It is a paper highly creditable to those who framed it, an excellent digest of evidence, clear, passionless, and austerely just.  No source from which valuable information was likely to be derived had been neglected.  Glengarry and Keppoch, though notoriously disaffected to the government, had been permitted to conduct the case on behalf of their unhappy kinsmen.  Several of the Macdonalds who had escaped from the havoc of that night had been examined, and among them the reigning Mac Ian, the eldest son of the murdered Chief.  The correspondence of the Master of Stair with the military men who commanded in the Highlands had been subjected to a strict but not unfair scrutiny.  The conclusion to which the Commissioners came, and in which every intelligent and candid inquirer will concur, was that the slaughter of Glencoe was a barbarous murder, and that of this barbarous murder the letters of the Master of Stair were the sole warrant and cause.

That Breadalbane was an accomplice in the crime was not proved; but he did not come off quite clear.  In the course of the investigation it was incidentally discovered that he had, while distributing the money of William among the Highland Chiefs, professed to them the warmest zeal for the interest of James, and advised them to take what they could get from the usurper, but to be constantly on the watch for a favourable opportunity of bringing back the rightful King.  Breadalbane’s defence was that he was a greater villain than his accusers imagined, and that he had pretended to be a Jacobite only in order to get at the bottom of the Jacobite plans.  In truth the depths of this man’s knavery were unfathomable.  It was impossible to say which of his treasons were, to borrow the Italian classification, single treasons, and which double treasons.  On this occasion the Parliament supposed him to have been guilty only of a single treason, and sent him to the Castle of Edinburgh.  The government, on full consideration, gave credit to his assertion that he had been guilty of a double treason, and let him out again.599

The Report of the Commission was taken into immediate consideration by the Estates.  They resolved, without one dissentient voice, that the order signed by William did not authorise the slaughter of Glencoe.  They next resolved, but, it should seem, not unanimously, that the slaughter was a murder.600 They proceeded to pass several votes, the sense of which was finally summed up in an address to the King.  How that part of the address which related to the Master of Stair should be framed was a question about which there was much debate.  Several of his letters were called for and read; and several amendments were put to the vote.  It should seem that the Jacobites and the extreme Presbyterians were, with but too good cause, on the side of severity.  The majority, under the skilful management of the Lord High Commissioner, acquiesced in words which made it impossible for the