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.