Jean Moffat was born in about 1666 at Netherbarns just outside Galashiels, the daughter of James Moffat, tenant farmer and determined Covenanter. Jean was perhaps even stronger her beliefs and persistently refused to attend the services of the local minister. In consequence her father was fined 1,000 merks, for failing in his legal responsibility to ensure religious conformity by his family and farm workers. Her father was already in trouble, accused of harbouring rebels and placed on the Fugitive Roll. Their house was raided by dragoons and goods and livestock carried off.
On 18 May 1685, following the authorities’ round-up of many of the most resolute Covenanters, Jean found herself in Burntisland, Fife amongst the 45 women prisoners to be sent to Dunnottar Castle in Kincardineshire. There she was held about 80 days in cramped, filthy conditions housing over 160 people. By mid August, Privy Council members were impatient to remove the most recalcitrant Covenanters and on 18 August, Jean was banished for refusing oaths of allegiance to the King and opposition to taking up arms in rebellion and given to George Scot of Pitlochie for transportation.
Once aboard the Henry and Francis lying off the port of Leith, she was one of 28 signatories of a testimony protesting the banishment of the Covenanters. The ship left on 5 September 1685 and arrived at Perth Amboy on 7 December with Jean amongst the survivors of the disease-ridden voyage.
Jean was amongst the party of Covenanters who decided to leave East Jersey and head for New England where they hoped to encounter English settlers who held sympathetic religious views. By 1686, she was living in Waterbury, Connecticut, where she married John Fraser [or Frazer], a fellow Dunnottar prisoner transported on the Henry and Francis.
John, a university graduate from the Fraser of Pitcalzean family, Nigg in Ross-shire, had earned a living in London as a writing master where he had been arrested in December 1684 for attending a house conventicle. Once in Waterbury he was licensed to preach by local Congregationalist ministers. This stood him in good stead when he and Jean returned to Scotland after the accession of William and Mary and the consequent resumption of religious authority on the part of the Presbyterian Church. Jean was then able to visit with her father who was once more living on his farm at Netherbarns.
John Fraser was ordained as minister of Glencorse parish near Penicuik, Midlothian in December 1691, before transferring to Alness in Easter Ross in 1695, pressed by the General Assembly to move to help address a shortage of Gaelic-speaking ministers.
John Fraser wrote a memoir of his experience as a Covenanter prisoner which was used by Robert Wodrow in his History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, in the process firmly planting the tales of Dunnottar Castle and the voyage of the Henry and Francis in popular Covenanter memory.
Jean and John had five children after their return to Scotland: Jean, James, Katherine, Isabel, and John. Their son James trained for the ministry and later (1736) also became minister of Alness. James’s collected works were published in 1834, with the addition by the editor of an account of his and his parents’ lives.
Following the death of John Fraser in 1711, Jean married widower George Gordon, minister of Cromarty in 1714. There she was regarded as an attractive woman though known – not to her face – as ‘Luggie’, as it was rumoured that she had suffered the fate other banished Covenanters of having her ears clipped. Hugh Miller relates in his Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (1835), his history of Cromarty, that this was not the case although she always kept her ears covered. Jean may have outlived George Gordon, who died in 1749.
