They shamefully and barbarously mangled and slew him
Ronald Campbell’s brief tenure as Laird of Craignish (1537-1540) was notable only for a vicious skirmish. As the proud descendant of ‘warriors of the first class’, Ronald sought to settle a land dispute by the sword. Unfortunately for Ronald, his company was routed by MacCorquodale of Phantelands:
[Ronald’s] foster brother MacKisage lost his hand and dropped his sword upon the banks of Loch Tromlee, which two-handed sword the MacCorquodales got and keep in their mansion house of the Island of Loch Tromlee to this day in memory of that action as a trophy, and is still called Claymore VicKisage.1
Did MacKisage’s (i.e. MacIsaac’s) severed hand also form part of the spoils? Consider the following. During the long-running feud between the Grants of Ballindalloch and the Grants of Carron, a band of the latter happened upon John Grant of Dalnabo (1628). It was his misfortune to be identified as the brother of the chieftain of the Ballindalloch sept:
They seized upon his person, tied his hands behind his back with bowstrings and cruelly and unmercifully murdered him in cold blood, every one of them striking him through the body with their dirks; thereafter they cut off his hands, ears and nose and carried the same with them as a trophy of their victory.2
Perhaps they danced as they paraded their gruesome trophies? In 1636, James Stewart of Drumquhen had a commission from the crown to apprehend John Dow Geir, an infamous MacGregor brigand. Unfortunately for Stewart, he was ambushed by Geir and his cateran at Tulloch in Strathspey.
They set upon [Stewart] with shots of hagbuts and muskets, shot him through the thighs, broke his thigh bones, cut off his fingers, cut off his head and danced and made merry about him a long time.3
Stewart was killed on Christmas Day, which may have added to the merriment of Geir and his men. (In 1640, the celebration of Christmas, or Yule, which was frowned upon by the puritanical and permanently po-faced establishment of Calvinist and Covenanting Scotland, was banned by an act of parliament.)
Clans on the Highland periphery were often the most barbarous. If we leave Strathspey and flit southwards, we encounter the brutal MacFarlanes.
In 1618/19, the elderly William Buchanan was hunting on a moor in the Lennox - a mere day’s travel from (relatively) civilized Glasgow. Here he was ambushed by Andrew Mor MacFarlane, a particularly vindictive bandit:
He [MacFarlane], accompanied with his two sons, and seven or eight other lawless limmars, came to the said moor and lay await for the gentleman [Buchanan]; and how soon he came there, about eight of the clock in the morning, without any company but four hunting dogs, they laid hands upon him and bound him fast… Having consulted among themselves after what form and manner they should dispatch him, they resolved in the end … an extraordinary death by torture which he suffered the space of ten hours… They bound him to a tree at the said hour of eight in the morning and every hour thereafter, till six at night, which made up ten hours, they gave him three cruel strikes with a dirk in such parts of his body as were not to bring present death. And having maimed him with thirty strokes till the full number of ten hours had run out, they then gave him the last deadly strike at the heart, wherewith he fell dead to the ground!
And having stripped him [Buchanan] naked, because his tongue was the instrument whereby, as they alleged, he offended in investigating the former stolen goods, they cut his throat, took his tongue out of his head, slew his four dogs, cut one of their tongues out and put it in the gentleman’s mouth, and put his tongue in the dog’s mouth. And not content herewith, but the further to satisfy poor inhuman and barbarous cruelty upon the naked corpse, they slit up his belly, took out his whole entrails and put them in one of the dog’s bellies, after they had opened the dog’s belly and taken out his entrails, which they put in the gentleman’s belly. And so left him lying naked, and the four dead dogs above him; where he lay above the earth the space of eight days thereafter, before he was found.4
Torture, mutilation and the display of bodies as a warning to others, or as a kind of battlefield trophy, was not uncommon. Allan Kennedy suggests that for Highland bandits ‘the performance of violence seems to have had a more performative function… The excessiveness and the Gothicism of the violence, which can be better understood as an almost ritualistic expression of the gang’s power and contempt for its enemies. As well as being a means of both facilitating and extending bandits’ criminal careers, violence could, it seems, serve as a gang bonding mechanism’.5 The very particular nature of William Buchanan’s torture and the apparently bizarre treatment of his corpse went beyond the usual overkill. It may seem psychotic and macabre to us, but the perpetrators likely considered their actions justified and perhaps even glorious. Thoughts of bloody vengeance loomed large in the minds of Highland warriors and their womenfolk. Marion Campbell, daughter of the Laird of Glenlyon, was besotted with Gregor Roy MacGregor, the dashing young Chief of Clan Gregor, but forcibly separated from him (1562). When news reached her that Gregor and his cateran had slaughtered a party of Campbells, which included her cousins, Marion composed a poem celebrating the courage, martial prowess and growing renown of her beloved. She also revelled in the demise of her close relatives. She imagined the big, arrogant Campbell men being humiliated, stripped of their fine garments and having their throats slit. Marion married Gregor Roy during a period of rapprochement between the warring clans (c. 1566/67), but their union was short-lived. Gregor’s feud with his in-laws reignited and in 1570 he was executed at Kenmore; his nemesis, Grey Colin Campbell, the grim Laird of Glenorchy, swung the heading axe. In her lament for Gregor, Marion raged against Grey Colin and longed for the day when her infant son would avenge his father.6
How did William Buchanan so incur the wrath of Andrew Mor? He had objected to MacFarlane’s plundering and intiated legal action for the return of stolen goods. Lawfare went hand-in-hand with warfare. The Buchanans soon secured a legal commission to apprehend William’s murderers and did so with extreme prejudice. Retribution was exacted upon Andrew Mor, but another victim of the violence was Duncan MacFarlane. The 16-year-old son of Andrew Mor had played no part in the murder of the elderly William, but the Buchanans declared him guilty of other depredations. Young Duncan was captured when the hagbut he was aiming at the Buchanans misfired. He was stabbed 18 times with dirks and then rolled on to his belly ‘where he lay dead upon the ground, they… to satisify their rage upon the poor corpse, cut his back in two with swords’.7
The Buchanans had quite the reputation. If you wanted wet work done in the Lennox, they were your men! In 1593, the Cawdor Campbells sought revenge for the assassination of their chieftain. A year earlier, John Campbell of Cawdor had been shot through a window while warming himself by a fire in his son-in-law’s house. He was the casualty of an internal feud for control of Clan Campbell during the minority of its chief, the seventh Earl of Argyll. It was widely known, or at least strongly suspected, that Campbell of Ardkinglas and Campbell of Glenorchy had orchestrated the murder. On 28 March, as Ardkinglas and four servants prepared to depart Dumbarton for Edinburgh, a cateran of 24 Buchanans and broken men just happened to be concealed in a yard opposite the gate through which Ardkinglas’ party would exit the town. Duncan Campbell and another servant proceeded slightly ahead of their master:
[The Buchanans] surely believing that one of them had been the said Laird of Ardkinglas, they discharged a dozen hagbuts at the said two persons and shot the said late Duncan in the head with one of the same shots; and thereafter, coming forth of the said yard, finding the said late Duncan not to be dead, and still believing he had been the said Laird of Ardkinglas, they shamefully and barbarously
mangled and slew him with swords and cut off his head, and then perceiving
themselves to be disappointed, they sharply followed the said Laird, shot
eight or nine hagbuts at him, and had not failed likewise to have slain him were [it] not by the providence of God he escaped.8
Not a successful mission, then, for the bloody Buchanans, but certainly a bold enterprise and one worthy of note. It added to their fame and renown as daring and dangerous men. And that was what really mattered to Highland warriors.
A. Campbell, ‘The Manuscript History of Craignish’, ed. H. Campbell, Scottish History Society: Miscellany IV (Edinburgh 1926), 285. As with all quotes in this series, I have modernised the language and placenames for those unfamiliar with the non-standardised and often eccentric or phonetic spelling in Scots and English documents of the 16th-18th cent.
RPCS II (2nd ser.), 411.
RPCS VI (2nd ser.), 366.
R. Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland III.2 (Edinburgh 1833), 547-548 (hereafter ACTS). Limmars = villains, outlaws, bandits (DSL).
A. Kennedy, ‘Deviance, Marginality and the Highland Bandit in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, Social History 47.3 (2022), 254. The severed head of John Drummond of Drummondernoch was used in a ritual of the Clan Gregor in 1589. Following his murder in Glen Artney by certain MacGregors, ‘the authors thereof cut off the said late John Drummond's head and carried the same to the Laird of MacGregor; who, and the whole surname of MacGregors purposely convened, upon the next Sunday thereafter at the Church of Balquhidder where they caused the said late John’s head to be presented to them, and there, avowing the said murder to have been committed by their common counsel and determination laid their hands upon the head, and, in heathen and barbarous manner, swore to defend the authors of the said murder’ (RPCS IV, 453). The ‘Laird’, i.e. chief, was Alasdair Roy MacGregor: see n. 6.
M. MacGregor, ‘'Tha mulad air m’ inntinn': a third song by Marion Campbell of Glen Lyon?’, Aiste 5 (2019), 1-49; M. MacGregor, ‘‘Surely One of the Greatest Poems Ever Made in Britain’: The Lament for Griogair Ruadh MacGregor of Glen Strae and its Historical Background’ in E.J. Cowan & D. Gifford (eds), The Polar Twins (Edinburgh 1999), 114-153. Marion (last attested in 1601) may still have been alive when that son, Alasdair Roy MacGregor of Glenstrae, Chief of Clan Gregor, was executed in 1604. It was Alasdair’s greatest achievement as a Highland warrior - his bloody victory over the Colquhouns, Buchanans and burgesses of Dumbarton at the battle of Glen Fruin in 1603 - that attracted royal displeasure and led to his demise. ‘Black John of the Mail Coat’, Marion’s other son by Gregor Roy, was killed at Glen Fruin. He was one of the few notable MacGregor casualties. Tradition maintained that he was killed by an arrow that struck “him through the neck joint of his mail.” See A.G.M. MacGregor, History of the Clan Gregor, vol. I (Edinburgh 1898), 332.
ACTS III.2, 551-552.
RPCS V, 68-69 = ACTS I.2, 285-286.