Note 177 — ORIGINS OF THE ’FORTY-FIVE PAPERS OF JOHN MURRAY OF BROUGHTON

This was Alexander (or Alistair), Lord Lovat’s second son, by his wife Margaret Grant, sister of Sir James Grant of Grant. Born 1729, died unmarried 1762.

The school at Prestonpans was kept by Mr. John Halket who had been tutor in Lovat’s family at Castle Downie. Peggy Vint’s was a tavern in Prestonpans. Alexander Carlyle gives an account of an extraordinary carouse there in 1741, at which Lovat, Erskine of Grange, Halket, four Fraser henchmen, young Lovat, Halket’s son, and Carlyle were present. Lovat said Grace in French, and he ‘swore more than fifty dragoons’ at the fish. The claret was excellent and circulated fast. There was a piper at the tavern, and the landlady’s daughter Kate was ‘very alluring.’ Lovat, then seventy-five, and Grange not much younger, warmed with wine, insisted on dancing a reel with Kate Vint: ‘this was a scene not easily forgotten.’ A banquet at Grange’s house of Preston, with a ‘new deluge of excellent claret,’ finished what Carlyle calls ‘a very memorable day.’—Carlyle, Autobiography, p. 58.