And so Archibald was in Edinburgh, preserving what little was left of the Lindsay estate. But the middle son, David, was there in Glenshiel, commanding a file of their own clansmen under another of James’ father’s friends, George Keith, the Earl Marischal.
As the crackle of musketry rose and fell, and the long Highland evening wore on, even a youth as callow as James could sense all chance of decision in this encounter was slipping away. The red coats advanced to fire volleys, then retired. The Highlanders returned their fire, but made no move to advance from their defences. And the small cluster of lace-trimmed coats and feathered tricornes that was Tullibardine’s command group sat stuck to the same patch of hillside, doing nothing.
The inaction let James’ mind wander back down the road to where this enterprise had begun for him, amidst so much hope and enthusiasm, in the hall at Eilean Donan Castle – with the hired ships that had brought the news, as well as troops and powder and guns from Spain, still riding in the bay opposite.
James had been in the hall for all the councils of war, an aide de camp on the staff of the Earl Marischal, while his brother spent all his time outside with the men he would command in battle. At first James had been jealous and resentful. David would be in the front line, and he would not. But he soon realised, that there, in the hall, was the very centre; and being there had been excitement beyond imagining.
He heard everything.
But it was only on this sun-dappled hillside, with his wounds throbbing and his inexperienced mind starting to swim in the brandy they’d been plying him with, that he’d had leisure to reflect, and for awareness to dawn that lessons are not just things you are taught in a schoolroom.
Growing up in the Lindsay household, the righteousness of the Stuart cause was the truth of the world. The talk at table was of the punitive taxes and duties imposed on Scotland after the union of the parliaments, the de-basing of the Scottish pound and the blatant bribery used to seduce an impoverished Scots gentry into the venal ways of the Whigs and the ‘wee German lairdie’. And how the wrong king was on the throne.
All the fine words.
And then, in those first days at Eilean Donan, James, with hairs standing on the back of his head, could not help but feel that here, at last, was action. That here was the stage upon which all that noble aspiration would be made manifest. Because here were the great men of the cause, pooling their wisdom and genius to reverse history and restore divine right again to these islands.
For the great news the ships had brought, by the hand of the Earl Marischal himself, direct from Madrid, was that the King of Spain had thrown the power of his empire behind the claim of King James VIII of Scotland, and III of Great Britain. An expedition was about to set sail from Corunna; 6,000 men under the Duke of Ormonde, to land near Bristol, whereupon they would raise the pro-Stuart population of the whole of the west country and march on London. Meanwhile the Earl Marischal would raise the Highlands and march south to join them, collecting on the way every disaffected, right-thinking soul, of whom it was claimed, there were legion.
And the young James Lindsay had been in the hall when the Marischal announced that the first step towards victory, for the men gathered at the mouth of Loch Duich, would be to march the seventy-odd miles to Inverness, and reduce the Hanoverian garrison there.
‘I have sound intelligence that they are but three hundred men,’ the Marischal had said, in tones of great gravity, that first night round the long table in hall. The fire was roaring in the grate, and the host of guttering candles sending all manner of portentous shadows dancing.
The Marischal’s commission as major general, in King James’ own hand, had sat on the table before him, among all the claret glasses. He was, he said, the senior officer in the room, and thus in command. A letter from the king’s own hand, this very minute in the copying, would be sent out summoning all the clans to his standard. Spanish muskets, and Spanish powder was this very hour being unloaded to arm them. They would march on Inverness within the week.
Young James Lindsay remembered how he’d thrilled to those words. But that had been before subsequent interventions.
The afternoon before that grand conference convened, the Marquess of Tullibardine, Murray and the Earl of Seaforth had arrived also, in a tiny barque from their exile in France. And at the conference Tullibardine had had some things to say regarding this march on Inverness. Where in the king’s letter was there an authorisation? Was such a precipitous movement wise? Tullibardine wanted sight of the document. Once it was finished copying, he was told. A debate had ensued, lasting long into the night and becoming more fractious the more decanters they drained.
James had gone to bed believing that a wise decision must eventually be settled upon, after all that exercising of wisdom.
The next day he spent chatting to some of the Irish officers in the Spanish service as they transformed the castle into a magazine, then in the evening he had returned to the hall. Tullibardine made an entrance, brandishing two documents, and requesting an audience with the Marischal. James had found it all regally flamboyant and formal, but he was only thirteen years old, after all, and could not suspect what was afoot.
‘This letter, my Earl Marischal,’ Tullibardine had said, brandishing one of
