The Poet Chief

In the spring of 1749, having made his peace with God, an old man was dying. His bed lay amid the remains of a burnt-out thatched cottage on the southern shore of Loch Rannoch in Perthshire. So was ending the life of Alexander Robertson, 13th of Struan, one of the most famous - some would say notorious - men in Scotland. The great cause to which he had devoted his life lay in ruins and many of his followers had been killed in his service. He had been dispossessed, and twice forced to flee to France, under sentence of death, where he spent more than twenty years in exile. He was unique in having taken a prominent part in the three great Jacobite Risings on behalf of the banished Stuart kings. His legacy was debt, some poems and his own legend.   James Irvine Robertson's biography of Alexander Robertson, 13th of Struan, conveys as few others, the passionate feelings which the Stuart risings evoked in the Highlands over a century of political and armed conflict. Meticulously researched, and quoting from a large number of contemporary letters and accounts, the Author has vividly brought the tragedy of the Jacobite cause to us through the life of one of its most faithful participants.