[2] The period of 1680–1688 was of growing religious persecution in Scotland with the House of Stuart steering for political perdition.
[2] James roused the Scots Covenanters to desperation and also alienated himself from many of the Cavalier families, until finally in 1688 the Stuarts were overthrown in the Glorious Revolution and replaced by William of Orange.
[5] General Hugh Mackay went on to support William of Orange during the Williamite War in Ireland and was killed at the Battle of Steenkerque in Belgium in 1692.
[9] John Gordon, 16th Earl of Sutherland, supporter of the British-Hanoverian Government had received a commission as the king's Lieutenant and arrived by boat from London at his seat Dunrobin Castle on 28 September 1715.
[13] However, Inverness having fallen, 200 Sutherlands, 150 Mackays, 300 Grants, 150 Munros and 50 Forbes of Culloden set out to give Seaforth battle, but he avoided them making his way back to Brahan Castle while his pursuers halted at Fraser of Lovat's Castle Downie until the Earl of Sutherland arrived with more troops.
[14] Also in 1719, George Mackay, 3rd Lord Reay, who was an elder in the Kirk applied to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to furnish his people with clergyman and school masters, and his proposal included dividing the large parish of Durness into three parishes: Tongue, Durness, and Ederachilis, each of which would be provided with a minister and school master.
[16] However, when the Jacobite rising of 1745 broke out George Mackay, 3rd Lord Reay, realized the necessity of united action by those who were friendly to the existing Government.
[17] At the request of Duncan Forbes, Lord Culloden, Lord Reay, Sutherland, Grant, Seaforth and Munro sent levies of troops to Inverness to join John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun, who was a supporter of the Government and who had assumed command of any troops that could be gathered together.
According to Angus Mackay, while Lord MacLeod was at Thurso, Caithness, where there was a Jacobite meeting house until after the Battle of Culloden he was joined by the men of Loch Broom under the brother of Mackenzie of Ballone.
[21] George Mackay, 3rd Lord Reay, then travelled to Leith on the ship named The Sheerness, which had pursued the Jacobites in the Skirmish of Tongue,[23] and remained in the south until the following autumn.
[26] In a letter to a government official dated 2 September 1746, Lord Reay suggested the need to erect new churches and to spread the Gospel among the disaffected.