Lovat, SIMON FRASER, LORD, was born about 1676 at Tanich in Ross-shire. About the beginning of the 14th century his ancestor and namesake, after whom the clan Fraser were called in Gaelic MacShimi, 'sons of Simon,' had migrated from Tweeddale to Inverness-shire; and Hugh, his grandson, had been made Lord Lovat in 1431. Our Simon was educated at King's College, Aberdeen, took his M.A. in 1695, having the year before accepted a commission in a regiment raised for King William. In 1696 his father, on the death of his grand-nephew, Lord Lovat, assumed that title; and Simon next year attempted to abduct the late lord's daughter and heiress, a child only nine years of age. Baffled in this, he seized and forcibly married her mother, a lady of the Athole family—a crime for which he was found guilty of high-treason and outlawed. After four years of petty rebellion (during which, in 1699, he succeeded his father as twelfth Lord Lovat), on Queen Anne's accession, in 1702, when the Athole family became all-powerful, he fled to France, but a twelvemonth later returned to Scotland as a Jacobite agent. He was at the bottom of the 'Queensberry plot,' in which he professed to reveal the policy of the exiled court and a plan for a Highland rising; but the discovery of his duplicity obliged him once more to escape to France. There, by one (the more probable) account, he was kept for some years a prisoner at Saumur; by another, turned Jesuit, and became a popular preacher. He was still the darling of his clan; and in 1714 they sent Major James Fraser as a sort of ambassador to bring him over. Next year his cousin's husband, the holder of the estates, having joined the rebellion, Simon found it his interest to take the government side; his clan at once left the insurgents; and for this good service he obtained a full pardon, with possession of the Lovat territory. His life for the next thirty years was active in intrigues for the consolidation of his influence; and the man who had heretofore had audience with Mary of Modena and the Grand Monarque now sought and obtained a sponsor for his first-born in George I. In the '45 Lovat tried to play a double game, sending forth the clan under his son to fight for the Pretender, whilst to his friend and neighbour, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, he made constant professions of loyalty. Culloden lost, and his castle fired by Cumberland's soldiery, he fled to an island on Loch Morar, where he was found hiding in a hollow tree. He was brought up to London, on the way being sketched at St Albans by his friend Hogarth, and, after trial by impeachment before the House of Lords, was beheaded on 9th April 1747. At his trial he defended himself with ability and dignity, and he met death gallantly, Horace's line on his lips, 'Dulce et decorum est pro patriâ mori.' He is buried in the Tower. A finished courtier, a good scholar, and a most elegant letter-writer, Lovat was also a ruffian, a liar, a traitor, and a hypocrite. A cultured savage, he stands as the incarnation of the clan system at its worst, the very opposite of Scott's 'Fergus MacIvor.' During the lifetime of the lady he had ravished he twice more married—in 1716 Margaret, daughter of the Laird of Grant, by whom he was father of Colonel Simon Fraser (1726-82) and three others; in 1733, Primrose Campbell, of the Argyll family, whom he had inveigled into a house of ill-fame in Edinburgh, and who also bore him a third son, Colonel Archibald Fraser (1736-1815).
See Hill Burton's Life of Lovat (1847), and works there cited; also the Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle, Sir W. Fraser's Chiefs of Grant (1883), Mr Henderson's article in the Dict. of Nat. Biography (vol. xx. 1889), and Major Fraser's Manuscript, edited by Colonel A. Fergusson (2 vols. 1889).