le officers, and
M^cdonald of Keppoch arrived in the afternoon with his regiment
consisting of about three hundred. In less than an hour after the whole
were drawn up, and the Royal Standart display'd by the D. of A[thole]
when the Chevalier made them a short but very pathetick speech.
Importing that it would be no purpose to declaim upon the justice of his
father's title to the throne to people who, had they not been convinced
of it, would not have appeared in his behalf, but that he esteemed it as
much his duty to endeavour to procure their welfare and happiness as
they did to assert his right, that it was chiefly with that view that he
had landed in a part of the Island where he knew he should find a number
of brave gentlemen fired with the "noble example of their predecessors,
and jealous of their own and their country's honour, to join with him in
so glorious an enterprise, with whose assistance and the protection of a
just God who never fails to avenge the cause of the injured, he did not
doubt of bringing the affair to a happy issue...."

Everything now being prepared for the Chevalier's departure, upon the
21st he moved from the place of rendezvous to the head of Locheil, about
nine miles from Fort William, and as the difficulty of finding horses
and the badness of the roads in this country were equally
unsurmountable, of twenty large swevel guns he made twelve be buried in
a bog about a mile from the place where he first erected his standard.
He had no sooner arrived at the above mentioned place than he received
intelligence of G[eneral] C[ope] having moved north ward and at the same
time had a copy of the proclamation sent which had been ishued by order
of the Lords Justices, affixing thirty thousand pound upon his head....

Upon seeing it he was heard to say that tho it was true that a reward
had been likewise set upon his father's head in the year 1715, that yet
he imagined that in proportion as the world grew in politeness they had
done so in humanity, that it were unjust to call the ancients rude and
savage etc., when no example could be given of their taking so mean and
unmanly a way to get rid of their enemy. That he should have been far
from ever thinking of such a device to exterminate the E[lector]s family
did his success depend upon it, but at the same time he could not in
justice to him self get[85] by offering the same reward in his turn. Tho
if he could allow himself to think that any of his frien