257 . - High Street.; LADY LOVAT.
She was received by Lord Lovat with an extravagant
affectation of welcome, and with many assurances
of the happiness his lady would receive from
seeing her. The chief then went to the lonely
tower in which Lady Lovat was secluded, without
decent clothes, and even without sufficient nourish.
ment. He laid a dress before her becoming her
rank, commanded her to put it on, to appear and
to receive her friend
as if she were the mistress
of the house in
which she was, in fact,
a half-starved prisoner.
And such was the strict
watch he maintained,
and the terror which
his character inspired,
that the visitor durst
not ask, nor LadyLovat
communicate, anything
respecting her real
situation.?
Long after, by a
closely-written letter,
concealed in a clue of
yarn dropped over a
window of the Castle
to a confidant below,
she was enabled to let
her relations know how
she was treated, and
means were taken to
separate her judicially
from her husband.
When, years after, his
share in the Jacobite
rising in 1745 brought
him to the Tower of
London, Lady Lovat
thought only of her
arrears, &so0 of which she spent in furnishing her
house at the head of the Blackfriars Wynd; and
small though her income she was long famous in
Edinburgh for her chanty and. goodness to the
poor.
In her gloomy house, on the first floor of the
turnpike stair, with a cook, maid, and page, she
not only maintained herself in the style of a gentle-
BLACKFRIARS WYND.
duties as a wife, and offered to attend him there ;
but he declined the proposal, and the letter in
which he did so contained the only expressions
of kindness he had bestowed upon her since their
marriage day; but he made no reference to her
in the farewell letter which he sent to his son
Simon, the Master of Lovat, to whose care he
specially commended his other children.
After his execution some demur arose about the
jointure of his unfortunate widow-only A190 per
annum-and for years she was left destitute, till
some of her friends, among others Lord Strichen,
offered money on loan, which, being of an independent
spirit, she declined. At length the dispute
was settled, and she received a p:etty large suiii of
33
woman of the period,
but could give a warm
weicome to many a
poor Highland cousin
whose all was lost OF
the field of Culloden.
Lady Dorothea Primrose,
who was her niece,
and third daughter of
Archibald first Earl of
Rosebery, lived with
her for many years,
and to her, in the goodness
of her heart, she
assigned the brightest
rooms, that overlooked
the broad High Street,
contenting herself with
the gloomier, that faced
the wynd. There, too,
she supported for years
another broken-down
old lady, the Mistress
of Elphinstone, whose
nightly supper of porridge
was on one occasion
fatally poisoned
by a half-idiot grandson
of her ladyship.
She was small in
stature, and retained
much of her beauty
and singular delicacy of feature and complexion
even in old age. ??When at home her dress
was a red silk gown, with ruffled cuffs, and sleeves
puckered like a man?s shirt, a fly-cap encircling
the head, with a mob-cap laid across it, falling
over the cheeks and tied under the chin; her
hair dressed and powdered; it double muslin
handkerchief round the neck and bosom ; Zammerbeads;
a white lawn apron edged with lace ; black
stockings with red gushets, and high-heeled shoes.
. . . , As her chair emerged from the head of
the Blackfriars Wynd, any one who saw her sitting
in it, so neat and fresh and clean, would have
taken her for a queen in wax-work pasted up in a
glass case,? .
