The hero of this ballad was the youngest of the five sons of the Rob Roy who has been immortalized by Sir Walter Scott, and was known as Robert Oig, young, or junior. When a mere boy (only twelve years old, it is said) he shot a man mortally whom he considered to have intruded on his mother's land, and for not appearing to underlie the law for this murder he was outlawed in 1736. He had fled to the continent, and there he enlisted in the British army, and was wounded and made prisoner at Fontenoy in 1745. He was exchanged, returned to Scotland and obtained a discharge from service, and, though still under ban, was able to effect a marriage with a woman of respectable family. She lived but a few years, and after her death, whether spontaneously or under the influence of his brother James, a man of extraordinary hardihood, Rob Oig formed a plan of bettering his own fortune, and incidentally that of his kin, by a marriage of the Sabine fashion with a woman of means. The person selected was Jean Key, who had been two months the widow of John Wright. She was but nineteen years of age, and was living with her mother at Edinbelly, in Stirlingshire, and her property is said to have been, not the twenty thousand pounds of some of the ballads, but some sixteen or eighteen thousand marks.
On the night of December 8, 1750, Rob Oig, accompanied by his brothers James and Duncan and others, first placing guards at the door and windows, to prevent escape from within and help from without, entered the house of Jean Key, and not finding her, because she had taken alarm and hidden her self in a closet, obliged the mother to produce her daughter, under threats " to murder every person in the family, or to burn the house and every person in it alive." Jean Key, on being brought out, was told by James MacGregor that the party had come to marry her to Robert, his brother. "Upon her desiring to be allowed till next morning, or some few hours, to deliberate upon the answer she was to give to so unexpected and sudden a proposal as a marriage betwixt her, then not two months a widow, and a man with whom she had no manner of acquaintance," after some little expostulation, they laid hands upon her, dragged her out of doors, tied her on the back of a horse, and carried her first to a house at Buchanan, six miles from Edinbelly, thence to Rowerdennan, "thence, by water, to some part of the Highlands about the upper part of Loch Lomond, out of the reach of her friends and relations, where she was detained in captivity and carried from place to place for upwards of three months." At Rowerdennan, or further north, a priest read the marriage-service while the resolute James held up the young woman before him, and declared Rob Oig and her to be man and wife.
The rest of the story does not come into the ballad, but it may be added that both the military and the civil power took the matter in hand; that the MacGregors found it necessary to release their captive (who died, but not of the violence she had undergone, ten months after she was taken away); that James MacGregor was brought to trial in July, 1752, for hamesucken (invasion of a private house), forcible abduction of a woman, and constraining her to a marriage, was convicted of a part of the charge but not of the last count, and while the court had the verdict under consideration made his escape from Edinburgh castle; that Rob Oig was apprehended the following year, tried and condemned to death, and was executed in February, 1754.[foot-note]
We may easily believe that, as Scott says, the imagination of half-civilized Highlanders was not much shocked at the idea of winning a wife in a violent way. It had been common, and they may naturally have wondered why it should seem so particular in their instance. It is certain that Jean Key did not receive the sympathy of all of her own sex. A lady of much celebrity has told us that it is safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion, and there were those in Jean Key's day, and after, who thought it mere silliness to make a coil about a little compulsion. "It is not a great many years," Sir Walter Scott testifies, "since a respectable woman, above the lower rank of life, expressed herself very warmly to the author on his taking the free dom to censure the behaviour of the MacGregors on the occasion in question. She said, 'that there was no use in giving a bride too much choice upon such occasions; that the marriages were happiest lang syne which had been done off hand.' Finally, she averred that her 'own mother had never seen her father till the night he brought her up from the Lennox with ten head of black cattle, and there had not been a happier couple in the country.'"
The ballad adheres to fact rather closely; indeed a reasonably good "dittay" could be made out of it. The halt at Buchanan is mentioned B 8, C 10, K 14; the road would be through Drymen, as in C 10, K 13; and Balmaha, H 2, is a little beyond Buchanan. Ballyshine is substituted for Buchanan in B 6, J 4. At Buchanan, or Ballyshine ('as they came in by Drimmen town, and in by Edingarry,' K 13), a cloak and gown are bought (fetched) for the young woman to be married in, B 8, C 10, F 4. It is a cotton gown, B 6, coat and gown, A 8; in cotton gown she is married, J 4; meaning probably that she was married in a night-gown, having been roused from her bed. It is at Buchanan, or Ballyshine, that she is married. Four held her up to the priest, A, C, F (two, D, I, K, three, E, J, six, B), four laid her in bed, A, B, E, F, I, J, K (two, C, D).
Rob Roy is said to come from Drunkie (the home of his first wife), J 1; to come over the Loch of Lynn, G 2. Jean Key's abode seems to be called White House (Wright?) in A 2, but Blackhills, C 2, and in K 2 Jean Key is called Blackhill's daughter. Blackhill is apparently a corruption of Mitchell, Jean's mother's maiden name. The mother is called Jean Mitchell in J 2.
In A 8, Rob Roy's party are wrongly said to tarry at Stirling. In J 2, Glengyle is said to go with him to steal Jean Mitchell's daughter. Glengyle, Rob Oig's cousin, and chief of his immediate family was, for a MacGregor, an orderly man,[foot-note] and did not countenance the proceeding. J 6, 7 belong to the ballad of 'Eppie Morrie,' No 223.
Rob Oig puts Jean Key's fortune at £20,000, A 13, C 19; 50,000 merks, D 14; 30,000, K 23; 20,000, which was not very far from right, B 10. The reading in B 15 is a manifest corruption of thirty thousand merks.
Old Rob Roy is in several copies spoken of as still alive. Though the time both of his birth and death is not accurately known, this was certainly not the case.
H is translated by Fiedler, Geschichte der schottischen Liederdichtung, I. 52
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