ST. KILDA FROM WITHOUT 181 



distinguished lawyers of his day in Scotland, with the 

 help of his infamous boon companion, the Lord Lovat, 

 who, after Culloden, atoned for many abominations on 

 Tower Hill, actually did. 



Lady Grange had, by her own admission, a tongue 

 in her head. 'There is no person/ she pathetically 

 writes, 'but has his faults,' and, until adversity had 

 broken her spirits, was not, perhaps, disposed to be 

 as blind as a well- trained eighteenth-century wife was 

 expected to be to a husband's irregularities. They 

 had agreed to separate ; and she had taken lodgings 

 in Edinburgh. What followed is best told in her own 

 words, written, 1 'with a bad pin,' from St. Kilda, on 

 the 20th January 1738, to a cousin who, though she 

 could scarcely then have known it, was, at the moment, 

 Lord Advocate for Scotland. 



'I lodged in Margaret M'Lean house and a little 

 before twelve at night Mrs. M'Lean being on the plot 

 opened the door and there rush'd in to my room some 

 servants of Lovats and his couson Roderick Macleod he 

 is a writter to the Signet they threw me down upon 

 the floor in a Barbarous manner I cri'd rnurther 

 murther then they stopp'd my mouth I puled out the 

 cloth and told Rod: Macleod I knew him their hard 

 rude hands bleed and abassed my face all below my 

 eyes they dung out some of my teeth and toere the 

 cloth of my head and toere out some of my hair I 

 wrestled and defend'd my self with my hands then 



1 The letter from which the extracts are taken is published at 

 length in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 



