Last of the Redshanks: The
Raid on Thurso, 1649
by Dr. Andrew McGregor
In the far north of Scotland the Highland mountains grow smaller, eventually
leveling out into vast stretches of rolling countryside that end abruptly with
rocky cliffs lurching out over the cold northern seas. Before the Celts arrived
these lands were ruled by Norsemen, the powerful ‘Sea-Kings of Orkney'. The
names of their settlements in Scotland's northeast county of Caithness
reflected their beliefs, like the town of Thurso, named for the Norse god Thor.
Though the town still stands after all these centuries, it came perilously
close to obliteration one day in 1649. That year's raid on Thurso by a small
group of veteran Irish fighters and a handful of Scottish highlanders is not
found on any list of Scotland's great battles, but the raid was significant
largely for one reason – it marked the last gasp of the once powerful Irish
brigade (known as ‘Redshanks') that came to Scotland to aid the Marquis of
Montrose and his Royalist forces during the British Civil War.
Combining innovative tactics with somewhat antiquated weapons the Irish won a
resounding series of victories for a year after their arrival in Scotland in
1644. Warfare in Britain was in transition during the 17th century. Pikes and
muskets dominated the battlefield but there was still a place for men like the
Irish who were expert in the use of sword and shield. The matchlock musket was
difficult and time-consuming to load and could only be used effectively in
battle by highly disciplined troops performing a complicated drill.
In battle the musketeers commonly formed up in six ranks. After the front rank
fired in volley they would ‘countermarch' to the rear to begin reloading while
the next rank moved to the front to fire their volley. Inexperienced troops
found the maneuver difficult. Nervousness interfered with the dozens of steps
involved in reloading the musket, while the men in the front rank tended to
discharge their weapons quickly and without aim in order to take their place at
the rear again as soon as possible. Many Civil War battles were lost because
half-trained musketeers would have been more useful with pikes in their hands
rather than firearms. Artillery was often present on the battlefield, but
tended to be so poorly served that it had little impact. Unlike the romantic
image of charge and counter-charge by valiant swordsmen against resolute
defenders, many Scottish battles of the era degenerated into rock-throwing by
both sides.
The trained swordsmen of the highland clans had a fearsome reputation, but in
reality they were always few in number. Most of the clansmen formed an
untrained rabble, useful only for pressing home an advantage already won by the
professionals in the first rank. In the impoverished Highlands there were few
who could afford the expensive tools of a Celtic warrior – a broadsword, a
targe (shield), a dirk (shortsword), a musket and pistols. Each clan maintained
a small group of professional fighters who kept close to the chief and led the
rest of the clan into battle. Most of the barefoot men brought on campaign had
to wait for someone to be killed in order to seize a weapon for themselves.
Nevertheless, the highlanders achieved several notable victories serving under
Montrose, but their desire to return home immediately with their loot resulted
in an unfortunate tendency for the highland ranks to dissolve after a victory
as surely as if they had been defeated.
In the end the total numbers brought to the battlefield mattered far less than
the number of professional soldiers involved on each side. A small core of men
skilled in the use of their weapons and tempered in the continental
battlefields of the Thirty Years War could easily rout far larger numbers of
inexperienced men. It was in this sense that the largely veteran Irish Brigade
(which may have included many MacDonalds from the Western Isles) was able to
have an immediate impact in the Scottish campaigns of the Civil War. Under
their leader Alistair MacColla (sometimes known as ‘Colkitto'), the Irish
perfected a tactic that came to be known as ‘the Highland Charge' after its
adoption by Scottish highlanders. The tactic involved getting in close to the
enemy before letting off a single short-range volley from their muskets into
the front ranks. The muskets were then tossed aside as the Irish and their
highland allies took sword in hand to emerge screaming from the smoke of their
musket-fire. With the hard-charging Celts bearing down fast only seasoned
regulars could be expected to resist the urge to break and run at this point.
Just as important to Montrose as the fearsome reputation of his Irish fighters
was their discipline under fire and their willingness to fight defensive
actions as well as charge headlong into the enemy. Between battles the brigade
remained an organized, armed force while the highlanders came and went
according to their needs and whims. To be fair, most of the highlanders had
farms to tend to, animals to care for and families who were unlikely to survive
long without male providers and defenders. Any booty that could be obtained
through battle was desperately needed at home.
In mid-1646 Charles surrendered to the Scottish army campaigning in England. In
a bizarre turn of events the King now made an alliance with his bitter foes,
the Scottish Covenanters (so-named for their ‘national covenant' against the
King's attempts to interfere with Scottish Protestantism). The latter insisted
the King disband his forces. Many of the surviving Irish fighters in Scotland
began to return home in small groups or joined up with armed groups in the
Western Isles and Highlands. Alistair MacColla refused to lay down his arms but
was soon bottled up in Kintyre with a group of Irish and highlanders (mostly
MacDonalds) by the pro-government Campbells. MacColla was driven out the next
spring, fleeing to Islay Island and eventually to Ireland. By February 1647 the
Covenanters had tired of the King's prevarications in fulfilling their demands.
Charles was turned over to the English Parliamentarians and the Scottish army
returned home, ready to mop up the last Royalist resistance. Isolated castles
and their Royalist garrisons fell one by one. Captured highlanders were
typically paroled, but the Irish were almost always massacred, sometimes by the
hundreds. It quickly became routine to hang any Irishman captured in Scotland,
encouraging those Irish Redshanks still at large to make their way back to
Ireland. Many Catholic highlanders joined them to continue the fight in
Ireland, but these groups were soon destroyed in a pair of disastrous battles.
On January 30, 1649, Charles I was executed by the Parliamentarians in London.
By this time there were few Irish fighters left in Scotland. Those who remained
at first fought on as bands of guerrilla fighters, but they eventually
developed a taste for looting, robbery and extortion. One of these bands was
led by Donald Macallister Mullich, a "powerful and ferocious" Irishman who
fought under Montrose in the Civil War. The band's activities gained notice
after they became involved in a spectacular robbery with Niel MacKay, leader of
the Abrach MacKays in Strathnaver.
In 1648 the Earl of Sutherland had sent a large armed party under his
chamberlain to collect the rents in Strathnaver. Niel MacKay disputed the
Earl's right to collect rents in parts of Strathnaver and was prepared to
enforce his point of view with the sword. MacKay persuaded Donald Macallister's
band of a dozen Irishmen to help him; together they drove off the taxmen and
relieved Sutherland's chamberlain of all the rents he had already collected.
The Earl went to Edinburgh to complain before Parliament personally, obtaining
a company of 100 soldiers to help bring Niel MacKay to justice. The government
men could not find the fugitive in the forest, nor could they find the cave
that became his temporary home. The latter was described by 19th century author
Robert MacKay as being "in the side of a mountain, scarcely perceptible, and so
narrow at the entry as only to admit of one on all fours, but so roomy within
as to contain a great number of men, and admitting air at the top through a
cranny in the rock."
A year after the robbery Niel MacKay arrived in Thurso to visit Sir James
Sinclair of Murkle. He seems to have been followed there by Macallister, who
had added several Highland desperadoes to his band of hell-raisers. As was his
habit wherever he went, Macallister sent a message the civic leaders of Thurso
demanding coin and provisions. Outraged by their refusal, the Irish captain
decided to help himself by raiding the town on a Sunday when everyone would be
in St.Peter's church. Macallister was also determined to wreak his revenge for
the townspeople's defiance by torching the church during services. When one of
his ruffians objected to such blasphemy, Macallister replied in bold Gaelic;
"In defiance of God and the Sunday, Donald will spill blood".
At the time, MacKay was living with a handful of retainers in a house at a fair
distance from Thurso. When the locals learned of Macallister's arrival outside
the church, they armed themselves and led by Sir James Sinclair (who habitually
took his sword to church) they attacked the bandits. Driven from Thurso,
Macallister headed to MacKay's house with the enraged citizens close behind
him.Despite being close friends with the Irishman, MacKay may have been unaware
of Macallister's plans for Thurso and was certainly unprepared for battle with
such a small group of men. The arrival on MacKay's heels of his recent ally
Macallister and a raiding party was enough to convince the people of Thurso of
MacKay's connivance in a scheme to pillage the town and murder its people. It
was not long before MacKay and his men were fighting side-by-side with
Macallister's bandits.
The fight was bitter and relentless, with the caterans defending the house
falling one by one to the furious attackers. Having survived countless battles,
there was a common belief that a lead bullet could not kill the Irish marauder
Macallister. One of Sir James Sinclair's servants cut a silver button from his
master's coat and loaded it into a pistol. Determined to slay Macallister, the
would-be killer succeeded only in piercing the Irishman's ear. Surprised but
still on his feet, Macallister coolly exclaimed; "Hoot! The fellow, he's
deafened me!" Eventually steel, if not lead, brought down the notorious
freebooter. Niel MacKay was killed in the early stages of the fight. Sir James,
unaware of his friend's death (and perhaps uncertain about his role in the
attack), ordered his men "Let no man touch Niel MacKay!" When informed that
MacKay had already fallen, Sinclair announced gravely; "Then spare none".
The question of MacKay's involvement remains open. Was it mere coincidence that
Macallister's men arrived at Thurso just behind him? There seems little reason
for MacKay to contemplate such a desperate and despicable act as burning a
church with its congregation still inside, particularly in his own region,
where retribution would be swift and inevitable. Yet, when the going got rough
for the freebooters in Thurso, they headed immediately for the house where
MacKay was staying. They may have expected the help of MacKay and his men after
aiding them against the Earl of Sutherland the previous year. Having realized
that the bandits intended to burn them alive, the seething mob that poured out
of Thurso in pursuit was probably not in the mood to listen to explanations of
innocence. In any case MacKay and his men were of the professional fighting
class, and once under attack would not have failed to respond in kind
immediately.
None were spared to answer these questions. Only two of the bandits escaped the
massacre, fleeing half a mile along the rocky sea-side cliffs to the village of
Scrabster, where they were set upon and killed. In Robert MacKay's 1829 history
of the Clan MacKay, the author recalled seeing the place of their death marked
by two large stones. The bodies of the rest were buried at the main entrance of
the church (last used for services in 1832 and now a picturesque ruin). The
remains of the caterans do not seem to have carried much respect with the
locals; Robert MacKay records seeing in the possession of a Thurso merchant a
remarkably large molar tooth recently pulled from one of the skulls. Niel
MacKay's mortal remains were another matter. Sir James was grief-stricken at
the death of his friend who, moreover, had been his guest in the area. Sinclair
ordered MacKay's body to be interned in his own family plot, with the late
chief's coat-of-arms carved on the gravestone. It being the custom in the north
at the time to take revenge for the death of any chief, Niel MacKay's son, also
named Niel, began the hunt for the men who brought down his father. The younger
Niel killed a man closely involved, but the actual culprit eventually tired of
being hunted and fled abroad.
With their days of victories under Montrose and Alisdair MacColla long behind
them, the last of the ‘Redshanks' met an ignoble death, their bones dumped in a
pit outside the very church they intended to burn. In the following year, 1650,
Montrose attempted a comeback from the Orkney Islands that lay within sight of
Thurso across the northern sea. After crossing to the mainland with his hastily
raised force of Orkney natives and Danish mercenaries (a poor substitute for
MacColla's Irish Brigade), Montrose was quickly defeated and sent on to
Edinburgh to be hanged and quartered. His brilliant ally Alistair MacColla had
already been killed at the 1647 battle of Knocknanuss in Ireland when his men
made the fatal mistake of dispersing to loot the enemy's baggage train after
slashing their way through the Parliamentarian infantry. The massacre of
Macallister and his men at Thurso brought a brutal end to the Redshanks in
Scotland. It was not the end of Irish fighting men in Scotland, however. That
would wait another hundred years for the end of Prince Charles Stewart's failed
rising of 1745-46.
Show Footnotes and
Bibliography
Sources
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the 10th Century, Wick, 1887
Gordon, Sir Robert: History of the House of Sutherland, Edinburgh,
1813
Haythornwaite, Philip: The English Civil War 1642-1651: An Illustrated Military
History, Poole, Dorset, 1983
Hill, JM: Celtic Warfare 1595-1763, Edinburgh, 1986
Lenihan, Pádraig: "Celtic' Warfare in the 1640s', In, John R Young (ed.), Celtic
Dimensions of the British Civil Wars, Edinburgh, 1997, pp. 116-140
Lawson, John Parker: Historical Tales of the Wars of Scotland, Vol. I,
Edinburgh, c.1850, pp. 326-28
MacKay, Robert: History of the House and Clan of MacKay, Edinburgh,
1829
Ó Ciardha, Éamonn: ‘Tories and Moss-Troopers in Scotland and Ireland in the
Interregnum: a political dimension', In, John R Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions
of the British Civil Wars, Edinburgh, 1997, pp. 141-163
Reid, Stuart: The Campaigns of Montrose: A Military History of the Civil War in
Scotland, 1639 to 1646, Edinburgh, 1990
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Stradling, RA: The Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries, 1618-68, Dublin,
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Copyright © 2007 Dr. Andrew McGregor.
Written by Dr. Andrew McGregor. If you have questions or comments on this
article, please contact Andrew McGregor at:
 mcgregor116@hotmail.com.
About the author:
Dr. Andrew McGregor is director of Aberfoyle International Security, a Toronto-based agency specializing
in security issues of the Islamic world. He is the author of A Military History of Modern Egypt
(Praeger, 2006) and may be reached at mcgregor116@hotmail.com
Published online: 08/11/2007.
* Views expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent
those of MHO.
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