HELL AT GLENCOE
It was early when the soldiers roused themselves, the dawn still a distant promise. As they mustered in the darkness, they likely could not see much of the rugged valley surrounding them, the narrow river running through its centre, or the forbidding mountain peaks pressing in from all sides. Nor, probably, did they care, for the grim task before them was surely enough to occupy their minds. In the name of William III & II and Mary II, joint king and queen of Scotland, these 120-or-so men (most of whom probably hailed from the Scottish lowlands) were charged with bringing order to a remote corner of the realm. They were to do so at bayonet-point, by visiting exemplary punishment on a group of people that, in the judgment of William and Mary’s ministers, had proved insufficiently enthusiastic in their submission to government authority.
As they stood in the winter chill, preparing to begin their bloody work, the troops cannot have known that what they were about to do would forever be remembered as one of the most horrific acts of political violence in British history. For this was Glencoe, home to a small sept of Clan MacDonald, and on the morning of 13 February 1692, it became the site of a massacre.
The soldiers, led by Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, had been quartered in Glencoe for nearly a fortnight. The troops had ostensibly been extracting ‘free quarter’, meaning that the local populace (made up of
