continued to stand as
high as ever in the favour of James. It can therefore hardly be doubted
that, in those passages which shocked even the zealous supporters of
hereditary right, the Secretary merely expressed with fidelity the
feelings and intentions of his master, [336] Hamilton, by virtue of the
powers which the Estates had, before their adjournment, confided to him,
ordered Balcarras and Dundee to be arrested. Balcarras was taken and
confined, first in his own house, and then in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh.
But to seize Dundee was not so easy an enterprise. As soon as he
heard that warrants were out against him, he crossed the Dee with his
followers, and remained a short time in the wild domains of the House
of Gordon. There he held some communications with the Macdonalds and
Camerons about a rising. But he seems at this time to have known little
and cared little about the Highlanders. For their national character he
probably felt the dislike of a Saxon, for their military character the
contempt of a professional soldier. He soon returned to the Lowlands,
and stayed there till he learned that a considerable body of troops had
been sent to apprehend him, [337] He then betook himself to the hill
country as his last refuge, pushed northward through Strathdon and
Strathbogie, crossed the Spey, and, on the morning of the first of May,
arrived with a small band of horsemen at the camp of Keppoch before
Inverness.

The new situation in which Dundee was now placed, the new view of
society which was presented to him, naturally suggested new projects to
his inventive and enterprising spirit. The hundreds of athletic Celts
whom he saw in their national order of battle were evidently not allies
to be despised. If he could form a great coalition of clans, if he could
muster under one banner ten or twelve thousand of those hardy warriors,
if he could induce them to submit to the restraints of discipline, what
a career might be before him!

A commission from King James, even when King James was securely seated
on the throne, had never been regarded with much respect by Coll of the
Cows. That chief, however, hated the Campbells with all the hatred of a
Macdonald, and promptly gave in his adhesion to the cause of the House
of Stuart. Dundee undertook to settle the dispute between Keppoch and
Inverness. The town agreed to pay two thousand dollars, a sum which,
small as it might be in the estimation of the goldsmiths of Lombard
Stre