The young Laird of Lochbuie, Archibald MacLaine[i], has summoned his tenants to Moy, welcomes them like brothers, familiar and in the bad Gaidhlig.  And after all, they are of an age – though he is a MacLaine [ii] and Iain is a MacPhaden.

After the welcome, Iain notices, Archibald sniggers with his hangers-on in a squeaky, incomprehensible Beurla.

The Laird is dressed up in his sodger dubh uniform, a fine outfit with red coat and sash, fine tartan stockings and a jaunty tourie with its black feathered crest.  He carries a muckle broadsword it doesn’t look as if he has the strength to wield. Baldy’s peely-wally legs poke out between the hem of his green kilt and the top of his stockings.  He has purchased the captaincy of a Light Infantry Company service the British government.  Now all he needs is a Company.

The trestles outside Moy House are laid with salmon, venison, bread and bannocks.  There is wine for those as want and whisky for the rest of them[iii].  Pure delicious bribery.

Iain’s father, Tearlach, scowls at Iain and his brother Fionnlagh fall into carousing with his cousins: Dòmhnall McPhaden of Scobul and Dòmhnall McPhaden of Cambus.  He had warned his sons as they trailed across from Tapul.

“Sign nothing.  Agree to nothing.”

The Ross of Mull is versed in war and weary of war.  A consequence of so often being on the losing side.

MacLaine[vi] of Lochbuie and MacGillEthain of Trenish answered the call of the famous Clanranald captain, Alastair Colla, with eleven thousand men.  John’s great great grandfather and his kinsmen stormed the higher ground above Kilsyth, routing the Covenanting army there with great bloodshed.  Then they returned, with Alasdair Colla, to settle issues in the West.

The 19^th MacGillEthain chieftain, and most of the men he had rallied to the Royalist cause again at the time of the English invasion, were killed at the Battle of Inverkiething in 1651.    Thereafter, the turncoat Argyll, in alliance with Oliver Cromwell, ravaged Mull.  They burned crops and slaughtered livestock, burned the roof trees of the houses of MacGillEthain tenants and cottars, and, finally, wrested control from the MacGillEthains.

Even the execution of Archibald Caimbeul in 1660, did not significantly shift the balance of power, however.  The Caimbeul recovered their influence surprisingly fast, and soon were licensed by the new King  to invade Mull to recover debts and violently evict MacGillEthain tenants[vii] by ‘fire and sword’[viii].  By 1691 the Caimbeuls had used their legal, financial and military power to wrest control of most of Mull from the MacGillEthains and began implementing a policy of colonisation, resettling Caimbeul tacksmen on formerly MacGillEthain tenancies.

But, like the judgement of the Almighty, King William’s Ill years[ix]  delayed the Caimbeuls’ enjoyment of their spoils.  

In Kilfinichen, they said, people died for want on the high road, were buried where they breathed their last as the few surviving relations had neither the strength nor means to carry them to the common burial places.[x]

After years of famine and harrying, few McPhadens or their kin came out in 1715, even when  the MacGillEthain, Cameron, MacDhòmhnaill and Mac an Tòisich interests marshalled at the head of Loch na Keal on Mull before proceeding to the mainland in support of the Old Pretender[xi].  John Caimbeul, 2^nd Duke of Argyll  defeated the Jacobite force, led by John Erskine, the Earl of Mar, in November of that year.

Fewer still came out in 1745. 

Following the rebellion[xii], Argyll commenced his programme of what he called ‘improvement’ on his Mull estates, intent, they said, on increasing the financial return from his land-holdings.  Rents in silver to pay for his big houses in Edinburgh and London and Inverary, his lavish lifestyle.

Argyll had commissioned a fellow from the North East, Duncan Forbes of Culloden to review the management of his Muilleach estates[xiii].  Forbes advised Campbell to “ deliver [subtenants] from the tyranny of Tacksmen.[xiv] to free them of the oppression of services[xv] and…encourage them to improve their farms by giving them… nineteen years by lease… offering frankly for their farms such rent as they fairly and honestly could bear”.[xvi]

From then on, tacksmen were to be by-passed and  non-heritable, 19 year leases of farms to the highest bidder rather than to the current leaseholder, a clear affront to the sense of dùthchas that existed in the community.  The incoming tenants, moreover, were forbidden from sub-letting their land. 

Campbell’s scheme dispossessed many in the tacksman class but  also created more cottars – men who had previously farmed on sub-let plots in fermtouns[xvii].  Of course, in the first few years, the McPhadens continued to farm according to tradition, on communal, run-rig fermtouns at Tapul, Scobul, Camrie and Tiroran.  The process of clearance (or improvement) was just beginning.

Dispossessed and thoroughly intimidated by the Campbell’s ruthlessness, few on the island came out, on one side or the other, when the Young Pretender raised the standard at Moidart in 1745.  Despite this, the Kilfinichen communities were still subjected to the suppression of imposed in retribution for the rebellion. 

The Act of Proscription[xviii] prohibited the wearing of highland dress[xix], public (or private) gatherings and teaching of or in the Gaidhlig.  The McPhaden men abandoned their plaids and kilt for trews and sarks in the Lowland manner on pain, in practice, of summary execution.  Ceilidhs were forbidden.  Also preaching in the Gaidhlig. This law applied only to the common folk however: the landed gentry were exempt from the entire Act of Proscription.

So, for three decades there was a lull in the fighting for the tenants of Lochbuie: disarmed, proscribed, occupied. Until Allan McLean of Torloisk contracted to raise a regiment to fight in North America.

The last ten years have been grim on Ardmeachan. 

1765 was the year of the black snow[xx]. Fine soot like lamp black fell from the dark clouds, blackening the leaves, the corn, folk’s faces, any surface that it settle on. The soot smelled of sulphur as though it had come straight from hell.

Three years of poor harvests and famine followed.  Snow lay on the ground long into what should have been Spring.  There was no corn to be had in July.

Then, in the year of the Black Spring[xxi], the cattle starved and those who had survived the winter did not come into season. What stock his father had sold lean and low-priced to buy them meal.

There are at once too many mouths to feed at Scobul and this feast from Iain’s ‘chieftain’ as a bribe.  And the bribe is fine, as the whisky rises in him and his belly fills and the other cheils, his cousins from Tapul and Camus rise to the opportunity.

Baldy is on this feet exhorting them to join him in this new adventure: brave clansmen, caterans and patriots of the new North Britain. Setting forth for King, Country (and Laird) to the New World.

Half-serious, Iain cheers on the laird’s flawed Gaidhlig as he mangles words and misplaces lenitions.

His father, Tearlach, is at his shoulder.

“Don’t,” he says.

“What harms in it?”

“A promise?”

“A promise of land maybe.  New land, father?”

“Aye.  Six feet of it in some nameless forest. No word.  Nothing.”

“What word of me here.  It’s good.  I’ll send back something for you.”

“He’s an ass, son!”

“Evidently.  But there are others there. Torloisk.  And Murdo.  And this time, there is no war.”

“Then why d’you think they are recruiting?”

“Keep the peace.”

“The Black Watch keep the peace. Aye.  Tell me.”

“I’m one less mouth to feed.”

“I’ll feed you. Would you feed Baldy?”

“Father?!”

“I didn’t go, Iain.  I might have done.  When Torloisk raised his company.  Regretted it.  Till only 50 men of seven times that number came back to the land.”

“They didn’t all die.”

“Aye.  Some settled in the forests there.  Got free land.  If there ever was such a thing.  Not theirs.  Dead men’s clothing will not keep you warm.”

“They say they’re doing fine.”

“Aye well.  Maybe so.”

Iain’s pals are queuing up to make their mark.  Baldy’s factor presides at the table and the man himself is quaffing claret from a quaich.

“It’s not the men who died,” his father says. “Or the ones who stayed.  Good luck to them.  But the ones who came back.  The things they said they had seen.”

“Aye.  Savages. The natives.”

“No.  Seen and done by the British and the French. Done. And saw themselves.  Ordered massacres.  Gruesome revenge. Scalps cut from women’s skulls.  Men’s heads on spikes.”

“But there’s no war, father.”

“There is always a war.  Coming of going.  Why else would that poltroon be gussied up and plying you with drink? Don’t.”

“The others are going.”

“Aye.  All the young men are going.  Are they?”

“You’ll manage without us. And we’ll send back gear.  Of course we will.”

“One out of seven, Iain.  That’s the odds.”

“Where you’re standing.  Think of the free land.”

“Aye.  There is no such thing as free land, Iain.  Under it or over it, it’ll come with a price, is all I am saying.”

It was a sad thing.  His father, standing there, denying him.

Iain turned back to the trestle: made his mark.

[i] In contrast to his father, Archibald MacAlaine was an absentee landlord affecting an English accent and English manners. He spent most of his short lairdship in  North America and Jamaica.^[i] During the period, however, he ran up substantial debts to fund his lifestyle.  It was those debts, added to debts run up by his own father and grandfather^[i] and exacerbated by scurrilous family politics around the entail on the estate, which drove Archibald’s heir and cousin, Murdo MacAlaine, to follow the Argyll’s policies in evicting tenants and consolidating leases when he inherited the Loch Buy Estates in 1785.

[ii] Clan Maclaine of Lochbuie is translated in Gaelic as Mac’ill-Eathain Locchabuide. They claim descent from Maurice Fitzgerald, an Anglo-Norman who moved to Ireland with Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, known as “Strongbow.” The Fitzgeralds of Ireland are said to have sent offshoots to Scotland in the thirteenth century. Two Fitzgerald cousins are said to have started both Clan Maclean and Clan Mackenzie, with the name MacLean being coined by Gillean-na-Taughe (Gillean of the Battle-Axe), a fierce warrior who lived in the thirteenth century.

[iii] The MacAlaine, a cadet branch of the MacGillEthain clan, have their ancestral seat at Moy on the southern coast of Mull.

[iv] McLean

[v] 1633. Leasing them back to the MacGillEthains to allow them to accumulate still greater debts.

[vi] Murdoch Mor, the tenth chief, fought for James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose in 1645 and as a result his lands were forfeited and not restored until 1661

[vii] Plundering and, allegedly, hamstringing cattle for sport

[viii] 1674

[ix] 1693-1699, when crop failure and unusually cold winters – perhaps associated with volcanic activity on Iceland – brought famine to Europe and, particularly, to the Western Highlands of Scotland. 

[x] Rev Dugald Campbell from The Naked Clansmen, Ian McPhee. It has been estimated that, in areas of the Highlands, the population declined by around 20% during this six year period.  In the Parish of Kilfinichen, according to the Old Statistical Account.

[xi] James Francis Stuart

[xii] And the (Second) Disarming Act (1737)

[xiii] 1716

[xiv]  General Review of Agriculture in the Hebrides. Based on the traditional Highland culture, where prestige and power were based on the number of armed men a proprietor could muster when required, land tenure had been based on a 3 tier hierarchy:

1. the proprietor,
2. tacksmen (local gentry linked to the proprietors who held long term, and generally heritable leases for areas of land)
3. sub-tenants (cottars and crofters who held tenancies ‘at will’ from the tacksmen or (latterly) tenants

Dr. Johnston described the class as “Next in dignity to the laird […]; a large taker or lease-holder of land, of which he keeps part as a domain in his own hand, and lets part to under-tenants. The tacksman is necessarily a man capable of securing to the laird the whole rent, and is commonly a collateral relation. These tacks, or subordinate possessions, were long considered as hereditary, and the occupant was distinguished by the name of the place at which he resided. He held a middle station, by which the highest and the lowest orders were connected. He paid rent and reverence to the laird, and received them from the tenants. This tenure still subsists, with its original operation, but not with its primitive stability.”  The Tacksman was also expected to render his laird military services, raising levies from his sub-tenants for this purpose.

[xv] Such as peat cutting or harvesting for the laird

[xvi] Forbes’ dim view of the agricultural competencies and commitment of Tacksmen was shared by MacDonald in his later 1811 Review

[xvii] Baille

[xviii] 1747

[xix] That from and after the first day of August, One thousand, seven hundred and forty-seven, no man or boy within that part of Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty’s Forces, shall, on any pretext whatever, wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland clothes (that is to say) the Plaid, Philabeg, or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder-belts, or any part whatever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland Garb; and that no tartan or party-coloured plaid of stuff shall be used for Great Coats or upper coats, and if any such person shall presume after the said first day of August, to wear or put on the aforesaid garment or any part of them, every such person so offending … For the first offence, shall be liable to be imprisoned for 6 months, and on the second offence, to be transported to any of His Majesty’s plantations beyond the seas, there to remain for the space of seven years.

A further Disarming Act of the same year, and the subsequent Heritable Jurisdictions Act, legislated to eliminate the local military agency of Highland society.

[xx] Hekla eruption

[xxi] 1771  Bliadhna an Earrach