The Last Highlander

SCOTLAND’S MOST

NOTORIOUS CLAN CHIEF,

REBEL & DOUBLE AGENT

SARAH FRASER

HarperPress

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London SE1 9GF

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Published by HarperPress in 2012

Copyright © Sarah Fraser 2012

Sarah Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007229499

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Version: 2018-06-21

Dedication

For Kim

&

For Arabella Vanneck

1959–2011

Epigraph

‘[The soul] demands that we should not live alternately with our opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to common end … The soul demands unity of purpose, not the dismemberment of man’

– ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

‘A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair’

– NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Maps

Lovat Family Tree

Prologue: Death of a Highland chief

PART ONE: FORMATIVE YEARS, C.1670–1702

ONE: Home, birth, youth, c.1670–94

TWO: To be a fox and a lion, 1685–95

THREE: ‘Nice use of the beast and the man’, 1695–96

FOUR: ‘No borrowed chief!’, 1696–97

FIVE: ‘The Grand Fornicator of the Aird’, 1697–99

SIX: Victory and loss, 1699–1702

PART TWO: AT THE COURT OF THE SUN KING, 1702–15

SEVEN: The Stuart Court of St Germains, 1702

EIGHT: Planning an invasion, 1702–04

NINE: ‘A disposition in Scotland to take up arms’, 1703

TEN: The ‘political sensation’, autumn 1703

ELEVEN: The ‘Scotch plot’ exposed, winter 1703–04

TWELVE: ‘You walk upon glass’, 1704–14

THIRTEEN: The end of exile, 1714

FOURTEEN: A necessary change, 1714–15

FIFTEEN: Return to Scotland, 1715

SIXTEEN: Fighting for the prize, 1715

PART THREE: THE RETURN OF THE CHIEF, 1715–45

SEVENTEEN: Home, 1715–16

EIGHTEEN: The legal battles begin, 1716

NINETEEN: Living like a fox, 1716

TWENTY: ‘What a lion cannot manage, the fox can’, 1717–18

TWENTY-ONE: Matters of life and death, 1718–21

TWENTY-TWO: Networking from Inverness, 1722–24

TWENTY-THREE: Lovat under Wade’s eye, 1725–27

TWENTY-FOUR: Tragedy, 1727–31

TWENTY-FIVE: Kidnapping and election-rigging, 1731–34

TWENTY-SIX: A pyrrhic victory, 1734–39

PART FOUR: LORD LOVAT’S LAMENT, 1739–47

TWENTY-SEVEN: Floating between interests, 1738–43

TWENTY-EIGHT: ‘A foolish and rash undertaking’, 1743–45

TWENTY-NINE: Rebellion, July–December 1745

THIRTY: A quick victory, and long march to defeat, December 1745–June 1746

THIRTY-ONE: The beginning of the end, 1746–47

THIRTY-TWO: Dying like a lion

Picture Section

Footnotes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Publisher

ILLUSTRATIONS

Etching of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat after William Hogarth. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

James II and family, 1694, by Pierre Mignard. (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Queen Mary II, c. 1685, studio of Willem Wissing. (Kenwood House, London © English Heritage Photo Library/The Bridgeman Art Library)

King William III by Godfried Schalcken. (© The Crown Estate/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, 18th century English School. (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Louis XIV in Royal Costume, 1701, by Hyacinthe Rigaud. (© Louvre, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

View of Edinburgh by J Slezer (engraved copper plate) produced for D. Browne, London, 1718. (© The British Library Board)

Major James Fraser of Castle Leathers, c. 1720, attributed to John Vanderbank. (Private Collection)

John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll and Greenwich, William Aikman. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll, attributed to Allan Ramsay. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

Sir James Grant. Etching by John Kay, 1798. (© The Mary Evans Picture Library)

The death of Colonel Gardiner on the field of Prestonpans. Sir William Allan lithograph by E. Walker. (© The Mary Evans Picture Library)

George II at the Battle of Dettingen by David Morier. (© Private Collection/Arthur Ackerman Ltd/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Field-Marshal George Wade, attributed to Johan van Diest. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, by William Mosman. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery)

The Battle of Culloden, 1746. Coloured engraving published by R. Sayer and J. Bennett, London c. 1780. (© The National Army Museum, London)

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, mid 18th century English School. (© Royal Armouries, Leeds/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Lord Lovat’s ghost. Mezzotint by Samuel Ireland. (© Grosvenor Prints/The Mary Evans Picture Library)

Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. Engraved by Cook after a portrait by Le Clare. (© The Mary Evans Picture Library)

MAPS

Scotland

Clans of Scotland

Aird of Lovat

Battle of Culloden

LOVAT FAMILY TREE

PROLOGUE

Death of a Highland chief

His execution was a public holiday. Tens of thousands crowded onto Tower Hill for the entertainment. In the Tower the prisoner raged at his barber. In a few hours he would lose his head. The barber offered up the condemned man’s wig, very light on powder ‘on account of it being a rainy day’. The prisoner tossed it back to be taken away, properly groomed, generously powdered and then returned. If he ‘had a suit of velvet embroidered, he would wear it’ today; he would go ‘to the block’ he said, ‘with pleasure’. These sartorial sensitivities belonged to the last aristocrat in Britain to be beheaded.

On this damp, grey, very English, spring day, Thursday 9 April 1747, warders and friends begged his Lordship to petition the King for mercy. ‘He was so old and infirm that his life was not worth asking,’ he replied.

This was not true. His life, and the ending of it, was worth a lot to many different people.

‘For my part,’ he claimed, ‘I die a martyr for my country.’

The barber returned his wig and his Lordship thanked him. ‘I hope to be in heaven by one o’clock,’ he said, ‘or I should not be so merry now … The soul is a spiritual substance.’ It could not be ‘dissolved by time’.

The barber wished the prisoner ‘a good passage’ across. Lovat looked out of the window. He was going to slip through the bars of life and escape to heaven, he was sure of it.

* * *

The previous month, Lord Lovat had been impeached for high treason as a Jacobite rebel. The whole House of his fellow Lords, including many former friends and allies, removed to Westminster Hall especially for the trial and one by one pronounced him ‘Guilty, upon my Honour’.

Simon Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat and leader of Clan Fraser – MacShimidh Mor in Gaelic – was the son of ‘the great Simon’ and the last of the great Celtic–Scottish chiefs. The Frasers had fought their way from France onto the beaches of England with William the Conqueror. One of Lovat’s forebears was Robert the Bruce’s chamberlain. Another had been William Wallace’s compatriot in the Scottish Wars of Independence from England; when the English captured him he was hung, drawn and quartered.

Four hundred years after his ancestor’s bloody end, Lovat was condemned to suffer the same brutal fate, though in the end he was merely beheaded. Lovat would die for an independent Scotland – or ‘North Britain’ as many maps now called it – to secure the fortunes of the Fraser clan, and for Bonnie Prince Charlie’s lunge at the thrones of his Stuart ancestors. For decades Lovat had maintained a double life, spying for and against the Houses of Stuart and Hanover. He had made fast friends and sworn enemies. His scheming had inadvertently led to the 1707 Act of Union, in which the Parliaments of Scotland and England were incorporated into Great Britain. He cursed it as ‘Cette Union infernelle’.

In Georgian Britain, all convicted felons about to ‘be launched into eternity’, both common and gentle, were expected to do so showing plenty of ‘bottom’, a certain gutsy dash. According to the broadsheet reports, in the days before Lovat’s beheading, the old man (he was about eighty when he died) faced his fate with ‘jocoseness’ and ‘gaiety’. Smoking his last pipe, he knocked it out into the fire, and gave the pipe away as a relic. The ash from it fell in little clods. He watched the eddying specks as the dust rioted away in the air. ‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said to his companions, ‘the end of all human grandeur is like this snuff of tobacco.’

As he smoked his pipe, ate his last meal, drank beakers of hot chocolate, dressed and prayed, the wooden scaffold grew greasy and slippery in the morning drizzle. London life went on around it. Maids raised fires in the first-floor drawing rooms around the square on Tower Hill, to take the chill from the rumps of the curious rich and rare as they watched in comfort. Tall chimneys smoked.

Before dressing to spectate at Tower Green, a gentleman wrote to his friend over breakfast. ‘Lord Lovat is to lose his head in a few hours, and the day being rainy is likely to prove a great disappointment to the crowds that are hastening to see the execution … Perhaps such tragical scenes may do good to somebody: and though this old man be highly guilty and his guilt very inexcusable, yet a considerate spectator cannot but be led to pity and bewail the corruption and infatuation of human nature when he sees a man almost at the utmost period of human life, under no necessitous circumstances … with a plentiful fortune and everything he could reasonably desire without any danger of losing it; and yet not content therewith, he must disturb the peace of the country, and endeavour to overthrow the constitution thereof. Men should consider that when they are endeavouring to break down hedges a serpent may bite them.’

Soldiers marched to the base of the scaffold. Unhurried, they formed up in rows between the block and the mob. Many of the crowd had gathered early, clambering up the stairs to rows of wooden benches, to get a clear view across to the block on the same level as the victim. Towards ten o’clock, one of the packed timber terraces, desperately overcrowded, collapsed. Those beneath panicked and drove themselves back from the splintering beams and planks. Bodies were crushed and impaled. The injured were carted away, some ‘screaming themselves to death’. There were nine corpses. The wood was shoved to one side, to be looted for firewood by the poor.

News of the slight delay this incident caused to proceedings reached Lovat.‘Good,’ he grunted, ‘the more mischief the better the sport.’ Sensitive to omens all his life, it was a sign that God was on his side. This execution was a sin.

Lesser players in the drama came and went from the scaffold. One was Mr Baker, the chaplain from the Sardinian Embassy, and the only Roman Catholic priest licensed to practise in England. He knelt now before the image of the crucified Lord and prepared himself to oversee the release of another papist ingrate from the twists and turns of the mortal coil. Government representatives lounged about on the scaffold, chatting with Lovat’s closest clansmen and friends. The gentlemen and bureaucrats gazed with distaste on the rabble. The officials were here to get the administration of the sentence right, and to record any last words of inspiration or insurrection. Carpenters hauled an empty coffin up steep steps, and dumped it in a corner. The executioner, John Thrift, laid out and checked the tools of his trade, and fiddled around the block.¹

The huge square had the atmosphere of a gala occasion. The Bonnie Prince, Charles Stuart, had slipped the hounds. The Old Fox caged in the Tower was the government’s most high-profile prisoner. There was a clamour to see him. The press had kept the name of the unseen ‘wicked’, ‘dangerous’, ‘notoriously to be suspected’ Lord Lovat in the public consciousness. Even though they had him now, he was still talked up as a threat to national security. The masses were beside themselves. The heart of England shouted, kissed, gossiped, ate and drank. Ballads about the drama began to flow from one to another, celebrating victory over ‘Old England’s Foe’.

As through the city Lord Lovat did pass,

The people in hundreds did follow,

And cried ‘You Old Fox you are catched safe at last’,

While some hissed and others did hollow …

It took about an hour to clear the dead and maimed from the terraces and then the Sheriffs of London sent their message to the prisoner. The axe demanded ‘his body’. When Lovat appeared, the tension ratcheted up by raucous degrees. Although ‘clogged with infirmities and pain’, the old man was an imposing presence. ‘He is tall, walks very upright considering his great age, and is tolerably well shaped,’ reported one news-sheet. ‘He has a large mouth and a short nose, with eyes very much contracted and down-looking, a very small forehead, almost all covered with a large periwig; this gives him a grim aspect, but upon addressing anyone he puts on a smiling countenance.’

No longer any harm to anyone, he had to be helped up the scaffold steps by his servants. James Fraser, a close kinsman and executor of his chief’s will, struggled to compose himself. ‘Cheer up thy heart man,’ Lovat patted his shoulder. ‘I am not afraid … My dear James I am going to heaven, but you must crawl a little longer in this evil world,’ and gave him his silver-topped cane as a memento.

Lord Lovat looked about him: ‘God save us! Why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head that can’t get up three steps without two men to support it?’ he asked, shaking off his supporters and going to test the axe for weight and keenness.

It was very nearly time. ‘Then farewell to wicked Lord Lovat, old Lovat,/Then farewell to wicked old Lovat!’ The chorus rose from the ground. The song lumbered along like an old nag beaten up to a canter, thumping out its taunts. ‘Don’t you love it, Lord Lovat, Lord Lovat?’

Codicils to Lovat’s will prescribed his funeral plans in his homeland, hundreds of miles and a civilisation away. ‘All the pipers from John o’Groats to Edinburgh shall play before my corpse and the good old women in my country shall sing a coronach² before me. And then there will be crying and clapping of hands, for I am one of the greatest chiefs in the Highlands.’

Taking his time, he hirpled over to consider his coffin. The lid, with his name on it, hung open, a door to take his mutilated body down to the underworld. A brass nameplate announced him, ‘SIMON DOMINUS FRASER DE LOVAT, DECOLLAT, April 9, 1747, AETAT SUAE 80’. He leaned against the rails a moment and murmured a line of Horace: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (‘It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country’).

Lovat took in the restless thousands around him, shouting and singing, all fixed on him. In his mind’s eye, he saw his ancestors. From this point on a public scaffold, they moved off from him in a line into the past. They had fought together to make their country independent and free; but Lovat had lived to see that country absorbed into another. He quoted Ovid to himself: ‘Nam genus et proavos et quae non fecimus ipsi Vix ea nostra voca’ (‘For those things which were done either by our fathers or ancestors, and in which we had no share, I can scarcely call my own’).

He knelt down. A kinsman who had helped him ascend to the block knelt near him. They picked up the cloth, a scarlet sheet, to catch his head, and stretched it out between them. The executioner moved his Lordship back a bit. Lovat sat up and the two men spoke. He would bend down, raise his handkerchief and pray, the old aristocrat said. When he dropped the hankie, John Thrift must do it.

Lovat stretched out his short, thick neck as best he could. In under a minute he gave the signal and was launched by the good grace of a single chop. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ‘late unnatural Rebellion’, the failed second coming of the Jacobite Messiah, thudded a step closer to permanent extinction. The crowd roared.

The style in which Lovat met his nemesis was approved of by supporters and detractors alike. That evening Sir Arthur Forbes wrote to his cousin Duncan, a close friend of Lovat’s, in Inverness. ‘It’s astonishing with what resolution and sang froid Lovat dyed today,’ he reflected. ‘Lovat said he dyed as a Christian, and as a Highland chief should, that is, not in his bed.’

He was born to little of this, however.

PART ONE

Formative Years, c.1670–1702

‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’

ONE

Home, birth, youth, c.1670–94

‘A mighty man of war had been added to the race’

– THE REVD JAMES FRASER ON SIMON’S BIRTH

The future 11th Lord Lovat was born around 1670, some 550 miles north of Tower Hill, in a small manor house in the Aird of Lovat, the hub of the Scottish Highlands. The lack of a recorded date illustrates the initial inconsequence of Simon Fraser’s birth to history.

In Simon’s heyday as Lord Lovat his clan territories extended over 500 square miles of northern Scotland. ‘My country’, as Lovat called it, was bigger than King George II’s Hanoverian homeland. Fraser territories fell into two distinct regions: poor Highland and rich Lowland. The estates reaching over to the west coast and heading south-west from Inverness down Loch Ness, were typically Highland: peaty soil covered in rough grass; rushes and heather rising from wind-whipped moors to stony peaks of over 3,000 feet. Between them sheltered valley floors of startling greenness.

Now almost deserted, in Lovat’s lifetime hundreds of families inhabited these remote fertile glens: the kindred, or ‘family’, of up to 10,000 that was Clan Fraser. Many passed their lives without venturing even once to the regional capital, Inverness – though the young men would pour out of the hills to fight if the chief summoned them with the fiery cross. Visitors from the Lowlands or England in the early eighteenth century regarded the Highlands with appalled distaste. ‘The huge naked rocks, being just above the heath, resemble nothing so much as a scabbed head,’ shuddered an English army officer. The ‘dirty purple’ heather sickened him. Yet the 11th Lord Lovat’s wild hill country produced his most loyal and ferocious fighting clansmen and their lairds, and Lovat returned their devotion with a passion.

The common people’s year followed an ancient pastoral pattern. Their stock was their wealth and security; their economy was based on exchange, with hardly any money being involved. Visiting tinsmiths, tailors or cattle dealers received hospitality and, say, cheese, a hide, or wool in return for their services, news of wars and national crises, folk tales and songs. These Frasers struggled to produce enough to survive the snowbound winters. In their calendar, January was An t-Earrach in Gaelic – the ‘tail’ end of the year, not the beginning. By then the grain chest was empty, the livestock emaciated from a winter indoors with too little to eat and from being bled to provide blood to mix with oatmeal. When the spring grass came the poor animals had to be carried out of the byres.

A clan was divided into branches. At the top was the chiefly family, and the families of his close cousins. Each branch was headed by a laird called after his small estate – such as Fraser of Foyers, Fraser of Gorthleck, Fraser of Castleleathers – and held by tack (lease) or wadset (mortgage). He might be responsible for up to 300 ordinary kinsmen and existed in a state of genteel financial stress. The minor lairds, who managed the Highland parts of the estates, could not make ends meet without the financial support that service to their chief earned them. As a consequence, upcountry men were more old-fashioned than their low-country brethren. Unlike English landowners, clan chiefs such as Lord Lovat kept large bodies of armed men in a state of semi-militarised readiness to protect the clan, and travelled nowhere without a ‘tail’ of up to a hundred of well-accoutred followers on horse and foot. The hill lairds were the first to make up Lord Lovat’s ‘tail’. He loved them above all his clansmen.

The other half of the Fraser chief’s territories was quite different from the hills and glens and was more familiar to foreigners from the south. The area known as the Aird of Lovat, around the mouth of the River Beauly on the east coast of the Scottish Highlands, was first-class agricultural land. This part of the Lovat estates provided nearly all the chief’s income, and the farms and estates here generated more than enough to meet their lairds’ needs. They did not need the extra money earned by traditional service to the chief. The wealthier east-coast lairds might become lawyers, officers in the British Army, politicians in Inverness and Edinburgh, or serve in local government.

Simon’s eastern territory stretched from the Aird, ten miles eastwards along the sheltered Beauly Firth to the eye of the Highlands, Inverness. Here, ambitious men, keen to market intelligence about this vast semi-autonomous region of the Scottish state to the authorities in Edinburgh or London, noted everything that happened. Lovat’s estates lay at a crossroads between the expanding world of Britain and her colonies, and the self-contained world of the clans.

At the time of Simon’s birth, the clan proclaimed widespread loyalty to the ancient royal House of Stuart. The Stuarts ruled in sacred bond with the land, just as a chief was ‘married to his clan and country’. However, decades of bloody internal conflict, ending just before Simon’s birth with the restoration of Charles II, sowed a horror of uncontrolled violence. However, in the Scottish and English governments’ minds, this independent-minded civilisation on its northern frontier, half of whom did not even speak English, posed the single biggest threat to the security of the fast-changing Scottish and British nations. Fraser country was, therefore, of strategic importance to any central authority intent on imposing the will of central government.

As the brother of a chief and great-uncle to another chief, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, grew up at the heart of this world at Castle Dounie, the historic stronghold of Clan Fraser. At the centre of the Aird of Lovat, the ancient fortress loomed on a manmade mound above the banks of the Beauly River. Towers at each corner of the castle and the thick walls between them offered protection to hundreds of the chief’s ordinary kin in times of famine or feud. If necessary, over 400 people could sleep there.

At Dounie, the Fraser chief maintained an entourage of staff, kin and allies who regulated the life of a Highland nobleman and the thousands who depended on him for their safety. One kinsman was fear an taighe, the head of the household. He controlled the chaplain, piper, harpist, steward, grooms, pantry boys, cooks, and scores of scallags (servants) running around beneath them. The principal Fraser families sent their sons to the chief’s household ‘to educate, polish and accomplish them’; they were ‘exchanged at the yeares end, and others taken … in their place’. The bonds this fostering forged throughout the clan endured for life and offered mutual protection in the frequent times of trouble that were to be a feature of Simon the future 11th Lord Lovat’s life.

Simon was the second son of Thomas of Beaufort. ‘Beaufort’ was another name for Castle Dounie. An honorary title, ‘of Beaufort’ was attached to the surname of the second line of the family tree, after the chiefly family, the Lovats. The title expressed the closeness of the connection between the two (Simon’s father was often called simply ‘Beaufort’). If Beaufort’s noble cousin Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, failed to raise a living male heir, then the male Beaufort Frasers would rise to be the heirs. Acknowledging their position, they had to prepare themselves for what they hoped would not happen: their cousin’s incapacity or death. It followed therefore that the men of the second line of the clan elite filled the most important clan posts.

From this position, in 1650, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, aged just eighteen, led a thousand Fraser men south to fight Cromwell’s New Model Army on behalf of Charles Stuart, recently returned from France. On 3 September 1651 a Cromwellian army numbering 28,000 met 16,000 Royalists at Worcester, in the last battle of the English Civil War. The New Model Army captured over 10,000 prisoners, among them young Thomas Fraser of Beaufort. Cromwell deported Beaufort’s fellow Fraser prisoners to Barbados as indentured labourers, or slaves. Simon’s father was lucky to survive. He was sent north and ‘keeped several years in a dungeon in the citadel that the English made in Inverness’, as Cromwell put Scotland under heavy military occupation.

Scotland eviscerated itself in the religious and dynastic wars of the mid-1600s. The country strained to cope with the thousands of government soldiers garrisoned and quartered on the nation. The troops had free rein to get supplies where they could, with the result that ‘be-tuixt the bridge end of Inverness and Gusachan, twenty-six miles, there was not left in my countrie a sheep to bleet, or a cock to crow day, nor a house unruffled’. Women were raped, animals butchered and the harvest carried away. Inverness shrank back ‘demure under a slavish calm’, economically ruined, said the Fraser chronicler. Lairds and chiefs were bankrupt, or fought ruthlessly to restore their fortunes. Cromwell’s victory and his subjection of Scotland gave the Scots a bitter taste of union with England that they were to remember in 1707, when another English ruler pressed them to give up their sovereignty.

After the Civil War, Thomas Beaufort married Sybilla MacLeod, the daughter of another chief, John MacLeod of MacLeod. It was usual for clan elites to intermarry in order to reinforce strategic alliances. Simon’s mother, Sybilla, grew up at ancient Dunvegan Castle, towering on a rocky promontory on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Skye as if carved from the cliff. Sybilla gave Beaufort a child each year of their fourteen-year marriage, dying with the last, when Simon was just eight. Altogether nine of their children died in childhood. The surviving five, in order of age, were: Alexander; Simon; John (who adored his older brother Simon); and the girls, Sybilla and Catherine. Thomas Beaufort lived most of his life within a few miles of Dounie, but whether ‘from his numerous family, or want of patrimony, appears to have been in not very wealthy circumstances’, said the Reverend James Fraser.

Though there is no date for Simon’s birth, the Reverend James, who was also the chiefly family’s chaplain, recorded that at Castle Dounie, ‘at the propitious moment, many swords hanging in the old hall leapt from their scabbards, indicating how mighty a man of war had been added to the race’. Even in earliest youth, Simon’s face expressed force of will. His steady gaze gave the impression of watchfulness, as his eyes scrutinised and his ears listened to his father and the Reverend James Fraser. He and his brothers were tall, vigorous and brave, when many of the older generation were exhausted by wars.

The route that took the Beaufort Fraser children from their home, the manor house ‘Tomich’, to Castle Dounie, to play with their aristocratic cousins, led them through the village of Beauly. Hugh, the 8th Lord Lovat, assumed his social and political domination of the regional capital, Inverness, in matters of politics and business. However, it was Beauly and the beautiful Aird of Lovat, not Inverness, that defined young Simon’s horizons. Here, Simon and his brothers and sisters learned to ride and hunt. The males of the upper reaches of the clan sometimes spent as much as a third of the year hunting. It kept them fit and ready, trained to act in a body. If the fiery cross went up, they could fly together in an instant and chase men not deer.

When clans with territories north of the Highland capital, such as the Mackenzies whose lands bordered Fraser country, wanted to go to Inverness to attend to their affairs, they crossed the River Beauly at the ford in the village. Here they would have to pay Fraser men a toll and declare their business. In this way the Frasers were able to control an important point of access for the northern clans. A strong Fraser chief could use his geographic position to his advantage and help manage the north for the government in Edinburgh. The rewards he sought were the usual expressions of gratitude: perquisites and government positions. Geography blended always into geopolitics.

As well as being a soldier, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort was a thoughtful, scholarly man. When the 8th Lord Lovat was dying, Thomas sat for weeks at Castle Dounie by his deathbed, ‘entertaining him with history and divinity’. Simon inherited from his father a passion for clan and national history, theology and philosophical debate, as well as the satisfaction of training and leading a body of armed kinsmen. The Beaufort Fraser children received an informal education in clan history and their place in the world from the Reverend James Fraser. The son of a laird, Reverend James was at ease with English, Gaelic, French and Latin, and ‘had a useful knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, German and Italian’. Simon Fraser would acquire the same languages, becoming fluent in four and competent in five.

In his youth, the Reverend James ‘mounted his Highland pony, and accompanied by a Highland servant, spent three years touring Britain, Europe and the Holy Land’ in order, he said, ‘to rectify the judgement, enrich the mind with knowledge’, and give it ‘a polish’. Though by turns a Calvinist and Episcopalian, he happily posed as a Roman Catholic to get a room in European monasteries. He visited over thirty European states and on his return wrote Triennial Travels, describing every town and city of note, starting with Inverness. He would dedicate his Chronicles of the Frasers to Simon when he became chief.

For almost five decades, Reverend James ministered at Kirkhill, a tiny settlement near Beauly, and served as family chaplain to the Frasers. As chronicler the Reverend also occupied the role of seanachie, or tradition-bearer, in the clan. In him the history of Scotland, England, Europe and the clan, actual and mythic, resided; he wove them together like a plaid, surrounding the Beaufort Fraser children with a solid sense of history, their duty to the living and to the dead. Their ancestors had served kings and country. So would they. This intoxicating blend of the literal and legendary fired their imaginations. Some of the oldest Gaelic songs, and even lullabies sung by wet nurses, rioted with bloody narratives of the honour their ancestors defended, and the outrages they avenged. Through such tales the children understood the Fraser loyalty to the doomed Stuart King Charles I.

At ceilidhs³ there would be folk tales, poems, theology, history, politics, agriculture, meteorology, games, riddles, repartee, music and medicine, and gossip – all in the Gaelic they liked to speak at home. Great arguments raged over international and local news. In the martial society of the clans, Simon learned, the chief must loom larger than everyone else, keeping his enemies at bay, whilst earning the respect of close friends and allies.

If ceilidh debates grew too heated and threatened to turn bitter or to violence, someone might intervene and call for music, dance or a song – sometimes bawdy. Risqué verse was acceptable at any gathering – though satirising someone’s good name could land you in a duel or a feud. One piece of bawdy by the bravura baronet Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy entitled Bod brighmhor ata ag Donncha (‘Duncan has a Potent Prick’) extended to thirty-two lines of self-praise. Typically Gaelic in spirit, the gist of it was this:

Grizzled Duncan’s organ

I guess is no great beauty,

Adamantine, wrathful,

ever ready to do his duty …

A rheum-eyed hooded giant,

sinuous, out-thrust face, spurty,

A cubit out from its bag,

ravaging, mighty knob-kerry.

Titillation was not the point (though it amused one clergyman enough to copy it into his personal poetry anthology); what this poem conveyed was the nature of a leader, of leadership. Its outrageousness merely educated by entertainment. The hero was a beast of eye-watering proportions and energy; the thought of him made women swoon. The part standing for the whole, the poem described a proper clan chief. The Viking culture of the rampaging warrior hero contributed features to the Celtic idea of an ideal chief. ‘Victorious in battle and conflict’, ‘fearsome’, ‘violent’, ‘wrathful’, with his ‘stately-purple … broad back’, it was the heroic duty of the ‘potent prick chief’ to generate and protect his own. He repelled rivals with the baleful glare of his single ‘canny’ eye, and with his stunning virility ensured the continuance of the natural order.

Laced with humour, verses like this carried a moral to the Beaufort boys, as they sat on the floor fireside in the main room at Tomich, taking it all in. There was no space in this world for a ‘sweet’ and ‘affable’ Fraser chief. Rather, the ceann cinnidh, the head of the kin, must be King Arthur, the Irish Diarmid, the Viking Beowulf, and Scots Wallace and his companion, Sir Simon Fraser, all rolled into one. The boys practised their swordsmanship imagining they were these great heroes, Simon taking the part of his namesake: Sir Simon the ‘Patriot’ Fraser – the ‘talk and admiration of all Europe’ – who was hung, drawn and quartered for his country’s freedom on 8 September 1306, a year after his leader, Wallace.

The Beaufort boys were raised to regard their homeland as the heart of the Highland world, connected to all the exotic parts of Europe the Reverend James visited and described to them. But Alexander, Simon, and John would need more than clan stories to perform their duties as future leading men in the modern world. They would need the experience, erudition and confidence that a broad-based education offered. So the boys were put on ponies and sent to school in Inverness to prepare them for university and the battles ahead.

Though barely twelve miles distance, Beauly and Tomich were a world away from the regional capital. Born and bred Invernessians did not much like Highlanders. The Beaufort Fraser boys were a blend of Highland and Lowland. Wild hill men caused trouble to a royal burgh that prided itself on its modern civic and religious values. Townsfolk were terrorised by the ‘bare-arsed banditti’ who ‘broke open their doors in the night time, and dig through their houses, plundering and taking away the whole moveables, and oftimes assassinating several poor people in their beds’, before heading back to their strongholds in the wilderness.

As civil society settled under Charles II’s rule, Inverness was more Lowland in character. Port towns like Inverness, and the sea lanes they sat on, thronged with traffic again. Over a hundred boats and ships could be anchored in Inverness harbour at any time; they strained at their ropes, ready to take scholars, curious travellers and merchants and their goods to and from the Continent. The Baltic ports, the great medical and ecclesiastical centres at Leyden and Paris, and the trading cities of the Hanseatic League, were more accessible and more familiar to educated Highlanders than most English cities and ports. Thousands of skiffs, fishing boats and ships hauling iron, coal and timber, fish and exotic commodities from all over the known world, sailed in and out of the lesser ports round the coast of northern Scotland.

Between Tomich and Inverness, the men and places that shaped young Simon Fraser’s outlook were at once insular and remote from Edinburgh and London, but also cosmopolitan and Europhile. Dutch Leyden was closer in every way than English London. Thomas Beaufort wanted to educate his boys to belong in all these worlds – Continental and clan, Highland and Lowland, theocratic and Renaissance humanist. A period at grammar school in Inverness would brush up their Presbyterian theology, and their Latin and Greek. Simon would later study at university in Aberdeen, where he would be taught in these classical languages, as young men were across Europe. He needed to be articulate and literate in both.

The grammar school at Inverness was a room under the roof of the Presbyterian church on Kirk Street. The building stood on the banks of the River Ness. The Kirk Session of Elders that administered the school’s business also interfered freely in the lives of the townsfolk. In fact, they saw it as a duty, and ran themselves ragged to keep the people ‘godly’ in the face of Highlanders’ fondness for ‘uncleanness, riots, and extravaiging’ – that is, strolling about the streets when they should be at Divine service. When Simon was a boy, Scotland was a Presbyterian theocracy and men could be hanged for blasphemy, such as denying the reincarnation of Christ or doubting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Along with the Town House, the Market Cross, the Court House, the Gaol and Armoury, the church was one of the matrices of Inverness life. Not only did it house the box pews in which each family shut themselves up to worship; in the body of the kirk, there were also desks for various traders to work from, as well as the school in the attic. Many of Simon’s classmates could not buy a seat in the schoolroom, let alone a table. The children would peer through the holes in the floorboards, watching the men below negotiate with locals and strange-looking foreigners. Heather and grass on the floors muffled draughts and softened the boards under their bottoms. A Lowland minister unhappily stationed to the Highlands, described the students crouching there ‘like pigs in a sty’. Slates in hand, they gazed up at their dominie, Mr Jaffray, who also yearned to return south as soon as possible from this strange place. ‘English ministers did not know much more of Scotland than they did of Tartary,’ another Lowlander concluded.

He could have added that they cared less than they knew. They did not see the multi-layered and shifting array of words and images that entered Simon and his brothers’ minds. Simon’s clan homeland was so remote from the rest of Britain that southerners often made out their wills before venturing there. One traveller to the Highlands returned hugely relieved to get out. ‘I passed to English ground, and hope I may never go to such a country again. I thank God I never saw such another.’

It was traditional for the Master of Lovat (the eldest son), any potential heirs, and the principal gentlemen of Clan Fraser to attend Aberdeen University. Simon Fraser went there later than his peers, after a gap of a few years. The young man who arrived in Aberdeen in 1691 to study was about twenty years old, high-minded, intellectually curious, charming, extremely ambitious and proud. Six foot tall in his stockinged feet, he was bright-eyed with a wide, well-shaped mouth half-smiling above a strong, set jaw. A lace jabot foamed at his neck and a toffee-toned extravaganza of a wig tumbled down his back. Every inch of him proclaimed a self-conscious young Highland gentleman, and a Royalist.

In the 1690s half the population of Scotland lived north of the Highland line; Aberdeenshire was the most densely populated county. Aberdeen was divided into two parts: Old and New, the traditional and progressive incarnations of the town. The university had two colleges. Marischal College in New Aberdeen, founded in 1593, which was governed by a modern, Calvinist spirit; and King’s College in Old Aberdeen, where Simon came to study, as had his father, Thomas, his brother Alexander, and his mentor, the Reverend James, before him. King’s was founded in 1494 to the glory of James IV King of Scots, who died at Flodden Field. Roman Catholic until the mid-seventeenth century, King’s was established on a European Renaissance model, mimicking the universities at Paris and Bologna.

On the chapel tower rose one of the glories of King’s: an open lantern spire. ‘A double arch of crossed stone’, its two stone arms cross over. On top of the lantern spire ‘there standeth a royal crown … upon the top of the crown a stone globe; above it a double cross gilded; intimating as it were by such a bearing, that it is the King’s College’. Here the Crown of earthly power was supported and raised on top of the House of God. Finally, a double cross perched like a gull on the summit of the globe. No one could fail to read the message: at King’s the power of Monarchy, Bishops, Lords and the Lord intertwined. Divine right led to global domination.

As if to sober up the Royalists, God had smitten the crown on the spire in the previous generation, and it ‘was overthrown … by a furious tempest’. The Calvinists at Marischal College cheerfully mocked the Divine pretensions of the King’s College Stuart affiliation after the disaster, but Royalists recalled it was ‘quickly afterwards restored’ and ‘in a better forme’.

Simon Fraser lived in its shadow for five years. As a young man of his times he was steeped in this sort of apprehension of the immanence and intervention of the Divine in human life. He had already known four monarchs, despite his young age: Charles II ruled at his birth, followed by the short reign of Charles’s brother, James II, before James had fled the thrones three years ago, refusing to renounce his Roman Catholicism and the rights of his Roman Catholic son and heir. By 1691, the solidly Protestant William III and Mary II co-ruled England, Scotland and Ireland. Like Cromwell before them, they maintained an experienced standing army in North Britain, quartered throughout Scotland with no regard for the local capacity to feed, water or house all these extra men.

Haars, the sea mists breathed out of the North Sea when the cold sea air meets the warm air off the land, haunted the mud streets around the King’s College buildings, clinging to clothes, wigs and livestock, and drifting against the windows, some glassless, some with tiny opaque panes in the rooms where Simon came to sit, take down his ‘dictats and notts’, and learn. Tallow candles wavered against the gloom of lecture rooms. The gesture of a fire hissed. Eyes, struggling in the half-light to take down etiolated Latin quotations, were further harassed by the smoke. Simon roomed in cramped chambers in a building abutting the chapel.

The curriculum at Aberdeen offered a mix of academic studies, physical and martial training. It continued the education Simon had received at home from the Reverend James. The Reverend’s nephew, Regent (Lecturer) George Fraser, was allocated to Simon as tutor for the duration of his degree. The timetable ran from the beginning of November to the end of June. The ‘conveniendums’ (times of convening to learn) were from seven to nine in the morning. After a break for breakfast, Simon worked from ten in the morning until midday. If it was ‘a play day’ he only worked again from five to six in the evening. If not, he sat from four to six o’clock. Before, after and in between all of this were prayers – in the Common School or at the dining table.

Recalling his university years, Simon described the timetable as gruelling. ‘I was the youth of this Age that applied himself most to College Learning,’ he said with pride. He followed the ordinary degree course in philosophy, yet he disparaged it. ‘I read ten hours every day,’ he said. ‘That four years’ study never signified a sixpence to me except to help me to chatter on some such foolish subject as Ens rationis.’ At other times he conceded that ‘the Philosophy class’ strengthened ‘discourse in arguing, which in my opinion is the most material thing which can be learned at Colleges now’. He could not possibly imagine in 1691 how much he would owe to that ability in later life.

The curriculum gave him more than training in rhetoric and disputation. Many decades ahead Simon would tell a friend: ‘I always observed since I came to know anything in the world, that an active man with a small understanding will finish business and succeed better than an indolent, lazy man of the brightest sense and the most solid judgement.’ His conclusion reflected his reading list at Aberdeen where they studied the recorded writings of Cicero, who pronounced ‘the active life is of the highest merit’. Machiavelli, also on the curriculum, agreed with the Roman: ‘An active man can achieve anything if he repudiates half-measures,’ he suggested. This was the intellectual discourse of Simon’s formative years: Cicero, Virgil, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Petrarch, Pufendorf and Grotius. These men taught Simon the power of human action to direct affairs, and jurisprudence. A strong man could be an agent of change, progress and power thanks to his own efforts – if he was wholehearted, ruthless and prepared. Simon’s life was not merely the effect of God’s, or godly government’s, design. If he needed a rationale for his relentless activity as an adult, Aberdeen and raw necessity supplied it.

After the day’s work, the ‘Hebdomadars’ – a sort of saintly university security force – received the keys of the college gates at nine at night. They would go to check on every room to ‘observe the absents’, or ‘inquire if prayer and reading a part of the Scripture be gone about’. Examination of sacred lessons, and testing students through ‘public disputes … in the Common School’ on Saturday mornings kept Simon busy, honed his debating skills. Sundays meant mortification and endless opportunities, or obligations, for copious prayers.

All his life – as Episcopalian, or Roman Catholic – Simon enjoyed theological dispute. But he kept ‘charity for all mankind’ on this matter, he said. Though passionate about politics, society and culture, religious intensity bored most King’s College men. Typically, Simon’s friends were lovers of the old High Church type of Protestantism. Called ‘Episcopalianism’ in Scotland, it was roughly equivalent to Anglicanism in England. They preferred to believe in bishops appointed by the King, and both appointed by God. The idea of a clan chief corresponded with the mystique of a divinely sanctioned ruler.

When they could escape observation, Simon and his friends frequented the taverns. Failure to keep up enough praying, getting caught drinking or dallying with the serving lasses (Jean Calvin thought lust a sickness only marriage could cure), playing dice and cards, loud singing, and persisting in holding worldly and semi-seditious conversation in their rooms, all incurred punishments. ‘Some crimes are punished corporalie, others by pecunial mulct, and grosser crimes by extrusion.’ You were thrashed, fined, or thrown out.

But Simon’s claim of time-wasting at university disparages the gifts it gave him: tactics, rationale and strategy for effective resistance. All his life, he never doubted Machiavelli’s contention that the ends justified the means. It was not good enough to be merely strong and upright. Machiavelli advised that ‘a Prince … should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves’.

At the end of his degree course, in the winter of 1694/95, Regent George Fraser offered Simon the chance to continue his studies in a civil law degree, an increasingly attractive route for modern clan leaders seeking to avoid blood feuds. The courts were becoming the more usual battlegrounds for defeating clan enemies, in place of the martial law of the glens. Simon began the course at Aberdeen, but then very suddenly withdrew from it. To understand why, it is necessary to go back nine years to 1685 and the reasons he delayed coming to university in the first place: a wedding – specifically its special marriage contract – and a revolution.

TWO

To be a fox and a lion, 1685–95

‘One must be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten wolves’

– MACHIAVELLI

In 1685, Simon was at school in Inverness when he learned that his seventeen-year-old cousin, Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, had taken a wife. The choice of a chief’s bride was of key importance to the political and dynastic interests of the clan, and it would have been conventional for Lord Lovat’s closest Fraser kin to advise him, Thomas Beaufort foremost among them. But no Fraser was consulted. Hugh Lovat’s maternal uncle, Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, made sure of it: he had kept the Fraser cousins apart for many years in order to isolate and control the young boy chief.

Hugh had been orphaned at the age of six, when his father, the 8th Lord Lovat, died at home aged just twenty-nine. After his funeral, the Fraser gentlemen allowed Mackenzie of Tarbat to take young Hugh away. Thereafter he was raised apart from his sisters and his Fraser kindred in Sir George’s home, Castle Leod, fifteen miles from Dounie. That the leading Fraser men allowed a Mackenzie to step in and dominate their clan showed how weak the Frasers had become. The Reverend James harangued the clan gentry for tolerating Tarbat’s dominance of young Hugh. ‘He that hath the blood and spirit of his ancestors running in his veins,’ Reverend James thundered, ‘cannot be so much turned into a statue or idle spectator … to look what our … predecessors have been, as well as what ourselves at present are, lest falling short of the imitation of their immortal actions, we so strangely degenerate as not to understand what we ourselves ought to be!’ But no amount of eloquent rhetoric by the Reverend could stir Thomas of Beaufort or other principal Frasers to rescue the boy.

A clan could only prosper under a strong chief, but it was clear from an early age that Hugh would not be that person. The Reverend James judged him as ‘always but a man of very weak intellectuals’. Bad chiefs came in the shape of weak men, children, women or old men. During Simon’s youth, Clan Fraser entered a phase where it got all four – in that order. Two generations of ‘virulent Mackenzie women’, including Hugh’s late mother, had left the Lovat estates rundown and drowning in debt. The Frasers of Beaufort were sidelined and Tarbat inserted his own kindred to manage the clan, handing the Mackenzies leases on Fraser lands. He even gave a profitable little sinecure to the high chief of the Mackenzies, the Earl of Seaforth, as a compliment.

Sir George’s standing rose within his own clan as he interfered in that of his nephew’s. Tarbat competed for high public office for sixty years, during an era ‘of extreme ruthlessness and cunning intrigue’, according to one historian of the 1600s, which culminated in ‘the final triumph of the various egomaniacs, bigots and embezzlers who’ by the final decade of the century would rule the roost in Edinburgh. During the period of his nephew, Hugh Lovat’s, minority, Sir George was out of favour and deprived of office.

Tarbat intended to use young Hugh to boost his political ambitions in Edinburgh and build up a local power base from which to launch himself back into the political fray. His search for a suitably connected bride for Hugh took him to Lord John Murray, who had been rising high in the ranks of the Scottish administration in Edinburgh and Whitehall since the accession of King James II, and on to his sister Lady Amelia Murray. In terms of breeding the Fraser elite liked the idea. Not only was Lady Amelia the daughter of the Stuart Royalist champion, the Marquis of Atholl, but she was also related to several Scottish noble families and crowned heads of Europe. The Murrays came from Blair Atholl in Perthshire, fifty miles north of Edinburgh, between the Highlands and the Lowlands. Lord John was married to Katherine, sister of the Duke of Hamilton. These two, the Murrays and Hamiltons, intrigued to dominate Scottish politics and rule the country for absent kings.

Scotland was a sovereign nation, but the Scottish sovereign had resided in London, not Edinburgh since 1603 (when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England on the death of Elizabeth I). In 1685, James II ruled from Whitehall through a rotating oligarchy of ambitious Scottish magnates who dominated the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Lord John Murray was one of these. Murray, son and heir to the Marquis of Atholl, was a favourite of King James’s. Atholl and Lord Murray also saw the appeal of the match. Clan Fraser’s star may have been waning, but it still had many attractions. The extensiveness and location of Fraser country at the heart of the Highlands could vastly increase Murray influence in Scotland and add handsomely to Lord Murray’s growing political profile.

Tarbat only saw the marriage from his own point of view, something he almost immediately regretted. Simon wrote later that the union of Hugh and the nineteen-year-old Amelia, now Lady Lovat, should have ‘accomplished the barbarous and long-continued designs’ of the Mackenzies ‘to win the family of Lovat and extirpate the name of Fraser out of the North of Scotland’. It so nearly did, and undoubtedly would have done, had it not been for Simon Fraser of Beaufort.

Hugh Lovat’s marriage naturally affected Simon’s standing in the clan, pushing him a step away from the topmost branch of the tree. But the Beauforts expected that. They were ‘spares’ to the heir, and a chief must marry. What irked Simon Fraser was not the union with Lady Amelia, but an extraordinary pre-nuptial agreement planted in the match that affected the future inheritance of the Lovat titles and estates. It would prove to be of such dubious legality that Tarbat and Murray let it lie dormant for nearly ten years, so as not to draw attention or resistance to their schemes from other magnates. For now young Hugh and Amelia settled to the only job Sir George entrusted his nephew to accomplish without his guiding hand – to make lusty male heirs.

But it was another inheritance problem that delayed Simon from going up to Aberdeen. He was preparing to leave Tomich in the autumn of 1688 and join Alexander at university when news came of the landing of William of Orange and his invasion force at Torbay in Devon. Their Stuart King, James II, had abandoned his thrones and was now rallying support.

Tension had built up over the decade before James came to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1685, as it became clear that his brother Charles II was not going to leave an heir. The English Parliament had tried to exclude James from the succession before Charles II died, but failed. By 1688, James II already had heirs. His first wife gave him two daughters, Mary and Anne Stuart, before she died. The girls’ mother had been Protestant, and so were they. Mary married William of Orange, and Anne wed Prince George of Denmark.

Then James II married again. The second time he took for his wife Mary of Modena, an Italian Roman Catholic, in a marriage negotiated by France. Parliament’s alarm increased when James converted to Catholicism, and reached fever pitch when his papist wife was delivered of a boy. James II refused to bring him up as a Protestant, as he himself had been raised, but promised to respect the Protestantism of his administration and country. His was a rather contradictory position: delicate and full of potential pitfalls.

James refused to let his government interfere in the natural course of the Stuart inheritance of the British Crown: God willed that the King and Queen have a healthy Catholic son. Opposite him, the government refused to contemplate a papist ascending the thrones on any terms. An impasse quickly developed between Westminster and St James’s until, just after Christmas 1688, James II suddenly fled to France. His first cousin, Louis XIV, welcomed James, his wife, his son, extended family and entourage, as the victims of a heretical state. James set up a temporary Court in exile, but planned to return within months.

James saw his departure merely as a tactical retreat. He admired the absolutism of the monarchies of France and Spain and assumed his government would not be unable to function without the King to sign laws. Parliament would have to ask him back. Of course he would accept, if Parliament backed down over the succession issue that had provoked this traumatic flight.

He was correct that the government required a monarch. But Parliament reacted to the ultimatum of his departure by inviting Mary Stuart, James’s Protestant daughter from his first marriage, to become their monarch. She accepted. Her husband, William of Orange, insisted on having equal status with his wife and William and Mary jointly assumed the thrones.

The crisis escalated at speed and within weeks the Highlands exploded into lawlessness and violence. The whole event would trigger the most serious conflict to gnaw at the foundations of Great Britain for the next sixty years. James’s departure provoked yet another revolution in a century of revolutions. And it led to the birth of Jacobitism, and its followers, Jacobites, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.

All through the winter of 1688/89, Scottish politicians fought for political power in Scotland with growing intensity. In the race to get control of the Scottish Parliament all constitutional principles were dumped. On 17 December, the Privy Council, including Tarbat, now back in government, sent a letter to James II, who had fled and then returned, asking him to call a free parliament. When James fled for a second time, they lost confidence in him. By 24 December they petitioned William, urging him to call a free Parliament.

In March the following year, a divided Parliament in Edinburgh passed a vote to support William and Mary against her father, James II. In Inverness, the Presbyterian-dominated Council swore allegiance to the new joint monarchs. But not everyone in Scotland agreed with the ruling. Many of the Gaelic-speaking and Episcopalian Highlanders remained loyal to James, including the Earl of Dundee (‘Bonnie’ Dundee), and large elements of the clan elites, such as Alexander Fraser of Beaufort, Simon’s older brother. Alexander came home to raise the Fraser host for James II along with clansman Fraser of Foyers. Once more, the four kingdoms stood ready to plunge into battle along religious and dynastic lines. It was a truly awful prospect.

Inverness, harried by Jacobite troops, soon became the scene of ‘blood works, riots and fornications’, the Council minutes noted with understandable hysteria. Simon claimed that Alexander was the first man in the north to join Dundee’s Jacobite army: ‘My brother brought him all the rents in Meal and Corn’ from the Lovat estates, Simon boasted. Since Tarbat and Lord Murray had abandoned their royal patron to serve a new master, Alexander of Beaufort’s initiative incensed them.

Simon tried to follow his brother. He gathered arms, mounted a horse and rode out to join General Thomas Buchan’s Jacobite force (consisting mainly of Highlanders and soldiers from the MacDonald, MacLean, Cameron, MacPherson and Invermoriston Grants clans). He did not get very far: he was captured, confined and eventually allowed to return to Tomich. Hugh, Lord Lovat did not accompany Alexander either. As soon as his Mackenzie uncle and Murray brother-in-law had changed sides, he was told to stay at home and prevent his men from joining the rebel Jacobites. This Hugh signally failed to do. When he was told to muster the Frasers for King William he was left gathering the few men who had refused to march for James, to go with him south to his in-laws’ Atholl–Murray territory and there to retrieve his clansmen from his cousin Alexander, and put the Frasers under Lord Murray’s command.

When Hugh reached Perthshire, his soldiers lined up with some of the Atholl Militia and awaited orders. Hugh went inside to explain why so few Frasers had come with him. As they waited, Hugh’s men caught sight of the rest of their clan marching by, Alexander at their head, en route to join Bonnie Dundee. They broke ranks and rushed to the river, scooped water into their bonnets and drank the health of King James VII of Scotland and II of England. Clapping their hats back on their heads, they ran to join their kinsmen, asking Alexander for orders.

Murray and the Marquis of Atholl were enraged; they would not forget this challenge to their authority by one of the young Beauforts. The ineffectual Hugh returned home to Castle Dounie while the Marquis of Atholl packed and headed south to Bath, to take the waters for his health – and safety. The Jacobite head of a traditionally Jacobite clan, he could not be accused of treason by his new King and Queen if he was not in the country. He left Lord Murray, his son and heir, behind to take charge.

The two armies finally closed in on each other on 27 July 1689 at Killiecrankie, a rocky pass ten miles south of the Atholl–Murray seat of Blair Castle. Dundee had 2,500 men, mainly Highlanders – ‘the best untrained fighting men in Scotland’ – against 3,000 government dragoons, troops and infantry. Supposedly allies by marriage, Murray’s Atholl men and Hugh Lovat’s kinsmen fought each other at close quarters, and to the death. Though the Jacobites won the battle, inflicting terrible losses of up to 2,000 on the Dutchman’s army, over 600 Jacobite Highlanders lost their lives, including their brilliant leader, Bonnie Dundee. His death signalled the end of the uprisings, with government forces scoring a final victory weeks later, despite their losses, in Murray country at Dunkeld.

Amongst the Fraser casualties was Simon’s brother, Alexander. Badly wounded, his clansmen ‘carried him home in a litter’. Thomas and Simon laid him on his bed to rest, but weeks later Alexander died of his wounds. Simon became his father’s heir. Fraser gentlemen gathered at Tomich, wondering if Hugh Lovat at Dounie would mourn the death of his cousin Alexander and the other brave Frasermen who had died with him. Would he lament the defeat of the Stuart King and order the usual magnificent Highland wake for fallen kinsmen? Or would he celebrate with Lady Amelia her Murray clan’s share in the victory of William and Mary, and the killing of his kin at Killiecrankie?

Following the battle, the Frasers again suffered. Believing the clan to be Jacobite, government troops were given permission to ransack the Aird of Lovat as they had in the months following the Civil War. After this, Jacobite soldiers came through the Lovat estates: since Lord Lovat had led out men for William of Orange, they assumed the clan had turned Williamite. They plundered freely, robbing the people of anything they could find. By the time peace was declared, the weakness and incoherence in the Fraser leadership had left Fraser country devastated by both sides, more than once. Without a strong chief, everything in Fraser country was open to predation by all comers, apparently.

The Reverend James expressed alarm at Murray–Mackenzie control. These ‘strangers’, he said, ‘prove but spies amongst us, discover our weakness, take all the advantage of us they can, fledge their wings with our wealth, and so fly away and fix it in a strange country, and we get no good of it.’ They leased Lovat lands to men from their own clan depriving the chief’s own kin of income and breaking up their inherited territories. Then Murray had tried to take the men away and make them fight against their rightful King. These lessons were not lost on Simon. He later claimed that he was nurtured ‘to display a violent attachment’ to King James from his ‘earliest youth’.

The birth of the Jacobite cause had taken Thomas of Beaufort’s eldest son and ruined his lands. Thomas could not afford to fund Simon through university until his affairs were in better order and the country at peace. On 1 July 1690, William decisively defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. James fled for the last time, ending his rule. By the autumn of 1691, Beaufort felt secure enough to send his son and heir, Simon, to Aberdeen.

The Highlands took a long time to settle under the new regime. Simon was in the first year at university when William lost patience with his Scottish subjects’ continuing flirtation with Jacobitism and refusal to swear allegiance to him and Mary. He agreed to a gesture to pacify them once and for all, needing to release British soldiers from security duties in Scotland to fight his European wars, as head of the Protestant Alliance against the territorial and religious ambitions of France’s Louis XIV.

In January 1692, William signed instructions to separate the Glencoe MacDonalds and make an example of them, by finding a way to ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. The justification was the delay by MacIain, chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds, in submitting formally to the government’s representative and obtaining the indemnity William offered to former rebels. The commander of the Scottish army, Livingstone, wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Hill, the officer in charge of the garrison nearest to Glencoe. ‘Here is a fair occasion for you to show that your garrison serves to some use … begin with Glencoe and spare nothing that belongs to him, but do not trouble the Government with prisoners.’ Hill was horrified. Calling the order ‘a nasty, dirty thing’, he said the proposed action was uncalled-for: the district where the Glencoe MacDonalds lived was calm; they did not need violent pacification. Too late.

On the night of 13 February, MacIain’s people offered shelter to government troops whom they believed were en route to bringing in the rebel Glengarry MacDonalds. At 5 a.m., Glenlyon, in charge of the government soldiers, began the slaughter. MacDonalds were bound, shot and then bayoneted for good measure. After the killings, they burned houses and drove the stock off to Fort William to feed the garrison, leaving ‘poor stripped women and children, some with child, and some giving suck, wrestling against a storm in mountains and heaps of snow, and at length overcome’ they lay down and died.

The bloodshed at Glencoe blighted King William’s rule, and left a deep, long-standing hostility towards him in much of Scotland. To bring Lord Murray back into the government fold and dissolve the stain left on their reputation by Killiecrankie, the Scottish Secretary James Johnston persuaded William to put Murray at the head of the enquiry into Glencoe, and find a scapegoat for the atrocity. That scapegoat was Dalrymple, a rival of Johnston’s, who had added the instruction ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. Though William undertook sweeping reforms of his Scottish ministry, the enquiry’s report would do little to soothe Highlander and Jacobite anger.

By the winter of 1694/95, after ten years of trying, Hugh Lovat had failed to achieve the one thing required of him. The lack of surviving male Lovat heirs caused Murray and Atholl increasing alarm. Lady Amelia produced both girls and boys, but only the girls (Amelia, Katherine and Margaret) lived. There was another infant boy, John, but the odds on him surviving were dreadful. Hugh Lovat was the only son of an only son, both of whom had died in their twenties. It was time to return to the marriage contract, and enshrine it in law.

Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat’s family contained a lot of lawyers. He was a lawyer; his brother, Sir Roderick Mackenzie (Lord Prestonhall), was a Law Lord. They reviewed the contents of the marriage contract. The first part of it stated the obvious. The Lovat–Fraser inheritance went through the boys. Then, it asserted that any surviving child of Hugh and Amelia would take precedence over the next male heirs, who were the Beauforts. All that an heiress need do was marry someone who already bore the name of Fraser. The normal procedure among the clans suffering the iniquity of an heiress would be to marry her to the nearest male heir. Given Thomas’s great age, in this case it would be his son and heir, Simon. So far, all this contract did was state the conventions governing marriage at the top of any kindred with a sizeable inheritance at stake. In other words, the contract was completely unnecessary. However it innovated in the next clause.

In 1685, Mackenzie and Murray had stated that if the inheritance did come down to an heiress, all her husband need do was assume the name of Fraser to fulfil the requirement that she marry someone ‘of the name of Fraser’. Then they would both inherit the Lovat titles and estates. The heiress could be married off to anyone from any clan in effect. This threatened to write out the Beaufort Fraser men, Thomas, Simon and John.

The marriage of an heiress to a man from another clan had the most serious implications for the heiress’s clan and its territories. This freshly made ‘Fraser’ husband would enter his wife’s inheritance right at the top and the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. The clan the husband came from, to whom of course he owed all his prior loyalty and affection, could eliminate the Frasers’ presence in their own country, and take over their assets. If the heiress married a Mackenzie, the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. If she married a Murray cousin, it would be conveyed to him.

If Hugh died without signing the ratification of their contract, a Fraser with some legal training might easily have this specious document dismissed. Then the Murrays’ power base and their exercise of power in the Highlands would be seriously weakened. The old Marquis of Atholl urged his son to get a move on. The Lovat estates are ‘the best feather in our wing’ he reminded Lord Murray. They must not ‘lose’ their ‘keystone’ after a decade of growing influence.

Murray presented the ratification document to Hugh Lovat, who signed it. Murray then took it to the Court of Session to be ratified in law. With the stroke of a pen, Hugh cut Simon from his place on the family tree, and was very likely handing over his inheritance to a girl. He had four; one was going to survive. Letting himself be manipulated by ‘natures stronger than his own’, as Simon noted tersely, Hugh overturned the tradition and logic of clanship. He opened the door wider to the danger of loss of the clan to another, and put huge power in the hands of whoever controlled the marriage prospects of the heiress. For an ineffectual man, Hugh had created something that had powerful implications for the clan and his family.

In his poky student lodgings in Aberdeen in the spring of 1695, Simon saw that his family were being juggled out of position. But he had to move carefully. Hugh’s baby son might survive. If so, Simon would only ever be the Laird of Beaufort. Lord Murray could be a valuable connection for someone like him. King William was starting to equip Murray with all the trappings that made power work – royal patronage, commissions and influence at Court. Murray had cash and jobs to distribute. He was networking to get all Scotland and half the British administration in his hands. Simon had to remember that, dislike him though he did, Murray could bring Simon, the scion of a clan now closely allied to Murray’s own, forward in the world. For now, Simon needed to be part of his enemy’s faction in Scotland.

It was therefore no surprise that after completing his first degree, Simon started on postgraduate work in civil law – specifically property rights. By becoming a lawyer, then a judge, he fought to equip himself should the rightful inheritance of the Lovat titles and estates be questioned. But the sudden ratification of the marriage contract had upset Simon’s plans, and now redirected his life. The infant John was Master of Lovat, but Lovat heirs often died young. John’s older sister Amelia, and who she married, were of real interest therefore. Simon had a young man’s sense of time. Precious years climbing to power in the judiciary might be years squandered. Besides, a growing number of judges, those who were not Mackenzies, owed their appointments to Murray.

Simon felt a measure of contempt for the chief who had exposed his clan to such powerful and ruthless men. Hugh had proved himself incapable of protecting their interests, homes and people. ‘Lord Lovat was known for a man of feeble understanding,’ he wrote. In Simon’s view – fired by principled, naive outrage – the job of preparing the clan’s defence against a decisive assault on their name and country had fallen on his shoulders. ‘It was my duty to venture my person and Life to recover … [my] ancient family,’ he wrote. He bubbled with idealism and bravado. His whole upbringing had prepared him to rise heroically to this kind of crisis and defend them all, he said of himself. ‘His duty was inseparable from his Nature.’

Lord Murray saw it all rather differently. As a penniless bystander, Simon posed little threat. Murray did not notice him. Young Beaufort would require a lot more than family pride and passion to halt Atholl ambitions. Simon needed power, money and the backing of his clan. To acquire these he put university ambitions to one side, and headed for Edinburgh.

THREE

‘Nice use of the beast and the man’, 1695–96

‘Your destiny decreed to set you an apprentice in the school of affliction, and to draw you through the ordeal fire of trial, the better to mould, temper and fashion you for rule and government’

– THE REVEREND JAMES TO SIMON

Simon approached the Scottish capital full of doubts. He knew what to do, but not how to do it. He needed a patron to bring him forward in the world. ‘There are two ways of fighting,’ Machiavelli instructed a would-be Prince: ‘by law or by force. The first way is natural to men, and the second to beasts … So a prince must understand how to make nice use of the beast and the man.’ Simon came to learn to fight like a beast and a man.

A young man full of ambition and ability, but without employment or income, Simon lacked prospects. He had connections, but his best contacts in government were also his enemies. His cousin by marriage, Lord Murray, was his obvious port of call. Atholl and Murray were working to tighten their grip on Clan Fraser and would only help Simon if they thought he could assist in their plans to dominate the Highlands. Murray might even readily give Simon a job to control him, even as Murray worked to cut him off. Simon saw little choice but to dissemble with the Murrays, and offer to serve them, as the Murrays dissembled with the Frasers.

Edinburgh was a typical medieval city. Its buildings clung to the high back of a long hill like fleas and burrs on a sheep’s back. The old city cooled its carcase in a mire of swamp and loch. When Simon arrived for the first time it was still largely enclosed within its medieval city walls. The scarcity of space meant the old houses towered ten or even twelve floors over the streets below. The High Street (‘the Royal Mile’) formed the city’s spine and central nervous system. It was capillaried with narrow lanes – wynds, allies and closes leading to and from the main street. At the lower end, the east end of the High Street, the Canongate guarded the entrance to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the image of King William III’s presence in Scotland. Heading west, halfway up the High Street, were the Scottish Parliament and offices of the judiciary. At the top end of it, on an extinct volcano, sprawled the massed bulk of Edinburgh Castle. A sleeping giant of military power, it dominated the institutions of the fragile, Williamite Scottish state.

Tall narrow houses flanked Simon as he headed up the High Street towards Parliament to find Lord Murray. He lowered his gaze to skip around the gurgling gutters, overflowing with the effluent of the piled-up city, and skirt the fat pigs rooting excitedly through it. He moved in and out of the piazzas on the ground floors of gaunt old houses. Aristocrats occupied the first floors, clerks nested on the tenth. People lived close up, bound by the economies of architecture, space and a dearth of hard cash. Merchants’ wares – woollen stuff, linen, pots – lay in heaps among the pillars, spilling from shops too tiny to do more than keep them secure at night. Ascending the buildings like a row of semaphore flags, colourful illustrations painted on boards indicated where people could find certain wares – a cut loaf, periwig, cheese, a firkin of butter, petticoat stays, from the baker, wig dresser, cheesemonger, dressmaker.

Most men of affairs were on the go by five in the morning. Before the bell of St Giles Kirk struck seven, the pioneering medical man Dr Pitcairne was seeing patients in his underground rooms near the church. Edinburghers called it the ‘groping office’, because of its darkness and its tenant’s occupation. By 6 a.m., Law Lords and lawyers had met agents and clients in the taverns and perused over half a dozen cases.

A fellow politician observed that Lord Murray was ‘so great an admirer of his master, King William, that he mimicked him in many of his gestures’. The King loved the way Murray revered him, and he showed it. He gave him a colonel’s commission (and the funding) to raise a regiment to defend Edinburgh. William did not feel safe on Scottish soil without a heavy military presence. Only the Stuart-born Queen at his side gave the Dutch Stadtholder any sense of legitimacy in the eyes of most Scots, especially after Glencoe. But the previous winter Mary had died suddenly of smallpox, aged just thirty-two.

In public, Simon echoed the Court Party’s expressions of sympathy for William III’s loss. In private, he wrote to his father: ‘I doubt not you will be in mourning [clothes] for Queen Mary, but I am resolv’d to buy none till Ki. W. dies.’ Mourning clothes, he teased, ‘perhaps may serve for the next Summer Suit’. He penned similarly jaunty notes to known fellow Jacobites: MacDonald of Glengarry and (rashly) Lady Amelia Lovat’s Jacobite brother, Lord Mungo Murray – ‘drinking’ to the death. Apart from Lord John, the Murrays remained predominantly a Jacobite clan. These letters were a young man’s folly and Simon’s first wrong move. Glengarry was married to Hugh Lovat’s sister, Isobel, and was in Lord Murray’s pay. He passed Simon’s notes to Murray, who kept them safe. They were Simon of Beaufort’s death warrant, if one were ever needed.

Queen Mary’s death exposed the tenuousness of William III’s right to rule. Many in Scotland felt their suffering was the legacy of removing God’s anointed King, James II. A failed harvest in 1695 compounded their discontent. William needed strong support in Scotland: it was imperative that Murray raise the thirteen companies needed to fill his regiment, each under a captain. Every captain received a salary. Out of this he provided the men, paid his company’s expenses and kept the balance for himself. Murray offered one to Hugh Lovat. It would bring this Jacobite clan to heel, turn it Williamite, and display to his royal master Murray’s growing influence in the Highlands.

Hugh was not interested. It would mean leaving his wife and family, mustering in Edinburgh and becoming politically active in a way he had never desired. Murray had pressured Hugh to take the oath abjuring the Stuarts in favour of William. Now Murray wanted his brother-in-law to take a captaincy, and provide 300 Frasers for Murray’s regiment. Murray insisted. Lovat caved in, and then failed to fill the company. He had never led his men.

Simon Fraser unleashed ‘the bitterest invectives’, criticising his chiefly cousin for accepting the ‘infamous commission’. Alexander had died resisting King William; now Lord Lovat was asking them to sign up to join his killers. Behind the scenes, Simon worked to discourage Frasermen from enlisting. Above all, Simon wanted the captaincy for himself. He approached Murray’s recruiting agent, Dollery, and offered to fill the Fraser Company of Murray’s Regiment of Foot in return for Hugh Lovat’s captaincy commission. Dollery wrote to Murray recommending Simon: ‘I think him a very hopeful young man … and may be very serviceable to your Lordship.’ Simon had told him that with anything less than a captaincy he could not ‘do anything to distinguish him from the rest, which I find he very much aspires after’. Dollery picked up on the ambition, but not the scale of it; and he missed the potential irony of his observation. Murray did not.

Simon duly filled the 300 places his clan chief had failed to achieve. Pleased with himself, Simon asked for his captaincy and his money, a pound per soldier. Murray refused: he recognised that Simon was attempting to use clan operational norms – where clansmen served their leading kinsman’s cause, not a distant representative of the Crown – and subvert British regimental ones. Murray allowed Simon into his fold, but at the lowest possible level – as a lieutenant, where he believed he could not cause any trouble. Simon found himself outmanoeuvred. He ‘did not fail to be extremely disgusted’, he wrote, ‘having suffered himself to be over-reached by Lord Murray, whose treason he conceived to be of a very infamous nature’. By the end of December 1695, Lieutenant Simon Fraser was in command of Lovat’s Company of accoutred, martial-souled, Jacobite Highlanders. Some days they formed the Palace Guard at Holyroodhouse; others they marched to the other end of the High Street to form part of the force to defend the Williamite regime in Edinburgh. On their uniforms they wore the Murray badge (a mermaid with comb and mirror, and the words, Tout Pret, ‘Quite Ready’); and they carried the Murray colours. Simon’s saddle blanket and holster cap were embroidered with the cipher ‘WR’. It was as if the Frasers had been printed all over with the stamp of the enemy’s seal. Where was the Fraser badge of stag’s head and motto Je suis prest, ‘I Am Ready’; the Fraser of Lovat coat of arms – crowns and strawberry leaves – the last indicating the French origin of the clan.

William III desperately needed his Scottish soldiers: the British Army was chronically overstretched because of the King’s European campaigns, particularly his obsession with countering French aggression on the Dutch borders. High war taxes, the poor harvests and the continued heavy-handed quartering of troops was crippling the Scottish economy.William needed stability in his territories in North Britain. The King’s Private Secretary, Johnston, requested Murray come to London, and to come with panache. ‘If you have company at hand to come with you, My Lord Lovat, or Glengarry, it will look well, but no time is to be lost,’ Johnston counselled. That was Hugh Lovat’s purpose in life, Simon thought to himself – to gild another man’s lily and make a usurper feel secure. But Lovat would not leave his fireside in the middle of a hellish Highland winter. So Murray travelled south alone.

When Murray arrived he found he was to be well rewarded. On 13 January 1696, the King appointed him Secretary of State for Scotland. ‘He told me I owed it only to himself, which indeed is passed doubting,’ Murray purred with pleasure to his wife.

In Edinburgh, Murray’s officers fell over each other to congratulate their colonel. Simon led the cheers. ‘All your Lordship’s friends here are overjoyed for your Lordship’s new preferment,’ he gushed. ‘God grant your Lordship health to enjoy it!’ And ended his huzzahs with a request: ‘I hope your Lordship will not forget my captain’s act. It will certainly do me good until your Lordship is pleased to bestow better on me.’ He had his eye on the colonelcy.

Another officer simply asked Murray for the whole regiment straight out. The Secretary of State would not be expected to keep it in his own hands. Even without the personal motivation of the clan, it was not surprising Simon pushed so hard. In the lower reaches of the establishment, men like Simon saw too clearly the kind of oblivion that lay just below them. Except for a tiny minority of aristocrats, everyone was on the make. Simon, born to a little portion of privilege, knew there was a path down the social ladder that offered no one, except maybe his chief, a foothold. The weak went down; the strong rose.

Poor and failing harvests dominated the rest of the decade in Scotland. ‘The living wearied of burying the dead,’ and the population was forced to fight for scraps. These were ‘King William’s ill years’. The term showed who the Scottish people thought had brought God’s anger on them. In London and Edinburgh, Jacobite presses poured forth propaganda: ‘I hear the angel guardian of our island whispering in our sovereign’s ear … Rise and take the child and his mother, and return into your country, for they are dead who sought the life of the child.’ The ‘sovereign’ was James II, and his flight had taken him and his wife, Mary and their baby boy into ‘Egypt’/France. The biblical analogy showed the strength of feeling in the two kingdoms on the issue of rightful kings and usurping tyrannical governments.

Murray’s pleasure in his political success was interrupted in February when the government received intelligence about an invasion plot from France that would terminate ‘in an assassination’ of the King. Other informants spoke of co-ordinating action by Jacobite officers embedded in regiments guarding Edinburgh Castle. Murray’s Regiment of Foot was one of those mentioned. Murray galloped north to hold Scotland steady for the King.

The castle was ‘in a very defenceless state’, Simon noted, as he trotted his company of clansmen up the Royal Mile from Holyroodhouse. He too had been plotting – with Lord Drummond, active Jacobite and heir to the Duke of Perth – and was in communication with both of them. They agreed that ‘as soon as the King [James II] should arrive in Scotland … they should make themselves masters by a coup de main of the unarmed garrison, and shut the gates … They should then declare for King James.’ In the end the scheme came to nothing. But plotting made disempowered men feel powerful. If James returned, he would sweep Lord Murray away.

Murray gathered his officers. They ‘were regarded by the common men in the light of Jacobites’, he stormed; all officers must swear the Oath of Abjuration, compelling their loyalty. The oath forswore loyalty to James II and the exiled Stuart Court, and swore allegiance to William and the Revolution settlement. Simon was outraged. ‘Officers, highly attached to King James, were forced to sign … in order to preserve to themselves the means of subsistence,’ he said, disgusted that Murray insulted good men by forcing them to square up to the competing interests of their souls and their sporrans. He was one of them, and signed.

The following March, 1696, King William summoned Murray south again to reward him further, creating him Earl of Tullibardine, so that he could be a King’s Commissioner in the next session of the Scottish Parliament. Murray insisted he must have his brother-in-law at his side this time and summoned Hugh to London. The Earl promised Hugh he would be presented at Court and said he would ask the King to make the whole Regiment of Foot over to him. Simon pushed to accompany his cousin. He and Hugh had grown close since Simon left university and Simon now occupied a traditional place in the clan hierarchy: commanding his chief’s soldiers. Murray reluctantly agreed.

After nearly two weeks on the roads, Hugh Lovat, Simon Fraser and their servants reached London, long black boots, full-skirted thick wool coats, linen and wigs all caked with sweat and muck. They found their lodgings and prepared to enjoy the city, keenly anticipating their royal audience. It was the perfect opportunity to make a favourable impression on the King, and who knew what ‘gratification’ might follow – the regiment, a government post perhaps? At Kensington Palace, they met Tullibardine who conducted them into the King’s presence. Lord Lovat was ‘one of the most ancient peers of Scotland … head of one of the bravest clans’. Tullibardine announced. Lovat and Tullibardine ‘could venture to assure his Majesty of their fidelity’. As the Highland chief stepped up to speak, Tullibardine told Hugh to ‘fall upon one knee and take leave of his Majesty’. Ever ‘of a contracted understanding’ Hugh ‘did as he was directed’, Simon later wrote of his cousin. Not for the first time, Simon despaired of his chief’s passivity. Some men did not merit their opportunities.

Before Simon could urge Hugh to re-present himself at Court, Tullibardine was recalled to the Scottish Parliament to deal with the ongoing fears of invasion and assassination. The Earl briefed Hugh and Simon that, all things considered, this was not the moment to bother the King with personal requests. He would be forced to hold on to the Regiment of Foot, he said, ‘till the fears of an invasion should be blown over’. They had heard all this before, Simon told Hugh. Had they come all this way, at great expense, to show the King of England that a great Highland chief would dance a jig before him, to the Earl’s tunes? When Tullibardine ordered them to return to Edinburgh, both young Frasers ignored him.

Instead they met with Tarbat’s son and Alexander Mackenzie, son of the Earl of Seaforth. As a Guards officer, Alexander was familiar with London’s best clubs and watering-holes. It would be chance too for the Mackenzie men to pick up the threads of their relationship with their Fraser cousins. Since the Murrays had taken over, Mackenzie influence at Castle Dounie had ceased.

Hugh and Simon, choked by Lord Murray’s condescension, patronage, expectations and favours, now threw ‘themselves into the hurly-burly of fun-making, love-making, noise-making’ offered by the English capital. ‘Come at a crown ourselves we’ll treat,/Champagne our liqueur and ragouts our meat’, the Highlanders joined in with the songs in the alehouses. ‘With evening wheels we’ll drive o’er the park,’ then ‘finish at Locket’s and reel home in the dark’. Locket’s, near Charing Cross, was a popular gentleman’s club. The area roughly bordered by the Strand, Covent Garden and Charing Cross teemed with life. The theatres around Drury Lane brought taverns, coffee houses and bagnios in their wake. Socialising levelled all the classes, aristocrats, intellectuals, merchants and tradesmen, foreigners, Gaels, and the people who fulfilled all whims and desires. When the young men spoke Gaelic, very loud and very fast, they could talk treason with impunity, though many taverns and coffee houses welcomed Jacobites.

Simon worked on his chief, showing Hugh ‘very plainly, that Tullibardine made a jest of him, and had brought him to London, in order to make his court to King William at Lord Lovat’s expense’. He and the Mackenzies counselled Hugh ‘to break with’ Murray, and free Clan Fraser from its predators. For once, Hugh openly defied his brother-in-law. He sent out a waiter for pen and paper, wrote to Murray, and resigned his commission. ‘I hope … you will be so kind as to bestow it on my cousin Beaufort,’ he added. Simon clapped his cousin on the back. This was the spirit they had looked for in him all these years. Simon followed up Hugh’s letter with one of his own. ‘If your Lordship have use for all my Lord Lovat’s men, I have, next to himself, most influence on them.’ It was a thinly veiled threat to take them away. Tullibardine made his own brother captain of Lovat’s men.

A worried Tullibardine wrote to his wife Katherine, sister of the Duke of Hamilton, who had remained in London, and asked her to find out what the young Frasers were up to. ‘I am extremely angry Lovat is not come off,’ he wrote. ‘I blame Beaufort who I believe occasions his stay till he gets … [Lovat’s] captain’s act.’ Katherine replied that she had seen Hugh. ‘O! He is a sad creature, and keeps the worst of company. It is not fit to tell you here the way he lives,’ she told her husband, ‘but he says … he’ll stay here, and spend of his own, and take his pleasures a while … I’m afraid he’ll fall into some inconveniency.’ Besides the ‘inconveniency’ of drink, Hugh was whoring himself to a physical breakdown and keeping other very ‘inconvenient’ companions.

The merry-making soon stopped with news from Dounie that Hugh’s only son, three-year-old John, had died. He still had his girls, but now no male heir. Simon could not help but be aware that with the infant’s death, the Beaufort Frasers were once again the only male heirs if the illegitimate marriage contract could be overturned. Simon discussed it with his cousin. The Fraser inheritance was nothing to do with an alien clan, he said. Murray had been deceiving him for years about what was best for the Frasers and disguising his real intentions. Even this trip: there was no colonelcy of the regiment or meaningful royal recognition for Hugh Lovat. Retrieve some loss of face, Simon urged him, and use the law to put right and undo what the Murrays had put wrong.

Hugh conceded that his in-laws probably ‘despised him’. He was an easy-going fellow and he had let them do as they liked with his titles and estates. The worm now turned. On 26 March, ‘Lord Lovat obliged’ Simon ‘to send for an attorney … Convinced of his Error, and the injury done to his own family, he … executed a Deed, in favours of Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, his Grand Uncle, Father to … Simon, upon the Failzie of Issue-male of the Marriage, and restored the Succession to the ancient Channel of the Heirs-male.’

While he had Hugh pointing in the right direction, Simon also persuaded him to draw up a legal bond. Lord Lovat bound himself to pay 50,000 Scottish merks to Simon ‘for the special love and affection I bear to my cousin, Master Simon Fraser … and for certain onerous causes and others moving me’. Were Simon to enforce this bond, it would utterly ruin his heavily indebted cousin. Fifty thousand Scottish merks was about £2,750 sterling (or £350,000 in today’s values).

Simon’s motives were so mixed. On the one hand he believed a weak chief threatened the very existence of the clan. He also believed in the unbroken male inheritance of Clan Fraser, and was determined to throw off the over-mighty Murrays. This bond was the Frasers’ security should the Murrays trespass too far and try to marry the heiress, Hugh’s eldest daughter Amelia, away from the male heir, Simon Fraser.

Eventually Tullibardine wrote to Simon. He coldly commanded his lieutenant to escort his cousin home, and then report for duty. Tullibardine was Master of the Privy Council, King’s High Commissioner and ruled Scotland with ‘the authority of a monarch in right of his office, and sometimes a greater power in virtue of his abilities’. The man representing the constitution and the King was supreme. Simon could ill afford to defy him openly. To his face Simon hailed him ‘the Viceroy of Scotland’. Behind Tullibardine’s back he was learning to plot with more craft.

Simon and Hugh did not return to Edinburgh until 30 June, when Lord Lovat inspected his old company of Frasers. ‘To my singular satisfaction,’ Simon told Tullibardine, ‘there is none of … his company deserted … My Lord Lovat told two or three that he saw of them that he would hang them without any judgement if they offered to go home without their pass.’ Simon made sure his colonel knew that the Fraser men only stayed loyal because their chief ordered it, not their new captain, Tullibardine’s brother, James Murray.

Hugh Lovat continued his journey north from Edinburgh alone. He had left London with a chest infection. By the time he reached the borders of Murray territory in Perthshire, some forty miles north of Edinburgh, his illness had developed into something like pneumonia. He managed to get to a Murray house at Dunkeld. There he received a letter recalling him to the Scottish Parliament. Obediently, Lovat turned south, but only got as far as a tavern at Perth. Some Murray ladies despatched a physician for their in-law, though they never offered to take him in. They had heard from Katherine Tullibardine that Hugh had annulled his marriage contract with their family, and had debauched himself, spending money he did not have. The old Marquis of Atholl visited Hugh: he had drawn up another marriage contract, reversing the annulment. The Murrays looked down on Lord Lovat in his sickbed, and forced him to sign.

Reports of Hugh’s collapse and the Murrays’ presence reached Simon, who rode to Perth immediately. He had to defend his new interests and protect his chief. By the time he reached Dunkeld, Hugh was delirious. He ‘quite lost the use of his reason for several days, and lay in his bed in a manner incapable of motion’, Simon informed Lady Lovat. It was hard for Lady Lovat at Dounie to gauge precisely what was going on in that airless little box-bed in a Perth tavern as the only eyewitness account she had was Simon’s. However, she did not come.

On the morning of 6 September, the fever left the clan chief’s body and Hugh cooled down. Simon lay next to him and wrapped him in his arms. He might now start to recover, and things could be different. This crisis must cast off the Murray yoke. Hugh slept quietly. Every now and then there erupted from deep in the young man’s body a roaring, snorting breath. After one harsh intake of breath, like a wave rushing over shingle, Hugh’s heart stopped.

Simon lay there a while. The room echoed his chief’s stillness. Poor Hugh. His father had died aged twenty-nine. He had barely made it into his thirties. Simon escorted his cousin’s body home where it was interred in the family mausoleum at Wardlaw. He then went to his father, bowed, and addressed him as ‘My Lord Lovat’.

FOUR

‘No borrowed chief!’, 1696–97

‘Men must either be pampered or crushed’

– MACHIAVELLI

There was no time to lose. Under feudalism, Atholl–Murray interest in the Frasers died with the late chief. Therefore, ‘my father did take upon him the title of Lord Lovat, and possessed himself of the estates’, wrote Simon.

Captain Simon Fraser, now the Master of Lovat, returned to his regiment. He had precedent and history and the desire of much of his clan on his side. He possessed youth, determination, righteous indignation, courage and acute financial need to power the claims of his birthright. This might not be enough. But Simon had already asserted the cause of the thousands of the ordinary Fraser clansmen, and of their chief, more vigorously in a couple of years than the Fraser chiefs had in a couple of generations.

As soon as he had the chance, Tullibardine came for Captain Fraser. Manipulating the Privy Council, Tullibardine obtained the gift of his niece, nine-year-old Amelia, ‘in a trustee’s name’, though the child had a mother and close Fraser kin, and did not need an externally appointed guardian. As trustee, he would manage her clan and choose her husband. It was his duty to make the most advantageous match possible for her. This was usually the male heir.

Simon returned to command the guard at Holyroodhouse. Late one night Tullibardine arrived. Simon heard a shout from the guard, saw the flaring of torches, and watched the Earl clatter into the palace courtyard, calling for light and ‘a bottle’. He then summoned Simon to join him. ‘Having drunk to a good pitch,’ Tullibardine ‘took a paper out of his pocket and called for pen and ink’. He wanted Simon to sign a retraction of his claims. Simon must know, he said, how he entertained an ‘extreme friendship’ for him, a mere ‘Cadet of the family of Lovat, but of no Manner of Estate’. Tullibardine was aware of the ‘meanness’ of his situation, he told Simon, who sat there stony-faced. However, ‘I am told you have assumed the title of Master of Lovat, and that you have sent the opinions of [legal] counsel to your father, recommending him to take possession of the property of my late brother-in-law.’ Tullibardine ended on an accusatory note.

Simon put down his drink and forced himself to be civil. Of course his father Thomas, Lord Lovat, enjoyed his inheritance: the honours and estates of his late great nephew. Why would Simon consult lawyers about a natural course of events, and send results north?

Tullibardine too had gone to the law. His lawyers agreed Thomas had a right to the title. They would all call the old fellow ‘Thomas, Lord Lovat’. Why not? However, under the terms of Hugh and Amelia’s marriage contract, ratified and signed by the late Lord Lovat, the property and estates belonged to his ward and niece, Amelia.

Simon countered: he either had ‘a just right to the succession, or … had not’. It was quite simple. ‘If he had no right, it was to little purpose to’ renounce his claim to nothing. ‘But, if he had a right, he would not renounce it for the revenues of Scotland.’ It was his birthright.

Tullibardine convulsed with ‘violent passion’. He had always known Simon ‘for an obstinate, insolent rascal’, he raged. ‘I do not know what should hinder me from cutting off your ears and throwing you into a dungeon, and bringing you to the gallows, as your treasons against the government so richly deserve!’ Tullibardine referred to Simon’s treasonable letters on the death of the Queen, which were now in his hands.

Although he felt awed by ‘his formidable person, in the midst of his state and authority’, Simon knew he had to stay calm. He stuck his hat on his head. He was off. ‘As for the paltry company I command in your regiment … it is the greatest disgrace to which I was ever subject to be under your command, and now, if you please,’ he said, jerking his head towards a lackey in the corner, ‘you may give it to your footman.’ And out he strode, shaking with emotion. Simon resigned from Tullibardine’s regiment.

The next day Tullibardine sent to the King the letters Simon had written on Queen Mary’s death. Tullibardine demanded that young Beaufort be arrested, court-martialled and hung for high treason. William consulted the commander-in-chief of his Scottish forces, Sir Thomas Livingstone. Men much more highly placed than young Simon Fraser could be compromised by their ambivalent stance to his rule, he counselled the King. William would be advised not to reagitate feelings that had led to the plotting in Scotland the previous summer.

The King ordered Livingstone to cashier Simon Fraser. Livingstone obeyed but told his Majesty that he suspected ‘the Viceroy’ was abusing his public position in a private vendetta against Simon Fraser in his and old Atholl’s lust to acquire the Lovat estates. It was a view Simon had keenly encouraged. Tullibardine’s growing number of enemies believed that ‘if the Secretary of State could turn out and in officers at their pleasure, upon their private pique, no officer in the army was sure of his commission’. With this sort of reportage, Simon cleverly and noisily drew attention to the Murrays’ pursuit of him and his clan. Men such as Archibald Campbell, the 10th Earl of Argyll, were keen to ally themselves to Simon, to prove that Tullibardine was too eager to use the tools of public office to build his personal power base. By favouring him so completely, it looked as if King William was colluding in the schemes of the Atholl Murrays to extend their territorial and political power in Scotland.

Argyll murmured to William Carstares, a Presbyterian minister and one of the King’s most trusted confidants, that Tullibardine’s activities around Inverness threatened national security. If ‘Tullibardine be allowed to go on … it may occasion a deal of bloodshed; for if one begin, all the Highlands will in ten days fly together in arms … I am most particularly concerned in Highland affairs,’ he said. Simon Fraser had called on the right man to help him. The Frasers were historically ‘sword vassals’ of the Campbells. It meant that in exchange for protection by the bigger clan, the Frasers brought out their men to fight Campbell battles. To bring down Tullibardine’s over-mighty schemes to dominate Scottish politics, men who otherwise supported William’s rule would go into opposition.

Tullibardine did not meet with this growing barrage of criticism calmly. He was, said a contemporary, ‘endowed with good natural parts, tho’ by reason of his proud, imperious, haughty passionate temper, he was no ways capable to be the leading man of a party. He much affected popularity,’ but his ‘kindest addresses were never taking: he was selfish to a great degree, and his vanity and ambition extended so far, that he could not suffer an equal. He was reputed very brave, but hot and headstrong.’ He would destroy Simon Fraser.

At the end of the summer, Simon left Edinburgh. Scottish law had not been able to solve his problems and Simon struggled to see how the traditional path – a clan feud – might be avoided. Everyone feared a feud, ‘for Highland feuds never die’, as the Reverend James Fraser counselled him. If it came to a feud he could not see how he might expect to win. Over the last two decades the Murrays had amassed a regiment and a militia force of their own. Tullibardine, as King’s High Commissioner, enjoyed huge power over the courts and Parliament. If Simon provoked the Murrays, they would surely attack. In the end the solution seemed obvious. The two sides must be brought together. He and the heiress, young Amelia, must be contracted to marry. This was the path of peace.

In April 1697, Simon headed to Castle Dounie to negotiate with Hugh’s widow for the hand, at puberty, of the heiress Amelia. Tullibardine reacted immediately. He ordered the girl to be whisked from her mother, the dowager Lady Lovat, and be taken to his Perthshire stronghold, Blair Castle. Simon meanwhile moved into Castle Dounie itself and sent his father to a safehouse on the Lovat Stratherrick estates.

When Simon said of his kin that ‘the Highland clans did not consider themselves as bound by the letter of the law, like the inhabitants of the low country’ around Inverness, ‘but to a man would regard it as their honour and their boast, to cut the throat, or blow out the brains of anyone … who should dare to disturb the repose of their laird’, he had his Stratherrick clansmen in mind. High above Loch Ness, Stratherrick concealed itself and its people behind the trees and rocks scaling the steep slopes along the south shore of the loch. Fertile fields around lairds’ houses nurtured cattle and rigs of corn in a sea of moorland wilderness. The Frasers who lived there existed in accordance with the values of the clan system. Financially, they depended on a traditional chief of the sort Simon desired to be. The elderly Lord Lovat would be safe among these men.

From Dounie, the dowager Lady Lovat complained to her family: ‘Young Beaufort is still here and does not intend to go from this place till his own time. They are more obdurate than ever, and delude the people extremely.’ Simon, the chief’s son, felt that the chief’s son living in the chief’s stronghold was not delusional. The widow of a dead chief had to make room for the living one, or move to a dower house.

‘The neighbourhood are all knaves, and for him,’ the Marquis of Atholl growled when he read his daughter’s letters. It maddened him that they had failed to kill young Beaufort in Edinburgh when they had the chance. After seizing Amelia, Atholl wrote to the Fraser lairds advising them to trust him rather than rally to ‘Captain Fraser’. The old Marquis ‘would find out a true Fraser and a man of handsome fortune that would support their whole name’. This was a dangerous time for the Murrays. Removing young Amelia gave them possession of a serious claimant to the inheritance, but it removed her from the objects of her claim.

Simon was dismayed to find that some Fraser lairds from the rich low-lying country around Inverness were hesitating to enlist for him. Others, such as Robert Fraser and his brother – both lawyers – had thrown over the ties of clanship in order to advance themselves. Even they advised the Murrays it was a step too far not to bring in a Fraser as chief and suggested they could find an alternative within the impoverished Saltoun Frasers from along the coast towards Aberdeen. Simon cursed the two lawyers like an Old Testament prophet. ‘Robert, the prime author of these misfortunes, died under the visible judgement of God,’ he wrote. Robert’s brother ‘may yet be overtaken with the just punishment of his crimes’, he added hopefully.

The response Atholl received from the Highland lairds was unequivocal. They ‘would have no borrowed chief!’ Moreover, if Saltoun ‘dared to enter their country in hostility to Thomas, Lord Lovat … his head should answer the infringement … We have put on a full resolution to defend our lands, possessions, goods, lives, wives, children, liberties and privileges of free subjects which lie at the stake against all invading and insulting avaricious ambition and oppression pro aris et focis contra omnes mortalles.’ The judicial phrasing in Latin (suggesting Simon’s hand in it) sealed the threat of an old-fashioned Celtic clan feud.

The letter left Lord Saltoun windy about his venture into Lovat territories to arrange a marriage between his son and Amelia Lovat. He wrote to Simon, claiming disingenuously that he only desired to help arbitrate in the Murray–Fraser dispute. Simon thanked him, and suggested they meet. Lord Saltoun agreed.

At the end of September 1697, Saltoun and Lady Lovat’s youngest brother, Lord Mungo Murray, rode to Beauly. They looked forward to their time at Castle Dounie working out the details of a pre-nuptial agreement. They would hunt, dance and feast. The intention was then to go back via the Murray stronghold and celebrate the contract by letting the young people meet. Simon, meanwhile, hoped to dissuade Lord Saltoun from acting as go-between for Tullibardine’s schemes.

At daybreak, Simon and his lairds set out to rendezvous with Saltoun from the Stratherrick estates, where he had been enlisting gentlemen to his cause. As their party crossed the River Ness and headed west towards Dounie, ‘the inhabitants, observing their alert and spirited appearance lifted up their hands to heaven, and prayed God to prosper their enterprise’, Simon wrote. Dollery, Tullibardine’s recruiting agent, confirmed their support. ‘It is certain the generality of the country about Inverness favours’ Simon, Thomas and their followers, he told his master. ‘In the very town of Inverness I hear they call the young rogue the Master of Lovat.’ Even the professional classes were coming over to Simon’s side.

The party rode on with confidence. The Beauly Firth sparkled on the right as they entered the woods of Bunchrew, about three miles out of Inverness. Suddenly, one of Simon’s lairds noticed a group of ‘running footmen’ scampering out of the woods. These runners accompanied gentlemen of any standing, holding their stirrups as they mounted and dismounted; opening gates in their path; fording rivers and burns and leading the gentleman’s horse to steady its progress. Simon was shocked to see that they were followed by the Lords Saltoun and Mungo Murray and their tail of armed followers. Saltoun was very chatty, apparently ‘in great hopes to have his son [become] Lord Lovat when the girl was ripe’. Seeing and hearing all this, Simon erupted. He and Saltoun had arranged to meet that day to prevent this very thing. He, Simon, was the obvious candidate for young Amelia’s hand. The Lords were reneging on their agreement on every count.

Simon’s reaction was phrased in the clan rhetoric of pride and ‘face’: such ‘an affront was too atrocious … not to exact satisfaction for it, or perish in the attempt’, Simon later wrote. William of Errochit, a Stratherrick laird, shot forward and levelled a carabine at Saltoun and Mungo: ‘Stop, traitor, you shall pay with your hide your irruption into this country in hostility to our laird!’ The party skidded to a halt. Simon cantered up to Mungo Murray, yelling at him, ‘Fire traitor, or I will blow out your brains!’ Mungo dropped his reins and threw up his hands. ‘My dear Simon,’ he retorted. ‘Is this the termination of our long and tender friendship?’

Simon looked at him along his pistol. ‘You are a base coward, and deserve no quarter,’ he replied, ‘but I give you your life.’

Simon’s men moved among the group and disarmed them all, ‘without the smallest resistance from any individual’, except Lord Saltoun’s valet de chambre, who only gave up his weapon after Simon ‘struck him a blow on the head with the flat side of his sword’. The two Lords and their company of gentlemen were rounded up and taken to Fanellan, two miles from Castle Dounie, where Simon ordered the party to be locked up. A gallows was erected outside Lord Saltoun’s cell window. The unhappy noble sat alone in a tiny room and, in between the sawing and banging, listened to his fate being discussed. The door of Saltoun’s cell opened and another of Simon’s lairds, Major Fraser of Castleleathers, entered, swathed in plaid from top to toe, his face as red as his tartan. Taunting him, Castleleathers instructed his Lordship ‘to prepare himself for another world … He had but two days to live.’ The pro-Murray Frasers who had called Saltoun in to their country were then made to cast dice, ‘to know whose fate it was to hang with him’. This was ritualised violence, a tool in old-fashioned clan diplomacy; a display of seriousness of intent.

Lord Saltoun did not react well, Castleleathers recorded. As the effect of the news sank in, ‘the poor gentleman, finding this a hard pill to digest, contracted a bloody flux, of which he almost dyed’. Saltoun passed out cold, crashing to the floor. ‘Upon his recovery he begged his life, the gallows having stood all the time beneath his window – and 500 men waiting on in arms.’

Not wanting the death of a nobleman on his hands, Simon released them all immediately, though not before pressing his sword under Saltoun’s and Mungo Murray’s chins and making them swear never to come back to Fraser country. Happy to agree to anything, the nobles touched the tip of his weapon, swore the oath and fled.

The kidnapping had started out as what most Highland Scots recognised as a clan raid – a wild spree by the young bloods of one clan against another. However, the Murrays went to court to move the insult into quite another quarter. They declared the Frasers had risen in ‘open and manifest Rebellion’. This was a capital charge. The Murrays demanded legal endorsement – a ‘Commission of Fire and Sword’ – to send in soldiers to arrest the Beaufort Frasers and devastate their lands. The court had to distinguish between the private and public offence in all this. The government had an interest in rather than a monopoly on violence as a tool of justice in North Britain. Representatives of the Crown knew Tullibardine was trying to use Scottish law against a kindred he himself was provoking into a clan feud. The Privy Council in Edinburgh hesitated.

To Simon the kidnapping and high jinx was a Highland, private matter, between the Master of Lovat and the Murrays. He did not see himself as being in rebellion against the Crown. It might all have been diffused, had British justice not been even more vexed by what Simon did next.

FIVE

‘The Grand Fornicator of the Aird’, 1697–99

‘The Lady not yielding willingly, there was some harsh measures taken …’

– MAJOR FRASER OF CASTLELEATHERS

Simon did not stop to think. He did not know what would happen or leave enough time to scheme at every twist and turn. On 15 October, days after freeing Lord Saltoun, his Frasers galloped over the hill from Fanellan. Runners fanned out across the slopes around them, like the clan’s hunting dogs, and fell on Castle Dounie. Simon ordered a guard to be placed on all the avenues to the castle ‘to prevent the Dowager from sending to her father’, or brother. Simon made Lady Amelia pen a soothing note to Colonel Hill, the officer in charge of the government barracks at Fort William. ‘We are still in hopes to take away this riot friendly,’ she reassured him.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff of Inverness-shire did what was required to mollify the victims and rein in the aggressively exuberant Fraser youth. Simon and his associates would appear before him to answer for the kidnapping of Lords Saltoun and Murray. Simon travelled to Inverness, accompanied by his father, where he was rebuked by the Sheriff for letting things get out of hand, told to quieten down and dismissed. The Sheriff Court did not care to consider the issue of Simon’s occupation of Castle Dounie. Impatient heirs often bumped against a dowager trying to hang on in the old family home. Besides, Lady Amelia seemed cross, not terrified.

In Fort William, Colonel Hill relaxed. Brigadier Alexander Grant, the Sheriff of Inverness-shire, was a competent man and chief of Clan Grant, friends and neighbours of the Frasers for hundreds of years. Grant was a follower of the Earl of Argyll and ‘is judged competent for the Riot’, Colonel Hill assured Tullibardine. ‘I conclude there will be no more trouble about that affair,’ Hill said, turning his mind back to organising supplies. The campaigning season was drawing to an end, and his troops needed to winter in at the garrison.

Tullibardine threw Hill’s reply aside and composed a cold note. Hill should not act as if the feuding Frasers and Murrays were just two barbaric clans locked into a territorial dispute. ‘Not only on the public account, but also on mine,’ he said – as if Scotland and the Murrays were mirrors of each other. The colonel must use government troops to quell this ‘uprising against the King’. He must send a ‘strong party of the King’s soldiers amongst them … to apprehend the Beauforts … which,’ Tullibardine gritted his teeth, ‘I wish you had sent on the first account.’

At Dounie, Simon had thought of another way to settle the feud, as audacious as the first. If he could not have Amelia the daughter, he would have Amelia the mother. Then he would have both of them. He walked through to Lady Lovat’s chambers. She loved and esteemed him. They had known each other most of their lives. They must marry. Lady Lovat refused. ‘He urged the more, fearing that troops’ from the Atholl Murrays ‘would march against him’. Still she would not yield.

Simon considered for a moment, then shouted for a couple of men and despatched them to Inverness. They returned after dark. In their wake, they towed an inebriated Episcopal minister on a pony, the Reverend Robert Munro of Abertarff, a ‘poor, sordid fellow’.

‘The Lady not yielding willingly,’ Fraser of Castleleathers noted with foreboding, ‘there was some harsh measures taken, a parson sent for, and the bagpipe blown up.’ Too late, Lady Amelia realised how vulnerable she was. Two men hauled her, in tears, before Reverend Munro, Simon taking his position grim-faced by her side. The deafening groan of the pipes bounced off the walls of the small room. The minister kept his head down, and pronounced Amelia and Simon man and wife.

An overwrought Amelia was dismissed to her maids. Simon joined his men to drink the health of bride and groom, and the settlement of their troubles. The clan was safe. The Master of Lovat sent a man to Stratherrick to tell his father the news.

Early next morning, at around two o’clock, Simon and a group of armed guards entered his bride’s apartments. A drunken Simon instructed the maids to undress Amelia for bed, and then withdraw. When he returned nothing had happened, so he ordered two clansmen to remove the serving women.

Amelia ‘cried out most piteously’ as two men lifted her to the bed, and struggled to prepare the lady for her wedding night. Bending over her, Simon held aquavitie⁴ to her nose. One man fumbled at her shoes. A maid rushed to her lady and attempted to untie Amelia’s clothes. Lady Lovat kicked her away. Determined, Simon searched for a dirk to cut his wife’s stays, found none, and told one of his men to do it.

Impatient for this to end, they ‘put my Lady on her face and spread her arms’ and cut the laces of her corset, and finally left Amelia and Simon alone. Versions of what happened that night circulated almost immediately. In one account the piper played in an adjacent room to drown Amelia’s screams, and in the morning a servant found her speechless and out of her senses. Others denied it. By dawn, however, silence hung over the castle. Simon had put the bachelor state behind him.

The Murrays erupted in fury. The sister of Scotland’s most powerful man was the ‘most violented lady’ in the kingdom, they said. Amelia’s father, the Marquis of Atholl, commanded Lords James and Mungo to get her away. Atholl pressed Tullibardine to obtain an order for government troops to ‘catch that base creature, Simon Fraser, and his accomplices’. From Inverness to Edinburgh and London, gossip and letters argued the question: had he raped a Marquis’s daughter? If he had forced her, and was not mad or stupid, what had driven him to do it?

Major Fraser of Castleleathers recorded that very quickly Lady Amelia made up her own mind. ‘Whatever new light the lady had got,’ she desired her husband to ‘send for Mr William Fraser, minister of Kilmorack, to make a second marriage (not thinking the first valid)’. The hell of that night left her not knowing where she stood.

Simon said he hoped the marriage would allay ‘the Marquis of Atholl’s fury against him’, but the news that Atholl had acquired Simon Fraser as a son-in-law, unsurprisingly, sent the old man into a frenzy. There ‘was nothing in his mind but the business of the base Frasers’, wrote his wife. Old Atholl was adamant Tullibardine must make their quarrels a government concern at the highest levels. For the next two years, the records of the Privy Council chattered with Inverness and the Frasers.

The forced marriage and consummation were brutal errors of judgement that Simon would regret all his life. Again he had used a lamented but tolerated old tradition and pushed it to new levels in order to force a match with a Marquis’s daughter against her family’s will. The practice was normally used to make a girl fall in line with her family’s wishes, against her will.

Thomas Lovat wrote to the Earl of Argyll, explaining first that the Saltoun incident had been settled by the Sheriff, and second, that his son and Amelia were now legally married. It was better to let it all die down, he said. Besides, he observed cannily, the Murrays’ ‘design of appropriating the estate and following of Lovat to themselves, is made liable to more difficulties by that match’. Argyll agreed entirely. Tullibardine’s political enemies stood by Simon as a way to attack the High Commissioner and curtail his vast ambitions to rule all Scotland with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton.

In order to convince the legal establishment in Edinburgh to act against Simon, the Murrays required their star witness: the victim of the alleged crime, Lady Amelia Lovat. Rumours buzzed around Inverness that the dishonoured Lady was now dead. When Lords Mungo and James Murray rode to Castle Dounie they found it empty. Simon and Amelia had withdrawn, with a company of armed men, to the isolation of Eilean Aigas, a wooded rocky islet in the middle of the River Beauly. Simon hoped the black, fast-flowing tangle of currents surrounding the island would make their retreat impregnable.

They stayed here for several weeks. Simon wrote to a friend in Inverness explaining he was struggling to keep up his wife’s spirits. ‘I know not how to manage her,’ he wrote unhappily, ‘so I hope you will send me all the advice you can.’ He was not used to coping with a woman, a mother, who was just a few years older than him. For a lady of rank to live an itinerant life, adjunct to a fugitive and far from her children, was very hard. Simon soothed her as best he could.

Amelia Lovat’s position was a confused one. A ‘shamed’ lady, even the daughter of a Marquis, was a social outcast; she knew this. Besides, she had sworn a deposition that her marriage was genuine when the Reverend James had visited them at Dounie. When Amelia’s father found this out he was furious, shouting that the Fraser clerics were all ‘false prophets and wizards’. She yearned to see her brothers, perhaps to find out when she might come back, or to get some degree of acceptance from her family. Though Simon did not trust them, he allowed Amelia to travel down the glen to meet with her brothers. He would never see her again.

At Castle Dounie, James Murray greeted his sister tenderly, and asked if she was ‘lawfully married to Captain Fraser of Beaufort?’ She answered that she was. Lord James pulled away, raised his foot and ‘gave her along the belly’, yelling at her that she was a bitch. Lady Amelia doubled over. An Inverness laird, Fraser of Culduthel, rushed forward to aid her, but Murray men overpowered him. They pushed Amelia onto a horse and galloped off towards Inverness.

With Lady Amelia on her way to Blair Castle, Tullibardine persuaded the Privy Council and Court of Session to issue ‘Letters of Intercommuning’ forbidding anyone to ‘commune’ with the Frasers. In effect, ‘whatever slaughter, mutilation, bloodshed, fire-raising or other violence, shall happen to be acted’, by anyone who assisted the law in ‘seizing, reducing, and bringing them in dead or alive … the same shall be held as laudable good and warrantable service to his Majesty’, but even more to the Atholl Murrays.

Colonel Hill warned Tullibardine that local people on both sides ‘talk very slightingly of the matter and say now there is no need of sending forces’. The issue was settled; no one wanted to stir it up to a savage feud where the more powerfully ambitious side used the law to inflict crushing blows and the other eventually responded in kind, having nothing to lose. Tullibardine ignored him. A first wave of troops was sent in, commanded by Amelia’s brothers. The ordinary clansmen, weakened by the famines of King William’s ill years, found increased troop numbers quartered on them and could not cope. The people began to starve.

Over the next few weeks, the Murray ladies at Blair Castle pressured Lady Amelia to condemn Simon Fraser. ‘My Lord and I has told her … over and over,’ her sister wrote to Katherine Tullibardine, ‘that if she has any regard to her own honour and reputation, she will for once lay aside her reserved humour … and tell, to all she speaks with, the abhorrence she has of that base man.’ If Amelia maintained she was married to Simon, there was no case.

Her refusal to come to court and declare she had been raped drove her family mad with frustration, and her despair is clear from her letters. ‘I have the comfort in my extreme misery to be owned by such relations … which is God’s goodness to me … one so unworthy and so unfortunate.’ If she assented to her family’s description of her as ruined, what sort of future would she face? By condemning Simon, she condemned herself. Her shame would feed scandal sheets from Inverness to Paris. Her family pushed on oblivious. She was their political pawn. Lord James Murray believed that Tullibardine and his eldest brother were prepared ‘to ruin my sister’s and niece’s interest’ – the Lovat estates – to exact vengeance, kill Simon and regain control.

* * *

Simon escaped Eilean Aigas and haunted the hill country, moving and hiding from glen to glen. At the end of the year, Simon sent his father to safety from the Stratherrick estates, to Thomas’s brother-in-law, the MacLeod chief, at Dunvegan Castle on the west coast of the Isle of Skye. The Murrays now had about 600 soldiers – government and Murray men – in the Inverness area. Lord James Murray wrote to his father, Tullibardine: ‘Except to satisfy you, I confess I expect neither honour nor credit by turning a plunderer.’ Atholl and Tullibardine worried that Lord James did not have the stomach for the fight to waste Fraser country and reduce the clan to submission.

Tullibardine had failed to secure from the Privy Council a Commission of Fire and Sword, the licence he needed that allowed him to eliminate the Frasers. Some Councillors ‘were opposing the case’, Dollery informed his master, ‘as judging it not proper to give a direct commission to one clan over against another, and others said that it was not agreeable to law either’. The government read this principally as a clan feud. The central authorities manipulated feuds as a control valve to maintain a power balance in the region, but were wary of elevating one to a matter of national security. It might all backfire. They all lived with the national outrage after Glencoe.

In Inverness, even the weather conspired to conceal Simon. ‘Severe frost and snow’ filled paths and tracks. The Murray soldiers shirked from going out on forays. No matter how much the Marquis of Atholl offered in lures and bribes, officers could obtain no reliable intelligence from turncoats. All his army could do was destroy the clan’s property, which, given ‘the most tempestuous weather of snow and great frosts’, brought more starvation to ordinary Frasers. Unless the country people, the poor, ‘be made to suffer for his being among them’, wrote one of Tullibardine’s officers, and those among the professional and landowning classes ‘that go along with him [be] punished in their goods’, they were sure it would be impossible to get hold of Simon Fraser. Tullibardine ordered the devastation to continue. It was futile. One officer spelled out the situation – ‘the whole country are entirely addicted to him’ and they should call a halt.

Atholl and Tullibardine would not relent. As the winter of 1697/98 ground on, it proved impossible ‘to march against them from a town that favours them … through a country that is friendly to them, and intangled with them, without being discovered’. The Murray spy network was proving a disaster. Simon’s functioned beautifully.

The Murrays subpoenaed scores of Frasers from all ranks to go south and testify against their chief. The road south led them by Blair Castle, thirty miles north of Perth. The old Marquis forced the military escorts to bring the witnesses to him and put them in his dungeons. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Annandale, sent tetchy letters requesting the forwarding of his witnesses. The Marquis of Atholl let the witnesses go, while he whinged that the court in Inverness, run by Brigadier Grant, was biased ‘to the prejudice of our family … It is all our enemies that has it in their hands’ – a breathtaking complaint from a man who intimidated witnesses daily and whose son manipulated the Edinburgh judiciary. Atholl asked Tullibardine to make sure the Frasers were sent back to him on their road home, ‘so that I may make them perfect what they have begun’. They know, the Marquis said, ‘they would be ruined if they did not’ appear for the Murrays, ‘which is the best argument to Highlanders’. If they ‘should fail’, he added chillingly, ‘they will still be in my power to take amends … All this has been my business night and day.’

Revenge consumed the old man. ‘I hope I have got the chief [men] of the name of Fraser who live in Stratherrick broke and divided,’ he told Tullibardine. He was determined to break Simon’s core support. Yet the Murray chief was no longer young. He carried stress in his belly, making him prone to belching and ‘gout in the stomach’. He put himself under terrible pressure to settle Simon on a gallows, before allowing himself to die a happy man.

By the spring of 1698, Atholl declared with satisfaction that ‘the estate of Lovat is altogether ruined’. Although the outlaws remained at large, the Murrays had amassed enough evidence to start their trial. Simon was cited to answer two charges: first, forced marriage and rape. Second, raising men in arms and resisting the King’s forces.

The court ‘compered’ Thomas and Simon and their followers to appear three times over the summer, with increasingly dire threats every time they declined. On 6 September 1698, the court found them guilty of the capital crime of rebellion, and they were declared forfeit in King William’s name. Tullibardine got his Commission of Fire and Sword. (The Crown prosecution refused to have anything to do with the private charge of possible marital rape.) Simon, his father and their main adherents were now ‘outlawes and fugitives frae the lawes’. They were to be ‘executed to the death … Their name, fame, memory and honours to be extinct and their armes to be riven furth and delate out of the bookes of armes.’ For the rest of time, none of their heirs could enjoy titles, positions and dignities. In effect, anything that anyone did to the Lovats and their men, since they were outside the law, would be ignored by anyone within the law. The Murrays had free rein to pursue Simon any way they chose. His family were to be wiped from the pages of history. The Lovat estates lay tantalisingly within the Murrays’ grasp.

Simon wrote to Argyll, asking that he secure a pardon from King William to let the Lovats live at peace, enjoy their estates and serve his Majesty. Someone had to control the Murrays. Argyll went to the King.

While at his brother-in-law’s castle on Skye, Simon received news that his father, Thomas, Lord Lovat, had died and been buried in the graveyard of his wife’s family. Simon could not risk bringing the body of the Fraser chief home, or honour him with the traditional huge Highland funeral and burial at Wardlaw. In hiding, Simon had no time to grieve. He believed the Atholls had hounded the old man to death. Simon now assumed the titles of MacShimidh Mor, the 11th Lord Lovat, chief of Clan Fraser – though these were worthless to a young man who was now an outlaw.

Armed with a death warrant, the Murray hunt heated up. At the head of hundreds of Athollmen and Lowland soldiers, Lord James Murray, accompanied by his brother Mungo, planned a night attack into Stratherrick where they believed Simon was hiding. ‘Having the authors of his father’s death, and of all his personal misfortunes before his eyes, he would now revenge himself in their blood, or perish in the attempt,’ Simon swore. He galloped to Stratherrick to stop more ill-treatment of his people. The hunters would become the hunted.

The Murrays struck camp for the night against a rocky crag. When they mustered the next morning, Simon calculated he had something under 300 men to their 600. Given the numerical disadvantage, a full-frontal attack would fail. Simon ordered one of his men, Alexander MacDonald, to take sixty Frasers and string them out in a thin line in front of the enemy, so they would believe his whole force faced them. Meanwhile, Simon led the rest around to their flank.

Realising late they were to be ambushed, Lord James ordered his troops to fall back towards a ‘terrible defile’, six miles in the direction of Inverness, called Allt nan Gobhar – the Blacksmith’s Burn. Alexander MacDonald guessed their goal and raced ahead of them to block the way through. The fighting men under Simon broke rank in pursuit.

Simon Fraser fought as MacShimidh, a Highland chief; not as the bewigged and breeches-clad British peer petitioning in the law courts of Edinburgh, but wrapped and belted in a plaid over the top of his linen shirt, like his ordinary kinsmen. He put a bonnet on his head, and stuck the Fraser emblem, a sprig of yew, in it. With the battle cry A’Chaisteal Dhunaidh – ‘for Castle Dounie’, and the scream of the pipes, they charged to battle. ‘Lord Lovat ran for three miles alongside them, on foot, and almost naked.’ The howling chief of Clan Fraser stampeded the government troops towards the men hidden in Blacksmith’s Burn. Drawing close, the Murrays saw what awaited them and suddenly ‘impressed with the most lively apprehensions’ of impending slaughter, most Murray men tried to surrender. Simon observed Lord James yelling at them to engage but they ‘laid down their arms and covering their heads with their plaids, cried out for quarter’. A Murray fighter came running towards them, ‘with a white handkerchief … neckcloth tied to a bludgeon, crying out for mercy’.

‘Lord James,’ Simon wrote with grim pleasure, ‘was beside himself at this declaration.’ Simon’s first response was not to take the surrender. He surveyed the noisy, trembling and quarrelling bunch of regular and irregular forces whose commanding officers had ‘deprived him of lands and title by violence, injustice, and fraud … [He was] outlawed and condemned to death, hunted on the mountains,’ he reflected. The last couple of years had not encouraged the philosophical, university-trained side of his character. They drove him in on most animal resources, to survive and fight, protect his territory. His father had died without elegy and obsequy; without his life being properly honoured. He would ‘avenge the death of his father, and the tyranny of Lord Athol and all his family’. Since birth, these men had tried to manipulate his destiny. Now Simon was clan chief.

Though his first instinct had been to massacre the lot of them, older heads among his advisers made him understand that if he did, ‘not a man in the Kingdom would either assist or pity’ the Frasers’ cause, so he contented himself with humiliation. He lifted his sword tip and made James and Mungo kiss it and swear upon it that ‘they renounced their claims in Jesus Christ, and their hopes of heaven, and devoted themselves to the torments of hell, if they ever returned’ or occasioned ‘Lord Lovat the smallest mischief’. He then lined up his men in two files and made the enemy troop run the gauntlet jostled like criminals, and sent them out of his country.

At bottom, Simon was in desperate need of a pardon to end this feud before his whole inheritance was torched beyond resurrection and his people all starved to death. More in hope than expectation, Simon Fraser thereafter took as his motto Sin Sanguine Victor, ‘Victor without Blood’.

SIX

Victory and loss, 1699–1702

‘I despair of saving myself or my Kindred’

– LOVAT TO THE EARL OF ARGYLL

The Reverend James had educated Simon in his responsibilities to his clan, always to keep going, and to determine his own fate. He conjured,

In spite of malice you will still be great,

And raise your name above the power of fate.

Our sinking house which now stoops low with age,

You show with newborn lustre on the stage.

Typical of Celtic eulogies, the hero is praised and cajoled to ever-greater sacrifices. Other chiefs had passed by this destiny. But it inspired Simon and, as the century drew to a close, left him facing a death sentence. He believed passionately that fate or God had laid on him as a sacred duty the salvation of Clan Fraser. It was, he always said, inseparable from ‘his Nature’. Primogeniture and his personal qualities confirmed fate’s decree. Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat and then Tullibardine had tried to break and remake Clan Fraser in their own image, using all the skills and resources they could muster. Now Simon sought to restore the clan using his gifts and training.

Without heavyweight political backing, Simon could not win. He faced a long guerrilla action, a ruinous feud, fought on and over his country. While Tullibardine influenced the Edinburgh judiciary, the courts offered no path back inside lawful society. For eight long months the Atholl Murrays had harried and hunted the Frasers, trying to capture or crush their leader, but without success. In a desperate attempt to flush out the Fraser chief, Lord James, smarting from his defeat at Lovat’s hands, had his men drive off stock, smash boats, nets and fishing gear, spinning wheels and looms, and fell trees – anything that might allow the Frasers to live or do a little business. But Simon was still at large, and his messages were getting through to the south. His successes and the substantial levels of support he clearly enjoyed impressed many who sought to bring down Tullibardine and stop him (in the Highlands) and his brother-in-law Hamilton (in the Lowlands) exercising almost unassailable power in Scotland. The Duke of Argyll advised Simon to ‘lay down his arms and come privately to London’ to seek a pardon, informing William III that Tullibardine created chaos and hostility to the King in Scotland in the service of his greed. Lovat and the trouble in Fraser country were Argyll’s proof.

Late in 1699, two weeks after setting out, Simon Fraser entered London for the second time in his life. It proved a wasted trip. The King had left the country and was at Loos in Flanders. By the turn of the century, William was in a stronger position in Europe. In 1697, Louis XIV of France had abandoned his previous war aims and sued for peace. As part of this he now acknowledged the Prince of Orange as William III, King of England and Scotland, thereby denying the claim of James II. Even the Pope proclaimed William III ‘the master; he’s arbiter of all Europe’.

King William was now in Flanders taking part in another struggle provoked by Louis XIV’s ambition. The future of the thrones of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire was at stake. At present the ailing King of Spain, Carlos II, sat on both thrones. The rest of Europe was divided between whether to keep the thrones united, or split them up when Carlos died, and on who would sit on either or both thrones. Competing European interests battled over a settlement, until Louis XIV insisted on having both titles for his second grandson, the Duke of Anjou. Relations between William III and Louis XIV, only recently nosing above freezing point after three years of peace, plunged to a glacial impasse and stayed that way while Carlos II lived.

William needed a relatively peaceful and united Britain to be able to concentrate on defeating Louis. And while no government needed the entirety of its peoples on its side, it did need enough capable supporters to maintain law and order locally, raise taxes and supply soldiers for these international affairs. To be one of the regional managers, Lovat explained, he needed to live as a magnate, not an outlaw. He and his people could then ‘serve your Majesty as they are full ready to do’, as he outlined to King William in a letter Carstares read aloud to his monarch.

Argyll supported Simon by adding his voice. ‘The persecution [Tullibardine] exercised against Lord Lovat and the clan of the Frasers, is capable of exciting all the clans, and even the whole nation, to revolt against the government,’ Argyll asserted. ‘The King cannot do a more acceptable thing for the generality than send [Lovat] his pardon for the convocation of men in arms.’ More people only hesitated to speak out against Atholl and Tullibardine because ‘they threaten so hard and bite so sore’, finished Argyll.

The Murrays vehemently opposed this. ‘It will be a great reflection on the government if there be not a speedy course taken to apprehend’ Simon Fraser, Tullibardine lectured his King, justifying the turbulence and suffering he brought about in Fraser country. Other Scottish politicians petitioned Carstares, emphasising the wider British political element in Lovat’s case. ‘Although I cannot justify Captain Fraser in his proceedings, but yet, the rendering of so many men desperate is not at all to the government’s interest,’ wrote Sir James Stewart, the Lord Advocate.

Simon reiterated that the Frasers wanted peace, ‘to live the more comfortable under the rays of your Majesty’s protection, and thereby be more encouraged to serve your Majesty’s interest’. William listened to the increasing volume of this sort of talk, of Tullibardine’s abuse of his position for private gain. Tullibardine had maintained his following with the promise of positions and pensions to clever, ambitious men. The King decided to stop promoting men put forward by Tullibardine to fill posts in the Scottish executive. Tullibardine reacted by resigning from the government in a fit of humiliated fury. Having the deepest confidence in the counsel of Carstares and Argyll, the King agreed to pardon Simon for his crimes against the Crown and accepted the Fraser chief’s offer of devoted service. However, William refused to enter into the murky business of the forced marriage. The Crown had never charged him with it and logically William could not pardon him for it. He was happy to curb Murray ambitions, but he told Argyll he did not want to ‘disgust’ them too much.

It had taken nearly two years, from Argyll’s first letter to his last, for the Earl to be able to write excitedly to Simon Fraser’s friends that he was brandishing ‘Beaufort’s (now I may say Lord Lovat’s) pardon’ in his hands. Simon was free, and now officially the 11th Lord Lovat. As the chief, MacShimidh Mor, Lovat could return home and relieve his people’s sufferings.

In Europe, three deaths threatened further political instability and affected Lovat’s plans. First, the British Protestant succession failed again when, in July 1700, the surviving Protestant Stuart child of Princess Anne and the Prince of Denmark, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, died.

The ramifications of Gloucester’s death spread north to Scotland, and far south to the Courts of Versailles and St Germains when, the following summer, Mary and Anne Stuart’s father, James II, died in exile. With his eye on Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, Louis XIV no longer had reason to appease William. Happy to aggravate political tensions within Britain, he proclaimed that James II’s son would be ‘King James III of England and VIII of Scotland’ on the death of Princess Anne. Anne had not even succeeded yet. The third death was the passing of Carlos II, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.

Meanwhile, King William’s grasp on Scotland was slipping. The whole country was breaking down after five years of failing harvests and a famine that had killed up to fifteen per cent of the Scottish population. Politicians racked their brains for schemes to stimulate life in the economic mud in which Scotland drowned. Their suffering was proof of God’s displeasure at the overturning of the natural order and at the anointed Stuart ruler having been driven away. The massacre at Glencoe, the quartering of government troops on starving people, and a series of economic disasters all blighted his rule.

The most recent crisis went back to 1696, when William Paterson, Scotsman and founder of the Bank of England, had suggested to his fellow Scots merchants and landowners that they should start a foreign trading company to stimulate their weak economy. Scottish businessmen set up ‘The Company of Scotland’ to trade with Africa and the Indies. Scots flocked to invest and sank a quarter of the nation’s tiny liquid capital into the venture. Inverness merchants contributed £3,000. They almost beggared the town on the gamble of massive returns. When the profits rolled in, it was said, investors’ wives and children would rush to demand luxuries from local merchants. The economy would boom. This was Paterson’s vision for Scotland.

The Scots plumped on Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama, as the cradle of their hopes, christening it ‘New Caledonia’. The Spanish complained angrily and claimed the territory – close to Spain’s silver mines – for themselves. William III agreed to withdraw English support for New Caledonia on one condition: that Spain refuse Louis XIV’s demand to make his grandson King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.

Spain agreed. The English Parliament pressured English merchants to withdraw all their capital from the Darien Venture. The English Navy, rather than protecting its sister nation’s merchant shipping, harried and captured it. To the Scots, William was putting his English subjects’ interests over those of Scotland. The collapse of the Darien Venture induced national economic breakdown. The Scots went into shock.

The whole nation seized on Darien and the colony at New Caledonia as the image of Scotland’s impoverished world standing. The Lord Advocate – the most senior lawyer in Scotland – Sir James Stewart, tried to impress on Carstares the level of grief and despair felt in the kingdom William had never once bothered to visit. ‘Disasters increase, and the weakness of the government is more and more discovered … Was ever a people more unhappy?’ The Scots asked themselves what they gained from the Union of Crowns. Independence looked like a solution to the succession and economic crises.

Sir James Stewart identified three groups fighting to dominate the Scottish Parliament: the Jacobites, the ‘Malcontents’, and the ‘Williamites’. The Jacobites wanted to ‘break the army … [so] that, when the King dies, and neither the Princess Anne nor he having any children, they may the easier embroil the nation, and do their own business’. That is, to restore the Stuarts from France. ‘The Malcontents that are not Jacobites,’ he explained, were aggressive place-seekers. They just wanted to disrupt proceedings in Parliament and disrupt government in Scotland, to force the King to promote them to power. However, ‘the Williamites … I think, must be more numerous than the other two. Their aim solely is the peace and security of the government and the good of the country, by an industrious pursuit of honourable and profitable trade …’ This last comment was wishful nonsense to make the King feel better. William’s credibility in North Britain was disintegrating.

Simon, Lord Lovat, moved into Castle Dounie and began collecting such rents as he decently could from starving clansmen and semi-bankrupt lairds. He took debts on himself and let the ordinary tenantry off their rents for that year where he saw they had nothing.

He was not left for long to try and sort out his estates. Goaded by Lovat’s reappearance, the Murrays hurtled back to the law courts. This time they forced ‘Sister Lovat’ there with them. They petitioned the Court of Session to summon ‘Captain Fraser’ (they would not call him Lord Lovat) – to answer the private charge of ‘rapt and hamesucken’. Relative to rape, rapt was a watered-down assault. Lovat explained it to one of the King’s advisers. ‘They do not [charge] me for ravishment, but for carrying her by violence from place to place.’ They hound me ‘as if I had murdered the King!’ Lovat complained. Hamesucken, loosely speaking, was socking (sucken) it to someone in their own home (hame). A crime against property rights, it was a capital crime, unlike rapt. Hamesucken also covered ‘the ravishing of persons of rank in houses of consequence’. They had to charge Lovat with both to get a death penalty.

Argyll told the King that the court summoning Lovat was ‘not composed as it ought to be’. While the Lord Advocate warned Argyll if Lovat ‘is found tomorrow in Edinburgh, I would not give a sixpence for his head’. Years of Tullibardine infiltration of the law courts favoured the Murrays securing the clan chief’s conviction. There were ‘such wicked and abandoned judges’, Lovat wrote, ‘the innocence of an angel of light would be to no avail!’ And Lovat was no angel. Lovat did not appear and on 17 February 1701 was found guilty in absentia. He was outlawed yet again.

Argyll advised Lovat to forget Edinburgh and the Scottish legal system and come south, persuade the King to extend his pardon to cover the ‘private charge’ and fulfil William’s intention to pardon Lovat. He must demonstrate that the Atholl Murrays subverted the King’s wishes.

In the summer of 1701, William raised Argyll to a dukedom, a great sign of royal favour. Lovat, an Argyll man, waited for his patronage. He wanted Argyll to place him somewhere in the Scottish government. There he could do the King’s business and his own.

Roderick Mackenzie, Lord Prestonhall, on the bench of the Court of Session, was a Scottish Law Lord, the brother of Sir George, now Viscount Tarbat – and therefore the uncle of the young Amelia Fraser presently living at Blair Castle. Tarbat and Sir Roderick had voted for Tullibardine to declare Lovat’s forced marriage with the dowager Lady Lovat null and void, and also to condemn Lovat to death because of the ‘rapt and hamesucken’. Now Sir Roderick presented the Mackenzies’ bill. He offered his son, Alexander Mackenzie, as husband to young Amelia, now rising thirteen and of marriageable age. On his ward’s behalf, Tullibardine thought about it, and accepted. It might help reduce the Frasers to obedience. It meant that Simon Fraser could never marry her and it brought the Mackenzies back on side. Tullibardine was rebuilding his power base. Those wily old Mackenzies could be useful allies.

There was a problem: even in the terms of the corrupt marriage contract of 1685, the husband had to be a Fraser. So the bridegroom’s father made him into one. Alexander was henceforth ‘Alexander Mackenzie of Fraserdale’. It was a mockery, but it mattered little. The bridegroom got ready to wrest the chieftainship of Clan Fraser from its natural chief.

On 7 March 1702, Lovat borrowed some money from Inverness lairds and merchants and prepared to go to London to raise an action in the House of Lords against this malicious twist of fate. Everything he had tried thus far the Murrays had countered using the might of the state. They had each resorted to force, corruption or violence to crush their opponent. He needed to stop the marriage and clear his name.

The next day at Richmond Park, William III’s horse put his hoof into a molehill, stumbled and threw its rider. The King broke his collar bone and contracted a chest infection. Two weeks later he was dead. Lovat had not even left Inverness.

In March 1702, Princess Anne of Denmark ascended the thrones. The great and good rushed to London to confirm or acquire places in her administration. Lovat headed south to join them, arriving in late April. As he skulked in London to get an entrée to the new Queen’s presence, news came of the marriage of young Amelia Fraser and Alexander Mackenzie. In his absence they had moved into Castle Dounie. The news ‘was decisive in shattering and reshaping his plans’. As if to confirm the blow to his hopes, Queen Anne then raised the Earl of Tullibardine to the Duke of Atholl.

Lovat wrote to Argyll asking for his help. His old patron replied he had to tread carefully; Argyll was not favoured by Anne. He could or would not do anything. ‘I despair of saving myself or my Kindred in this government. So I am resolved to push my fortunes some elsewhere,’ Lovat wrote. ‘The restless enemies of the family of Lovat’, and the ‘indifference’ of his allies and protectors filled him with pain and disillusionment. ‘Though I have now lost my Country and Estate, I do not value my personal loss, for I can have bread anywhere.’ He predicted, though it tortured him to say it, ‘that after I am gone, in ten years there will not be ten Frasers together in Scotland’.

Scarcely eight weeks after Queen Anne ascended the thrones, her ministry opened hostilities against France in what would become known as the War of the Spanish Succession. On Carlos II’s death, Louis claimed the thrones of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for his grandson. Should he succeed, Spain, her colonial empire, and the loose confederation of European states that made up the Holy Roman Empire, would all fall within Louis XIV’s sphere of influence. Louis would interfere in Spanish colonies and overseas trade through French ambassadors in Madrid. On France’s northern frontier lay the Spanish Netherlands, buffer between France and the United Provinces. Louis would quarter his troops there if he could, and menace the Protestant Low Countries. To the south, if France influenced Spanish-held territories in Italy – such as Naples and Sicily – then Anglo-Dutch Mediterranean trade would be disrupted. In England’s nightmares, Louis XIV achieved his wildest dream, to be the first ‘universal monarch’ – effectively, ruler of the known world. That world would be largely Roman Catholic. The consequences for Protestant Britain and her allies would be dire.

Alone, Lovat concluded he could hope for nothing from Edinburgh or Whitehall and must leave the country for a short while. He lodged for a few weeks in Harwich and thought things over. While there he took a lover, a young woman called Lucy Jones. Little is known of Lucy other than her notes to Lovat. He asked her to write to him as ‘Captain John Campbell’, showing he felt the need to adopt pseudonyms, fearing perhaps that the new Duke of Atholl would hunt him down. She told him she worried about the effects of his ‘melancholy’. She counselled the sort of stoicism that showed she did not know her man very well (‘life has such mixtures, that sure all wise people must despise it. It is the mart for fools and carnaval of knaves’). When he left, Lucy disappeared from the record of his life.

Lovat collected himself. He straightened his cuffs. He must think more flexibly. The weakness of the British succession might be the key to reverse his phase of bad luck. The Stuarts’ quest for Restoration to their inheritance seemed to chime so neatly with his own. If Anne died, her nearest relative was her half-brother, James. Instead of missions to hold the line of the Highland chiefs for William or Anne, perhaps he should sway the clans to support James’s claims? The Scottish Parliament was calling officially for the end of the Union of Crowns. The Jacobites in Edinburgh saw independence as the preliminary to bringing in James. Scotland and England seethed with intrigue, action and possibilities. There must be something in all this for Lovat; his family had always supported the Stuarts.

The blending of the personal and political reinvigorated him. ‘My nature,’ Lovat explained, ‘obliged me to expose my person … in such a ventorious or rather desperate manner that none of my enemies or even my own friends and Relations thought that ever I would be able to accomplish my design,’ to save the Fraser clan from disappearing, ‘but that I must die in the attempting of it.’ Lovat told some clan members and supporters in Inverness-shire that he was going to the Continent for a few months, to gather arms and money, and maybe commissions, to buy support in the Scottish Parliament to vote for independence.

He left his young brother John Fraser as his deputy, with instructions to defend their interests and resist the Mackenzies should they try to encroach. They did. John haunted Stratherrick, still the centre of support for Lovat’s claims. From there John led a band of men into the Aird of Lovat and garrisoned Beauly. He and about thirty minor Fraser lairds and their sons roamed the Aird for months, threatening those who looked likely to accept the new incumbents at Dounie. When the government at last forced the Atholls to recall their soldiers, much of Fraser country was laid waste. It seemed to Lovat, as he prepared to leave, that all he had predicted was fast coming to pass. But he dared stay no longer.

His destination was the exiled Stuart Court outside Paris. Except for a few stolen weeks on the run, it would be fifteen years before he was back among his Fraser clan again.

PART TWO

At the Court of the Sun King, 1702–15

‘A Perfect Romance’

– GUALTERIO TO LORD LOVAT

SEVEN

The Stuart Court of St Germains, 1702

‘The dismallest place in all Europe’

– THE EARL OF MIDDLETON

Lovat trotted out through the forests west of Paris. His goal was the palace at St-Germains-en-Laye, twelve miles out of the city, and ten miles north of the new and still-expanding Palace of Versailles.

It soon loomed above him. Birthplace and childhood home of Louis XIV, the French King had only moved from St Germains on the completion of Versailles seven years earlier. Until then it was the premier royal palace in France, fit for a king-in-waiting. Louis XIV and James II’s grandparents, Henry IV of France and Marie Medici, laid out six formal terraces descending from the palace in huge, graceful steps to the Seine. Mary, Queen of Scots, lived at St Germains as Queen of France when she was married to Francis II. By offering James II sanctuary and a pension at St Germains after he fled England in December 1688, Louis showed how highly he regarded his Stuart cousins, and how acutely he felt their injury. James had died the previous September and spent his final years depressed and obsessed with religious devotions. His body was buried in the chapel at St Germains, and his brain in a sarcophagus at the Scots Chapel in Paris.

The Stuart Court had been looking for a way home, scanning the vistas from the palace’s uppermost terraces, across northern France, for almost fifteen years. The hills of Montmartre lay in the distance to the east. Below the chateau, deep avenues cut long ago, lined with chestnuts and oaks, disappeared into the forest. The woods nurtured wild boar, deer and birds. Louis XIV’s children came regularly from Versailles for the sport. It was imperative Lovat improve his prospects. He had borrowed money from Principal Carstares to go home and from the Fraser lairds and merchants to return to London. He was ‘in a starving condition’ and needed funds and protection. He tormented himself with thoughts of what his life should be: Dounie and all that went with it, the chief at ease in his own hall. Instead, Amelia and Alexander Mackenzie of ‘Fraserdale’ sat in his chairs and made heirs in his bed.

Lovat’s first contact was a cousin, Sir John MacLean. The two had communicated as soon as Lovat landed in France. Sir John addressed his letters to Lovat’s new alias, ‘Donald Campbell’, or ‘Dole Don, Ambassador Extraordinaire of the Devilish Cantons’ as he was in MacLean’s crazy demotic. (Dole is the phonetic rendition of the Gaelic for Donald, Domhnall. Donn is dull brown – in hair or mood. The ‘devilish cantons’ were their beloved Highlands.) Lovat was vic mo chri, ‘son of my heart’, and ‘I am yours and yours I will be to all eternity or may God confound me. Your own, In saecula, seculorum. Amen.’ Sir John mixed Gaelic, English, French and Latin promiscuously.

Before Louis XIV moved to Versailles, he had spent years upgrading the irregular pentagon of his grandparents’ medieval palace to the sprawling monster Lovat now gazed on. Louis’s architect, Hardouin-Mansart, added five projecting wings, regularising each façade. To allow for the crush and scramble of courtiers milling around the French King as he moved from room to room, the architect collapsed walls dividing the cramped medieval rooms. Wind-tunnel passages now stretched from end to end of the vast building, creating walkways for processing, parading and plotting in. Dogs, servants, politicians and courtiers tripped over each other as they jostled to keep close to the Sun King, his family, his favourites and his succession of mistresses. Then one day they all left for the new palace at Versailles.

Neglected, St Germains fell fast into disrepair. The ‘Accounts of the Royal Buildings’ record the condition of the empty palace when James II arrived in winter 1688/89: broken glass; dried-out, un-waxed, shrunken parquet flooring heaved out of line; locks stuck with rust that bled down doors and windows in damp weather; blown plaster and warping woodwork needed repairing. St Germains reeked of neglect. Nevertheless, in 1702 the new war and Louis’s opportunistic proclamation of ‘James III and VIII’ gave Lovat optimism: plans and counter-plans changed as news of the progress of the war arrived.

The layout of the palace made day-to-day management hard. Louis’s half-completed building works failed to open up a way to allow internal communication between the royal apartments of the Queen Regent, and sixteen-year-old James, and their ministers. The royal accommodation spread over most of the bel étage (the second floor was the ‘beautiful floor’). Everyone here was forced to live modestly. Lovat wandered with counsellors and royalty alike, scurrying rat-like from one suite to another between floors via exterior gangways. He would soon understand that the palace’s rambling and incoherent structure mirrored deep problems amongst the leading Jacobites at St Germains.

Lovat was introduced by Sir John to one of the most senior politicians and nobles, the Duke of Perth. An energetic man, ‘always violent for the party he espoused, and … passionately proud’, Perth was impatient for the Jacobite call to action. He was very sociable and open hearted, lively but quixotic. He ‘tells a story very prettily, is capricious, a thorough bigot, and hath been so in each religion while he professed it’, observed one of the British Secretary’s spies. Perth converted – more than once – and dashed through a spiritual palette that took in Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, and Roman Catholicism.

Lovat’s reports about the discontent in Scotland and England were sweet music to Perth’s ears. Perth was happy to make the Scottish throne available to James as a first step, whether by Act of Parliament or at the point of a sword. Lovat claimed to have met ‘the chiefs of the clans and a great number of the Lords of the Lowlands’ before he left Scotland. Never deserted by the rhetoric of self-promotion, Lord Lovat claimed he had pleaded their Majesties’ case ‘in so spirited a manner … urged with so much force’ that the leading men of the Highlands begged him to go and represent them in Paris, and tell their King to come now, and rule over them. The country suffered grievously under the yoke of the Union of Crowns, Lovat said. Hence, he ‘arrived in Paris with this important commission’.

If this accorded exactly with Perth’s hope, it was anathema to the other dominant character at St Germains. The Earl of Middleton was a moderate Jacobite and an English Protestant. He had come over in 1693 to be James II’s chief minister. The Duc de Saint-Simon, recorder of everyday life in Louis XIV’s Court, described Middleton and his wife as ‘fiendishly spiteful and scheming, but Middleton, because he was admirably good company, mixed on equal terms with best people at Versailles’. Though the Earl hated St Germains, calling the palace ‘the dismallest place in all Europe’, he remained ferociously loyal to young James and his mother, Mary of Modena. Guided by Middleton, devout Catholics though they were, the Stuarts were committed to preserving the Protestant settlement in Britain, and offering religious tolerance to all. Middleton’s secretary recalled the late James II counselling his son that ‘if ever he came to Rule over that People, to be a strict Observer of … the Laws of England … that he might not split upon that Rock which had been so fatal to him’.

In Middleton’s judgement, strict observation of ‘the Laws of England’ and diplomatic exchanges between magnates – not threats of violence by Gaelic-speaking Highlanders like Perth’s kin – was the correct strategy for restoration. When speaking to Middleton, Lovat emphasised the need to strengthen resistance in the Scottish Parliament, to vote for independence and then the restoration of the male Stuarts. Someone should be sent back with money to buy votes, he argued. He, Lovat, could do it.

By living at daggers drawn (‘like cats and dogs’ was how Louis XIV’s daughter-in-law put it) Perth and Middleton terminally weakened the Jacobite ruling council. Lovat tried to avoid taking sides, or being treated with contempt by one side or the other. However, the minute Middleton heard of Lovat’s strategy for restoration and the key role of the Highland clans, he opposed it. The Earl then worked to ruin Lovat’s credibility, gleefully repeating at Versailles gossip about ‘the Grand Fornicator of the Aird’. Lovat hit back that the Earl’s strategy had slowly suffocated the cause: his many missives lay smothered under a mountain of paperwork in the English administration. While some English ministers nodded and gave verbal support to Middleton, they prevaricated with questions, delaying commitment to bring back James, even as they worked to proclaim George of Hanover King of England and Scotland when Anne died. Their measured, meaningless exchanges with the Court at St Germains damped down the Jacobite threat while satisfying their own residual Jacobite sympathies.

Middleton soon hated Lovat for his views. He truly believed the Fraser chief was wrong. Yet it was plain to Lovat that Middleton’s group were out of touch with national sentiment. They had been away from the British political and social scene for at least a decade and more. What Parliament might have accepted then was not so obviously attractive now. Bringing in Anne instead of James, and negotiating with other claimants to the thrones, should have alerted old hands at St Germains to the new political realities. Only force would carry them home.

Perth countered, citing Lovat, that only a rising in Scotland, backed by France, would give them what they wanted. He bemoaned ‘the counsel that prevails here is that which advises inaction and waiting for a miracle’. The ultra-pious Mary of Modena liked to believe waiting for a miracle was a viable policy and would retreat frequently to the convent at Chaillot to pray for one.

Middleton had some reason to pursue the policy he did. Even pro-Hanoverians admitted the level of support for James in both English Houses of Parliament. ‘There is a party in this Kingdom for the Prince of Wales,’ they wrote to the Elector of Hanover. Even his enemies called Young James the Prince of Wales. Their ‘boldness is founded, not only on their confidence in the King of France, but on an assurance with which they flatter themselves, of being countenanced and supported by the present government’. Many of the most powerful men in Queen Anne’s administration – Godolphin, Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Ormonde – engaged in friendly communications with St Germains. It did not mean they would actually vote to bring ‘King James III’ back. Lovat declared in frustration that ‘while her Majesty implicitly followed the advice of the people who were at the head of the English Parliament, Jesus Christ would come in the clouds before her son would be restored’. Middleton recalled the Queen Regent to the reports he had from Scotland, that Lovat ‘joined insinuating talents to low manners and a profligate character’.

Lovat lost patience. He had intended to be in France just a few weeks, obtaining money and stirring up opposition to Anne in the Scottish Parliament and the Highlands. He urged the Jacobites to catch hold of the opportunity the war presented and persuade Louis XIV to back them. It offered the sort of chance that might not come again for another fifteen years. An invasion of Scotland would merely be part of Louis’s larger strategy, and divert some British troops menacing his northern border through the Low Countries.

Though Mary disliked Lovat’s arrogant tone, the logic of his argument tempted her. She agreed that Middleton’s policy was not working, and if the war suddenly turned against France, Louis might recognise Anne, and then George as her successor. She would ask Louis to back an invasion.

Before she could act, the Queen Regent was distracted by a bizarre religious conversion. Middleton claimed to have been woken in the night, ‘hearing the Blessed Sacrament carried along with the sound of a little bell before it, to the apartment of his son, Lord Clermont, who was at the point of death’. Middleton’s son suddenly felt better. He was convinced it had been Mary’s husband, the late James II, ringing to exhort him to convert to Catholicism. Middleton declared that the keys to the offices of state were incompatible with the keys to heaven, and theatrically handed them back to the Queen Regent. He needed to go on retreat to clean his soul.

Mary’s attention swung ecstatically away from Perth, Sir John MacLean and Lovat, and back to her dear Middleton. She told everyone that Middleton’s conversion gave her the only joy she had experienced since the death of ‘our Saint King’, as Mary now called her late husband. It was almost beyond belief. Up to now, Middleton ‘had so mean an opinion of converts, that he used to say, “A new light never comes into the house but by a crack in the tiling”.’ It was a miracle, said the Queen, the first her dead husband had performed. Middleton slid back into Mary of Modena’s favour, and slipped the keys of office back into his pocket. Mary waited for another ‘sign’.

Living with the infighting at St Germains for even a few months made it clear to Lovat that he must go straight to the real decision-maker, or he would be trapped inside this melodrama for years. Only Louis XIV could provide effective support for an uprising. However, the French King would not meet with a heretic. All things considered, it was a good time to consult one’s religious conscience. Besides, it was clear that conversions were de rigueur for ambitious politicians at St Germains.

Lovat went to Brother McLoghlan, a priest at St Germains, and declared his intention to convert. Brother McLoghlan advised the Scot to retire to a convent to think it over. Lovat did not need to go that far: this was not a huge leap of faith for an Episcopalian, and not a very devout one. Without Catholicism he did not have the support of the Queen Regent or a recommendation to Louis XIV. By early the following year, Lovat was writing to Italy to offer the Pope his service to the Holy Mother Church ‘to the spilling of my blood … With this object I go to hazard my life and my family.’ The Pope replied, thanking Lovat and welcoming him into the Church of Rome.

Lovat’s persistence had paid off. In the autumn of 1702, he had heard that Louis XIV would grant him a private audience. Immediately Lovat started penning a grandiloquent harangue for the edification of ‘The Greatest Prince in the Universe’ from the self-appointed spokesman of his Scottish allies – les chefs des tribus montagnards – the chiefs of the Highland clans.

EIGHT

Planning an invasion, 1702–04

‘The Greatest Prince in the Universe’

– LOVAT TO LOUIS XIV

Lord Lovat, MacShimidh Mor, had abandoned his clan for exactly this sort of opportunity. As for his Most Christian Majesty, the Stuarts were loved relations. Schemes to benefit them had bubbled out of this chiefly milord for months before Louis granted him an audience.

He clattered into the courtyard at Versailles, his nerves steeled by need. Lovat felt the Sun King’s presence all round him, monumentalised in the buildings Louis had raised and the gardens he had laid down, beautifying the face of the earth and glorifying God as Louis had been glorified by the Almighty. When Louis walked in the gardens, fountains sprang to life. To bring off the effect, other fountains had to die down behind him. The plumbing was not up to his vision. Nothing quite worked as hoped.

Lovat chivvied himself down miles of corridors towards his private audience. He was shown into a small chamber off the Hall of Mirrors. Standing in his stockinged feet ‘Louis le Grand’ was just five feet five inches of global power. Lovat, broad and long, loomed over him by seven inches. He had to bow very low. The Court flunkies retired leaving just the Marquis de Torcy (son of the great Colbert), who placed himself behind the King, now seated in the royal chair, and giving the Highlander space to speak. Torcy was keen for the invasion of Scotland to happen. It would pull thousands of British troops out of the Continental field of operations and weaken the Duke of Marlborough’s army.

Addressing the King in good French with a Scots accent, Lord Lovat enlarged ‘upon the ancient alliances between Scotland and France’. He expatiated on genealogies: Louis XIV’s, ancient and connecting him intimately to the royal House of Stuart; and Lovat’s, 500 years old, connecting him to French aristocracy. The Frasers were originally a French family, Lovat reminded the King: they went to England with the last successful French invaders, the Normans. This Fraser could go with the next, the greatest Bourbon. Lovat knew Louis adored genealogy.

‘At a thousand hazards to [my] … life,’ Lovat accepted the commission of the Highland elite to come here, he said. If the Highlanders rose in rebellion and were ‘honoured with the protection of the greatest King that ever filled the throne of France’, he said they could not fail. Lovat drew to a close. ‘With a look of much benignity,’ he noted happily, Louis assured him the ‘whole French nation had their hearts unfeignedly Scottish’. The two men speculated about invasion plans. It pained Lovat to be looking back towards his homeland through the spyglass of an invading soldier, pointing out opportunities to attack it.

Back at St Germains, Lord Lovat’s mind flitted between France and home. With Louis behind him, his hopes of his own restoration had been revived. He broadcast the news of his success to the Duke of Perth, Sir John MacLean, and MacLean’s cousin, Alexander. ‘The King promised at all times to assist the Scots with troops, money and everything that might be necessary to support them against the English,’ he told them. The men were overjoyed and raised their glasses. Lovat looked at the old men around him. They had all come here to this place as optimistic young men; he was determined not to get stuck, like them, for a decade and a half.

The Middletonian faction took little notice of Lovat and his claims until gifts from Louis XIV began to arrive for Lovat, including a valuable sword and a pair of beautiful pistols. His new friends admired their lovely workmanship, with the head of ‘His Most Christian Majesty’ cast in silver on the handles, and Lovat’s full coat of arms, coronet and all. The steel barrels were richly inlaid with figures in gold with the Fraser motto, Je suis prest [prêt] and the crest of the Fraser chief at the muzzle. The presents suggest Lovat made quite an impression on the French King; and a slightly different one on Louis’s maitresse en titre, Madame de Maintenon. She saluted the tall, dashing Highlander as ‘un homme ravissant’, a loaded compliment in the light of his conviction for ‘ravishing a lady of rank in a house of consequence’, but also perhaps an amused allusion to his gift of a beautiful weapon engraved with ‘I am Ready’ on it.

Lovat retired to his room to prepare for his meetings with Louis’ ministers. The cogitations emerged in another of his memorial letters to the Sun King. ‘What is necessary to carry on a vigorous war?’ Lovat asked rhetorically. His answer was quite specific: 6–7,000 men, including 600 cavalry and 1,200 dragoons, ‘who must have their accoutrements carried along with them’; 18,000 arms, ‘firelocks with bayonets, and not muskets’; also, ammunition for an army of 30,000 men, plus artillery, plus ammunition for three garrisons and artillery for them too, ‘to be a safe retreat in case the army be obliged to winter in that country’. Finally, Lovat required about £40–50,000 cash ‘to gratify those that bring in forces … and to buy provisions’ – there would be no more quartering of troops on poor Highlanders. ‘The sooner this is done,’ Lovat continued, ‘it is certainly the better because of the season of the year and the present commodious weather.’ Spring was campaign time. No one fought through the winter if they could possibly help it. Everything got bogged down in the mud. Men and materiel rotted like turnips.

Lovat’s invasion plot was born of impatience and ambition: he had been away nearly a year and was increasingly restless to return to the Highlands. Ships with men, war chests and arms must land on the west coast of Scotland, he said, and others on the east. They could sweep through the country gathering men and seizing Edinburgh before the English were properly alerted to the threat. Sir John MacLean looked over the plans. He cavilled. Cousin Lovat had been a bit creative with the figures, he thought. He had rated some of the chiefs at about double the number of troops they could actually bring out. Lovat dismissed his criticisms; the French needed encouragement, he said.

Lovat could not hope to succeed if he did not involve Mary of Modena, young James and the Earl of Middleton. He petitioned James for gratifications. Lord Lovat ‘expects a letter of thanks from the King for the service of his family wherein he should promise to make him Sheriff of Inverness’. Wherever he was, home was the backcloth against which Lovat stood and spoke. The Sheriffs of the shires dominated both elections and the county law courts. ‘My enemies grow great in the Prince of Denmark’s [Queen Anne’s] government,’ he complained to James, ‘and they accomplish the ruin of my estate and family.’

Letters from the Highlands told of a worsening situation. At St Germains, Lovat requested a patent for the title of ‘Earl of Inverness’ from the Stuarts, though a duke’s coronet might sit better on him. Above all, he wanted to be restored to his inheritance. In his imagination, he could be the premier duke in Scotland, and unassailable. In reality he was a broke and dispossessed fugitive.

The young king-in-waiting was all in favour of Lovat’s dashing schemes, but Mary of Modena could not decide what to do. In theory, she would undertake whatever was needed to get the two of them back to the Palace of Whitehall, though she also believed that God would provide, and she must prevent her son exposing himself to danger. The Duc de Saint-Simon observed of James’s mother, ‘for all that she was so pious, loved power, and had been too strict and narrow in his [her son’s] education, either from misguided affection or because she wished to keep him obedient and fearful of her’.

The Earl of Middleton drifted through the corridors like a cloud, growing blacker and heavier. Rumours reached him that Lovat had been urging the Queen Regent to ‘use all her interest with the King of France to embrace the offers of the Highlanders’. Lovat told her the Highlanders ‘are certainly the strongest party in the three kingdoms to bring home the King or make a diversion for the armies of the Allies by a war in Britain’. Middleton’s view of them as cateran bands was wrong, Lovat explained. ‘The Highlanders’ power and loyalty is so frightful to the usurping government’ of Queen Anne, ‘that those in authority always come to them and make great offers to come into their party’. This was partly true. ‘Management’ by ‘offers’ was a recognised government tactic: ministers bought the loyalty they could not command by affection, or compel by fear. Some impoverished chiefs simply offered themselves and their men to the highest bidder. There was an element of this sort of opportunism in Lovat’s presence at St Germains.

Lovat counselled Mary of Modena against the policies of ‘a politique party in England who promise to call home the King on conditions’. ‘They are not to be believed, though they write and swear never so much. For knave will be knave still to my certain knowledge.’ This was daring – the ‘knaves’ flirting with restoring James included the Earls of Godolphin, Marlborough and Bolingbroke.

Middleton argued against Lovat’s plan as soon as he saw details of it. Lovat is ‘full of ambition and enterprise’ and has been ‘gained’ by the French to stir up ‘a civil war in Scotland’, he said to Mary. It was ‘extremely advantageous to France’, since it would draw British troops home, but ‘it would ruin instead of advancing the affairs of the King her son,’ he judged. Lovat challenged Middleton to prove his claim that the English administration had made a ‘promise to call home the King’ on the death of Queen Anne. Middleton could not produce proof. Lovat suggested the Queen Regent set a deadline. If the English ministers refused to fix a term for persuading Anne to nominate her half-brother James as heir, then ‘it was incontestable proof’ they never would. Lovat told Mary ‘that their promises were intended only to amuse and lull asleep the Court of St Germains, as they had successfully done for fifteen years past’.

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