Note 361 — Chapter III

‘Few victories have been more entire. It is said that scarcely two hundred of the infantry escaped.’ … ‘The Highlanders obtained a glorious booty in arms and clothes, besides self-moving watches, and other products of civilisation, which surprised and puzzled them. Excited by such acquisitions, a considerable number could not resist the old practice of their people to return to their glens, and decorate their huts with their spoil.’ Burton's History of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 465. Compare Home's History of the Rebellion, p. 123. This was an old practice of theirs, as Montrose found out, a century earlier, ‘when many of the Highlanders, being loaded with spoil, deserted privately, and soon after returned to their own country.’ Wishart's Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose, Edinburgh, 1819, p. 189. So, too, Burnet (Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, p. 272): ‘Besides, any companies could be brought down from the Highlands might do well enough for a while, but no order could be expected from them, for as soon as they were loaded with plunder and spoil, they would run away home to their lurking holes, and desert those who had trusted them.’ See also p. 354. A more recent writer, drawing a veil over this little infirmity, remarks, with much delicacy, that ‘the Highlanders, brave as they were, had a custom of returning home after a battle.’ Thomson's Memoirs of the Jacobites, London, 1845, vol. i. p. 122. Not unfrequently they first robbed their fellow-soldiers. In 1746, Bisset writes: ‘The Highlanders, who went off after the battel, carried off horses and baggage from their own men, the Lowlanders.’ Diary of the Reverend John Bisset, in Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. i. p. 377, Aberdeen, 1841, 4to.