Indeed, Glenure was shot, by Allan Breck or another, because, as factor for the forfeited estates of Lochiel and Ardsheil, he had evicted Cameron or Stewart tenants, and preferred Campbells. But Mr. Fraser Mackintosh ought to know that the Commissioners were _not_ the first evictors. Who drove a hundred families from Mull and Tyree about 1738, as Culloden tells us? Who ‘removed’ James Stewart of the Glens before Campbell of Glenure did? Why Ardsheil, whose bastard brother he was. Who evicted some and threatened to evict all Macphersons from the Duke of Gordon’s lands in Badenoch in 1724? Why the Duke and his factor, Gordon of Glenbucket. The story is told in a letter of Cluny to the Earl Marischal.[181] The Macphersons held lands in Badenoch ‘as feuars, woodsellers, or kindly tenents to the Duke of Gordon.’ He however ‘vexes and reduces us by perpetuall lawsuits,’ and ‘_has taken it into his head to root us intearly out of our own country_.’ He therefore feued most of his Badenoch lands to Glenbucket ‘for the half of its value, or, I may say, a third, meerly out of design to take it out of the hands of the Macphersons.’ Glenbucket, ‘in order to begin the work of extirpating us, has turned out the tenants of six farms.’ Their high offers of rent were refused, so they dirked Glenbucket, ‘in a most barbarous manner.’ The operation can scarcely be performed in a gentle fashion. ‘They very luckily missed their aim by the favour of a buff belt he had about him,’ also by the favour of a claymore that, was lying convenient. The Duke now threatened to ‘extirpate’ or evict ‘the whole name of Macpherson,’ which he proceeded to do ‘with a body of a thousand men, foot and horse.’ All parties were Jacobites, and King James settled _hæc certamina tanta_. _He_ had no objections to eviction. He writes to the Duke of Gordon, ‘I am far from blaming you for any steps you may have taken which are authorised by the law of the land, but there are only a few offenders, and, politically, the _eviction_ disunites loyal clans.’[182] Indeed the more one thinks of Mr. Fraser Mackintosh’s assertion that the Commissioners were the first evictors in the Highlands, the more grotesque does it appear. We turn to the manuscript ‘Letter of a Gentleman’ whose sympathies are with ‘the wretched commons,’ not with the Chiefs.[183] ‘The gentlemen of the name of Mackenzie,’ says our author, ‘are frugal and industrious.... They have screwed up their rents to an extravagant height, which they vitiously term improving their estates, without putting the tenants upon a proper way of improving the ground, to enable them to pay that rent, which makes the common people little better than slaves and beggars.’ No ‘screw’ but eviction could be used by these Mackenzie landlords, frugal and industrious. Here is a case among the Camerons from the same MS.:—