culated, it was supposed, to maintain the repose of a country
with which they were well acquainted, than regular troops. But the
experiment did not succeed. The Highland companies, known by the famous
name of the Black Watch, traversed the country, it is true, night and
day, and tracked its inmost recesses; they knew the most dangerous
characters; they were supposed to suppress all internal disorders. But
they were Highlanders. Whilst they looked leniently upon robberies and
outrages to which they had been familiarized from their youth, they
revived in their countrymen the military spirit which the late Act for
disarming the clans had subdued. Upon their removal from the Highlands,
and their exportation to Flanders, the mischief became apparent; and no
regular force being sent to the Highlands in their stead, those
chieftains who were favourable to the exiled family, found it easy to
turn the restless temper and martial habits of their clansmen to their
own purposes.

Lord Lovat was one of those who thus acted. The Ministry, irritated by
his patronage of Sir William Grant's interests, in preference to those
of Forbes, at the election for Inverness, suddenly deprived him of his
pension in 1739, and also of the command of the free company of
Highlanders. This was a rash proceeding, and contrary to the advice of
President Forbes. Lord Lovat, who had caused his clansmen to enter his
regiment by rotation, and had thus, without suspicion, been training his
clan to the use of arms, soon showed how dangerous a weapon had been
placed in his hand, and at how critical a period he had been incensed to
turn it against Government.

He had long been suspected. Even in 1737, information had been given of
his buying up muskets, broadswords, and targets, in numbers. When
challenged to defend himself from the imputation of Jacobitism by a
friend, he insisted upon the services he had done in 1715 as a reason
why he should for ever be free from the imputation of disloyalty; and he
continued to play the same subtle part, and to pretend indifference to
all fresh enterprises, to his friends at Culloden, as that which he had
always affected.

"Everybody expects we shall have a war very soon," he writes to his
friend John Forbes in 1729--"which I am not fond of; for being now
growne old, I desire and wish to live in peace with all mankind, except
some damned Presbyterian ministers who dayly plague me."[229] Yet, even
then he was engaged in a