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UPON Saturday, the 28th day
of January, 1715-16, a party of the Clans, about fifty men, consisting of
the M'Donalds, M'Cleans, and Camerons, under the command of the Captain of
Clanranald, came from Drummond Castle (where they were quartered) to the
town of Muthill, under silence of night, betwixt eight and nine of the
clock, and without any advertisement given, or time allowed the people to
carry out their household furniture, sett the town on fire, and burnt down
houses, household furniture, and corn stacks to ashes; which was done in
such a barbarous manner as that they would not allow the poor people to save
from the flames that of their furniture, which they might have done. As for
instance, when the flames had consumed are honest merchant's house all to
his shop, which was divided from the rest of his house by a stone wall, in
order to save this much of his house which was about eight foot, his sons
went up to the roof to cutt the thatch above the wall, that the fire might
not proceed any further, they most barbarously presented their guns to fire
at them if they should not come down, and so were oblidged to suffer that,
which would have been a small refuge to the honest man and his numerous
familie, to be burnt down with the rest. Ane other instance of the barbarity
of this action: When they were burning the stack-yards they took special
care to sett fire to every stack, and guarded them, so that the people were
kept off from rescuing any of it from the fire. And when a certam person
offered a considerable summ of money, to allow him to save what he could of
one bear stack after it was kindled, and the fire proceeded a good length
upon it, this was not granted, but the man beaten for demanding it. This was
in a yard wherein there was reckoned to be more than two hundred bolls of
victuall, all consumed. And such was their inhumanity, that in some houses
the inhabitants narrowly escaped with their lives. In one family they
kindled a bed and a child in it, and had not the mother pulled it out of the
flames, half stifled, it had been presently burnt. And what of the people's
cloaths they had thrown out into the street to save them from the fire, they
carried most of them away with them, leaving wives and children to starve
with cold upon the snow in such a rigorous season. And that Lodovick
Drummond of Westerfeddall, late Chamberlain to the Lord Drummond, a violent
Papist, had a chief hand in influenceing to the bumeing of these towns, and
directed in the execution of that barbarous order, is notour. It was his
common threatning, when he was dragging the poor people out to the
Rebellion, that they who refused to go should have their houses burned,
themselves hanged before their own door, and their cattle all driven to the
camp at Perth. The loss sustained by the inhabitants of this town (tho' for
the most part very poor), as they gave it in under their hands, upon which
they are ready to depone, amounts to the summ of six thousand and ninety-six
pounds seventeen shillings and ten pennies Scotts money, which is about five
hundred pounds sterling. |
