Alexander Cameron (priest)

Alexander Cameron of Lochiel, S.J. (Scottish Gaelic: Maighstir Sandaidh, an t-Athair Alasdair Camshron) (17 September 1701 in Achnacarry Castle, Lochaber, Scotland – 19 October 1746 in Gravesend, Kent, England) was a Scottish Catholic priest and outlawed missionary, who became a Jacobite Army Captain and military chaplain. After being captured after the Battle of Culloden in Lochaber, he died while being held by the Royal Navy as a prisoner of war.

Cameron was born the third son of John Cameron of Lochiel, the 18th chief of Clan Cameron. After being fostered within the clan and raised by relatives, he made his Grand Tour in both Catholic Europe and the British West Indies. While employed at the House of Stuart government in exile in Rome as "an honorary gentleman of the bedchamber" to Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, he converted from the Scottish Episcopal Church to Catholicism.

After ordination as a priest, he was ordered by the Society of Jesus in 1741 to return to Scotland. Living in a cave and aided by two fellow priests, Cameron ran an underground ministry to Clan Chisholm and Clan Fraser of Lovat throughout The Aird and Strathglass for the illegal Catholic Church in Scotland. It was so successful that it provoked a 1744 government crackdown at the insistence of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which forced Cameron to flee to his native district in the Rough Bounds of Lochaber.

Cameron was assigned as a military chaplain to the regiment of the Jacobite Army commanded by his elder brother, Donald Cameron of Lochiel, the 19th chief of Clan Cameron. Alexander Cameron served in this position for the rest of the Jacobite rising of 1745.

Cameron was captured while in hiding at the White Sands of Morar. He died four months later of the conditions of his incarceration aboard Royal Navy Captain John Fergussone's prison hulk H.M.S. Furnace, at anchor off Gravesend.