LOVAT, Simon Fraser, Baron, a famous Jacobite intriguer, executed for the part which he took in the rebellion of 1745, was born about the year 1676, and was the second son of Thomas, afterwards twelfth Lord Lovat. He was educated at King’s College, Aberdeen, and there seems reason to believe that he was there no negligent student, as his correspondence afterwards gives abundant proof, not only of a thorough command of good English and idiomatic French, but of such an acquaintance with the Latin classics as to leave him never at a loss for an apt quotation from Virgil or Horace. Whether Lovat ever felt any real principle of loyalty to the Stuarts or was actuated throughout merely by what he supposed to be self-interest it is difficult to determine, but that he was a born traitor and deceiver there can be no doubt. One of his first acts on leaving college was to recruit three hundred men from his clan to form part of a regiment in the service of William and Mary, in which he himself was to hold a command,— his object being, as he unhesitatingly avows, to have a body of well-trained soldiers under his influence, whom at a moment’s notice he might carry over to the interest of King James. Among other wild outrages in which he was engaged about this time was a rape and forced marriage committed on the widow of a previous Lord Lovat with the view apparently of securing his own succession to the estates; and it is a curious instance of his plausibility and power of influencing others that, after being subjected by him to the most horrible ill-usage, the woman is said to have ultimately become seriously attached to him. A prosecution for his violence, however, having been instituted against him by Lady Lovat’s family, Simon found it prudent to retire first to his native ...