the Abbey of Holyrood, in which service he was assisted by the eldest sons of four earls. . . . Sir Robert's fifth son, Charles, was named after the king.' For fifteen years this learned and trustworthy uncle was tutor of Sutherland, a post which entailed great personal fatigue, when we remember the constant broils and disturbances, which obliged the young Earl's guardian to ride from Scotland to London six times within fifteen months. In spite of troubles, Sir Robert paid off all the debts, repaired the churches of Dornoch and Golspie, and, lest death should overtake him before the years of his stewardship were ended, he wrote out for his ward a curiously pathetic letter of advice, which he termed his 'Fearwell.' But a kind fate spared the tutor until he had been able to mould Earl John's character into a robust and honourable manhood. Sir Robert Gordon died at Gordonstone in 1656. Living, he had seen many strange things done in the name of religion, and in dying the righteous patriot might well have exclaimed, 'How I leave my country!' His brother Alexander had remained of the faith of the Countess Jean, and his nephew Alexander had fallen at Edgehill in 1642; while, on the other side, another nephew had marched under the Covenanting flag against the king in 1646. The whole country was as much agitated as were the great families, and all these things were but as preludes to a far greater theme. The king was to be deserted by the Scotch Church and Parliament; but the royalist party was formidable, and the struggle of the Marquis of Montrose to reinstate the Stuart dynasty and the right divine of kings was in Sutherland to put on the proportions of genuine warfare and all the dignity of a genuine tragedy. When we look at the portrait of the good Sir Robert, ward of Ian Glas, or Grey John, the thirteenth Earl of Sutherland, we feel at once what to expect from this strong man in his steel cuirass, and with a little black skull cap above his locks of grey. He is grave, capable, and cautious, and most distinctly a Roundhead. The youth of this lad had been spent in Dornoch, and the bills for his food, books, and golf clubs are still in existence. Among the entries that refer to his nonage is one of interest to the folklorists of Sutherland. We have ourselves, and since 1850, twice seen in Sutherland a cock buried alive in order to obtain a satisfactory cure and recovery. It does not appear that in the case of the thirteenth earl this sacrifice (to Esculapius?) was resorted to. Possibly the orthodoxy of the Countess Jean and of her priests would have forbidden such a remedial effort, which, after the triumph of Free Church theology, still lingered in the minds of the crofters; but to heal this Ian one Niel Beton' was summoned and consulted. It must have been with excellent results, since Ian the boy lived to be Ian of the grey hairs; but the interest centres, not in the prescriptions, but in the pedigree and personality of this doctor. Niel entered Dunrobin, not as the first-comer, but as the descendant of the most famous wizard doctor of the Highlands—of Ferchard Leche, Farquhar Bethune, a Beton, the leech who, for services to a royal patient, had obtained a grant of land in Sutherland from King Robert II. in 1386. Strange legends have crystallised themselves round this wizard, who was a native of Islay. He is said to have become omniscient through tasting serpents' broth. An identical legend has been found among the Albanian mountaineers, and the tale as told in Sutherland and in Albania is an excellent example of the nonhistorical character of myths. The fantastic incidents are property common to the race, while a fancy independent of criticism appropriates them to such once popular heroes as Gilbert de Moravia, Donald, Lord Reay, and Farquhar Bethune. Of this man's descendants, one really did attend King James VI., and ministered to Earl Ian Glas in his green and salad days. The thirteenth earl was to outgrow his sickness, and he was in his twenty-fourth year when, in the church of the Greyfriars, he stood up (1638) among his brother peers to subscribe the solemn Confession of Faith, or National 'Covenant.' As premier earl, he was the first to step forward and to sign his name. At that epoch the interdependence of the State and of the Church was the firmest and dearest conviction of the patriotic mind; so the National Covenant between men and their Maker was held to be the truest expression of a people's manhood. No half measures could now be tolerated, and Ian, standing so proudly committed to the people's creed, had to press the Covenant on the Highlanders, and that at a time when Montrose was operating against the city of Aberdeen, and when a Scottish army was approaching the English border. If hostilities were yet delayed for a time, it was but for a time, and because King Charles had consented to call a General Assembly. Matters went from bad to worse, and the Earl, though busy in the completion of the new tower at Dunrobin and in the purchase of Strathnaver, had to repair constantly to Edinburgh to interfere, among other matters, in the examination of Montrose. The enmity between Montrose and Argyll was positively Homeric, and, by the irony of fate, the close of their careers, their capture and execution as conquered heroes, were not very dissimilar. Montrose was captured in Sutherland, betrayed by a neighbouring chief, after a battle lost just above the estuary of the Oikel, beside a lonely silvery tarn, and under the shadow of a wooded ridge which preserves to this day the name of the Rock of Lamentation.' Sir William Fraser has given a very animated and picturesque sketch of this memorable battle and its tragical ending, which deserves to be quoted. But we have so recently published in these pages a full account of the same events in reviewing the Last Deeds of Montrose,' that it would be superfluous to repeat the narrative in this place.* The support given by the Clan Chattaibh, chieftain and men, to the Protestant and Whig cause did not cease with the close of this campaign. William III., through the Privy Council in Scotland, ordered the levy of two regiments of foot,' of which the colonels were to be Sir James Moncrieff and John, Lord Strathnaver, afterwards fifteenth earl. This was the peer whom George I., too glad to catch at a powerful sympathiser, actually wrote to invite to his coronation; and the same chieftain lived to receive from George II. a permission not to travel up to Westminster for a similar ceremony. The rebellion of 1715, and the less well-known but very serious rising in Glenshiel in 1719, were both felt in the most northern provinces of Scotland: Seaforth's men and Lovat's in constant agitation, with wilder kerns from the Islands, and much scheming and counter-scheming of chiefs, and retaliation always overhanging the actors on either side of this protracted civil war. But most deeply felt was the final struggle in 1745-6. It is necessary to be conversant with the family history and family records of the great houses of Lovat, Cromartie, and Sutherland, to realise all the importance of a warfare which, to the north of the Cromartie Firth, remained alight for many months after bonnie Charlie' was awa',' and after Cumberland Willie' had practically reasserted in the Highlands the authority of a Hanoverian king. The sixteenth Earl of Sutherland had married a daughter of the Earl of Wemyss, whom he took from the shores of the Firth of Forth to his own castle by the sea. The establish See Edinburgh Review, No. ccclxvii., for January, 1894. ment which the young countess found there was considered to be suitable to the family importance. Sixteen servants were kept, and their bills of fare and account-books, as still preserved, give a correct impression of the mixture of plenty and discomfort and the varied larder incidental to life in the Highlands in the middle of the eighteenth century. It had been arranged with much care and forethought by the earl's mother, the Lady Strathnaver, who was born Katharine Morison of Prestongrange. She was the daughter of a family whose name is still attached to the picturesque fishing village of Morison's Haven, near Musselburgh, and she must have been a woman of a practical and parsimonious turn of mind. Great were the pains she took at Dunrobin in purchasing cattle and stores, and a story is still told about the iron ring which this Lady Strathnaver carried in her pocket. Rents were partly paid in kind, and when the 'kain,' eggs, and fowls were brought in, Lady Strathnaver would inspect them in person, passing every egg through the ring, and if its size was so contemptible as to allow it to fall through and get smashed, then the liege lady would be angry, and mercilessly exact another and a larger egg from the hapless owner. Acute would have been this careful housekeeper's distress could she but have foreseen all the losses and expenses to be incurred by her son through the years 1745 and 1746. This earl, who fought at Culloden, confesses in one of his letters that he had not had one penny of his rents to spend that year everything had gone in raising, arming, and victualling troops. Dunrobin, as we shall see, was not to be spared. Nothing is more complicated than the part which Simon, Lord Lovat, played in the different rebellions; unless, indeed, it be the way in which, after temporising and finessing for so long, he contrived to lose a son at Culloden, and to put himself within the arm of the law. Lovat's correspondence over a period of nearly forty years forms a complete trimmer's guide; for he alternately declares that the enemies of the House of Hanover are his own foes, and lays traps to oblige the Seaforth people to bring in their arms, and almost at the same moment conspires against the king and the great northern earl, whom he so frequently prays God to reward and preserve.' To this sly old chieftain words were clearly lent to conceal his thoughts. Hogarth's picture of him is so characteristic that it seems almost a caricature of the man whose very possession of the chieftainship many of the Frasers ascribed to a piece of deceit. Malignity, sensuality, shrewdness, and avarice may all be read on the seamed face; but its prevailing expression is that of a schemer, without a trace of either compunction or self-respect. No one of the rebel lords deserved so little commiseration. Of mature years, of a vast and varied experience of men and women, Lord Lovat might in 1746 well have been termed an old revolutionary hand;' and when orders were given for his capture, the Earl of Sutherland could not say of him, as he had said of Lord Balfour of Burleigh in 1719, that he was but a poor untutored lad.' The order ran as follows: 'Inverness: 23 April, 1746. 'H.R.H. William, Duke of Cumberland, to the Earl of Sutherland. 'MY LORD SUTHERLAND,—I have received yr letter, and desire you wd place yrself, with yr men, at the head of Ld Lovat's and the Chisholm's country, and trie if La Lovat is to be catched that way: and likewise that in yr passage you would take proper notice of such of the Mackenzies as have been in the rebellion.' The royal command is curt and explicit, and as regards the euphemism of taking proper notice,' we shall see what it involved. Lord Lovat was captured and taken to Inverness, where, oddly enough, he was allowed to be on parole in that city. Needless to say that from the northern capital he escaped. His trial and ultimate execution are all matters of history; but matter of dispute in the glens, to this day, is the method of his betrayal and final capture. To the Saxon sportsman or tourist, now one man, and now another, will be pointed out as the descendant of him that gave up 'Lovat.' Whoever sold his chieftain would, as a clansman, feel bound to keep his own secret; but, outside of the clan, the ruin of Lovat gave great and far-spread satisfaction, if we may believe the once popular rhyme made on his fate: 'Lovat's head in the pot: Horns and all thegither- To gie the swine their supper.' Between the houses of Cromartie and Sutherland the warfare had never become a personal as well as a political grudge. Yet the Duke of Cumberland's order to take 'proper notice' of rebellious Mackenzies could hardly have fallen on wholly unwilling ears, and for this reason: while the Earl was in attendance on the Duke 300 rebels came to Dunrobin that night. Some of them were in the place in less than half an hour, commanded by MacDonald of Clan |