If Gilderoy had done amiss, He might have banished been. Ah! what fair cruelty is this, To hang such handsome men! This bandit was hanged at Edinburgh, 1636. Among the charges against him was one of taking part in a feud in the Grant country, where the Forbes and the Gordons were concerned; we hear of those Ishmaelites as having a hand in various quarrels as well as those of their own country. The fellest foes of the Macgregors could seldom accuse them of not being ready to fight, unless, as at Sheriffmuir, when distracted by plunder. James VI. had offered Elizabeth a levy of Highlandmen, including fifty Macgregors, to put down her Irish rebels. Sundry members of the bellicose stock were let out of prison to make recruits for Gustavus Adolphus in Germany. The Earl of Moray enlisted three hundred Highlanders from Menteith and Balquhidder to overawe the Clan Chattan in the north: these auxiliaries are believed to have been Macgregors, and they are reported not to have taken kindly to this police service, so that their employer dismissed them; while another story makes some of them refuse to be dismissed, settling down on the Deeside lands, whither they had been rashly called in as bailiffs. In their own fastnesses the Children of the Mist still held out stubbornly. When Montrose set the heather on fire he was followed by part of the proscribed clan, coming boldly forth from the islands and the wild nooks in which they had taken sanctuary; and we may be sure their tartans were made welcome for the nonce. That blaze extinguished, again they rallied to Charles II.’s standard set up by Glencairn at Killin, which soon went down before Cromwell’s soldiery; then when their Argyll enemies were out of favour, the King’s gratitude for fruitless loyalty availed them in the repeal of the act of proscription. Their forfeited lands, however, were not restored, as Montrose had promised in his master’s name; and for the most part they had to content themselves with becoming tenants or dependents of more thriving names. Here and there, indeed, we find Macgregors, helped by other lawless bands, making bold to drive off the occupants of farms from which they had been themselves evicted; now and then emerges a record of “the good old rule, the simple plan,” leading one of them to the gallows; but at this date their historian can also quote a number of marriage contracts, wadsetts, sasines, bonds, and such-like deeds of Scots law going to show how the clan, on its outskirts at least, began more or less willingly to adapt itself to the conditions of modern life. In 1691, that old enemy Colquhoun of Luss comes forward to testify to the Laird of Macgregor as “a law-abiding man, regularly paying mail and duty,” while other members of the clan are still denounced as lawless loons, “who have little property or inheritance to be a pledge for them.”