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Title |
The Last of the Chiefs
- Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry 1773-1828
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Author |
Brian D. Osborne |
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Details |
Soft Cover.
Argyll Publishing. 254 pages |
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ISBN |
1902831276 |
Comment: The story of the
rather eccentric
Colonel Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell, 15th Chief of
Glengarry. Gives an excellent insight into the life of a
late C18th Scottish landowner.
Extracts by Kind Permission
of the Author.
From the Introduction
Alasdair Ranaldson Macdonell
died in 1828, leaving behind little but debts and a trail of
argument, controversy and on-going litigation. He never
occupied any major posts in the state, wrote nothing of
significance, failed in what was probably the dearest desire
of his heart - to have a family peerage restored. Debts
forced the sale of much of the once vast family lands
shortly after his death and by the middle of the century,
with the sale of Knoydart, the Glengarry estate was reduced
to a ruined castle and a mausoleum. The case for writing, or
reading, a biography of such an unsuccessful and ill-fated
man may perhaps seem unclear.
However Macdonell was both an unusually interesting man and
lived in interesting times. His life and career illustrate
many of the most significant features of Highland life at
the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth
centuries. His activities in raising troops to fight in the
French wars, his estate management policies, his
establishment of the Society of True Highlanders, his
devotion to tradition (even to the point of maintaining a
personal bard, and a blind one at that), his feuding with
the Commissioners for the Caledonian Canal all cast light on
the changes in the Highlands in Macdonell�s day and
illustrate the significance of these changes in the way of
life of the Highlanders.
Macdonell�s immense capacity for contradiction and seeming
lack of any deep capacity for self-awareness or
self-criticism allowed him to simultaneously promote
sheep-farming and the clearance philosophy while promoting
the ancient Highland customs and traditions which the new
patterns of estate management were inevitably doomed to
destroy. Similarly he could sell ground and timber to the
Caledonian Canal, take a leading part in the celebration of
the opening of the Canal, attack the Canal Company�s workmen
when the Canal was being built and after it was opened sue
the Commissioners because in his view the �passage boats and
smoking steam vessels� using the Canal breached the privacy
of what he considered a private waterway. To add a final
twist to the tale, his wife was a shareholder in one of
these �smoking steam vessels� and Glengarry himself did not
disdain to travel on them; indeed his death resulted from a
trip on the Stirling Castle steam ship.
In his own day Glengarry was seen as an eccentric
aberration, as the �Last of the Chiefs�, as a man born out
of his proper time. His Gaelic sobriquet was �Alasdair
Fiadhaich� - Wild Alasdair or Fierce Alasdair, which does
convey something of the light in which he was seen by
contemporaries.
When Henry Raeburn painted the great portrait of him around
1812 he depicted him in a consciously archaic setting with
targe and broadsword on the walls of some idealised baronial
hall and with Glengarry holding an old-fashioned rifle with
an octagonal barrel. Glengarry is, at first sight, a
commanding and imposing figure, but there is also, on closer
examination, a sense of distance almost amounting to
insecurity in the pose. Glengarry does not meet the artist�s
or the viewer�s eye, he looks out of the picture, as it
might be to some distant focus of desire. This is hardly an
accidental pose. Raeburn�s portraits combine technical
excellence with a high degree of psychological insight - his
subjects might have been drawn from �society� but no one
could accuse Raeburn of being a �society portraitist.� His
work goes below the skin, below the tartanry, below the
accoutrements of sgian dubh and pistol, to show a man, proud
in his position, traditional in his outlook and alienated
from his contemporary environment.
From Chapter 2 - Mac Mhic
Alasdair
�ni h-eibhneas gan Chlainn
Domhall�
�it is no joy without Clan Donald�
When Alasdair Ranaldson
Macdonell was born on 15th September 1773 he did not simply
become the heir to a major Highland estate. He entered into
a great dynastic tradition and into a potentially leading
role in a once-powerful family whose members had for
centuries ruled much of the Highlands and Islands.
The Macdonells of Glengarry
were one of the nine major branches of Clan Donald. All of
Clan Donald proudly traced their descent from Somerled, the
twelfth century warrior leader, who won control of the
western isles from the Norse and established himself as Ri
Innse Gall, King of the Isles of the Norsemen. More
distantly and mythically Clan Donald traced their origins
back to Conn of the Hundred Battles, High King of Ireland.
However it was Somerled�s grandson, Donald of Islay, who
died in 1249, who gave his name to the clan. During the Wars
of Independence one of Donald�s grandsons, Angus Og, was an
early and loyal follower of King Robert the Bruce and Clan
Donald was appropriately rewarded with lands in Lochaber
formerly held by the Comyn family, unsuccessful contenders
for the Crown, as well as lands in Mull and Tiree held by
the MacDougall clan, allies of the Comyns.
As the years went on what
became recognised as the Lordship of the Isles - the title
was claimed from the fourteenth century under John of Islay
but only officially recognised by the Crown in the fifteenth
century - would embrace a huge sweep of the West Coast of
Scotland. By the death of Angus Og�s son, John of Islay, in
1386 the Lordship in the Hebrides extended from Lewis south
to Islay (with the exception of Skye) as well as the
mainland coast and much of the interior from Knoydart,
Moidart and Loch Oich in the North through Ardnamurchan,
Morvern, Lorne, Knapdale to Kintyre in the South. The power
and scope of the Lordship were significantly increased when
one of John of Islay�s sons married an Antrim heiress and
with her brought a large part of Northern Ireland into the
family. John�s heir, Donald, the 2nd Lord of the Isles, by
marriage to the heiress of the Earldom of Ross, laid the
foundation for his son, Alexander, to become Earl of Ross
and so to incorporate vast areas of the Central Highlands
and the island of Skye in the Lordship.
The branch which became known
as Glengarry traces its origins back to Ranald, the son of
John of Islay and his first wife, Amy MacRuarie. In a
politically inspired move John later was to divorce Amy to
marry Margaret Stewart, a princess of the Royal house. John
was succeeded in the Lordship by Donald the eldest son of
this second marriage, while Ranald inherited the lands of
the MacRuarie lordship of Garmoran - including Moidart,
Morar, Knoydart, Ardgour, Eigg, Rum, the Uists and Harris.
Ranald was the progenitor of two of the great branches of
Clan Donald. From his first son, Allan, sprang the Clan
Ranald and from his second son, Donald Ranaldson who died in
1420, came what would become the Glengarry branch.
~~~
All this was, of course, long
in the past when Alasdair Ranaldson was born. However the
reputation and memory of the Lordship remained strong in
Gaeldom and the sentiments expressed in the sixteenth
century poem preserved in the Book of the Dean of Lismore
held true for many years after:
It is no joy
without Clan Donald
it is no strength to be without them;
the best race in the round world:
to them belongs every goodly man.
~~~
This long family history stretching
from the glory of the Lordship of the Isles to the tragedy of
Culloden was part of the formation of Alasdair Ranaldson�s
character. He was steeped in family history and in the history of
the Highlands. Sir Walter Scott wrote appreciatively of him in his
journal: �To me he is a treasure, as being full of information as to
the history of his own clan, and the manners and customs of the
Highlanders in general.�
Glengarry was indeed generous with information about the history of
his family in particular and Clan Donald in general. He regretted,
for example, that he had been unable to brief Scott adequately on
clan matters, especially the falsely presumed precedence of
Clanranald, when Scott was writing his epic poem The Lord of the
Isles.
Did I not feel I was too late for your present work I would
willingly hand you an acknowledged anecdote of one of my ancestors,
a Lord of the Isles, trusting to your indulgence, if it has already
reached your well-informed ears. Tho� I will first observe my regret
that you seem impressed with a belief that Clanranald (ie MacDonald
of Moidart �The Captain of Clanranald�) is of legitimate extraction,
and no less so that it does not appear to have reached you that the
Glengarries were the Chiefs of Clanranald which is the oldest branch
of the whole clan.
Scott fully reciprocated this spirit of genealogical enquiry and
passed on to Glengarry any matters of family interest that came his
way. In 1816 he wrote to say:
� I have now in
my possession � an original letter from Charles II to General
Middleton in which he acknowledges himself bound by promise to
give Glengarry the Earldom of Ross but excuses himself on
account of the Act of Annexation � The letter is dated Cologne 6
Jany. 1654/5 and says many polite things of Glengarry�s
services. I think it may be interesting to you to know that your
family at all times maintained their claim to the Earldom and
were not therein opposed by the counter claims of any other
family but only by the State jealousy which would interfere to
prevent the reestablishment of so great an authority as was
possessed by the Earls of Ross.
It is perhaps
difficult to visualise a young man being brought up into such a
tradition who would not have harboured some ideas of his own
importance and of the high position to which he had been born. Older
and wiser heads, and the rough and tumble of daily life would, in
most cases, have moderated these views and forced at least a surface
compliance with the values and standards of a more modern age. It
was Glengarry�s misfortune to be brought up in an isolated setting,
without exposure to companions of his own class outwith his own
family group, and in what was a peculiarly difficult household.
His father Duncan
was not a strong character but his mother, Marjory Grant of Dalvey,
more than made up for her husband�s weakness of character. She came
from another old Highland family and she seems to have been
determined to restore the Glengarry family fortunes and to this end
took a very aggressive line in the management of the estate. Marjory
had brought with her the very useful dowry of �2,000 which went some
way to facilitating her plans. Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, a
nineteenth century historian of the Highlands wrote of Marjory:
� her great
rise in social importance moved her at once to strive with
success to clear off the debts, to raise the rents and generally
to aggrandise the position of the Glengarry family .
Much of the land
was occupied by the tacksman class, the clan gentry, who sublet land
to minor tenants and cottars. Many of the tacksmen held land by
wadset, having long-term possession of the land as mortgage security
against cash loans to the Chief. Under the urging of Marjory, Duncan
Macdonell attempted, with considerable success, to buy out this type
of holding and replace them with tenancies at a newly negotiated
price. Many of the chief men of the clan were unwilling to embrace
this change of status and there was a substantial emigration of the
wadsetters and their closest followers to New England.
There had, in the
traditional political and social structure of the Highlands, been a
clear role for these tacksmen. The clan gentry had formed the
officer corps for the clan regiments and had formed an advisory
group around the chief, able to furnish a temporary commander if the
chief was too old or too young to take the field in time of war. The
post-Culloden pacification of the Highlands had removed this role
and the reduced status of tenant farmer was not an attractive
substitute.
The coming of the large low country sheep into the Highlands also
drove the process of change. Sheep had been raised in the Highlands
for centuries, but these were small, hardy beasts which could forage
for a living on rough hill ground. The imported sheep needed winter
grazing on low ground, land that was already occupied by small
tenants and cottars. The large scale raising of the Cheviot or
Blackface sheep was incompatible with the small-scale subsistence
farming practised in the Highlands to this time.
The large population sustained by
small-scale farming had been a matter of pride to the traditional
clan chief, who measured his importance by the number of men of
military age he could raise from his lands. In a settled and
peaceful Highlands cash income was becoming more significant than a
long muster roll.
In 1782 the first sheep farmer from
the Borders was planted in Glen Quoich, then directly operated by
Glengarry. A series of evictions took place on the Glengarry estates
in 1785, 1786 and 1787. In 1786 around 500 people emigrated from
Knoydart led by their priest, Father Alexander Macdonell of Scotus,
and settled in what is now Ontario.
For more books by Brian D Osborne
please visit the author's
website.
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