Crisis in Scottish History from 1700 to 1705.

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his country. He sought a refuge from the pursuit in France, leaving his brother John to act as lieutenant in his absence, to exact rents, levy contributions, and keep the whole district of the Aird and Stratherick in commotion. To meet this, the Privy Council, at the instance of the heiress, issued an abundance of orders and proclamations; and, as was their custom with disobedient districts, they hounded out upon the Frasers somet neighbouring clans to ravage and desolate.

At this period, Lovat was uncertain whether or not the Stuarts would be restored; and upon this depended the course to be adopted, amid the difficulties by which he was surrounded. Upon the whole, it seemed more probable that they would. Shortly after the commencement of the reign of Anne, her opinions began to glide into the jure-divinity toryism at which they settled. She had no violent antipathies against her brother; and if she had no violent affection to gratify by his restoration, there was at least a greater probability that she would lean to this, than call an obscure German Elector to the throne held for generations by her family. Minds as astute as Lovat's, and nearer the scene, were deceived by such appearances even at a later date, when the quarrel with Marlborough and his Duchess sealed the doom of the Whigs. In the meantime, Lovat, who cared nothing for the person who filled the throne, provided his own interests were not affected, did no disgrace to his sagacity in adhering at that time to the Stuarts.

Prior to the Union indeed, there were circumstances that might have been worked up into a national cause, under which they might have been restored. From the accession of Anne down to the incorporation of the parliaments, causes of dispute between the two countries, productive of exasperation, jealousy and distrust, were hourly occurring. There was first the celebrated Darien scheme, annihilated by William to conciliate the English East India Company; but whose train of disasters were not terminated in the reign of Anne. The massacre of Glencoe, left behind it a deep feeling of insult and of wrong. Then followed the seizure of the English ship Worcester, and the execution (insisted for by the Edinburgh rabble) of Captain Green, and two of his crew--a judicial murder, perpetrated against evidence, against the convictions of the judges, and against the will of Government. Of all the men of note in this matter, the only person who appears to have had moral courage to resist the popular fury was Duncan Forbes, then a young student at college, who, in the debate on the Porteous riots in the House of Commons, referred with honest pride to an incident of his early life, when he had the courage, in the midst of a universal fury, to expose the pusillanimity of the Privy Council, who signed the order for the execu

tion. "I was," said the orator, "so struck with the horror of the fact, that I put myself in deep mourning, and with the danger of my life, attended the innocent but unfortunate men to the scaffold, where they died with the most affecting protestations of their innocence. I did not stop here, for I carried the head of Captain Green to the grave; and in a few months after, letters came from the captain for whose murder, and from the very ship for whose capture, the unfortunate men suffered, informing their friends that they were all safe." This execution was resented in England as a national insult, and produced a bitterness scarcely credible at the present day. Then came the vexed subject of the succession to the crown-the fruitful source of national jealousy, followed as it nearly was by actual hostilities. At last the noted Act of Security of the Scottish Parliament was passed. It was magnified in England into a declaration of absolute independence, and was followed up by an act of the English Parliament, professing to remedy its alleged mischiefs. This last act was effectually a declaration of open war by England against Scotland, unless in a few months the crown should be settled on the German Elector.

Matters had, by these means, come to a crisis at the end of the year 1705. The people in both nations had revived the national hatreds which had slept for many years. Nay, even the very governments of the same Sovereign seemed determined to run counter to one another in all their councils; and every Parliament wished only to outstrip its predecessor, in heaping insult upon the other country, and placing obstructions on its commerce. England laid a new impost upon Scottish cloth; Scotland prohibited all the English woollen manufacture in general, and exported all her own wool to the continent; the sister country thereupon proceeded to prohibit the importation of Scottish cattle, and to interrupt by force our long-established trade with France.

It was unfortunate for the Stuarts, that amid all these conflicting elements of disunion, they had no able head to plan a national conspiracy. There were, indeed, many plots at this period, hatched on their behalf, but they all came to nothing, through the treachery or imprudence of their agents. We shall immediately see the part adopted by Lovat, in regard to one of the most feasible of these, which he himself concocted and destroyed.

On his arrival in France, he proceeded to the country-house where embryo statesmen resolved and re-resolved upon the affairs of Europe. James the II. had carried his single-minded bigotry to the grave, and Mary of Modena became openly, what she had in reality ever been, the source and lifespring of Jacobitical intrigue. To her, Lovat applied himself with his accustomed

Interview with Louis XIV-Queensberry Plot.

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dexterity and Highland shrewdness. He appeared before her with protestations of inviolable attachment; and, what was more to the purpose, he made assurances as to the fidelity of the clans. He never, indeed, neglected the great principle of accommodation to his company, inter lupos ululandum. A short time, however, had elapsed, when he saw through the whole farce of the do-nothing secretaries, and endeavoured to free himself from the idle kind of life to which he was doomed. It was here he devised the only scheme that was ever practical for the restoration of the Stuarts. England being furiously Protestant, and Lowland Scotland sternly Presbyterian, it was hopeless to look there for a successful rising. Through the Highlands alone-the stronghold of the Stuart family-could an impression be made; and, accordingly, Lovat fixed upon the weak point with a sagacity. that experience justified. To give his scheme feasibility, he drew of course largely upon his imagination, in stating himself to be the authorised agent of the clans.

The last days of the glory of old Louis le Grand were approaching; but the prestige of the name that had long awed Europe still survived. The victories of Marlborough at this period of 1702, when Lovat landed in France, had not yet convinced the world that he was no longer the invincible; and Mr. Burton somewhat anticipates the desolation which overtook the French monarchy. With the old monarch, Lovat obtained an interview, and impressed him-a shrewd judge of character— with a high notion of his abilities. He retired from the presence of the king, to consult with his ministers; and while his proposals were cautiously received, he had the satisfaction of being sent back to his own country for farther information, and with an assurance of assistance on any favourable conjuncture. On his arrival in Scotland, he had some interviews with the Highland chiefs, when a new light as to his own interest dawned uponhim. He immediately wiped his hands of his mission, and one night entered the presence of the Duke of Queensberry, the commissioner to the Scottish Parliament, with the startling intelligence of the organization of a rebellion. The Duke, overjoyed at being the instrument through whom such important information was procured, " entertained Lovat with some money," and many promises. The Government, on being informed of the matter, became alarmed, as the account implicated men who had much to lose, and who would, therefore, not rush blindly into rebellion. A message was conveyed to Parliament, and strong resolutions were passed. The Marquis of Athole, one of the parties falsely implicated by Lovat, having got intelligence of the trap laid for him, immediately addressed the Queen, in a memorial, which exposed the character of his assailant, and the

means by which Queensberry had been duped, in crediting all his informant's calumnies. The affair vanished in smoke. No evidence could be found against any of the Jacobites; and the Queensberry plot added another to the hundred-and-one plots of the day, leaving Lovat in the disagreeable position of having fallen between two stools.

Being under sentence of outlawry still, Athole opened the bull-dogs of the law once more upon him in full cry, and once more he was obliged to retire to the continent. Rotterdam was the place he selected as a kind of neutral position, from which he could soothe the roused spirits of the Scottish Jacobites and the Court of St. Germains on the one hand, and also induce the English Government, on the other, to retain him in their pay. With all his invincible humour of lying, it was difficult for him, in telling this portion of his history, to prevent some inkling of the truth. The Jacobites discovered some of his letters; and as there was no destroying the relation of identity between twice two and four, it was impossible to avoid the awkward conclusion to which his Jacobite friends found themselves obliged to come. To some he put his defence for betraying them, upon the ground of anxiety to serve their interest; and nothing can be better than the mode in which the parodox is supported. With regard to others again, who had not so clear evidence against him, he took the easier course of indignant denial :

"I believe," he writes from Liege to a Scotch Jacobite, "all the devils are got loose to torment me—with you I am abused, ruined, and my reputation torn. Here I suffer by those whom I served, and am treated like a traitor and a villain, and if I had not had good friends here of strangers, I had perished like a dog. I do not yet know what my fate will be; but I have dear bought my conversation with those you call real friends. You tell me that K (Keith?) betrayed me to A (Athole), and now we hear of his sufferings for me; but none in England could wrong me (anglice expose him) but he or you, and if either of you has wronged me, I cannot trust myself, or any flesh and blood; my comfort is, that I neither betrayed my trust or my friends, nor would not for the universe (!!!). For my part I believe the day of judgment is at hand, for I see a great many of the symptoms of it.".

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After waiting at Rotterdam for some time, he found it expedient to quit it in the disguise of a Dutch officer; and having fled to France, he was very disagreeably astonished, by being immediately seized, and encaged in the Bastile, or in the Castle of Angoulème.

We have followed the history of this strange being, whose moral nature was as rotten as his intellect was acute, aided by the certain light of contemporary documents. He now, however, glides off the public stage, beyond the view of the letter

Becomes a Priest-Escape from France.

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writers, and the reach of the legal warrants, which have enabled us hitherto to follow him. For ten years he lived in France, and during part of that time, there can be no doubt he was in prison. He appears, however, to have been liberated, and to have taken holy orders, joined the Jesuits at St. Omer, and, ac-. cording to some accounts, to have officiated as curé at that city.

During his protracted absence, the heiress of Lovat had married a gentleman of the name of M'Kenzie, who had got hold of the estates, but not of the affections of the clan. They ever regarded Lovat as their chief; and deep was their sorrow, when a report was spread, that "he had rotted in the Bastile." No communication appears to have been allowed between him and his vassals in Scotland; and, as a last resource, they determined to send a special embassy to discover, and if possible relieve him. The person selected was a Major Fraser, who has given an amusing account of the disastrous chances he suffered in his journey. Having discovered his chief among the Jesuits at St. Omer, it was found impossible to obtain the consent of the French authorities to his liberation. The two accordingly concerted an escape, which they effected by means of an open boat, which landed them on the English shore in the year 1714, at the critical moment of the death of Queen Anne. His arrival in London being soon known, his old enemy Athole once more set the officers of the law upon his track, and he only found rest to his weary footsteps, when he arrived among the wide solitudes of his

own mountains.

The rebellion of the '15 was raging on his arrival in the North. The indecisive battle of Sheriffmuir proclaimed the weakness of Government, and the danger of energetic action on the part of the Jacobites. It was fortunate, therefore, that so influential and clever a man as Lovat, in the vigour of manhood, and with his abilities sharpened by experience, sided with the Government, and recalled the whole clan of the Frasers who had gone to join the rebels. As soon as they returned, he put himself at their head, and along with Duncan Forbes, reduced the town of Inverness, on the day that the battle of Sheriffimuir was fought. This quieted the North. It prevented many from engaging in the rebellion, and cut off the communication between the rebel army and the source of its supplies. It had the effect, indeed, of extinguishing the rebellion throughout the country; and on its importance Lovat did not fail duly to descant. "This," he

said, "was the greatest service that was done in this country to any king."

The first fruit of gratitude, was his unqualified pardon, and the gift of the forfeited estates of M'Kenzie, the heiress' husband, who had joined the rebels. He thus obtained a legal title to the

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