The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Massacre of Glencoe came under sustained attack in the Scottish Parliament during 1695. William of Orange had instituted the inquiry three years after the massacre of 38 members of the ClanDonald of Glencoe. Acting on political orders, the Argyll Regiment had carried out the slaughter well before daybreak on 13 February 1692.

Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, the commander of the company that had been receiving hospitality in Glencoe, instigated the bloody proceedings at 5 a.m.

Several weeks later, in a bout of drunken remorse, he left his incriminating order papers at a coffee house in Edinburgh where they were spirited to France and published in the Paris Gazette. Charles Leslie, an Irish polemicist based in London and sympathetic to the Jacobite cause that reviled William of Orange, first suggested publicly that responsibility lay with the Court in London.

This cry was taken up by Scottish politicians disenchanted with the then Secretary of State for Scotland, James Dalrymple, Master of Stair.

The undoubted mastermind behind the massacre, Stair was intent on running Scotland, like Ireland, as a satellite state of England.

William had established the royal commission primarily to exonerate himself from responsibility from giving Stair a free hand to extirpate the MacDonalds. As a result of parliamentary pressure Stair was dismissed from office. But no reprisals were enacted against the soldier.

No reparations were offered to the surviving MacDonalds. Slaughter under trust remains treason under Scots Law.