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His Intrigues-Object of an Oath.

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ledged facts, and next according to the theory of probabilities. It is really very shocking to find such a man, taking the most solemn subjects in his mouth, and protesting, as he "believed in God and a future state," that he was innocent of the crimes he was at the very moment industriously hatching." Since the year 1719, I solemnly declare before God, and as I must answer to him at the great day of judgment, I did not write any one single letter beyond seas, or to any man in the Pretender's service or interest." At the time he wrote this, he was in correspondence with the Jacobite court for his patent of a dukedom.

His wavering inclinations took shape in 1737, when he was at the head of all the disaffected parties in the north. On his trial, he said justly, that "for many years I was the life and spirit of the king's (James) affairs in these countries." Inaccessible as were his dominions, news of his proceedings reached the Government, to whom it appeared necessary immediately to remove so dangerous a man from every thing like legal power. One by one, therefore, his offices of Lord-Lieutenant and Sheriff of Inverness, and his command of the independent company raised there, were taken from him. Of course innumerable letters, with outbursts of indignation descriptive of innocence wronged, trampled on, and abused, were written; all the figures of a copious rhetoric, employed during a whole life-time in deploring the success of slanderers, and the unhappy fate of the virtuous, were laid under contribution." I bless God," he concludes, "that whatever I suffer, or may suffer, no power can take away the comfort I have, of a clear conscience and an upright heart, that never betrayed a private man nor a public cause." In 1740, he had an interview with Lord Islay, when in the midst of the organization of the rebellion, and hourly expecting his patent. Accused of Jacobitism," I answered his lordship with a little warmth that these stories were calumnies and lies." To prove this, he entered into a confederacy with the patriot party, who opposed the Government, but equally hated the Jacobites. He immediately set to work to create votes in Inverness-shire, and found among his Jacobite friends some ridiculous scruples, on the ground of being obliged to take the oaths to Government, to obtain the qualification. "Write strongly," he said, "to Glengarry, to persuade him to take the oaths. I know he has no regard for them; so he should not stand to take a cart load of them, as I would do to serve my friends." This is the character of Simon Lord Lovat, summed up by himself, in brief terms.

With the exception of a single Fraser,-." a poor covetous narrow greedy wretch," who had "renounced his chief and kindred," and had "discovered himself to be an unnatural traitor, an infamous deserter, and an ungrateful wretch to me

his chief, who had done him such signal service," he appears to have been successful. The fate of this ungrateful slave is hinted at. "Duke Hamilton and several other lords asked me, in a joking way, whether that fellow that has deserted his chief and his clan, is still alive or not? I answered that he was, by my precise and express orders;' and I said but what was true." Lovat thus speaks in the year 1740.

Prince Charles landed; and then began the contest between present competence with safety, and future greatness with the risk of the loss of all. His patent of a Dukedom and his commission of Lieutenant-General of the Highlands had been received; but there stood in front of him the grim spectres he had seen swinging on the scaffolds of the '15, and he had known from experience the long train of confiscation that was sure to follow. Even in the tourbillon of his passions, he could estimate the character of parties. In youth he never was an enthusiast ; and in old age he was not likely to be led away. He saw, however, but little, presumed a great deal, and so jumped to his conclusion; hastening from the wish conceived to the end contemplated. After Lochiel had declared, and before he himself had taken active measures, he wrote that chieftain a characteristic letter, which much tickled Sir Walter Scott by its shrewd estimate of his countrymen-" My service to the Prince; but I wish he had not come here so empty handed-siller would go far in the Highlands." At the same time he sent off a letter, in the manly style, to the Lord-Advocate, requesting a supply of arms for his clan; for no ill-usage would "alter or diminish my zeal and attachment for his Majesty's person and government." He next commenced a correspondence with Duncan Forbes, then Lord President, in the same strain. He was unable to tell the issue of the conflict, and so kept see-sawing backwards and forwards, making the most solemn protestations of fidelity to both parties, until the battle of Prestonpans, which appeared so decisive that the fiery cross was sent over the whole Fraser country, and 700 men were enrolled for the rebels. That battle, indeed, was magnified throughout the north into the complete annihilation of the Government troops; and one can easily imagine the kind of frantic enthusiasm described in the following letter of Duncan Forbes, then engaged in suppressing the rebellion.

"3d October 1745.

"I have just received the twenty bolls of meal you sent me, for which I shall pay you on demand. The concern I am under, for the folly of some of my neighbours, is very great. The late unexpected successes their friends have met with, at Edinburgh and near it, has blown up their hopes to that degree, that they are apt to look upon the whole affair as over, and to rush upon a danger, which seems to them to be

Joins the Rebels-Skill in lying.

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none at all, but to me appears to be almost certain destruction. They will not believe the London Gazette, which name the Swiss and Dutch regiments that have actually come into the river Thames. They look upon what it says of the embarkation of 10 British batallions at Williamstadt as a fiction; nor will they believe one word of the preparations in the north of England to resist them. Full of their vain hopes, they are flocking together with intention to go southward and share in the expected glory and spoil. But I have still some faint hopes that they will recover their senses ere it is too late; and I shall leave nothing undone, that is in my power, to prevent their folly and stop the contagion."-From MSS.

Cautious to the last, Lovat would not appear openly, and thus trusted that in case of a reverse, he would escape the meshes of the law. On the score of ill health he wrote the Prince, that his son, a young lad of 19, would lead the clan, and at the same time despatched a letter to the Lord President, to the effect that "there was nothing ever out of hell more false," than that he had anything to do with it. On the contrary, the clan were mad, and his son was mad, and he, an old man, was unable to keep them from rushing into "the villanous, malicious, and ridiculous rebellion." The correspondence has all the effect of farce. We have, turn about, a letter to Murray of Broughton, the Jacobite secretary, and to Duncan Forbes as the organ of the Government. The encouraging, bombastic, selfglorifying styles come out strongly in the Jacobite letters; the pathetic, indignant, resigned, injured, meekly forgiving styles are the characteristics of those to the President. Had Swift seen his correspondence, he would never have written as he did: "As universal a practice as lying is, and as easy a one as it seems, I do not remember to have heard three good lies in all my conversation, even from those who were most celebrated in that faculty."

Forbes entreated, expostulated, reasoned, until even his patience failed him. The Frasers marched-all too late for any good and then Forbes wrote the well known letter, first given in the Culloden Papers, which for solemnity of warning and earnest reproof, is only exceeded by its thorough appreciation of his correspondent's character; and in which the whole devices of Lovat are as plainly exposed as if he had done it himself.

"I can no longer remain a spectator of your Lordship's conduct, and see the double game you have played for some time past, without betraying the trust reposed in me, and at once risking my reputation and the fidelity I owe to his Majesty as a good subject. Your Lordship's actions now discover evidently your inclinations, and leave us no farther in the dark about what side you are to choose in the present unhappy insurrection. You have now so far pulled off the mask, that we can see the mark you aim at, though on former occasions you have

had the skill and address to disguise your intentions in matters of far less importance; and indeed, methinks, a little more of your Lordship's wonted artifice would not have been amiss. Whatever had been your private sentiments with respect to this unnatural rebellion, you should, my Lord, have duly considered and estimated the advantages that would arise to your Lordship from its success, and balance them with the risks you run if it should happen to miscarry; and above all things, you ought to have consulted your own safety, and allowed that the chief place in your system of politics, which I persuade myself would have induced your Lordship to have played the game after quite a different manner, and with a much greater degree of caution and policy. But so far has your Lordship been from acting with your ordinary finesse and circumspection on this occasion, that you sent away your son, and the best part of your clan, to join the Pretender, with as little concern as if no danger had attended such a step. I say, sent them away; for we are not to imagine that they went of themselves, or would have ventured to take arms without your Lordship's concurrence and approbation. This, however, you are pretty sure can't be easily proved, which I believe, indeed, may be true; but I cannot think it will be a difficult matter to make it appear that the whole strain of your Lordship's conversation in every company where you have appeared since the Pretender's arrival, has tended to pervert the minds of His Majesty's subjects, and seduce them from their allegiance."

This was the harbour of refuge into which Lovat thought he could in the day of danger take shelter. By writing strongly to the Government officials in favour of the Government, and conjuring his Jacobite friends to destroy all his letters, he had hoped that however the moral evidence might preponderate, there would not be legal evidence to procure a conviction. How he must have been startled, then, to find from the President that enough was already known to seal his doom!

"Give me leave," continues the President, "to tell you, my Lord, even this falls under the construction of treason, and is no less liable to punishment than open rebellion, as I am afraid your Lordship will find when once this rebellion is crushed, and the Government at leisure to examine into the affair. 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 just now 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. What shall I say in favour of you, my Lord?-you, who have flourished under the present happy establishment?-you, who in the beginning of your days forfeited both your life and fortune, and yet by the benignity of the Government were not only indulged the liberty of living at home, but even restored to all you could lay claim to; so that both duty and gratitude ought to have influenced your Lordship's conduct at this critical juncture, and dis

His Capture and Trial.

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posed you to have acted a part quite different from what you have done; but there are some men whom no duty can bind, nor no favour can oblige."

This letter produced only an answer in the superlative style of injured innocence. "I see by it (the letter) that for my misfortune in having an obstinate stubborn son, and an 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 has had an undutiful and unnatural son?"

The retreat from Derby told the downfall of his hopes. The ragged and miserable Highlanders, after their temporary triumph at Stirling, received their last defeat on the barren moor of Culloden. On that day, Lovat saw Charles for the first and last time; and, amid the panic of disaster, he alone retained the energy of manhood. Each of the unhappy fugitives looked only for a refuge from the pursuing royalists. All community of action or of counsel vanished. In vain Lovat (after the first agony of defeat had passed away) reminded the Chevalier that Bruce had lost eleven battles, and established his country's independence by the twelfth. In vain he proposed to raise a force of 3000 men, to defend the mountain passes, and compel at least an honourable capitulation. The spirit was dead within them; and unrestricted scope was given to the remorseless barbarity that pursued the wrecks of the rebel army.

The fate of Lovat did not remain long undetermined. Upwards of 80 years of age, corpulent and weakened by disease, which rendered him unable to walk, he had not the least chance of escape. He wandered through the barren regions that skirt Inverness and Argyle, tended by his gillies; and was at last apprehended in a hollow tree swathed in flannel. He was conveyed in a litter by easy stages to London, growing most boisterous in his buffoonery, as he saw his destiny fixed; and when placed at the bar of the House of Lords, to be "worried," as Horace Walpole called it, by the ablest lawyers of England, the old battered intriguer often put them off with a laugh, or a happy repartee, or by the exercise of a native humour that never failed him. Murray of Broughton, the king's evidence, who propter vitam vivendi perdidit causas, he rebuked in the best moral style of his most eloquent letters; and some compassion was excited by this pitiable appeal against the then barbarous mode of trial for treason in the south-"My Lords, I have not had the use of my limbs these three years; I cannot see, I cannot hear; and I beg, if your Lordships have a mind I should have any chance of my life, that you will allow either my counsel or my solicitor to examine my witnesses, and to cross-examine those

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