an additional clause of attainder against the Queen, Mary of
Modena, together with an oath of abjuration of the "Pretender." The
debates which impeded the progress of this measure, plainly prove how
deeply engrafted in the hearts of many of the higher classes were those
rights which they were thus enforced to abjure.[166]

This was one of the last acts of William. His death, in 1702, revived
the spirits of the Jacobites, for the partiality of Anne to her brother,
the young Prince, was generally understood; and it appears, from the
letters which have been published in later days to have been of a far
more real and sisterly character than has generally been supposed. The
death of the young Duke of Gloucester appeared, naturally, to make way
for the restoration of the Stuart family; and there is no doubt but that
Anne earnestly desired it; and that on one occasion, when her brother's
life was in danger from illness, her anxiety was considerable on his
account.

It is, therefore, no matter of reproach to the Jacobites, as an
infatuation, although it has frequently been so represented, that they
cherished those schemes which were ultimately so unfortunate, but which,
had it not been that "popery appeared more dreadful in England than even
the prospect of slavery and temporal oppression," would doubtless have
been successful without the disastrous scenes which marked the struggle
to bring them to bear.

Lord Lovat was at this time no insignificant instrument in the hands of
the Jacobite party. When he found that the sentence of outlawry was not
reversed; when he perceived that he must no longer hope for the
peaceable enjoyment of the Lovat inheritance, his whole soul turned to
the restoration of King James; and, after his death, to that of the
young Prince of Wales. Yet he seems, in the course of the extraordinary
affairs in which the Queen, Mary of Modena, was rash enough to employ
him, to have one eye fixed upon St. James's, another upon St. Germains,
and to have been perfectly uncertain as to which power he should
eventually dedicate his boasted influence and talents.

Lord Lovat may be regarded as the first promoter of the Insurrection of
1715 in Scotland. Whether his exertions proceeded from a real endeavour
to promote the cause of the Jacobites, or whether they were, as it has
been supposed, the result of a political scheme of the Duke of
Queensbury's, it is difficult to determine, and immaterial to decide;
because