Free In Praise of Savagery by Warwick Cairns Page A

four years before, a party of Glencoe MacDonalds, together with their Glengarry cousins, had raided Robert Campbell’s lands and stolen his livestock, putting him into debt and necessitating, incidentally, his decision to join the army for the wage it offered; but at this time they found themselves on opposite sides of something much bigger—something that was, in all respects, a civil war over the throne of Scotland.
    With the ascendancy of William of Orange, all the Highland chiefs were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown; and it had been judged that MacIain had been unduly slow and reluctant in doing so, and his loyalty was considered suspect, if not downright false.
    With this in mind, Captain Campbell was dispatched to Glencoe with a very particular and most secret set of orders.
    The MacDonalds welcomed Campbell’s men into their homes as guests; and though Campbell himself was what he was, and who he was, and of the clan from which he came, he was alsorelated to the MacDonald chief through marriage; and so he was given a bed in one of MacIain’s own houses.
    The soldiers were fed, housed and entertained for some two weeks, until the night of the twelfth. That night, Campbell spent the evening playing cards with his hosts, before wishing them goodnight and accepting an invitation to dine with them the following night.
    But later, in the early hours of the following morning, a single shot rang out. It was a signal for which the soldiers had been waiting, dressed and armed; and upon the sound of it they turned upon their hosts, dragging them from their beds and slaughtering them in front of their homes.
    In all, thirty-eight MacDonalds were killed by the soldiers. Another forty, mostly women and children, died of exposure in the snow after fleeing from their burning houses.
    The number of deaths would have been higher still, were it not that the idea of killing one’s host—of murder under trust—was considered deeply shameful in Highland culture. No matter how much you might happen to loathe a man, and no matter that, if you were to come across him in other circumstances, you would happily slit his throat as soon as look at him, it was just not the done thing to kill him while a guest under his roof.
    For this reason, not all of the soldiers were wholly enthusiastic about their task, nor were they wholly diligent in carrying it out.
    Some found ways of warning their hosts beforehand, saying things like ‘If I were a sheep, I think I would head up to the hills tonight’, while giving their hosts the kind of meaningful looks that either persuaded them that they had lost their marbles altogether, or else that they had some urgent message of the utmost importance to impart. Two lieutenants, Francis Farquhar and Gilbert Kennedy, went so far as to break their swords rather than carryout their orders, and for this were subsequently imprisoned for their disobedience—though they were pardoned at a later date.
    The ruins of MacIain’s house can still be seen to this day, in a wood not far from the present-day village of Glencoe, overgrown with heather and bracken.
    More than 300 years later, people in those parts still sing of the massacre in ballads:
    Some died in their beds at the hand o’ the foe
    Some fled in the night and were lost in the snow
    Some lived tae accuse him wha’ struck the first blow
    But gone was the house of MacDonald.

    And there is a story, also, of a soldier in Campbell’s regiment who was sent down to search beneath the bridge of the River Coe, where it was believed that a number of the MacDonalds might be hiding. Sure enough, he found a small group of women and children huddled down there; but rather than kill them all, he drew his sword and, taking hold of the arm of one among them, a young boy, he cut off one of the boy’s fingers, smearing the blood along the length of his blade, before returning to his unit to report his ‘success’.
    It is also told how many years