Up to Auld Reekie to
visit the National Library exhibition “Game of Crowns” about the
struggle for the throne between the House of Orange and the House of
Stuart.
After the invasion of England by William of Orange with
the complicity of the Protestant Lords and the deposing of the
Catholic James VI in favour of his Protestant sister, Mary, wife of
William, those loyal to James and the Stuarts, the Jacobites, became
involved in a civil war.
This culminated in
the 1715 rising and only finished with the defeat of James' grandson,
Charles Edward Stuart at Culloden in 1746.
Many of the Highland
clans maintained their allegiance to the Stuarts and suffered in the
process, mostly, it must be said at the hands of their fellow Scots.
None more so than
the MacIans of Glencoe, a sept of the Macdonalds. The story of the
massacre in 1692 is almost universally known and has been recounted
in verse and song as well as captured on canvas and recreated in film
and drama.
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| The memorial to the victims |
What started as a
punishment meted out to people probably regarded by William, if he
gave them any thought at all, as savages, so stirred the nation's
conscience that the charge of “murder under trust”, a most
heinous crime, was brought against the perpetrators.
No-one was ever
convicted. Not surprisingly as the order was signed by William
himself! He probably didn't give it a moments thought … just
another paper to sign. The real culprits were the Lowland Scots
especially John Dalrymple, Master of Stair who disliked Highland
clans in general and his Campbell accomplices who saw a chance of
exacting revenge on their age old enemies, the Macdonalds.
It is quite chilling
to see the original hand written document ordering the massacre.
You can't visit
Glencoe without feeling the impact of the events even after three
hundred years. The mountains seem to hold the memory.
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| Clouds rising from Aonach Eagach |
Here the crow
starves, here the patient stag
Breeds for the
rifle. Between the soft moor
And the soft sky,
scarcely room
To leap or soar.
Substance crumbles, in the thin air
Moon cold or moon
hot. The road winds in
Listlessness of
ancient war,
Langour of broken
steel,
Clamour of confused
wrong, apt
In silence. Memory
is strong
Beyond the bone.
Pride snapped,
Shadow of pride is
long, in the long pass
No concurrence of
bone
(T.S. Eliot)
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| Meall Mor |
I'll be back there
this summer, still some hills to climb and the Hidden Valley beckons
before I am too old.
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