ssest legal oppression
practised. The remedy adopted for all these evils, which was to abate
nothing and to enforce everything under the direction of English
counsels or of English men, completed the national wretchedness, and
infused its bitterest ingredient into the brim full cup.

The events of the year 1715 present but a feeble exemplification of the
truth of this description compared with the annals of 1745, for the
first Rebellion was, happily, soon closed.

Lord Lovat did not hesitate long on which side he should enlist himself;
and the intelligence that his rival, Mackenzie of Fraserdale, had taken
up arms in favour of the Chevalier, decided his course.[202] On the
fifth of November he assembled all those of his clan who were still
faithful to him, and who had been warned of his approach by his friends.
He was received among them with exclamations of joy; and, hearing that a
body of Mackintoshes, a Jacobite clan, were marching to reinforce Sir
John Mackenzie, who commanded the castle at Inverness, he marched
forward with his adherents to intercept them, and to prevent their
joining what he then called "the rebel garrison."

The citadel of Inverness, built in 1657 by Oliver Cromwell, and called
Oliver's Fort, stood on the east bank of the river Ness, and was a
regular pentagon, with bastions, ramparts, and a moat; the standard of
the Protectorate, with the word "Emmanuel" inscribed upon it, had
formerly been displayed upon its ramparts. It was calculated to hold two
thousand men, and was washed on one side by the river. As a fortress it
had many inconveniencies; approaches to it were easy, and the town
afforded a quarter for an enemy's army. In 1662 it had been partly
dismantled by Charles the Second, because it was the relic of
usurpation, and constituted a check upon the adjacent Highlanders, who
were then considered loyal.[203] It is said by one who saw it after the
Restoration to have been a very superb work, and it was one of the
regular places for the deposition of arms at the time of the Rebellion
of 1715. Subsequently it was much augmented and enlarged, and bore,
until its destruction after the battle of Culloden, the name of Fort
George, an appellation now transferred to its modern successor on the
promontory of Ardesseil.

It was against this important fortress that Lord Lovat now marched with
as much zeal and intrepidity as if he had been fighting in the cause of
that family for whom his ancestors