Just west of Pitlochry, Tayside, is Glen Lyon, the longest, and perhaps the most picturesque glen in Scotland. It was there, a little while after the seventeenth century turned to the eighteenth that the lad history would know as John McNaughton was born.
The son of a crofting family who most likely were gaelic speakers, his name in the glen would have been Iain Macnachtan. Not having been a laird's child, there is no record of his early life, but somewhere along the way he went away to work for Murray of Broughton in a serving capacity. At some point later he went to Edinburgh as a watchmaker's apprentice, indicating mechanical and intellectual skills. In spite of his common social status, he evidently became known to his employers for his personal integrity and fidelity to his word. Fate was to demonstrate the strength and courage behind that integrity. When Murray and his fellow planners of the '45 had settled their plans, they could go no further until this information could be communicated to Prince Charles in France. Their dilemma was that the information was so crucial to the future of Scotland that only they themselves could be trusted with it, yet if the English were to learn of it, not only would they lose the honors of their titles, and their heads, but their clans would likely lose their lands. The only man known who could be counted on to carry such a fateful message with such dire risk was John Macnachtan. Their trust was well placed, for he succeeded in his mission, as attested to by the very fact that the rising took place. The aging chief of clan Menzies of Culdares had himself been out for King James in the noble but clumsy attempt in 1715. In 1745 he was too old to take the field. It was the place of his son to lead the clan in the cause of justice, but that very son was leading Hanoverian troops for the German usurper. Some no doubt thought the father's sympathies went with the son, but not so. To show his support for the king, he chose his best horse, a great white charger fit for a king, as a gift to the prince. He could not deliver it himself. His risk in doing so, like the planners of the rising, was the loss of everything dear to him and of the homelands of his clan. He too knew of only one man with a heart gilt so fine that he could be entrusted with the burden of such grave responsibility... the same John Macnachtan, a son of his former factor. So, at the ancient cattle trysting center of Crieff, John fulfilled his pledge, presenting the gift of the Menzies to Bonnie Prince Charlie. There is a portrait of the prince on this white steed. John brought not only this gift, but also one immeasurably more profound: his own courageous spirit to fling selflessly into the great hope for his beloved nation's life.
Then came Culloden and the suppression of the dream by the King of England's butcher brother, the Duke of Cumberland. John, like so many other highlanders was imprisoned in Carlyle castle. Somehow, perhaps through rumors or spies, the English learned of John's connection with the leaders of the rising. Not being of high rank, he must have seemed like an easy source of the names of those on whom the English sought to vent their blood lust. They reckoned wrongly. When they asked him, he declined, and in typical adherence to his principles, when they offered him freedom and a pension that he might live in comfort amid the general poverty, he thanked them for their consideration in treating him as a gentleman and hoped they would leave him in peace to die like one.
They did not.
Even though he received no help from those whom he was protecting, he would not violate his honor by breaking his word. Even with the noose around his neck, they asked him a third time. At this point he had the specter of death before him; he had everything to gain: his life, freedom, prosperity. He need only say a few names and gain his revenge on those who deserted him. Such would his tormentors have thought. They did not understand, for they were lesser men than John Macnachtan. Had they but a fraction of John's nobility, they would have known that he had nothing to gain compared to what he had to lose: his place among his clansmen who sanctified the truth of their word. It was this he might have feared, but fear was not in him, for by the words which his clan holds so dear, his hope was in God.
On the eighteenth of September, 1746, John Macnachtan showed the mettle of one true man. Few among us are blue of blood, but all of us in clan Macnachtan have within our hearts, that strain older than Scotland itself, the royal Pictish red which binds us to John Macnachtan regardless of the centuries between.
Each of us, as we face those moments when it would be easier, more comfortable to be untrue or dishonest, and we then call up the courage to follow our belief instead, then do we perpetuate the gift of john Macnachtan's life. Let us keep our gift well, and to the red of Macnachtan let us be ever true.

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