r day. In three successive sittings Tweedale
was able to restrain the eagerness of the assembly. But, when he at
length announced that the report had been completed; and added that it
would not be laid before the Estates till it had been submitted to the
King, there was a violent outcry. The public curiosity was intense;
for the examination had been conducted with closed doors; and both
Commissioners and clerks had been sworn to secrecy. The King was in the
Netherlands. Weeks must elapse before his pleasure could be taken; and
the session could not last much longer. In a fourth debate there were
signs which convinced the Lord High Commissioner that it was expedient
to yield; and the report was produced. [598]

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 Itali