[345] Buchan, northern Aberdeenshire and part of eastern Banffshire; Formartine, the district south of Buchan, between the sea and the Don.
[346] The laird of Leys was then Sir Alexander Burnett, 4th bart.; d. 1758.
[347] Rev. George Law, of Aberdeen; acted as chaplain to Stonywood’s regiment; made prisoner at Culloden; tried at Southwark in December, and acquitted. I am not aware of any active part taken by Seaton. It is mentioned that the French officers were made burghers of Aberdeen in December, and that Seaton received a similar honour; also that in February his lodging was ransacked and ‘some papers, mistically written for five or six years back, found.’ (Spald. Club. Misc., i. 360 and 385.)
[348] Fourth son of Alexander, 2nd Duke of Gordon; b. c. 1724; lieutenant in the Navy, but joined Prince Charles at Edinburgh. Was appointed by him Lord-Lieut. of Banff and Aberdeen shires. Escaped after Culloden, and died at Montreuil, 1754.
[349] At Fountainhall, East Lothian, twelve miles from Edinburgh. The Duchess was Henrietta Mordaunt, daughter of the celebrated Earl of Peterborough. On her husband’s death in 1728, she brought up her numerous children as Protestants, though her husband’s family was hereditarily Catholic. For this she received, in 1735, a pension of £1000 a year, which it is said she forfeited for entertaining Prince Charles to breakfast on the roadside as he passed her gates. Her son, the 3rd duke, took no active part in the ’45, but his influence was against his brother and the Jacobites. He seems to have remained in Gordon Castle down to March, but he left it on the 8th, ‘in the most secret manner he could,’ probably to avoid meeting Prince Charles, who visited the castle a few days later. The Duke then joined Cumberland in Aberdeen. (S.M., viii. 138.)
[350] William Baird (b. 1701; d. 1777) of Auchmeddan, in the Aberdeenshire parish of Aberdour, on the borders of Banff, the last of an ancient family, of which the baroneted families of New Byth and Saughton are cadets. His wife was a sister of the 1st Earl Fife, then Lord Braco. He was author of a genealogical history of the Bairds (reprinted, London, 1870) and another of the Duffs, which was privately printed in 1869.
[351] Charles Gordon of Blelack, near Aboyne, Deeside.
[352] A district of Aberdeenshire, south of Strathbogie and south-west of Formartine, comprising the valleys of the Urie and the Gadie.
[353] Lord John Drummond landed a force of about 800 men, composed of his own French regiments of Royal Scots and a piquet of fifty men from each of the six Irish regiments in the French service. They landed on 22nd November at Montrose, Stonehaven, and Peterhead. Two of Drummond’s transports were captured by English men-of-war; among the prisoners so taken was Alexander Macdonell, ‘Young Glengarry,’ Mr. Lang’s Pickle the Spy.
[354] These were Lord John Drummond, brother of the titular Duke of Perth, and Lord Lewis Drummond. The latter (1709-92), the lieut.-colonel of Lord John Drummond’s French Royal Scots, was the second son of John (Drummond), 2nd (but attainted) Earl of Melfort, whose father had been created Duke of Melfort by James VII. while in exile in 1692, and Duke of Melfort in the French peerage by Louis XIV. in 1701. Lord Lewis lost a leg at Culloden. He died in Paris, 1792.