LOVAT, SIMON FRASER, 12TH BARON (c. 1667-1747), Scottish chief and Jacobite intriguer, was born about 1667 and was the second son of Thomas Fraser, third son of the 8th Lord Lovat. Young Simon was educated at King's College, Aberdeen. and one of his first acts on leaving college was to recruit 30o men from his clan to form part of a regiment in the service of William and Mary, in which he himself was to hold a command. Among other outrages in which he was engaged about this time was a rape and forced marriage committed on the widow of the loth Lord Lovat with the view apparently of securing his own suc cession to the estates. A prosecution having been instituted against him by Lady Lovat's family, Simon retired first to the Highlands, and afterwards (1702) to the court of St. Germain.
He planned to land 5,000 French troops at Dundee, where they might reach the north-eastern passes of the Highlands in a day's march, and divert the British troops till the Highlands should have time to rise. Immediately afterwards Soo men were to land on the west coast, seize Fort William or Inverlochy, and thus pre vent the access of any military force from the south to the central Highlands. His plan was continuously kept in view in all future attempts of the Jacobites, and finally acted on in the outbreak of 1745. Lovat was despatched (1703) on a secret mission to ascer tain what forces the chiefs might bring into the field. He found little disposition to rebellion, and he then decided to reveal all that he knew to the government of Queen Anne. He persuaded the duke of Queensberry that his rival, the duke of Atholl. was in the Jacobite plot, and that if Queensberry supported him he could obtain evidence of this at St. Germain. Queensberry foolishly entered into the intrigue with him against Atholl, but when Lovat had gone to France with a pass from Queensberry the affair was betrayed to Atholl by Robert Ferguson, and resulted in Queens berry's discomfiture. The story is obscure, and is complicated by partisanship on either side ; but Lovat was certainly playing a double game. Suspicions got afloat as to Lovat's proceedings. and on his return to France he was imprisoned in the castle of Angoule'me. He remained nearly ten years under supervision, till in November 1714 he made his escape to England.
For some twenty-five years after this he was chiefly occupied in lawsuits for the recovery of his estates and the re-establishment of his fortune. The intervals were filled by Jacobite and Anti Jacobite intrigues, in which he betrayed both parties. When the
rebellion of 1745 broke out, Lovat represented to the Jacobites that his weak health and advanced years prevented him from joining the standard of the prince in person, while to the Lord President Forbes he professed his cordial attachment to the house of Hanover, and expressed regret that his son had joined the Pre tender and taken with him a strong force from the clan of the Frasers. The truth was that the lad was unwilling to go, but was compelled by his father. After the battle of Culloden he was obliged to retreat to the Highlands. Lovat, after enduring extreme hardships in his wanderings, was at last arrested on an island in Loch Morar. He was conveyed in a litter to London, and after a trial of five days sentence of death was pronounced on March 19, I 747. He was beheaded on April 9.
His son SIMON FRASER, Master of Lovat (1726-1782) (not to be confused with another Simon Fraser who saw somewhat simi lar service and was killed in 1777 at the battle of Saratoga), was a soldier, who at the beginning of the Seven Years' War raised a corps of Fraser Highlanders for the English service, and at the outbreak of the American War of Independence raised an other regiment which took a prominent part in it. He fought under Wolfe in Canada, and also in Portugal, and rose to be a British major-general. The family estates were restored to him, but the title was not revived until 1837.
See Memoirs of Lord Lovat (1746 and 1767) ; J. Hill Burton, Life of Simon, Lord Lovat ; J. Anderson, Account of the Family of Frizell or Fraser (Edinburgh, 1825) ; A. Mackenzie, History of the Frasers of Lovat (Inverness, 1896) ; Mrs. A. T. Thomson, Memoirs of the Jacobites ; and W. C. Mackenzie, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat (1908) ; Papers relating to Simon, Lord Lovat edited by J. R. N. Macphail (1924).
a name bestowed, chiefly by dealers and their customers, on some of the smaller short-tailed parrots, from the affection which examples of opposite sexes exhibit towards each other. They belong to the genera Psittacula and Agapornis, the former being South American, the latter African. One of the birds most commonly called love-birds, which, however, bears no near relationship to the above, but is a small, long-tailed parrot, is the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) now familiar in Europe, being bred by hundreds in aviaries. Its native country is Australia.