It is seldom that a trained historian with experience in
wider spheres cares to treat of Highland feuds, so that Miss A. A. W. Ramsay's very able study of the MacGregors, The Arrow of Glenlyon (Murray, 6s.) is novel and welcome. Miss Ramsay showed her qualities in her monographs on Victorian foreign policy and on Peel. Here, with the same care for breadth of view and accurate detail, we find a touch of passion as the evil deeds of bygone Campbells are recounted: Alasdair MacGregor, the " Arrow of Glenlyon," was the last recognized chief of the unlucky clan whose extermination was decreed by James VI. in 1603 and carried out by Archibald the Grim, seventh Earl of Argyll. Miss Ramsay shows how the Clan Gregor had suffered for centuries through not having a powerful noble to protect them at court, and how they became, partly through their own unruliness, the tools of this great man or that. Their final betrayal by Argyll followed on their slaughter of the Colquhouns in Glenfruin. to which they were incited by the grim earl himself. Alasdair was hanged at Edinburgh in 1604, and most of his men suffered the same fate. The very name was proscribed. But when the Act was repealed a century and a half later, " all over Scotland respectable farmers and tradesmen, doctors and lawyers, astounded their neighbours by flinging off the titles of Drummond, Murray or Campbell which they had borne, and announced themselves MacGregors."
Previous page
