look up to see
That was the start of the slaughter.
Up and down the glen are little townships, clusters of houses like these
ruins at Achtriochtan.
One such township was Inverrigan, where one of
Campbell of Glenlyon s company later reported
I saw eight persons killed and
several houses burnt, and women flying to the hills to save their lives.
MacDonald of Inverrigan, and the eight men of his household, were carried beyond
the door, still bound hand and foot.
They were thrown upon the dung-hill,
and there Glenlyon shot Inverrigan.
One by one the others were also killed a slow,
methodical slaughter with musket and bayonet.
A soldier who rifled Inverrigan's coat
brought his captain a paper he had found,
and Glenlyon called for a torch
so that he might read it.
It was a letter from Colonel John Hill,
giving the MacDonald protection ,
and assuring him that he and his family, his
land and his stock, were free from molestation.
Now Glenlyon stood between his soldiers
and the final victim and said Hold! .
As the soldiers stared Captain Thomas Drummond
arrived and demanded of the waiting soldiers:
Why is he still alive? What
of our orders? Kill him!
When no one moved, Drummond raised his pistol
and shot the young man through the head.
A young boy ran out of the darkness
and he clawed at Glenlyon's legs, crying that he would go anywhere with
the Campbell if his life were spared.
Glenlyon could say nothing, and the boy
was shot on Captain Drummond's order.
As a captain of Grenadiers
Drummond s orders were followed.
It just sounds better if it was a Campbell.
What they don t say is the
troops weren t all Campbells.
Privates on the muster rolls included:
Campbell, MacCallum, MacDiarmid, MacKissock, MacKellar, MacIvor, MacUre and MacNichol.
Lowland, NCOs had been brought in from the regular army to stiffen up the raw Argylle conscripts.
Men like John Kilpatrick, Walter Purdie, John Lindsay, Robert Barber, John Lundie,
Walter Bruss and Robert Jackson,
and of course Major Duncanson, who
led them, was from Stirlingshire.
That s a lot of folk to ignore
at your clan gathering.
Neither were the clansmen
of Glencoe all MacDonalds.
I met up with archaeologist Derek Alexander
at the remains of one of the massacre sites, the township of Achtriochtan.
It s the work of Derek and his team here that s given us the information
for building this turf house.
As we chatted we discussed how the townships
in this glen would have contained Rankins, MacColls, MacPhails and Hendersons
we re going to come back to. ..
but a clash of clans between Campbells and
MacDonalds is so much simpler , more Hollywood.
Of course, there would have been MacDonalds in these houses who had carried
out raids on Campbell lands,
and there would have been Campbells amongst
the troops who still bore a grudge.
But the Campbells themselves
stole from neighbours
Here they were just useful tools of state.
Robert Campbell of Glenlyon wasn t chosen to captain the murder squad by accident.
Notorious as a drinker, gambler and debtor, he d had to sell his own lands to
The Duke of Atholl to cover debts.
He d been taken under wardship of
Campbell of Breadalbane and Argyll to stop him raking up more debt.
His lack of reliability is probably why he was never informed of the plan until
the night before the morning s massacre.
His indebtedness was why they were
orders he couldn t afford to ignore
and just in case, when his instructions
came , they included the words:
See that this be put in execution without feud or favour, else you may expect to be
dealt with as one not true to King.
This massacre was ordered by the king
This massacre happened because these clansmen
had been slow to submit to that king.
In 1888 William of Orange had landed in in the south of England and
taken over from James VII and II.
They called it The Glorious Revolution
because there ws no bloodshed
in England.
There followed sixty years of blood and conflict in Scotland
and the bloodshed in Ireland has barely stopped yet.
It s a dilemma.
What do you do when a new king overthrows the
old one to whom you ve pledged allegiance?
What do you do when a new crime family
takes over protection of your streets?
What do you do when a corporate
takeover restructures your department or rationalises your job?
What do you do when your new bosses tell you that your next job
is to murder men, women and children in cold blood?
If you ve signed an oath to the king and article sixteen says
that refusing an order can result in death
article nine says that giving advice or
intelligence to the enemy means death.
Article nineteen says that to commit
murder or wilful killing is death.
Now your orders are to go out
and murder those children.
What do you do?
I said we d come back to Hendersons.
This is the Henderson stone.
The story goes that the night before the massacre there was a game of shinty going on here.
One of the Argyll soldiers was dealing with the very dilemma I ve presented to you.
What does he do?
It s said that having drawn the
attention of a local with a fixed look,
he talked to the stone, saying: Great stone
of the glen! Great is your right to be here.
But if you knew what will happen this
night you would be up and away.
Did these things happen?
Did something like it happen?
We know that two officers who came over
the hills with Deputy Governor Hamilton broke their swords rather than follow orders.
Other soldiers looked the other
way as people fled to safety.
There s some indication that some Campbell
Highlander privates were far more disgusted by the task than some of their lowland sergeants
who had a hatred of all Gaels.
John Dalrymple First Earl of Stair and the
Secretary to the King, was the Lowlander
who ordered, and expressed glee at
the prospect of this slaughter,
but he was 500 miles away in
Kensington when it happened and King William slept soundly in his bed.
Maybe this massacre wasn t so much hatred of your neighbour, as contempt from a distance.
Was it really about Campbells and MacDonalds?
I m not suggesting for a moment that
there was no clan loyalty or enmity when it came to these clans.
In drawing rooms far from this glen people in power used loyalty
and enmity for their own ends.
MacDonalds and Campbells
a sacrificial lamb and a scapegoat before the alter of power.
Glencoe was about who would submit to power
and who would look the other way.
In France James had cared little for those who so preciously protected their oath to him.
In Britain, King William ordered a massacre,
the Earl of Stair delighted in it,
Colonel Hill despaired of it,
Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton welcomed
the opportunity for advancement,
Campbell of Glenlyon was ambivalent,
many scribbling solicitors were just doing their jobs
and the soldiers, whose job it was, had many different names and made
different choices that night
There s no shortage of guilt to go around.
but judgment doesn t rest with a clan or a name .
but the moral choices made by many individual links in a long chain.
The biggest question of Glencoe is:
What would I have done?
What would you have done.
There s another video about the Jacobite
years coming up on screen now. Tha mi an dòchas gum bi lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda
