positions. But many were not far removed economically from their clan members or tenants. A close rapport grew between the leaders and commoners and brought with it mutual feelings of faith, loyalty, and respect. The Chieftains needed this support in order to ward off attacks by neighbours. The tenants depended upon the chieftains’ benevolence to maintain the low rents. Besides, all ranks expected, by custom, to be treated like gentlemen.‘ There was more:

The intimate connexion of the chief with his people, their daily intercourse, the daily dependance they had on each other for immediate safety, the dangers which they shared, were all naturally calculated to produce a great degree of mutual sympathy and affection.’

From the time of William the Conqueror until the Rebellion of 1745, the Highland people had been fending off successfully English appropriation of their lands. The Chieftains had maintained relative independence as feudal lords, but this had been checked by Cromwell’s conquests in Scotland and the issue of the Rebellion of 1715.

The Rebellion of 1745 wiped out the system of land tenure as well as the supremacy of the Chieftains. This last rebellion was, like the Rebellion of 1715, a frustrated attempt by the Highlanders to end all English control and to gain autonomy for themselves under a Stuart monarchy. When this failed, the clanship society as the Scots had known it came to an end. The rebellion provoked the most drastic social changes in the Highlands’ turbulent history.6 In The Scottish Tradition in Can- ada, W. Stanford Reid argues that above all other consequences of the ’45 rebellion, “the Highlands were pacified.” He continues with an ef- fective statement on the immensity, and the devastating results of the English victory:

Every effort was made to destroy the clan system by wiping out the authority of the Chieftains, by banning the wearing of the kilt, by calling in all firearms and by building roads throughout the whole area. These measures were followed by the enlisting of whole regiments of clansmen to fight overseas in the Empire’s wars, and by the beginning of the clearance of people from the Highland glens. These uprooted Highlanders either migrated to Lowland cities such as Glasgow or crossed the sea to America, bearing with them the traditions, sen- timents, nostalgia and often anger of a displaced people.7

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