y hardly recalls a baser figure than that of Simon
Fraser (Lord Lovat). He is remembered chiefly as the desperate
shuffler and paltry traitor who tried to blow hot and cold, to fawn on
Hanover with one hand and to beckon the Stuarts with the other. But
his whole career was of a piece with its paltry ending. His youth and
manhood were characterized by a kind of savage lawlessness, like that
of a Calabrian chieftain brigand or the brave of a Sioux band. He was
cruel, he was cunning; he was, in his wild Highland way, a voluptuary
and a debauchee; he was treacherous and hideously selfish. In his
earlier days he had cast his eyes upon a lady, whom, for motives of
worldly advantage as well as for her beauty, he had regarded as
suitable to make his wife. Neither the young lady nor the young lady's
family would listen to the suit of Captain Fraser, as he then {230}
was; whereupon Captain Fraser gathered together a select company of
scoundrels, carried the young lady off by force, very much as Rob Roy's
wild son did with the girl of whom he was enamoured, married her
against her will by force, with the aid of a suborned priest, actually,
so the story goes, cutting the clothes off her body with his dirk,
while his pipers, in obedience to his orders, drowned the poor
creature's cries with their music. Now, in the eightieth year of his
age, he had come to his grim end. He had broken most of the laws of
earth and of heaven; he had ever tried to be in with both sides and to
cheat both; he was always ready to betray and lie and cozen; seldom,
perhaps, did a more horrible old man meet a more deserved doom; yet he
died with a bravery and a composure which were not to be expected.
Nothing in his life became him like to the leaving it. Thanks to the
genius of William Hogarth, we all know exactly how Simon Fraser, the
bad Lord Lovat, looked in those last days of his life when he lay in
prison, his old body weak with many infirmities, and his old spirit
still scheming and hoping for the reprieve that did not come. On April
9th he was executed on Tower Hill. His latest words were grotesquely
inappropriate to his evil life. With his lying lips he repeated the
famous line from Horace, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," and
with that lie on his lips he knelt before the block and had his head
cut off at one stroke. His body was laid in the company of better men,
by the side of Balmerino and Kilmarnock, in the Church of St. Peter