Note 364 — Chapter III

Which gave rise to a report that they were cannibals. ‘The late Mr. Halkston of Rathillet, who had been in this expedition’ (the Rebellion of 1745), ‘told Mr. Young that the belief was general among the people of England, that the Highlanders ate children.’ Johnstone's Memoirs of the Rebellion, 3rd edit. London, 1822, p. 101. Such a rumour, notwithstanding its absurdity, was made somewhat plausible by the revolting conduct of the Highlanders in the first rebellion of 1715, when they committed, in the Lowlands, horrible outrages on corpses which they dug up. See the contemporary evidence, in Correspondence of the Rev. Robert Wodrow, published by the Wodrow Society, vol. ii. pp. 86, 87, 93. ‘They have even raised up some of my Lord Rothes's children and mangled their dead bodies’ … ‘till the stench put them away.’ In 1745, they signalized their entrance into England in the following manner. ‘The rebels, during their stay in Carlisle, committed the most shocking detestable villanies; for, not contented with robbing families of their most valuable effects, they scrupled not to act their brutal insolence on the persons of some young ladies, even in the presence of their parents. A gentleman, in a letter to his friend in London, writes thus: “That, after being in a manner stripped of every thing, he had the misery to see three of his daughters treated in such a manner that he could not relate it.”’ Marchant's History of the present Rebellion, London, 1746, pp. 181, 182.