Castle till February 4th, 1746, and in Edinburgh Castle till May 29th of said year. We were seven in number, taken upon the seventh day of the week, the seventh day of the month, and the seventh month of the year, reckoning from March.'[1] An incident of the roping of these prisoners at their removal from Stirling to Edinburgh is narrated by the author.[2]

After his release from imprisonment Mr. Forbes appears to have been invited to reside in the house of one of the most wealthy members of his congregation, Dame Magdalene Scott, Lady Bruce of Kinross, the widow of Sir William Bruce of Kinross. She resided in the Citadel of Leith, and was a strong Jacobite; Mr. Forbes tells how her house was on more than one occasion the special object of the Government's concern, as the Prince himself was supposed to be concealed there.[3] For this lady Mr. Forbes cherished the highest esteem, speaking of her as 'the worthy person, the protection of whose roof I enjoy.'[4] She died in June 1752, aged 82; but before that event took place he had left her house, on the occasion of his marriage to his first wife, Agnes Gairey. This was in 1749,[5] and the lady died on 4th April of the following year.[6] He afterwards married, as his second wife, Rachel, second daughter of Ludovick Houston of Johnstone, in Renfrewshire, of whom he makes frequent mention in The Lyon. She was in fullest sympathy with her husband's Jacobite proclivities, and occasionally sent presents to the Prince abroad.

In 1762 Mr. Forbes was chosen and appointed Bishop of Ross and Caithness, and in 1767 he was elected Bishop of Aberdeen by a majority of the local clergy, but the College of Bishops disallowed the election in his case, and another was appointed. How keenly Mr. Forbes felt this action will be seen from his conversation and correspondence with Bishop Gordon of London. He twice visited his diocese in the north, and kept full journals of his progresses.[7] They are similar to a diary of his visit to Moffat, which is inserted in The Lyon,[8] and which was doubtless so inserted because of its concern with certain Jacobite matters; but it is also of interest on other accounts.

In later life, when, from having less to chronicle, he was not so taken up with this work, Bishop Forbes was an occasional contributor to the Edinburgh Magazine, in which he published a number of topographical and antiquarian articles. Several of these, relating to Roslin Chapel, were collected and printed in 1774, under the nom de plume of Philo-Roskelynsis. He died at Leith on 18th November 1775 and was buried in the Maltman's Aisle in South Leith parish church. He does not appear to have had any children.

The origin of this collection, The Lyon in Mourning, probably dates from the author's imprisonment in Stirling Castle or Edinburgh Castle. In the latter place he was brought into contact with some of those who had taken an active share in the cause of Prince Charles, and it was, doubtless, while listening to their narratives that he was inspired with the idea of committing them to writing. Why he called his collection by the name it bears, he nowhere explains. It has been suggested that it was 'in allusion to the woe of Scotland for her exiled race of princes;' the Lyon being the heraldic representative of the nation. Bishop Forbes, in his own mind, no doubt, identified the Scottish nation with the comparatively few Jacobites within the country.

But whatever may be said about the title, the Bishop's purpose was, as he declared, to make up 'a Collection of Journals and other papers relative to the important and extraordinary occurrences of life that happened within a certain period of time,' and which, he adds, 'will serve to fix a distinguishing mark upon that period as a most memorable æra to all posterity.... I have,' he proceeds to say, 'a great anxiety to make the Collection as compleat and exact as possible for the instruction of future ages in a piece of history the most remarkable and interesting that ever happened in any age or country.' Nor was it only what particularly concerned that 'certain Young Gentleman' (as they were wont to style the Prince) that Bishop Forbes set himself to gather information, but also whatever could be gleaned about those who followed his fortunes. He was even desirous that every act of kindness performed by the victorious Hanoverians towards their vanquished enemies, should be cherished with the names of the doers, that they with the others 'may be carefully recorded and transmitted to posterity, according to truth and justice.'

And thus, though it be a purely Jacobite Collection, it is evident throughout that the author was most scrupulous with regard to the truth of the facts he relates. Hence, in seeking for narratives of the different episodes in the rebellion, his endeavour was to get them at first-hand from participators therein. 'I never chuse,' he says, 'to take matters of fact at second-hand if I can by any means have them from those who were immediately interested in them.'[9] Where this could not be obtained, he instructed his correspondents to 'have a particular attention to dates, and to names of persons and places;' for, he adds,'I love a precise nicety in all narratives of facts, as indeed one cannot observe too much exactness in these things.... I love truth, let who will be either justified or condemned by it.... I would not wish to advance a falsehood upon any subject,' not even on Cumberland himself, for any consideration whatsoever.

His assiduity in the work is likewise noteworthy. Assuming that he began collecting in the end of 1746, by September 1747 he records that he has covered between twenty-four and thirty sheets, which by 19th April following had increased to about forty, by 4th July 1748, to sixty sheets, and by the following month about seventy, which he had bound up in several octavo volumes. These (from the point at which he mentions this[10]) would be at this time four in