2ni S. VI. 110., Sept. 4. '58.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



191 



Archbishop Bramhall married Mrs. Halley, 



widow of the Rev. (who ?), by whom he had 



issue Thomas ; Isabella, married to Sir James Gra- 

 ham ; married to Alderman Toxteith of Drog- 



heda ; and married to Standish Hartstonge. 



Can any of your correspondents give their names ? 

 Any information relating to the families of the 

 daughters will oblige C. J. D. Ingledew. 



[Abp. Bramhall's eldest daughter, Isabella, who niar- 

 Jried Sir James Graham, had one daughter called Helen, 

 •who was married to Sir Arthur Rawdon of Moira, and to 

 >vhora she brought a considerable estate. " This Lady 

 liawdon," says Lodge, " was endowed with extraordi- 

 nary virtues; she was of exquisite good sense and taste, 

 and her charities were numberless to all in distress, and 

 will never he forgotten." Her son, Sir John Rawdon, the 

 third baronet, was the father of the late John, Earl of 

 Moira. ■ The name of the Archbishop's second daughter 

 ■was Jane ; that of the third Anne ; Standish Harstonge, 

 Iher husband, was one of the barons of the Exchequer. In 

 the will of Ellianor Bramhall, the Archbishop's widow, 

 she bequeaths legacies to William Halley, and to her 

 two sisters-in-law, Margerj' and Alice Halley. Rawdon 

 Fapers, p. 13.] 



J. J. Defoe. — I find it stated in the Stamford 

 Mercury, under the date of January 2, 1771, that 

 " Five malefactors were executed at Tyburn. 

 One of them (J. J. Defoe) was grandson of the 

 celebrated Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson 

 Crusoe, &c." Is this assertion corroborated by 

 other testimony, and what (if anything) is known 

 of the unfortunate culprit, if such there were? 

 Was he the son of the eldest or the second son of 

 Daniel de Foe ? Pishey Thompson. 



Stoke Newington. 



["John Joseph Defoe was executed on Jan. 2, 1771, 

 for robbing Mr. Fordyce of a gold watch and some 

 money. He is said to be the grandson of the celebrated 

 Defoe." (^Annual Register, xiv. 65.) But according to 

 information communicated to Walter Wilson by a repre- 

 sentative of the family, this John Joseph Defoe was a 

 great-grandson of the celebrated writer, and was the son 

 of Samuel Defoe, who died in Pedlar's Acre in November, 

 1783. See Wilson's Life of De Foe, iii. 648. ] 



»C}]lUlS. 



BROTHER OF SIMON FRASER, LORD LOVAT. 



(2"* S. V. 335.; vi. 176.) 



I think I can answer Mr. Fraser's query on 

 this head ; as, though long absent and far distant 

 from my native land, I still lay claim to being a 

 Scotish reader of " N. & Q.," as well as a bit of a 

 genealogist. Ale-vander Fraser, eldest son of 

 Thomas of Beaufort, fought at the battle of Kil- 

 iiecrankie, 27 July, 1G89, and died shortly after- 

 wards, in his twenty-sixth year, unmarried ; thus 

 leaving his next brother, Simon, afterwards the 

 celebrated Lord Lovat, the heir to -that branch of 

 the family : so that Mb. Fraser correctly styles 

 bim the " elder brother;" but J think he h^ mis- 



taken this Alexander (whose death was clearly 

 proved when Simon was served heir to his father, in 

 1699) for a,ynunger brother, — third surviving son 

 of Thomas Fraser of Beaufort — John, regarding 

 whom considerable mystery exists. He was a 

 dissipated youth, and styled by the Highlanders 

 " Jon Dhu nan Betach," or " Black John of the 

 Dirk," from the following circumstance : — During 

 a feast at Beauly Castle, about the year 1724, tlie 

 family piper was " playing a spring " to the tune 

 of " I?etach er Mac Thomais," and some lines of 

 this Gaelic song, which he must have been at the 

 same time singing, were to the following efiect : 

 " There is a dirk upon Thomas's son, rattling and 

 glancing above the band of his kilt, when a knife 

 (' skein ') might very well satisfy him ; he has a 

 sword and a shoulder-belt, when a straw-rope 

 would suit him," &c. : it appears that these allu- 

 sions were personally ofiensive to John, who drew 

 his dirk to let out the wind of his pipe, and pro- 

 bably not much caring where he drove it ; at all 

 events, he stabbed the piper to the heart : for 

 which murder it is said that he had to flee the 

 country, and having found an asylum in Eng- 

 land, married there a niece of Hogarth the painter. 

 This is an exceedingly improbable tradition ; 

 though my informant, an octogenarian of the 

 name of Fraser, related the story to me twenty 

 years ago, and firmly believed in the facts liim- 

 self, which he derived from his father, a contem- 

 porary of the event. It is not likely that the 

 brother of " Mac Skimei" should have been put 

 to much inconvenience in those days for the mur- 

 der of a piper, and some inferior member of the 

 family must have been concerned in the affair : 

 for Simon Lord Lovat, in his letters, makes fre- 

 quent allusion to the death of his brother John, 

 about the year 1715, and alludes to his loss with 

 expressions of strong and apparently sincere at- 

 tachment. The only interest attached to the 

 legend is, that a claim to the title of Lovat was 

 brought forward in 1834, by a claimant who main- 

 tained his descent from this John : he was styled 

 Eev. Alexander Garden Fraser, a Presbyterian 

 clergyman at New York, in America. Mr. Fra- 

 ser's pedigree was deduced from John, who was 

 said to have returned to Scotland, and died at 

 Greenock, leaving two sons : 1. William, who 

 died unmarried ; and 2. James, who was a com- 

 missary in the British army during the American 

 revolutionary war ; afterwards settled as a mer- 

 chant at Charleston, in the U. S., and died there, 

 leaving a large family, of whom the claimant was 

 the eldest son ; he married a Miss Frances AVebb 

 of New York, by whom he had issue five sons and 

 three daughters. Mr. Fraser's claims, though be- 

 lieved by many, were never satisfactorily esta- 

 blished ; and he appears to have subsequently 

 returned to the U. S., as he died at New York on 

 6th March last, aged sixty-six years, His death 



