to Catholicism, James was deposed and exiled when a group of powerful Protestant aristocrats invited William of Orange to come to England with an army. The Dutch invasion came to be known by Parliament as the ‘Glorious Revolution’; among its consequences were a strengthening of Protestantism, Whig supremacy and a limitation of royal powers. The Jacobites took their name from the Latinised form of ‘James’, and their ambition was to bring back ‘the king over the water’, James II’s eldest son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who became known as ‘the Old Pretender’. His son, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ or ‘the Young Pretender’, would lead another, more substantial, Jacobite rising thirty years later, in 1745. Both would end in military defeat. Scottish nationalistic resentment over the union and English suspicion of Jacobite tendencies were unavoidable contexts for the lives of families such as the Murrays, which had to make a choice between Scotland and England, Edinburgh and London.
On 15 March 1718, young William Murray set off for London on horseback to take up a place at Westminster School, where he hoped to win a scholarship. He was just thirteen. He stopped at Gretna Green for an overnight stay, then continued south despite problems with his horse, which fell lame in the first leg of the journey, meaning he had to walk part of the way. The distance from Perth to London by road is over four hundred miles. To have completed this trip was a mark of Murray’s tenacity and determination, and a testament to his great energy, which would be remarked upon throughout his life.
He never saw Scotland again.2 It was apropos Murray, by then Lord Mansfield, that Dr Johnson remarked to James Boswell, ‘Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.’3 Not a single letter survives from Murray to his parents, and it seems unlikely that he kept in contact with any of his siblings.4 For some of his critics, he was distancing himself from unsavoury Jacobite connections. His father openly supported James Stuart, as did several of his siblings, including his brother James, who was secretary of the Old Pretender’s court in exile in France.
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