LORD LOVAT AND DUNCAN FORBES. the rebel army and the source of its supplies. It The first fruit of gratitude, was his unqualified 66 66 To secure the grant of the Lovat estates, the legal knowledge of Forbes was put under requisition. "I want a gift of the escheat (forfeited property) to make me easy; but if it does not do, you must find me some pretence or other, that will give me a title to keep possession." He also implored Forbes to prevent the pardon of his neighbors Glengarry and The Chisholm, and to divert some of their forfeitures his way. estates, In the midst of the war of litigation, which he "I had," said Lovat, "the honor of your fine his affairs, than an indolent, lazy man of the bright- The dispute relative to the estate, was referred to Litigation operated as a sedative on the corrosions of unabsorbed energy, under which he chafed. But having brought his lawsuits to a triumphant close, he began, as was the manner of Highland lairds, to "birse yont ;" and thus by gradual squatting on the grounds of a neighbor, contrived, by the aid of a little confusion as to the principle of If the neighbor property, to appropriate now and then a field, or perhaps a mountain, or a loch. grew troublesome and grumbled at these inroads, he generally received a visit from Lovat's gillies, who were reasonable, if they did no more than hough his cattle, or fire his house about his ears. He never in this way owed any man ill-will; he always made present payment. Lovat's history is the best illustration of the blessings resulting from the annihilation of the heThe petty chiefs in their reditary jurisdictions. own straths, exercised a despotism, which though it had its origin in custom, was not less absolute than that of the sultan over a nation of Turks. In the middle of last century, these personages hanged their vassals according to their pleasure; and when we remember, that, over all the north, these nuclei of mischief existed-that every chief had a quarrel with his neighbor, in which his vassals were always involved, and that the sole education these miserable wretches received, was that of robbery or murder, as exemplified in the conduct of Lovat towards them, it may truly be said, that no single act did more to change the face of Scotland, than the destruction of the source from which these evils flowed. The law administered by a bad government is often hard to bear; but the lion is not such an object of dismay, as the swarms of little loathThe connexion some animals that arise from his dead carcass, each crawling in a way of its own. between chief and vassal had begun to decline when Lovat was settled in his domains; and he set to work, with all his energy, to create a resurrection of the departed spirit. He discouraged schools, hunted out disaffection, and plied the people with When he every flattery that would rouse military ardor, or devotion to himself. He knew almost every man in the Highlands, of the slightest note. met one having pretensions to be a Duinheuassail, he bombastically praised the clan whose name he bore, and instanced its acts of bravery in former days. Prophecies and dreams, and the language of holy writ, he was ever ready with, as occasion served; and, when with supernatural agency, he had worked his hearers up to the requisite enthusiasm, he would leave them with a dexterous insinuation as to the downfall of their greatness, unless they rallied round their chief. If he would meet with one, whose circumstances were lower by a resided for some months. Lovat's house, considfifth or a tenth part, he would ask his name, and ered according to modern ideas, was comfortless his father's, of whom in his latter days he pretended enough. He received his company and kept pubignorance; but generally said: "I believe I knew lic table, after the manner of a petty court, in the your grandfather very well, and a worthy man he room where he slept; and the only place his lady was; well did it set him to wear a belted plaid, and had was also her bed-room. The servants and rea broadsword; there are but few like him now-a-tainers had nothing but straw, spread on the four days; you resemble him very much, but not quite lower apartments in the house. About four hunso brawny." A sentence or two would then be dred persons would often thus be kennelled together; given, as to the old gentleman's intrepidity on the and Ferguson declares, that of these wretched defields of Cromdale and Killicrankie, or he would pendents, he has seen three or four, and sometimes trace him up to the days of Montrose-fighting half a dozen, hung up by the heels, for hours, on against the covenanters. The smaller gillies had the trees around the mansion, to expiate offences. also their genealogy traced backwards for generations; and an undying devotion kindled in their hearts, by proof tendered by him of their relationship to himself. He could do with them what he pleased. He led them in favor of the government, in the first rebellion, after recalling them from the service of Mar; he led them against the government in the '45, and at one blow struck down the fruit of all his policy. He sometimes issued pious proclamations, in which, with some end to serve, he would ascend through the whole gamut of virtuous emotion-from Christian forgiveness to seraphic love. To heighten the effect, he would tell them he was on his deathbed, as in the following instance, wherein he whips them up to the requisite enthusiasm :— The tables ran along the length of the room, and were carried out at the door to the lawn in front of the house. Near the chief were set the distinguished guests or neighboring chief, entertained with claret and French cookery; next in progression were the Duinheuassails of the clan, who had beef and mutton and a glass of port; the "pretty handsome fellows" came next, and were honored with sheep's-head and whiskey; and, lastly, the mass of the useless, old, and maimed, waited on the lawn for such relics as their betters left. Under this system everything was eaten. But the best part of it all was the discriminating courtesy with which Lovat noticed his respective guests. "My lord, here is excellent venison-here turbot. Call for any wine you please; there is excellent claret and champagne on the side-board." To the next class it would be-" Pray now, Dunballoch, or Kinbockie, help yourselves to what is before you; there are port and Lisbon, ale and porter excellent." Then raising his voice for the rabble-" Pray, redhaired Donald," or by whatever other name the gillie would be known, "Pray, help yourself and my other cousins to that fine beef and cabbage; there are whiskey-punch and beer for you." But life at Castle Dounie began to get dull. A pension from government and the estates secured, were not enough. His inroads upon his neighbors, too, were not always attended with the desired success, and he bitterly complains of Glengarry, who would "as soon part with his liver or his lungs" as with one acre of his lands. Ease and plenty just gave him a lever for a renewed war with existing things. All the loyalty and obedience called forth, like beautiful frost-work, in the season of his exile, dissolved under the warm sun of prosperity. Tolle periculum MY DEAR FRIENDS,-Since, by all appearances, this is the last time [he had a great number of last times] of my life I shall have occasion to write to you, I being now very ill of a dangerous fever, I do declare to you before God, before whom I must appear, and all of us at the great day of judgment, that I loved you all; I mean you and all the rest of my kindred and family, who are for the standing of their chief and name; and as I loved you, so I loved all my faithful commons in general, more than I did my own life, or health, or comfort, or satisfaction. I did design to make my poor commons live at their ease, and have them always well clothed, and well armed after the Highland manner, and not to suffer them to wear low country clothes, but make them live like their forefathers, with the use of their arms, that they might always be in a condition to defend themselves against their enemies, and to do service to their friends, especially to the great Duke of Argyle, and his worthy brother the Earl of Islay. And you may depend upon it, and you and your posterity will see it and find it, that if you do not keep steadfast to your chief, I Jam vaga prosiliet frenis natura remotis. mean the heir-male of my family, but weakly and From the year 1719 down to the '45, he was confalsely, for little private interest and views, abandon tinually engaged in fomenting rebellion; on the your duty to your name, and suffer a pretended point of being often exposed, and obliged as freheiress and her Mackenzie children, to possess your quently to take all kinds of oaths, and make all country, and the true right of the heirs-male, they sorts of declarations in favor of government, always will certainly, in less than an age, chase you all by coming to his determinations according to the law slight and might, as well gentlemen as commons, of the strongest, which was his gospel, and settling out of your native country, which will be possessed by the Mackenzies and the Macdonalds; and you will be like the miserable, unnatural Jews, scattered and vagabonds throughout the unhappy kingdom of Scotland; and the poor wives and children that remain of the name, without a head or protection, when they are told the traditions of their family, will be cursing from their hearts the persons and memory of those unnatural, cowardly, knavish men, who sold and abandoned their chief, their name, their birthright and their country." King, in his Monumenta Antiqua, has given us the experiences of James Ferguson the astronomer, as to the nature of life at Castle Dounie, where he his cases of conscience according to his interest. In the year 1719, he wrote Lord Seaforth_that he would be ready to join the ill-concerted Jacobite scheme of Spanish invasion then concocted. His letter was communicated at London; and he posted south to meet his vile calumniators by denouncing them; applying the maxim to the defence of character-that it is the best security of one's own country to carry the war into the enemy's. His accustomed success attended him; the newspapers of the day announcing that "His majesty had done the Lord Lovat the honor to be godfather to his child." Ten years later, in 1729, he was on the point of being again found out, through “the barbarous villany," as he terms it, of one of his own clan; but being more secure this time in the matter of evidence, he could assume, with considerable firmness, the tone of injured innocence. "I bless God," this good man meekly said, "I never was, in my life, guilty of a base or villanous action; so I do not fear this wicked calumny." In an elab- lieutenant-general of the Highlands had been reorate memorial, which he afterwards sent to Lord Islay, he argues the matter from the acknowledged 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. 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 ceived; 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. 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 everything 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 organiza- you sent me, for which I shall pay you on demand. "I have just received the twenty bolls of meal tion of the rebellion, and hourly expecting his patent. The concern I am under, for the folly of some of Accused of Jacobitism, "I answered his lordship my neighbors, is very great. The late unexpected with a little warmth that these stories were calum-successes their friends have met with, at Edinburgh nies and lies." To prove this, he entered into a and near it, has blown up their hopes to that degree, confederacy with the patriot party, who opposed the that they are apt to look upon the whole affair as over, government, but equally hated the Jacobites. He and to rush upon a danger, which seems to them to immediately set to work to create votes in Inverness- be none at all, but to me appears to be almost cershire, and found among his Jacobite friends some tain destruction. They will not believe the London ridiculous scruples, on the ground of being obliged Gazette, which name the Swiss and Dutch regito take the oaths to government, to obtain the qual-ments that have actually come into the river Thames. ification. "Write strongly," he said, "to Glen- They look upon what it says of the embarkation of garry, to persuade him to take the oaths. I know 10 British battalions at Williamstadt as a fiction; he has no regard for them; so he should not stand to take a cart load of them, as I would do to serve in the north of England to resist them. Full of nor will they believe one word of the preparations my friends." This is the character of Simon Lord their vain hopes, they are flocking together with Lovat, summed up by himself, in brief terms. intention to go southward and share in the expected With the exception of a single Fraser- a poor, glory and spoil. But I have still some faint hopes covetous, narrow, greedy wretch," who had re- that they will recover their senses ere it is too late; nounced his chief and kindred," and had "discov- and I shall leave nothing undone, that is in my ered himself to be an unnatural traitor, an infamous deserter, and an ungrateful wretch to me, his chief, Power, to prevent their folly and stop the contawho had done him such signal service," he appears gion."-From MSS. to have been successful. The fate of this ungrate- Cautious to the last, Lovat would not appear ful slave is hinted at. "Duke Hamilton and sev- openly, and thus trusted that in case of a reverse, eral other lords asked me, in a joking way, whether he would escape the meshes of the law. On the that fellow that has deserted his chief and his clan, score of ill health he wrote the prince, that his son, is still alive or not? I answered that he was, by a young lad of 19, would lead the clan, and at the same time despatched a letter to the lord presi- This was the harbor of refuge into which Lovat dent, to the effect that "there was nothing even out thought he could in the day of danger take shelter. of hell more false," than that he had anything to By writing strongly to the government officials in do with it. On the contrary, the clan were mad, favor of the government, and conjuring his Jacobite and his son was mad, and he, an old man, was un-friends to destroy all his letters, he had hoped that able to keep them from rushing into "the villanous, however the moral evidence might preponderate, malicious, and ridiculous rebellion." The corre- there would not be legal evidence to procure a conspondence has all the effect of farce. We have, viction. How he must have been startled, then, to turn about, a letter to Murray of Broughton, the find from the president that enough was already Jacobite secretary, and to Duncan Forbes as the known to seal his doom! organ of the government. The encouraging, bombastic, self-glorifying 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." "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 Forbes entreated, expostulated, reasoned, until defence of your lordship's. What shall I say in even his patience failed him. The Frasers marched favor of you, my lord?-you, who have flourished -all too late for any good-and then Forbes wrote under the present happy establishment?-you, who the well known letter, first given in the Culloden in the beginning of your days forfeited both your Papers, which, for solemnity of warning and earnest life and fortune, and yet by the benignity of the reproof, is only exceeded by its thorough apprecia- government were not only indulged the liberty of tion of his correspondent's character; and in which living at home, but even restored to all you could the whole devices of Lovat are as plainly exposed lay claim to; so that both duty and gratitude ought as if he had done it himself. to have influenced your lordship's conduct at this This letter produced only an answer in the superlative style of injured innocence. "I see by it (the latter) 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?" I can no longer remain a spectator of your lord-critical juncture, and disposed you to have acted a ship's conduct, and see the double game you have part quite different from what you have done; but played for some time past, without betraying the there are some men whom no duty can bind, nor no trust reposed in me, and at once risking my repu- favor can oblige." tation 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 further 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 The fate of Lovat did not remain long undeterwould have ventured to take arms without your mined. Upwards of 80 years of age, corpulent and lordship's concurrence and approbation. This, how-weakened by disease, which rendered him unable ever, you are pretty sure can't be easily proved, to walk, he had not the least chance of escape. He which I believe, indeed, may be true; but I cannot wandered through the barren regions that skirt Inthink it will be a difficult matter to make it appear verness and Argyle, tended by his gillies; and was that the whole strain of your lordship's conversation at last apprehended in a hollow tree swathed in 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." 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 honorable capitulation. The spirit was dead within them; and unrestricted scope was given to the remorseless barbarity that pursued the wrecks of the rebel army. 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 humor 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 produced on behalf of the crown, and to take He was unanimously found guilty, and left the bar, bidding their lordships an everlasting farewell. About a fortnight afterwards he was led out to execution. Without affectation of indifference, or levity unbecoming the solemnity of death, he went through the last scene with a Roman fortitude and with a Horatian sentiment in his mouth. And thus died the most powerful of the Highland chieftains a man who, with the name of virtue continually on his lips, cared not a rush for all the virtue in the world, though he would have given much to have been able to secure a good character. notes." of high Presbyterian principles, and partook largely of the persecutions to which that national party had been exposed. After the revolution, the estates of Forbes' father were ravaged by the troops of Cannon and Buchan, as a punishment for his adherence to the usurper. For this he received, as compensation, the right to make whiskey at a small duty, on his barony of Ferintosh, unhampered by the excise restrictions as to the nature of the still. Being thus allowed to use the small stills, which give a more highly flavored material, the name of Ferintosh became famous, and its proprietor was in the fair way to fortune. Forbes' parents were everything that was amiable and excellent. Their children were children of many a prayer; and his mother especially, even when he had arrived at manhood, preserved the same tender watchfulness over his happiness. His only other near relation was a brother, with whom he lived in terms of the most endearing affection; and indeed it seems to have been impossible for any one to come within the sphere of Forbes' influence, without being hurried into liking him. At the age of 19 he was sent to Edinburgh to college, and thereafter he went to Leyden, as was the manner of the Scottish lawyers of his day. He only remained a year abroad, returning in 1707 to commence life by marrying Mary Rose, a daughter of Hugh Rose of Kilravok, who only survived a short period, leaving her husband an only son, by whom he was succeeded in his estates. He passed to the Scottish bar in 1708, and soon rose to high distinction as a judicious and eloquent pleader. In that day the patronage of lawyers was, in like manner as of literary men, not the patronage of the public, but of some great man; and Forbes was lucky in securing that of the great Argyle. From the correspondence preserved, this appears to have taken more of friendship than of the connexion of patron and vassal, though Forbes managed all the duke's estates, for which however he would never accept payment. We have now to deal with a man the opposite of Lovat in all but intellectual capacity; in reading whose history we become prouder of our country, becouse it was his. A portrait of Duncan Forbes, with all his fund of overflowing affection, sketched in the way Dickens has drawn fictitious characters, would be a delightful study. Much of him is now lost-it being only from a few letters that we can obtain a faint insight into the character of one, who stood in the foremost rank, if his great abilities be regarded in combination with their useful application, and if his claim on the approbation of the world be united with that on its gratitude. Without the high talents that dazzle and astonish, he had the enduring and sterling virtues which have made immortal Rome's proudest names-her sublimest natures. His country he roused from inac-tary operations equally as in his more comprehention to industry-saved her by his energy and his courage, improved her by his labors, adorned her by his virtues, and ennobled her by his talents and his fame. He was actively engaged in the suppression of the rebellion of the '15, and materially assisted Lovat in the reduction of Inverness. In his mili sive civil designs, he displayed a judgment that we look for in vain amid the professed military commanders of his day. He seldom undertook any design which he did not accomplish-and when the One hundred and twenty pages are devoted to rage of strife had passed, he was the first to symthis man's life. The space was scarcely sufficient pathize with the unhappy vanquished, and his purse to give half the interesting relics of him that remain, was ever ready to relieve them. How noble a and the finer impulses of so good a heart are lost trait is this, in civil war, when men forget that forever, since all his writings refer to the public they are brethren! The strife in such a case is not matters in which, against his own happiness, he ended with a triumph and a treaty. The desolawas so largely mingled. Like the brilliant spots tion which follows the victory, exceeds in intensity on the highest mountains, when the sun has with- all the horrors of ordinary warfare, in which a prudrawn his beams from the rest of the hills and val- dent regard for the morrow restrains the hands of leys, we may still perhaps discover, amid the ob- the victors of to-day. The ferocity of opposition scure mass of papers on public affairs, a bit here being stimulated by the necessity for after security, and a bit there, illustrative of the delicacy and the subjugation is not complete unless there is an loftiness of principle, the gentleness of heart, of one extinction of the last gleam of hope; and while a who, though involved in the strife of insurrection foreign country recovers from its disasters, on the and civil war, has been consigned to an envied im- retreat of an invading army, the effects of civil mortality, in the praises of the men whom his cour-war are felt in the long misery of years-the forage subdued. Duncan Forbes was the second son of a country gentleman, the proprietor of the estate of Culloden in Inverness-shire. He was born in 1685-of a family which had, by the economy of successive heirs, risen to considerable opulence. They were feitures of possessions-the trials and the brutalities of executions. It was difficult for any mind, however well balanced, to preserve its tone of justice, under the party fury of the civil wars of the last century; and it certainly is one of the rarest things, to find not only justice, but sympathy and |