In a moment a brawl began
in the crowd, none could say how or where. Hundreds of dirks were out:
cries of "Help" and "Murder" were raised on all sides: many wounds were
inflicted: two men were killed: the sitting broke up in tumult; and the
terrified Sheriff was forced to put himself under the protection of the
chief, who, with a plausible bow of respect and concern, escorted him
safe home. It is amusing to think that the man who performed this feat
is constantly extolled as the most faithful and dutiful of subjects
by writers who blame Somers and Burnet as contemners of the legitimate
authority of Sovereigns. Lochiel would undoubtedly have laughed
the doctrine of nonresistance to scorn. But scarcely any chief in
Invernessshire had gained more than he by the downfall of the House
of Argyle, or had more reason than he to dread the restoration of that
House. Scarcely any chief in Invernessshire, therefore, was more alarmed
and disgusted by the proceedings of the Convention.

But of all those Highlanders who looked on the recent turn of fortune
with painful apprehension the fiercest and the most powerful were the
Macdonalds. More than one of the magnates who bore that widespread name
laid claim to the honour of being the rightful successor of those
Lords of the Isles, who, as late as the fifteenth century, disputed the
preeminence of the Kings of Scotland. This genealogical controversy,
which has lasted down to our own time, caused much bickering among the
competitors. But they all agreed in regretting the past splendour of
their dynasty, and in detesting the upstart race of Campbell. The old
feud had never slumbered. It was still constantly repeated, in verse and
prose, that the finest part of the domain belonging to the ancient
heads of the Gaelic nation, Islay, where they had lived with the pomp of
royalty, Iona, where they had been interred with the pomp of religion,
the paps of Jura, the rich peninsula of Kintyre, had been transferred
from the legitimate possessors to the insatiable Mac Callum More. Since
the downfall of the House of Argyle, the Macdonalds, if they had not
regained their ancient superiority, might at least boast that they had
now no superior. Relieved from the fear of their mighty enemy in the
West, they had turned their arms against weaker enemies in the East,
against the clan of Mackintosh and against the town of Inverness.

The clan of Mackintosh, a branch of an ancient and renowned tribe which
t