On 1 February 1692, roughly 120 soldiers arrived at the settlements strung along the floor of Glencoe and asked for quarters. They were two companies of the Earl of Argyll’s Regiment of Foot, commanded by Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, and there was nothing obviously sinister in the request. Billeting soldiers under free quarter was a routine substitute for taxation in a Highland economy that ran on cattle rather than coin. The MacDonalds took them in and fed them.
It is worth being clear about who these men were, because the popular version of this story gets it wrong. Argyll’s was a regiment of the Scottish standing army, raised for the government and recruited largely in Argyllshire — Cowal, Kintyre, districts with heavy Lowland settlement. The 1691 muster rolls show relatively few men actually named Campbell, though many came from Campbell septs. The Glencoe Folk Museum puts the number of genuine Campbells in the detachment at twelve. Glenlyon himself was tied by marriage to the household he would shortly be ordered to destroy: a niece of his was married to one of MacIain’s sons. He was also broke, having joined the army because bankruptcy had left his family destitute, a point the Clan Campbell Society is understandably keen to make but which the record does not contradict.
The soldiers stayed twelve days. The traditional accounts fill those days with shared fires, cards and MacDonald whisky, and the picture is plausible enough for men billeted in a small glen in February, but it is colour rather than evidence. What the record supports is the shape of it: a fortnight of hospitality accepted, and then, at five o’clock on the morning of 13 February, the killing.
The Horror
The pretext was paperwork. Under the terms of the indemnity, Highland chiefs had to swear allegiance to William by 1 January 1692. The difficulty was that permission to submit came from the exiled James VII in a document dated 12 December which did not reach Glengarry until 23 December and was not passed on until 28 December, leaving three days.
Alasdair MacDonald, MacIain, went first to Fort William at the end of December, well inside the deadline. Colonel John Hill, the governor there, had no authority to administer the oath and sent him on sixty miles to Inveraray with a letter asking Sheriff Colin Campbell to take it anyway. Winter roads slowed the journey; the story goes that he was also detained for a day en route, deliberately. At Inveraray he had to wait again for the sheriff to return, and the oath was finally administered on 6 January — five days late. MacIain went home believing his people were covered. Alone among the chiefs who submitted, his name was left out of the indemnity that followed.
The article of faith that the orders were issued by Sir John Dalrymple and signed by King William is close to the truth but not quite it, and the difference matters. William did sign instructions in January 1692 authorising his commanders to act against the Highland rebels by fire and sword, and singling out the MacDonalds of Glencoe as a fit example of public justice. Dalrymple, Master of Stair and joint Secretary of State for Scotland, supplied the appetite: he wrote that “the clan Donell must be rooted out”, and described the extirpation of Glencoe as “a great work of charity to be exact in rooting out that damnable sect”. The famous wording, though, belongs to a third man. It appears in Major Robert Duncanson’s order to Glenlyon, written on the evening of 12 February and preserved in the National Library of Scotland: “You are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebells, the McDonalds of Glenco, and putt all to the sword under Seventy.”
The rest of that order instructed Glenlyon to secure the avenues out of the glen so that no man escaped, to begin at five o’clock precisely, and told him that this was by the King’s special command and that the miscreants were to be cut off root and branch. It also warned him what would happen to an officer who failed to carry it out. Whatever Glenlyon felt about the men he had been eating with for twelve days — and there are persistent stories that he helped two young MacDonalds slip away — he had been handed a document that made refusal a career-ending act at best.
MacIain was shot as he rose from his bed. His wife was stripped and turned out of the burning house and died the following day. The detail that has travelled furthest, that soldiers tore the rings from her fingers with their teeth and stripped the flesh with them, belongs to clan tradition and the retellings that grew out of it rather than to the evidence taken in 1695, and it should be read as story.
The number of dead is the claim most often stated with false confidence. Thirty-eight is the figure reported by Colonel Hamilton’s men, who came into the glen from the far end and counted bodies. The MacDonalds themselves put their known slain at about twenty-five. Modern research settles at around thirty. None of the three is a census, and thirty-eight is best described as the highest contemporary count rather than a verified total.
What happened next is where the record goes quietest and the legend loudest. The parties detailed to seal the passes arrived late, and most of the glen’s inhabitants got away into the hills in a February blizzard, having watched their houses burned and their cattle driven off. Nearly every account, popular and local, says a further number — often given as around forty — died of exposure in the mountains in the days that followed. No record supports a figure. There are no names, no count and no burials, and the honest position is that an unknown number of people who escaped the muskets almost certainly did not survive the winter that the soldiers had engineered by destroying their shelter and their food.
The Modern Relic
Glencoe is now one of the most visited valleys in Scotland, and the National Trust for Scotland manages much of it. At the foot of Meall Mòr, a few minutes from the visitor centre, the Trust has reconstructed a seventeenth-century turf and creel house of the kind the MacDonalds lived in, built with materials taken from the glen and filled periodically with peat and wood smoke so that visitors walk into something closer to the conditions than to a display case. Above the river at Upper Carnoch stands the memorial: an eighteen-foot tapering granite Celtic cross rising from a cairn, cut by Alexander Macdonald and Co. of Aberdeen and erected in 1883.
The most affecting relic was found only recently. Excavations by the University of Glasgow and the Trust in Gleann Leac-na-muidhe, at a site traditionally identified as MacIain’s summer settlement, turned up a hearth with a small pot buried beneath the hearth stone. Inside, in August 2023, a student found thirty-six silver and bronze coins from England, France, the Spanish Netherlands and the Papal States, the earliest from the late 1500s and none minted after the 1680s. Someone lifted a stone, hid their money and never came back for it.
At the Clachaig Inn there is a sign reading “No Hawkers or Campbells”. It is a piece of modern dark humour rather than an unbroken century-old grudge, and claims that it hung for over a century before being taken down do not survive checking; the sign is still there.
The 1695 inquiry is remembered for a phrase it did not quite deliver. A commission of the Scottish Parliament investigated whether there was a case to answer under the Act of 1587 against slaughter under trust — the killing in cold blood of someone whose hospitality you have accepted or who has surrendered on terms — which is where the popular label “murder under trust” comes from. The commission examined whether the men had exceeded their orders rather than whether the orders were lawful, a boundary set by the fact that the King’s own signature lay at the top of them. It concluded that Stair and Hamilton had a case to answer, and left the decision to William. Nobody was ever tried. Stair lost his office, was back in government by 1700 and was made an earl under Queen Anne. Glenlyon died at Bruges in 1696; Duncanson was killed in Spain in 1705.
The clan feud reading of Glencoe came later, largely through Macaulay, and it has outlasted the evidence because it is a more comfortable story: two Highland families, an old score, a private horror. Both the National Trust for Scotland and the Clan Campbell Society reject it, from opposite directions and for the same reason. Dalrymple chose Argyll’s regiment knowing exactly how its involvement would be read, and the misreading has served the government’s memory well for three centuries. What happened in the glen was policy, written in Edinburgh and London and signed at the top.
George R. R. Martin has repeatedly cited Glencoe, alongside the Black Dinner of 1440, as an inspiration for the Red Wedding. The common thread is not the body count but the violation: guest right broken, a table turned into a trap. Highland hospitality was not sentiment, it was the infrastructure that made travel and survival possible in a country with no inns and no law worth the name. Killing men who had fed you did not merely offend a custom. It taught every household in the Highlands that an open door was a risk, and that is the part the record shows the government understood before it gave the order.
