The alliances of the Perthshire Campbells went on with noble and lairdly houses; and their wealth paved the way to peerage, while they came to look on themselves as an independent stock; yet in 1633, the head of the Breadalbane branch is found addressing Lorne as his “lord and chief,” and getting back the style of “cousin.” Under Charles II. Sir John Campbell secured a reversion to the title and lands of the Caithness Earl, whose widow he married to “mak’ siccar.” But on the Earl’s death a right Sinclair arose to dispute this settlement; and the Breadalbane men marched all the way to Caithness on that private invasion already mentioned in _Bonnie Scotland_. The Sinclairs got the worst of it in the field; but the law pronounced against the Campbell baronet’s claim, who was consoled by the new titles, Earl of Breadalbane and Holland, Viscount Tay, Lord Ormelie and Glenorchy, with other lordships thrown into the lump of dignity. This was the politician, “as sly as a fox, wise as a serpent, and slippery as an eel,” who earned an evil name for himself through his part in the Glencoe massacre, carried out by his vassal, Campbell of Glenlyon. King William’s Government had placed in his hands the large sum--when there was not a million of money in all Scotland--of £20,000, to be spent in pacifying the Highlands, which he accounted for in this offhand manner: “The Highlands are quiet; the money is spent; and that is the best way of accounting among friends.” Yet William’s agent lived to turn out his clan for the Pretender, in 1715, when they came to blows with their kinsmen of Argyll. In the ’45, however, the next Lord Breadalbane threw his influence on the Hanoverian side, though some of the Perthshire Campbells joined Prince Charlie. This earl, like the contemporary Duke of Atholl, was the second son; the elder, Lord Ormelie, having been set aside from the succession, apparently as weak-minded. The direct line of Breadalbane died out in George III.’s reign with the third earl, whose son, Lord Glenorchy, had predeceased him, leaving a widow, known, like the Countess of Huntingdon, as a patroness of evangelical preachers, who came to end her life at Matlock. For an heir, the family had to cast back more than a century to one of the collateral branches. Campbell of Carwhin, who succeeded to the earldom in 1782, at the age of twenty, had a long and prosperous tenure, swelling the family wealth by his marriage with a great Scottish heiress. She was daughter of David Gavin, whose father, a poor Angus weaver, had lamented over the son as not taking to his own trade, consorting rather with smugglers, Dutchmen, and such-like; but the family ne’er-do-weel, drifting abroad, made a princely fortune at Hamburg, and came back to set up as a Berwickshire laird.