Memoirs of the Jacobites
Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat

THE memoirs of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, have been written in various forms, and with a great diversity of opinions. Some have composed accounts of this singular, depraved, and unfortunate man, with the evident determination to give to every action the darkest possible tinge; others have waived all discussion on his demerits by insisting largely upon the fame and antiquity of his family. He has himself bequeathed to posterity an apology for his life, and from his word we are bound to take so much, but only so much, as may accord with the statements of others in mitigation of the heinous facts which blast his memory with eternal opprobrium.

As far as the researches into the remote antiquity of Scotland may be relied upon, it appears that the name of Fraser was amongst the first of those which Scotland derived from Normandy, and the origin of this name has been referred to the remote age of Charles the Simple. A nobleman of Bourbon—such is the fable,—-presented that monarch with a dish of strawberries. The loyal subject, who bore the name of Julius De Berry, was knighted on the spot, and the surname of Fraize was given him in lieu of that which

he had borne. Hence the ancient armorial bearing of the Frasers, a field azure, seme with strawberries: and hence the w idely-spreading connection of the Frasers with the noble family of Frezeau, or Frezel. in France, a race connected with many of the royal families in Europe. For a considerable period after the elevation of .Julius de Berry, the name was written Frezeau, or Frisil.

The period at which the Frasers* left Normandy for Scotland has been assigned to the. days of Malcolm Canmore, where John, the eldest of three brothers of the house, founded the fortunes of the Frasers of Oliver Castle in Tweedale, by marrying Eupheme Sloan, heiress of Tweedale: whilst another brother settled beyond the Forth, and became possessed of the lands of Inverkeithing. Eventually those members of this Norman race who had at first settled in Tweedale, branched off to Aberdeenshire, and to Inverness-shire; and it was in this latter county, at Beaufort, a property which had been long held by his family, that the famous Lord Lovat was born.

Such is the account generally received. According to others, the family of Fraser is of Scandinavian origin. When the Scandinavians invaded the eastern coast of Britain, and the northern coast of France, one branch of the family of Frizell, or Fryzell, settled in Scotland; another in Normandy, where the name has retained its original pronunciation.

The castle of Beaufort, anciently a royal fortress, had been bestowed upon the Frasers. in the year 1367. It is situated in the beautiful neighbourhood of Inverness, in the district of the Aird: it was besieged by the army of Edward the First during the invasion of Scotland by the usual method of throwing stones from catapults, at a distance of seven hundred yards. A subsidiary fortress, Lovat, heretofore inhabited by one of the constables of the Crown, whom the lawlessness of the wild inhabitants and the turbulence of their chieftains had rendered it necessary to establish in the west of Scotland, also fell into the possession of the Frasers.

The present seat of the family of Lovat, still called Beaufort, is built on a part of the ground originally occupied by a fortress. It lies on a beautiful eminence near the Beauly, and is surrounded by extensive plantations.

The race, thus engrafted upon a Scottish stock, continued to acquire from time to time fresh honours. It was distinguished by bravery and fidelity. When Edward the First determined to subdue Scotland, he found three Powers refuse to acknowledge his pretensions. These were. Sir William Wallace, Si" Simon Fraser. commonly called the Patriot, and the garrison of Stirling. When Bruce, with an inconsiderable force fought the English army at Methven. near Perth, and was thrice dismounted, Sir Simon Fraser thrice replaced him on his saddle; he was himself taken prisoner and ordered to be executed. And then might be witnessed one of those romantic instances of Highland devotion, which appear almost incredible to the calmer notions of a modern era, A rumour went abroad that the stay of the country, the gallant Fraser, was to suffer for his fidelity to his country's interests. Herbert de Norham, one of his followers, and Thomas de Boys, his armour-bearer, swore, that if the report were true, they would not survive their master. They died voluntarily on the day of his execution.

In 1431, the Frasers were ennobled ; the head of the house was created a Lord of Parliament by James the First, and the title was preserved in regular succession, until, by the death of Hugh, the eleventh Lord Lovat. it reverted, together with all the family estates, now of considerable value and extent, to Thomas Fraser, of Beaufort, great uncle of the last nobleman. This destination of the property and honours was settled by a deed, executed by Hugh, Lord Lovat, in order to preserve the male succession in the family. It was the cause of endless heart-burnings and feuds. Hugh had married the Lady Ernelia Murray, daughter of John, Marquis of Athole, and had daughters by that marriage. He had, in the first instance, settled upon the eldest of them the succession, on condition of her marrying a gentleman of the name of Fraser. But this arrangement agreed ill with the Highland pride; and, upon a plea of his having been prevailed on to give this bond, contrary to the old rights and investments of the family, he being of an easy temper, having been imposed on to grant this bond, he set it aside by a subsequent will in favour of his great uncle, dated March 26th, 1696.

The families of Murray and Fraser were, at the time that the title of Lovat descended upon Thomas Fraser, united in what outwardly appeared to be an alliance of friendship. Their politics, indeed, at times differed. The late Lord Lovat had persisted in his adherence to James the Second of England after his abdication, and had marshalled his own troops under the banners of the brave Dundee. The Marquis of Atliole, then Lord Tullibardine, on the other hand, had adopted the principles of the Revolution, and had received a commission of Colonel from William the Third, to raise a regiment of infantry for the reigning monarch. Thus were the seeds of estrangement between these families, so nearly united in blood, sown; and they were aggravated by private and jarring interests, and by manoeuvres and intrigues, of which Lord Lovat, who has left a recital of them, was, from his own innate taste for cabals, and aptitude to dissimulation, calculated to be an incomparable judge.

Of the character of Thomas of Beaufort, the father of Simon, little idea can be formed, except that he seems to have been chiefly guided by the subtle spirit of his son Simon. The loss of an elder son, Alexander, after whose death Simon was considered as the acknowledged heir of the Frasers, may have increased the influence which a young, ardent temper naturally exercises over a parent advanced in years. Of his father, Simon, in his various memoirs and letters, always speaks with respect; and he refers with pride and pleasure to his mother's lineage.

"His mother,'" he remarks, writing in the third person, "was Dame Sybilla Macleod, daughter of the chief of the clan of the Macleods, so famous for its inviolable loyalty to its princes."

During his life-time his great nephew, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, had borne the title of Laird of Beaufort. "He now took possession." says his biographer, "without opposition, of the honours and titles which had descended to him, and enjoyed them until his death." According to other authorities, however, Thomas Fraser never assumed the rank of a nobleman, but retired to the Isle of Sky, where he died in 1699, three years after his accession to the disputed honours and estates.

The family of Thomas of Beaufort was numerous. Of fourteen children, six died in infancy; of the eight who survived, Simon Fraser only mentions two,—his elder brother. Alexander, and his younger, John. Alexander, who died in 1692, was of a violent and daring temper. A determined adherent of Jaines ihe Second, he joined Viscount Dundee in 1689, when the standard was raised in favour of the abdicated monarch. During a funeral which had assembled at Beauly, near Inverness, Alexander received some affront, which, in a fit of passion, he avenged. Tie killed his antagonist, and instantly fled to Wales, in order to escape the effects of his crime. lie died ia Wales, without issue. John became a brigadier in the Dutch service, and was known by the name of Le Chevalier Fraser. He died in 1716, "when," says his brother, Lord Lovat, in his Memoirs, "I lost my only brother, a fine young fellow."

Simon Fraser, afterwards Lord Lovat, was born at Inverness,—according to some accounts in 1668, to others in 1670: he fixes the date himself at 1676. He was educated at the University of Aberdeen, where he distinguished himself, and took the degree of Master of Arts. During his boyhood he shewed his hereditary affection to the Stuarts,—an affection which was probably sincere at that early age and he was even imprisoned for his open avowal of that cause, at the time when his elder brother repaired to the standard of Dundee. Deserting the study of the civil law, to which he had been originally destined, Simon Fraser entered a company in the regiment of Lord Tullibardine, his relation; nevertheless, he twice attempted to benefit the Jacobite cause,—once, by joining the insurrection promoted by General Buchan, and a second time by forming a plan, which was rendered abortive by the famous victory at La Hogue, for surprising the Castle of Edinburgh, and proclaiming King James in that capital. In speaking of the other members of the family, Mr. Anderson remarks:—"The parish registers of Kiltarlity, Kiikill, and Kilmorack, were at the same time examined with the view of tracing the other children of Thomas of Beaufort, but the communications of the various clergymen led to the knowledge that no memorials of them exist. The remote branches called to the succession in General Fraser's entail proves, to a certainty, that these children died unmarried."—Anderson's Historical Account of the Family of Fraser. It appears, however, from a previous note, that a branch of the family still exists in Ireland.

This plot escaped detection; and the young soldier pursued his military duties, until the death of Hugh Lord Lovat drew him from the routine of his daily life into intrigues which better suited his restless and dauntless character.

Although his father, it is clearly understood, never bore the title of Lord Lovat, Simon, immediately upon the death of Lord Hugh, took upon himself the dignity and the offices of Master of Lovat. He seems, indeed, to have assumed all the importance, and to have exercised nil the authority, which properly belonged to Lord Lovat. He was at this time nearly thirty years of age, and he had passed his life, not in mere amusement, but in acquiring a knowledge of the world in prosecuting his own interests. It is true, his leisure hours might have been, more innocently bestowed even in the most desultory pursuits, than in the debasing schemes and scandalous society in which his existence was passed : it is true, that in studying his own interests, he forgot his true interest, and failed lamentably; still, he had not been idle in his vocation.

He is said, on tradition, to have been one of the most frightful men ever seen ; and the portrait which Hogarth took of him, corroborates that report. He inherited the courage natural to his family, and his character, in that single respect, shone out at the last with a radiancy that one almost regrets, since it seemed so inconsistent that a career of the blackest vice and perfidy should close with something little less than dignity of virtue. He seems to have been endowed with a capacity worthy of a better employment than waiting upon a noble and wealthy relative, or inflaming discords between Highland clans. If we may adduce the Latin quotations which Lovat parades ifi his Memoirs, and which he uttered during his last hours, we must allow him to have cultivated the classics. His letters are skilful, even masterly, cajoling, yet characteristic. It is affirmed that in spite of a physiognomy vulgar in feature, and coarse and malignant in expression, he could, like Richard of Gloucester, obliterate the impression produced by his countenance, and charm those whom it was his interest to please. His effrontery was unconquerable: whilst conscious of the most venal motives, and even after he had displayed to the world a shameless tergiversation, he had the assurance always to claim for himself the merit of patriotism. "For my part," he said on one occasion, in conversation with his friends, "I die a martyr to my country.''

In after life, Lovat is described by a contemporary writer, "to have had a fine comely head to grace Temple Bar." He was a man of lofty stature, and large proportion: and in the later portion of his life, he grew so corpulent, that "I imagined," says the same writer, "the doors of the Tower must be altered to get him in.''

"Lord Lovat," says another writer, "makes an odd figure, being generally more loaded with clothes than a Dutchman; he is tall, walks very upright, considering his great age, and is tolerably well shaped ; he has a large mouth and short nose, with eyes very much contracted and down-looking; a very small forehead, covered with a large periwig, —this gives him a grim aspect, but on addressing any one, he puts on a smiling countenanc : he is near-sighted, and affects to be much more so than he really is."

"His natural abilities," remarks the editor of the Culloden Papers, "were excellent, and his address, accomplishments, and learning far above the usual lot of his countrymen, even of equal rank. With the civilized, he was the modern perfect fine gentleman; and in the North, among his people, the feudal baron of the tenth century.'"

It seems absurd to talk of the religious principles of a man who violated every principle which religion inculcates; yet the mind is naturally curious to know whether any bonds of faith, or suggestion of conscience ever checked, even for an instant, the career of this base, unprincipled man. After much deception, much shuffling, and perhaps much self-delusion, Lord Lovat was, by his own declaration, a Roman Catholic: his sincerity, even in this avowal, has been questioned. In politics, he was in heart (if he had a heart) a Jacobite ; and yet, on his trial, he insisted strongly upon his affection for the reigning family.

Such were the characteristics of Simon Fraser, when, by the death of Hugh Lord Lovat, his father and himself were raised from the subservience of clansmen to the dignity of chieftains. To these traits may be added a virtue rare in those days, and, until a long time afterwards, rare in Highland districts ;—he was temperate: when others lost themselves by excesses, he preserved the superiority of sobriety; and perhaps his crafty character, his never-ending designs, his remorseless selfishness, were rendered more fatal and potent by this singular feature in his deportment. There was another circumstance, less rare in. his country, the advantage of an admirable constitution. It was this, coupled with his original want of feeling, which sustained him in the imprisonment in the Tower, and enabled him to display, at eighty, the elasticity of youth. Lord Lovat was never known to have had the headache, and to the hour of his death he read without spectacles. A very short time after the death of Hugh Lord Lovat elapsed, before those relatives to whom he had bequeathed his estates were involved in the deadliest quarrel with the family of Lord Tullibardine.

The family of Lord Tullibardine, at that time called Lord Murray, furnish one of those numerous instances which occur in the reign of William the Third, of an open avowal of Whig principles, joined to a secret inclination to favour the Jacobite party. The Marquis of Athole, the father of Lord Tullibardine, had been a powerful Royalist in the time of Charles the First; but had, nevertheless, promoted the Revolution, and had hastened, in 1689, to court the favour of the Prince of Orange, with whom his lady claimed kindred.

Disappointed in his hopes of distinction, the Marquis returned to his former views upon the subject of legitimacy; and finally retired into private life, leaving the pursuit of fortune to his son, Lord John, afterwards Earl Tullibardine, and Marquis of Athole. The disgust of the old Marquis towards the government of William the Third, and the evident determination which his son soon manifested to ingratiate himself with that monarch, had, at the time when the death of Hugh Lord Lovat took place, completely alienated the Marquis from his son, and produced an entire separation of their interests.

In his zeal for the King's service, Lord Tullibardine had endeavoured to raise a regiment of infantry; and it happened, that at this tune Simon Fraser, as he expresses it, "by a most extraordinary stroke of Providence, held a commission in that regiment." This commission had been procured for him by his cousin, Lord Lovat, who looked upon it as the best means of " bringing him out in the world," as he expressed himself. The mode in which Simon was induced by Lord Murray to accept of this commission, and the manner in which he was, according to his own statement, induced to support a scheme which was adverse to the interests of King James, is narrated in his own Memoirs. If we may believe his account, he opposed the formation of this regiment by every exertion in his power : he aided the Stewarts and Robinsons of Athole, devoted Jacobites, and determined opposers (if Lord Murray, whose claims on them as their chieftain they refused to admit; and when Lord Murray, oil being appointed one of the Secretaries (if State, resolved to give up the colonelcy of the troop, he tried every means in his power to dissuade his cousin, Hugh Lord Lovat, to whom it was offered, from accepting the honour which it was inconsistent with his principles to bear. This conduct, according to the hero of the tale, was highly applauded by the old Marquis of Athole, who even engaged his young relative, Simon, to pass the winter in the city of Perth with the younger son of the Marquis, Lord Mungo Murray, in order that they might there prosecute together the study of mathematics.

Simon accepted the invitation: and whilst he was at Perth, he was. according to his own statement, cajoled by Lord Murray into accepting the commission, which he held by a stroke of Providence and which was represented by Lord Murray, as Simon affirms, to be actually a regiment intended for the service of King James, who, it was expected, would make a descent into Scotland in the following summer. And it was observed that since the Laird of Beaufort was so zealous in his service, he could not do his Majesty a greater benefit than in accepting this commission.

Influenced by these declarations, Simon had not only accepted the commission, but had used his influence to make up a complete company from his own clan: nevertheless, the command of the company was long delayed. His pride as a Highlander and a soldier was aggrieved by being obliged to sit down content, for some time, as a lieutenant of grenadiers; and, at last, the company was only given upon the payment of a sum of money to the captain, who made room for the Laird of Beaufort. Xor was this all§ for upon the Lord Murray being made one of the Secretaries of State, he insisted upon the regiment taking oath of adjuration, which had never before been tendered to the Scottish army.

Such had been the state of affairs when Hugh Lord Lovat was taken ill, and died at Perth. The manner in which Simon Fraser represents this event, is far more characteristic of his own malignant temper, than derogating to the family upon whom he wreaks all the luxury of vengeance that words could give. Simon, it appears, had persuaded Lord Lovat to go to Dunkeld, to meet his wife, the. daughter of the Marquis of Athole. in order to conduct her to Lovat. Lord Lovat, disgusted by the treachery of the Earl of Tullibardine in respect to the regiment, had refused to have anything more to do with "this savage family of Athole," as he called them, "who would certainly kill him." According to an account more to be relied on than that of the scheming and perfidious Simon, the aversion which Lord Lovat imbibed during his latter days to his wife's kindred, was implanted in his mind by Simon Fraser, in order to gain his weak-minded relative over to that plot which he had formed in order to secure the estates of Lovat to his own branch of the house. This, however, is the account given by Fraser of his kinsman's last illness :—

"In reality he had been only two days at Dunkeld, when he fell sick, and the Atholes, not willing to be troubled with the care of an invalid, or for some other reasons, sent him to an inn in the city of Perth, hard by the house of Dr James Murray, a physician, the relation or creature of the Marquis of Athole, upon whom the care of Lord Lovat's person was devolved.

"The moment the Laird of Beaufort heard the news that Lord Lovat had been conducted, very ill, to the town of Perth, he set out to his assistance. But before his arrival, in consequence of the violent remedies that had been administered to him, he lost the use of his reason, and lay in his bed in a manner incapable of motion,—abandoned by his wife and the whole family of Athole, who waited for his dissolution in great tranquillity, at the house of Dr. Murray.

Lord Lovat, however, recollected his cousin, and embracing him said, "Did not I tell you. my dear Simon, that these devils would certainly kill me? See in what a condition I am!" Simon could not refrain from tears at this melancholy spectacle. He threw himself on the bed beside Lord Lovat, and did not quit him till he died the next morning in his arms. Meanwhile, not an individual of the Athole family entered his apartment after having once seen him in the desperate condition in which he had been found by the Laird of Beaufort.

Such was the state of family discord when Lord Lovat died; and it was discovered, to the consternation of the Marquis of Athole and his sons, that he had made a will in favour of his relation Thomas of Beaufort, and to the exclusion of his own daughter.

The right of Thomas of Beaufort was deemed incontestable; and not a man, it was presumed, dreamed of disputing it. Yet it was soon obvious that the Earl of Tullibardine, who had now acquired the title of Viceroy of Scotland, was determined to support a claim in behalf of the daughter of Lord Lovat, and to have her declared heiress to her father. This scheme was coupled with a design of marrying the young lady also to one of Lord Tullibardine's own sons, of whom he had five, and, according to Simon Fraser, without fortune to bestow on any of his children.

The Master of Lovat, Simon Fraser, as lie rightfully was now, communicated this scheme to his father, and entreated him to resist this claim. Recourse was had to several of the most able lawyers of the kingdom, and their opinion unanimously was, that Lord Tullibardine had no more right to make his niece heiress of Lovat than to put her in possession of the throne of Scotland: that the right of Thomas of Beaufort to those honours and estates was incontrovertible, and that the King himself would not deprive him of them, except for high treason. It appears that Lord Tullibardine was satisfied of the justice of the opinion as far as the title was concerned, but he still considered that the property of the last Lord Lovat ought to descend to his daughter and heiress. The point was warmly viewed between the Earl and the Master of Lovat; but the conference ended with no farther satisfaction to either of the gentlemen than that of having each a full opportunity of reviling the other: such, at least, is the account given by one of the parties; no reasonable person will venture wholly to vouch for its accuracy, yet the dialogue does not appear improbable. This firmness and spirit threw the Lord Commissioner into a violent passion ; he exclaimed in a furious tone, "I have always known you for an obstinate, insolent rascal; I don't know what should hinder me from cutting off your oars, or from throwing you into a dungeon, and bringing you to the gallows, as jour treasons against the Government so richly deserve." Simon, having never before been accustomed to such language, immediately stuck his hat on his head, and laying his hand upon the hilt of his sword, was upon the point of drawing it, when he observed that Lord Tullibardine had no sword: upon this he addressed him in the following manner.

"I do not know what hinders me, knave and coward as you are, from running my sword through your body. You are well known for a poltroon, and if you had one grain of courage, you would never have chosen your ground in the midst of your guards, to insult a gentleman of a better house, and of a more honourable birth than your own; but I shall one day have my revenge. As for the paltry company that I hold in your regiment, and which I have bought dearer than ever any company was bought before,—it is the greatest disgrace to which I was ever subject, to be a moment under your command; and now, if you please, you may give it to your footman."

Such was the beginning of a long course of hostilities which were thenceforth carried on between the Murrays and the clan of Fraser, and which was productive of the deepest crimes on the part of the Master of Lovat. That he was fully prepared to enter in to any schemes, however desperate, to ensure the succession of the estates of Lovat, cannot be doubted. lie prosecuted his designs without remorse or shame. The matter of surprise must be, that he found partisans and followers willing to aid him in crime, and that he possessed an influence over his followers little short, on their part, of infatuation.

The first suggestion that occurred to the mind of this bold and reckless man was, perhaps, a natural and certainly an innocent method of securing tranquillity to the enjoyment of his Inheritance. He resolved to engage the affections of the young daughter of the late Lord Lovat, and, by an union with that lady, to satisfy himself that no doubt could arise as to his title to the estates, nor with regard to any children whom he might have in that marriage ; nor was the hand of the Master of Lovat, if we put aside the important point of character, a proffer to be despised. The estate of Beaufort had long been in the possession of his father, as an appanage of a younger son ; and had only been lent as a residence to Hugh Lord Lovat, on account of the ru'n-ous state of the castle of Lovat. Downie Castle, another important fortress, also accrued to the father of Simon Lovat; and the estate of Lovat itself was one of the finest and best situated in Scotland.* In addition to these, the family owned the large domain of Sthratheric, which stretches along the western banks of the Ness, and comprises almost the whole circumference of that extensive and beautiful lake. The pretensions of the Master were, therefore, by no means contemptible; and as he was young, although, according to dates, ten years older than he states himself to be, in his Memoir of his life, he had every reason to augur success.

For a time, this scheme seemed to prosper. The young lady, Amelia Fraser, was not averse to receive the Master of Lovat as her suitor; and the intermediate party, Fraser, of Tenechiel, who acted as interpreter to the wishes of the Master, actually succeeded in persuading the young creature to elope with him, and to fix the very day of her marriage with the Master, to whom Fraser promised to conduct her. But either she repented of this clandestine step, or Fraser of Tenechiel, dreading the power of the Athole family, drew hack j for he reconducted her hack to her mother at Castle Pownie, even after her assurance had been given that she would marry her cousin.

The circumstances of this elopement are obscurely stated by Lord Lovat in his account of the affair; and he docs not refer to the treachery or remorse of his emissary Fraser of Tenechiel, nor does he dwell upon a. disappointment which must have gratified his mortal enemies of the house of Athole. Yet it appears, from the long and early intimacy to which he alludes as having subsisted between himself and the Dowager Lady Lovat, that he may have had many opportunities of gaining the regard of the young daughter of that lady,—an idea which accounts, in some measure, for her readiness to engage in the scheme of the elopement. At all events, he expresses his rage and contempt, and makes no secret of his determined revenge on those who had, as he conceived, frustrated his project. The young lady was at first placed under the protection of her mother at Castle Downie, the chief residence of the clan Fraser ; but there it was not thought prudent to allow her to abide, and she was therefore carried, under an escort, to Dunkeld, the house of her uncle, the Marquis of Athole. And here another match was very soon provided for her, and again her consent was gained, and again the preliminaries of marriage were arranged for this passive individual. The nobleman whom her relations now proposed to her was William, afterwards eleventh Lord Salton, also a Fraser, whose father was a man of great wealth and influence, although referred to the Master of Lovat as the "representative of an unconsiderable branch of the Frasers who had settled in the lowlands of the county of Aberdeen.'' This match was suggested to the Athole family by one Robert Fraser "an apostate wretch," as the Master of Lovat calls him, a kinsman, and an advocate; and he advised the Marquis of Athole, not only to marry the young lady to the heir of Lord Salton, but also, by various schemes and manoeuvres, to get Lord Salton declared head of the clan of Frasers. This plot was soon divulged; disappointment, rage, revenge were raised to the height in the breast of the Master of Lovat. His pride was as prominent a feature in this bold and vindictive man, as his duplicity. Throughout life, he could, it is true, bend for a purpose, as low as his designs required him to bend ; but the fierce exclusiveness of a Highland chieftain never died away, but rankled in his heart to the last.

It must be admitted that he had just cause of irritation against the Murrays, first for disputing the claim of his father to the Lovat title and estates, a claim indisputably just; nor was their project for constituting Lord Salton the head of the clan Fraser, either a wise or an equitable scheme. It was heard with loud indignation in that part of the country where the original stock of this time-honoured race were, until their name was stained by the crimes of Simon Fraser, held in love and reverence. It was heard by the Master of Lovat perhaps with less expression of his feelings than by his followers; but the meditated affront was avenged, and avenged by a scheme which none but a demon could have devised. It was avenged: but It brought ruin on the head of the avenger.

Perhaps in no other country, at the same period, could the wrongs of an individual have been visited upon an aggressor with the same dispatch and ruthless determination as in the Highlands. Until the year 1748, when the spirit of clanship was broken, never to be restored, those hereditary monarchies founded on custom, and allowed by general consent rather than established by laws, existed in their full vigour.

The military ranks of the clans was fixed and continual during the rare intervals of local quiet, and every head of a family was captain of his own tribe. The spirit of rivalry between the clans kept up a taste for hostility, and converted rapine into a service of honour-Revenge was considered as a duty, and superstition aided the dictates of a fiery and impetuous spirit. A people naturally humane, naturally forbearing, had thus, by the habits of ages immemorial, become remorseless plunderers and resolute avengers. When any affront was offered to a chieftain, the clan was instantly summoned. They came from their straths and their secluded valleys, wherein there was little intercourse with society in general to tame their native pride, or to weaken the predominant emotion of their hearts,— their pride in their chieftain. They came fearlessly, trusting, not only in the barriers which Nature had given them in their rocks and fastnesses, but in the unanimity of their purpose. Each clan had its stated place of meeting, and when it was summoned upon any emergency, the fiery cross, one end burning, the other wrapt in a piece of linen stained with blood, was sent among the aroused clansmen, traversing those wild moors, and penetrating into the secluded glens of those sublime regions. It was sent, by two messengers, throughout the country, and passed from hand to hand, these messengers shouting, as they went, the war-cry of the clan, which was echoed from rock to rock. And then arose the cry of the coronach, that wail, appropriate to the dead, but uttered also by women, as the fiery cross roused them from their peaceful occupations, and hurried from them their sons and their husbands.

Never was the fiery cross borne throughout the beautiful country of lnvernessshire, never was the wail of the coronach heard on a more ignoble occasion, than on the summons of the Master of Lovat, in the September of the year It! 9 8. After some fruitless negotiation, it is true, "with Lord Salton, and after availing himself of the power of his father, as chieftain, to imprison Robert Fraser, and several other disaffected clansmen whom that person had seduced from their allegiance, the Master of Lovat prepared for action. The traitors to his cause had escaped death by flight, but the clan were otherwise perfectly faithful to their chieftain. Fear, as well as love, had a part in their allegiance; yet it has been conjectured that the hereditary devotion of the Highlanders must, originally, have had its origin in gratitude for services and for bounty, which it was the interest of every chieftain to bestow.

The Master of Lovat, or, as ho was called by his people, the chieftain, first assembled his people at their accustomed place, to the number of sixty and seventy, and bade them be in readiness when called upon, lie thanked them for their prompt attendance, and then dismissed them. During the next month, however, he was met, coming from Inverness, by Lord Salton and Lord Mungo Murray, who were returning from Castle Dowrde. Such was the preparation for the disgraceful scenes which quickly followed. As soon as the Master of Lovat and his father were informed of the flight of their treacherous clansmen, they wrote a letter to Lord Salton. and conjured him, in the name of the clan, to remain at home, and not to disturb their repose nor to interfere with the interests of their chief; an<l they assured him. that though a Fraser, he should, if he entered their country, pay for that act of audacity by his head. Such is Lord Lovat's account: it is not borne out by the statements of others ; yet since the affair must have been generally discussed among the clan, it is probable, that he would not have given this version of it without foundation. Lord Salton, according to the same statement, at first received this letter in good part : and wrote to Lord Lovat and to the Master, giving his word that he would only interfere to make peace; and that, for this reason, he would proceed to the seat of the Dowager Lady Lovat, at Beaufort. Upon afterwards discovering that this courtesy was a mere feint, and that this new claimant to the honours of chief was in close correspondence with the Murrays, who were with him and the Dowager at Beaufort, the Master of Lovat wrote to his father, who was at Sthratheric, to meet him at Lovat, which was only three miles' distance from Beaufort, whilst he should himself proceed to the same place by way of Inverness, where he trusted that Lord Salton would grant him an interview for the purpose of explaining their mutual differences.

No sooner had the Master arrived at Inverness, than he found, as he declares, so much reason to distrust the assurances of Lord Salton, that he wrote him a letter, sent, as he says, "with all diligence by a gentleman of his train, to adhere to his word passed to his father and himself, and to meet him the next day at two in the afternoon, three miles from Beaufort, either like a friend, or with sword and pistol, as he pleased."

Such is the account transmitted by Lord Lovat, and intended to give the air of an "affair of honour" to a desperate and lawless attack upon Fraser of Salton, and on those friends who supported his pretensions to the hand of the heiress of Lovat.

The real facts of the case were, that Fraser of Salton was to pass through Inverness on his way to Dunkeld, where the espousals between him and the heiress of Lovat were to be celebrated. "Whether Simon Fraser purposed merely to prevent the accomplishment of this marriage, or whether he had fully matured another scheme :—whether he was excited by disappointment to rush into unpremeditated deeds of violence, or whether his design had been fostered in the recesses of his own dark mind, cannot be fully ascertained. In some measure his revenge was gratified. He was enabled, by the events which followed, to delay the marriage of Fraser of Salton, and to retard the nuptials,—which, indeed, never took place. "This wild enterprise," observes Arnot, in his Collection of Criminal Trials in Scotland, "was to be accomplished by such deeds, that the stern contriver of the principal action is less shocking than the abject submission of his accomplices."

Lord Salton dispatched an answer, saying, that he would meet the Master of Lovat at the appointed time, as his "good friend and servant." But the bearer of that message distrusted the reply, and informed the Master that he believed it was Fraser of Salton's intention to set out and to pass through Inverness early in the morning, iii order to escape the interview. Measures were taken accordingly, by the Master of Lovat. At a very early hour he was seen passing over the bridge of Inverness, attended by six gentlemen, as he himself relates, and two servants, completely armed. This is the Master's statement; but on his subsequent trial, it appeared that the fiery cross and the coronach had been sent throughout all the country ; that a body of four or five hundred men in arms were in attendance, and that they had met in the house of one of the clansmen, Fraser of Strichen, where the Master took their oaths of fidelity, and where they swore on their dirks to be faithful to him in his enterprise. "The inhabitants of Inverness," says Lord Lovat, "observing their alert and spirited appearance, lifted up their hands to heaven, and prayed God to prosper their enterprise." These simple and deluded people, doubtless, but partially understood the nature of that undertaking which they thus called on Heaven to bless.

The Master of Lovat and his party had not proceeded more than four or five miles from Inverness, than they observed a large party of runners issuing out of the wood of Bonshrive, which is crossed by the high road. "It is a custom," adds Lord Lovat, " in the north of Scotland, for almost every gentleman to have a servant in livery, who runs before his horse, and who is always at his stirrup when he wishes to mount or to alight; and however swift any horse may be, a good runner is always able to match him."

The gentlemen who attended the Master of Lovat, were soon able to perceive that Lord Salton was one of the leaders of the party who was quitting the "Wood of Bonshrive, and emerging into the high road ; and that his Lordship was accompanied by Lord Mungo Murray, a younger son of the Marquis of Athole, and, as the Master of Lovat intimates, an early friend of his own. The account which Lord Lovat's narrative henceforth presents, of that which ensued, is so totally at variance with the evidence on hit. trial, that it must be disregarded and rejected as unworthy of credit, as well as the boast with which he concludes it, of having generously saved the lives of Lord Salton, and of his own kinsman, Lord Mungo. It appeared afterwards, that his followers had orders to seize them, dead or alive.

These two young noblemen were, it seems, almost instantly overpowered by numbers, notwithstanding the attendance of the runners, on whom Lord Lovat so much insists. Lord Mungo was taken prisoner by the Master himself. They were then deprived of their horses, and being mounted on poneys, were conducted to Fanellan, guards surrounding them, with their muskets loaded, and dirks drawn, to a house belonging to Lord Lovat, where they were kept in close confinement, guarded by a hundred clansmen. Gibbets were erected under the windows of the house, to intimidate the prisoners; and at the end of a week they were inarched off to Castle Downie, —the Master of Lovat going there in warlike array, with a pair of colours and a body of five hundred men. From Castle Downie, Lord Salton and Lord Mungo were led away into the islands and mountains, and were treated with great indignity.

These adversaries being thus disposed of, the Master of Lovat invested the castle of Downie with an armed force, and soon took possession of a fortress, tenanted only by a defenceless woman, the Dowager Lady Lovat. But that lady was a Murray; one of a resolute family, and descended on her mother's side from a Stanley. She was the grand-daughter of Charlotte de la Tremouille, who defended Latham House against the Parliamentary forces in 1(544. Notwithstanding that armed men were placed in the different apartments of the castle, she was undaunted. Attempts were made by the Master cf Lovat to compel her to sign certain deeds, securing to him that certainty of the right to the estates, for which he was ready to plunge in the deepest of crimes. She was firm—she refused to subscribe her name. Her refusal was the signal, or the incentive, for the completion of another plot, of a last resource,—a compulsory marriage between the Master of Lovat and herself.

The awful and almost incredible details of that last act of infuriated villany, prove Lady Lovat to have been a woman of strong resolution, and of a deep sensibility. The ceremony of marriage was pronounced by Robert Monro, Minister of Abertaaife. The unhappy Lady Lovat's resistance and prayers were heard in the very court-yard below, although the sound of bagpipes were intended to drown her screams. Morning found the poor wretched being, to make use of one of the expressions used by an eye-witness, " out of her judgment; she spoke none, but gave the deponent a broad stare." For several days reason was not restored to her, until, greeted by one of her friends with the epithet "Madam", she answered, "Call me not Madam, but the most miserable wretch alive." The scene of this act of diabolical wickedness is razed to the ground: Castle Downie was burned by the royal troops, in the presence of him who had committed such crimes within its walls, and of three hundred of his clansmen, shortly after the battle of Culloden.

It appears from a letter written by Thomas Lovat. the father of the Master, to the Duke of Argyle, that he and his son were shortly " impeached for a convocation," and for making prisoners of Lord Salton and Lord Mungo Murray, for which they were charged before him, wore lined, discharged their lines, and gave security to keep the peace." So lightly was that gross invasion of the liberty that threatened the lives of others at first treated! "We have many advertisements," adds Thomas Lovat, "that Athole is coming here in person, with all the armed men he is able to make, to compel us to duty, and that without delay." If he come, so we are resolved to defend ourselves; the laws of God, of nature, and the laws of all nations, not only allowing, but obliging all men, vim vi repellere. And I should wish from my heart, if it were consistent with divine and human laws; that the estates of Athole and Lovat were laid as a prize, depending on the result of a fair day betwixt him and me." It was, perhaps, an endeavour to avert the impending ruin and devastation that followed, that the Master of Lovat gave their liberty to Lord Saltoun and Lord Mungo Murray, although not until he had threatened them both with hanging for interfering with his inheritance, and compelling Lord Saltoun to promise that he would, on arriving at Inverness, send a formal obligation for eight thousand pounds, never more to concern himself with the affairs of the Lovat estate, and that neither he nor the Marquis of Athole would ever prosecute either Lord Lovat or his son, or their clan in general, for the disgrace they hail received in having been made prisoners, for any of the transactions of this affair.

But it was evident that, in spite of this concession, the vengeance of the Marquis of Athole never slept; and that he was resolved to wreak it upon the head of the wretch who had for ever blasted the happiness of his sister.

The Master of Lovat was shortly aware that it would no longer be prudent to remain with his victim in the castle of Downie. His wife, as it was then his pleasure to call her, remained in a condition of the deepest despair. She would neither eat nor drink whilst she was in his power; and her health appears to have suffered greatly from distress and fear. In the dead of night she was summoned to leave Castle Downie, to be removed to a more remote and a wilder region, where the unhappy creature might naturally expect, from the desperate character of her pretended husband, no mitigation of her sorrows. Since rumours were daily increasing of the approach of Lord Athole's troops, the clan of Fraser was again, when Lady Lovat was conveyed from the scene of her anguish, called forth to assist their leader, and the wail of the coronach was again heard in that dismal and portentous night : for portentous it was. This crime, the first signal offence of Simon Fraser, stamped his destiny. Its effects followed him through life : it entailed others : it was the commencement of a catalogue of iniquities almost unprecedented in the career of one man's existence.

Crushed, broken-spirited, afraid of returning to her kindred, whose high fame she seems to have thought would be sullied by her misfortunes, Lady Lovat was conducted by Fraser to the Island of Aigas. They stole thither on horseback, attended by a single servant, and arriving at the sea-shore, they there took a boat, and were carried to the obscure island which Fraser had chosen for his retreat. Thomas Fraser of

Beufort, the father of Simon, thus writes to the Duke of Argvle respecting this singular and revolting union.

"We have gained a considerable advantage by my eldest son's being married to the Dowager of Lovat; and if it please God they live together some years, our circumstances will be very good. Our enemies are so galled at it, that there is nothing malice or cruelty can invent but they design and practice against us; so that we are forced to take to the hills, and keep spies at all parts; by which, among many other difficulties, the greatest is this,—that my daughter-in-law, being a tender creature, fatigue and fear of bloodshed may put an end to her, which would make our condition worse than ever."

And now there took place, in the mind of Lady Lovat, one of those singular revulsions which experience teaches us to explain rather than induces us to believe as neither impossible nor uncommon. Lady Lovat, it is said upon the grave authority of a reverend biographer, became attached to the bonds which held her. "Here," says Mr. Arbuthnot, in his Life of Lord Lovat, " he continued a month or six weeks, and by this time the captain had found means to work himself so effectually into the good graces of the lady, that, as he reported, "she doated on him, and was always unhappy at his absence.'" However true or however false this representation may he, the marriage sen ice was again, as it was said, solemnized, at the suggestion of the Master of Lovat, and with the free consent of Lady Do vat.* On the twenty-sixth of October, 1697, we find Simon Fraser writing in the following terms to the Laird of Culloden. The answer is not given in the Culloden Papers, but it not improbably contained a recommendation to repeat the marriage ceremonials:—

" Beaufort, the 26th of Oct., 1797."

" Dear Sir,

"Thir Lords att Inverness, with the rest of my implacable enemies, does so confound my wife, that she is uneasy till she see them. I am afraid that they are so madd with this disapointment, that they will propose something to her that is dangerous, her brother having such power with her ; so that really, till things be perfectly accommodatt, I do nott desire they should see her, and I know not how to manage her. So I hope you will send all the advice you can to your oblidged humble servant, Sin. Fraser."

" I hope you will excuse me for not going your lenth, since I have such a hard task at home."

from simon fraser to the laird of culloden.

"Nov. 23rd, 1697.

" Sir,

" I pray you receive the inclosed acompt of my business, and see if your own conscience, in sight of God, doth not convince you that it is literally true. 1 hade sent it to you upon Saturday last, but you were not at home; however, I sent it that day to the Laird of Calder, who, I hope, will not sitt down on me, but transmitt it to my best friends; and I beseech you, Sir, for God's sak, that you do the like. I know the Chan-cellour is a just man, notwithstanding his friendship to my Lord Tilliberdine. I forgive you for betraying of me; but neither you, nor I, nor 1 hope God himself, will forgive him that deceived you, and caused you to do it. I am very hopeful m my dear wife's constancey, if they do not put her to death. Now I ad no more, but leaves myself to your discretion; and reste, Sir, your faithful friend and servant, Sim. Fraser."

Lady Lovat lived to hear her husband deny that he had ever sought her in marriage, and to see him married to two different wives; and he scrupled not to represent the unfortunate Lady Lovat as the last possible object of his regard--as a "widow, old enough to be his mother, dwarfish in her person, and deformed in her shape!'" This, as far as related to disparity of years, was untrue; the Dowager was only four years older than the Master of Lovat.

Meantime justice had not slumbered; and one morning, a charge against Captain Simon Fraser, of Beaufort, and many others, persons mostly of the clan Fraser, for high treason, in forming unlawful associations, collecting an armed force, occupying and fortifying houses and garrisons, &c.' was left by the herald, pursuant to an old Scottish custom, in a cloven stick, which was deposited at the river side, opposite to the Isle of Aigas. Of this no notice was taken by Simon, except to renew his addresses to his clan, and to hasten, as far as he could from his secluded retreat, a systematic resistance to the Marquis of Athole, and even to the royal troops, whose approach was expected. But his fears were aroused. Again he sought to avert the coming danger by concession; and he determined, in the first instance, on restoring Lady Lovat to her friends.

It is stated by Mr. Arbuthnot, but still on the authority of the Master of Lovat, that Lady Lovat had now become reluctant to return to her relations. Nor is it improbable that this statement is true, without referring that reluctance to any affection for the wretch with whom her fate was linked. She complied, nevertheless, with the proposal of the Master; and leaving the Island of Aigas, she proceeded first to Castle Downie, and afterwards to Dunkeld, where, according to Arbuthnot, she was obliged by her brother, the Marquis, to join in a prosecution against her husband, for a crime which she had forgiven. According to a letter from the Duke of Argyle, addressed to the Rev. Mr. Carstares, chaplain to King William, she fully exculpated the Master from the charges made against him on her account. This exculpation was doubtless given when the unhappy woman was under the influence of that subtle and powerful mind, which lent its aid to its guilty schemes. Simon Fraser himself, as we have seen, in writing to Duncan Forbes, declared—"I am very hopeful in my dear wife's constancy, if the/ do not put her to death." This might be only a part of his usual acting,—a trait of that dissimulation which was the moral taint of his character; or it may have been true that the humiliated being whom he called his wife had really learned to cherish one who seemed born to be distrusted, hated, and shunned.

The return of Lady Lovat to her family was of no avail in mitigating the indignation of the Marquis of Athole. By his influence with the Privy Council, who were, it is said, completely under his control, he procured an order from King "William for the march of troops against the clan of Fraser, with instructions, according to Simon Fraser, to overrun the country, to burn, kill, and to destroy the whole clan, without exception ; and, without issuing a citation to Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, or to his son, to appear—without examining a single witness—a printed sentence was published against all the Frasers, men and women and children, and their adherents. Even the sanctuary of churches was not to be respected: "in a word," says Lord Lovat's Manifesto, "history, sacred or profane, cannot produce an order so pregnant with such unexampled cruelty as this sentence, which is carefully preserved in the house of Lovat, to the eternal confusion and infamy of those who signed it.

Government which sanctioned the massacre of Glencoe was perfectly capable of issuing a proclamation which confounded the innocent with the guilty, and punished before trial.

The Master of Lovat assembled his clan. That simple and faithful people, trusting m the worth and honour of their leader, swore that they would never desert him, that they would leave their wives, their children, and all that they most valued, to live and die with him. An organized resistance was planned ; and the Master of Lovat intreated his father, as he himself expressed it, with tears, "to retire into the country of his kinsmen, the Macleods of Skye." The proposal was accepted, and Thomas of Beaufort, for he never assumed the disputed title of Lord Lovat, took refuge among that powerful and friendly clan.

The prosecution against the Master of Lovat was, in the mean time, commenced in the Court of Justiciary; "the only case," so it has been called, "since the Revolution, in which a person was tried in absence, before the Court of Justiciary, a proof led, a jury inclosed, a verdict returned, and sentence pronounced; forfeiting life, estate, honours, fame, and posterity."41" None of the parties who were summoned, appeared. The jury returned a verdict finding the indictment proved, and the Court adjudged Captain Fraser and the other persons accused, to be executed as traitors; "their name, fame, memory, and honours, to be extinct, and their arms to be riven forth and deleted out of the books of arms; so that their posterity may never have place, nor be able hereafter to bruite or enjoy any honours, offices, titles, or dignities; and to have forfeited all their lands, heritages, and possessions whatsoever."

After this sentence, a severer one than that usually passed in such cases, the Master of Lovat, for the period of four years, led a life of skirmishes, escapes, and hardships of every description. lie retired into the remote Highlands, then almost impenetrable; and, followed by a small band of hi< clansmen, he wandered from mountain to mountain, resolved never to submit, nor yield himself up to justice. Since his father's estates were forfeited, and he could draw no means of subsistence from them, he was often obliged to the charity of the hospitable Highlanders for some of their coarse fare; and when that resource failed, or when he had lived too long on the bounty of a neighbourhood, he and his companions made nightly incursions into the Lowlands, and, carrying off cattle and provisions, retreated again to their caverns, there to satisfy hunger with the fruits of their incursions.

During the four years of misery and peril in which the Master of Lovat continued to evade justice, his father died, among his relations in the island of Skye. His decease was caused, according to the representation of his son, by a hasty march made to escape the King's troops, who, he heard, were coming to the islands to pursue him. Among the few humane traits in the character of Simon Fraser, the habitual respect and affection borne by the Highlanders to parents appears to have been perceptible. He speaks of Thomas of Beaufort in his Life with regret and regard; but seals those expressions of tenderness with an oath that he "would revenge himself on his own and his father's enemies with their blood, or perish in the attempt." Such were his notions of filial piety.

The Master of Lovat had now attained the rank for which he had made such sacrifices of safety and of fame; and had the hollow satisfaction of a disputed title, with an attainted estate, and a life over which the sword of destiny was suspended,

A sentence of outlawry followed that of condemnation, and letters of fire and sword were issued against him. He was forbidden all correspondence or intercourse with his fellow subjects: he was cast off and rejected by his friends, and in constant danger either of being captured by the officers of justice, or assassinated by his enemies. The commission for destroying the clan of Fraser was not, indeed, put into execution; but that wild and beautiful district which owned him for its lord, was ravaged by the King's troops stationed at Inverness, or intimidated by the Highland army, commanded by Lord Lovat's early companions, but now deadly foes,—Lord James and Lord Mungo Murray. At length, after gaining a complete victory, according to his own account, at Stratheric, over the tributaries of Lord Athole, and extracting from the prisoners an oath by which they "renounced the claims on our Saviour and their hopes in Heaven if ever they returned to the territories of his enemy, the guilty and unfortunate man grew weary of his life of wandering, penury, and disgrace."

He was always fertile in expedients, and audacious in proffering his petitions for mercy. During his father's life, a petition in the form of a letter, written by Thomas of Beaufort, and signed by seven Frasers, had been addressed to the Duke of Argyle, appealing to his aid at Court, upon the plea of that "entire friendship which the family of Lovat had with, and dependence upon, that of Argyle, grounded upon an ancient propinquity of blood, and zealously maintained by both through a tract and series of many ages.'' The Duke of Argyle had. it was well understood, made some applications on behalf of the Frasers; and Lord Lovat now resolved to push his interest in the same friendly quarter, and to endeavour to obtain a remission of the sentence out against his head.

His efforts were the more successful, because King William had by this time begun to suspect the fidelity of Lord Tullibardine, and to place a strong reliance upon the integrity and abilities of the Duke of Argyle. The Duke represented to his Majesty not only the ancient friendship subsisting between the house of Campbell and that of Fraser, but also that the King might spend " a hundred times the value of the Fraser estate before he could reduce it, on account of its inaccessible situation and its connection with the neighbouring clans. The Duke's account of his success is given with characteristic, good sense in the following letter :—

the earl of argyle to the laird of culloden.

" Edinburgh, Sept. 5, 1700.

"Sir,

" In complyance with your deeyre and a great many other gentlemen, with my own inclination to endeavour a piece of justice, I have made it my chief concern to obtain Beaufort's (now I think 1 may say Lord Lovatt's) pardon, and the other gentlemen concerned with him in the convocation and seizing of prisoners, which are crymcs more immediately against his Majesty, which I have at last obtained and have it in my custody. I designe to-morrow for Argyllshire ; and, there not being a quorum of Exchequer in town, am oblidged to delay passing the remission till next moneth. We have all had lyes enuf of his Majestic before : his goodness in this will, I hope, return my friend Culloden to his old consistency, and make E. Argyll appear to him as good a Presbiterian and a weel wisher to his country in no lesse a degree then Tullibardine, who plundered my land some tyme agoe, and Culloden's lately Pray recover the same spiritt you had at the Revolution ; let us lay assyde all resentments ill founded, all projects which may shake our foundation ; let us follow no more phantasms (I may say rather divells), who, with a specious pretext leading us into the. dark, may drownd us. I fynd some honest men's eyes are opened, and I shall be sorie if Oulloden's continue dimm. You have been led by Jacobitt generales to fight for Presbiterie and the liberty of the country. Is that consistent 'l. If not speedily remedied, remember I tell you the pos-teritie of such 'will curse them. Let me have a plain satisfactorie answer from you, that I may be in perfect charitie with Culloden. Adieu."

Accordingly, the Duke having obtained his pardon, Lord Lovat was enjoined to lay down his arms, aud to go privately to London. That sentence, which had followed the prosecution on the part of Lady Lovat, was not. at that time, remitted, for fear of disobliging the Athole family. Upon arriving in London, Lord Lovat found that Lord Seafield, the colleague of the Earl of Tullibardine, was disinclined to risk incurring the displeasure of the Athole family. lie put off the signing of the pardon from time to time. He was even so much in awe of the Earl of Tullibardine, that he endeavoured to got the King to sign the pardon when he was at Loo ; that Mr. Pringle, the other Secretary of State, might bear the odium of presenting it for signature. During this delay, Lord Lovat, not being able with safety to return to Scotland, resolved to occupy the interval of suspense by a journey into France.

Whilst Lord Lovat's affairs were in this condition, the Marquis of Athole, resolved for ever to put it out of Lord Lovat's power to gain any ascendancy over the young heiress of Lovat, Amelia Fraser, was employed in arranging a marriage for that lady to the son of Alexander Mackenzie, Lord PrestonhalL It was agreed, by a marriage settlement, that Mr. Mackenzie should take the name and title of Fraser-dale, and that the children of that marriage should bear the name of Fraser. The estate of Lovat was settled upon Fraserdale in his life, with remainder to his children by his wife.'55' It indeed appears, that the estate of Lovat was never surrendered to Lord Lovat; that he bore in Scotland, according to some statements, no higher title than that of Lord of Beaufort; and that a regular receiver of the rents was appointed by the guardians of Amelia Fraser :t so completely were the dark designs of Simon Fraser defeated in their object! He was, however, graciously received at St. Gerinains. whither he went whilst yet, James the Second, in all the glory of a sanctified superstition, lived with Lis Queen, the faithful partner of his misfortunes. Lord Lovat ascribes this visit to St. Germains to his intention of dissipating the calumnious stories circulated against him by the Marquis of Athole. The flourishing statement which he gives in his memoirs of King James's reception, may, however, be treated as wholly apocryphal. James the Second, with, all his errors, was too shrewd a man, too practised in kingcraft, to speak of the "perfidious family of Athole," or to mention the head of that noble house by the title of that "old traitor." Lord Lovat's incapacity to write the truth, and his perpetual endeavour to magnify himself in his narrative, cause us equally to distrust the existence of that document, with the royal seal affixed to it, which he says the King signed with his own hand, declaring that he would protect Lord Lovat from "the perfidious and faithless family of Athole."'

The fact is, and it redounds to the credit of James the Second, that monarch, eager as he ever remained to attach partisans to his interests, never received Lord Lovat into his presence. The infamy of the exploits of the former Master of Lovat had preceded his visit to France : the whole account of his own reception at St. Germains, written with astonishing audacity, and most circumstantially worded, was a fabrication.

Lord Lovat's usual readiness in difficulties did not fail him ; he was a ruined man, and it was puerile to shrink from expedients. lie applied to the Pope's nuncio, and expressed his readiness to become a Roman Catholic. The suit was, of course, encouraged, and the arch hypocrite, making a recantation of all his former errors, professed himself a member of the holy Catholic Church, and acknowledged the Pope as its head. This avowal cost him little, for he was by no means prejudiced in favour of any specific faith ; and it gained him for the time, some little popularity in the gay metropolis in which he had taken refuge.

King James, indeed, to his honour, was still resolute in declining his personal homage; but Louis the Fourteenth was less scrupulous, and the Marquis de Torcy, the favourite and Minister of the French King, presented the abjured of England and Scotland at the Palais of Versailles. It is difficult to picture to oneself the savage and merciless Fraser, the pillager, the destroyer, the outlaw, conversing, as he is said to have done, with the saintly and sagacious Madame Maintenon. It is scarcely possible to conceive elegant and refined women of any nation receiving this depraved, impenitent man, with the rumour of his recent crimes still fresh in their memory, into their polished circles. Yet they made no scruple in that dissolute city, to associate with the abandoned wretch who dared not return to Scotland, and who only looked for a pardon for his crimes through the potent workings of a faction.

Lord Lovat well knew the value of female influence. He dressed in the height of fashion—he adapted his language and sentiments to the tone of those around the Court. He was a man of considerable conversational talents; "his deportment" says his biographer, "was graceful and manly." When he was first presented to Louis the Fourteenth, who was desirous of asking some questions concerning the invasion of Scotland, he is said to have prepared an elaborate address, which he forgot in the confusion produced by the splendour around him, but to have delivered an able extempore speech, with infinite ease and good taste, upon the spur of the moment, to the great amusement of Louis, who learned from De Torcy the circumstance".'

His advancement at the Court of Versailles was interrupted by the necessity of his return to England, in order to obtain at last a final pardon from the King for his offences. It is singular that the instrument by whom ho sought to procure this remission was William Carstairs, that extraordinary man, who had suffered in the reign of James the Second the thumb-screw, and had been threatened with the iron boot, for refusing to disclose the correspondence between the friends of the Revolution. Mr. Carstairs was now secretary to King "William, and he little knew, when he counselled that monarch to pardon Lovat, what a partisan of the Jacobite cause he was thus restoring to society.

His mediation was effectual, perhaps owing to a dislike which had arisen in the mind of William against the Athole family; and a pardon was procured for Lord Lovat. The affair was concluded at Loo, whither Lovat followed the King from England. "He is a bold man," the Monarch is said to have observed to Carstairs, "to come so far under sentence of death." The pardon was unlimited, and that it might comprise the offence against Lady Athole, it was now " a complete and ample pardon for every imaginable crime." The royal seal was appended to it, and there remained only to get that of Scotland also affixed.

Lovat entrusted the management of that delicate and difficult matter to a cousin, a Simon Fraser also, by whose treachery it was suppressed; and Lord Seafield caused another pardon to pass the great seal, in which the treason against King William was alone specified; and other offences were left unpardoned. Upon this, Lord Lovat cited the Marquis of Athole before the Lords Justiciary in Edinburgh to answer before them for a false accusation : but on the very day of supporting his charge, as the biographer of his family relates, his patron the Duke of Argyle was informed that the judges had been corrupted, and that certain death would be the result if he appeared." This statement is taken from Lord Lovat's own complication of falsehoods, his incomparably audacious "Manifesto." Notwithstanding that Lovat had appeared with a retinue of a hundred armed gentlemen, as honorable as himself. with the intention of intimidating the judges;—in spite of the Duke of Argyle's powerful influence, the friends of the outlawed nobleman counselled him again to retreat to England, and to suffer judgment to go by default. The Duke of Argyle, he says, would not lose sight of him till he had seen him 011 horseback, and had ordered his own best horse to be brought round to the door. There was no remedy for what was called by Lord Lovat's friends, the. "rascality" of the judges :—and again this unworthy Highlander was driven from his own country to seek safety in the land wherein his offences had received their pardon. The 'uflexibility of the justiciary lords, or their known integrity, form a fine incident in history ; for the Scottish nation was at this period, ridden by Court faction, and broken down by recent oppression and massacre.

Lord Lovat, meeting the Duke of Argyle on the frontiers, accompanied his Grace to London; and here, notwithstanding his boast. "that after his arrival in London he was at the Duke's house every day", he appears, about this time, to have been reduced to a state of miserable poverty, and merited desertion.

In the following letter to Mr. Carstairs, he complains that nothing is done for him—he applies to Mr. Carstairs for a little money to carry him home, "having no other door open."

lord lovat to mr. carstairs,

" London, June 20th, 1701

" Dear Sir,

"I reckon myself very unhappy that my friends here do so much neglect me ; and I believe my last journey to England has done me a vast prejudice; for if T had been at home, I would have got something done in my Lord Evelin's business, and would have got money before now, that might serve me to go a volunteer with the King, or maintain me anywhere ; but my friend at home must have worse thoughts now of my affairs than ever, having staid so long here, and got nothing done. However, I now resolve to go to Scotland, not being able to subsist longer here. I have sent the inclosed note, that, according to your kind promise, I may have the little money which will carry me home, and it shall he precisely paid before two months; and I must say, it is one of the greatest favours ever was done me, not having any other door open, if you were not so generous as to assist me, which I shall alwise gratefully remember, and continue wiLh all sincerity, Dear Sir, Your faithful and obliged servant, Lovat."

The death of William the Third revived the hopes of the Jacobite party; and to that centre of attraction the ruined and the restless, the aspiring and the profligate, alike turned their regards. Never was so great a variety of character, and so great a diversity of motives displayed in any cause, as in the various attempts which were made to secure the restoration of the Stuarts. On some natures those opinions, those schemes, which were generally known under the name of Jacobitism, acted as an incentive to self-sacrifice — and to a constancy worthy of better fortune. In other minds the poison of faction worked irremediable mischief: many who began with great and generous resolves, sank into intrigue, and ended in infidelity to the cause which that had espoused. But Lord Lovat came under neither of these classes ; he knew not the existence of a generous emotion; he was consistent m the undeviating selfishness and baseness of his career.

If he had a sincere predilection, he was disposed to the interest of King James. Hereditary tendencies scarcely ever lose their hold upon the mind entirely.

The period was now, however, approaching, when he whose moral atmosphere was, like his native climate, the tempest and the whirlwind, might hope to glean some benefit from the impending storm which threatened the peace of the British empire.

On the sixth of September, 1701, James the Second of England expired at St. Germains. This event was favourable to those of the Jacobite party who wished to bring forward the interests of the young Prince of Wales. James had long been infirm, and had laid aside all schemes of worldly elevation. He had passed his time between the diversion of hunting and the duties of religion, his widowed Queen retained, on the contrary, an ardent desire to see her son restored to the throne of England. She implanted that wish in his own breast; she nourished it by the society of those whom she placed around him; and she passed her time in constantly forming new schemes for the promotion of that restoration to which her sanguine anticipations were continually directed.

The death of James was succeeded by two events: one, the avowed determination of Louis the Fourteenth to take the exiled family of Stuart under his protection, and the consequent proclamation of the young Prince of Wales as King of England; the other, the bill for the attainder of the pretended Prince of Wales, in the English Parliament, with an additional clause of attainder against the Queen, Mary of Modena, together with an oath of abjuration of the "Pretender." The debates which impeded the progress of this measure, plainly prove how deeply engrafted in the hearts of many of the higher classes were those rights which they were thus enforced to abjure.

This was one of the last acts of William. His death, in 1702, revived the spirits of the Jacobites, for the partiality of Anne to her brother, the young Prince, was generally understood; and It appears, from the letters which have been published in later days to have been of a tar more real and sisterly character than has generally been supposed. The death of the young Duke of Gloucester appeared, naturally, to make way for the restoration of the Stuart family; and there is no doubt but that Anne earnestly desired it; and that on one occasion, when her brother's life was in danger from illness, her anxiety was considerable on his account.

It is, therefore, no matter of reproach to the Jacobites, as an infatuation, although it has frequently been so represented, that they cherished those schemes which were ultimately so unfortunate, but which, had it not been that "popery appeared more dreadful in England than even the prospect of slavery and temporal oppression," would doubtless have been successful without the disastrous scenes whHi marked the struggle to bring them to bear.

Lord Lovat was at this time no insignificant instrument in the hands of the Jacobite party. When he found that the sentence of outlawry was not reversed; when he perceived that he must no longer hope for the peaceable enjoyment of the Lovat inheritance, his whole soul turned to the restoration of King James; and, after his death, to that of the young Prince of Wales. Yet he seems, in the course of the extraordinary affairs in which the Queen, Mary of Modena, was rash enough to employ him, to have one eye fixed upon St. James's, another upon St. Germains, and to have been perfectly uncertain as to which power he should eventually dedicate his boasted influence and talents.

Lord Lovat may be regarded as the first promoter of the Insurrection of 1715 in Scotland. Whether his exertions proceeded from a real endeavour to promote the cause of the Jacobites, or whether they were, as it has been supposed, the result of a political scheme of the Duke of Queensbury's, it is difficult to determine, and immaterial to decide ; because his periidy in disclosing the whole to that nobleman has been clearly discovered. It seems, however, more than probable, that he could not go on in the straightforward path ; and that he was in the employ of the Duke of Queens-bury from the first, has been confidently stated.

Early in 1702, Lord Lovat went to France, and pretending to have authority from some of the Highland clans and Scottish nobility, offered the services of his countrymen to the Court of St. Germains. This offer was made shortly before the death of James the Second, and a proposal was made in the name of the Scottish Jacobites to raise an army of twelve thousand men, if the King of France would consent to Iand five thousand men at Dundee, and five hundred at Fort William. His proposals were listened to, but his integrity was suspected.

According to his own account, Lord Lovat, being in full possession of his family honours, upon the death of King "William, immediately proclaimed the Prince of Wales in his own province, and acting, as he declares, in accordance with the advice of his friend, the Duke of Argyle, repaired to France, "in order to do the best that he could in that country," He immediately, to pursue his own statement, engaged the Earl Lord Marischal, the Earl of Errol, Lord Constable of Scotland, in the cause, and then, passing through England and Holland, in order to go to France through Flanders, he arrived in Paris with this commission about the month of September.

Sir John Maclean, cousin-german of Lord Lovat, had resided ten years at the Court of St. Germains, and to his guidance Lovat confided himself. By Maclean, Lovat was introduced to the Duke of Perth, as he was called, who had been Chancellor of Scotland when James the Second abdicated, and whose influence was now divided at the Court of St. Germains, by the Earl of Middleton. For never was faction more virulent- than in the Court of the exiled Monarch, and during the minority of his son. The Duke of Perth represented Lord Middleton as a "faithless traitor, a pensionary of the English Parliament, to give intelligence of all that passes at the Court of St. Germains." It was therefore agreed that this scheme of the invasion should be carried on unknown to that nobleman, and to this secrecy the Queen, it is said, gave her consent She hailed the prospect of an insurrection in Scotland with joy, and declared twenty times to Lord Lovat that she had sent her jewels to Paris to be sold, in order to send the twenty thousand crowns, which Lord Lovat represented would be necessary to equip the Highland forces. Hitherto the Court of St. Germains had been contented merely to keep up a correspondence with their friends, retaining them in their principles, though without any expectation of iinmediate assistance. The offer of Lord Lovat was the first step towards more active exertions in the cause of the Stuarts. It is in this sense that he may almost be considered as the father of the Rebellion of 1715. He first excited those ardent spirits to unanimity and to action ; and the project of restoration, which only languished whilst Anne lived, was never afterwards abandoned until after the year 1746.

Either through the indiscretion of Queen Mary of Modena, or through some other channel, the plot of the invasion became known to Lord Middleton. Jealous of the family of Perth his avowed enemies. Lord Middleton, according to Lord Lovat, was enraged at the project, and determined to ruin the projectors. It is very true that the antipathies between the prevailing factions may have excited Lord Miudleion's anger; but it is evident, from his lordship's letters and memoranda, that his dislike had a far deeper source—the profligacy of the agent Lovat; a profligacy which had deterred, as it was afterwards found, many of the Highland chiefs from lending their aid to the cause. Party fury, however, ran high, and before the affair of the insurrection could be settled, Lord Middleton, declaring that the last words of King James had made a powerful impression on his mind, retired into the convent of Benedictines at Paris, to be satisfied of some doubts, and to be instructed in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. But this temporary retirement rather revived than decreased the favour of the Queen towards him. She trusted to his advice; and, as the statement which Lord Lovat gave of the affairs of Scotland appeared too favourable to the excluded family to he believed, Louis the Fourteenth counselled the Court of St. Germains to send with Lord Lovat, or, as he is invariably called in all contemporary documents, Simon Fraser, a person who could be trusted to bring back a genuine account. Accordingly, James Murray of Stanhope, the brother of Sir David Murray, was employed to this effect. "He was," says Lord Lovat, "a spy of Lord Middleton's, his sworn creature, and a man who had no other means of subsistence.* From other accounts, however, Mr. Murray is shown to have been a man of probity, although in great pecuniary difficulties, as many of the younger members of old families were at that time. Mr. James Murray was sent forward into Scotland six weeks before Lord Lovat set out from France ; and the Court had the wisdom to send with the latter another emissary in the person of Mr. John Murray, of Abercairney.

After these arrangements were completed, Lord Lovat received his commission. lie set out upon his expedition by way of Brussels, to Calais. Not being furnished with passports, and having no other pass than the orders of the Marquis De Torcy to the commandants of the different forts upon the coast, he was obliged also, to wait for an entire month, the arrival of an English packet for the exchange of prisoners,—the captain of the vessel having been bribed to take him and his companions on board as English prisoners of war, and to put them on shore during the night, in his boat, near Dover.

Through the interest of Louis the Fourteenth, Lovat had received the commission from King James of major-general, with power to raise and command forces in his behalf :* and thus provided, he proceeded to Scotland, where he was met by the Duke of Argyle, his friend, and conducted by that nobleman to Edinburgh. Such was the simple statement of Lovat's first steps on this occasion. According to his memorial, which ho afterwards presented to Queen Alary, he received assurances of support from the Catholic gentry of Durham, who, "when he showed them the King's picture, fell down on their knees and kissed it." This flattering statement appeared, however, to resemble the rest of the memorial of his proceedings, and met with little or no credence even in the quarter where it was most likely to be well received.

From the Duke of Queensbury, Lord Lovat received a pass to go into the Highlands, which was procured under feigned names, both for him and his two companions, from Lord Nottingham, then Secretary of State. After this necessary preliminary, Lord Lovat made a tour among some of the principal nobility in the Lowlands. He found them, even according to his own statement, averse to take up arms without an express commission from the King. But he remarks, writing always as he does in the third person,  My Lord Lovat pursued his journey to the Highlands, where they were overjoyed to see him, because they believed him dead, having been fourteen months in France, without writing any word to his country. They came from all quarters to see him. He showed them the King's instructions, and the King of France's great promises. They were ravished to see them, and prayed to God to have their King there, and they should soon put him on the throne. My Lord Lovat told them that they must first fight for him, and beat his enemies in the kingdom. They answered him, that, if they got the assistance he promised them, they would march in throe days' advertisement, and beat all the King's enemies in the kingdom." This statement, though possibly not wholly untrue, must be taken with more than the usual degree of allowance for the exaggeration of a partisan. Many of the Highland noblemen and chieftains were, indeed, well disposed to the cause of which Lord Lovat was the unfortunate and unworthy representative; but all regretted that their young King, as they styled him, should repose trust in so bad a character, and in many instances refused to treat with Lcvat. And, indeed, the partial success which he attained might be ascribed to the credit of his companion Captain John Murray, a gentleman of good family, whose brother, Murray of Abercaimey, was greatly respected in his county.

The embryo of the two Rebellions may be distinctly traced in the plain and modest memorial which Captain Murray also presented, on his return from Scotland, at the Court of St. Germains. "The Earl and Countess of Errol," he relates, "with their son Lord Hay, were the first to whom I spoke of the affairs of the Ring of England." '' Speaking at Edinburgh with the King's friends, about his Majesty's affairs, in a more serious way than I had done before, I found that these affairs had not been mentioned among them a long time before, and that it was to them an agreeable surprise to see some hopes that they were to be revived by my negotiation."

The greatest families in Scotland were, indeed, ready to come forward upon condition of a certain assistance from France; and a scheme seems even to have been suggested for the invasion of England, and to have formed the main feature in one of those various plots which were as often concerted, and as often defeated, in favour of the excluded family.

In France, those continual schemes, and the various changes in the English Government, were regarded with the utmost contempt. "The people," writes the Duke of Perth, Chancellor of Scotland, "are kept from amusement, frameing conceits of government and religion, such as our giddy people frame to themselves, and make themselves the scorn and reproach of man kind, for all arc now foes under the name of English, and we are said to be so changeable and foolish, that nothing from our parts seems strange. Beheading, dethroning, and banishing of kings, being but children's play with us."

But all the promise of this plan was defeated, as it is generally and confidently asserted, by the character of Lord Lovat. A general distrust prevailed, of his motives and of his authority, even in that very country where he hail once led on his clansmen to crimes for which they had paid dearly in the humiliation anil devastation of their clan. He was indeed, prevented from lingering near the home of his youth, from the decrees which had been issued against him, and the risk of discovery. Disappointed in his efforts, unable to raise even fifty men of his own clan, and resolved upon gaining Influence and favour in some quarter or another, he determined upon betraying the whole scheme, which has since obtained in history the name of the Scottish Plot, to the Duke of Queensbury.

It was on pretext of obtaining a passport for France, that Lord Lovat now sought an interview with the Duke in London. lie there discovered to that able and influential minister, then Secretary of State for Scotland, the entire details of the meditated insurrection, together with the names of the principal Scottish nobility concerned in the conspiracy. The Duke, it appears, perfectly appreciated the character of his informant. He seems to have reflected, that from such materials as those which composed the desperate and hardened character of Lovat, the best instruments of party may be selected. He consented, it is generally believed,—although historians differ greatly according to their particular bias, as to the fact, —to furnish Lovat with a passport, and to employ him as a spy in the French Court, in order to prosecute his discoveries still farther.

"When Lovat was afterwards charged with this act of treachery, he declared, that he had told the Duke of Queensbury little more than what had escaped through the folly or malice of the Jacobites; but acknowledged that a mutual compact bad passed between him and the Duke of Queensbury!"'

Somerville, in his history of the reign of Queen Anne, remarks, that it is doubtful whether Fraser of Lovat had ever any intention of performing effectual service to the Chevalier. "No sooner had he set foot in England," adds the same historian, "than he formed the nefarious project of counter-plotting his associate, and betraying the trust which he had procured through the facility and precipitate confidence of the Queen."

The Duke of Queensbury immediately communicated the plot, disclosed by Lovat, to Queen Anne. In the main points the conduct of that able and influential Minister appears to have been tolerably free from blame during the inquiry into the Scottish plot which was afterwards instituted; but it is a proof of the horror and suspicion in which Lord Lovat was held, that the Duke of Queensbury's negotiations with so abandoned a tool for some time diminished the political sway which he had heretofore possessed in Scotland.

Lord Lovat returned to Paris, where he had the effrontery to hand in a boasting memorial of his services, written with that particularity which gives an air of extreme accuracy to any statement. In this art he was generally accomplished, yet he seems on this occasion to have tailed. For some time he flourished ; alternately, one day at Versailles—one day at St. Germains; and, whilst an under-current of dislike and suspicion marked his course, all, apparently, went on successfully with this great dissembler. The Earl of Middleton. indeed, was undeceived.

"I doubt not," he writes to the Marquis De Torcy "you will be as much surprised at Lord Lovat's memorial as we have been; for although I never had a good opinion of him, yet, I did not believe him fool enough to accuse himself. He has not, in some places, been as careful as authors of romance to preserve probability."

"If the King thinks proper to apprehend him," concludes Lord Middleton, "it should be done without noise. His name should not be mentioned any more, and at the same time his papers should be seized." Such were the preparations for the secret incarceration which it was then the practice of the French Court to sanction.

Lord Lovat was not long m ignorance of the intrigues, as he calls them, which were carried on to blast his reputation at the Court of St. Germains. In other words, he perceived that the double game which he had been playing was discovered, and discovered in time to prevent any new or important trust being committed to his command. lie fell ill, or perhaps feigned illness, probably in order to account for his absence from Court; and, although backed by the influence of the Earl of Melfort, brother of the Luke of Perth, and by the Marquis De Torcy, he found that he could never recover the confidence of the Queen Mother.

He took the usual plan adopted by servants who perceive that tlicy art on the eve of being discarded —he announced his determination to retire. "My Lord," he wrote to Lord Middleton, "I am daily informed, that the Queen has but a scurvy opinion of me, and that I did her Majesty bad rather than good service by my journey. My Lord, 1 find that my enemies have greater power with the Queen than I can have ; and to please them, and ease her Majesty, I am resolved to meddle no more with any affairs till the King is of age."

There seemed to have been little need of this voluntary surrender of his employments; for, after undergoing an examination, in writing from the Tope's Nuncio, and after several letters had passed between Lord Middleton and himself, the altercation was peremptorily closed by a lettre de cachet, and Lord Lovat was committed, according to some statements, to the Bastille,—as others relate, to the Castle of Angouleme. Upon this occasion the hardihood of Lord Lovat's character, which shone out so conspicuously at his death, was thus exemplified.

"As they went along the Captain (by this name he was generally called among his friends) discoursed the officer with the same freedom as if he had been carrying him to some merry-meeting; and, on observing on his men's coats a badge all full of points, with this device—monstrous terror,—' the terror of monsters,' he said wittily, pointing to the man, ' Behold there the terror, and here the monster!' meaning himself. ' And if either of the Kings had a hundred thousand of such, they would be litter to fright their enemies than to hurt any one of them.' He took occasion, also, to let his attendants know of what a great and noble family he was, and how much blood had been spent in the cause, of the Monarchs by his ancestors."

According to Lord Lovat's manifesto, he was at dinner at Bourges, whither he had been sent on some pretext by the French Government, when "a grand fat prevot, accompanied by his lieutenant and twenty-four archers, stole into the drawing-room, and seized Lord Lovat as if he had been an assassin, demanding from him his sword in the King's name. The villain of a prevot," adds his Lordship, "was so obliging as to attend Lord Lovat, with his archers, all the way to Angouletne. He had the luck to procure a cursed little chaise, where Lord Lovat was in a manner buried alive under the unwieldy bulk of this enormous porpoise." This relation, so different from that given by Mr. Arbuthnot. weakens the veracity of both accounts, and leads one to infer that the long narrative by the reverend gentleman of Lord Lovat's adventures in the Bastille were written upon hearsay.

In the Castle of Angouloime Lord Lovat continued for three years; at first, being treated with great severity: "thirty-five days in perfect darkness, where every moment he expected death, and prepared to meet it with becoming fortitude. He listened with eagerness and anxiety to every noise, and, when his door screached upon its hinges, he believed that it was the executioner come to put an end to his unfortunate days."

In this predicament, finding that the last punishment was delayed, he "thought proper to address himself to a grim jailoress, who came every day to throw him something to eat, in the same silent and cautious manner in which you would feed a mad dog." By the "clink of a louis d'or," the prisoner managed to subdue the fidelity of this fair jailoress; she supplied him with pens and paper, and he immediately began a correspondence with his absent friends at the French Court.

After a time, the severity of Lord Lovat's imprisonment was mitigated. The Castle of Angouleme was, in a manner, an open prison, having an extensive park within its walls, with walks open to the inhabitants ; and here, through the influence of Monsieur De Torcy, Lord Lovat was permitted to take exercise. His insinuating manners won upon the inhabitants, and the prison of Angouleme became so agreeable to him, that he was often heard to say, that "if there was a beautiful and enchanting prison in the world, it was the Castle of Angouleme."

Meantime, the scheme of invasion was by no means relinquished on the part of the Jacobites, although it had received a considerable check from the treachery of its agents.

It is stated by some historians that scarcely had Lord Lovat quitted England, than Sir John Maclean, his cousin-german, and Campbell, of Glendarnel, disclosed the plot to Lord Athole and Lord Tarbat. These noblemen instantly went to Queen Anne, and accused the Duke of Queensburv of high treason, in carrying on a villain ms plot with the Court of St. Germains. Queensbury defended himself before the House of Lords, and the accusation, which rested chiefly on the assertions of Ferguson, the famous hatcher of plots, was declared false and scandalous, and Ferguson was committed to Newgate. The reluctance of the Duke of Queenshury to give up the correspondence, excited, however, suspicions of his integrity; which, as Harley, Lord Oxford, expressed it, could only he cleared up by Fraser, Lord Lovat but Lord Lovat was not then to be found.

In all this singular and complicated affair, it is impossible to help wondering at the folly and audacity which Lord Lovat had shown in returning to France, conscious of having placed himself at the mercy of ruthless politicians, and aware that in that country he could expect no redress nor protection from law. But the original crime for which he had been sent forth, an outlaw from his country, was the source of all his subsequent mistakes and misfortunes. France was open to him; Scotland was closed; and England was a scene of peril to one who trod on fragile ice, beneath which a deep gulf yawned.

Lord Lovat had been two years in prison before any of his former friends, for even he was not wholly devoid of partisans, interfered with success in his behalf; and it was the good, old-fashioned feeling of kindred that finally moved the Marquis De Frezcliere, or Frezel, or Frezeau de la Frezeliere, to interest himself in the fate of his despised, and perhaps forgotten, relative.

Lovat, "in an uninterrupted line, and without any undqual alliance, to the year 1030, with its sixty-four quarterings in its armorial bearings, and all noble, its titles of seven hundred years standing in the Abbey of Notre Dame de Noyers in Touraine, and its many other circumstances of inherent dignity," was, as we have seen, derived from the same blood with the family of Frezel, or Fraser. In former, and more prosperous days, a common and authentic Act of Recognition of this relationship had been drawn tip at Paris by the Marquis and his many illustrious kinsmen, the three sons of the Marshal Luxembourg de Montmorenci; and executed, on the other hand, by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, and by his brother, and several of their nearest kin.

The Marquis De Frezeliere appears to have been a tine specimen of that proud and valiant aristocracy, not even then wholly broken down in France by the effeminacy of the times. He was haughty and determined, "an eagle in the concerns of war," and of a spirit not to be subdued. By his powerful intercession, checked only by the disgust which Mary of Modena felt towards Lovat, he procured from the King of France permission for his relative to repair to the waters of Bourbon for the restoration of his health. This order was signed by Louis the Fourteenth, and countersigned by the Marquis De Torcy, as "Colbert." Four days afterwards, a second order was received by the authorities at Angouleme, by which his Majesty commanded that Lord Lovat, after the restoration of his health, should repair to his town of Sauinur, until further orders. "At the same time," says Lord Lovat, "he was permitted to take with him the Chevalier De Frezel, his brother." These orders were dated August the second and August the fourteenth, 1707.

The brother, whom Lord Lovat always designates as the Chevalier de Fraser, had been placed with a Doctor of the Civil Law at Bourges, in order to learn French, and the profession of a civilian. He had been arrested at the same time with Lord Lovat; and was now, after a temporary separation, permitted to share the pleasures of a, removal to Bourbon. According to Lord Lovat, a pension from the French Government was settled upon this young man as long as he resided in France; and Lord Lovat received also the ample income of four thousand francs, (one hundred and sixty-six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence,) from the same quarter : nor was it in the power of his enemies at St. Germains to induce Louis the Fourteenth to withdraw this allowance.

The Marquis de Frezeliere continued firm in his regard towards Lord Lovat. On his road to Saumur, Lord Lovat was received and entertained at the chateau of the Marquis with hospitality and kindness, and no opportunity was omitted by which the Marquis could testify the sincerity of his interest in the fate of his relative. Meantime daily reports were circulated that the projected insurrection, far from being abandoned, had been revived, and that the Chevalier was going to undertake the conduct of the invasion in person. But that young Prince was still inexorable to any petition in favour of Lovat, and was wisely resolved not to let him participate in the operations. "Were he not already in prison," he is stated by Lovat himself to have said, "I would make it my first request to the King of France to throw him into one." This fixed aversion was owing to the determined dislike of the Queen to abdicate, as it was her resolution, if there were no other person to be employed, never to make Lord Lovat an instrument of her affairs.

Lovat, therefore, now clearly perceived that, during the life of the Queen and of Lord Middle-ton, he must look for nothing favourable from the Court of St. Germains. That of Versailles, although, by his account, decidedly friendly to his release, refused to support those whom the Chevalier had renounced. He resolved, therefore, to make every exertion to return to his own country, and to place himself once more at the head of his clan, who, in spite of his crimes, in spite of his long absence and imprisonment, had still refused to acknowledge any other chief. The attempt was indeed desperate, but Lovat resolved to risk it, and to escape, at all events, from France.

To the vengeance of the Athole family, Lord Lovat always imputed much of the severity shown him by the Court at St. Germains: and it is probable that the representations of that powerful house may-have contributed to the odium in which the character of Lord Lovat was universally held. His own deeds were, however, sufficient to ensure him universal hatred. The great source of surprise is, that this unscrupulous intriguer, this unprincipled member of society, seems, at times, during the course of Ids eventful life, to have met wilh friends, firm in their faith to him, and to have enjoyed, in that respect, the privilege of virtue.

The young heiress of Lovat. Amelia Fraser, was now married to Alexander Mackenzie, son of Lord Prestonhall; Mr. Mackenzie had adopted the title of Fraserdale; and a son had been born of this marriage, who had been named after his grandfather, Hugh Fraserdale and his lady hail taken possession both of the title and estates of Lord Lovat, during his absence; but, .since the dignity and estates had always been enjoyed by an heir-male, from the origin of the house of Fraser, these claimants to the estate of the outlawed Lovat spread a report that the honours and lands had, in old times, belonged to the Bissets, whose daughter and only child had married a Fraser, from whom the estates had descended to the heir of that line. A suit was instituted against Lord Lovat and, on the ninth of Mareh, 1703, Lord Prestonhall, the father of Fraserdale, himself adjudged the Lordship and Barony of Lovat to Amelia Fraser. An entail of the estates and honours upon the heirs of the marriage between Amelia Fraser and Mackenzie of Fraser-dale, was then executed, and the former assumed the title of Lady Lovat, whilst her son was designated the Master of Lovat.*

Lord Prestonhall seems to have acted with the same unscrupulous spirit which characterizes most of the business transactions of those who intermeddled with the forfeited or disputed estates. It was his aim, as the Memorial for the Lovat case, subsequently tried, sets forth, to extirpate the clan of the Frasers, and to raise that of the Mackenzies upon its ruins.

"Accordingly," says Mr. Anderson, in his curious and elaborate account of the house of Fraser, "he framed a deed, with the sly contrivance of sinking the Frasers into the Mackenzies, by encouraging the former to change their names, and providing, as a condition of the estate, that should they return to, and reassume their ancient name of Fraser, they should forfeit their right.

The arms of Mackenzie, Macleod of Lewis, and Bisset, were to be quartered with those of Fraser. in this deed, which bore the signature of Robert Mackenzie, and was dated the twenty-third of February, 1706.

This decision, and the deed which followed it, appeared to complete the misfortunes of the disgraced and banished Lord Lovat. But, in fact, the act of injustice and rapacity, so repugnant to the spirit of the Highlanders,—this attempt to force upon the heirs of Fraser a foreign name, and thus to lower the dignity of the clan, was the most auspicious event that could happen to the wretched outlaw. What was his exact condition, or what were his circumstances, during the seven years of his imprisonment, three of which were passed under strict, though not harsh control, in the Castle of Angouleme, and four, apparently on his parole, to the Fortress of Saumur, it is not easy to describe. The cause of the obscurity of his fate at this time, is not that too little, but that too much, has been stated relative to his movements.

It is always an inconvenience when one cannot take a man's own story in evidence. According to Lord Lovat's own account, these weary years were spent in visits to different members of the nobility. The charming Countess de la Roche succeeded the Marquis de la Frezeli^re as his friend and patroness, after the death of the Marquis ru 1711, an event which, according to Lord Lovat's statement, brought him nearly to the grave from grief. The Countess was a woman of a masculine understanding, and of admirable talents, bold, insinuating, and ambitious. Her education in the household of the great Conde, and her long attendance upon the Princess de Conti. the hero's daughter, had qualilied her for those arduous and delicate intrigues, without which no woman of intellect at that period in France might think herself sufficiently distinguished.

The appointment of the Duke of Hamilton as ambassador at the Court of Louis, rendered such a friend as Madame de la Roche, who was also distantly related to him, very essential for the prosecution of Lord Lovat's present schemes, which were, to obtain his release, and to procure employment in any enterprise concerted by the Jacobites against England.

Fate, however, relieved Lord Lovat from one apprehension. The Duke of Hamilton was killed in a duel by Lord Mohun, in Hyde Park, and this fresh source of danger was thus annihilated. The kindness which the famous Colbert, Marquis de Torcy, had shown to Lord Lovat, and the promise which he had given to that nobleman, not to break his parole, and to return to England, seems to have been the only check to a long-cherished project on the part of Lord Lovat to escape to London, and to risk all that law might there inflict. It is uncertain in what manner, during the tedious interval between intrigues and intrigues, he solaced his leisure. It has been stated by one of his biographers that he actually joined a society of Jesuits,—by another, that he took priest's orders, and acted as parochial priest at St. Omers. Of course, in compiling a defence of his life, the wary man of the world omitted such particulars as would, at any rate, betray inconsistency, and beget suspicion. His object in becoming a Jesuit, is said to have been to hear confessions and to discover intrigues. With respect to the report of his having entered the order of Jesuits, it is justly alleged in answer, that no Jesuit is permitted to hear confessions until he has been fifteen years a member of the society, or, at least, in priests orders.

The rumour of his having become an ecclesiastic, in any way, no doubt originated in Lord Lovat's joke on a subsequent occasion, when '*' he declared that had he wished it, and had remained in priest's orders, which he did not deny having assumed for some purpose, he might have become Pope in time."

"Whilst Lord Lovat, contrary to the advice of Madame la Roche, was deliberating whether he should not leave France, he was surprised, in the summer of 1714, by a visit from one of the principal gentlemen of his clan, Fraser of Castle Lauder, son of Malcolm Fraser, of Culdelthel, a very considerable branch of the family of Lovat. This gentleman brought Lord Lovat a strong remonstrance from all his clan at his absence—an entreaty to him to return—a recommendation that he would join himself in an alliance with the Duke of Argyle, who was disposed to aid him; he added affectionate greetings from some of the principal gentry of his neighbourhood, and, among others, from John Forbes, of Culloden. This important ally was the father of the justly celebrated Duncan Forbes, afterwards Lord President. Those messages decided Lord Lovat. After some indecision he left Sauinur, and being allowed by his parole to travel to any place in France, he went on the twelfth of August, 1714, to Rouen, under pretence of paying a visit there. From Rouen lie proceeded to Dieppe, but liuding no vessel there, he travelled along the coast of Normandy, and from thence to Boulogne. From that port he sailed in a small smack, in a rough sea, during the night, and landed at Dover, November the eleventh, 1714.

He met his kinsman, Alexander Fraser, on the quay at Dover, and with him proceeded to London. His former friend, the Duke of Argyle, was now dead; but alliances, as well as antipathies, are hereditary in Scotland, and John, Duke of Argyle, was well disposed to assist one whose family had been anciently connected with his own. Besides, the state of public affairs was now totally changed since Lord Lovat had left England, and it was incumbent upon the Government to avail themselves of any tool which they might require for certain ends and undertakings.

Queen Anne was now dead,—the last of the Stuart dynasty in this kingdom. Whatever were her failings and her weaknesses as a woman, she has left behind her the character of having loved her people ; and she was endeared to them by her purelyr English birth, her homely virtue of economy, and her domestic unpretending qualities. Her reign had been one of mercy; no subject had suffered for treason during her rule : she had few relations with foreign powers; and when, in her opening speech to the Parliament, she expressed that her heart was "wholly English," she spoke her real sentiments, and described, in that simple touch the true character of her mind.

She was succeeded by a German Prince, who immediately showered marks of his royal favour upon the Whigs; whilst the Tories, who formed so large a party in the kingdom, were alienated from the Government by the manifest aversion to them which George the First rather aimed to evince than laboured to conceal.

The Jacobites differed m some measure from the Tories, inasmuch as the latter were generally well affected to the accession of the Hanoverian family, until disgusted by the choice of the new administration. Dissensions quickly rose to their height; and when the Government was attacked in the House of Commons by Sir William Wyndham, the unusual sounds, "the Tower! the Tower!" were heard once more amid the inflamed assembly.

The spirit of disaffection quickly spread throughout England ; the very life-guards wore compelled by an angry populace, when celebrating the anniversary of the Restoration of the Stuarts, to join in the cry of " High Church and Orinond!" Lord Bobngbroke had withdrawn to France—treasonable papers were discovered and intercepted on their way from Jacobite emissaries to Dr. Swift, tumults were raised in the city of London and in Westminster, and were punished with a severity to which the metropolis had been unaccustomed since the reign of James the Second. All those manifestations had their origin in one common source,—the deeply concerted schemes which were now nearly brought into maturity at the Court of St. Germains.

The following extract of a letter dated from Luneville, and taken from the Macpherson Papers, shows what was meditated abroad; it is in Schrader's hand.

(Translation.)

" Luncyille, June 5th, 1714.

"It is likely the Chevalier St. George is preparing for some great design, which is kept very private. It was believed he would drink the waters of Piombirre for three weeks, as is customary, and that he would come afterwards to pass fifteen days at Luneville ; but he changed his measures ; he did not continue to drink the waters, which he drank only for ten days, and came back to Luneville on Saturday last. lie sets out to-morrow very early for Bar. Lord Galnroy went before him, and set out this morning. Lord Talmo, who came lately from Prance, is with him, and some say that the Duke of Berwick is incognito in this neighbourhood.

"The Chevalier appears pensive,—that, rindeed, is his ordinary humour. Mr. Floyd, who has been these five days at the Court of his Royal Highness, told a mistress he has there, that when he leaves her now, he will take his leave of her perhaps for the last time :— in short, it is certain that everything hero seems sufficiently to announce preparations for a journey. It is said, likewise, in private, that the Chevalier has had letters (hat the Queen is very ill. I have done everything I could to discover something of his designs. I supped last night with several of his attendants, thinking to learn something ; but they avoid to explain themselves. They only say that the Chevalier (lid not find himself the better for drinking the waters; that he would now go to repose himself for some time at Bar, until he goes, the beginning of next month, to the Prince De Vandemont's, at Commereie, where their Royal Highnesses will come likewise. They say they do not know yet if they will remain in this country or not; that they will follow the destiny of the Chevalier, and that it is not. known yet what it shall be."

"When Lord Lovat thus precipitately threw himself once more on the mercy of his country, he could not have been ignorant that the cabals which had long been carried on against the Hanoverian succession, were now shortly to break out in open rebellion ; and it was, without doubt, in the hope of profiting in some measure during the confusion of the coming troubles, that lie had hastened, at the risk of his life, to England.

He entrusted the secret of his arrival immediately to the Duke of Argyle, whom he met in London. That nobleman, one of the few disinterested men whose virtues might almost obtain the name of patriotism in those days, saw the danger which Lord Lovat would incur if he returned to Scotland. Sentence of death had been passed upon him; it might be acted upon by an adverse judge at any moment. He besought Lovat to remain in England until a remission of that sentence could be obtained; and for this purpose addresses to the Court for mercy were circulated for signature throughout the northern counties of Scotland. To further the success of this scheme, Lord Lovat had recourse to his neighbour and early friend, John Forbes, laird of Culloden, whose after-services in the royal cause, and whose strict alliance of friendship with the Duke of Argyle, secured to him a considerable influence iu that part of Scotland in which he resided.

"Much honoured and dear Sir,"—thus wrote Lord Lovat to the Laird,—"The real friendship that I know you have for my person and family makes me take the freedom to assure you of my kind service, and to entreat you to join with my other friends between Sky and Nesse, to sign the addresse which the Court requires, in order to give mo my remission. Your cousin James, who has generously exposed himself to bring me out of chains, will inform you of all steps and circumstances of my affairs since he saw me. I wish, dear Sir, from my heart, you were here; I am confident you would speak to the Duke of Argyle and to the Earl of Isla, to let them know their own interest, and their reiterated promises to do for me. Perhaps they may have, sooner than they expect, a most serious occasion for my service. But it is needless to preach now that doctrine to them ; they think themselves in ane infallible security; I wish they may not be mistaken. However, I think it's the interest of all who love this Government, betwixt Sky and Nesse, to see me at the head of my clan, ready to join them ; so that I believe none of them will refuse to sign ane adresse to make me a Scotsman. I am persuaded, dear Sir, that you will be of good example to them on that head. But secrecy, above ail, must be keept; without which all may go wrong. I hope you will be stirring for the Parliament, for I will not be reconciled to you if you let Prestonall outvote you Brigadier Grant, to whom I am infinitely obliged, has written to Foyers to give you his vote, and he is ane uugrat villian if he refuses him. I was at borne, the little pitiful barons of the Aird durst not refuse you. But I am hopefull that the news of my going to Brittain will hinder Prestonall to go north ; for I may-come to meet him when he lest thinks of me. I am very impatient to see you, and to assure you most sincerely how much I am, with love and respect, Right Honourable, your most obedient and most humble servant, " Lovat."

" The 21th of Nov. 1711."

The nature of the address to which this letter refers was not only an appeal to the King in behalf of Lord Lovat, but also an engagement, on the part of his friends, to answer for the loyalty of Lord Lovat, in any sum required. It is remarkable that when .Tames Fraser, the kinsman of Lovat, arrived in the county of Inverness, and declared the purpose of his journey, the lairds who were well-affected to the nobility, joined in giving their subscriptions ; and the Earl of Sutherland, the Lord Strathallan, and the nobility of the counties of Ross and Sutherland, signed them also. The Duke of Montrose, however, boldly opposed them, and described Lord Lovat as a man unworthy of the King's confidence.

A year, however, had elapsed, whilst Lovat was hanging about the Court, before the address was brought to London by Lord Isla, brother of the Bake of Argyle, and afterwards Archibald, Puke of Argyle. The address was presented on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of July, 1715. "The Earl of Orkney," says Lord Lovat, "who was the lord in waiting, held out his hand to receive them from the King, according to custom. The King, however, drew them back, folded thern up, and, as if he had been ]ire-advised of their contents, put them into his pocket." And with this sentence, denoting that the crisis of his affairs was at hand, end the memoirs which Lord Lovat either wrote or dictated to others, of the early portion of his life.

Meantime, the Earl of Stair, the English ambassador at Paris, had discovered the embryo scheme of invasion, and had communicated it to the British Court, although, unhappily for both parties, not in sufficient time to damp the hopes of the unfortunate Jacobites. On the sixth of September, 1715, the Earl of Mar set up his standard at Braemar. Consistent with the usual fatality attending every attempt of the Stuarts, this event was preceded only five days by the death of Louis the Fourteenth—the only real friend of the excluded family; but the Jacobites had now proceeded too far to recede.

Lord Lovat resolved, however, to profit in the general disasters. His influence among his clansmen was obvious : whether for good or, in some instances, for evil, there is much to admire in the resolute adherence of those faithful mountaineers, who had resisted the assumption of a stranger, and invited back to their hills the long-absent and ruined chief, whom they regarded as their own.

Lord Lovat now found means to represent to the English Government, that if he could have a passport to go into the Highlands, he might be instrumental in quelling the rebellion. The Ministry, in their perplexities, availed themselves of his aid, and a pass was granted to him, under the name of Captain Brown.

He once more set out for his own country, and reached Edinburgh ;n safety, attended only by his kinsman, Major Fraser. From Edinburgh he resolved to proceed in a ship—when he could procure one, for the country was all in commotion, Meantime he took up his abode, still maintaining his disguise, in the Grass Market.

His real name was soon discovered, and information was given to the Lord Justice Clerk, who granted a warrant for his apprehension, as a person "outlawed and intercommuned" and to prevent any difficulty in apprehending the prisoner, a party of the town guard was ordered to escort the peace officers to the lodgings of Lord Lovat,

The officer who had the command of the town guard happened, however, to be acquainted with Lovat, and he interposed his aid on this occasion. lie listened to the account which Lovat gave of the business which had brought him to Edinburgh. The Provost was next gained over to the opinion, that it would be wrong to oppose any obstruction to one who had his Majesty's passport: he ordered Lord Lovat to be set at liberty; and in order to give some colour of justice to this act, he declared that the information must have been wrong, it being laid against Captain Fraser,—whereas, the person taken appeared to be Captain Brown.

Lovat was once more in safety : he changed his lodgings, however ; and, as soon as possible, set sail for Inverness. Again danger, in another form, retarded his arrival among his clan. A storm arose, the ship was obliged to put into the nearest harbour, and Lord Lovat was driven into Fraserburgh, which happened to be within a few miles of the abode of his old enemy and rival Lord Haltoun.

Mr. Forbes, one of the Culloden family, was now fortunately for Lord Lovat, with him on his Majesty's service. After some consultation together, he and Lovat decided to make themselves known to Mr. Bail-lie, town-clerk of Fraserburgh : they did so, were kindly received, and provided with horses to convey them to Culloden House, the seat of the future Lord President of Scotland. Duncan Forbes. Here they arrived in November, after incurring great risks from the Jacobite troops, who were patroling in parties over the country.

Culloden House, famed in history, was inhabited by a race whose views, conduct, and personal character present a singular contrast, with those of Lord Lovat, or with those of other adventurers in political life. The head of the family was, at the period of the first insurrection, John Forbes, a worthy representative of an honourable, consistent, and spirited family. The younger brother of John Forbes was the celebrated Duncan Forbes, a man whose toleration of Lord Lovat, not to say countenance of that compound of violence and duplicity, seems to be the only incomprehensible portion of his lofty and beautiful character.

"Duncan Forbes was born," observes a modern writer, "of parents who transmitted their estate to his elder brother, and to all their children an hereditary aversion to the house of Stuart, which they appear to have resisted from the very commencement of the civil wars, and upon the true grounds on which that resistance ought to have been made." By a singular fortune the hereditary estates of Culloden and Ferin-tosh had been ravaged, the year after the Revolution, by the soldiers of Buchan and Cannon, on account of the Jacobite principles of the owners. A liberal compensation was made iu the form of a perpetual grant of a liberty to distil into spirits the grain of the Barony of Ferintosh,—a name which has become almost as famous as that of Culloden. ft was the subsequent fate of Culloden to witness on its Moors the total destruction of that cause which its owners had so long resisted and deprecated.

Duncan Forbes, who, during a course of many years, was bound by an inexplicable alliance with Lovat, was at this period about thirty years of age. lie had already attained the highest reputation for eloquence, assiduity, and learning at the Scottish bar, and during his frequent opportunities for display before the House of Lords. But it was his personal character, during a period of vacillating principles, and almost of disturbed national reason, which obtained that singular and benignant influence over his fellow-countrymen for which the life of Duncan Forbes is far more remarkable, far more admirable, than for the exercise of his brilliant and varied talents. He had "raised himself," observes the same discriminating commentator on his life and correspondence, "to the high station which he afterwards held by the unassisted excellence of a noble character, by the force of which he had previously won and adorned all the subordinate gradations of office." He adorned this unenivied and unsullied pinnacle of fame by virtues of which the record is ennobling to the mind. "He is," observes another writer, "in every situation, so full of honour, of gentleness, of kindness, and intrepidity, that we doubt if there be any one public man in this part of the empire, or of the age that is gone, whose qualities ought to be so strongly recommended to the contemplation of all those who wish to serve their country."

It was in such society as this that Lord Lovat, by a rare fortune, was brought, after his long and disgraceful exile. It was to such a home of virtue, of intelligence, of the purest and best affections, that he was introduced after a long course of contamination i ti the lowest scenes of French corruption, which had succeeded an equally demoralising initiation into the less graceful vices of the Court of George the First. The inestimable privilege came too late in one sense. Lord Lovat had gained nothing but wariness by the lapse of years; but the benefit to his worldly condition was considerable.

From this time until a few years before the insurrection of 1745, Lord Lovat may be regarded as a jealous partisan of the house of Hanover. No doubt, a general survey of the state of society in Scotland would, independent of his own personal views, have satisfied him that in such a course was the only chance of permanent safety. The wretchedness of the state of things at that period, can scarcely be adequately comprehended by those who live in tunes when liberty of opinion is universally an understood condition of civilized intercourse.

It is difficult for any person who lives now to carry himself back, by reading or conversation, ;into the prospects or feelings of the people of Scotland about a hundred years ago. The religious persecutions of the Stuarts had given a darker hue to the old austerity of their Calvinism. The expectation of change constantly held out by that family divided the nation into two parties, differing on a point which necessarily made each of them rebels in the eyes of the other; and thus the whole kingdom was racked by jealousies, heart-burnings, and suspicions. The removal, by the Union, of all the patronage and show of royalty, spread a gloom and discontent, not only over the lower, but over the higher ranks. The commencement of a strict system of general taxation was new, while the miserable poverty of the country rendered it unproductive and unpopular. The great families still, lorded it over their dependants, and exercised legal jurisdiction within their own domains; by which the general police of the kingdom was crippled, and the grossest legal oppression practised. The remedy adopted for all these evils, which was to abate nothing and to enforce everything under the direction of English counsels or of English men, completed the national wretchedness, and infused its bitterest ingredient into the brim full cup.

The events of the year 1710 presents but a feeble exemplification of the truth of this description compared with the annals of 1745, for the first Rebellion was, happily, soon closed.

Lord Lovat did not hesitate long on which side he should enlist himself; and the intelligence that his rival, Mackenzie of Fraserdale, had taken up arms in favour of the Chevalier, decided his course. On the fifth of November he assembled all those of his clan who were Still faithful to him, and who had been warned of his approach by his friends. lie was received among them with exclamations of joy ; and, hearing that a body of Mackintoshes, a Jacobite clan, were marching to reinforce Sir John Mackenzie, who commanded the castle at Inverness, he marched forward with his adherents to intercept them, and to prevent their joining what he then called "the rebel garrison."

The citadel of Inverness, built in 1057 by Oliver Cromwell, and called Oliver's Fort, stood on the east bank of the river Ness, and was a regular pentagon, with bastions, ramparts, and a moat; the standard of the Protectorate, with the word ,c Emmanuel" inscribed upon it, had formerly been displayed upon its ramparts. It was calculated to hold two thousand men, and was washed on one side by the river. As a fortress it had many inconveniencies; approaches to it were easy, and the town afforded a quarter for an enemy's army. In 1GG2 it had been partly dismantled by Charles the Second, because it was the relic of usurpation, and constituted a check upon the adjacent Highlanders, -who were then considered loyal. It is said by one who saw it after the Restoration to have been a very superb work, and it was one of the regular places for the deposition of arms at the time of the Rebellion of 1715. Subsequently it was much augmented and enlarged, and bore, until its destruction after the battle of Culloden, the name of Fort George, an appellation now transferred to its modern successor on the promontory of Ardesseil.

It was against this important fortress that Lord Lovat now marched with as much zeal and intrepidity as if he hail been fighting in the cause of that family for whom his ancestors had suffered. He proceeded straight to Inverness, and placing himself on the west side of the town despatched a party of troops to prevent any supply of arms or provisions from approaching the castle by the Firth. Forbes of Culloden lay to the east, and the Grants, to the number of eight hundred, to the south side of the town. Sir John Mackenzie finding himself thus invested on all sides, took advantage of a spring tide that came up to the town and made the river navigable, to escape with all his troops; and Lord Lovat immediately gained possession of the citadel. The fame of this inglorious triumph has, however, been divided between Lovat and Hugh Rose of Kilravock. whose brother, in pursuing the Jacobite guard to the Tolbooth, was shot through the body. But whoever really deserved the laurel, Lord Lovat profited largely by his dishonest exertions in a cause which he began life by disliking, and ended by abjuring.

On the thirteenth of November Lord Lovat was joined by the Earl of Sutherland; and, leaving a gum-son in Inverness, the two noblemen marched into the territory of the Earl of Seaforth, where they intimidated the natives into submission. Lord Lovat also despatched a friend to Perth, where the main portion of the Jacobite army lay, to claim the submission of his clansmen, who were led by his rival, Mackenzie of Fraserdale. They complied with his summons to the number of four hundred, and Lovat, after entering Murray and Strathspey, and exacting obedience to the King's troops in these districts, prepared to attack Lord Seaforth, who was threatening to invest Inverness. But Duncan Forbes, who was then serving with the army, restrained the ardour of his neighbour, and hostilities were terminated in the North without further bloodshed.

Lord Lovat was quickly repaid for his exertions. From George the First he received three letters of thanks, and an invitation to go to Court; and in March, 1716, a remission of the sentence of death which had been passed upon him, received the royal signature. He was appointed governor of Inverness, with a free company of Highlanders. What, perhaps, still more gratified his natural thirst for vengeance was the fate of his rival, the husband of Amelia Lovat, Mackenzie of Fraserdale, who was attainted of high treason, and whose life-interest in the lands and barony of Lovat were forfeited and escheated to the Cruwn, To complete the good fortune of Lovat, the King was graciously pleased, in June, 1716, to make him a present of the forfeited lands; and Lovat immediately took possession of the estate, and entered his claim to the honours and dignities which were appended to the lands. It was now that he added another motto to the arms of the Frasers, and struck out the quarterings of the Bisset family, which had been made a plea for his adversary. The ancient Frasers, or Frizells, had for their motto "Je suis pred" to which this honour to their house now added the words, "Sine sanguine victor," denoting that he had come peaceably to the estate.

He was now the undisputed Lord Lovat; hitherto he had borne, generally, the convenient name of Captain Fraser, given to him in his military capacity ; and it appears, in spite of all his boastings, that he had scarcely been called by any other title at the French Court than that of Fraser of Beaufort. He had now an admirable opportunity of obliterating the remembrance of hi® past life, and of conciliating good opinion by the consistency and regulation of his present conduct. Notwithstanding his crimes his clansmen turned towards him gladly ; his neighhours were willing to assist him in the support of his honours, and he enjoyed what ho had never before experienced, the confidence of his Sovereign.

Lord Lovat began his season of prosperity by litigations, which lasted between twelve and fourteen years. His first aim was to set aside the pretensions of Hugh Fraser, the son of Mackenzie of Fraserdale, who claimed the title of Lord Lovat after his father's death; and also, by virtue of settlements, asserted rights to the estate. The contest was finally decided by the House of Lords in favour of Lord Lovat's enjoying the honours and lands during his life, the fee remaining with Fraserdale, who died in 1755.

Vexatious and expensive suits occupied the period between 1715 and 1732, when they were brought to a final conclusion.

Lovat now assumed a state corresponding to his station, and suitable to the turn of his mind for display. Not only the lands, heritages, tenements, annual rents, &c„ of the unfortunate Mackenzie of Fraserdale were bestowed on him for his services in suppressing what in the deed of gift was termed "the late unnatural rebellion in the north of Scotland ;" but also the " goods, jewels, gear, utensils and domecills, horses, sheep, cattle, corn, and, in short, whatsoever had belonged to the Mackenzies, together with five hundred pounds of money, which had fallen into the King's hands. It was, indeed, some time before all this could be accomplished, as the correspondence between Lord Lovat and his friend Duncan Forbes sufficiently shows.

" Inverness, the 6th March, 1715.

" My dearest General,*

" I send you the inclosed letter from the name of Macleod, which I hope you will make good use of ; for it's most certain, I keep'd the M'Leods at home, which was considerable service done to the Government. The Earle went off from Cullodin to Cromarty last night ; and tho' he got a kind letter from Marlbrugh, congratulating him on his glorious actions, yet he was obliged to own to General Wightman, that his Lordship would have got nothing done in the North without mj dear General and me. I wish he may do us the same justice at Court. I am sure, if I live, I vv ill Inform. the King in person of all that passed here since the rebellion. The Earle's creatures openly speak of the Duke of Argyle's being recalled. I could not bear it. You know my too great vivacity on that head. J was really sick with it, and could not sleep well since. I expect impatiently a letter from you to determinal my going to London, or rny stay here, where I am very well with General Wightman, but always much mortified to see myself the servant of all, without a post or character. I go to-morrow to Castle Grant to take my leave of my dear Alister Dow Your brother is to follow and to go with Alister to London this week. I find the Duke was gone before you could be at London. T hope, my dear General, you will take a start to London to serve his Grace, and do something for your poor old corpora]; and, if you suffer Glengarry, Frazer-dale, or the Chisholm, to be pardoned, I will never carry a rnusquet any more under your command, though I should be obliged to go to Affrick. However, you know how obedient I am to my General's orders. You forgot to give the order, signed by you and the other depicts, to meddle with Frazerdale's estate for the King's service. I intreat you send it me, for he is afraid to meddle without authority. Adieu, mon aimable General; vous savez (pre je vous aime tendre-ment; et que je suis mille Ibis plus a vous qu'ii moy-nieme pour la vie. " Lovat.''

In another letter, he observes—"The King has been pleased, this very day, to give me a gift of all Fraser-dale's escheat." Still, however, one thing was wanting; the rapacious Lovat had not obtained his former enemy's plate ; General Wightman had taken possession of it as from the person with whom it was deposited ; and he was celebrated for his unwillingness to part with what he had gained. At last, however, the greediness of Lovat was appeased if not satisfied bv a present from General Cadogan of the plate which he had taken, belonging to Fraserdale ; and by a compromise with General "Wightman, Lovat paying the General one-half of the value of the plate which was worth only one hundred and fifty pounds. Thus were the remains of the unhappy Jacobites parcelled out among these military plunderers.

During this year, the avocations of Lord Lovat's turbulent leisure were pleasingly varied by the cares of a love suit. The young lady who was persuaded to link her fate to his, was Margaret, the fourth daughter of Ludovick Grant, of Grant; she is said to have been young and beautiful. Hut several obstacles retarded for awhile her union with Lord Lovat. In the first place, he was not wholly unmarried to the Dowager of Lovat, who was still, alive. The family of Athole had, it is true, annulled that marriage, yet there were still legal doubts and difficulties in the way of a fresh bond. Lord Lovat was now, however, according to his own report to his "dearest General" at Culloden, n high favour with King George and the Prince of Wales; and to them he broached the subject of his marriage.

"I had a private audience of King George this day; and I can tell you, dear General, that no man ever spoke freer language to his Majesty or to the Prince than I did." They still behave to me like kind brothers; and I spoke to them both of my marriage, they approve of it mightily, and my Lord Islav brother of the Duke of Argyle], is to make the proposition to the King; and, so that I believe it will do, with that agreement that my two great friends wish and desire it."

He could, however, do nothing except in a sinister manner | nor was there ever one motive which sprang from a right source. Again he thus addresses Duncan Forbes :—

"I spoke to the Duke and my Lord Islay about my marriage, and told them that one of my greatest motifs to that design, was to secure them the joint interest of the North. This must have been a pleasing consideration for the young lady, but that which follows is scarcely less promising and agreeable.

"They [the Duke and Lord Islay] are both to speak of it to the King; but Islay desired me to -write to you, to know if there would be any fear of a poursuit of adherence from that other person [the Dowager Lady Lovat ], which is a cliimirical business, and tender fear for me in my dear Islay. But when I told lmn that the lady denyed, before the Justice Court, that I had anything to do with her, and that the pretended marriage is declared nul (which Islay says should be done by the Commissarys only), yet, when I told him that the witnesses were all dead who were at the pretended marriage, he was satisfyed that they could make nothing of it, though they would endeavour it."

This letter, which shows in too clear colours how unscrupulous even men of reputed honuur, such as Lord Islay, were on some points in those days, seems to have removed all obstacles; and, during the following year (1717), Lord Lovat was united to Margaret Grant. Her father was the head of a numerous and powerful clan, and this marriage tended greatly to increase the influence of Lord Lovat among the Highlanders. Two children, a son and a daughter, were the result of this union. Prosperity once more shone upon the chieftain of the Frasers; and he now restored to his home, Castle Downie, all the baronial state which must so well have accorded with that ancient structure. The famous Sergeant Macleod. in his Memoirs, gives a graphic account of his reception at Castle Downie by Lord Lovat, where the old soldier repaired to seek a commission In the celebrated Highland company, afterwards called the Highland Watch.

[Sergeant Macleod served in 1703, when only thirteen years of age, in the Scots Royals, afterwards under Marlborough, then at the battle of Sherriif Muir in 1715. After a variety of campaigns he was wounded in the battle of Quebec, in 1759, and came home in the same ship that brought General Wolf's body to England. Macleod died in Chelsea Hospital at the age of one hundred and three. His Memoirs are interesting. Memoirs of the Life of Sergeant Donald Macleod, p. 45. London, 1791.]

"At three o'clock," says the biographer of Macleod, "on a summer's morning, he set out on foot from Edinburgh ; and about the same hour, on the second day thereafter, he stood on the green of Castle Downie, Lord Lovat's residence, about five or six miles beyond Inverness; having performed in forty-eight hours a journey of a hundred miles and upwards, and the greater part of it through a mountainous country. His sustenance on this march was bread and cheese, with an onion, all which he carried in his pocket, and a dram of whiskey at each of the three great stages on the road,—and at Falkland, the half-way house between Edinburgh, by the way of Ringhom and Perth. He never went to bed during the whole of this journey ; though he slept once or twice for an hour or two together, in the open air, on the road side.

"By the time he arrived at Lord Lovat's park the sun had risen upwards of an hour, and shone pleasantly, according to the remark of our hero, well pleased to find himself in this spot, on1 the walls of Castle Bownie, and those of the ancient abbey of Beaulieu in the near neighbourhood. Between the hours of five and six Lord Lovat appeared walking about in his hall, in a morning dress, and at the same time a servant flung open the great folding doors, and all the outer doors and windows of the house. It is about this time that many of the great families of the present day go to bed.

"As Macleod walked up and down on the lawn before the house, he was soon observed by Lord Lovat who immediately went out, and, bowing to the Sergeant with great courtesy, invited him to come in. Lovat was a fine-looking tall man. and had something very insinuating in his manners and address. He lived in the fullness of hospitality, being more solicitous, according to the genius of the feudal times, to retain and multiply adherents than to accumulate wealth by the improvement of his estate. As scarcely any fortune, and certainly not his fortune, was adequate to the extent of his views, he was obliged to regulate his unbounded hospitality by rules of prudent economy. As his spacious hall was crowded by kindred visitors, neighbours, vassals, and tenants of all ranks, the table, that extended from one end of it nearly to the other, was covered at different places with different kinds of meat and drink -—though of each kind there was always great abundance. At the head of the table the lords and lairds pledged his Lordship in claret, and sometimes champagne the tacksmen, or demiwassals, drank port or wliiskey-punch ; tenants, or common husbandmen, refreshed themselves with strong beer; and below the utmost extent of the table, at the door, and sometimes without the door of the hall, you might see a multitude of Frasers, without shoes or bonnets, regaling themselves with bread and onions, with a little cheese, perhaps, and small beer. Yet amidst the whole of the aristocratic inequality, Lord Lovat had the address to keep all his guests in perfectly good humour. ' Cousin,' he would say to such and such a tacksmen or demiwassal, ' I told my pantry lads to hand you some claret, but they tell me you like port or punch best.' In like manner to the beer drinkers he would say, ' Gentlemen, there is what you please at your sendee; but I send you ale because I understand you like ale.' Everybody was thus well pleased ; and none were so ill bred as to gainsay what had been reported to his Lordship.

This introduction was followed by still further condescension on the part of Lord Lovat. He looked at the veteran who had served in Lord Orkney's regiment, under Marlborough, at Hamilies and Malplaquet, with approbation.

'I know,' said his Lordship, 'without your telling me, that you have come to enlist in the Highland Watch; for a thousand men like you I would give an estate.' Donald Macleod then, at Lovat's request, related his history and pedigree,—that subject which most delights the heart of a Highlander. Lord Lovat clasped him in his arms, and kissed him, and then led him into an adjoining bedchamber, where Lady Lovat then lay, to whom he introduced the Sergeant. Lady Lovat raised herself in her bed, called for a bottle of brandy, and drank prosperity to Lord Lovat, to the Highland Watch, and to Donald Macleod. 'It is superfluous to say,' adds the Sergeant, ' that in this toast the lady was pledged by the gentlemen.'

In contradiction to this attractive account of Lord Lovat's splendour and hospitality we must quote a very different description, given by the astronomer Ferguson. Lord Lovat's abode, according to his account, boasted, indeed, a numerous feudal retinue within its walls, but presented little or no comfort. It was a rude tower with only four apartments in it, and none of these spacious. Lord Lovat's own room served at once as his place for constant residence, his room for receiving company, and his bedchamber. Lady Lovat's bedchamber was allotted to her for all these purposes also. The domestics and a herd of retainers were lodged in the four lower rooms of the tower, a quantity of straw constituting their bed-furniture. Sometimes above four hundred persons were thus huddled together here; the power which their savage and ungrateful chieftain exercised over them was despotic; and Ferguson himself had occasionally the pleasurable .sight of some half dozen of them bring up by the heels for hours, on a few trees near the house.

The pretended loyalty of the chief to the exiled family constituted a strong bond of union between Lovat and his followers; and having them once under his command, "that indefinable magic by which he all his life swayed those who neither loved nor esteemed him." to borrow Mrs. Grant's expression, caused them afterwards to follow his desperate fortunes. "He resembled, in this respect," says the same admirable writer, "David when in the cave of Adullam, for every one that was discontented, and every one that was in debt, literally resorted to him." Lovat, once settled in the abode of his ancestors, did all that he could do to efface the memory of the past, and to redeem the good opinion of his neighbours. One thing he alone left undone,—he did not amend his life. Crafty, vindictive, gross, tyrannical, few men ever continued long such a career with impunity.

He was long distrusted by the good of both parties; by the one he was regarded as a spy of Government, by the other as cne whose Jacobite loyalty was only a pretext to win the affections of the honest and simple Highlanders. Yet, at last, he succeeded in. obtaining influence, partly by his real talents, partly by his artifices and knowledge of character. "When one considers," observes Mrs. Grant, "that his appearance was disgusting and repulsive, his manners, except when he had some deep part to play, grossly familiar, and meanly cajoling, and that he was not only stained with crimes, but well known to possess no one amiable quality but fortitude, which he certainly displayed in the last extremity, his influence over others is to be regarded as inexplicable." Although the most valuable possessions of his family were on the Aird, the chief centre of his popularity was in Stratheric, a wild hilly district between Inverness and Fort Augustus. There he was beloved by the common people, who looked upon him as a patriot, and there he made it his chief study to secure their affections, often going unlooked for to spend the day and night with his tenants there, and banishing reserve, he indulged in a peculiar strain of jocularity perfectly suited to his audience, His conversation, composed of ludicrous fancies and blandishments, was often intermingled with sound practical advice and displays of good sense. The following curious account of his table deportment, and ordinary mode of living, is from the pen of Mrs. Grant of Laggan, who was well acquainted with those who hail personally known Lord Lovat.

"If he met a boy on the road, he was sure to ask whom he belonged to, and tell him of his consequence and felicity in belonging to the memorable clan of Fraser, and if he said his name was Simon to give him half-a-crown. at that time no small gift in Stratheric; but the old women, of all others, were those he was at most pains to win, even in the lowest ranks. He never was unprovided with snuff and flattery, both which he dealt liberally among them, listened patiently to their old stories, and told them others of the King of France, and King James, by which they were quite captivated, and concluded by entreating that they impress their children with attachment and duty to their chief, and they would not fail to come to his funeral and assist in the corauach heir. At Castle Downie he always kept an open table to which all comers were welcome, for of all his visitors he contrived to make some use ;--from the nobleman and general by whose interest he could provide for some of his followers, and by that means strengthen his interest with the rest, to the idle hanger-on whose excursions might procure the fish and game which he was barely suffered to eat a part of at his patron's table. Never was there a mixture of society so miscellaneous as was there assembled. From an affectation of loyalty to his new masters Lovat paid a great court to the military stationed in the North; such of the nobility in that quarter as were not in the sunshine, received his advances as from a man who enjoyed court favour, and he failed not to bend to his own purposes every new connection he formed. In the mean time the greatest profusion appeared at table while the meanest parsimony reigned through the household. The servants who attended had little if any wages ; their reward was to be recommended to better service afterwards; and meantime they had no other food allowed to them but what they carried off on the plates: the consequence was, that you durst not quit your knife and fork for a moment, your plate was snatched while you looked another way; if you were not very diligent, you might fare as ill amidst abundance as the Governor of Barataria. A surly guest once cut the fingers of one of these harpies when snatching his favourite morsel away untasted. I have heard a military gentleman who occasionally dined at Castle Downie describe those extraordinary repasts. There was a very long table loaded with a great variety of dishes, some of the most luxurious, others of the plainest—nay, coarsest kind : these were; very oddly arranged; at the head were all the dainties of the season, well dressed and neatly sent in ; about the middle appeared good substantial dishes, roasted mutton, plain pudding and such like. At the bottom coarse pieces of beef, sheeps' heads, haggiss, and other national but inelegant dishes, were served in a slovenly manner in great pewter platters; at the head of the table were placed guests of distinction, to whom alone the dainties were offered; the middle was occupied by gentlemen of his own tribe, who well knew their allotment, and were satisfied with the share assigned to them. At the foot of the table sat hungry retainers, the younger sons of younger brothers, who had at some remote period branched out from the family; for which reason he always addressed them by the title of 'cousin.' This, and a place, however low, at his table, so flattered these hopeless hangers-on, that they were as ready to do Lovafs bidding " in the earth or in the air" as the spirits are to obey the command of Prospero."

"The contents of his sideboard were as oddly assorted as those of his table, and served the same purpose. He began, —' My lord, here is excellent venison, here turbot, &c.: call for any wine you please; there is excellent claret and champagne on the sideboard. Pray, now. Punballock or Killbockie, help yourselves to what is before you; there are port and lisbon, strong ale and porter, excellent in their kind;' then calling to the other end of the table,—*Pray, dear cousin, help yourself and my other cousins to that fine beef and cabbage; there is whiskey-punch and excellent table-beer.' His conversation, like his table, was varied to suit the character of every guest. The retainers soon retired, and Lovat (on whom drink made no impression) found means to unlock every other mind, and keep his own designs impenetrably secret; while the ludicrous and careless air of his discourse helped to put people off their guard; and searchless cunning and boundless ambition were hid under the mask of careless hilarity."

But darker deeds even than these diversified the pursuits of a man who had quitted the prisons of Angouleme and of Saumur only to wreak, upon his own faithful and trusting clansmen, or his neighbours, as well as his foes, the vindictive cruelty of a nature utterly depraved, not softened even by kindness, still less chastened by a long series of misfortunes.

Lovat's re-establishment at the head of his clan seems to have intoxicated him, and the display of his power to have risen into a ruling passion. Above all, he boasted of it to Duncan Forbes, whose endurance of this wretched ally's correspondence lasted until the pretended friendship was succeeded by avowed treachery to the Government to which he had professed such gratitude, and to the King and Prince whom he was wont to call "the bravest fellows in the world." In accordance with this spirit of self-glorification was Lovat's erection of two monuments,—filial piety dictating the inscription on one of them, that dedicated to his father, and his own audacious vanity assisting in the composition of the tribute to his own virtues.

It was his Lordship's favourite boast that at his birth a number of swords which hung up in the hall of his paternal home leaped themselves out of their scabbards, denoting that he was to be a mighty man of arms. The presage was not fulfilled, but Lord Lovat's ingenuity suggested the following means of imposing upon the credulity of his simple clansmen, by the composition of an epitaph which he erected in the old church of Kirkhill, a few miles from Castle Downie to the memory of THOMAS LORD FRASER, OF LOVAT, Who chose rather to undergo the greatest hardships of fortune than to part with the ancient honours of his house, and bore these hardships with undaunted fortitude of mind.

This monument was erected by

simon lord fraser of lovat, his son.

Who, likewise, having undergone many and great vicissitudes of good and bad fortune, through the malice of his enemies, he, in the end, at the head of his clan, forced his way to his paternal inheritance with his sword in his hand, and relieved his kindred and followers from oppression and slavery; and both at home and in foreign countries, by his eminent, actions in the war and the state, he has acquired great honours and reputation.

Sir Robert Munro, who was killed at the battle of Falkirk, being on a visit to Lord Lovat, went with his host to see this monument. "Simon," said the brave and free-spoken Scotsman, "how the devil came you to put up such boasting romantic stuff?" "The monument and inscription." replied Lovat, "are chiefly for the Frasers, who must believe whatever I require, their chief, of them, and then posterity will think it as true as the Gospel.'' Yet he did not scruple, when it suited his purpose, to designate his clansmen, the lairds around him. as "the little pitiful barons of the Aird;"—this was, however, when writing to his friends of opposite politics to the Frasers, generally to Duncan Forbes.

The devotion of his unfortunate adherents can hardly be conceived in the present day. In the early part of his career, before his rapacity, his licentiousness, and falsehood were fully known, one may imagine a fearless and ardent young leader, of known bravery, engaging the passions even of the most wary among his followers in his personal quarrels : but it is wonderful how, when the character of the man stood revealed before them, any could be found to lend their aid to deeds which had not the colour of justice, nor even the pretence of a generous ardour, to recommend them to the brave. But Lovat was not the only melancholy instance in which that extraordinary feature in the Highland character, loyalty to a chieftain, was employed in aiding the darkest treachery, and in deeds of violence and cruelty.

For many years, Lovat revelled in the indulgence of the fiercest passions; but he paid in time the usual penalty of guilt. His name came to be a bye-word for every act of violence, done in the darkness of night, —the oppressions of the helpless, the corruption of the innocent,—every plot which was based upon the lowest principles, were attributed to him. His vengeance was such, that while the public knew the hand that dealt out destruction, they dared not to name the man. The hated word was whispered by the hearth; it was muttered with curses in the hovel; but the voice which breathed it was hushed when the band of numerous retainers, swift to execute the will of the feudal tyrant, was remembered. His power, thus tremblingly acknowledged, was fearful ; his wrath, never was appeased except by the ruin of those who had offended him. With all this, the manners of Lord Lovat were courteous, and, for the times, polished; whilst beneath that superficial varnish lay the coarsest thoughts, the most degrading tastes. His address must have been consummate; and to that charm of manner may be ascribed the wonderful ascendancy which he acquired even over the respectable part of the community

Something of his ready humour was displayed soon after Lord Lovat's restoration to his title, in his rencontre with his early friend, Lord Mungo Murray, in the streets of Edinburgh. Lord Mungo had sworn to avenge the wrongs and insults inflicted by Lord Lovat on himself and Lord Saltoun, whenever he had an opportunity. Seeing Lord Lovat approaching, he drew his sword and made towards him as fast as he could. Lord Lovat, being near-sighted, did not perceive him, but was apprised of his danger by a friend who was walking with him; upon which his Lordship also drew, and prepared for his defence. Lord Mungo, seeing this, thought proper to decline the engagement, and wheeled round in order to retire. The people crowded about the parties, and somewhat impeded Lord Mungo's retreat; upon which Lord Lovat called out to the people, "Pray, gentlemen, make room for Lord Mungo Murray," Lord Mungo slank away, and the affair ended without bloodshed.

An affair with the profligate Duke of Wharton, was very near ending more fatally. Lord Lovat, during the year 1724, happening to be in London, mingled there in the fashionable society for which his long residence in France had, in some measure, qualified him. In the course of his different amusements, he encountered one evening, at the Hayrnarket, the beautiful Dona Eleanora Sperria, a Spanish lady who had visited England under the character of the Ambassador's niece. His attentions to this lady, and his admiration of her attractions, were observed by the jealous eye of the Duke of Wharton, who immediately sent him a challenge. Lord Lovat accepted it, replying, that "none of the family of Lovat were ever cowards, and appointing to meet the Duke with sword and pistol. The encounter took place in Hydepark. They first fired at each other, and then had recourse to the usual weapon, the sword. Lovat was unlucky enough to fall over the stump of a tree, and was disarmed by Wharton, who gave him his life, and what was in those days perhaps even still more generous, never boasted of the affair until some years afterwards.

Lovat lived, however, chiefly in Scotland. Four children were born to writhe under his sway; the eldest, Simon, the Master of Lovat, gentle, sincere, of promising abilities, and upright in conduct, suffered early and late from the jealousy of his father, who could not comprehend his mild -virtues. This unfortunate young man was treated with: the utmost harshness by Lord Lovat. who kept him in slavish subjection to his own imperious will, and treated him as if he had been the offspring of some low-born dependant, instead of his heir. Still, those who were well-wishers to the Lovat family, built their hopes upon the virtues of the young Master of Lovat, and they were not deceived. Although forced by his father to quit the University of St. Andrews, where he was studying in 1745, and to enter into the Rebellion, he retrieved that early act by a subsequent respectability of life, and by long and faithful services.

But there was another victim still more to be pitied, and over whose destiny the vices of Lord Lovat exercised a still more fatal sway than on those of his son. The story of Primrose Campbell is, perhaps, the saddest among this catalogue of crimes and calamities.

She was the daughter of John Campbell, of Mamore, and the sister of John Duke of Argyle, the friend and patron of Duncan Forbes; and she had been, by Lovat's introduction, for some time a companion of his first wife. Lord Lovat, about the year 1732, became a widower. He then cast his eyes upon the ill-fated Miss Campbell, and sought her in marriage. The match was of great importance to him, on account of the family connection; and Lord Lovat had reason to believe, that whatever the young lady might think of it. her friends were not opposed to the union. She was staying with her sister, Lady Roseberry, when Lovat proffered his odious addresses. She to whom they were addressed, knew him well for she entertained the utmost abhorrence of her suitor, and repeatedly rejected his proposals. At last, he gained her consent to the union which he sought, by the following stratagem. Miss Campbell, while residing still with her sister In the country, received a letter, written apparently by her mother, and, beseeching her immediate attendance at a particular house in Edinburgh, in which she lay at the point of death. The young lady instantly set out, and reached the appointed place: here, instead of beholding her mother, she was received by the hated and dreaded Lovat. She was constrained to listen to his proffers of marriage; but she still firmly refused her assent. Upon this, Lord Lovat told the unhappy creature that the house to which she had been brought was one in which no respectable woman ought ever to enter :—and he threatened to blast her character upon her continued refusal to become his wife. Distracted, humiliated by a confinement of several days, the young lady finally consented. She was married to the tyrant, who conveyed her to one of his castles in the North, probably to Downie, the scene of his previous crimes. Here she was secluded in a lonely tower, and treated with the utmost barbarity, probably because she could neither conceal nor conquer her disgust to the husband of her forced acceptance. Yet outward appearances were preserved: A lady, the intimate friend of her youth, was advised to visit, as if by accident, the unhappy Lady Lovat, in order to ascertain the truth of the reports which prevailed of Lord Lovat's cruelty. The visitor was received by Lovat with extravagant expressions of welcome, and many assurances of the pleasure which it would afford Lady Lovat to see her. His Lordship then retired, and hastening to his wife, who was secluded without even tolerable clothes, and almost in a state of starvation, placed a costly dress before her, and desired her to attire herself, and to appear before her friend. His commands were obeyed; he watched his prisoner and her visitor so closely, that no information could be conveyed of the unhappiness of the one, or of the intentions of the other. This outrageous treatment, which Lord Lovat is reported, also, to have exercised over his first wife, went on for some time. Lady Lovat was daily locked up in a room by herself!, a scanty supply of food being sent her, which she was obliged to devour in silence. The monotony of her hapless solitude was only broken by rare visits from his Lordship. Under these circumstances, she bore a son, who was named Archibald Campbell Fraser, and who eventually succeeded to the title. In after years, when he frowned at any contradiction that she gave him, Lady Lovat used to exclaim, ' Oh, boy! Dinna lock that gate—ye look so like your father." These words spoke volumes.

The character of the lady whose best years were thus blighted by cruelty, and who was condemned through a long life to bear the name of her infamous husband, was one peculiarly Scotch. Homely in her habits, and possessing little refinement of manner, she had the kindest heart, the most generous and self-denying nature that ever gladdened a house, or bore up a woman's weakness under oppression. The eldest sol of Lord Lovat, Simon, was a sickly child. His father, who was very anxious to have him to his house, placed him under Lady Lovat's charge; and whenever ho went to the Highlands, left her with this pleasing intimation, "that if he found either of the boys dead on his return, he would shoot her through the head." Partly through fear, and partly from the goodness and rectitude of her mind, Lady Lovat devoted her attentions so entirely to the care of the delicate and motherless boy, that she saved his life, and won his filial reverence and affection by her attention. He loved her as a real parent. The skill in nursing and in the practical part of medicine thus acquired, was never lost; and Lady Lovat was noted ever after, among those who knew her, as the "old lady of the faculty."

Family archives, it is said, reveal a tissue of almost unprecedented acts of cruelty towards this excellent lady. They were borne with the same spirit that in all her life guided her conduct,—a strict dependance upon Providence. She regarded her calamities as trials, or tests, sent from Heaven, and received them with meek submission In after years, during the peaceful decline of her honoured life, when a house near her residence in Blackfriars Wynd, Edinburgh, took fire, she sat calmly knitting a stocking, and watching, occasionally, the progress of the flames. The magistrates and ministers came, in vain, to entreat her to leave her house in a sedan; she refused, saying, that if her hour was come, it was in vain for her to think of eluding her fate: if it were not come, she was safe where she was. At length she permitted the people around her to fling wet blankets over the house, by which it was protected from the sparks.

She seems, however, to have made considerable exertions to rid herself from an unholy bond with her husband. Like many other Scottish ladies of quality, in those days, her education had been limited; and it was not until late in life that she acquired the art of writing, which she then learned by herself without a master. She never attained the more difficult process of spelling accurately.

She now, however, contrived to make herself understood by her friends in this her dire distress: and to acquaint them with her situation and injuries, by rolling a letter up in a clue of yarn, and dropping it out of her window to a confidential person below. Her family then interfered, and the; wretched lady was released, by a legal separation, from her miseries. She retired to the house of her sister, and eventually to Edinburgh. When, in after times, her grand nephews and nieces crowded around her, she would talk to them of these days of sorrow. "Listen, bairns," she was known to observe, "the events of my life would make a good novel; but they have been of so strange a nature, that I'm sure naebody wad believe them."

But domestic tyranny was a sphere of far too limited a scope for Lord Lovat: His main object was to make himself absolute over that territory of which he was the feudal chieftain; to bear down everything before him, either by the arts of cunning, or through intimidation. Some instances, singular, as giving some insight into the state of society in the Highlands at that period, have been recorded.! Very few years after the restitution of his family honours had elapsed, before he happened to have some misunderstanding with one of the Dowager Lady Lovat's agents, a Mr. Robertson, whom her Ladyship had appointed as receiver of her rents. One night, during the year 1719, a number of persons, armed and disguised, were seen in the dead of night, very busy among Mr. Robertson's barns and outhouses. That night, the whole of his stacks of corn and hay were set on fire and entirely consumed. Lord Lovat was suspected of being the instigator of this destruction ; yet such was the dread of his power, that Mr. Robertson chose rather to submit to the loss in silence than to prosecute, or even to name, the destroyer.

A worse outrage was perpetrated against Fraser of Phopachy, a gentleman of learning and character, and one who had befriended Lord Lovat in all his troubles, and had refused to join with Fraserdale in the Rebellion of 1715. Mr. Fraser had the charge of Lord Lovat's domestic affairs, more especially of his law contests, both in Edinburgh and in London. When accounts were balanced between Lord Lovat and Mr. Fraser, it was found that a considerable sum was due to the latter. Among his other peculiarities Lord Lovat had a great objection to pay his debts. As usual, he insulted Fraser, and even threatened him with a suit. Mr. Fraser, knowing well the man with when he had to deal, submitted the affair to arbitration. A Mr. Cuthbert of Castlehill was chosen on the part of his Lordship ; the result was, a decision that a very considerable sum was due to Fraser. Lord Lovat was violently enraged at this, and declared that Castlehill had broken his trust. Not many days afterwards, Castlehill Park, near Inverness, was invaded by a party of Highlanders, armed and disguised ; the fences and enclosures were broken down, and a hundred of his best milcli-cows killed. Again the finger of public opinion pointed at Lovat, but pointed in silence, as the author of this wicked attack. None dared to name him; all dreaded a summary vengeance: his crimes were detailed with a shudder of horror and disgust: their author was not mentioned.

Lord Lovat, moreover, instantly commenced a lawsuit against Fraser, in order to set aside the arbitration. This process, which lasted during the lifetime of the victim, was scarcely begun when one night Fraser's seat at Phopachy, which, unhappily, was near the den of horrors, Castle Downie, was beset by Highlanders, armed and disguised, who broke into the house and inquired for Mr. Fraser. He was, luckily, abroad. The daughters of the unfortunate gentleman were, however, in the house; they were bound to the bed-posts and gagged; and, doubtless, the whole premises would have been pillaged or destroyed, had not a female servant snatched a dirk from the hands of one of the ruffians; and although wounded, defended herself, while by her shrieks she roused the servants and neighbours. The villains fled, all save two, who were taken, and who, after a desperate resistance, were carried olf to the gaol at Inverness; they were afterwards tried, and capitally convicted of housebreaking, or hamesahen, as it is called in Scotland, and eventually hung. It appeared, from the confession of one of these men to a clergyman at Inverness, that the same head which planned the destruction of Mr. Robertson's stacks had contrived this outrage, and had even determined on the murder of his former friend, Mr. Fraser. But the hour was now at hand in which retribution for these crimes was to be signally visited upon this disgrace to his species."

One more sufferer under his his designs must be recorded, the unhappy Lady Grange. In that story which has been related of her fate, and which might, indeed, furnish a theme for romance, she is said to have ever alluded to Lord Lovat as the remorseless contriver of that scheme which doomed her to sufferings far worse than death, and to years of imbecility and wanderings. The subtlety of Lord Lovat equalled his fierceness; it is not often that such qualities are combined in such fearful perfection. He could stoop to the smallest attentions to gain an influence or promote an alliance: a tradition is even believed of hip going to the dancing-school with two young ladies, and buying them sweeties, in order to conciliate the favour of their father, Lord Alva.

His habitual cunning and management were manifested in his discipline of his clan. It was his chief aim to impress upon the minds of his vassals that his authority among them was absolute, and that no power on earth could absolve them from it; that they had no right to inquire into the merits or justifiableness of the action they were ordered to engage in; his will ought to be their law, his resentment a sufficient reason for taking his part in a quarrel, whether it were right or wrong.

One can hardly conceive that it could be requisite for the Frasers to give any fresh proof of their obedience and fealty; yet it seems to have required a continual effort on the part of Lord Lovat to establish his authority and to keep up his dignity among the Frasers. The reason assigned for this is, that though they were his vassals, tenants, and dependants, yet they must be brought to acknowledge his sovereignty; otherwise, when on some emergency lie might require their assistance, they might assume their natural right of independence, and refuse to rise. It was Lord Lovat's policy, therefore, to discourage all disposition in his clansmen to enter trade or to go to sea and seek their fortunes abroad, lest they should both shake off their dependence on him, and also, by emigrating, diminish the broad and pompous retinue with which he chose to appear on all occasions. It was therefore his endeavour to check industry, to oppose improvement, to preach up the heroism of his ancestors, who never stooped to the meannesses of commerce, but made themselves famous by martial deeds. "Never,"' thus argued the chieftain, "had those brave men enervated their bodies and debased their minds by labours fit only for beasts or stupid drudges. Should not the generous blood which flowed in their veins still animate the brave Frasers to deeds of heroism? Notwithstanding all these exalted sentiments, the chief, who was set upon this pinnacle of power, hesitated not to retain a hired assassin for the purpose of executing any of his dark projects. Donald Gramoach, a notorious robber, was long in the employ of Lovat, who lavished large sums upon him. At length, in the year 1742, this man was apprehended, lodged in Dingwall Gaol; and being convicted of robbery, was sentenced to be hanged. Lord Lovat immediately despatched a body of his Highlanders to rescue the prisoner; but the magistrates were aware of his intentions; the prison was doubly guarded, and the culprit met with his due punishment.

Lord Lovat had long thrown off the mask of courtesy, and had laid aside the arts of fawning to which he had had recourse before his claims to the honours and estates had been fully acknowledged. His tenants now felt the iron rule of a merciless and necessitous master; for Lord Lovat's expenditure far exceeded his means and revenue. He raised his rents, and many of the fanners were forced to quit their farms; but his vassals by tenure were even more ruinously oppressed by suits of law, compelling them to make out their titles to their estates; if they failed in so doing, he insisted on forfeiture or escheate; and, in some instances, these suits were so expensive that it was almost wiser to relinquish an estate, than to be plundered in long and anxious processes.

At last, to prevent their utter ruin, the gentlemen who held lands under Lord Lovat determined upon resistance; after twenty-seven years of bondage they resolved to free themselves. They met together, and unanimously resolved to unite their arms, and to deliver themselves by their swords; to this extremity were reduced these brave and devoted adherents, who had blindly rushed into every crime and every danger at the command of their ungrateful chieftain. Their resolution alarmed the tyrant; he ordered the suits against his vassals to be stopped, and excused, as well as he could, and with his usual odious courtesy, the severities into which he had been led. He was playing a desperate game; and the adherence of these unhappy dependants was soon to be put to the test.

His oppression of his stewards and agents was consistent with the rest of his conduct. They could rarely induce him to settle his accounts; and if they ventured to ask for sums due to them, he threatened them with actions at law. He was all powerful, and they were forced to submit. His inferior servants were treated even still more oppressively. If they wished to leave his Lordship's service, or asked for their wages, he alleged some crime against them, which he always found sufficient witnesses to prove. They were then sent off to the cave of Beauly, a dismal retreat, about a mile from his castle, where they wore confined until they were reduced to submission. That such enormities should have been tolerated in a land of liberty, seems almost incredible; but the slavery of the clans, the poverty and ignorance of the people, the vast power and influence of the chief, account, .in some measure, for this degrading bondage on the one hand, this absolute monarchy on the other.

This long-endured course of tyranny had not tended to humble the heart of him who indulged in such an immoderate exercise of power. The ambition of Lord Lovat, always of a low and personal nature, increased with years. He watched the state of public affairs, and built upon their threatening character a scheme by which he might, as he afterwards said, "be in a condition of humbling his neighbours."

His allegiance was henceforth given to the Jacobites, and his fidelity, if such a word could ever be used as applied to him, seems actually to have lasted two years,—that is from 1717 to 1719, when a Spanish invasion was undertaken in favour of the Pretender. To that Lord Lovat promised to lend his aid, and wrote to Lord Seaforth, promising to join him. But the invasion was then defeated, and Lovat continued to enjoy royal favour at home. On this occasion the letter which Lord Lovat had written to Lord Seaforth, was shown to Chisholm of Knobbsford before it was delivered, and an affidavit of its contents was sent up to Court. Upon Lord Lovat becoming acquainted with this, he immediately' got himself introduced at Court, possibly with a view to deceiving the public mind. Lady Seaforth having asked some favour from him, he refused to grant it, unless she would return that letter, which had been addressed to her son. With his usual cunning he had omitted to sign the letter, which he thought could not therefore be fixed upon him. Upon receiving it back, Lovat showed it to a friend, who remarked that there was enough in it to condemn thirty lords. He immediately threw it into the fire.

During many years of iniquity, Lord Lovat had preserved, to all appearance, the good will of Duncan Forbes. That great lawyer had been Lovat's legal advocate during the long and expensive suits for the establishment of his claims, and had generously refused all fees or remuneration for his exertions. The letters addressed by Lovat to him breathe the utmost regard, and speak an intimacy which, as Sit Walter Scott observes, "is less wonderful when we consider that Duncan Forbes could endure the society of the infamous Charteris." Lovat's expressions of regard were frequently written in French. "Mori aimable General:" he writes to Mr. John Forbes, also, the President's elder brother.—"My dear Culloden.'' "Your affectionate friend, and most obedient and most humble servant.''

To the President, whom he always addressed with some allusion to his brief military service,—"My dear General." "Your own Lovat." In 1716 such professions as these are made to Mr. John Forbes.

"My dearest Provost (we must give you your title, since it is to last but short), my dear General's letter and yours are terrible; but I was long ere now prepared for all that could happen to me on your illustrious brother's account: I'll stand by him to the last; and if I fall, as I do not doubt but I will. I'll receive the blow without regret. But all I can tell you is this, that we are very like to see a troublesome world, and may Genorall and you will be yet useful; and I am ready to be with you to the last drop, for I am yours eternally, Lovat." His frequent style to the President was thus,—"The most faithfull and aficctionat of your slaves." It is indeed evident, in almost every letter, what real obligations Lovat received from both Culloden and his brother; and how strenuously they supported his claim against Fraserdale."

At the hospitable house of Culloden he was a frequent guest,—"a house, or castle," says the author of "Letters from the North," written previous to the year 1730, "belonging to a gentleman whose hospitality knows no bounds. It is the custom of that house, at the first visit or introduction, to take up war freedom, by cracking his nut, as he terms it; that is, a cocoa-shell, which holds a pint, filled with champagne, or such other sort of wine as you shall chose. You may guess, by the introduction, of the contents of the volume. Few go away sober at any time; and for the greatest part of his guests, in the conclusion, they cannot go at all."

"This he partly brings about artfully, by proposing, after the public healths (which always imply bumpers) such private ones as he knows will pique the interest or inclination of each particular person of the company, whose turn it is to take the lead, to begin it in a brimmer, and he himself being always cheerful, and sometimes saying good things, his guests soon lose their guard, and then- I need say no more."

In this hospitable house, a strange contrast to the penuriousness and despotic management of Castle Downie, Lord Lovat was on the most intimate footing. His professions of friendship to the laird were unceasing. "I dare freely say." he observes in one of his characteristic letters, "that there is not a Forbes alive wishes your personal health and prosperity more than I do, affectionate and sincerely; and I should be a very ungrateful man if it was otherways, for no man gave me more proofs of love and friendship at home and abroad than John Forbes of Colodin did.

"As to carrying your lime to Lovat, I shall do more in it than if it was for my own use. I shall give the most pressing orders to my officers to send in my tenants' horses; and to show them the zeal and desire that I have to serve you, I shall send my own labouring horses to carry it, with as much pleasure as if it was to build a house in Castle Downie."

Even his wife and his "beams"' are "Colodin's faithful slaves—" "I'll never see a laird of C'ulodin I love so much," he declares in another letter; — in which, also, he reminds Mr. Forbes of a promise that he "will do him the honour, since he cannot himself at this time be present, to hold up his forthcoming child to receive the holy water of baptisme, and make it a better Christian than the father. I expect this mark of friendship from my dear John Forbes of Culodin."

Yet all these professions were wholly forgotten, when Lord Lovat. being fairly established in his honours, no longer deemed the friendship of the Forbes family necessary to him. An occasion then occurred, in which Mr. Forbes's "grateful slave" showed the caprice inherent in his nature. Forbes of Culloden had long been the representative of Inverness, chiefly through the interest of Lord Lovat; but when Sir William Grant came forward to oppose the return of Forbes, to the dismay of that gentleman, Lord Lovat turned round, and, upon the plea of consanguinity, used his interest in favour of the new candidate. The disappointment resulting from this defeat is said to have preyed upon the spirits of the worthy Laird of Culloden, and to have caused his death.

The decline of this alliance between the Forbes family and Lord Lovat, was the prelude to greater changes.

In order to repress the local disturbances in the Highlands, Government had adopted a remedy, well termed by Sir Walter Scott, "of a doubtful and dangerous character." This was the raising of a number of independent companies among the Highlanders, to be commanded by chieftains, and officered by their sons, by tackmen, or by Daihne vassals. At the period when those great military roads were formed in the Highlands between the year 1715 and 1745, these companies were better calculated, it was supposed, to maintain the repose of a country with which they were well acquainted, than regular troops. But the experiment did not succeed. The Highland companies, known by the famous name of the Black Watch, traversed the country, it is true, night and day, and tracked its inmost recesses; they knew the most dangerous characters; they were supposed to suppress all internal disorders. But they were Highlanders. Whilst they looked leniently upon robberies and outrages to which they had been familiarized from their youth, they revived in their countrymen the military spirit which the late Act for disarming the clans had subdued. Upon their removal from the Highlands, and their exportation to Flanders, the mischief became apparent; and no regular force being sent to the Highlands in their stead, those chieftains who were favourable to the exiled family, found it easy to turn the restless temper and martial habits of their clansmen to their own purposes.

Lord Lovat was one of those who thus acted. The Ministry, irritated by his patronage of Sir William Grant's interests, in preference to these of Forbes, at the election for Inverness, suddenly deprived him of his pension in 1739, and also of the command of the free company of Highlanders. This was a rash proceeding, and contrary to the advice of President Forbes. Lord Lovat, who had caused his clansmen to enter his regiment by rotation, and had thus, without suspicion, been training his clan to the use of arms, soon showed how dangerous a weapon had been placed in his hand, and at how critical a period he had been incensed to turn it against Government.

He had long been suspected. Even in 1737, information had been given of his buying up muskets, broadswords, and targets, in numbers. When challenged to defend himself from the imputation of Jacobitism by a friend, he insisted upon the services he had done in 1715 as a reason why he should for ever be free from the imputation of disloyalty; and he continued to play the same subtle part, and to pretend indifference to all fresh enterprises, to his friends at Culloden, as that which he had always affected.

"Everybody expects we shall have a war very soon," he writes to his friend John Forbes in 1729— which I am not fond of; for being now growne old, I desire and wish to live in peace with all mankind, except some damned Presbyterian ministers who dayly plague me." Yet, even then he was engaged in a plot to restore the Stuarts. In 1736, when ho was Sheriff for the county, he received the celebrated Roy Stuart, who was imprisoned at Inverness for high treason, when he broke out of gaol, and kept him six weeks in his house ; sending by him an assurance to the Pretender of his fidelity, and at the same time desiring Roy Stuart to procure him a commission as lieutenant-general, and a patent of dukedom.

This was the secret spring of his whole proceeding. It is degrading to the rest of the Jacobites, to give this double traitor an epithet ever applied to honourable, and fervent, and disinterested men. The sole business of Lovat wras personal aggrandizement; revenge was his amusement.

Lord Lovat immediately changed the whole style of his deportment. He quitted the comparative retirement of Castle Downie; went to Edinburgh, where he set up a chariot, and lived there in a sumptuous manner, though with little of those ceremonials which we generally associate with rank and opulence. He now sought and obtained a very general acquaintance. Few men had more to tell; and he could converse about his former hardships, relate the account of his introduction to Louis the Fourteenth, and to the gracious Maintenon. He returned to Castle Downie. That seat, conducted hitherto on the most penurious scale, suddenly became the scene of a plenteous hospitality; and its lord, once churlish and severe, became liberal and free. He entertained the clans after their hearts' desire, and he kept a purse of sixpences for the poor. As his castle was almost In the middle of the Highlands, it was much frequented; and the crafty Lovat now adapted his conversation to his own secret ends. lie expatiated to the Highlanders, always greedy of fame, and vain beyond all parallel of their country, upon the victories of Montrose on the fields of Killicranuie and Oromdale.

"Such a sword and target," he would say to a listener, "your honest grandfather wore that day, and with it be forced his way through a hundred men, Well did I know him; he was my great friend, and an honest man. Few are like him now-a-days; — you resemble him pretty much."

Then he began to interpret prophecies and dreams, and to relate to his superstitious listeners the dreams their fathers had before the battle, in which they fought. He would trace genealogies as far back as the clansmen pleased, and show their connection with their chieftains. They were all his "cousins and friends;" for he knew every person that had lived in the country for years.

Then he spoke of the superiority of the broad-sword and target over the gun and the bayonet; he sneered at the weakness of an army, after so many years of peace, commanded by boys; he boasted of the valour of the Scots in Sweden and France; he even unriddled the prophecies of Bede and of Merlin. By these methods he prepared the minds of those over whom he ruled for the Rebellion; but in the event, as it has been truly said, "the thread of his policy was spun so fine that at last it failed in the maker's hand."

The shrewdness of Lovat's judgment might indeed be called in question, when he decided to risk the undisturbed possession of his Highland property for a dukedom and prospect. But there were many persons of rank and influence who believed, with Prince Charles Edward, that "the Hanoverian yoke was severely felt in England, and that now was the time to shake it off."'  "The intruders of the family of Hanover," observes a strenuous Jacobite, "conscious of the lameness of their title and the precariousness of their tenure, seem to have had nothing in view but increasing their power, and gratifying their insatiable avarice : by the former, they proposed to get above the caprice of the people ; and by the latter, they made sure of something, happen what would." "Abundance of the Tories," he further remarks, "had still a warm side for the family of Stuart ; and as for the old stanch Whigs, their attachment and aversion to families had no other spring but their love of liberty, which they saw expiring with the family of Hanover : they had still this, and but this chance to recover it. In fine, there was little opposition to be dreaded from any quarter but from the army,—gentlemen of that profession being accustomed to follow their leaders, and obey orders without asking any questions. But there were malcontents among them, too; such as were men of property, whose estates exceeded the value of their commissions, did by no means approve of the present measures."'*

Upon the whole the conjuncture seemed favourable, and Lord Lovat, whose political views were very limited, was the first to sign the association despatched in 1736, according to some accounts, by others in 1740, and signed and sealed by many persons of note in Scotland, inviting the Chevalier to come over to that country. His belief was, that France hail at all times the power to bring in James Stuart if she had the will; that, indeed, was the general expectation of the Jacobites.

"Most of the powers in Europe," writes Mr. Maxwell, "were engaged, either as principals or auxiliaries, in a war about the succession to the Austrian dominions. France and England were hitherto only auxiliaries, but so deeply concerned, and so sanguine, that it was visible they would soon come to an open rupture with one another; and Spain had been at war with England some years, nor was there the least prospect of an accommodation. From those circumstances it seemed highly probable that France and Spain would concur in forwarding the Prince's views."

Influenced by these considerations, Lovat now became chiefly involved in all the schemes of the Chevalier. In 1743, when the invasion was actually resolved upon, Lovat was fixed upon as a person of importance to conduct the insurrection in the Highlands. Nor did the failure of that project deter him from continued exertions. During the two succeeding years, and until after the battle of Preston Pans, lie acted with such caution and dissimulation, that, had his party lost, he might still have made terms, as he thought, with the Hanoverians.

In the beginning of the year 1745, Prince Charles despatched several commissions to be distributed among his friends in Scotland, with certain letters delivered by Sir Hector Maclean, begging his friends in the Highlands to be in readiness to receive him, and desiring, "if possible, that all the castles and fortresses in Scotland might be taken before his arrival." On the twenty-fifth of Ju!y, the gallant Charles Edward landed in a remote corner of the Western Highlands, with only seven adherents. Lord Lovat was informed of this event, but he continued to play the deep game which his perfidious mind suggested on all occasions. He sent one of his principal agents into Lochaber to receive the young Prince's commands, as Regent of the three kingdoms, and to express his joy at his arrival. He sent also secretly for his son, who was then a student at the University of St. Andrews, and compelled him to leave his pursuits there, appointing him colonel of his clan. Arms, money, and provisions were collected ; and the fiery cross was circulated throughout the country.

Such proceedings could not be concealed, and the Lord Advocate, Craigie, wrote to Lord Lovat from Edinburgh, :in the month of August, calling upon him to prove his allegiance, referring to Lovat's son as well able to assist him, and asking his counsels on the state of the Highlands. The epistle alluded to a long cessation of any friendly correspondence between the Lord Advocate and Lord Lovat.

It was answered by assurances of loyalty. "I am as ready this day (as far as I am able) to serve the King and Government as I was in the year 1715, &c. But my clan and I have been so neglected these many years past, that I have not twelve stand of arms in my country, though I thank God I could bring twelve hundred good men to the field for the King's sendee if I had arms and other accoutrements for them." He then entreats a supply of arms, names a thousand stand to be sent to Inverness, and promises to engage himself in the King's sendee, he continues, —"Therefore, my good Lord. I earnestly entreat that as you wish that I would do good service to the Government on this critical occasion, you may order immediately a thousand stand of arms to be delivered to me and my clan at Inverness, and then your Lordship shall see that I will exert myself for the King's service; and if we do not get these arms immediately, we will certainly be undone; for these madmen that are in arms with the pretended Prince of Wales, threaten every day to burn and destroy my country if we do not rise in arms and join them; so that my people cry hourly that they have no arms to defend themselves, nor no protection or support from the Government. So I earnestly entreat your Lordship may consider seriously on this, for it will be an essential and singular loss to the Government if my clan and kindred be destroyed, who possess the centre of the Highlands of Scotland, and the countries most proper, by their situation, to serve the King and Government."

"As to my son, my Lord, that you are so good as to mention, he is very young, and just done with his colleges at St. Andrews, under the care of a relation of yours, Mr. Thomas Craigie, professor of Hebrew, who I truly think one of the prettiest, most complete gentlemen that 1 ever conversed with in any country and I think I never saw a youth that pleased him more than my eldest son; he says he is a very good scholar, and has the best genius for learning of any he has seen, and it is by Mr. Thomas Craigie's positive advice, which he will tell you when you see him, that I send my son immediately' to Utrecht to complete his education. But I have many a one of my family more fitted to command than he is at his tender age; and I do assure your Lordship that they will behave well if they are supported as they ought from the Government."

This artful letter, wherein he talks of sending his son to Utrecht, when he was, at that time, by threats and persuasion driving him into the field of civil war, is finished thus :—

"I hear that mad and unaccountable gentleman'' (thus he designates the Prince) "has set up a standard at a place called Glenfinnin—Monday last. This place is the inlet from Moydart to Lochaber; and I hear of none that joined him as yet, except the Camerons and Macdonells."

But this masterpiece of art could not deceive the honest yet discerning mind of him to whom it was addressed.

Since the death of Mr. Forbes, the President had resided frequently at Culloden. now his own property; his observing eye was turned upon the proceedings of his neighbour at Castle Downie, but still appearances wore maintained between him and Lovat. "This day," writes the President to a friend, "the Lord Lovat came to dine with me. He said he had heard with uneasiness the reports that were scattered abroad; but that he looked on the attempt as very desperate; that though he thought himself but indifferently used lately, in taking his company from him, yet his wishes still being, as well as his interest, led him to support the present Royal Family; that he had lain absolutely still and quiet, lest his stirring in any sort might have been misrepresented or misconstrued; and he said his business with me was, to be advised what was to be done on this occasion. I approved greatly of his disposition, and advised him, until the scene should open a little, to lay himself out to gain the most certain intelligence he could come at, which the situation of his clan will enable him to execute, and to prevent his kinsmen from being seduced by their mad neighbours, which he readily promised to do."

Consistent with these professions were the letters of Lovat to the President.

"I have but melancholy news to tell you, my dear Lord, of my own country; for 1 have a strong report that mad Foyers is either gone, or preparing to go, to the "West; and I have the same report of poor Kilbockie; but I don't believe it. However, if I be able to ride in my chariot the length of Inverness, I am resolved to go to Stratherrick next week, and endeavour to keep my people in order. I forgot to tell you that the man yesterday assured me that they were resolved to burn and destroy all the countries where the men would not join them, with lire and sword, which truly frights me much, and has made me think of the best expedient I could imagine to preserve my people.

"As I know that the Laird of Lochiel has always a very affectionate friendship for me, as his relation, and a man that did him singular services, and as lie is perfectly well acquainted with Gortuleg, I endeavoured all I could to persuade Tom to go there, and that he should endeavour in my name to persuade Lochiel to protect my country; in which I think I could succeed ; but I cannot persuade Gortuleg to go; he is so nice with his points of honour that he thinks his going would bring upon him the character of a spy, and that he swears he would not have for the creation. I used all the. arguments that I was capable of, and told him plainly that it was the greatest service he could do to me and to my country, as I knew he could bring me a full account of their situation, and that is the only effectual means that I can think of to keep the Stratherrick men and the rest of my people at home. He told me at last he would take some days to consider of it until he comes out of Stratherrick; but I am afraid that will be too late. I own I was not well pleased with him, and we parted in a cooler manner than we used to do."

In all his letters he characterizes Charles Edward, to whom he had just pledged his allegiance, as the "pretended Prince." His affectation of zeal in the cause of Government, his pretence of an earnest endeavour to arrest the career of the very persons whom he was exciting to action, his exertions with my "cousin Gortuleg," and his delight to find that "honest Kilbockie," whom he had been vilifying, had not stirred, and would do nothing without his consent, might be amusing if they were not traits of such wanton irreclaimable falsehood in an aged man, soon to be called to an account, before a heavenly tribunal, for a long career of crime and injury to his neighbours.

If any further instance of his duplicity can be read with patience, the following letter to Lochiel, who, according to Lovat, had a very affectionate friendship for him. affords a curious specimen of cunning.

" 1745.

" Dear Lochiel,

" I fear you have been over rash in going ere affairs were ripe. You are m a dangerous state. The Elector's General. Cope, is in your rear, hanging at your tail with three thousand men, such as have not been seen here since Dundee's affair, and we have no force to meet him. If the Macphersons will take the field I would bring out my lads to help the work ; and 'twixt the two we might cause Cope to keep his Christmas here ; but only Cluny is earnest in the cause, and my Lord Advocate plays at cat and mouse with me; but times may change, I may bring him to Saint Johnstone's tippet. Meantime look to yourselves, for ye may expect many a sour face and sharp weapons in the South. In aid when I can, but my prayers are all I can give at present. My service to the Prince, but I wish he had not come here so empty-handed. Siller would go far in the Highlands. I send this by Evan Fraser, whom 1 have charged to give it to yourself; for were Duncan to find it, it would be my head to an onion. Farewell!

" Your faithful frond,

" Lovat."

" For the Laird of Lochiel.

But perhaps the most odious feature in this part of Lovat's career was his treachery to Duncan Forbes, whose exertions had placed his unworthy client in possession of his property, and whose early ties of neighbourhood ought, at any rate, to have secured him from danger. A party of the Stratherric Frasers, kinsmen and clansmen of Lovat's, attacked Culloden House, as there was every reason to believe with the full concurrence of Lovat. Forbes, who was perfectly aware of the source whence the assault proceeded, appeared to treat it lightly, talked of it as an "idle attempt," never hinting that he guessed Lovat's participation in the affair, and only lamenting that the ruffians had "robbed the gardener and the poor weaver, who was a common benefit to the country." Lovat, as it has been sagaciously remarked, the guilty man, took it up much more knowingly.

This tissue of artifice was carried on for some weeks; first by a vehement desire to have arms sent in order to repel the rebels, then by hints that the inclinations of his people, and the extensive popularity of the cause began to make it doubtful whether he-could control their rash ardour. "Your Lordship may remember," he wrote to Forbes, "that I had a vast deal of trouble to prevent my men rising at the beginning of this affair; but now the contagion is so general, by the late success of the Highlanders, that they laugh at any man that would dissuade them from going; so that I really know not how to behave. I really wish I had been in any part of Britain these twelve months past, both for my health and other considerations." The feebleness of his health was a point on which, for some reasons or other, he continually insisted. It is not often that one can hear an aged man complain, without responding by pity and sympathy.

"I'm exceeding glad to know that your Lordship is in great health and spirits: I am so unlucky that my condition is the reverse; for I have neither health nor spirits. I have entirely lost the use of my limbs, for I can neither walk nor mount a horseback without the help of three or four men, which makes my life both uneasy and melancholy. But I submit to the will of God." This account, indeed, rather confirms a tradition that Lord Lovat, after the separation from his wife, sank into a state of despondency, and lay two years in bed previous to the Rebellion of 1745. "When the news of the Prince's landing was brought to him, he cried out, "Lassie, bring me my brogues.—I'll rise too."

At length, this wary traitor took a decisive step. His dilatoriness had made many of the Pretender's friends uneasy, and showed too plainly that he had been playing a double game. He was urged by some emissaries of Charles Edward "to throw off the mask," upon which he pulled off his hat and exclaimed "there it is!" He then, in the midst of his assembled vassals, drank confusion to the white horse, and all the generation of them." He declared that he would "cut off" in a moment any of his tenants who refused to join the cause, and expressed his conviction that as sure as the sun slimed his "master would prevail."

This was in the latter part of the summer: on the twenty-first of September the battle of Preston Pans raised the hopes of the Jacobites to the highest pitch, and Alexander Macleod was sent to the Highland chieftains to stimulate their loyalty and to secure their rising. Upon his visiting Castle Downie he found Lovat greatly elated by the recent victory, which he declared was not to be paralleled. He now began to assemble his men, and to prepare in earnest for that part which he had long intended to adopt; "but," observes Sir Walter Scott, "with that machiavelism inherent in his nature, he resolved that his own personal interest in the insurrection should be as little evident as possible, and determined that his son, whose safety he was bound, by the laws of God and man, to prefer to his own, should be his stalking-horse, and in case of need his scape-goat."

Lord President Forbes, who had been addressing himself to the Highland chieftains, exhorting the well-affected to bestir themselves, and entreating those who were devoted to the Pretender not to involve themselves and their families in ruin, expostulated by a letter with Lord Lovat upon the course which his son was now openly pursuing, pointing out how greatly it would reflect upon the father, whose co-operation or countenance he supposed to be impossible. The letters written on this subject by Forbes are admirable, and show a deep interest not only in the security of his country', but also in the fate of the young man, who afterwards redeemed his involuntary errors by a career of the highest respectability.

"You have now so far pulled off the mask," writes the President, "that we can see the mark you aimed at." "You sent away your son, and the best part of your clan," he adds, after a remonstrance full of good sense and candour, "to join the Pretender, with as little concern as if no danger had attended such a step. And I am sorry to tell you, my Lord, that I could sooner undertake to plead the cause of any one of those unhappy gentlemen who are actually in arms against his Majesty; and I could say more in defence of their conduct, than I could in defence of your Lordship's."

Can any instance of moral degradation be adduced more complete than this? The implication of a son by a father, who had used his absolute authority to drive his son into an active part in the affairs of the day.

"I received the honour of your Lordship's letter," writes Lovat, in reply, "late last night, of yesterday's date; and I own that I never received any one like it since I was born; and I give your Lordship the thousand thanks for the kind freedom you use with me in it; for I see by it that for my misfortune of having ane obstinate stubborn son, and ane ungrateful kindred, my family must go to destruction, and I must lose my life in my old age. Such usage looks rather like a Turkish or Persian government than like a British. Am I, my Lord, the first father that had ane undutiful and unnatural son or am I the first man that has made a good estate, and saw it destroyed in his own time? but I never heard till now, that the foolishness of a son. would take away the liberty and life of a father, that lived peaceably, that was ane honest man, and well inclined to the rest of mankind. But I find the longer a man lives, the more wonders, and extraordinary things he sees.

"Now, my Lord, as to the civil war that occasions my misfortune; and in which, almost the whole kingdom is involved on one side or other. I humbly think that men should be moderate on both sides, since it is morally impossible to know the event. For thousands, nay, ten thousands on both sides are positive that their own party will carry ; and suppose that this Highland army should be utterly defeat, and that the Government should carry all in triumph, no man can think that any king upon the throne would destroy so many ancient families that are engaged in it."

Upon the news of the Pretender's troops marching to England, the Frasers, headed by the Master of Lovat, formed a sort of blockade round Fort Augustus; upon which the Earl of Loudon, with a large body of the well-affected clans, marched, in a very severe frost during the month of December, to the relief of Fort Augustus. His route lay through Stratherric, Lord Lovat's estate, on the south side of Loch Ness. Fort Augustus surrendered without opposition; and the next visit which Lord Loudon paid was to Castle Downie, where he prevailed on Lord Lovat to go with him to Inverness, and to remain there under London's eye, until his clan should have been compelled to bring in their arms. Lord Lovat was now very submissive; he promised that this should be done in three days, and highly condemned the conduct of his son. Rut he still delayed to surrender the arms; and, at last, found means, in spite of his lameness which he was always lamenting, to get out of the house where he was lodged by a back passage, and to make his escape to the Isle of Muily, in Glenstrathfarrer. Here he occupied himself in exciting all the clans, especially his own Frasers, to join in the insurrection. A scheme having been submitted to the Duke of Cumberland, for the prevention of all future disturbances by transporting all those who had been found in arms to America, Lord Lovat had this document translated into Gaelic, and circulated in the Highlands, in order to exasperate the natives against the Duke, and to show that that General intended to extirpate them root and branch. Unhappily, the event did not serve to dispel those suspicions. This manifesto, as it was called, was read publicly in the churches every Sunday.

The march of the rebels to Inverness drove Lord Loudon to retire into Sutherland early m 1746, and President Forbes had accompanied him in his retreat. It was, therefore, again practicable for Lord Lovat to return to his own territory; and we find him, before the battle of Culloden, alternately at Castle Downie, or among some of his adherents, chiefly at the House of Fraser of Gortuleg, from which the following letter which exemplifies much of the character of Lovat, appears to have been written,

" March 20, 1746

" My dearest Child,

" Gortulegg came home last night, with Inocralachy's brother; and the two Sandy Fairfield's son, and mine and I am glad to know, that you are in perfect health, which you may be sure I wish the continuance of. I am sure for all Sandy's reluctance to come to this country, he will be better pleased with it than any where else; for he has his commerade, Gortuleg's son, to travell up and down with him; I shall not desire him to stay ane hour in the house but when he pleases.

" My cousin, Mr. William Fraser, tells me that the Prince sent notice to Sir Alexander Bennerman, by Sir John M'Donell, that he would go some of these days, and view my country of the Aird, and fish salmon upon my river of Beauly, I do not much covet that great honour at this time as my house is quite, out of order, and that I am not at home myself nor you, however, if the Prince takes the fancy to go, you must offer to go along with him, and offer him a glass of wine and any cold meat you can get there. I shall send Sanday Doan over immediately, if you think that the Prince is to go: so I have ordered the glyd post to he here precisely this night.

" Mr. William Fraser says, that Sir Alexander Bennerman will not give his answer to Sir John M'Donell. till he return about the Prince's going to Beaufort; and that cannot be before Saturday morning. So I beg, my dearest child, you may consider seriously of this, not to let us be affronted ; for after Sir Alexander and other gentlemen were entertained at your house, if the Prince should go and meet with no reception, it will be ane affront, and a stain upon you and me while we breathe. So, my dearest child, don't neglect this; for it is truely of greater consequence to our honour than you can imagine, tho' in itself it's but a maggot: but, I fancy, since Cumberland is comeing so near, that these fancy's w;jl be out of head. However, I beg you may not neglect to acquaint me (if it was by ane express) when you are rightly informed that the Prince is going. I have been extreamly bad these four days past with a fever and a cough; but I thank God I am better since yesterday afternoon. I shall be glad to see you here, if you think it proper for as short or as long a time as you please. All in this family offer you their compliments: and I ever am, more than I can express, my

dearest child, your most affected and dutiful father,

"P. S.—The Prince's reason for going to my house is, to see a salmon kill'd with the rod, which he never saw before; and if he proposes that fancy, he must not be disappointed.

"I long to hear from you by the glyd post some time this night. I beg, my dear child, you may send me any news you have from the east, and from the north, and from the south."

It was not until after the battle of Culloden that Charles Edward and Lord Lovat first met. In that engagement, Lovat's infirmities, as well as his precautions, had prevented his taking an active part; but his son, the Master of Lovat, whose energy in the cause which he had unwillingly espoused, met the praise of Prince Charles, led his clan up to the encounter, and was one of the few who effected a junction with the Prince on the morning of the battle. Fresh auxiliaries from the clan Fraser were hastening in at the very moment of that ill-judged action; and they behaved with their accustomed bravery, and were permitted to march off unattacked, with their pipes playing, and their colours flying. The great body of the clan Fraser were led by Charles Fraser, junior, of Inverlaltochy, as Lieutenant-Colonel in the absence of the Master of Lovat, who was coming up with three hundred men, but met the Highlanders flying. The brave Inverlaltochy was killed; and the fugitives were sorely harassed by Kingston's light horse.

The battle of Culloden occurring shortly afterwards, decided the question of Lord Lovat's political bias. Very different accounts have been transmitted of the feelings and conduct of Prince Charles after the fury of the contest had been decided. By some it has been stated, that he lost on that sad occasion those claims to a character for valour which even his enemies had not hitherto refused him; but Mr. Maxwell has justified the unfortunate and inexperienced young man.

"The Prince," he says, "seeing his army entirely-routed, and all his endeavours to rally the men fruitless, was at last prevailed upon to retire. Most of his horse assembled around his person to secure his retreat, which was made without any danger, for the enemy advanced very leisurely over the ground. They were too happy to have got so cheap a victory over a Prince and an enemy that they had so much reason to dread They made no attack where there was any body of the Prince's men together, but contented themselves with sabering such unfortunate people as fell in his way single and disarmed."

"If he did less at Culloden than was expected from him," adds this partial, but honest follower, "'twas only because he had formerly done more than could be expected." He justly blames the Prince's having come over without any officer of experience to guide him. "He was too young himself, and had too little experience to perform all the functions of a general; and though there are examples of Princes that seem to have been born generals, they had the advice and assistance of old experienced officers, men that understood, in detail, all that belongs to any army."

Lord Elcho, m his manuscript, thus accounts for the censures which were cast upon the Prince by those who shared his misfortunes.

"What displeased the people of fashion (consequence) was, that he did not seem to have the least sense of what they had done for him; but, after all, would afterwards say they had done nothing but their duty, as his father's subjects were born to do.

"And there were people about him that took advantage to represent the Scotch to him as a mutinous people, and that it. was not so much for him they were fighting as for themselves; and repeated to him all their bad behaviour to Charles the First and Charles the Second, and put it to him in the worst light, that at the battle of Culloden he thought that all the Scots in genera] were a parcel of traitors. And he would have continued in the same mind had he got out of the country immediately; but the care they took of his person when he was hiding made him change his mind, and affix treason only to particulars."

After the battle was decided, and the plain of Culloden abandoned to the fury of an enemy more merciless and insatiable than any who ever before or after answered to an English name, the Prince retired across a moor in the direction of Fort Augustus, and, according to Maxwell, slept that niglit at the house of Fraser of Gortuleg; and there for the first time saw Lord Lovat. But this interview is declared by Arbuthnot, who appears to have gathered his facts chiefly from local information, in the Castle of Downie; and the testimony of Sir Walter Scott confirms the assertion. "A lady," writes Sir Walter, "who, then a girl, was residing in Lord Lovat's family, described to us the unexpected appearance of Prince Charles and his flying attendants at Castle Downie. The wild and desolate vale on which she was gazing with indolent composure, was at once so suddenly filled with horsemen riding furiously towards the Castle, that, impressed with the idea that they were fairies, who, according to men. are visible only from one twinkle of the eyelid to another, she strove to refrain from the vibration which she believed would occasion the strange and magnificent apparition to become Invisible. To Lord Lovat it brought a certainty more dreadful than the presence of fairies or even demons. The tower on which he had depended had fallen to crush him. and he only met the Chevalier to exchange mutual condolences."

The Prince, it is affirmed, rushed into the chamber where Lovat, supported by men, for he could not stand without assistance, awaited his approach. The unhappy fugitive broke into lamentations. "My Lord," he exclaimed, "we are undone; my army is routed: what will become of poor Scotland?" Unable to utter any more, he sank fainting on a bed near him. Lord Lovat immediately summoned assistance, and by proper remedies the Prince was restored to a consciousness of his misfortunes, and to the recollection that Castle Downie, a spot upon which the vengeance of the Government was sure to fall, could be no safe abiding place for him or for his followers.

Such was the commencement of those wanderings, to the interest and romance of which no fiction can add. After this conference was ended, Prince Charles went to Invergarie; Lord Lovat prepared for flight.

His first place of retreat was to a mountain, whence he could behold the field of battle; he collected his officers and men around him, and they gazed with mournful interest upon the plain of Culloden. Heaps of wounded men were lying in their blood; others were still pursued by the soldiers of an army whose orders were, from their royal General, to give no quarter; fire and sword were everywhere, vengeance and fury raged on the moor watered by the river Nairn. Here, too, the unhappy Frasers and their chief might view Culloden House, a large fabric of stone, graced with a noble avenue of great length leading to the house, and surrounded by a park covered with heather. Here Charles Edward had slept the night before the battle. The remembrance of many social hours, of the hospitality of that old hall, might recur at this moment to the mind of Lovat. But whatever might be his reflections, his fortitude remained unbroken, He turned to the sorrowful clan around them, and addressed them. He recurred to his former predictions: "I have foretold," he said, still attempting to keep up his old influence over the minds of his clans, "that our enemies would destroy us with the fire and sword; they have begun with me, nor will they cease until they have ravaged all the country." He still, however, exhorted his captains to keep together their men, and to maintain a mountain war. so that at least they might obtain better terms of peace. Having thus counselled them, he was carried upon the shoulders of his followers to the still farther mountains, from one of which he is said, by a singular stroke of retributive justice, to have beheld Castle Downie, the scene of his crime, to maintain the splendour of which he had sacrificed every principle, and compassed every crime, burned by the infuriated enemy. Nine hundred men, under Brigadier Mordaunt, were detached for this purpose.

In one of the Highland fastnesses Lovat remained some time; but the blood-thirsty Cumberland was eager in pursuit. Parties of soldiers were sent out in search of Lovat, and he soon found that it was no longer safe to remain in the vicinity of Beaufort. He fled, in the first instance, to Cawdor Castle. In this famous structure, with its iron-grated doors, its ancient tapestry hanging over secret passages and obscure approaches, he took refuge. In one of its towers, in a small low chamber beneath the roof, the wretched old man concealed himself for some months. When he was at last obliged to leave it, he descended by means of a rope from his chamber.

He had still lost neither resolution nor energy. On the fourth of May, fifteen of the Jacobites chieftains, Lord Lovat among the number, met in the Island of Mortlaig, to concert measures for raising a body of men to resist the victorious troops. On this occasion Lord Lovat declared that they need not be uneasy, since he had no doubt but that they should be able to collect eight or ten thousand men to fight the Elector of Hanover's troops. Cameron of Lochiel, Murray of Broughton, and several other leaders of distinction were present; Lord Lovat was attended by many of his own clan, who were armed with dirks, swords, and pistols, and marked by wearing sprays of yew in their bonnets. But the conference broke up without any important result. The leaders embraced each other, drank to Prince Charles's health, and separated. On this occasion Lord Lovat headed that party among the Jacobites who still looked for aid from France, and abjured the notion of surrendering to the conqueror. Still hunted, to use his own expression, "like a fox," through the main land, Lovat now got off in a boat to the Island of Morar, where he thought himself secure from his enemies; but it was decreed that his iniquitous life should not close in peaceful obscurity. It was not long before he heard that a party of the King's troops had arrived in pursuit of him, and a detachment of the garrison of Fort William, on board the Terror and Furnace sloops, was also despatched, to make descents on different parts of the island. Lovat retreated into the woods; Captain Mellon, who commanded the detachment searched every town, village, and house; but not finding the fugitive, he resolved to traverse the woods, planting parties at the openings to intercept an escape. In the course of his researches he passed a very old tree, which, from some slits in its trunk, he and his men perceived to be hollow. One of the soldiers, peeping into the aperture, thought he saw a man's leg; upon which he summoned his captain, who, on investigating farther, found on one side a large opening, in which stood a pair of legs, the rest of the figure being hidden within the hollow of the tree. This was, however, quickly discovered to be Lord Lovat, for whom this party had then been three days in search. He was wrapped in blankets, to protect his aged limbs from the cold.

Thus discovered, Lovat was forced to surrender, but his spirit rose with the occasion: he told Captain Mellon that "he had best take care of him; for if he did not, he should make him answer for his conduct before a set of gentlemen the very sight of whom would make him tremble." He was taken, in the first instance, to Fort William, where he was treated with humanity, in obedience to the express orders of the Duke of Cumberland. From this prison Lovat wrote a letter to the Duke, reminding his Royal Highness of the services which he had performed in 1715. and of the favour shown him by George the First,  I often carried your Royal Highness," pursues the unhappy old man, "in my arms, in the palaces of Kensington and of Hampton Court, to hold you up to your royal grandfather, that he might embrace you, for he was very fond of you and the young princesses." He then represented to the Duke that if mercy were shown him, and he "might have the honour to kiss the Duke's hand, he might do more service to the King and Government than destroying a hundred such old and very infirm men like me, (past seventy, without the least use of my hands, legs, or knees,) can be of advantage in any shape to the Government."

He was conveyed soon after this letter, which is dated June the twenty-second, 1746, to Fort Augustus. He had requested that a litter might be prepared for him, for he was not able either to stand, walk, or ride. On the fifteenth of July he was removed, under a strong guard, to Stirling, where a party of Lord Mark Ker's dragoons received him. After a few days rest he passed through Edinburgh for the last time; thence to Berwick, and on the twenty-fifth he began his last journey under the escort of sixty dragoons commanded by Major Gardner. His journey to London was divided into twenty stages, and he was to travel one stage a day. It was, indeed, of importance to the Government that he should reach London alive, since many disclosures were expected from Lovat. On reaching Newcastle three days afterwards he appeared to be in a very feeble state, and walked from his coach to his lodgings supported by two of the dragoons. As he travelled along in a sort of cage, or horse-litter, the acclamations and hisses of the populace everywhere assailed him; but his spirits were unbroken, and he talked confidently of his return.

But as he drew near London this security diminished- He happened to reach London a few days before the unhappy Jacobite noblemen were beheaded on Tower Hill. On his way to the Tower he passed the scaffold which was erected for their execution. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "I suppose it will not be long before I shall make my exit there."

He was received in the Tower by the Lieutenant-Governor, who conducted him to the apartment prepared for his reception. Here, reclining in an elbow chair, he is said to have broken out into reflections upon his eventful and singular career. He uttered many moral sentiments, and expressed himself, as many other men have done on similar occasions, perfectly satisfied with his own intentions. Such was the self-deception of this extraordinary man.

In this prison Lovat remained during five months without being brought to trial. But the delay was of infinite importance; it prepared him to quit, with what may be almost termed heroism, a life which he had employed in iniquity. "Without remembering this interval, during which ample time for preparation had been afforded, the hardihood which could sport with the most solemn of all subjects, would shock rather than astonish. In consideration of the conduct of many of our state prisoners on the scaffold, we must recollect how familiarized they had previously become with death, in those gloomy chambers whence they could see many a fellow sufferer issue, to shed his blood on the same scaffold which would soon be re-erected for themselves.

During his imprisonment, Lovat had the affliction of hearing that his estates, after being plundered of everything and destroyed by fire, were given by the Duke of Cumberland to James Fraser of Cullen Castle. He was therefore left without a shilling of revenue during his confinement, and was thus treated as a convicted prisoner. In this situation he was reduced to the utmost distress, and indebted solely to the bounty of a kinsman, administered through Governor Williamson, for subsistence. At length, early in the year 1747, upon preferring a petition to the House of Lords, these grievances were in a great measure redressed. Yet the unhappy prisoner had sustained many hardships. Among others the legal plunder of his strong box, containing the sum of seven hundred pounds, and of many valuables.

After much deliberation on the part of the Crown lawyers, Lord Lovat was impeached of high treason. "We learn," says Mr. Anderson, "from Lord Mansfield's speech in the Sutherland cause, that much deliberation was necessary. It was foreseen that his Lordship would have recourse to art. If he was tried as a commoner he might claim to be a peer; if tried as a peer he might claim to be a commoner. Everything was fully considered; the true solid ground upon which he was tried as a peer, was the presumption in favour of the heirs male."

On Monday, the ninth of March, the proceedings were commenced against Lord Lovat; and a renewal took place of that scene which Horace Walpole declared to be "most solemn and fine; — a coronation is a puppet-show, and all the splendour of it idle, but this sight at once feasted the eyes, and engaged all one's passions."

Lord Lovat was now dragged forth to play the last scene of his eventful life. His size had by this time become enormous, so that when he had first entered the Tower it was jestingly said that the doors must be enlarged to receive him. He could neither walk nor ride, as he was almost helpless; he was deaf, probably eighty years of age, ignorant of English law, and was therefore not a matter of surprise that the high-born tribes, who thronged to his trial, were disappointed in the brilliancy of his parts, and in the readiness of his wit.  I see little of parts in him? observes Walpole, "nor attribute much to that cunning for which he is so famous; it might catch wild Highlanders." Singular, indeed, must have been the contrast between Lord Lovat and the polished assembly around him : the Lord High Steward, Hardwicke, comely, and endowed with a fine voice, but "curiously searching for occasions to bow to the Minister, Henrv Felham," and asking at all hands what he was to do. The rude Highland clansmen, vassals of Lord Lovat's, but witnesses against him; above all, the blot and scourge of the Jacobite cause, Murray of Broughton, who was the chief witness against the prisoner, must have formed an assembly of differing characters not often to be seen, and never to be forgotten.

The trial lasted five days; it affords, as has been well remarked, a history of the whole of the Rebellion of 1745. Robert Chens of Muirtown, a near neighbour of Lovat's, but, as the counsel for the Crown observed, a man of very different principles, gave testimony against the prisoner. At the end of the third day, Lord Lovat, pleading that he had been up at four o'clock in the morning, "to attend their Lordships," and declaring that he would rather "die on the road than not pay them that respect," prayed a respite of a day, which was granted. It appeared, indeed, doubtful in what form death would seize him first, and whether disease and age might not cheat the scaffold of its victim.

Lord Lovat spoke long in his defence, but without producing any revulsion in his favour. Throughout the whole of the proceedings he appears not to have dreaded the rigour of the law; when the defence was closed, and the Lord High Steward was about to put the question, guilty or not guilty, to the House, the Lieutenant of the Tower was ordered by the Lord Steward to take the prisoner from the bar, but not back to the Tower.

"If your Lordships," said Lovat, "would send me to the Highlands, I would not go to the Tower any more." Be was pronounced guilty by the unanimous votes of one hundred and seventeen Lords present. He was then informed of his sentence, and remanded to his prison. On the following day, March the nineteenth, he was brought up to receive sentence. On that occasion, in reply to the question 'why judgment of death should not be passed upon him,' he made a long and, considering his fatigues and infirmities, an extraordinary speech, giving the Lords "millions of thanks for being so good in their patience and attendance," and drawing a parallel between the two different men of the name of Murray, who had figured in the trial. The one was Murray of Broughton ; the other, Murray afterwards Lord Mansfield. He then went into the history of his life; or, at least, into such passages of it as were proper for the public ear. He was interrupted by the Lord High Steward, whose conduct to the unhappy State prisoner is said to have been peevish and overbearing.

Judgment of death was then pronounced upon him, and the barbarous sentence which had been passed upon the Earl of Wintoun was pronounced; "to be hanged by the neck, but not till you are dead," &c. The prisoner then spoke again; hoping by this reiterated reference to his services, to obtain a mitigation of the sentence; but he spoke to those who heard, without compassion, the petitions for mercy which fell from an aged, tottering, and miserable old man. Welt has it been said, "Whatever his character or his crimes might be, the humanity of the British Government incurred a deep reproach, from the execution of an old man on the very verge of the grave."

At last, the Lord High Steward put the final question: "Would you offer anything further?'

"Nothing," was the reply, "but to thank your Lordships for your goodness to me. God bless you all; I bid you an everlasting farewell. We shall not meet all again in the same place,—I am sure of that."

Lord Lovat was reconducted to the Tower—that prison on entering which he had boasted, that if he were not old and infirm they would have found it difficult to have kept him there. The people told him they had kept those who were much younger. "Yes," ho answered, "but they had not broken so many gaols as I have."

He now met his approaching fate with a composure that it is difficult not to admire, even in Lovat. And yet reflection may perhaps suggest that the insensibility to the fear of death—an emotion incident to conscientious minds—bespeaks, in one whose responsibilities had been so grossly abused, an insensibility springing from utter depravity. Let us, however, give to the wretched man every possible allowance. He wrote, in terms of affection, a letter full of religious sentiments to his son, after his own condemnation. When the warrant came down for his execution, he exclaimed, "God's will be done!" With the courtesy that had charmed and had betrayed others all his life, he took the gentleman who brought the warrant by the hand, thanked him, drank his health, and assured him that he would not then change places with any prince in Christendom. He appears, indeed, to have had no misgivings, or he affected to have none, as to his eternal prospects. When the Lieutenant of the fortress in the Tower asked him how he did? "Do? was his reply; "why I am about doing very well, for I am going to a place -where hardly any majors, and very few lieutenant-generals go,"

Some friends still remained warmly attached to this singular man. Mr. William Fraser, his cousin, advanced a large sum of money to General Williamson, to provide for his wants; and, after acting as his solicitor, attended him to the last. But Lord Lovat felt deeply the circumstance of his having been convicted by his own servants: "It is shocking," he observed, "to human nature. I believe that they will carry about with them a sting that will accompany them to their grave; yet I wish them no evil."

He prayed daily, and fervently; and expressed unbounded confidence in the Divine mercy. "So, my dear child," he thus wrote to his son, "do not be in the least concerned for me; for I bless God I have strong reasons to hope that when it is God's will to call me out of this world, it will be by his mercy, and the suffering of my Saviour, Jesus Christ, to enjoy everlasting happiness in the other world. I wish this may be yours." After he had penned this remarkable letter, be asked a gentleman who was in his room how he liked the letter? The reply was, "I like it very well; it is a very good letter." "I think," answered Lord Lovat, "it is a Christian letter."

In this last extremity of his singular fortunes, the wife, whom he had so cruelly treated, forgetful of every thing but her Christian duty, wrote to him, and offered to repair immediately to London, and to go to him in the Tower, if he desired it. But Lord Lovat returned an answer, in which, for the first time, he adopted the language of conjugal kindness to Lady Lovat, and refused the generous proposal, worthy of the disinterestedness of woman's nature. He declared that he could not take advantage of it, after all that had occurred.*

Meantime, an application was made in favour of Lovat by a Mr. Painter, of St. John's College, Oxford, in the form of three letters, one of which was addressed to the King, another to Lord Chesterfield, a third to Henrv Pelham. The courage of the intercession can scarcely be appreciated in the present day; in that melancholy period, the slightest word uttered in behalf of the Insurgents, brought on the interceder the imputation of secret Jacobitism, an opinion which even President Forbes incurred. The petitions for mercy were worded fearlessly; "In a word," thus concludes that which was addressed to the King, "bid Lovat live; punish the vile traytor with life; but let me die; let me bow down my head to the block, and receive without fear the friendly blow, which, I verily believe, will only separate the soul from its body and miseries together." In his letter to Lord Chesterfield the Oxonian repeats his offer of undergoing the punishment instead of the decrepid old man; "This I will be bold to say," he adds: "I will not disgrace your patronage by want of intrepidity in the Injury of death, and that all the devils in Milton, with all the ghastly ghosts of Scotsmen that fell at Culloden. if they could be conjured there, should never move me to say, coming upon the scaffold, 'Sir, this is terrible. To Mr. Pelham. he declared, that "the post that he wanted was not of the same nature with other Court preferments, for which there is generally a great number of competitors, but may be enjoyed without a rival."

The observations which Lord Lovat made upon this well-meant but absurd proposal, show his natural shrewdness, or his disbelief in all that is good and generous. "This," he exclaimed, on being told of these remarkable letters, "is an extraordinary man indeed. I should like to know what countryman he is, and whether the thing is fact. Perhaps it may be only some finesse in politics, to cast an odium on some particular person. In short, Sir, I'm afraid the poor gentleman is weary of living in this wicked wrorld; in that case, the obligation is altered, because a part ox the benefit is intended for himself."

In his last days, Lovat avowed himself a Roman Catholic; but his known duplicity caused even this profession of faith to be distrusted. It is probable that like many men who have seen much of the world, and have mingled with those of different persuasions, Lord Lovat attached but little importance to different modes of faith. He was as unscrupulous in his religious professions as in all other respects. Early in his career, he thought it expedient to obtain the favour of the Pope's nuncio at Paris by conforming to the Romish faith. He declared to the Duke of Argyle and to Lord Leven that he could not get the Court of St. Germains to listen to his projects until he had declared himself a papist. One can scarcely term this venal conversion an adoption of the principles of any church. The outward symbols of his pretended persuasion had, however, become dear to him, from habit: he carried about his person a silver crucifix, which he often kissed. "Observe," he said, "this crucifix! Did you ever see a better? How strongly the passions are marked, how fine the expression is! We keep pictures of our best friends, of our parents, and others, but why should we not keep a picture of Him who has done more than all the world for us? When asked, Of what particular sort of Catholic are you? A Jesuit?' He answered to the nobleman who inquired, (and whose name was not known,) "No, no, my Lord, I am a Jansenisthe then avowed his intimacy with that body of men, and assured the nobleman, that in his sense of being a Roman Catholic, he "was as far from being one as his Lordship, or as any other nobleman in the House."

"This is my faith," he observed on another occasion, after affirming that he had studied controversy for three years, and then turned Roman Catholic; "but I have charity for all mankind, and I believe every honest man bids fair for Heaven, let his persuasion be what it may ; for the mercies of the Almighty are great, and his ways past finding out."

The allusion to his funeral had something touching, coming from the old Highland chieftain. Almost the solitary good trait in Lovat's character was the fondness for his Highland home —a pride in his clan—a yearning to the last for the mountains, the straths, the burns, now ravaged by the despoiler, and red with the blood of the Frasers. "Bury me," he said, "in my own tomb in the church of Kirk Hill; in former days, I had made a codicil to my will, that all the pipers from John O'Groat's house to Edinburgh should be invited to play at my funeral: that may not be now—but still I am sure there will be some good old Highland women to sing a coronach at my funeral; and there will be a crying and clapping of hands—for I am one of the greatest of the Highland chieftains." The circumstance which gave him the most uneasiness was the bill then depending for destroying the ancient privileges and jurisdiction of the Highland chiefs. "For my part," he exclaimed, when referring to the measure, "I die a martyr to my country."

He became much attached to one of his warders, and the usual influence which he seems to have possessed over every being with whom he came into collision, attracted the regards of this man to him. "Go with me to the scaffold," said Lovat—and leave me not till you see this head cut off the body. Tell my son, the Master of Lovat, with what tenderness I have parted from you. "Do you think," he exclaimed, on the man's expressing some sympathy with his approaching fate, "I am afraid of an axe? 'Tis a debt we all owe, and what we must all pay; and do you not think it better to go off so, than to linger with a fever, gout, or consumption? Though my constitution is so good, I might have lived twenty years longer had I not been brought hither."

During the week which elapsed between the warrant for his being brought down to the Tower, and his death, although, says a gentleman who attended him to the scaffold, he had a great share of memory and understanding, and an awful idea of religion and a future state, I never could observe, in his gesture or speech, the least symptom of fear, or indeed any symptoms of uneasiness." "I die," was his own expression, "as a Christian, and a Highland chieftain should do,—that is, not in my bed." Throughout the whole of that solemn interval, the certainty of his fate never dulled the remarkable vivacity of his conversation, nor the gay courtesy of his manners. No man ever died less consistently with his life. "It is impossible,"—such is the admission of a writer who detests his crimes,—"not to admire the fearlessness even of this monster in his last moments. But, in another view, it is somewhat difficult to resist a laugh of scorn at his impudent project of atoning for all the vices of a long and odious career, by going off with a fine sentiment on his lips."

On Thursday, the ninth of April, and the day appointed for his death, Lord Lovat awoke about three in the morning, and then called for a glass of wine and water, as was his custom. He took the greatest pains that every outward arrangement should bear the marks of composure and decency,—a care which may certainly incline one to fancy, that the heroism of his last moments may have had effect, in part, for its aim, and that, as Talleyrand said of Mirabeau, "he dramatized his death." But, it must be remembered, that in those days, it was the custom and the aim of the state prisoners to go to the scaffold gallantly; and thus virtuous men and true penitents walked to their doom attired with the precision of coxcombs. Lord Lovat, who had smoked his pipe merrily during his imprisonment with those about him, and had heard the last apprisal of his fate without emotion, was angry, when within a few hours of death and judgment, that his wig was not so much powdered as usual. "If he had had a suit of velvet embroidered, he would wear it," he said, "on that occasion." He then conversed with his barber, whose father was a Muggletonian, about the nature of the soul, adding with a smile, "I hope to be in Heaven at one o'clock, or I should not be so merry now." But, with all this loquacity, and display of what was, perhaps, in part, the insensibility of extreme age, the "behaviour that was said to have had neither dignity nor gravity"  in it at the trial, had lost the buffoonish character which characterized it in the House of Lords.

At ten o'clock, a scaffold which had been erected near the block fell down, and several persons were killed, and many injured; but the proceedings of the day went on. No reprieve, no thoughts of mercy ever came to shake the fortitude of the old man. At eleven, the Sheriffs of London sent to demand the prisoner's body: Lord Lovat retired for a few moments to pray; then, saying, "I am ready,'' he left his chamber, and descended the stairs, complaining as he went, "that they were very troublesome to him."

He was carried to the outer gate in the Governor's coach, and then delivered to the Sheriffs, and was by them conveyed to a house, lined with black, near to the scaffold. He was promised that his head should not be exposed on the four corners of the scaffold, that practice, in similar cases, having been abandoned: and that his clothes might be delivered with his corpse to his friends, as a compensation for which, to the executioner, he presented ten guineas contained in a purse of rich texture. He then thanked the Sheriff, and saluted his friends, saying, "My blood, I hope, will be the last shed upon this occasion."

He then walked towards the scaffold. It was a memorable and a mournful sight to behold the aged prisoner ascending those steps, supported by others, thus to close a life which must, at any rate, soon have been extinguished in a natural decay. As he looked round and saw the multitudes assembled to witness this disgraceful execution, "God save us!" he exclaimed; "why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head, that cannot get up three steps without two men to support it?" Seeing one of his friends deeply dejected, "Cheer up," he said, clapping him on the shoulder; "I am not afraid, why should you be?"

He then gave the executioner his last gift, begging him not to hack and cut about his shoulders, under pain of his rising to reproach him. He felt the edge of the axe, and said "he believed it would do then his eyes rested for some moments on the inscription on his coffin. "Simon Dominus Fraser de Lovat, decollat. April 9, 1747. JStat 80." He repeated the line from Horace :—

"Dulce et decoruxn est pro patria mori."

Then quoted Ovid.—"Nam genus et proavos, et qua? non fecimus ipsi. vix ea nostra voco."

He took leave of his solicitor, Mr. William Fraser, and presented him with his gold cane, as a mark of his confidence and token of remembrance. Then he embraced another relative, Mr. James Fraser. '"James," said the old cliieftain, "I am going to Heaven, but you must continue to crawl a little longer in this evil world." He made no address to the assembled crowds, but left a paper, which he delivered to the Sheriffs, containing his last protestations. After his sentence, Lovat had accustomed his crippled limbs to kneel, that he might be able to assume that posture at the block. He now kneeled down, and after a short prayer gave the preconcerted signal that he was ready; this was the throwing of a handkerchief upon the floor. The executioner severed his head from his body at one blow. A piece of scarlet cloth received his head, which was placed in the coffin with his body and conveyed to the Tower, where it remained until four o'clock. It was then given to an undertaker.

In the paper delivered to the Sheriff there were these words, which would have partly been deemed excellent had they proceeded from any other man :— "As it may reasonably be expected of me that I should say something of myself in this place, I declare I die a true but unworthy member of the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church. As to my death, I cannot look upon it but as glorious. I sincerely pardon all my enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, from the highest to the lowest, whom God forgive as I heartily do. I die in perfect charity with all mankind. I sincerely repent of all my sins, and firmly hope to obtain pardon and forgiveness for them through the merits and passion of my blessed Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, into whose hands I recommend my soul. Amen. Lovat."

" The Tower, April 9, 1747."

The public might well contrast the relentless hand of justice, in this instance with the mercy of Queen Anne. She, like her brother the Chevalier, averse from shedding blood, had spared the life of an old man, who had been condemned in her reign for treason. Many other precedents of a similar kind have been adduced. But this act of inhumanity was only part of a system of what was called justice; but which was the justice of the heathen, and not of the Christian.

If the character of Lord Lovat cannot be deduced from his actions, :it must be impossible to understand the motives of man from any course of life; for never was a career more strongly marked by the manifestation of the passions, than that of this unworthy descendant of a great line. His selfishness was unbounded, his rapacity insatiable; his brutality seems incredible. In the foregoing narrative, the mildest view has been adopted of his remorseless cruelty: of his gross and revolting indulgences, of his daily demeanour, which is said to have outraged everything that is seemly, everything that is holy, in private life, little has been written. Much that was alleged to Lovat, in this particular, has been contradicted: much may be ascribed to the universal hatred of his name, Which tinted, perhaps too highly, his vices, in his own day. Something may be ascribed to party prejudice, which gladly seized upon every occasion of reproach to an adversary. Yet still, there is too much that is probable, too much that is too true, to permit a hope that the private and moral character of Lord Lovat can be vindicated from the deepest stains.

By his public life, he has left an indelible stain upon the honour of the Highland character, upon his party, upon his country. Of principle he had none:—for prudence, he substituted a low description of timeserving: he never would have promoted the interests of the Hanoverians in the reign of George the First, if the Court of St. Germains had tolerated his alliance: he never would have sided with Charles Edward, if the Court of St. James's had not withdrawn its confidence. His pride and his revengeful spirit went hand in hand together. The former quality had nothing in it of that lofty character which raises it almost to a virtue, in the stern Scottish character: it was the narrow-minded love of power which is generated in a narrow sphere.

In the different relations of his guilty life, only one redeeming feature is apparent,—the reverence which Lord Lovat bore to his father. With that parent, seems to have been buried every gentle affection: he regarded his wives as slaves; he looked upon his sons with no other regard and solicitude, than as being heirs of his estates. As a chief and a master, his conduct has been variously represented; the prevailing belief is, that it was marked by oppression, violence, and treachery: Yet, as no man in existence ever was so abandoned as not to have his advocates, even the truth of this popular belief has been questioned, on the ground that the influence which he exercised over them, in being able to urge them to engage in whatsoever side he pleased, argues some qualities which must have engaged their affections.

He who pleads thus, must, however, have forgotten the hereditary sway of a Highland chieftain, existing in unbroken force in those days: he must have forgotten the sentiment which was inculcated from the cradle, the loyalty of clanship,—a sentiment which led on the brave hearts in which it was cherished to far more remarkable exertions and proofs of fidelity than even the history of the Frasers can supply.

But the deepest dye of guilt appears in Lord Lovat's conduct as a father. It was not only that he was, in the infancy and boyhood of his eldest born, harsh and imperious: such was the custom of the period. It was not only that he impelled the young man into a course which his own reason disapproved, and which he undertook with reluctance and disgust throwing, on one occasion, his white cockade into the fire, and only complying with his father's orders upon force. This was unjustifiable compulsion in any father, but it might be excused on the plea of zeal for the cause. But it appeared on the trial that the putting forward the Master of Lovat was a mere feint to save himself at the expense of his son, if affairs went wrong. In Lord Lovat's letters to President Forbes the poor young man was made to bear the brunt of the whole blame; although Lord Lovat had frequently complained of his son's backwardness to certain members of his clan. On the trial it appeared that the whole aim of Lord Lovat was, as Sir John Strange expressed it, "an endeavour to avoid being fixed himself and to throw it all upon his son, —that son whom he had, in a manner, forced into the Rebellion."

Rare, indeed, is such a case;—with that, let these few remarks on the character of Lord Lovat, conclude. Human nature can sink to no lower depth of degradation.

Lord Lovat left, by his first wife, three children — Simon, Master of Lovat; Janet, who was married to Ewan Macpherson of Cluny,—a match which Lord Lovat projected in order to increase his influence, and to strengthen his Highland connections. This daughter was grandmother to the present chief, and died in 1765. He had also another daughter, Sybilla.

This daughter was one of those rare beings whose elevated minds seem to expand in despite of every evil influence around them. Her mother died in giving her birth; and Lord Lovat, perhaps from remorse for the uncomplaining and ill-used wife, evinced much concern at the death of his first lady, and showed a degree of consideration for his daughters which could hardly have been expected from one so steeped in vice. Although his private life at Castle Downie, after the death of their mother was disgusting in detail, and therefore, better consigned to oblivion, the gentle presence of his two daughters restrained the coarse witticisms of their father, and he seemed to regard them both with affection and respect, and to be proud of the decorum of their conduct and manners. Disgusted with the profligacy which, as they grew up, they could not but observe at Castle Downie, the young ladies generally chose to reside at Leatwell, with Lady Mackenzie, their only aunt; and Lord Lovat did not resent their leaving him, but rather applauded a delicacy of feeling which cast so deep a reproach upon him. He was to them a kind indulgent father. When Janet, Lady Clunie, was confined of her first child, he brought her to Castle Downie that she might have the attendance of physicians more easily than in the remote country where the Macphersons lived. He always expressed regret that her mother had not been sufficiently attended to when her last child was born.

The fate of Sybilia Fraser presents her as another victim to the hardness and impiety of Lovat. "She possessed," says Mrs. Grant, "a high degree of sensibility, which when strongly excited by the misfortunes of her family, exalted her habitual piety into all the fervour of enthusiasm." When Lovat passed through Badenoch, after his apprehension, Sybilla. who was there with Lady Clunie, followed him to Dalwhinnev, and there, in an agony of mind which may be readily conceived, entreated her aged father to reconcile himself to his Maker, and to withdraw his thoughts from the world. She was answered by taunts at her "womanish weakness," as Lovat called it, and by coarse ridicule of his enemies, with a levity of mind shocking under such circumstances. The sequel cannot be better told than in these few simple words: "Sybilla departed almost in despair; prayed night and day, not for his life, but for his soul; and when she heard soon after, that 'he had died and made no sign,' grief in a short time put an end to her life.

The Master of Lovat was implicated, as we have shown, in the troubles of 1745. Early in that year, he had the misery of discovering the treachery of his father, by accidentally finding the rough draught of a letter which Lord Lovat had written to the President, in order to excuse himself at the expense of his son. "Good God!" exclaimed the young man, "how can he use me so? I will go at once to the President, and put the saddle on the right horse." In spite of this provocation, he did not, however, reveal his father's treachery; whilst Lord Lovat was balancing between hopes and fears, and irresolute which side to choose, the Master at last entreated, with tears in his eyes, that he might no longer be made a tool of—but might have such orders as his father might stand by."

Having received these orders, and engaged in the insurrection, the Master of Lovat was zealous in discharging the duties in which he had thus unwillingly engaged. His clan were among the few who came up at Culloden in time to effect a junction with Prince Charles. In 1746 an Act of Attainder was passed against him; he surrendered himself to Government, and was confined nine months in Edinburgh Castle. In 1750 a full and free pardon passed the seals for him. He afterwards became an advocate, but eventually returned to a military life, and was permitted to enter the English army. In 1757 he raised a regiment of one thousand eight hundred men, of which he was constituted colonel, at the head of which he distinguished himself at Louisbourg and Quebec. He was afterwards appointed colonel of the 71st foot, and performed eminent services in the American war.

The title of his father had been forfeited, and his lands attainted. But in 1774 the lands and estates were restored upon certain conditions, in consideration of Colonel Fraser's eminent services, and in consideration of his having been involved in "the late unnatural Rebellion" at a tender age. Colonel Fraser rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, and died in 1782 without issue; he was generally respected and compassionated. He was succeeded in the estates by his half-brother, Archibald Campbell Fraser, the only child whom Lord Lovat had by his second wife. This young man had mingled, when a boy, from childish curiosity among the Jacobite troops at the battle of Culloden, and had narrowly escaped from the dragoons.

He afterwards entered into the Portuguese service, where he remained some years; hut, being greatly attached to his own country, he returned. He could not, however, conscientiously take the oaths to Government, and therefore never had any other military employment. "With much truth, honour, and humanity" relates Mrs. Grant, "he inherited his father's wit and self-possession, with a vein of keen satire which he indulged in bitter expressions against the enemies of his family. Some of these I have seen, and heard many songs of his composing, which showed no contemptible power of poetic genius, although rude and careless of polish." He sank into habits of dissipation and over-conviviality, which impaired a reputation otherwise high in his neighbourhood, and became careless and hopeless of himself. What little he had to bequeath was left to a lady of his own name to whom he was attached, and who remained unmarried long after his death.

It is rather remarkable that Archibald Campbell Fraser, generally, from his command of the Inverness-shire militia, called Colonel Fraser, should survive his five sons, and that the estates which Lord Lovat had sacrificed so much to secure to his own line should revert to another family of the clan Fraser,—the Frasers of Stricken, the present proprietors of Lovat and Stricken, being in Aberdeenshire the twenty-second in succession from Simon Fraser of Inverness-shire."

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

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