The Highland Clan Hosting Government Soldiers for Twelve Nights Before Being Massacred by Them on 13 February 1692

The 1689 Jacobite rising in Scotland — the Highland Catholic and Episcopalian clans’ attempt to restore the deposed Catholic king James VII and II against the new Protestant monarchs William of Orange and Mary II — had been militarily defeated by 1691. In August 1691 William’s Scottish administration issued an indemnity offer: every Highland chief who had taken arms against the new government would be pardoned provided he took an oath of allegiance to William and Mary in person before a sheriff by 1 January 1692.

Alasdair MacIain MacDonald, twelfth chief of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, was 70 years old in late December 1691 and was, like most Highland chiefs, reluctant to swear an oath that would dishonour the still-living James. He waited until the last possible date. On 31 December 1691 he travelled to Fort William, the nearest royal garrison, to take the oath there.

The colonel at Fort William, John Hill, was not legally empowered to administer the oath. The competent judicial authority was the sheriff at Inveraray, about 60 miles away through midwinter mountain passes. MacIain took Hill’s letter of explanation and walked to Inveraray. He arrived on 2 January 1692 — one day after the deadline — and was sworn in by the deputy sheriff Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglas on 6 January 1692.

The oath was, in MacIain’s view and in Colin Campbell’s view, valid. The five-day delay was procedural and was being formally explained in writing to the Edinburgh authorities.

The order

In Edinburgh the Master of Stair John Dalrymple — Secretary of State for Scotland and the chief Williamite political administrator — read MacIain’s oath documentation in mid-January 1692 and decided that the lateness made the oath invalid. The decision was not legally compelled. It was political.

Dalrymple drafted military orders specifically targeting the MacDonalds of Glencoe. The order’s language is preserved:

Your troops will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Lochiel’s lands, Keppoch’s, Glengarry’s and Glencoe. Your powers shall be large enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with prisoners. Let it be secret and sudden.

The order was countersigned by William of Orange himself on the document held in the Scottish National Archives. The countersignature has been the subject of historical dispute since 1692 — was William reading what he was signing, or merely signing a routine military document presented by Dalrymple? Modern Scottish historical consensus is that William had read at least the operational summary.

The military execution was assigned to the Earl of Argyll’s Regiment under the regional commander Colonel John Hill at Fort William. Hill was personally opposed to the order — he had recommended MacIain’s late oath be accepted — but obeyed it. The on-the-ground commander was Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, a 60-year-old impoverished officer who, by coincidence or by Dalrymple’s design, was distantly related by marriage to MacIain (Campbell’s niece had married MacIain’s younger son).

Twelve nights of hospitality

Captain Campbell and approximately 120 soldiers arrived at Glencoe on 1 February 1692. They presented papers indicating that they were on routine winter quarters because the Fort William barracks was full. Highland hospitality custom required them to be billeted on the MacDonald households. They were.

The soldiers were quartered with MacDonald families across the seven inhabited settlements of Glen Coe for the next twelve nights. They ate at MacDonald tables, drank MacDonald whisky, played cards with MacDonald sons, and slept in MacDonald beds. Captain Campbell spent his evenings at MacIain’s own house playing cards with the chief.

On the night of 12 February 1692 Campbell received a written order from his subaltern Major Robert Duncanson:

You are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebels, the MacDonalds of Glenco, and put all to the sword under seventy. You are to have a special care that the old fox and his sons doe upon no account escape your hands.

He read the order at his card table in MacIain’s house. He continued playing cards until past midnight.

13 February 1692, 5 a.m.

The killings began at approximately 5 a.m. on 13 February 1692. The order had specified that the operation should be coordinated across the seven settlements to begin simultaneously. The coordination broke down. Killings began at MacIain’s house and at the next two settlements but the signal failed to reach the western settlements at the head of the glen.

Alasdair MacIain was shot in the back as he rose from bed. His wife was stripped, her finger-rings removed by mouth (the soldiers bit the rings off), and she was thrown out into the snow where she died of exposure later the same day. Their two sons survived — they had been warned by individual soldiers who could not bring themselves to obey the order — and escaped across the mountains. Thirty-eight MacDonalds were killed in or immediately outside their houses. The dead included two children. The youngest victim was a 13-year-old boy who was shot by a soldier his father had personally hosted at his table the previous evening.

The western settlements at the upper end of the glen heard the shots in time. Approximately 300 MacDonalds — most of the population of the glen — escaped on foot up the mountain passes to the south and west in deep snow and a developing storm. Approximately 40 more died of exposure in the mountains over the following days before reaching shelter at neighbouring clans.

1695

The massacre produced political shock across Scotland and a much smaller but real shock in England. The Highland hospitality breach — the killings by men who had been the victims’ guests — was the element that caused the broadest contemporary moral outrage. The political objection to the killing of Highlanders was, in late 17th-century Edinburgh and London, comparatively narrow.

A Scottish parliamentary inquiry was convened in 1695. It concluded that the massacre had been “murder under trust” — a specifically Scots-law category of premeditated killing aggravated by abuse of a relationship of confidence — and that John Dalrymple was its principal author. The inquiry recommended that Dalrymple be prosecuted. William of Orange refused to allow the prosecution. Dalrymple was dismissed from the Secretary of State office but retained his other royal appointments and continued his political career under Queen Anne.

No one was punished for the massacre.

Glen Coe is now a Scottish National Trust property. The MacDonald descendants have, since 1992 (the 300th anniversary), held an annual commemoration at the village of Carnoch on 13 February. Members of Clan Campbell of Glenlyon are formally welcome at the commemoration. The 332nd anniversary was observed in February 2024.