When was the battle of glencoe

For the Jacobites in Edinburgh it was a powerful piece of anti-government propaganda. An inquiry was held and Scottish Parliament declared the whole affair an act of murder. John Dalrymple, the Master of Stair, resigned and the matter was forgotten by the government.

In Scotland it passed into legend. The Campbells were accursed in much of the Highlands and even to this day the old Clachaig Inn at Glen Coe carries the sign on its door, 'No Campbells'. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. The Massacre of Glen Coe. Explore the BBC. BBC Homepage. Scottish History. Dark Ages. Early Church.

Wars of Independence. Scotland in Europe. The Union. Victorian Scotland. But how did this chilling event come about?

King James fled to France but his supporters in Scotland, known as the Jacobites from Jacobus, the Latin for James , rose up and tried to restore a Catholic king to the throne. The two Highland clans at the centre of the Glencoe Massacre had a history of feuding.

Their lineages are interwoven, with both clans having long histories linked to Robert the Bruce and the fight for independence. They both also had opposing political views, with the MacDonalds supporting the deposed King James.

Despite the first Jacobite risings mostly resulting in defeat for the Highlanders, William III wanted to pacify any clans sworn to James and his claim to the throne, including the Glencoe MacDonalds. William demanded that all the clans sign an oath of allegiance to him, initially with the promise of giving them money and land.

Any clan signing the oath before 1 January would be pardoned, while anyone who refused would be punished as traitors. One of the problems for the clans was that they were already felt bound by an oath to James, and he only gave his consent to this request from William in mid-December.

News only reached the MacDonalds on 28 December: they had three days to meet the deadline. The chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds, Maclain, set out to Fort William, but there was no-one there who could take his oath, and he had to go to Inveraray, 60 miles away. He arrived late, but was eventually allowed to take the oath on 6 January — he believed it had been accepted and his clan was safe.

But the decision to make an example of them had already been made. Although hospitality like this was traditional in the Highlands, in reality the villagers had little choice. Then, on the evening of 12 February , Glenlyon and the other officers received orders to destroy the MacDonald clan:. The first man killed was Maclain, before the attackers went up and down the glen killing anyone under the age of 70, including women and children.

This you are to putt in executione att fyve of the clock precisely. So it was that, at the appointed hour, Glenlyon mustered his men around the settlement of Inverrigan, a short distance into the five-mile-long glen. He lived at Polveig, near the mouth of the glen.

As the soldiers burst into his home, he rose to greet them and began to get dressed, but fell dead when a volley of gunfire thundered into his back.

Meanwhile, another party of troops descended on the settlement of Achnacone, further into the glen, where they broke into the largest house to find eight men huddled around a fire. Guns were immediately discharged; five of the men died, but the others managed to flee.

Similar scenes were played out all through Glencoe, although the chosen weapon was not always gunfire; one attack at Leacantuim saw year-old Archibald MacDonald bludgeoned into unconsciousness, before later being burned alive inside a house where he had taken refuge.

Back at Inverrigan, Glenlyon was not idle. Nine men, bound hand and foot, likely to prevent them raising the alarm, were shot one by one, before the soldiers turned their attention to the rest of the village.

The attack seems to have been chaotic, and many MacDonalds escaped, although others, including an old woman and a boy no older than five, did not. There was little room for mercy; when Glenlyon himself attempted to save the lives of two young men, one of his fellow officers, citing their orders, overruled him and shot them both.

From about 7am, Glenlyon began receiving reinforcements from nearby Fort William. By late morning there were well over soldiers in Glencoe, but there was little left for them to do. The MacDonald townships were all smoking ruins, and most of those who had not been killed had long-since escaped.

As they withdrew back to their quarters, the troops left somewhere between 30 and 40 MacDonalds dead. The massacre was a consequence of a short-term crisis in the governance of the Scottish Highlands, combined with much longer-term trends. Lowland Scots had been developing hostile ideas about Highlanders since at least the 14th century, and by the s this discourse — which tended to shape English and other non-Scottish views as well — was firmly rooted in the idea that Highlanders were violent, barbaric, uncivilised and fundamentally disorderly.

And the worst of the lot were widely held to be those who, like the Glencoe MacDonalds, lived in Lochaber, the wild and mountainous region at the south-western end of the Great Glen. In the short term, the story that terminated in Glencoe began three years earlier at Dundee. Dundee was aiming to restore James as king of Scots, two days after the Scottish parliament had formally declared him deposed in favour of William and Mary.

Despite scoring a military victory over Williamite forces at the battle of Killiecrankie in July, during which Dundee himself was killed, the rising never posed a particularly serious threat to the new monarchs, and by late it had more or less petered out.

Crucially, however, the rising had been sustained almost entirely by Highland manpower, thus confirming latent suspicions that Highlanders were naturally disloyal and disorderly. The events that would unfold were fundamentally shaped by that conviction. In June , it entered negotiations with the remaining Jacobites, with the talks being conducted at Achallader in Perthshire under the leadership of John Campbell, 1st Earl of Breadalbane.