Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Macpherson, James (d.1700)
MACPHERSON, JAMES (d. 1700), known as the Banff freebooter, is said to have been an illegitimate son of a member of the family of Invereshie in Inverness-shire by a gipsy woman. After his father's death he joined his mother and her roving companions. For some years he defied the magistrates and lairds of the neighbourhood, but in the autumn of 1700 he, with some of his gipsy band, was captured at Keith market by Lord Braco of Kilbride. He was imprisoned in the tolbooth of Banff under an exceptionally strong guard, and was tried before the sheriff of that place on 7 Nov., on the charge of ‘going up and doune the country armed and keeping mercats in a hostile manner.’ He and an accomplice, Gordon, were sentenced to death, and were executed at the Cross of Banff during the afternoon market of Friday, 16 Nov. 1700. According to tradition, Macpherson was handsome in appearance and of kindly temper. No charge of bloodshed was preferred against him, and evidence was adduced at his trial that one of his ‘unlawful’ visits had been for the purpose of curing a sick man.
It is said that before his execution he played a ‘rant’ or dirge on his favourite violin, offered the instrument as a keepsake to any one in the crowd who would think well of him, and, receiving no response, broke it and threw it into the open grave by his side. The rant is said to have appeared in a broadside in 1701. An early version, reputed to have been committed to memory by a young woman to whom Macpherson had formed a strong attachment, was given by Buchan to Motherwell, and is printed in Hogg and Motherwell's edition of Burns (1834, ii. 178). Another copy, obviously later, appears in Herd's collection, published in 1776 (see also Hogg and Motherwell, ii. 179, and Ritson, ii. 454). Internal evidence shows that none of these versions could have been written by Macpherson, though we can readily believe that the melody, played with such dramatic circumstance, was not long without words. It suggested Burns's ‘Macpherson's Farewell,’ in which the poet has characteristically preserved the old air and the burden, almost verbatim, of the version associated with the outlaw's lover.
A curious parallel is found in the story of John Macpherson, the Leinster highwayman, the reputed composer of an Irish air called ‘Macpherson's tune’ (see notes to ‘Titus's Ballad’ in Ainsworth's Rookwood, p. 63).
[Process against the Egyptians at Banff, 1700 (Spalding Club Miscell. iii. 175); Imlach's Hist. of Banff, 1868, pp. 26–8; Cramond's Annals of Banff (New Spalding Club), i. 99; New Monthly Mag. 1821, i. 142–3, quoted in Gipsy Lore Journal, iii. 190; Chambers's Domestic Annals, iii. 233. See also Carlyle's account of his reading the ‘rant’ to Tennyson, in a letter to E. Fitzgerald, 26 Oct. 1844 (E. F.'s ‘Letters,’ 1889 i. 144 n.)]