Culloden, "the Duke of Cumberland gave Brigadier Mordaunt the Pretender's coach, on condition he rode up to London in it. 'That I will, Sir,' said he, 'and drive till it stops of its own accord at the Cocoa Tree.'"[1] Lord Elibank had been deeper in the cause than was known at the time. According to Sir Walter Scott, the Stuart Papers show that "he carried on a correspondence with the Chevalier after 1745, which was not suspected by his most intimate friends."[2] He probably was made to pay dearly for his attachment to the exiled family. Lord Cromartie, one of the rebel lords, "had been," says Walpole, "receiver of the rents of the king's second son in Scotland, which it was understood he should not account for, and by that means had six hundred pounds a year from the Government. Lord Elibank, a very prating, impertinent Jacobite, was bound for him in nine thousand pounds, for which the duke is determined to sue him."[3] If the money was exacted, the loss must have been severely felt, for Elibank was somewhat parsimonious. "When he heard of John Home's pension, he said, 'It is a very laudable grant, and I rejoice at it; but it is no more in the power of the king to make John Home rich than to make me poor.'"[4] Perhaps when he said this he was thinking how the king had done his best to impoverish him by exacting "the penalty and forfeit of his bond," and had failed.
One day he and Dr. Robertson called on Johnson at Boswell's house, and the talk turned on the Rebellion, Lord Elibank, addressing the historian, said: "Mr. Robertson, the first thing that gave me a high opinion of you was your saying in the Select Society, while parties ran high, soon after the year 1745, that you did not think worse of a man's moral character for his having been in rebellion. This was venturing to utter a liberal sentiment, while both sides had a detestation of each other." Such a sentiment must have been particularly comforting to a man who perhaps was still plotting treason. The Select Society had been founded in 1754 by Allan Ramsay the painter, aided by Robertson, Hume, and Adam Smith. "It rubbed off all corners by collision," says Dr. Carlyle, "and made the literati of Edinburgh less captious and pedantic than they were elsewhere."[5] If collision always rubbed off corners, there was enough between Elibank and Hume to have
