Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 | Page 2

VOLUME.
PAGE LORD GEORGE MURRAY 1
JAMES DRUMMOND, DUKE OF PERTH 226
FLORA MACDONALD 310
WILLIAM BOYD, EARL OF KILMARNOCK 381
CHARLES RADCLIFFE 480
With Portraits of Flora Macdonald, Prince Charles, and Lord
Balmerino.

MEMOIRS OF THE JACOBITES.

LORD GEORGE MURRAY.
This celebrated adherent of the Chevalier was born in the year 1705. He
was the fifth son of John Duke of Atholl, and the younger brother of

that Marquis of Tullibardine, whose biography has been already given.
The family of Atholl had attained a degree of power and influence in
Scotland, which almost raised them out of the character of subjects. It
was by consummate prudence, not unattended with a certain portion of
time-serving, that, until the period 1715, the high position which these
great nobles held had been in seasons of political difficulty preserved.
Their political principles were those of indefeasible right and hereditary
monarchy. John, first Marquis of Atholl, the father of Lord George
Murray, married Amelia Stanley, daughter of Charlotte De la
Tremouille, Countess of Derby, whose princely extraction, to borrow a
phrase of high value in genealogical histories, was the least of her
merits. This celebrated woman was remarkable for the virtue and piety
of her ordinary life; and, when the season of trial and adversity called it
forth, she displayed the heroism which becomes the hour of adversity.
Her well-known defence of Latham House in 1644 from the assaults of
the Parliamentarian forces, and her protracted maintenance of the Isle
of Man, the last place in the English dominions that submitted to the
Parliament, were followed by a long and patient endurance of penury
and imprisonment.
The Marquis of Atholl was consistent in that adherence to the Stuarts
which the family of his wife had professed. He advocated the
succession of James the Second, and was rewarded with the royal
confidence. Indeed, such was the partiality of the King towards him,
that had the Marquis "in this sale of favour," as an old writer expresses
it, "not been firm and inflexible in the point of his religion, which he
could not sacrifice to the pleasure of any mortal, he might have been
the first minister for Scotland."[1] After the Revolution, the Marquis
retired into the country, and relinquished all public business; thus
signifying his opinion of that event.
He bequeathed to his son, John second Marquis of Atholl, and the
father of Lord George Murray, as great a share of prosperity and as
many sources of self-exultation as ordinarily fall to the lot of one man.
To the blood of the Murrays, the marriage with Lady Amelia Stanley
had added a connection in kindred with the Houses of Bourbon and

Austria, with the Kings of Spain and Duke of Savoy, the Prince of
Orange, and most of the crowned heads in Europe. Upon the extinction
of the descendants of John the seventh Earl of Derby, commonly called
the loyal Earl of Derby, and of his wife Charlotte De La Tremouille,
"all that great and uncommon race of royal and illustrious blood," as it
has been entitled, centred in the descendants of the Marquis of Atholl.
In 1726, the barony of Strange devolved upon the Duke of Atholl; and
the principality of the Isle of Man was also bequeathed to the same
House by William ninth Earl of Derby. This was the accession of a
later period, but was the consequence of that great and honourable
alliance of which the family of Atholl might justly boast.
The father of Lord George Murray adopted every precaution, as we
have seen,[2] to preserve the acquisitions of dignity and fortune which
the lapse of years had added to his patrimonial possessions. Sixteen
coats of arms, eight on the paternal side, and eight on the maternal side,
had composed the escutcheon of his father, John Marquis of Atholl.
Among those great names on the maternal side, which graced a funeral
escutcheon, which has been deemed the pattern and model of perfect
dignity, and the perfection of ducal grandeur, was the name of the
Prince of Orange.[3] This plea of kindred was not thrown away upon
the Marquis of Atholl; he declared himself for King William, and
entered early into the Revolution. For this service he was rewarded
with the office of High Commissioner to represent his Majesty in the
Scottish parliament. But subsequent events broke up this compact, and
destroyed all the cordiality which subsisted between William and the
head of the House of Atholl. The refusal of the King to own the African
Company was, it is said, the reason why the Marquis withdrew himself
from Court, and remained at a distance from it during the lifetime of
William.
The accession of Anne brought, at first, fresh honours to this powerful
Scottish nobleman. He was created in 1704