History of the Stewarts | Battles and Historic Events
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Appin Murder
The Appin Murder was the shooting in the back of government agent Colin Campbell of Glenure – the ‘Red Fox’ in Kidnapped. He was assassinated in an ambush by an unknown hand in the Wood of Lettermore near Ballachulish by the side of Loch Linnhe in Argyll. Two days later, James Stewart from Glenduror known in Gaelic as Seumas a Ghlinne was taken in custody as an accessory to murder. The murder was assumed to have been committed by his foster son Allan Breac Stewart.
On May 14th 1752, Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure, the factor to the forfeited estates of the Charles Stewart V of Ardsheal was killed. Shot in the back by what is described as a marksman in the wood of Lettermore - although the guns of the time don´t really allow for shooting like that. The search for a culprit targeted the local clan, the Stewarts of Appin, who had recently suffered evictions on Campbell’s orders because of their support for the Jacobite cause. Investigations saw the chief suspect, Allan Breac Stewart flee, leaving people to turn to the last remaining leader of the Stewarts, James Stewart, a tacksman who would later be arrested and tried for the crime. He had led local opposition to attempts to evict tenants from the land which had been forfeited by the British government for the clan´s involvement in the Jacobite Rising of 1745. It was this that gave the murder and the trial of James Stewart or James of Glen a political dimension with the involvement of the government.
On the afternoon of May 14, 1752, Campbell and three companions made their way slowly along Loch Linnhe side. The following day evictions for non-payment of rent among some Stewart tenants were to take place. As they passed through the Wood of Lettermore a single shot suddenly rang from the hillside. Immediately Campbell slumped in the saddle wounded. “Oh, I am dead”, he shouted. “Take care of yourselves. He’s going to shoot you”. Or words like that.- accounts differ.
Lawyer Mungo Campbell, Glenure’s nephew, and riding close to him, saw a figure on the hillside wearing a short, dark coat and carrying a gun. Yet his first thought was that the man was too far away to have fired the shot. One shot was fired, but two bullets had passed through Glenure’s body. And so from the first few seconds after the crime, the Appin mystery began to unfold . . .
The death of Glenure, immediately set in motion an extraordinary chain of events. The King in London was informed. The Government, still jittery after being almost overthrown six years previously by the Jacobites thought that Glenure’s killing was the first shot of another rebellion. The order was given from London and Edinburgh: stop it in its tracks, use whatever force or means necessary and make an example of the perpetrators.
That single shot sparked one of the biggest murder hunts in Scottish history. Even shipping in the River Forth was intercepted.
On September 2nd James Stewart (half brother to Ardsheal from whom the estates had been confiscated) was moved from Fort William to Inveraray,. His trial started on 21st of September eleven of the fifteen jurors were Campbells in the country town of Argyllshire and the seat of the staunchly government supporting dukes of Argyllshire. The duke himself, Archibald Campbell presided over the court that tried Stewart so it was unlikely that any verdict other than a guilty verdict would have been returned. Four days later he was found guilty of aiding and abetting Allan Breac Stewart in the murder and executed on the knoll above the Ballachulish Ferry (Cnap a ´Chaolais) on 8 November. His body was left hanging on the gallows for more than 3 years under guard.
Then just over a century after Colin Campbell’s assassination, along came writer Robert Louis Stevenson, just back from America and intent on writing a history of the Highlands. After a family holiday in the spa town of Strathpeffer, the train journey was broken in Inverness, and while Stevenson walked around the city, his father went browsing to a favourite second-hand bookshop. There he found a little book - Trial of Stewart – so he bought it as background reading for his son’s history. Local tradition which Stevenson knew about pointed to the possibility of a conspiracy of the local clans involving the Appin Stewarts and the Campbells of Lochaber with Donald Stewart, son-in-law of the local laird Alexander of Ballachuish as the murderer.
It was from the account in the book of the trial that Kidnapped grew.. Stevenson was dismayed that justice had been discarded and that the James of the Glen, as the leading Stewart around, was a dead man from the moment the bullets entered Glenure’s back in the Wood of Lettermore. The prime suspect, Allan Breac Stewart, simply vanished. However it seems unlikely that he did it either.
It is claimed that only two of the old families in the area still possess the famous "secret" of the true identity of the murderer, although several others claim to do so. In 2001, Anda Penman, an 89-year-old descendant of the Stewarts of Appin, revealed what she alleged to be a long-held family secret. She said the murder was planned by four young Stewart lairds without the sanction of James of the Glens. There was a shooting contest among them and that the assassination was committed by the best marksman among the four, the young Donald Stewart of Ballachulish.
In 2013, the murder was examined again and it was agreed that whilst a possible case could be built on circumstantial evidence but given the circumstances of the trail and the duke´s presence there was no chance of even a not proven verdict. There is also an artwork of Allan Breac Stewart´s face. It can be seen here www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-23960171
You can also follow some of the key places and events in the Appin murder on the Stevenson Way http://www.stevensonway.org.uk/
With thanks to The National Archives of Scotland (photograph)
