The Gaelic population was far indeed from holding the doctrines of passive obedience and nonresistance.

In fact disobedience and resistance made up the ordinary life of that population.

Some of those very clans which it has been the fashion to describe as so enthusiastically loyal that they were prepared to stand by James to the death, even when he was in the wrong, had never, while he was on the throne, paid the smallest respect to his authority, even when he was clearly in the right.

Their practice, their calling, had been to disobey and to defy him.

Some of them had actually been proscribed by sound of horn for the crime of withstanding his lawful commands, and would have torn to pieces without scruple any of his officers who had dared to venture beyond the passes for the purpose of executing his warrant.