History of the Frasers of Lovat

XVIII. SIMON, THIRTEENTH LORD FRASER. 483
of my blessed Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, into whose hands
I recommend my soul. Amen. Lovat.
" In the Tower, April 9, 1747."
His body, according- to a contemporary, was buried in
the Tower of London, "with the other rebel Lords,"* but
if so, there seems to be no doubt that the remains were
subsequently disinterred, taken to the North, and laid in
the family vault in the Church of Kirkhill. Hugh Inglis,
belonging to Inverness, who sailed a vessel of his own
named the Pledger, between that town and London, being
in the English Metropolis at the time of Lovat's execution,
wrote a letter to Bailie Gilbert Gordon of Inverness, dated
the nth of April, 1747, two days after Lord Simon's death,
in the course of which he says — " Poor Lord Lovat was
beheaded a few hours after writing you my last. He
behaved like an old true deulnach ; quite undaunted he went
to the last ; made several witty speeches, which seemed
quite agreeable to the bulk of the people. His corpse is
to be brought down by the Pledger, which is to leave
London this ensuing week."f This should set the matter,
so long in doubt, finally at rest.
He appears to have indulged the idea almost to the last
that the Government would not carry out the extreme
penalty of the law, and the universal opinion was and still
is that it was a great mistake to have done so. Mr Laing
in his History of Scotland says, "that whatever the char-
acter or crimes might be, the humanity of the British
Government incurred a deep reproach from the execution
of an old man on the very verge of the grave." Dr Hill
Burton expresses the same feeling. It was, he says, a
melancholy instance of the inefficiency of harsh laws, that
the system which could not prevent a citizen from sporting
with the interests of the community for sixty years "should
make such mighty exertions to cut off a few years of his
paralysed life. It could furnish but a poor warning to
* Scots Magazine for 1747, p. 158.
t The letter is given at length in a foot-note in the new edition of
Historical and Traditional Sketches of Highland Families, recently published
by John Noble, Inverness,