There will be blows and blood good store.
‘When,’ said the witness, ‘I refused a commission offered me by the Pretender, Lord Lovat told me I was guilty of High Treason.’ Further, Lovat had drunk ‘Confusion to the White Horse and the whole generation of them;’ and had cursed both the Reformation and the Revolution. Lovat retorted by showing that this not disinterested witness was a loyal man living at the expense of Government. ‘He is trying to hang an old man to save himself,’ said Lovat. This was warmly denied, but Lovat was right in the implication.
FATHER AND SON.
Lovat’s secretary, Fraser, was a dangerous witness. He proved that, by Lord Lovat’s order, he, the secretary, wrote to Lord Loudon (in the service of George II.) informing him that he was unable to keep his son out of the rebellion, and another letter to the Pretender that, though unable to go himself to help to restore the Stuarts, he had sent his eldest son to their standard. It was shown that the son was disgusted at his father’s double-dealing, and only yielded to him at last (in joining the army of Charles Edward), on the ground that he was bound to obey his sire and the chief of the clan Fraser. Undoubtedly, the attempt to save himself by the sacrificing of his son, was the blackest spot in Lovat’s mean, black, and cruel character. According to Walpole, ‘he told’ Williamson, the Lieutenant of the Tower, ‘We will hang my eldest son and then my second shall marry your niece!’
THE FRASERS.
Fraser after Fraser gave adverse evidence. Lovat maintained that they were compelled to speak against him. One of them confessed, with much simplicity, that he lived and boarded at a messenger’s house; but that he had no orders to say what he had said. ‘I am free: I walk in the Park or about Kensington; I go at night to take a glass,’—but he allowed that the messenger went with him. One or two witnesses had very short memories, or said what they could for their feudal superior. Another, Walker, spoke to the anger of Lovat’s son, on being driven into rebellion. ‘The Master of Lovat took his bonnet and threw it on the floor. He threw the white cockade on the fire, and damned the cockade, &c.’ Lord Lovat, on the other hand, had sworn he would seize the cattle and plaids of all the Frasers who refused to rise, and would burn their houses. One of these adverse Frasers, being hard pressed by Lovat, allowed that he expected to escape punishment, for his evidence, but that he had not been promised a pardon. ‘If,’ said he, ‘I give evidence, in any case it should be the truth; and,’ he added, with a composure so comic that it might well have disturbed the august solemnity, ‘if the truth were such as I should not care to disclose, I would declare positively I would give no evidence at all.’ Another witness, a Lieutenant Campbell, in the king’s service, but who had been a prisoner in the power of the Jacobites, being questioned as to a conversation he had had with Lovat, made the amusingly illogical remark, ‘As I did not expect to be called as a witness, so I do not remember what passed on that occasion.’ The lieutenant did, however, recollect one thing, namely, that Lovat had said that his son had gone into the rebellion, but that he himself was a very loyal person. A second officer, Sir Everard Falconer, secretary to the Duke of Cumberland (and very recently married to Miss Churchill, daughter of the old general), stated that he had been sent by the duke to converse with Lovat, and he repeated the loyal assertions that the prisoner had made. ‘Will your Lordship put any question to Sir Everard?’ asked the Lord High Steward, of Lovat. ‘I have only,’ replied Lovat, ‘to wish him joy of his young wife.’
MURRAY OF BOUGHTON.
The most important witness of all was, of course, Mr. Murray, of Boughton, late secretary to the young Chevalier, and, only a day or two before, a prisoner in the King’s Bench, from which he had been discharged. In the course of his answers, Murray said he had been ‘directed’ to give a narrative of the springs and progress of the late rebellion,—when he came to be examined at the Bar of the High Court of Justice, where he was then standing. ‘Directed?’ exclaimed the Earl of Cholmondely, ‘who directed you?’ The Lord High Steward and the Earl of Chesterfield protested they had not heard the word ‘directed’ used by the witness. There was a wish to have the matter cleared up, and Murray then said, ‘Some days after my examination in the Tower, by the honourable Committee of the House of Commons, a gentleman, who, I believe was their secretary, came to me to take a further examination; and to ask me as to any other matter that had occurred since my last examination. Some days after that, he told me I should be called here before your Lordships, upon the trial of my Lord Lovat, and that at the same time, it would be expected that I should give an account of the rise and progress of the Rebellion in general.’
MURRAY’S EVIDENCE.
The above shows pretty clearly how the weak natures of prisoners in the Tower were dealt with, in order to get evidence by which they would destroy at once the life of a confederate and their own honour. Murray did what he was ‘directed’ or ‘expected’ to do, without passion but with some sense of pain and shame. The whole rise and course of the insurrection may be found in his testimony; he was prepared for the questions, equally so with the answers he gave to them; and his evidence is of importance for a proper understanding of the outbreak. Some merit was made of his ‘voluntary surrender,’ but Lord Talbot, quite in Lovat’s interest, roughly asked if Murray had really intended to surrender himself at the time he became a prisoner to the Royal forces. The poor man truthfully answered that ‘it was not then my intention particularly to surrender myself’;—adding, ‘it was not my intention till I saw the dragoons;’—but that he had never since attempted to escape.—‘Have you ever taken the Oaths of Allegiance and Fidelity to the King?’ asked Lord Talbot. He never had. ‘Did you ever take such Oaths to anybody else?’ CROSS EXAMINATION. Murray let drop a murmured ‘No’; and then Sir William Yonge, one of the Managers for the Commons, came to his help, with the expression of a hope that the king’s witness should not be obliged to answer questions that tended to accuse himself of High Treason. To which Lord Talbot replied that the gentleman had already confessed himself guilty of that crime. Lord Talbot then asked Murray if he was a voluntary evidence. Murray requested him to explain what he meant by those two words. ‘Are you here?’ said Talbot, ‘in hopes of a pardon? And if you had been pardoned, would you now be here as a witness at all?’ The Attorney-General came to the rescue. It was an improper question, he said, resting upon the supposition of a fact which had not happened. Lord Talbot insisted: he asked Murray, ‘Do you believe your life depends upon the conformity of the evidence you shall give on this trial, with former examinations which you have undergone?’ There was a fight over this matter, but a lull came in the fray, and then Murray spoke with a certain dignity, and said: ‘I am upon my oath and obliged to tell the truth; and I say that possibly and very probably, had I been in another situation of life, I should not have appeared before your Lordships as a witness against the noble Lord at the Bar.’ There was a touch of mournful sarcasm in Murray’s truthful answer, which escaped Lord Talbot, for he remarked: ‘I am extremely well satisfied with the gentleman’s answer; and it gives me a much better opinion of his evidence than I had before.’