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.