The Duke of Argyll.

The Jacobite standard was raised by the Earl of Mar on 6 September 1715 at Braemar. The dignity of the ceremony itself was upset when the gilt ball on top of the standard fell to the ground, an event considered to be an ill omen by the watching Highlanders. Mar made a speech, regretting his own part in pushing through the Act of Union in 1707 and now admitting it to be a mistake.

At Westminster, the Parliament passed an Act for Encouraging Loyalty, often known, quite mistakenly, as the Clan Act. This required all `suspected . . . persons, whose estates or principal residences are in Scotland, to appear at Edinburgh, or where it shall be judged expedient, to find bail for their good behaviour’. Twenty-one peers and forty-one gentry were summoned but, of these, only two surrendered themselves, whereupon they were promptly arrested. This action hardly encouraged loyalty to the Hanoverian regime, forcing those remaining at liberty into the Jacobite camp, including the eighty-year-old John Campbell of Glenorchy, Earl of Breadalbane. He persuaded a doctor and a minister to sign a medical certificate, claiming that he was too ill to travel to Edinburgh, as he suffered from an alarming array of illnesses, such as `coughs, rheums, gravels, stitches, defluxions and disease of the kidneys’. Nevertheless, he managed to join Mar at Perth on 20 September 1715. Others made similar excuses or simply ignored the summons.

By now, the government in London was seriously alarmed. It had already ordered three regiments of infantry from Ireland which had arrived in Edinburgh on 24 August. Meanwhile, Major-General Joseph Wightman, as the commander-in-chief in Scotland, had ordered all the regular troops in Scotland to Stirling, where they had begun to muster towards the end of August, amounting to barely 1,000 men. Then John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, was ordered north to replace Wightman as commander-in- chief of the government forces in Scotland. Argyll wrote back to London, assessing the deteriorating situation thus: `If the enemy think fit to act with the vigour that men of commonsense would, in their circumstances, the handful of [Hanoverian] troops now in Scotland may be beat out of the country.’ Indeed, Mar was now ready to march south from Braemar and his forces would soon capture Perth.

On the night of 14 September, Argyll reached Edinburgh where a botched attempt to seize the castle for James Edward Stuart had failed a few days previously. He inspected its defences and then spent the next week calling up all the forces he could muster. But, by the end of his first week in Scotland, he still had only 1,600 men, mostly ill-trained and poorly equipped. Against them was a Jacobite army apparently consisting of several thousand of men. By 21 September, Argyll thought the situation so dangerous that he wrote south to say that he was surprised that:

his Majesty’s Ministers still persist to think this matter a jest, and that we are in a condition to put a stop to it. Give me leave to say, Sir, that if all of us who have the honour to serve his Majesty here are not either knaves or cowards, we ought to be believed when we tell you that this country is in the extremest danger.

Three days later, he wrote again, begging for yet more troops: `I must end with insisting on considerable reinforcements, for without it, or a miracle, not only this country will be utterly destroyed but the rest of his Majesty’s dominions put in the extremest danger.’ Only sheer incompetence on Mar’s part seemed likely now to stop the Jacobite cause from triumphing in Scotland.