Clan Campbell · 1692
The Massacre of Glencoe — the Campbell side
The order came from London. The clan paid for it for three centuries.
Draft entry · awaiting review
The killing in Glencoe on 13 February 1692 has been remembered as a Campbell crime. The truth is more political and more bitter.
The order was Sir John Dalrymple's, Master of Stair, Joint Secretary of State for Scotland. It was approved by William II in his own hand. The regiment that carried it out was the Earl of Argyll's Regiment of Foot — a unit nominally Campbell, but whose rank and file were largely not Campbells. Its commanding officer that morning, Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, was a sixty-year-old in debt to the MacDonalds for cattle his men had taken in earlier raids.
Argyll provided the regiment because Argyll had a regiment. The Campbells of the great house at Inveraray had been the political beneficiaries of every shift against the Lordship of the Isles for three hundred years; they were the available instrument of state in the Highlands. That, more than any blood feud, is why the duty fell to a Campbell officer.
The clan's reputation never recovered. Modern historians have largely shifted the moral weight back to Dalrymple and the crown — but Campbell of Glenlyon led the muskets, and history takes its lessons in faces, not in cabinets.