Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/182

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144
THE HIGHLANDS LAID WASTE.

that if some of your Northumberland graziers were here they might make their fortunes."[1] The author of a Plain Narrative of the Rebellion, tells with exultation how "they marched to Loch Yell, the stately seat of old Esquire Cameron," the Lochiel of Campbell's spirited lines. "His fine chairs, tables, and all his cabinet goods were set on fire and burnt with his house. His fine fruit garden, above a mile long, was pulled to pieces and laid waste. A beautiful summer-house that stood in the pleasure garden was also set on fire. From hence the party marched along the sea-coast through Moidart, burning of houses, driving away the cattle, and shooting those vagrants who were found about the mountains. For fifty miles round there was no man or beast to be seen."[2] Andrew Henderson, in his History of the Rebellion, after admitting that in the rout several of the wounded were stabbed, and some who were lurking in houses were taken out and shot, urges by way of excuse that "the rebels had enraged the troops; their habit was strange, their language still stranger, and their way of fighting was shocking to the utmost degree."[3] Besides the massacre after the battle and the executions by courts-martial, there were the hangings, drawings and quarterings, and beheadings by judge and jury. Seventy-six had been sent to the scaffold by September, 1747,[4] and above one thousand were transported.[5] Even George II. "said that he believed William had been rough with them."[6] When it was proposed to confer on the duke the freedom of the City of London, an alderman was heard to say that it ought to be the freedom of the Butchers' Company. So late as the summer of 1753 seven rebels were seized in a hut on the side of Loch Hourn, at no great distance from the way along which Johnson was to pass only twenty years later.[7] Nevertheless he everywhere travelled in safety. Among the chieftains, no doubt, "his tenderness for the unfortunate House of Stuart" was known, but to the common people he would only be an Englishman—a man of the race that had slaughtered their fathers and wasted their country. That both he and Boswell were not free from uneasiness they avowed when at Auchnasheal they were surrounded by the wild McCraas. In the memory of men not much past the middle

  1. Gentleman's Magazine, 1746, p. 429.
  2. Michael Hughes's Plain Narrative of the Rebellion, p. 56.
  3. Henderson's History of the Rebellion, p. 117.
  4. Scots Magazine, 1747, p. 649. According to Smollett the number executed was eighty-one. History of England, ed. 1800, iii. 188.
  5. Gentleman's Magazine, 1747, p. 246.
  6. Marchmont Papers, i. 196.
  7. Gentleman's Magazine, 1753, p. 391.