In 1754 an Act "annexed the forfeited estates of the Jacobites who had
been out (or many of them) inalienably to the Crown." The estates were
restored in 1784; meanwhile the profits were to be used for the
improvement of the Highlands. If submissive tenants received better
terms and larger leases than of old, Jacobite tenants were evicted for
not being punctual with rent. Therefore, on May 14, 1752, some person
unknown shot Campbell of Glenure, who was about evicting the tenants on
the lands of Lochiel and Stewart of Ardshiel in Appin. Campbell rode
down from Fort William to Ballachulish ferry, and when he had crossed it
said, "I am safe now I am out of my mother's country." But as he drove
along the old road through the wood of Lettermore, perhaps a mile and a
half south of Ballachulish House, the fatal shot was fired. For this
crime James Stewart of the Glens was tried by a Campbell jury at
Inveraray, with the Duke on the bench, and was, of course, convicted, and
hanged on the top of a knoll above Ballachulish ferry. James was
innocent, but Allan Breck Stewart was certainly an accomplice of the man
with the gun, which, by the way, was the property neither of James
Stewart nor of Stewart of Fasnacloich. The murderer was anxious to save
James by avowing the deed, but his kinsfolk, saying, "They will only hang
both James and you," bound him hand and foot and locked him up in the
kitchen on the day of James's execution. {293} Allan lay for some weeks
at the house of a kinsman in Rannoch, and escaped to France, where he had
a fight with James Mor Macgregor, then a spy in the service of the Duke
of Newcastle.
This murder of "the Red Fox" caused all the more excitement, and is all
the better remembered in Lochaber and Glencoe, because agrarian violence
in revenge for eviction has scarcely another example in the history of
the Highlands.
CONCLUSION.
Space does not permit an account of the assimilation of Scotland to
England in the years between the Forty-five and our own time: moreover,
the history of this age cannot well be written without a dangerously
close approach to many "burning questions" of our day. The History of
the Highlands, from 1752 to the emigrations witnessed by Dr Johnson (1760-
1780), and of the later evictions in the interests of sheep farms and
deer forests, has never been studied as it ought to be in the rich
manuscript materials which are easily accessible. The great literary
Renaissance of Scotland, from 1745 to the death of Sir Walter Scott; the
years of Hume, a pioneer in philosophy and in history, and of the Rev.
Principal Robertson (with him and Hume, Gibbon professed, very modestly,
that he did not rank); the times of Adam Smith, of Burns, and of Sir
Walter, not to speak of the Rev. John Home, that foremost tragic poet,
may be studied in many a history of literature. According to Voltaire,
Scotland led the world in all studies, from metaphysics to gardening. We
think of Watt, and add engineering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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