The fact is, and it redounds to the credit of James the Second, that monarch, eager as he ever remained to attach partisans to his interests, never received Lord Lovat into his presence.[162] The infamy of the exploits of the former Master of Lovat had preceded his visit to France: the whole account of his own reception at St. Germains, written with astonishing audacity, and most circumstantially worded, was a fabrication.
Lord Lovat's usual readiness in difficulties did not fail him; he was a ruined man, and it was puerile to shrink from expedients. He applied to the Pope's nuncio, and expressed his readiness to become a Roman Catholic. The suit was, of course, encouraged, and the arch hypocrite, making a recantation of all his former errors, professed himself a member of the holy Catholic Church, and acknowledged the Pope as its head. This avowal cost him little, for he was by no means prejudiced in favour of any specific faith; and it gained him for the time, some little popularity in the gay metropolis in which he had taken refuge.
King James, indeed, to his honour, was still resolute in declining his personal homage; but Louis the Fourteenth was less scrupulous, and the Marquis de Torcy, the favourite and Minister of the French King, presented the abjured of England and Scotland at the Palais of Versailles. It is difficult to picture to oneself the savage and merciless Fraser, the pillager, the destroyer, the outlaw, conversing, as he is said to have done, with the saintly and sagacious Madame Maintenon. It is scarcely possible to conceive elegant and refined women of any nation receiving this depraved, impenitent man, with the rumour of his recent crimes still fresh in their memory, into their polished circles. Yet they made no scruple in that dissolute city, to associate with the abandoned wretch who dared not return to Scotland, and who only looked for a pardon for his crimes through the potent workings of a faction.
Lord Lovat well knew the value of female influence. He dressed in the height of fashion—he adapted his language and sentiments to the tone of those around the Court. He was a man of considerable conversational talents; "his deportment," says his biographer, "was graceful and manly." When he was first presented to Louis the Fourteenth, who was desirous of asking some questions concerning the invasion of Scotland, he is said to have prepared an elaborate address, which he forgot in the confusion produced by the splendour around him, but to have delivered an able extempore speech, with infinite ease and good taste, upon the spur of the moment, to the great amusement of Louis, who learned from De Torcy the circumstance.[163]
His advancement at the Court of Versailles was interrupted by the necessity of his return to England, in order to obtain at last a final pardon from the King for his offences. It is singular that the instrument by whom he sought to procure this remission was William Carstairs, that extraordinary man, who had suffered in the reign of James the Second the thumb-screw, and had been threatened with the iron boot, for refusing to disclose the correspondence between the friends of the Revolution. Mr. Carstairs was now secretary to King William, and he little knew, when he counselled that monarch to pardon Lovat, what a partisan of the Jacobite cause he was thus restoring to society.
His mediation was effectual, perhaps owing to a dislike which had arisen in the mind of William against the Athole family; and a pardon was procured for Lord Lovat. The affair was concluded at Loo, whither Lovat followed the King from England. "He is a bold man," the Monarch is said to have observed to Carstairs, "to come so far under sentence of death." The pardon was unlimited, and that it might comprise the offence against Lady Athole, it was now "a complete and ample pardon for every imaginable crime." The royal seal was appended to it, and there remained only to get that of Scotland also affixed.
Lovat entrusted the management of that delicate and difficult matter to a cousin, a Simon Fraser also, by whose treachery it was suppressed; and Lord Seafield caused another pardon to pass the great seal, in which the treason against King William was alone specified; and other offences were left unpardoned. Upon this, Lord Lovat cited the Marquis of Athole before the Lords Justiciary in Edinburgh to answer before them for a false accusation: but on the very day of supporting his charge, as the biographer of his family relates, his patron the Duke of Argyle was informed that the judges had been corrupted, and that "certain death would be the result if he appeared."[164] This statement is taken from Lord Lovat's own complication of falsehoods, his incomparably audacious "Manifesto." Notwithstanding that Lovat had appeared with a retinue of a hundred armed gentlemen, "as honorable as himself," with the intention of intimidating the judges;—in spite of the Duke of Argyle's powerful influence, the friends of the outlawed nobleman counselled him again to retreat to England, and to suffer judgment to go by default. The Duke of Argyle, he says, would not lose sight of him till he had seen him on horseback, and had ordered his own best horse to be brought round to the door. There was no remedy for what was called by Lord Lovat's friends, the "rascality" of the judges:—and again this unworthy Highlander was driven from his own country to seek safety in the land wherein his offences had received their pardon. The inflexibility of the justiciary lords, or their known integrity, form a fine incident in history; for the Scottish nation was at this period, ridden by Court faction, and broken down by recent oppression and massacre.
Lord Lovat, meeting the Duke of Argyle on the frontiers, accompanied his Grace to London; and here, notwithstanding his boast, "that after his arrival in London he was at the Duke's house every day," he appears, about this time, to have been reduced to a state of miserable poverty, and merited desertion.
In the following letter to Mr. Carstairs, he complains that nothing is done for him—he applies to Mr. Carstairs for a little money to carry him home, "having no other door open."