CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM, ‘MCSNEESHIN’, SCOTS INDEPENDENT, JANUARY 1931

From the beginning the McSneeshin clan have been the greatest enemy Scotland has known. The Spanish saying runs, ‘There is no worse thief than the thief in your own house’ (no hay peor ladron, que el de casa). Scotland has suffered bitterly, if not from thieves, at least by traitors in her house. They, one and all, disguise it as they may, were but mere pensioners of England, taking her money quite contentedly, so that, as Murray, Morton, and many other Scottish noblemen, they were allowed to browse upon the spoils of the monasteries, and to preserve their power and their position of pre-eminence inviolate. All were McSneeshins to a man, and anti-patriots, content to do the bidding of a foreign potentate, as long as a full mess of beef and beer supplied the absence of the soul that they had bartered for it.

John Balliol McSneeshin

Balliol was a good douce noble. No doubt a gentleman, but not a ‘parfait knight.’ As a Norman noble, holding estates on both sides of the Tweed, and also in both Aquitaine and Normandy, he was more to be excused than were the above referred to English pensioners. Brought up in courts and probably speaking Norman French as his mother tongue, no doubt he looked upon the Scots as mere barbarians. He saw that England was more advanced in arts and chivalry than Scotland. He probably admired sincerely the stern warrior Edward, perhaps the ablest king who ever sat on England’s throne. He saw the English knights were sheltered in Milan steel and rode destriers3 from Naples and from Spain, whilst those from Scotland had to be content with Galloways, or at the best with heavy flat-footed animals from Flanders. What he did not see was that the wildest Johnstone, Jardine or Turnbull, upon his little hackney, ‘that was never putte to hard meete’, as Froissart4 tells us, but who remained a Scot at heart, was, as far as Scotland was concerned, a prince compared to the McSneeshin chivalry.

Balliol bowed the knee, no doubt, in the first place for the crown, but perhaps as much because he saw something superior to the Scot in ‘Goddes owne Englishman.