James II. and VII. died on 5th September 1701 (16th Sept. N.S.), and immediately on his death Louis XIV. acknowledged his son as king, and promised to further his interests to the best of his power.
The Scots Plot, 1703.[2]
The first opportunity of putting the altruistic intention of the King of France into operation occurred within a year of King James’s death, and the evil genius of the project was Simon Fraser, the notorious Lord Lovat.
Lovat, whose scandalous conduct had shocked the people of Scotland, was outlawed by the courts for a criminal outrage, and fled to France in the summer of 1702. There, in spite of the character he bore, he so ingratiated himself with the papal nuncio that he obtained a private audience with Louis XIV., an honour unprecedented for a foreigner. To him he unfolded a scheme for a Stuart Restoration. He had, he said, before leaving Scotland visited the principal chiefs of the Highland clans and a great number of the lords of the Lowlands along with the Earl Marischal. They were ready to take up arms and hazard their lives and fortunes for the Stuart cause, and had given him a commission to represent them in France. The foundation of his scheme was to rely on the Highlanders. They were the only inhabitants of Great Britain who had retained the habit of the use of arms, and they were ready to act at once. Lord Middleton and the Lowland Jacobites sneered at them as mere banditti and cattle-stealers, but Lovat knew that they, with an instinctive love of fighting, were capable of being formed into efficient and very hardy soldiers. He proposed that the King of France should furnish a force of 5000 French soldiers, 100,000 crowns in money, and arms and equipment for 20,000 men. The main body of troops would land at Dundee where it would be near the central Highlands, and a detachment would be sent to western Invernessshire, with the object of capturing Fort William, which overawed the western clans. The design was an excellent one, and was approved by King Louis. But before putting it into execution the ministry sent Lovat back to obtain further information, and with him they sent John Murray, a naturalised Frenchman, brother of the laird of Abercairney, who was to check Lovat’s reports.
It is characteristic of the state of the exiled Court, that it was rent with discord, and that Lord Middleton, Jacobite Secretary of State, who hated Lovat, privately sent emissaries of his own to spy on him and to blight his prospects.
Lovat duly arrived in Scotland, but the history of his mission is pitiful and humiliating. He betrayed the project to the Duke of Queensberry, Queen Anne’s High Commissioner to the Scots Estates, and, by falsely suggesting the treason of Queensberry’s political enemies, the Dukes of Hamilton and Atholl, befooled that functionary into granting him a safe conduct to protect him from arrest for outlawry.
When Lovat returned to France he was arrested under a lettre de cachet and confined a close prisoner for many years, some records say in the Bastille, but Lovat himself says at Angoulême.
The whole affair had little effect in Scotland beyond compassing the disgrace of Queensberry and his temporary loss of office, but it had lasting influence in France and reacted on all future projects of Jacobite action. For, first, it instilled into the French king and his ministers the suspicious feeling that Jacobite adventurers were not entirely to be trusted. And second, Lovat’s account of the fighting quality of the Highlanders and of their devotion to the Stuarts so impressed itself on both the French Court and that of St. Germains that they felt that in the Highlands of Scotland they would ever find a point d’appui for a rising. Lovat’s report, in fact, identified the Highlanders with Jacobitism.
The French Descent, 1708.[3]
Scotland was the scene of the next design for a restoration, and the principal agent of the French Court was a certain Colonel Nathaniel Hooke. Hooke had been sent to Scotland in the year 1705, to see if that country was in such a state as to afford a reasonable prospect of an expedition in favour of the exiled Stuart. In the year 1707, while the Union was being forced upon an unwilling population, and discontent was rife throughout the country on account of that unpopular measure, Hooke was again sent, and although not entirely satisfied with all he saw and heard, he returned with favourable accounts on the whole. Among other documents he brought with him was a Memorial of certain Scottish lords to the Chevalier, in which, among other things, it was stated that if James, under the protection of His Most Christian Majesty (Louis XIV.), would come and put himself at the head of his people in Scotland, ‘the whole nation will rise upon the arrival of its King, who will become master of Scotland without any opposition, and the present Government will be intirely abolished.’ It was some months before the French king gave any answer. St. Simon in his Memoires says that Louis XIV. was so disheartened by his previous failure that he would not at first listen to the suggestion of a French expedition; and it was only through the efforts of Madame de Maintenon that he was persuaded to sanction an invading force. Even then much time was wasted, and it was not until the spring of 1708 that a squadron was equipped under the command of the Admiral de Forbin, and a small army under the Comte de Gasse. Even when ready to sail, the constant and proverbial ill-luck of the Stuarts overtook the poor Chevalier. He caught measles, which still further delayed the expedition. By this time, naturally, the British Government had learned all about the scheme, and made their naval preparations accordingly. At last, on the 17th March, James, hardly convalescent, wrapped in blankets, was carried on board the flagship at Dunkirk. The squadron was to have proceeded to the Firth of Forth and to have landed the Chevalier at Leith, where his partisans were prepared to proclaim him king at Edinburgh. Possibly because of bad seamanship, possibly because of treachery,[4] the French admiral missed the Firth of Forth, and found himself off Montrose. He turned, and could proceed no nearer Edinburgh than the Isle of May, off which he anchored. There the British Fleet, which had followed him in close pursuit, discovered him. The admiral weighed anchor, and fought a naval action in which he lost one of his ships. He then retreated towards the north of Scotland. James implored to be set ashore even if it were only in a small boat by himself, but his solicitations were in vain. The admiral positively refused, saying that he had received instructions from the French king to be as careful of the Chevalier as if he were Louis himself; so Forbin carried him back to Dunkirk, where the heart-broken exile was landed on the 6th of April, having been absent only twenty days, and having lost one of the most likely opportunities that ever occurred for his restoration to his ancient kingdom of Scotland, if not to England.