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WE have seen how the Orcadians are mainly Norse.
Landing on Caithness, once a shelf of wild Catti, or on its Sutherland, we
find clans like the Gunns, the Keiths, and the Mackays, plainly or
possibly of Viking stock, and a swarm of Sinclairs whose chiefs came from
the south as confessed Normans. The greatest of the Macaulays, who seems
to set little store by his Scottish descent, boasted his clan as sons of
Olaf. All along the north-west coasts and in the islands we must note how
common are Norse place-names, given by godfathers who often brought gifts
of fire and sword to the christening, or again, as in more than one
authentic instance within historic records, might be shipwrecked Danes
settling down by accident in some no-man's corner. Who can say what crews
from other European lands may not have found or forced the same
hospitality? As soldiers rather, Scots went much abroad in early days, and
some of them came back again, not always leaving behind women and children
of uncouth speech. Cromwell's men, by the way, did not scunner to look
upon Highland daughters of Heth. We catch modern Saxons intruding here,
who, after a generation or two, —so experience shows in our own time,—may
grow as ardent Gaels as ever chorused "Auld Lang Syne" at Highland
gatherings. If one desire some idea of the cross-strains in this
miscellany of population, let him read Skene's Highlanders as corrected by
his recent editor, Dr. Macbain, and by the author himself in his more
mature Celtic Scotland. It is far from clear how much Pict and how much
Scot went to the making of a Gaelic-speaking race, which, the harder one
looks at it, the more puzzlingly suggests that hero described by a modern
ballad-maker---
In a knot himself he ties,
With his grizzly head
appearing in the centre of his thighs,
Till the petrified spectator
asks in paralysed alarm,
Where may be the warrior's body, which is leg
and which is arm.
To the hopeless question, Who were the Picts? there
are two main schools of answering guesswork one holding them an older
stock, displaced or overlain by Gaels; the other taking them as a Celtic
people, reinforced from Ireland or elsewhere. As to the Celts,
ethnologists have a good deal to say and sing, but by no means in chorus.
Shall we trust the Milesian tale of their coming from Spain, bringing
their courteous manners and that watchword mańana, honoured in the
Hebrides as in Iberian lands - a consideration for Buckle's handling of
Scottish and Spanish characteristics? Did their race flourish in Etruria
when the Romans were still kilted in wolf-skins? Are we to look for their
ancestors in Greece, as Professor Blackie would have liked to believe?
Were they not rather Phoenicians, a race notoriously given to emigration?
Did they start farther back in the blessed Mesopotamia, perhaps walking
straight out of the Garden of Eden, since the purest Gaelic has been
seriously defined as that spoken by Adam"?
I wonder that no more has been made of a kinship
between Gaelic and Arab customs—the proud independence of clans living in
ancestral feuds chequered by rules of scrupulous hospitality, the division
of work among men and women, the raids in which young swashbucklers win
their spurs by booty of black cattle and camels; there are several such
points likening those Bens to Macs a little mummified by a dry climate,
who would soon learn to skip over bogs and to abuse factors instead of
pashas. The Wahabi sect of Arabia has some correspondence with Scottish
Presbyterianism as kept pure in the Highlands. The Arab burnous could
easily be tinted as a plaid ; and in some parts of Arabia, it appears, a
kind of philabeg is worn. In the Highlands there is a stunted love for a
horse; and the seaside Arab can manage a dhow as well as our West
Islanders. The matter of language of course presents some difficulty, but
ethnologists are skilled in getting over difficulties.
Egypt and Scythia are other cradles suggested for the
Celt, for whom also has been claimed a filial interest in the mysterious
traces of the Hittites. Descent from Chaldean or Accadian sages had better
be reserved for the Lowland Scots, so prominent as lawgivers or
instructors in the modern world. Speculators of past generations always
had the lost Ten Tribes to draw upon. Joseph, certainly, is recorded as
wearing tartan in his youth, and being carried off to market in Egypt by
Macgregors of the period. Higher criticism, on the other hand, has
quenched the pretensions of those chiefs who fondly looked back on their
ancestors as using a private boat at the flood, that may well have
affected this land of Ararats. A Highland tourist of a century ago tells
how his host entertained him with a boastful tale of the antiquity and
grandeur of the clan Donnachie, known to ignorant Sassenachs as Robertson.
The bored guest tried to change the subject with, "I am of the clan Adam,
which I believe is the oldest of them all."—"So are the Hottentots!" quoth
the offended chieftain, and went on with his long genealogy.
Turning in quite another direction for an ancestry,
might one not make out much in common between those bellicose clans and
the Red Indian tribes of America? But when it comes to facts and figures,
one is not sure that the Highlanders can boast any clearer title than that
of " Children of the Mist." And if this seem an unworthy pedigree, let
them remember the proud Roman whose fabled ancestor brought little but
legends to cement a foundation of Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans, that
became built so high by materials from all the ends of the earth.
To travel through Scotland, it has been well said, is
to travel through the Waverley Novels. The north end of the kingdom,
however, makes an exception, which lay beyond Sir Walter's ken, but for
one swoop he took round the islands. Perhaps because it was frame for none
of his stories, this region from Caithness to Kintail is less visited by
tourists, though it contains such grand scenes as the Cave of Smoo, Loch
Maree, and the worn-down mountains of Torridon. It is a smaller edition of
the rest of Scotland, its sea-bound lowlands facing to the east, its
highlands to the west, where their jutting promontories and deep fiords
seem made to dovetail into the opposite island shores, with which this
side was long closely connected in peace and war, bringing about an
interfusion of enterprisingly restless neighbours. On the other side,
landward, a remarkably sharp division marks the province of the Gael from
that of the ex-Goth.
Horace himself would be puzzled to find a lucid order
for the history of the North-Western Highlands, so obscurely entangled are
its thickets of legend and so dim often its clearings of chronicle. We
catch vague glimpses of a struggle between the mainland power of the Earl
of Ross and that of the Macdonald Lords of the Isles. More than once these
titles became fused, till their rival powers died out, and they were both
merged in the crown. The famous battle of Harlaw was not so much a
struggle between Highlander and Lowlander as an attempt on the part of the
Lord of the Isles to seize the Earldom that had invaded his water-walled
domains. When adventurous James V., sailing in person to Stornoway, had
been able to over-awe but hardly to master those quarrelsome western
Rodericks, Red and Black, the task of training or exterminating them was
offered in turn to Huntly, to Argyll, and to the company of Fife
gentlemen, who in the Lewis imitated the enterprise and the failure or
Elizabeth's Virginia colonists. Then out of the welter of anarchy arose
one dominant name, to play over the northern islands and mountains the
same absorbing part as the Campbells in the south.
Who were those Mackenzies of Kintail, that, passing
over to Lewis, grew to be better known by the title of Seaforth? Like the
Campbells, they were at one time fain to claim descent from a Norman
family, that of the Irish Fitzgerald. But this clan has had the fortune to
possess an historian on the premises, so to speak, in the person of the
late Alexander Mackenzie, one of the most zealous and industrious of
Highland antiquaries. He declares the Fitzgerald origin "impossible," and
takes back the "Sons of Kenneth" to one O'Beolan, or Gilleoin, who married
the daughter of Rollo, the pirate earl, before Norsemen became Normans.
This origin is admittedly nebulous; but when the epoch gets into its
teens, Sons and daughters of the line appear as clearly intermarrying with
Bruces, Grahams, St. Clairs, and other Lowlanders, some of whom were
little better than English barons, the Plantagenet blood of Normandy and
the MacAlpine royalty being among their infusions, which also filter down
from kings of Norway, France, and the Isle of Man. Through a shadowy
ancestral Gillanders, "servant of St. Andrew," in the far background, the
Clan Ross, alias Andrias, is made out a senior branch of the same stock ;
and there is a less famed Clan Matheson that would have itself known as
the original tree.
Not to give the reader a headache over genealogical
tables more involved than the story of the "Ring and the Book," one may
ask him to consider if the youths and maidens of those names were
alabaster grandsires all through the centuries when Viking Jaris ruled the
islands and swept their raids over half Scotland. Such considerations go
to bear out the comparison of Highland purity of race to an old knife well
provided, in the course of time, with another handle and more than one new
blade. A fitter metaphor would be a faded and partly re-dyed tartan, whose
intricate pattern of crossing stripes is hardly distinguishable without
spectacles. Unless in metaphors, at long range, I am not disposed to argue
with Celtic historians, who, from Dr. Johnson perhaps, have learned his
trick of knocking you down with the butt end of a pistol when it misses
fire. But surely enough has been said to show how these much-vexed
questions of genealogy give footing no firmer than the bogs of Gaeldom and
Gaildom.
The Mackenzies first come into note as seated at
Kintail, in the south-west corner of Ross. Here the "Five Sisters of
Kintail" now look frowningly down on a stranger's deer forest, once held
by Mackenneths on somewhat doubtful terms from the Earls of Ross; and so
long as the Lordship of the Isles lasted, they were vassals also of that
power. Their stronghold was the castle on Eilean Donan, where Loch Duich
and Loch Long separate as inner recesses of Loch Aish, a beautifully
winding sheet of blue water, "fringed with golden seaweed," beneath the
shade of grassy cones that shut in one of the fairest Highland scenes.
Here they lived at hot feud with Glengarry and other neighbours,
exchanging tit for tat of raids and revenges till, in the beginning of the
seventeenth century, Kenneth Mackenzie took a rise in the world by shifty
arts to win royal favour, as well as by unscrupulous readiness to do
without it. When the Fife Undertakers failed to lay out the turbulent
Lewis, this chief, presently created Lord Kintail, got a commission of
fire and sword to play civilising agent there. The last act of the
Macleods' defence was at the islet of Berrisay, when the Mackenzies forced
its garrison to surrender by exposing their wives and children upon a rock
overwhelmed by the tide.
Thus set astride on both sides of the Minch, the head
of the victorious clan took from the Lewis his higher title Earl of
Seaforth, whose ups and downs went mainly with those of the house of
Stuart. As loyal Cavaliers, though they began by withstanding Montrose,
the Seaforths suffered exile and forfeiture under Cromwell. Again they
shared the misfortunes of James II., rewarded by a paper Marquisate. The
fifth Earl was at Sheriffmuir, and made an attempt to prolong the struggle
in his own country. Four years later the banished chief returned to Lewis
to lead the rising of 1719, that, quickly stamped out, is not known to
every schoolboy, though a little prudence or luck might have made it as
formidable as that of i5, and more famous, had not a cannon ball cut short
Charles XII. of Sweden's design to join the enterprise.
With three hundred Spanish soldiers, the vanguard of
an Armada some thousands strong driven back to Spain by the winds that
have more than once favoured our Protestant throne, and with a few
hundreds of his own clan, Seaforth invaded the mainland by way of
Glenshiel. He was joined by some other Highlanders, including a party of
Macgregors under Rob Roy, while loyal clans like the Rosses and Munros
rallied to support a force of English and Dutch soldiers which marched
against the rebels from Inverness. The encounter was a drawn match; Scott
seems to go too far in saying that the Jacobites had the best of it ; but
Seaforth being seriously wounded, and some of his followers not very keen
in the cause, the rebels dispersed at nightfall, the Spanish soldiers
surrendering next day. It was on this occasion that a wounded Munro
officer on the Whig side was saved by the devotion of his servant, as
mentioned by Burt, the poor fellow shielding his master's body with his
own and receiving several balls before they were both rescued by a
sergeant, who had sworn on his dirk to rescue the chieftain at all risks.
Another trait of Highland manners appears in one body of clansmen having
been lent to Seaforth by an obliging neighbour, but for a single day only.
With such auxiliaries even victory could be of little profit.
Seaforth, again driven into exile, was pardoned and
allowed to end his days in Scotland. His son had the gratitude to hold
aloof from Prince Charlie in 1745, and though some of the Mackenzies took
part in the rising, the mass of the clan was kept quiet by Lord President
Forbes of Culloden, who perhaps did more than any other man to check the
movement that had its checkmate at his home. The next chief, who received
an Irish peerage, presently advanced to the former title of Earl of
Seaford, showed his loyalty by raising and commanding a famous regiment.
With him the original line died out but a collateral heir was created Lord
Seaford, and after being half-ruined by keeping company with the Prince
Regent, died without male issue in 1815. The chiefship of this clan, as of
others, fell into a chaos of dispute, as to which the reader must be
referred to its history above mentioned. "Who will, may hear Sordeflo's
story told." That authority pronounces for the stock of Allangrange; but
the most prosperous branch is now grafted into the ducal house of
Sutherland, which has succeeded Seaforth as chief title in the Northern
Highlands.
A terrible story this is, in its early chapters, of
bloodshed, rapine, and treachery, luridly illustrating those good old
times of the poets. Of the many Mackenzies who have made their mark on
modern history, two Sir Georges earned an uncanny renown as persecutors of
the Covenanters, one of them better famed as founder of the Advocates'
Library. To their date belongs the "Doom of Kintail," not less famous in
the Highlands than the "Curse of Cowdray" in Sussex. The Seer of Brahan,
who left other predictions said to have come true, was burned as a
sorcerer by Lady Seaforth, under Charles II., and while being led to the
stake he is recorded to have pronounced this "Doom"
I see a Chief, the last of his House, both deaf and
dumb. He will be the father of four fair sons, all of whom he shall follow
to the tomb. He shall live careworn, and die mourning, knowing that the
honours of his House are to be extinguished for ever, and that no future
Chief of the Mackenzies shall rule in Kintail. After lamenting over the
last and most promising of his sons, he himself shall sink into the grave,
and the remnant of his possessions shall be inherited by a white-coiled
lassie from the East, and she shall kill her sister. As a sign by which it
shall be known that these things are coming to pass, there shall be four
great lairds in the days of the last Seaforth (Gairloch, Chisholm, Grant,
and Raasay), one of whom shall be buck-toothed, the second hare-lipped,
the third halfwitted, and the fourth a stammerer. Seaforth, when he looks
round and sees them, may know that his sons are doomed to death, and that
his broad lands shall pass away to the stranger, and that his line shall
come to an end.
The Psychical Society might examine this most
circumstantial and well-vouched case of the second sight. Mr. A. Mackenzie
asserts that the Doom had been handed down for generations; and he quotes
several witnesses, one of them Lord Lieutenant of the county, another Sir
Walter Scott, as testifying to knowledge of its provisions before they
came to pass in due time. The last Lord Seaford was partly deaf, and so
taciturn as to pass for dumb. He had reason not to be light of speech.
Four neighbouring lairds showed the infirmities mentioned by the seer. His
four sons died one by one before their broken-hearted father. He was
succeeded by his eldest daughter, widow of Admiral Hood, our naval
commander in the East, who might be taken for "white-coifed" in her
widow's weeds. In a sense she did kill her sister, through a carriage
accident when the heiress was driving. Thus were almost literally
fulfilled the predictions that had so long hung over this family.
The "stranger" that became second husband to the
daughter of Seaforth and took her name, was a Galloway Stewart, whose
ancestor came into Scotland as a stranger indeed, a Norman adventurer,
destined by fortunes of love and war to breed more kings than those weird
sisters of Forres foresaw. As we go south from the Mackenzie country, we
get among Frasers, Gordons, Cummings, Murrays, Grahams and other clans of
Southron, Saxon, or Norman race, that pressed northwards to cut out homes
for themselves in the mountains, and soon fell under the charm of misty
religion, Gaelic, tartans, bare legs, bards, bagpipes and all, even as the
same sentiment may be mastering the intruders from Chicago, or Cape!
Court, who to-day conquer the Highlands at the edge of the dollar.
One of the most truly ancient clans is perhaps the
"wild Macraes," long ill famed for their robber prowess and for deft
archery that could not stand against the Saxon long-bows. They seem, in
some unexplained way, to have been hereditary allies or dependants of the
greater Mackenzie name ; and it may be that they represent a prehistoric
stock enslaved as Gibeonites by Celtic conquerors ; but they declare
themselves to have served the Mackenzies in no less honourable rank than
that of bodyguard, and one story goes so far as to make the original
Gilleoin the son of an ancestral Macrath. Another account is that they
were kinsfolk adopted by the Mackenzie chiefs in a scarcity of heirs.
About a century ago, almost all the inhabitants of Kintail, the cradle of
the Mackenzie power, bore the name of Macrae, which had ousted that of
Macaulay and others once mixed with the dominant clan. When the Earl of
Seaforth raised his famous regiment, so many of the men belonged to that
subordinate sept, that it was spoken of as the "Macrae regiment"; and its
mutiny at Leith in 1778 was known as the "Macrae affair." These new
soldiers had refused to leave the country till certain grievances were
redressed. With pipes playing and plaids on poles for colours, they
marched to Arthur's Seat, and there held out for several days, provisioned
by sympathisers in Edinburgh. In this case, the authorities had the good
sense to conciliate them by satisfying their complaints ; then they
marched down again, headed by their officers, and cheerfully embarked, not
a man being brought to punishment, a leniency justified by their future
conduct on many a battlefield.
The chief of the Macraes to-day has distinguished
himself as Chairman of the Edinburgh School Board, and as a worthy Writer
to the Signet, a hint how the wild Highlandman can enter into the
conditions of modern life. It is always a satisfaction for an amateur to
correct a professed genealogist, and I note that the Mackenzie historian
above mentioned errs in promoting a younger brother to the Macrae
chieftainship. My conscience pricks me that this wrong might have some
relation to the story I set going, "with a cocked hat and stick." More
years ago than any of us will care to count, I was walking with those
brothers, the younger by chance in the silk hat and such like of
professional life, the elder more rustically arrayed. My story is that a
client heaving into sight—so far true—the chief borrowed his brother's
headgear to make a becoming appearance, and for such accommodation sold
his birthright.
I can see Sir Colin Macrae and other Highland friends
laying hands on their dirks, or umbrellas, with a frown for one who makes
light of sacred things. But I would ask them whether the education of a
race does not lead to a shelving of childish toys, nursery fairy tales,
and schoolroom squabbles. On week days, at least, we may be content with
the sober trappings of city life, yet keep a show of tartan for holiday
wear. "Saxon, or Dane, or whatever we be," the Celtic element has a way of
coming to the top as a smart feather in our cap, sometimes indeed as a bee
in our bonnet. The Gael, adapting himself to trousers and pockets, need
not forget his romance, his poetry, his picturesque points, as he does
choose to forget some uglier traits of his past. If he call me a Sassenach
reviler, I can tell him that I, too, have kindly Highland blood in my
veins ; and let him tell me precisely what is Highland blood, which is
more than I can. Wherever it first sprang, from China to Peru, I take it
to be something like Orange Pekoe tea, for which, unmixed, our age has not
so much use, but which gives a piquant flavour to that choice blend of
humanity apparently destined to become the salt of the world.
This view of the Highlander's mission will not
commend itself either to Cockney caricaturists or to Pan-Celtic
Congresses. But I find my own sentiment well expressed by one of the most
eloquent voices of the Celtic Renascence, the author styled Fiona Macleod,
long hidden in mist—now alas ! in silent darkness,— whose two names,
perhaps unwittingly chosen, seem to record the union of Norse and Gaelic
blood that makes the so-called Scottish Celt, incarnate pseudonym as he
may be. To these words the arrantest Saxon should heartily say Amen.
The Celtic element in our national life has a vital
and great part to play. We have a most noble idea if we will but accept
it. And that is not to perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what is
gone away upon the wind, not to repay ignorance with scorn or dulness with
contempt or past wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray,
so to hope, so to work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic
races, of the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we are
a vital part, so that with this emotion, Celtic love of duty, and Celtic
spirituality, a nation greater than any the world has seen may issue, a
nation refined and strengthened by the wise relinquishings and steadfast
ideals of Celt and Saxon, united in a common fatherland, and in singleness
of pride and faith.
Let me not be held guilty as trifling with certain
matters which some of my countrymen seem to take over seriously. Far,
indeed, be it from me and my friends to love Scotland better than truth ;
but not less far would I hold aloof from the laughing hynas who snarl or
grin at that native land and her people. I have tried to put good points
and other points in the fairest light, for the information of strangers,
often getting their notions of the country from misty reminiscences of
poetry and fiction. And as I have more than once illustrated this account
by verses quoted from two teachers of my youth, who wrote of the Highlands
both in jest and in earnest, so let me end in the warm words of an old
schoolfellow of mine
While huge Ben Nevis rears his sovereign crown,
And dark Glencoe looks sternly wrathful down,
And Skye's grim crests
in savage blackness frown—
While many an isle, in summer bliss serene,
Floats on its limpid floor
of lustred sheen,
And hangs the enchanted wave and sky between—
While braes are purple, glens are green, and blue
The sea that mirrors
all with heavenly hue,
Scotland! to thee my heart shall still be true.
THE END
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