It is now generally acknowledged that on this occasion, however it may have been in the next century, the action of the Highland chiefs was not inspired by devotion to the House of Stuart.  Lochiel himself may indeed have been moved by some personal consideration for the exiled King.  He had fought bravely under Montrose for Charles the First, and under Middleton for Charles the Second.  From the latter King he had received more than one letter full of those flattering assurances Charles knew so well how to make.  By James he had been graciously welcomed at Whitehall, and had received the honour of knighthood from the royal hand.  He was brave, wise, generous, and faithful, and, even in a less rude society than that in which his lot was cast, his manners would have been called agreeable and his education certainly not contemptible.  But even Lochiel’s loyalty was not suffered to run counter to his interests.  In Lochaber the name of James was as nothing compared with the name of Evan Dhu, and the law of the King of England gave place to the law of the great Chief of the Camerons.  As for the rest, the dispute between Whigs and Jacobites was no more to them than the dispute between the Guelphs and Ghibellines had been to their ancestors.  They cared not the value of a single sheep whether James or William sat on the throne of Great Britain, so long as neither interfered with them.  No later than the previous year the authority of James had been insulted and his soldiers beaten by one of these independent lordlings—­Colin Macdonald of Keppoch, familiarly known as Coll of the Cows, for his skill in tracking his neighbour’s cattle over the wildest mountains to the most secret coverts.[78]

But for what loyalty to the House of Stuart was powerless to effect a motive was found in the hatred to the House of Argyle.  Nearly all the chiefs of the Western Highlands were vassals to Mac Callum More, the head of the great clan of Campbell.  The numerous branches of the Macdonalds, who had once been lords of the Hebrides and all the mountain districts of Argyleshire and Invernessshire, the Camerons, the Macnaghtens, the Macleans, the Stuarts of Appin, all these paid tribute (it would be probably more correct to say owed tribute) to the Marquis of Argyle, and all were ready to welcome any chance of freedom from that odious bondage.  The early loyalty of Lochiel had probably been as much inspired by the fact that he was fighting against an Argyle as for a Stuart, as it is possible had been the loyalty of Montrose himself.  In 1685 he had cheerfully summoned his clan to repel the invasion of another chief of that hated House; and now the Revolution had brought back from exile yet another to exercise the old tyranny.  This was enough to make the Revolution a hateful thing in the eyes of Lochiel and his neighbours.  But it was also believed that James had conceived the idea of buying up from the great Highland nobles their feudal rights over the clans, and had only been prevented