James Stewart of the Glen

James Stewart of the Glen was a leader of the Stewarts of Appin in the decades after the Jacobite rising of 1745. As a prominent representative of a clan whose estates had been forfeited, he became entangled in the bitter struggle over government management of former Jacobite lands.

After the 1752 assassination of the government factor Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure, Stewart was prosecuted as an accessory despite evidence that he had not carried out the shooting. He was convicted in a controversial trial and hanged at Ballachulish on 8 November 1752 while protesting his innocence; the case became one of the most notorious legal episodes in post-Jacobite Scotland.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona, David Balfour tries to clear Allan Breck Stewart and save James Stewart of the Glen from conviction for the Appin Murder. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Scotland, 1751. Newly orphaned David Balfour travels to the House of Shaws to claim his inheritance from his miserly uncle Ebenezer. Ebenezer arranges for him to be abducted aboard the Covenant and sold into servitude in the American colonies, but the ship takes on Allan Breck Stewart, a Jacobite soldier returning secretly from France.