The companions of Pickle: Being a sequel to 'Pickle the spy'Lang, Andrew
History
The companions of Pickle: Being a sequel to 'Pickle the spy'
Lang, Andrew
Jacobites
The inferences are obvious. Government had a motive for sparing
Glengarry. Again, quite apart from the Pickle letters, Glengarry is
assuredly betraying one or the other party. To James he poses as an
active conspirator. To the English Government he poses as, at least, ‘one
peaceable subject,’ for they allow him to live, and love, in London, and
to go where he pleases. He was in Edinburgh in April, 1752, and dined
with Bishop Forbes. Later, he seems to have gone to Lochaber, which
Government knew, from an Informer.
We now come to the Elibank Plot, to kidnap the Royal Family. It flickered
from November 1752 to summer, 1753. Glengarry, writing from Arras on
April 5, 1753, gives Edgar, James’s secretary, a veiled account of the
affair. ‘The day was fixt,’ on, or for, November 10, 1752, but the
English shuffled, and did not act. ‘The concert in Novr. was,’ says
Glengarry, ‘that I was to remain in London, as I had above four hundred
Brave Highlanders ready at my call, and, after matters had broke out
there to sett off directly for Scotland, as no raising would be made
amongst the Clans without my presence.’[137] He then alludes to ‘my leate
illness at Paris,’ which has left him ‘still very weake’—a phrase used at
the same time by Pickle.
Now the Pickle letters begin on November 2, 1752, and Pickle speaks
of himself, to his English employers, in precisely the same terms as
Glengarry uses about himself when writing to Edgar. Pickle says that,
among his Jacobite friends, he explains his supplies of English money as
remittances from ‘Baron Kenady.’ Now, in Lord Advocate Craigie’s letters
of 1745,[138] we read ‘in most things Young Glengarry is advised and
directed by Baron Kennedy,’ a Baron of the Scottish Exchequer. Thus, if
Pickle is Glengarry, he would naturally represent his chief adviser,
Baron Kennedy, as the source of his supplies. He announces (Boulogne,
November 2, 1752) ‘you’l soon hear of a hurly burly,’ and he must make
a long journey, first to Paris, then South, as he writes on November 4
to Henry Pelham.[139] The hurly burly is the Elibank Plot. ‘I will see
my friend’ (Henry Pelham) ‘or that can happen.’ To Pelham he says, ‘I
will lay before you _in person_ all I can learn.’ Pelham knew Pickle
_personally_, and could not be deceived as to his identity, as to his
being a Chief, as he represented himself. In December 1752 Pickle, in
London, informed against Archibald Cameron and Lochgarry, whom Charles
had sent to Scotland, also against Fassifern and Glenevegh (Glenevis) as
agents for Charles with the Southern Jacobites. Pickle has seen Charles,
and, in town, Lord Elibank, who ‘surprised me to the greatest degree by
telling me that all was put off for some time.’ He has promised Charles
‘to write nothing to Rome,’ which Glengarry actually did, in April 1753.
In later letters to his English employers, Pickle speaks much of a severe
illness, at Paris, which ‘nearly tripped up his hiells,’ and left him,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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