‘This,’ it is added, ‘he partly brings about by artfully proposing after the public healths (which always imply bumpers) such private ones as he knows will pique the interest or inclinations 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.

‘As the company are one after another disabled, two servants, who are all the while in waiting, take up the invalids with short poles in their chairs, as they sit (if not fallen down), and carry them to their beds; and still the hero holds out.’[[216]]

Mr Burton, in his Life of President Forbes, states that it was the custom at Culloden House in the days of John Forbes—Bumper John, he was called—to prize off the top of each successive cask of claret, and place it in the corner of the hall, to be emptied in pailfuls. The massive hall-table, which bore so many carouses, is still preserved as a venerable relic; and the deep saturation it has received from old libations of claret, prevents one from distinguishing the description of wood of which it was constructed. Mr Burton found an expenditure of £40 sterling a month for claret in the accounts of the President.

Oct. 6.

At an early hour in the morning, seven gentlemen and two servants, all well armed, might have been seen leaving Inverness by the bridge over the Ness, and proceeding along the shore of the Moray Firth. Taking post in the wood of Bunchrew, they waited till they saw two gentlemen with servants coming in the opposite direction, when they rushed out into the road with an evidently hostile intent. The leader, seizing one of the gentlemen with his own hand, called out to his followers to take the other dead or alive, and immediately, by levelling their pistols at him, they induced him to give himself up to their mercy. The victorious party then caused the two gentlemen to dismount and give up their arms, mounted them on a couple of rough ponies, and rode off with them into the wild country.

This was entirely a piece of private war, in the style so much in vogue in the reign of the sixth James, but which had since declined, and was now approaching its final extinction. The leader of the assailants was Captain Simon Fraser, otherwise called the Master of Lovat, the same personage who, as Lord Lovat, fifty years after, came to a public death on Tower-hill.

1697.

The father of this gentleman had recently succeeded a grandnephew as Lord Lovat; but his title to the peerage and estates, although really good, had been opposed under selfish and reckless views by the Earl of Tullibardine, son of the Marquis of Athole, and brother of the widow of the late Lovat; and as this earl chanced to be a secretary of state and the king’s commissioner to parliament, his opposition was formidable. Tullibardine’s wish was to establish a daughter of the late lord, a child of eleven years old, as the heiress, and marry her to one of his own sons. His sons, however, were boys; so he had to bethink him of a more suitable bridegroom in the person of Lord Salton, another branch of the house of Fraser. Meanwhile, Captain Simon, wily as a cat, and as relentless, sought to keep up his juster interest by similar means. He first tried to get the young lady into his power by help of a follower named Fraser of Tenechiel; but Tenechiel took a fit of repentance or terror in the midst of his enterprise, and replaced the child in her mother’s keeping. Lord Salton was then hurried northward to the Dowager Lady Lovat’s house of Castle Downie, to woo his child-bride, and arrange for her being brought to safer lodgings in Athole. He went attended by Lord Mungo Murray, brother at once to the Earl of Tullibardine and the Dowager Lady Lovat. The Master, seeing no time was to be lost, brought a number of the chief gentlemen of his clan together at a house belonging to Fraser of Strichen, and had no difficulty in taking them bound under oaths to raise their followers for the advancement of his cause. It was by their aid that he had seized on Lord Salton and Lord Mungo Murray at the wood of Bunchrew.

Lord Salton and his friend were conducted amidst savage shouts and drawn dirks to the house of Fanellan, and there confined in separate apartments. The fiery cross was sent off, and the coronach cried round the country, to bring the faithful Frasers to the help of their young chief. A gallows was raised before the windows of the imprisoned gentlemen, as a hint of the decisive measures that might be taken with them. They saw hundreds of the clansmen arrive at muster on the green, with flags flying and bagpipes screaming, and heard their chief taking from them oaths of fidelity on their bare daggers. When five hundred were assembled—a week having now elapsed since the first assault—the Master put himself at their head, and went with his prisoners to Castle Downie, which he took into his care along with its mistress. The child, however, was safe from him, for |1697.| she had been already transferred to a refuge in her uncle’s country of Athole. Fraser was, of course, mortified by her escape; but he was a man fertile in expedients. He first dismissed his two prisoners, though not till Salton had bound himself under a forfeiture of eight thousand pounds to ‘interfere’ no more in his affairs. His plan was now to secure, at least, the dowager’s portion of the late lord’s means by marrying her. So, too, he calculated, would he embarrass the powerful Tullibardine in any further proceedings against himself.

That night, the lady’s three female attendants were removed from her by armed men; and one of them, on being brought back afterwards to take off her ladyship’s clothes, found her sitting in the utmost disorder and distress on the floor, surrounded by Fraser and his friends, himself trying by burned feathers to prevent her senses from leaving her, and the others endeavouring to divest her of her stays. Robert Monro, minister of Abertarf, then pronounced the words of the marriage-ceremony over her and the Master of Lovat. As the woman hurried out, she heard the screams of her mistress above the noise of the bagpipes played in the apartment adjacent to her bedroom; and when she came back next morning, she found the lady to appearance out of her judgment, and deprived of the power of speech. Lady Lovat was at this time a woman of about thirty-five years of age.