An emissary of James had crossed from Ireland to Scotland with letters addressed to Dundee and Balcarras. Suspicion was excited. The messenger was arrested, interrogated, and searched; and the letters were found. Some of them proved to be from Melfort, and were worthy of him. Every line indicated those qualities which had made him the abhorrence of his country and the favourite of his master. He announced with delight the near approach of the day of vengeance and rapine, of the day when the estates of the seditious would be divided among the loyal, and when many who had been great and prosperous would be exiles and beggars. The King, Melfort said, was determined to be severe. Experience had at length convinced his Majesty that mercy would be weakness. Even the Jacobites were disgusted by learning that a Restoration would be immediately followed by a confiscation and a proscription. Some of them did not hesitate to say that Melfort was a villain, that he hated Dundee and Balcarras, that he wished to ruin them, and that, for that end, he had written these odious despatches, and had employed a messenger who had very dexterously managed to be caught. It is however quite certain that Melfort, after the publication of these papers, continued to stand as high as ever in the favour of James. It can therefore hardly be doubted that, in those passages which shocked even the zealous supporters of hereditary right, the Secretary merely expressed with fidelity the feelings and intentions of his master, [336] Hamilton, by virtue of the powers which the Estates had, before their adjournment, confided to him, ordered Balcarras and Dundee to be arrested. Balcarras was taken and confined, first in his own house, and then in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh. But to seize Dundee was not so easy an enterprise. As soon as he heard that warrants were out against him, he crossed the Dee with his followers, and remained a short time in the wild domains of the House of Gordon. There he held some communications with the Macdonalds and Camerons about a rising. But he seems at this time to have known little and cared little about the Highlanders. For their national character he probably felt the dislike of a Saxon, for their military character the contempt of a professional soldier. He soon returned to the Lowlands, and stayed there till he learned that a considerable body of troops had been sent to apprehend him, [337] He then betook himself to the hill country as his last refuge, pushed northward through Strathdon and Strathbogie, crossed the Spey, and, on the morning of the first of May, arrived with a small band of horsemen at the camp of Keppoch before Inverness.