The Jacobite rising of 1715 was the first serious armed attempt to restore the exiled Stuart dynasty to the British throne. It began when John Erskine, Earl of Mar - dismissed from office under the new Hanoverian king George I - raised the standard of James Francis Edward Stuart, the 'Old Pretender', in the eastern Highlands in September 1715. Within weeks Mar had gathered a substantial Highland army and a portion of the Scottish nobility around him. The Jacobites took Perth and then moved on Inverness, hoping to secure the north of Scotland. Inverness fell. Some of the rebel force then marched the few miles east to Culloden House, the seat of the Forbes family - one of the most prominent pro-Government clans in the north - and laid siege to it. The objective was not merely military. Holding the Forbes seat would deny the Hanoverians a base, would humiliate a leading loyalist family, and would draw in adherents who otherwise might hedge their bets.

What the besiegers had not bargained for was the lady of the house. The laird, John Forbes, was elsewhere; his wife and her household servants made up the defence. When the Jacobite force summoned her to surrender, Lady Forbes gave her famous reply about gun-shot range and royal title. She was not bluffing. The household held muskets, powder, ball, and supplies, and the house itself was stoutly built. Seven weeks of siege followed. Musket fire passed both ways; the rebels brought up cannon and pounded the walls. One cannonball, badly aimed, struck a tree near the house. The falling timber killed a Jacobite rebel sheltering beneath it. The tradition of the ivy-grown tree, recorded much later, suggests that the spot was remembered locally for some time. Servants in the house cared for the wounded, brought powder, watched the perimeter through whatever loopholes the architecture afforded. Lady Forbes refused to yield. The Forbes clan had been a Hanoverian bulwark in the north since the Glorious Revolution, and she made no secret of where her loyalties lay.

Help came from an unlikely quarter. Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, was a man already infamous for opportunism. He had spent years as a fugitive in France, had at various times offered his services to both the Hanoverian government and the Jacobite court, and now he saw an opening. Clan Chattan controlled the area around Culloden, and if Lovat could disperse the clansmen besieging the house, he would simultaneously do the Government a favour and assert his own authority over a rival territory. He mobilised the Frasers, marched on Culloden, and broke up the besieging force. Clan Chattan abandoned the siege and joined the main Jacobite army at Perth on 5 October with 700 men. Lovat's reward was material. He used the Forbes family's gratitude to gain the support of John Gordon, 16th Earl of Sutherland, and of John Forbes himself, and these powerful endorsements helped him secure freedom from outstanding charges of treason. He had broken a Government siege; the Government, in turn, found it could not prosecute him. The 1715 rising ended in defeat at Sheriffmuir in November and Lovat lived to plot another day. Thirty years later, in 1745, the cycle would begin again. Culloden House would be besieged a second time. And Lovat - by then aged, still notorious - would back the wrong side at last.