The story of the treacherous spy who wrecked the Jacobite cause

In her opinion, the spy who really wrecked Scotland’s chance of getting out of the Union was “Pickle”, the infamous secret agent of the Hanoverian British state who spied on the Jacobites after the 1745-46 Rising that ended in disaster at Culloden.

Pickle has always intrigued me, not least because at a crucial time when another Rising was possible, he was particularly informative to the Hanoverian government on the activities on the continent of Prince Charles Edward Stuart to whom he was once quite close, making his treachery even more vile.

Having looked at the evidence dispassionately, I have no hesitation in saying the secret agent code-named Pickle was no mere footnote of history but a man who deliberately and very successfully sabotaged the chances of a Scottish-led overthrow of the British Protestant Hanoverian state. What’s more, he did so as a born Catholic and one-time ardent Jacobite.

Although he carried out most of his infamous work in the late 1740s and 1750s, it was nearly 150 years before Pickle was unmasked by the journalist and author Andrew Lang as Alasdair Ruadh MacDonnell (1725-61), the 13th chief of Clan MacDonald of Glengarry.

Lang’s 1897 book, Pickle The Spy, is hugely convincing, not least because he had access to secret government documents proving the identity of Pickle. He was even allowed by Queen Victoria to consult royal documents and the so-called Stuart Papers, while no less than Robert Louis Stevenson, shortly before his death in 1894, sent Lang a batch of documents that he had obtained while researching a possible book on Pickle.

The very name can still turn the stomachs of those Scots who know how much Pickle did to wreck the Jacobite cause. Pickle has also been a huge mystery to history writers like myself, though professional historians often tend to dismiss him as someone who appears “after the fact” of Culloden and really only helped to stop Charles Edward Stuart causing more damage to Scotland. I disagree with that finding – Pickle really was at the centre of events within Jacobitism which, don’t forget, survived Culloden – albeit in much reduced circumstances. After Pickle, Jacobitism was moribund.

There are still plenty of MacDonnells and MacDonalds who refuse to accept that Alasdair Ruadh was Pickle but as I will show, the evidence is fairly convincing, and Lang got it right. Whether Pickle was the most damaging spy against Scotland is a matter of opinion, but there’s little doubt in my mind that he effectively wrecked the chances of the Stuarts ever regaining the throne of the United Kingdom.

Remember that Bonnie Prince Charlie had declared he would end the Union – he actually made such a decree in Edinburgh after the victory at Prestonpans in 1745 – but as he never gained the throne he could not carry out that promise and we’ve been stuck in the Union ever since, and our current monarch remains Charles III and not Charles IV.

Although, of necessity, much of Pickle’s life was led in the shadows, the basic facts about Alasdair Ruadh MacDonnell are well known. He was born the eldest son of John MacDonnell, 12th Laird of Glengarry and chief of that branch of Clan MacDonald whose first wife was Margaret Mackenzie. She died around 1728 and her widowed husband remarried so that Alasdair had several siblings and half-siblings.

The 12th Laird of Glengarry was probably the leading Roman Catholic in the Highlands at that time and sent his son to France for education as a Catholic. Alasdair Ruadh stayed on in France and joined the Scottish regiment in the French army who were nearly all Jacobites.

BY the age of 18, he was a company commander in the Royal-Ecossais and probably met Bonnie Prince Charlie around that time because King Louis XV had decided to support the Prince’s cause with an invasion of Britain.

Bonnie Prince Charlie

MacDonnell – usually known as Glengarry the Younger or Young Glengarry to distinguish him from his father – obviously had the trust of both the French king and the Bonnie Prince as he was sent to Scotland to find out the state of preparation for a Jacobite Rising.

It was made clear to him that the clans would only come out for the Young Pretender if French troops and supplies were guaranteed. The headstrong Charles would not wait, however, and raised his standard at Glenfinnan in August 1745. Young Glengarry had already gone back to France and helped prepare for the French-led invasion. It never happened, not least because a ship carrying one French contingent was captured by the Royal Navy in November, and Alasdair Ruadh was sent to the Tower of London.

His two years in that prison gave him great credibility with the Jacobites but it was there that he was recruited – some say heavily bribed – by the Whig government of Henry Pelham, who became his ultimate spymaster. No-one knows why Pelham gave MacDonnell the code name Pickle.

He had grown up tall and good-looking and his education in France had given him the veneer of nobility, so much so that his best disguise was himself – no-one could consider such a fine man to be a pursuer of espionage.

As Andrew Lang wrote: “Pickle had, at least, the attraction of being eminently handsome. No statelier gentleman than Pickle, as his faded portrait shows him in full Highland costume, ever trod a measure at Holyrood. Tall, athletic, with a frank and pleasing face, Pickle could never be taken for a traitor and a spy.”

The secret agent lost no time in hurrying to France where he was welcomed into the retinue of the Bonnie Prince from where he communicated the Jacobites’ movements to Pelham, though for some reason the British government did not act on the prince’s clandestine visit to London in 1749-50.

Andrew Lang was able to find Pickle’s letters to his spymasters and in one missive we can see how he blew apart the so-called Elibank Plot, named after Alexander Murray of Elibank, which was the plan by Jacobites in England to kidnap King George II and his family from a boat on the River Thames in November 1752.

The plot failed because Bonnie Prince Charlie refused to sanction an attack on the king’s family. Pickle wrote to the government in England to give them the background – I’ve retained the original spellings: “The Young Chevalier has been in close correspondence with England for a year and a halph past. Mr Carte the Historian has carried frequent messages. They never commit anything to writing. Elderman Hethcot is a principall Manager.

“The very words the Young Pretender told me was that all this schemne was laid and transacted by Whiggers, that no Roman Catholick was concerned, and oblidged me to give my word and honour that I would write nothing concerning him or his plan to Rome.

"After what I said last night, this is all that occurs to me for the present. I will lose no time in my transactions, and I will take care they will allways be conforme to your directions, and as I have throwen myself entirely upon you, I am determined to run all hazards upon this occasion, which I hope will entittle me to your favour and his Majestys protection.”

Further evidence of Pickle’s treachery is reported by Lang, quoting from the actual letters sent by the spy to his masters: “In September 1752, according to Pickle, Prince Charles sent Archibald Cameron and Lochgarry to Scotland, with a mission to his representative, Cluny Macpherson, and the clans. The English government, knowing this and a great deal more through Pickle, hanged Cameron, in June 1753, on no new charge, but on the old crime of being out in the Forty-five.”

Seventy years later, Sir Walter Scott researched exactly what Pickle did. According to Lang: “Scott was well aware of the circumstances …The ministers thought it prudent to leave Dr Cameron’s new schemes in concealment, lest by divulging them they indicated the channel of communication which, it is well known, they possessed to all the plots of Charles Edward”.

The extraordinary thing is that no-one within the Jacobite leadership, and certainly none of the prince’s inner circle seems to have tumbled to the fact that information was being fed to the government in London from within their own ranks. As Lang reports, Pickle was still in close touch with Charles Edward – so much so that they travelled together to Paris in August 1753. He even reported on the prince’s private life with his Scottish lover, Clementina Walkinshaw.

The secret report stated: “Soon after, the Young Pretender, the French Gentleman, and Pickle set out for Paris, the Young Pretender being disguis’d with a Capouch [a monk’s hood]. The Young Pretender shew’d Pickle Loch Gairy’s [Lochgarry’s] report of his late expedition with Dr Cameron to Scotland, and also the List hereunto annex’d of the numbers of the disaffected clans that Doctor Cameron and he had engaged in the Highlands, and also an extract of a memorial or scheme sent over to the Pretender from some of his friends in England.

“The Pretender talked very freely with Pickle of affairs … he has been a rambling from one place to another about Flanders … except some small excursions he made; once he went to Hamburgh. He told Pickle that another rising in Scotland would not do untill a war broke out in the North, in that case he expected great things from Sweden would be done for him, by giving him men, arms and ammunition … “The Pretender said that he beleiv’d he had many friends in England but that he had no fighting friends; the best service his friends in England could do him at present was to supply him with money.

“Pickle says that Sir John Graeme, Sir James Harrington, and Goring, and Loch Gairy are the Pretender’s chief confidants and agents, and know of his motions from place to place; that Goring is now ill, having been lately cut for a fistula.

“Pickle kept himself as private as he could at Paris, went no where but to Lord Marshall’s, and once to wait upon Madame Pier Cour, Monsr D’Argenson’s mistress, who offer’d to recommend him to Monsr. D’Argenson if he inclin’d to return to the French Service. Pickle believes Monsr D’Argenson and Monsr Paris Mont Martell are the Pretender’s chiefest friends at the Court of France. He says that Mrs. Walkingshaw is now at Paris big with child, that the Pretender keeps her well, and seems to be very fond of her.”

This is phenomenal stuff found by Lang in official government documents and proves conclusively, I think, that Alasdair Ruadh MacDonnell was Pickle.

Two events in 1754 effectively ended his espionage career. His father died and he inherited the Glengarry name and precious little money, and Henry Pelham also died. Without the prime minister’s control, Alasdair Ruadh no longer felt protected.

Little is known of his subsequent life at Glengarry except his clan did not like his activities as a landlord. He fell ill and died in December 1761 aged just 36. Though some Jacobites had suspicions, Pickle died without his identity being revealed.