Note 24 — Chapter XI · THE LAST CAMPAIGN

I cannot find any good authority for the popular tradition that has branded Macleod with the treachery of betraying an old friend and companion-in-arms. After the Restoration, when the act of his having delivered an officer holding the royal commission over to a usurping power would of course be called treasonable, he was twice tried on this indictment; first before the Scottish Parliament, when, after four years' imprisonment, he was released by order of the King under an Act of Indemnity; a second time at Law, when he was acquitted of this and other treasonable charges. In Nichol's Diary of Transactions in Scotland, the father is said to have been out with Montrose; but neither in Gordon's History of the Earldom of Sutherland (where the story of the capture is told by one who knew the Laird) nor in Mackenzie's History of the Macleods is there a trace of any Macleod of this line having been in arms for the King during the war. On the contrary, the evidence of both books, such as it is, tends the other way, and Gordon explicitly says that Neil fought under the Earl of Sutherland for the Covenant. John Macdonald, the bard of Keppoch, composed a pathetic lament for Montrose, "the manly, mighty lion," in which Neil "of woful Assynt" and his family are not spared; but he is not accused of betraying a friend (Cumha Mhontroise in Mackenzie's Beauties of Gaelic Poetry, for a translation of which I am obliged to Mr. Alexander Nicolson, Advocate, of Edinburgh; according to the bard three fourths of the meal, which formed a part of the reward, were found to be sour). In the Old Statistical Account of Scotland it is alleged that Neil was on the march to join Montrose in Caithness, that the fugitive was brought to his house during his absence, and that the traitor was (presumedly) his wife, a sister of Monro of Lamlair one of Strachan's officers. This story (first told in 1792 by the minister of Kincardine) is, however, directly at variance with Gordon's, and it was proved moreover before Parliament that Neil had received the promised reward. On the whole evidence it seems hard to suppose that Macleod acted otherwise than any Covenanter in his situation would at that time have acted towards the man whom he had been taught to regard as the most dangerous enemy of his country.