Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, had been hesitating for months. The young Prince Charles Edward Stuart had landed in the Western Highlands in July 1745 and raised the clans. Lovat - chief of Clan Fraser of Lovat, holder of more than one royal pardon, infamous as a double-dealer even by the standards of Scottish politics - held back. He was old, gout-ridden, and cautious. He had survived three previous decades by switching sides whenever the wind shifted. By October he had made up his mind. According to historian Christopher Duffy, Lovat sent one of his leading clansmen, James Fraser of Foyers, to lead a raid that would kidnap Duncan Forbes. The cynical detail is in the personnel: James Fraser of Foyers was the brother of Hugh Fraser, who had defended Culloden House during the 1715 siege. One Fraser had once held the house for the Government; his brother now led the Jacobite attempt to take it. Such were the divisions a civil war forced through Highland families.

The Stratherrick Frasers came on the house at night. Two hundred men, moving across dark country, expecting to surprise the sleeping household and seize Duncan Forbes before any alarm could be raised. They got close - close enough to exchange musket fire with the sentries. Forbes had taken precautions. Sentries from John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun's Independent Company were on duty around the perimeter; they spotted the approach and opened fire. The Jacobites returned the volley. Then, suddenly, cannon balls began to tear through the trees and undergrowth where the raiders had taken cover. The defenders had brought cannon to bear on positions the Stratherrick men had thought concealed. The illusion of a stealth operation collapsed in noise and flying timber. The Frasers fled. They had not captured Forbes. They had barely got within range of the house. The most senior legal officer in Scotland slept through, or close to through, the kidnapping attempt directed at him.

The morning after the raid, Lord Lovat wrote to Duncan Forbes - the man he had just tried to kidnap - apologising. The letter, recorded by historian Sarah Fraser, called the conduct of the Stratherrick men 'base barbarous, inhuman, and distracted'. Lovat went on, in the same letter, to say that his own son the Master of Lovat was on the point of leaving to join the rebels, would take hundreds of men with him, and that he, Lovat, was powerless to stop him. It was the kind of letter only Lovat could have written: simultaneously denouncing the raid, distancing himself from it, and warning his correspondent that worse was coming - all in the apparent posture of a loyal neighbour caught up in events beyond his control. Forbes was not deceived. Lovat would be tried after the rising, convicted of treason, and beheaded on Tower Hill in April 1747, the last man in Britain executed by axe. The Master of Lovat did join the Jacobite army; the Frasers fought at Culloden the following April. In April 1746, with the rising in its final desperate weeks, Prince Charles Edward Stuart requisitioned Culloden House and used it as his headquarters in the days leading up to the battle that ended the Jacobite cause forever. The house that had refused Lord Lovat's clansmen now sheltered Lord Lovat's prince. A few miles to the south, on Drumossie Moor, the rising would die in a single bloody hour.