In 1754 an Act “annexed the forfeited estates of the Jacobites who had been out (or many of them) inalienably to the Crown.”  The estates were restored in 1784; meanwhile the profits were to be used for the improvement of the Highlands.  If submissive tenants received better terms and larger leases than of old, Jacobite tenants were evicted for not being punctual with rent.  Therefore, on May 14, 1752, some person unknown shot Campbell of Glenure, who was about evicting the tenants on the lands of Lochiel and Stewart of Ardshiel in Appin.  Campbell rode down from Fort William to Ballachulish ferry, and when he had crossed it said, “I am safe now I am out of my mother’s country.”  But as he drove along the old road through the wood of Lettermore, perhaps a mile and a half south of Ballachulish House, the fatal shot was fired.  For this crime James Stewart of the Glens was tried by a Campbell jury at Inveraray, with the Duke on the bench, and was, of course, convicted, and hanged on the top of a knoll above Ballachulish ferry.  James was innocent, but Allan Breck Stewart was certainly an accomplice of the man with the gun, which, by the way, was the property neither of James Stewart nor of Stewart of Fasnacloich.  The murderer was anxious to save James by avowing the deed, but his kinsfolk, saying, “They will only hang both James and you,” bound him hand and foot and locked him up in the kitchen on the day of James’s execution. {293} Allan lay for some weeks at the house of a kinsman in Rannoch, and escaped to France, where he had a fight with James Mor Macgregor, then a spy in the service of the Duke of Newcastle.

This murder of “the Red Fox” caused all the more excitement, and is all the better remembered in Lochaber and Glencoe, because agrarian violence in revenge for eviction has scarcely another example in the history of the Highlands.

CONCLUSION.

Space does not permit an account of the assimilation of Scotland to England in the years between the Forty-five and our own time:  moreover, the history of this age cannot well be written without a dangerously close approach to many “burning questions” of our day.  The History of the Highlands, from 1752 to the emigrations witnessed by Dr Johnson (1760- 1780), and of the later evictions in the interests of sheep farms and deer forests, has never been studied as it ought to be in the rich manuscript materials which are easily accessible.  The great literary Renaissance of Scotland, from 1745 to the death of Sir Walter Scott; the years of Hume, a pioneer in philosophy and in history, and of the Rev. Principal Robertson (with him and Hume, Gibbon professed, very modestly, that he did not rank); the times of Adam Smith, of Burns, and of Sir Walter, not to speak of the Rev. John Home, that foremost tragic poet, may be studied in many a history of literature.  According to Voltaire, Scotland led the world in all studies, from metaphysics to gardening.  We think of Watt, and add engineering.