St. Germains. Queensbury defended himself before the House of
Lords, and the accusation, which rested chiefly on the assertions of
Ferguson, the famous hatcher of plots, was declared false and
scandalous, and Ferguson was committed to Newgate. The reluctance of the
Duke of Queensbury to give up the correspondence, excited, however,
suspicions of his integrity; which, as Harley, Lord Oxford, expressed
it, could only be cleared up by Fraser, Lord Lovat;[188] but Lord Lovat
was not then to be found.

In all this singular and complicated affair, it is impossible to help
wondering at the folly and audacity which Lord Lovat had shown in
returning to France, conscious of having placed himself at the mercy of
ruthless politicians, and aware that in that country he could expect no
redress nor protection from law. But the original crime for which he had
been sent forth, an outlaw from his country, was the source of all his
subsequent mistakes and misfortunes. France was open to him; Scotland
was closed; and England was a scene of peril to one who trod on fragile
ice, beneath which a deep gulf yawned.

Lord Lovat had been two years in prison before any of his former
friends, for even he was not wholly devoid of partisans, interfered with
success in his behalf; and it was the good, old-fashioned feeling of
kindred that finally moved the Marquis De Frezeliere, or Frezel, or
Frezeau de la Frezeliere, to interest himself in the fate of his
despised, and perhaps forgotten, relative.

"The house of Frezeliere, which ascends," says Lord Lovat, "in an
uninterrupted line, and without any unequal alliance, to the year 1030,
with its sixty-four quarterings in its armorial bearings, and all noble,
its titles of seven hundred years standing in the Abbey of Notre Dame de
Noyers in Touraine, and its many other circumstances of inherent
dignity," was, as we have seen, derived from the same blood with the
family of Frezel, or Fraser. In former, and more prosperous days, a
common and authentic Act of Recognition of this relationship had been
drawn up at Paris by the Marquis and his many illustrious kinsmen, the
three sons of the Marshal Luxembourg de Montmorenci; and executed, on
the other hand, by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, and by his brother, and
several of their nearest kin.

The Marquis De Frezeliere appears to have been a fine specimen of that
proud and valiant aristocracy, not even then wholly broken down in
France by the effeminacy of the