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 farmers 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 were 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.[223]
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 Knoebsford 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 Sir Walter
Scott observes, "is less wonderful when we consider that Duncan Forbes
could endure the society of the infamous Charteris."[224] Lovat's
expressions of regard were frequently written in French. "Mon 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 my Generall 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
affectionat 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.[225]
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 chuse. 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."[226]
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 "bearns" are "Colodin's faithful slaves--" "I'll
never see a laird of Culodin 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."[227]
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.[228]
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 _Dnihne_
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 those
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."[229] Yet, even
then he was engaged in a plot to restore the Stuarts. In 1736, when he
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 was personal aggrandizement; revenge was his
amusement.
Henderson, in his "History of the Rebellion," attributes to Lord Lovat
the entire suggestion of the invasion of 1745. It is true that the
Chevalier refused to accede to the proposal made by Roy Stuart of an
invasion in 1735, not considering, as he said, that the "time for his
deliverance was as yet come." But, after consulting the Pope, it was
agreed that the present time might be well employed in "whetting the
minds of the Highlanders, and in sowing in them the seeds of loyalty
that so frequently appeared." In consequence of this, Lord Lovat's
request was granted; a letter was written to him from the Court, then at
Albano, giving him full power to act in the name of James, and the title
of Duke of Fraser and Lieutenant-General of the Highlands was conferred
upon the man who seems to have had the art of infatuating all with whom
he dealt.[230]
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. He 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 Killicrankie and Cromdale.
"Such a sword and target," he would say to a listener, "your honest
grandfather wore that day, and with it he 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."[231]
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,[232] "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."[233]
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 had
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, he 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."[234] On the twenty-fifth of July,[235] 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
service 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 service. 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 I 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.