The Appin Murder

The Killing That Shook a Nation

James Hunter

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781788853224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

On a hillside near Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands in May 1752, a rider is assassinated by a gunman. The murdered man is Colin Campbell, a government agent traveling to nearby Duror where he’s evicting farm tenants to make way for his relatives. Campbell’s killer evades capture, but Britain’s rulers insist this challenge to their authority must result in a hanging. The sacrificial victim is James Stewart, who is organizing resistance to Campbell’s takeover of lands long held by his clan, the Appin Stewarts. James is a veteran of the Highland uprising crushed in April 1746 at Culloden. In Duror he sees homes torched by troops using terror tactics against rebel Highlanders. The same brutal response to dissent means that James’s corpse will for years hang from a towering gibbet and leave a community utterly ravaged. Introducing this new edition of his account of what came to be called the Appin Murder, historian James Hunter tells how his own Duror upbringing introduced him to the tragic story of James Stewart.

Chapter One

James was as fairly murdered as though the duke had got a fowling-piece and stalked him.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, Catriona

In Inveraray, capital of the Highland county of Argyll, at a little after eleven o’clock on the morning of Monday, 25 September 1752, sentence on James Stewart was pronounced by the Scottish High Court’s dempster. Nothing is known of that functionary. But it’s possible, despite this, to guess the way he spoke. From time immemorial in Scotland, the ‘dooms’ or judgements handed down by trial judges had been proclaimed publicly by doomsters or dempsters. Such dempsters must have cultivated forceful voices. It’s likely, therefore, that what the High Court’s dempster had to say in Inveraray was said in tones that carried clearly. His words would definitely have reached all the many folk thronging the church where, due to Inveraray’s lack of a large enough courtroom, the High Court had been sitting since the previous Thursday. Those same words may also have been audible to those who’d gathered outside the church’s door to learn the outcome of one of the longest and most contentious trials Scotland had ever staged.

In one of the ledger-like volumes kept by them for this purpose, the High Court’s clerks were meanwhile penning – with their customary care – the words enunciated by the court’s dempster. More than 250 years after they were inscribed there, those words can still be read in the High Court’s records. The passing of centuries has done little to mitigate their harshness.

James Stewart, the dempster told his listeners, was guilty of having been implicated – though as accessory rather than perpetrator – in the murder of Colin Campbell of Glenure. Campbell, when shot four months earlier, had been attending to his business as factor, or manager, on the Ardshiel estate – which the British government, in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46, had seized by way of punishing its owner, Charles Stewart, for his leading role in that failed uprising. James Stewart was Charles’s half-brother. And during the several years since Charles (who’d long since fled abroad) had set foot in Duror (the North Argyll locality which included Ardshiel), James – as he freely conceded – had been doing his best to ensure that his half-brother’s confiscated lands were administered in a manner that kept open the possibility of Charles (or, failing this, Charles’s wife and children) continuing to get some kind of income from the lands in question.

Prior to its judges turning things over to their dempster, the High Court had heard that James Stewart’s interventions in the management of the Ardshiel estate were such as to have brought him into conflict with Colin Campbell – James opposing, even seeking to sabotage, Colin’s plans. And for all that James had taken no active part, as was universally acknowledged, in Campbell’s assassination, people in Argyll (James included) were not greatly surprised when, shortly after Colin Campbell’s murder on 14 May 1752 in the Wood of Lettermore, not far from James Stewart’s Duror home, James was arrested on suspicion of having colluded in the factor’s killing. Nor was anyone in Argyll (James again included) surprised by the verdict reached in Inveraray on 25 September. The murder of Colin Campbell, after all, was reckoned on all sides to be a deeply subversive act. Both in Edinburgh and in London, politicians were united in their insistence that someone must pay a heavy price for it. And given the failure of the authorities to apprehend the man alleged by those same authorities to have fired on Campbell in the Wood of Lettermore, James Stewart – jailed in connection with the Lettermore crime and known to have been at loggerheads with the dead factor – was the obvious candidate to pay this price. There was thus a certain inevitability about James Stewart’s fate.

That fate had become all the more inescapable as a result of James’s trial having been presided over by a man with his own axe – indeed a whole set of axes – to grind in the matter of Colin Campbell’s death. Archibald Campbell, Duke of Argyll, was Scotland’s Lord Justice General. As such, he was entitled both to adjudicate on High Court cases and, when so adjudicating, to take precedence over such other judges – Lords Elchies and Kilkerran on this occasion – as might be present. But Duke Archibald’s decision to involve himself more than was usual in the case of James Stewart, or so it was widely suspected at the time, had less to do with his judicial position than with his other roles. The duke was both the British government’s leading representative in Scotland and the chief of Clan Campbell. In each of those capacities, the murdered factor having been an official of the government he served and a member of the clan he headed, Duke Archibald had a personal interest in avenging Colin Campbell’s death. Something of this would be revealed in the aftermath of what the High Court’s dempster had to say. For the moment, however, the Duke of Argyll, like the rest of the dempster’s Inveraray audience, sat silently while James Stewart’s sentence was spelled out.

James, the dempster declared, would be held in Inveraray until Thursday, 5 October when he would be taken north to Fort William, today a substantial urban centre but in 1752 a heavily garrisoned military strongpoint. At Fort William, the dempster went on, James would be kept in army custody until Tuesday, 7 November. Then, under armed guard, he would make one final journey, by way of Onich, to North Ballachulish, where the fiord-like Loch Leven joins the wider waters of Loch Linnhe and where, until it was replaced by a twentieth-century bridge, there was for several hundred years a well-used ferry. James, the dempster continued, would be ‘transported over [this] ferry of Ballachulish’ and ‘delivered . . . to the sheriff-depute of Argyllshire or his substitutes [and] . . . carried to a gibbet to be erected by the said sheriff on a conspicuous eminence upon the south side of, and near to, the said ferry’. This eminence is known as Cnap a’ Chaolais, meaning the hillock by the narrows. It is within a mile of the place where Colin Campbell died. And because of its proximity to the ever-busy Ballachulish Ferry, Cnap a’ Chaolais in 1752 was as public a site as could have been chosen for a gallows.¹

At Cnap a’ Chaolais, the High Court’s dempster announced, James Stewart, ‘upon Wednesday, the eighth day of November next [and] betwixt the hours of twelve at noon and two after noon [would] be hanged by the neck until he be dead’. Thereafter, as a dire warning to other wrongdoers, actual or potential, the hanged man’s corpse was to be sheathed in chains and suspended high above the approaches to Ballachulish Ferry for an unspecified period of time – a period which, in the event, would last for several years.²

A letter written by one of his lawyers on the day he was sentenced reports that James Stewart heard out the High Court’s dempster with ‘the greatest resolution and appearance of innocence’. James, his lawyer commented, then ‘addressed himself’ to the Duke of Argyll in these words: ‘I do declare, in the presence of Almighty God, that I had no previous knowledge of the murder of Colin Campbell of Glenure.’³

Those statements and others to the same effect – not least James’s defiant declaration that prosecution witnesses had told ‘untruths’ in the course of their evidence – were received, or so James’s lawyer wrote, with ‘great surprise’ by Duke Archibald. Angrily, the duke responded to the condemned man’s comments by making a speech of his own. No notes of this speech were made during its delivery. But some months later the Duke of Argyll’s remarks, with a view to their inclusion in a semi-official account of James Stewart’s trial, were reconstructed from the recollections of those of his hearers who were in agreement with the duke’s sentiments. By James’s sympathisers this published rendering of Duke Archibald’s comments was thought less brutally direct than what the duke had actually said by way of winding up James’s trial. The ‘speech spoke’, one such sympathiser insisted, ‘was much more acute [cutting] and bitter than the speech printed’. Maybe so. But even if the published speech is a watered-down version of the words he used on 25 September 1752, the Duke of Argyll’s observations, in their surviving form, remain extraordinarily revealing.⁴

Archibald Campbell, it must be emphasised, was one of the more eminent Scots – some would say the most eminent Scot – of his day. Administratively supreme north of the border, he also carried great weight in London. Nor were Duke Archibald’s interests confined to affairs of state. He was a lover and collector of books; he studied science and engineering; he was a gardener, a forester and an agricultural improver. He strove to promote the economic expansion both of Scotland and of the United Kingdom – a country which, during the Anglo-Scottish union negotiations of 1706 and 1707, he’d helped create. In Archibald Campbell, Duke of Argyll, then, qualities may be discerned that, by later commentators as well as by Duke Archibald’s contemporaries, were thought enlightened and progressive. Those qualities, it might be said, were what gave shape and direction to the policies with which Archibald Campbell had identified himself politically – policies, as his admirers might have added, that were helping to turn the United Kingdom of Scotland and England into one of the eighteenth-century world’s great powers.

And yet, when he spoke to James Stewart at the end of his trial, the Duke of Argyll showed himself to be other than a supremely self-assured symbol of a nation carrying all before it. As his words reveal, Archibald Campbell harboured profound anxieties – anxieties centring, that September morning in 1752, on the prisoner whose life the duke and his fellow judges had, minutes before, declared forfeit. Something of this is evident in the duke’s exploration of the nature of the crime that had brought James Stewart before him. For all its ‘uncivilised’ nature, the killing of Colin Campbell – a killing the duke labelled ‘heinous’, ‘horrid’, ‘base’ and ‘infamous’ – was not, Duke Archibald suggested, a piece of casual and unconsidered violence. On the contrary, the duke contended, Colin Campbell’s murder had the most deep-seated causes. Those causes – ‘the true original source’, as the duke put it, of James Stewart’s offence – were to be discovered in the ‘obstinate and almost incurable disaffection’ that had resulted in numerous Highland clans, including the one to which James belonged, more than once resorting to arms in the hope of overthrowing Britain’s ruling regime.⁵

This regime owed its existence to what the Duke of Argyll, still addressing James Stewart, called ‘the happy revolution’ of 1688. As the duke’s hearers (none more so than James) were well aware, that particular upheaval inaugurated a political and constitutional order which Duke Archibald and the bulk of his Campbell kin had been determinedly propping up – to their considerable benefit – ever since. So close, indeed, was the duke’s identification with post-1688 arrangements that, had the United Kingdom of 1752 been searched for someone thought to be archetypally representative of those arrangements, the search would probably have ended with Archibald Campbell. This, since Duke Archibald regarded Colin Campbell’s murder as amounting to an assault on the 1688 settlement, accounts for a good deal of the strong feeling he displayed in the course of his comments to James Stewart. Accounting for much of the rest of his aggravation is the fact that if the United Kingdom had also been ransacked for a set of folk more rooted than any other in their opposition to everything accomplished in 1688 and subsequently, then the search may have ended with James, with Charles, James’s half-brother, and with their Stewart relatives. Those were people for whom battling with the British state, and with this state’s Campbell servants, had long been a way of life.⁶

In James Stewart, then, the duke saw no straightforward criminal. He saw, instead, an enemy – an enemy against whom Duke Archibald considered himself to be waging a war his side might yet lose. This war had already gone on, if intermittently, for the best part of a century. And in the assassination of Colin Campbell of Glenure, the Duke of Argyll glimpsed the possible beginnings of yet another outbreak – an outbreak, the duke feared, that might unleash forces capable of blowing to smithereens everything he’d worked so hard to nurture and to safeguard.

From a twenty-first-century standpoint, the Duke of Argyll’s apprehensions seem wildly exaggerated. We know that he and his kind were ultimately to prevail; that they were to make their world safe for themselves and their successors; that the threat posed to the duke’s position, whether by James Stewart or by the beliefs James held, was, in the end, of no great consequence. But it’s easy to overlook, and vital to remember, that the Duke of Argyll in September 1752 knew none of this. Our past was his future. And that future, from the duke’s perspective, appeared anything but secure.

After all, though the constitutional structures dating from Duke Archibald’s ‘happy revolution’ of 1688 had been in place for more than sixty years when Colin Campbell met his death in the Wood of Lettermore, there continued to be many people – the Ardshiel factor’s killer, or killers, prominent among them, the duke believed – who wanted that revolution reversed. Their key objective was to restore to power the heirs of the Stuart king whose dethroning had been the principal outcome of the events of 1688. The supporters of a Stuart restoration were called Jacobites. That title derived from the Latinised name of the monarch, known in England as James II and in Scotland as James VII, who had fled to France rather than do battle with the army landed in Devon towards the end of 1688 by the Dutch-born Prince William of Orange, whom King James’s enemies had invited to take charge of what had been James’s kingdoms. During 1689 a challenge to the new dispensation, in the shape of a largely Highland rebellion in the former King James’s interest, was seen off – after some fierce fighting – by William’s followers. But Jacobitism as a cause, an ideal, even in some respects an ideology, survived this initial setback. In 1715, 1719 and 1745, Scotland’s Jacobites mounted further insurrections which, had they gone as planned, would have led to the now-dead King James’s son (in 1715 and 1719) or grandson (in 1745) occupying Britain’s throne. Since the Duke of Argyll would have been among the casualties of any such Jacobite comeback, and since the Jacobite attempt of 1745 had come closer to success than its predecessors, there was every reason for Archibald Campbell, just seven years after that attempt’s commencement, to be hostile to Jacobitism. There was particular reason, as already noted and as he himself now stressed, for Duke Archibald to harbour a profound dislike, even hatred, of the Stewarts of Appin – a clan whose territories included James Stewart’s native Duror and whose leading men included James’s half-brother, the exiled Charles Stewart of Ardshiel.

In 1715, the Duke of Argyll told James Stewart, his clansmen had joined ‘the rebel army’ which had besieged Inveraray that autumn and which, at Sheriffmuir some weeks later, fought a pitched battle with a pro-government force.⁷

Although he made no explicit mention of this on Monday, 25 September 1752, that force had included, as all the duke’s courtroom audience knew, the young Archibald Campbell – who’d sustained at Sheriff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map: The Appin Country
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index