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“But thou hast a shrine,
Kingussie,
Dearer to my heart than all
Rocky strength and grassy beauty
In Glen Feshie’s mountain-hall;
E’en thy granite Castle Cluny,
Where the stout old Celtic man
Lived the father of his people,
Died the noblest of his clan.
Many eyes were red with weeping,
Many heads were bowed with grief,
When, to sleep beside his fathers,
Low they laid their honoured chief.”
—Blackie.
THE LAST OF THE OLD JACOBITE
CHIEFS.
CLUNY MACPHERSON, C.B., Chief of Clan Chattan
BORN 24th APRIL 1804; DIED 11th JANUARY 1885.
AT Cluny Castle, in Badenoch,
on the second Sunday of the year, there “fell asleep,” full of years and
full of honours, the venerable Cluny Macpherson, “the living embodiment,” as
he had been justly termed, “of all the virtues of the old patriarchal
Highland chief.” His unexpected death has not only awakened feelings of the
deepest sorrow among his clansmen and natives of Badenoch all over the
world, but has left a blank in the public and social life of the Highlands
which will probably never be filled up.
His removal is indeed that of an ancient landmark. In days when so much is
said and done tending to set class against class, and leading certain
sections of the public to regard the interests of landlord and tenant as
hostile, a state of society in which their interests were recognised as
identical deserves to be studied. In their best form the mutual relations
existing between a chief and his clansmen produced this unity in a manner to
which, in the present day, we shall vainly seek a parallel. “ I would
rather,” said MacLeod of MacLeod of the time to Johnson, on the occasion of
the great lexicographer’s tour in the Hebrides in 1781, —“I would rather
drink punch in the houses of my people than be enabled by their hardships to
have claret in my own.” A more striking example of this patriarchal feeling
could not be found than in the affection which bound Cluny Macpherson to his
clan and his clan to him. In their relations with their people, the old race
of Highland chiefs, of whom Cluny Macpherson was such a noteworthy
representative, really held in effect the words of the well-known and
patriotic Highlander, Sheriff Nicolson, as part, so to speak, of their
creed:—
“See that thou kindly use
them, O man!
To whom God giveth
Stewardship over them, in thy short span,
Not for thy pleasure.
Woe be to them who choose for a clan
Four-footed people.”
Born on the 24th of April
1804, Cluny, as he was popularly known all over the Highlands, had at the
time of his death entered his eighty-first year. He was the representative
of the ancient chiefs of Clan Chattan, embracing, in that general
appellation, the Macphersons, Mackintoshes, Macgillivrays, Shaws,
Farquharsons, Macbeans, Macphails, Clan Terril, Gows (said to be descended
from Henry the Smith of North Inch fame), Clarks, Macqueens, Davidsons,
Cattanachs, Clan Ay, Nobles, Gillespies; and was the twentieth Chief in
direct succession from Gillicattan Mor, the head or Chief of the clan who
lived in the reign of Malcolm Canmore. He succeeded to the chiefship of the
clan, and to the Cluny estates, on the death of his father in 1817, and thus
possessed the estates for the long period of nearly seventy years. A very
interesting fact in connection with his boyhood, carrying us back to the
third decade of the present century, is that Sir Walter Scott, in a letter
to Miss Edgeworth, describes him as “a fine spirited boy, fond of his people
and kind to them, and the best dancer of a Highland reel now living.” In
1832 Cluny married Sarah Justina, a daughter of the late well-known Henry
Davidson, Esq. of Tulloch, who now cluny’s early manhood survives him with
an unbroken family circle of four sons and three daughters.
The son of a gallant officer who fought in the American War of Independence;
grandson of the devoted “Ewen of Cluny,” who died in exile after the ’45;
great-grandson of Simon Lord Lovat, who suffered in the same cause, and
great-great-grandson of the heroic Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, Cluny always
maintained with true dignity the fame of his ancestry, and inherited all
their military ardour. To a quaint old engraving of Sir Ewen at Cluny
Castle, the following just and appropriate lines are appended : —
“The Honest Man, whom Virtue
sways,
His God adores, his King obeys;
Does factious men’s rebellious pride
And threat’ning Tyrants’ rage deride;
Honour’s his Wealth, his Rule, his Aime,
Unshaken, fixt, and still the same.”
In his early manhood Cluny
served his country as an officer in the 42d Royal Highlanders, the famous
Black Watch. From the institution of the Volunteer Force in 1859 down to
within two or three years of his death he acted as Lieutenant-Colonel of the
Inverness-shire Highland Rifle Volunteers. In that capacity he attended the
Royal Review in Edinburgh in 1881, and although then in his seventy-seventh
year, he kept the head of his regiment in spite of the fearful weather,
discarding even the use of a plaid as a protection. Riding along Princes
Street with the Inverness Volunteers, the brave old Chief, with his courtly
and soldierly bearing, was a conspicuous figure in the procession, and was
singled out for repeated rounds of enthusiastic cheering. On his retirement
his regiment presented him with a sword of honour with an appropriate
inscription.
As indicating the interest taken by Cluny in everything affecting the
prosperity of the wide district over which his influence extended, and the
recognition of his character and position, it may be sufficient to mention
that he was president or was otherwise closely associated with almost every
public and local association or institution in the Central Highlands. In his
delightful book, ‘Altavona,’ Professor Blackie makes his Alter Ego say of
Cluny, “He is the genuine type of the old Scottish chief, the chief who
loves his people, and speaks the language of the people, and lives on his
property, and delights in old traditions, in old servants, in old services,
and old kindly usages of all kinds.” It has been justly said that into all
his duties Cluny carried with him a flavour of the olden times, a mingled
homeliness, courtesy, and simple dignity that conveyed a remarkable
impression impossible to describe, but characteristic and memorable. In the
Highland dress, surmounted by the bonnet and eagle’s feather of the chief,
with his firm, erect, athletic figure, no more graceful specimen of Highland
physique could be anywhere seen.
While a conspicuous figure at all public gatherings in the Highlands,
nowhere was Cluny seen to more advantage than at his own castle, surrounded
by his genial and happy family, dispensing, with a genuine kindness and
courtesy that never failed, true Highland hospitality to the many friends
and clansmen who flocked to it from all parts of the kingdom. Substitute the
one castle for the other, and the touching words of Dean Stanley apply
almost as appropriately to Cluny Castle as to the Castle of Fingask :—
“Who that had ever seen the delightful Castle of Cluny, explored its
inexhaustible collection of Jacobite relics, known its Jacobite inmates, and
heard its Jacobite songs, did not feel himself transported to an older world
with the fond remembrance of a past age, of a lost love, of a dear though
vanquished cause? What Scotsman—Presbyterian though he be—is not moved by
the outburst of Jacobite-Episcopalian enthusiasm which enkindled the last
flicker of expiring genius when Walter Scott murmured the lay of Prince
Charlie by the Lake Avernus, and stood wrapt in silent devotion before the
tomb of the Stuarts in St Peter’s?”
It was worth going a long day’s journey to hear Cluny with his simple grace
and dignity narrating incidents of the Jacobite days of other years, the
hair-breadth escapes of his grandfather, and describing the many interesting
and historical relics the castle contains. Among these relics, carefully
treasured, is the Black Chanter or Feadan Dubh of the clan, on the
possession of which the prosperity of the house of Cluny is supposed to
depend. Of the many singular traditions regarding it, one is that its
original fell from heaven during the memorable clan-battle fought between
the Macphersons and the Davidsons in presence of King Robert III., his
queen, and nobles, on the North Inch of Perth in 1396, and that being made
of crystal it was broken by the fall, and the existing one made in fac-simile.
Another tradition is to the effect that this is the genuine original, and
that the cracks were occasioned by its violent contact with the ground. Be
the origin of the Feadan Dubh what it may, it is a notable fact that whether
in consequence of its possession, or of their own bravery, no battle at
which the Macphersons were present with the great standard or “green banner”
of the clan, and the chief at their head, was ever lost. One of the Clan
Chattan battles was fought at Invernahaven in the neighbourhood of Kingussie
in 1386, on which occasion the Macphersons, coming to the rescue of their
kinsmen the Mackintoshes, saved the honour of the Clan Chattan and the
Mackintosh section from almost utter annihilation at the hands of their
opponents, the hitherto victorious Camerons. The battle of the Inch at
Perth, fought ten years subsequently, has been rendered familiar to general
readers through the pages of Scott’s ‘ Fair Maid of Perth.’ The Clan Chattan
took part in the great national battles of Bannockburn and Harlaw, the
Macphersons in the latter, under their chief, Donald Mor, fighting “with my
Lord Marr against M'Donald.” “Duncan persoun,” one of Cluny’s ancestors, was
one of the chiefs seized and imprisoned by James I. at a Parliament which he
had summoned to meet him at Inverness in 1427. The Macphersons were out in
great force under Montrose and Dundee. They were also present at the battle
fought at Mulroy, in Lochaber, in the year 1688—the last clan-battle in the
Highlands—where, as narrated by Sir Walter Scott, they rescued the Laird of
Mackintosh (who had been defeated and made prisoner) from the hands of his
ferocious captors, the Macdonalds of Keppoch, and afterwards escorted him in
safety to his own proper territory.
The Macphersons were again
out in the Rising of 1715, and with a loyalty that “no gold could buy nor
time could wither,” took a distinguished part thirty years later in the
gallant but ill-fated attempt of Prince Charlie to regain the crown of his
ancestors:—
“Whom interest ne’er moved
their true king to betray,
Whom threat’ning ne’er daunted, nor power could dismay ;
They stood to the last, and, when standing was o’er,
All sullen and silent they dropped the claymore,
And yielded, indignant, their necks to the blow,
Their homes to the flame, and their lands to the foe.”
It is related that before the
battle of Culloden an old witch or second seer told the Duke of Cdmberland
that if he waited until the Bratach Uaine, or green banner, came up he would
be defeated. Ewen of Cluny was present at the battle of Prestonpans with six
hundred of his clan, and accompanied the Prince during his march into
England. On the Prince’s retreat into Scotland, Cluny with his men put two
regiments of Cumberland’s dragoons to flight at Clifton, fought afterwards
at the battle of Falkirk, and was on his way to Inverness with his clan to
join the Prince when flying fugitives from Culloden met him with the
intelligence of that sad day’s disaster.
Another relic at Cluny Castle no less carefully treasured is the autograph
letter, of date 18th September 1746 (which is given here in facsimile),
addressed by Prince Charlie to Cluny of the ’45 just on the eve of their
parting before the Prince escaped to France.
To Cluny of the ’45 might, mutatis mutandis, be appropriately applied Sir
David Brewster’s touching epitaph on a Scottish Jacobite:—
“To Scotland’s king I knelt in homage true,
My heart—my all I gave—my sword I drew;
Chased from my hearth, I reached a foreign shore,
My native mountains to behold no more—
No more to listen to Spey’s silver stream—
No more among its glades to love and dream,
Save when in sleep the restless spirit roams
Where Ruthven crumbles, and where Pattach foams.
From home and kindred on Albano’s shore,
I roamed an exile till life’s dream was o’er—
Till God, whose trials blessed my wayward lot,
Gave me the rest—the early grave—I sought;
Showed me, o’er death’s dark vale, the strifeless shore,
With wife, and child, and king, to part no more.
O patriot wanderer, mark this ivied stone,
Learn from its story what may be thine own:
Should tyrants chase thee from thy hills of blue,
And sever all the ties to nature true,
The broken heart may heal in life’s last hour,
When hope shall still its throbs, and faith exert her power.”
In view of the very prominent
part the clan took in the Risings of the ’15 and the ’45, and the sufferings
of his grandfather and greatgrandfather in the cause, it is not surprising
that Jacobite leanings should have developed themselves in Cluny at an early
period of his life. The bloodthirsty vindictiveness displayed towards a
defenceless people after the battle of Culloden, by the Duke of Cumberland
and the Government of the day, is almost unexampled in history.
“The cruelties,” says Chambers, “were such that, if not perfectly well
authenticated, we could scarcely believe to have been practised only a
century ago in our comparatively civilised land. Not only were the mansions
of the Chiefs Lochiel, Glengarry, Cluny, Keppoch, Kinlochmoidart, Glengyle,
Ardshiel, and many others, plundered and burned, but those of many inferior
gentlemen, and even the huts of the common people, were in like manner
destroyed. The cattle, sheep, and provisions of all kinds were carried off
to Fort Augustus. In many instances the women and children were stripped
naked, and left exposed; in some, the females were subjected to even more
horrible treatment. A great number of men, unarmed and inoffensive,
including some aged beggars, were shot in the fields and on the
mountain-side, rather in the spirit of wantonness than for any definite
object. Many hapless people perished of cold and hunger amongst the hills.
Others followed, in abject herds, their departing cattle, and at Fort
Augustus begged, for the support of a wretched existence, to get the offal,
or even to be allowed to lick up the blood of those which were killed for
the use of the army. Before the 10th of June the task of desolation was
complete throughout all the western parts of Inverness-shire; and the curse
which had been denounced upon Scotland by the religious enthusiasts of the
preceding century was at length so entirely fulfilled in this remote region
that it would have been literally possible to travel for days through the
depopulated glens without seeing a chimney smoke or hearing a cock crow"
Of a corps under the command of Lord George Sackville, Browne relates :—
“Not contented with destroying the country, these bloodhounds either shot
the men upon the mountains, or murdered them in cold blood. The women, after
witnessing their husbands, fathers, and brothers murdered before their eyes,
were subjected to brutal violence, and then turned out naked with their
children to starve on the barren heaths. A whole family was enclosed in a
barn, and consumed to ashes. So alert were these ministers of vengeance,
that in a few days, according to the testimony of a volunteer who served in
the expedition, neither house, cottage, man, nor beast was to be seen within
the compass of fifty miles: all was ruin, silence, and desolation. Deprived
of their cattle and their small stock of provisions by the rapacious
soldiery, the hoary-headed matron and sire, the widowed mother and her
helpless offspring, were to be seen dying of hunger, stretched upon the bare
ground, and within view of the smoking ruins of their dwellings.”
It is instructive to contrast that inhuman vindictiveness with the spirit in
which the descendants of Highlanders, so cruelly and mercilessly persecuted,
have since so nobly fought and died for their country on many a
battle-field. To quote the famous eulogy on the Highland regiments uttered
in Parliament in 1776 by William Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham :—
“I sought for merit wherever it could be found. It is my boast that I was
the first Minister who looked for it, and found it, in the mountains of the
north. I called it forth, and drew into your service a hardy and intrepid
race of men ; men who, when left by your jealousy, became a prey to the
artifices of your enemies, and had gone nigh to have overturned the State,
in the war before last. These men, in the last war, were brought to combat
on your side; they served with fidelity, as they fought with valour, and
conquered for you in every quarter of the world.”
At the advanced age of nearly eighty years Cluny’s great-grandfather was
beheaded in the Tower of London. After being hunted in the mountain
fastnesses of Badenoch for the long period of nine years, his grandfather
escaped from his relentless pursuers only to die in exile. It was very
natural, therefore, that Cluny’s Jacobite sympathies should have remained
with him to the end. An instance of his leanings in this direction may be
appropriately told. At a school inspection in Kingussie a few years ago, in
the course of one of his usually happy and encouraging little speeches to
the children, he mentioned that, in listening to the examination in history,
some of the words used had jarred upon his ear. “In Badenoch,” he said, “it
is not common to call Prince Charlie ‘the Pretender.’ I should advise you
henceforth to call him by his name, Prince Charles Edward, the King over the
water!”
With all his hereditary Jacobite sympathies, the Queen had no more loyal and
devoted subject than Cluny in her wide domains; of his four sons he devoted
three to her service. On the occasion of the first Royal visit to the
Highlands in August 1847, her Majesty and Prince Albert, with the Prince of
Wales and the Princess Royal, occupied for a time Cluny’s beautiful
residence of Ardverikie, overlooking Loch Laggan, on an island in the middle
of which Fergus, “the first of our kings,” had his hunting - lodge.
Accompanied by Prince Albert and the Royal children, her Majesty paid a
visit to Cluny Castle and examined the shield and other relics of Prince
Charlie with the greatest interest. Meeting Cluny frequently at the time,
the Queen was most favourably impressed with his polished manners and
chivalrous courtesy, and he subsequently received many gracious and
flattering marks of her regard. After the lapse of nearly forty years since
her first meeting with him, her Majesty showed her long-continued regard for
the venerable Chief by conferring upon him the distinction of the Order of
the Bath, which, as coming from her own gracious hands, he very highly
prized. It was a source of special gratification to him that he lived to see
two of his sons commanding two of the most distinguished regiments in her
Majesty’s service— the eldest, Colonel Duncan, commanding the famous Black
Watch ; and the second, Colonel Ewen, commanding the 93d Highlanders. They
have both seen a great deal of active service; and worthily and honourably
have they maintained the ancient fame and prowess of their forefathers.
Colonel Duncan, who now succeeds to the chief-ship and to the Cluny estates,
has had an eminent military career, and has had a pension for “distinguished
service” conferred upon him, besides the distinction of the Order of the
Bath. Leading the Black Watch, he was wounded at Coomassie, in the Ashantee
war; and at the head of that famous regiment in the Egyptian war, two or
three years ago, was “the only man who rode over Arabi’s intrenchments at
Tel-el-Kebir.”
On their “golden wedding-day,” in December 1882—the fiftieth anniversary of
Cluny’s marriage to the lady who had for the long period of half a century
shared with him the affection and loyalty of his clan and tenantry—the
venerable and happy pair received an ovation such as seldom, if ever
previously, was witnessed in the Highlands. Congratulatory addresses,
couched in the warmest terms, were presented by all the public bodies in the
county with which Cluny was connected. In addition to deputations from these
bodies, a large and distinguished party of clansmen and friends, headed by
Sir George Macpherson-Grant and the veteran soldier, General Sir Herbert
Macpherson, waited upon Cluny and his lady and presented them with a
beautifully illuminated address, along with a magnificent work of art in the
form of a massive silver candelabrum or centrepiece, costing in all between
£600 and £700. A sturdy oak springing from the heather forms the stem of the
centrepiece, from which radiate at the top nine branches. At its foot is
placed a group representing one of the most striking and characteristic
incidents in the history of the famous Cluny of the “Forty-five.” Sir Hector
Munro—the officer in command of the party in search of the fugitive
chief—mounted on his steed, is questioning Cluny, who, disguised as a
servant, had been holding the bridle of Sir Hector’s horse during the
search, as to the whereabouts of his supposed master. Sir Hector asks if he
knows where Cluny is. The reply given is, “I do not know, and if I did I
should not tell you.” Sir Hector rewards the supposed servant for his
fidelity.
The address expressed on the part of the general body of subscribers their
warm appreciation of the admirable way in which Cluny had for upwards of
half a century, “with a grace and dignity peculiarly your own, discharged
every public and private duty devolving on you as a constant resident in
your native county, which has won for you the universal popularity you
happily enjoy.” On the part of his own “faithful and attached clan,” allied
to him “by closer ties and sympathies,” the address specially recorded
“their love and veneration for their dear old patriarchal Chief, and their
pride in him as representative of all that they and their forefathers have
ever held most precious as children of one race.”
No better exponent of the feelings and sentiments of the general body of
subscribers than Sir George Macpherson-Grant, himself a chieftain of the
clan,1 could possibly have been selected :—
Cluny’s “golden wedding.”
“This address,” said Sir George, in making the presentation to Cluny,
“speaks of your clansmen. I hardly know what to say on such a point as that
which the use of the word on an occasion like the present calls up. I have
deep feelings on the subject. In these days we don’t hear—and perhaps it is
for our good—very much of the clan, of the clansmen, of the clanship, and of
their varied mutual relationships, and all that at one time was connected
with it. But I have the feeling in my breast that as long as the clan
exists—I care not how it should be shown—the sense of the duty which
clansmen owe to their chief can never be torn from our hearts. We cannot
show our sense of that duty, that loyalty, that affection, in the same way
as it has frequently been shown before; but although the outward
manifestation is not the same, the spirit of it remains the same in the
hearts of us all. Allow me one personal remark. As a neighbouring
proprietor, and as an old friend of your family, it gives me the greatest
possible pleasure to take part in the proceedings of to-day. I know that by
you and the Lady of Cluny the proceedings of to-day must be viewed with
mixed feelings. Your thoughts must turn to-day not only to many years of
bygone times, but they must also be directed to what we hope may be many
happy years in the future. And it is my wish, and it is the wish of all here
present, that as the end approaches, you, surrounded by a happy and united
family, honoured and respected by all who know you—honoured by your
sovereign, as we know you are, and respected and beloved by your clansmen—I
say, we fondly hope that you may regard the last days of your life as the
brightest and the happiest of the days you have remembered. I have only now
to ask you to accept this address, and I have to ask you also to accept the
memorial, the sketch of which you see before you. It occurs to me that
perhaps, as you look at that [pointing to the picture of Sir Hector Munro,
who searched Badenoch for Cluny of the ’45], the feeling may come over you
that there were leal hearts in Badenoch in the days when English gold could
not tempt the Highland people to give up your distinguished ancestor or the
Prince, to whose cause he was so faithfully attached. When that feeling
comes over you, will you read this address which I now present to you, and
\^hich is signed by over three hundred men throughout the empire and beyond
it? And will you believe me, that although there is no king’s gold put forth
to buy the Highlanders now, there are as leal hearts in Badenoch now as ever
there were in the days of your forefathers?”
In the course of a touching reply by Cluny—
“It has been”—said the venerable Chief, with deep emotion—“It has been my
delight and that of my wife to dwell among our own people, and to endeavour
so to act in every relation of life as to secure their affection and
respect. Nothing could give us greater satisfaction in the evening of life
than the consciousness of having so acted ; and nothing to us is more
gratifying than the strong testimony we have now received that we have in
some measure succeeded in doing our duty, and retaining the confidence and
goodwill of so large a circle of friends. We cannot expect at our time of
life long to take an active part in the duties of our station; but you may
all rest assured that we shall continue through life to take the deepest
interest in everything that relates to and that will promote the welfare of
the district where our home is, and where we have passed so many happy
years, and which, to us, no place on earth can compare. To my clansmen I
will say this, that though the days are past when the gathering cries of
clans resounded throughout the Highlands, and the clansmen hastened to the
banners of their chiefs, there is no abatement in their old clannish feeling
of devotion, nor of affection and pride on the chief’s part towards and in
his clansmen. These feelings it has been my pride and pleasure to cherish ;
and the sentiments you, my clansmen, have expressed towards your Chief will,
I am sure, find an echo in the hearts of clansmen all the world over.”
The subscribers to the presentation numbered between three and four hundred,
and embraced all the historic names in the Highlands. The existing chiefs of
clans are nearly all represented in the list: Cameron of Lochiel, The
Chisholm of Chisholm, Lord Lovat (Chief of the Clan Fraser), the Earl of
Seafield (Chief of the Clan Grant), Lord Macdonald of the Isles, Mackintosh
of Mackintosh, MacLeod of MacLeod, and Sir Robert Menzies, all old friends
or neighbours linked with many memories of the days of other years. The
Macphersons are represented by one hundred names. Had time permitted
communication with clansmen in the Australian colonies, the names would have
been still more numerous. The letters received by Cluny at the time from
clansmen in all parts of the world, breathing the warmest spirit of
devotion, were intensely gratifying to him. As evidencing the deep regard
entertained for him, not only in this country, but beyond the limits of the
United Kingdom— extending even to our American cousins—not the least
interesting circumstance in connection with the presentation was the fact
that spontaneous contributions were cabled by the Speaker of the Senate of
Canada (Sir D. L. Macpherson) from Canadian clansmen, and that similar
contributions were cabled by a barrister of high standing in Washington (Mr
John D. Macpherson) from clansmen in the United States.
A consistent Conservative all his life, Cluny was ever courteous and
tolerant to all who differed from him, whether in Church or in State—
disarming contention, as he frequently, quietly, and happily did, with the
remark, “We must agree to differ.” A loyal and devoted Presbyterian, he was
no sectarian. Men of all Churches and of all ranks honoured him. In the
management of his estates the maxim, “Live and let live,” which he often
quoted, was his ruling principle. During his long possession, evictions or
summonses of removal were never heard of, and cluny’s death and funeral.
practically there were no arrears of rent. He, winter and summer, ever loved
to dwell “among his own people.” It is no exaggeration to say that every
tenant and crofter on his estates were familiarly known to him by name. In
him were the Scriptural precepts, “Be pitiful, be courteous,” beautifully
exemplified. He never passed the humblest labourer on his estates without,
when opportunity offered, some happy salutation in the old mother tongue, so
dear to Highlanders. Less than a week before his death he expressed to the
writer feelings of the warmest kind towards his clan and tenantry. Among
other matters, he spoke about the meeting of Highland proprietors which had
been arranged by his kinsman, Lochiel, to take place at Inverness the
following week, in connection with the crofter question, observing that he
was too old to attend. “You know,” he said, “that I am on the best of terms
with my tenants and crofters, and I do not consider my presence necessary in
any case.” Encouraging, as he ever did within reasonable and well-regulated
bounds, all the innocent and manly pastimes of our forefathers, Cluny was in
the habit of annually giving a “ball play,” or shinty match, to his people.
On Christmas Day (old style), five days before his death, the “ball play”
took place as in previous years. The day happened to be very stormy, with
blinding showers of snow. The aged Chief would not be dissuaded by loving
counsels from attending as usual, remarking that while strength was spared
to him he considered it simply his “duty” to be present at all such happy
gatherings of his people. Accompanied by the loving partner of his long and
happy wedded life, he accordingly drove to the field, and they were both
received with the genuine Highland enthusiasm ever evoked by the presence of
the venerable pair at such gatherings. In response, Cluny made a happy
little speech in Gaelic, expressive of the pleasure it always afforded him
to be present with his people, participating, as he had always endeavoured
to do, in their joys as well as in their sorrows. Although Cluny’s exposure
to the piercing blasts on that occasion—dictated, as such exposure was, by a
lifelong regard and consideration for his people—did not, it is believed,
hasten the end, yet that end was very near. Within five days an attack of
bronchitis had developed itself to such an extent that on Sunday, the nth of
January, the venerable Chief passed calmly and peacefully to his rest.
Attended by a large gathering, representative of all classes, embracing many
of the greatest historical names in the Highlands, the funeral took place on
Saturday, the 17th of January, amid manifestations of the deepest sorrow.
The scene was altogether peculiarly touching and impressive. In the spacious
hall of the castle lay the coffin, bearing on a brass plate the following
inscription :—
“EWEN MACPHERSON OF CLUNY
MACPHERSON,
CHIEF OF CLAN CHATTAN, C.B.,
DIED 11TH JANUARY 1885, IN HIS EIGHTY-FIRST YEAR.”
On the top of the coffin were
placed the sword and well-known bonnet of the Chief, embowered with wreaths,
loving tributes of affection from relatives, friends, and clansmen.
Prominent among such tributes was one from his old regiment, the Black
Watch. Around the hall were the numberless historical relics of the past, in
which the dead Chief took such an interest. Suspended above the coffin was
the famous Bratach Uaine, or green banner of the clan, torn and dimmed with
the stains of many a battle-field, but with no stain of dishonour. While
descending the steps leading from the hall, the eyes of not a few present
filled with tears as they recalled many a happy greeting or parting word,
warm from the heart, uttered by the lips now closed for ever. As the funeral
procession moved slowly along the avenue to the quiet and secluded
burial-place of the family—the snow muffling the measured tread of the
mourners—the solemn and impressive stillness was broken by the plaintive
notes of the bagpipe, the pealing lament of the pibrochs awakening, as if in
responsive sympathy, the wailing echoes of Craig Dhu—the Craig Dhu so
closely identified with the Macphersons as their war-cry in turbulent days
happily long gone by. Thus appropriately was the venerable Chief “gathered
to his fathers” under the shadow of the “everlasting hills” he loved so
well. Conscious that beneath the whitened sod that wintry day there had been
laid one of the truest and most patriotic hearts that ever beat in the
Highlands of Scotland, his friends and clansmen left all that was mortal of
their dear old Chief in his last resting-place, the words of the old Gaelic
Coronach—so inexpressibly touching to all Highlanders—as they sorrowfully
wended their way homeward, still sounding in their ears:-
“Cha till, cha till, cha till mi tuilleadh,
An cogadh n’an sith, cha till mi tuilleadh;
Le h-airgiod no ni cha till mi tuilleadh
Cha till gu brhth gu la na cruinne.”
(I’ll return, I’ll return, I’ll return no more,
In war or in peace, I’ll return, no never;
Neither love nor aught shall bring me back never
Till dawns the glad day that shall jjoin us for ever.)
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