Although his time spent in what is now the Lower Argyll Tower of Edinburgh Castle cannot have been comfortable, he was home again by Christmas. His old friends did not let him down, for on November 13, 1707, the Earl of Mar—who was then at the Palace of Whitehall in London—wrote to tell his brother, Lord Grange, “I have got the Queen’s hand to a warrand for seting Robt Moray at libertie.”
Robin was released from prison in December, but his time by his own hearth was brief.
The following spring, after the failure of the Jacobite invasion attempt, he was taken up again with other Scottish noblemen and members of the gentry suspected of being involved in the plot. They were marched as prisoners to London in three divisions, sent from Scotland a week apart from one another. Robin was in the first division, which left Edinburgh on April 29, 1708, and was along the way exposed to all the coarse humiliation heaped upon them by the English standing at the roadsides.
It was while he was on this march and separated from his family—unable to protect them and most likely worried for their welfare—that his second son, named John, was born.
He would not get to hold his son for many months. Despite the efforts of his noble friends, he was held prisoner in the Tower of London until he was finally able to arrange his release in January 1709 in exchange for posting ￡6,000 bail.
None of this seemed to stop him from continuing his service to the exiled King James VIII, although he did it in clandestine style—at least until the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, when he came out into the open with his sympathies, serving, like his brothers Maurice and William, in a regiment of horse.
In late October, he was captured in a surprise night raid on Dunfermline. Held under close guard at Stirling Castle for almost a year, he was then moved with other prisoners to await trial at Carlisle, in England, the British government having conveniently decided that the wording of one of their recently passed Coercion Acts gave them the right to breach the Acts of Union, which had promised Scottish subjects that they would be tried in Scotland, by their own laws.
Robin was condemned to die on December 27, 1716—but the execution was not carried out, and he remained a prisoner at Carlisle until the general indemnity issued by King George in July 1717 set him free again.
He had been imprisoned, unable to be with his wife and young children, for nearly two years. I cannot imagine the range of his feelings as he made his weary way home to his family.
The joy of his homecoming wasn’t to last. His wife, Janet, fell ill shortly after his return, and by mid-October that year she had died, leaving him with three sons and two daughters.
He never remarried, that I’ve found a record of.
If he continued his service to King James, he did it discreetly. I’ve found only one mention of Robin traveling over to France afterward, in 1721, on some business that took him to Paris, from where he returned home to Scotland with his brother Maurice, who’d lived in France from the time he had carried some money and messages there for King James in the wake of the ’15 rebellion.
Robert Moray died at home in Perthshire on January 27, 1733, having managed, in spite of the dangers and intrigues he’d weathered, to live till his sixty-third year.
Most history books don’t mention him, but I feel that a man who lived a life like his deserves to be remembered, so I hope you will indulge me for the space that I’ve allowed him here.
He might turn in his grave to know one of his grandsons, Robert Keith, grew to be a diplomat in service to the government of Britain—that same government that held Robin for so long in prison, and came close to killing him. He’d doubtless turn a little faster in his grave if he were told Sir Robert Murray Keith—his own great-grandson—not only continued to serve Britain as a diplomat, but earned some fame by rescuing the sister of King George III when she was held a prisoner in Copenhagen. Still, it might be some solace to him that one of his great-granddaughters—Anne Murray Keith—was well-known to the great novelist Sir Walter Scott, who used her as the inspiration for the character of Mrs. Bethune Balliol in his novel Chronicles of the Canongate, and who, after her death, wore a memorial ring with her name inscribed upon it, to remember his “excellent friend.”
Robin’s brother, John Moray, isn’t often mentioned in the history books either.
The story of John Moray’s part in the true-life Franco-Jacobite invasion attempt that happened in the spring of 1708 became my book The Winter Sea, where Captain Thomas Gordon first stepped from the pages of the history books and took on life for me, as well.