Rob Roy (Gaelic, 'Red Robert'), the Scottish Robin Hood, was born in the year 1671, the second son of Lieut.-colonel Donald Macgregor of Glen-gyle. Till 1661 the 'wicked clan Gregor' had for more than a century been constantly pursued with fire and sword; the very name was proscribed. But from that year until the Revolution the severe laws against them were somewhat relaxed; and Rob Roy, who married a kinswoman, Mary Macgregor, lived quietly enough as a grazier on the Braes of Balquhidder. From youth, however, he was a master of the claymore, the uncommon length of his arms giving him much advantage, for without stooping he could tie the garters of his Highland hose, 2 inches below the knee. Then his herds were so often plundered by 'broken men' from the north that he had to maintain a band of armed followers to protect both himself and such of his neighbours as paid him blackmail. And so with those followers, espousing in 1691 the Jacobite cause, he did a little plundering for himself, and, two or three years later having purchased from his nephew the lands of Craigroyston and Inversnaid, laid claim thenceforth to be chief of the clan. In consequence of losses incurred about 1712 in unsuccessful speculations in cattle, for which he had borrowed money from the Duke of Montrose, his lands were seized, his houses plundered, and his wife shamefully used, turned adrift with her children in midwinter. Madened by these misfortunes, Rob Roy gathered his clansmen and made open war on the duke, sweeping away the whole cattle of a district, and kidnapping his factor with rents to the value of more than £3000 Scots. This was in 1716, the year after the
Jacobite rebellion, in which at Sheriffmuir Rob Roy had 'stood watch' for the booty, and had been sent by the Earl of Mar to raise some of the clan Gregor at Aberdeen, where he lodged with a kinsman, Professor Gregory. Marvellous stories are current round Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond (where a cave near Inversnaid still bears his name) of his hairbreadth escapes from capture, of his evasions when captured, and of his generosity to the poor, whose wants he supplied at the expense of the rich. They in return gave him timely warning of the designs of his two arch-foes, the Dukes of Montrose and Athole, and of the red-coats they called to their aid from Dumbarton and Stirling; besides, Rob Roy enjoyed the protection of the Duke of Argyll, having assumed the name Campbell, his mother's. Late in life he is said to have turned Catholic, but in the list of subscribers to the Episcopalian church history of Bishop Keith occurs the name 'Robert Macgregor alias Rob Roy.' The history came out in 1734, and on the 28th December of that same year Rob Roy died in his own house at Balquhidder. He left five sons, two of whom died in 1754—James, an outlaw, in Paris; and Robin, the youngest, on the gallows at Edinburgh for abduction.
See the introduction and notes to Scott's Rob Roy (1817); Dorothy Wordsworth's Tour in Scotland in 1803, with her brother's poem; and the Lives of Rob Roy by K. Macleay (1818; new ed. 1881) and A. H. Millar (1883).