A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. IVGuizot, François
History
A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. IV
Guizot, François
Great Britain -- History
The English Jacobites belonged almost entirely to the Anglican
Church, being passionately and ancestrally devoted to its cause,
as well as to the House of Stuart. The Irish Jacobites were
Catholics and separatists, convinced that the greatness of their
native country, like that of the Roman Church, depended on the
restoration of King James. The Scotch Jacobites actively engaged
in the struggle were Episcopalians, lately triumphant, but now
oppressed in their religion, or Highlanders uniting against the
power of the Clan Campbell and its chief, the Earl of Argyle,
_Mac Callum More_, as he was called in the mountains. It was
Argyle who, standing before the throne at Whitehall, had
pronounced the words of the royal oath, repeated after him by the
new sovereigns. At its last clause William had paused for a
moment: its purport was that he should destroy all heretics and
enemies of God. "I could not engage to become a persecutor," said
the king aloud. "Neither the tenor of the oath nor the laws of
Scotland impose this obligation on your majesty," replied one of
the delegates. "It is on this condition that I swear," returned
William; "and I beg you, my lords and gentlemen, to be witnesses
of this."
So much moderation and prudence remained without effect upon the
Highlanders. Argyle was employed in the new government. However
unimportant his part in it was to be, from the capacity and
character of the earl, the traditional foes of his clan, the
Camerons, the Macleans, the Macgregors, naturally, went over to
the other camp. When Dundee, threatened with arrest, left the
little castle where he had quartered himself since fleeing from
Edinburg, he found the Highlanders already risen under the
command of Lochiel, chief of the Camerons, and Colin Keppoch, one
of the Macdonalds.
{26}
Bringing in his suite some Lowland gentlemen, capturing some
Whigs, whom he carried with him as prisoners, sending the fiery
cross before him, and accompanied everywhere by the terror of his
name, Dundee soon found himself at the head of an army of five or
six thousand men, all brave, hardy, inured to fatigue,
undisciplined and tumultuous, incapable of fighting according to
the ordinary rules of war, and, consequently, of making a long
resistance to regular troops. "We would not have time to learn
your mode of fighting," said Lochiel, "and we would have time to
forget our own."
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