Chapter 7

YOUNG GLENGARRY

Pickle the spy--Not James Mohr Macgregor or Drummond--Pickle was the young chief of Glengarry--Proofs of this--His family history--His part in the Forty-five--Misfortunes of his family--In the Tower of London--Letters to James III.--No cheque!--Barren honours--In London in 1749--His poverty--Mrs. Murray of Broughton's watch--Steals from the Loch Arkaig hoard--Charges by him against Archy Cameron--Is accused of forgery--Cameron of Torcastle--Glengarry sees James III. in Rome--Was he sold to Cumberland?--Anonymous charges against Glengarry--A friend of Murray of Broughton--His spelling in evidence against him--Mrs. Cameron's accusation against Young Glengarry--Henry Pelham and Campbell of Lochnell--Pickle gives his real name and address--Note on Glengarry family--Highlanders among the Turks.

In November 1752, if not earlier, a new fountain of information becomes open to us, namely, the communications made by Pickle the spy to the English Government. His undated letters to his employers are not always easily attributed to a given month or year, but there can be mo mistake in assigning his first DATED letter to November 2, 1752. {145}

The spy called Pickle was a descendant of Somerled and the Lords of the Isles. In her roll-call of the clans, Flora MacIvor summons the Macdonalds:

'O sprung from the kings who in Islay held state, Proud chiefs of GLENGARRY, Clanranald, and Sleat, Combine like three streams from one mountain of snow, And resistless in union rush down on the foe!'

Pickle was the heir to the chieftainship of GLENGARRY; he was ALASTAIR RUADH MACDONNELL (or Mackdonnell, as he often writes it), son of John Macdonnell, twelfth of Glengarry. Pickle himself, till his father's death in 1754, is always spoken of as 'Young Glengarry.' We shall trace the steps by which Young Glengarry, the high-born chief of the most important Catholic Jacobite clan, became PICKLE, the treacherous correspondent of the English Government. On first reading his letters in the Additional MSS. of the British Museum, I conceived Pickle to be a traitorous servant in the household of some exiled Jacobite. I then found him asserting his rank as eldest son of the chief of a great clan; and I thought he must be personating his master, for I could not believe in such villainy as the treason of a Highland chief. Next, I met allusions to the death of his father, and the date (September 1, 1754) corresponded with that of the decease of Old Glengarry. Presently I observed the suspicions entertained about Young Glengarry, and the denunciation of him in 1754 by Mrs. Cameron, the widow of the last Jacobite martyr, Archibald Cameron. I also perceived that Pickle and Young Glengarry both invariably spell 'who' as 'how.' Next, in Pickle's last extant epistle to the English Government (1760), he directs his letters to be sent to 'Alexander Macdonnell, Glengarry, Fort William.' Finally, I compared Pickle's