Towns > Helensburgh > 1875 - Battrum's guide and directory to Helensburgh and neighbourhood

GLEN FRUIN. 75
scribed clan. Enactments had been passed against them
and commissions obtained " to fersen and assege their housis
and strengthis, raise fyre and use all kind of force and wer-
lyke ingyne " against them. Such commissions put into the
hands of crafty and designing statesmen like Archibald, Earl
of Argyll, were not likely to prove a dead letter. There is
rather reason to suppose that, as Breadalbane and Argyll had
grasped at and secured the lands of this clan in the counties
of Perth and Argyll, and were exposed to the retaliative
wrath of the oppressed, these commissions were obtained for
their own particular benefit. That was not an age of par-
liamentary commissions, or committees of inquiry into the
proceedings of men in power; and the most lawless and
rapacious deeds might, under slight sanction of authority,
be safely perpetrated in a country so little known as the
Highlands of Scotland. How the feud with the clan Colqu-
houn originated does not very clearly appear from any
account which has been handed down. It is asserted on the
one hand that the Colquhouns, lending a helping hand to
the strong, were the original aggressors ; and on the other,
that the murder of Sir Humphrey Colquhoun in the Castle
of Bannachra, in 1592, had been planned and accomplished
by the Macgregors, in company with the Macfarlanes, and
that this was the foundation of the quarrel. But neither of
these statements rest on any broad basis of fact, and can
only be adopted as probabilities in absence of anything more
tangible. There seems, however, to be good reason for
supposing that, for artful and selfish purposes, the original
quarrel was fomented into such a bitter and relentless hate
as clansmen only could cherish, by Archibald of Argyll.
He was then King's Lieutenant, and something more, in
the government of this country ; and the use he made of his