The Last Highlander (11 page)

Thou Sylvia kills me, I’ll never complain

Or demonstrat my love, since I know it’s in vain.

He gave it up. He liked women, but had no time to take them seriously.

In Scotland, Sir Roderick Mackenzie had turned up an old debt that young Amelia Mackenzie (Lovat’s) grandfather raised in the late 1660s. The old Lord Lovat secured the debt against some Fraser property, but never repaid it, and it sank into the background for thirty-five years. Sir Roderick found the debt and bought it off the creditor’s heirs, who were astonished suddenly to have the matter settled. Sir Roderick sniffed about for more. Miscellaneous Fraser debts, mostly paltry sums, lurked in corners of solicitors’ offices. Sir Roderick bought up the lot. He went to the Court of Session (on which he and his brother sat) for the right to enforce repayment to himself immediately as creditor of all these debts. The Lovat estates did not pay – Sir Roderick must have instructed his son to default – and Sir Roderick raised an action before his legal brethren (including his brother) to claim the assets of the Lovat estates in lieu of the money he was owed. He won. Sir Roderick Mackenzie was judged to be ‘in rights of the Lovat estates’. Ostensibly, Sir Roderick had dispossessed his own son, daughter-in-law and grandsons.

Mackenzie had trumped them all, both the male heir, Simon, Lord Lovat, and Amelia’s ambitious Uncle John, the Duke of Atholl. He drew up an entail of his new properties – the whole 500 square miles of Fraser country – in favour of his son and grandson. In France, Lovat was stunned. How could an outlaw Highlander, practising treason at an exiled court, challenge a senator of the College of Justice in Edinburgh? Sir Roderick’s timing and execution were faultless.

Lovat was desperate for any mission that gave him money and reason to leave France. By the spring of 1703, Middleton gave it to him, recommending that Louis XIV send the clan chief back home to obtain proof of the situation on the ground. Louis agreed and requested that Lovat obtain written pledges from the Highland chiefs that they would rise if France invaded. Lovat was apprehensive about the mission. He relied on the Duke of Perth to maintain the French King’s enthusiasm for action. Lovat was to tell the Scots that if enough troops took to the field, Louis would back them with experienced officers, money, arms, and munitions. Mary and Middleton told Lovat to keep quiet and only find out the level of support in Scotland. Louis and Torcy issued passports for Lovat and another Jacobite, Johnny Murray, the son of a Perthshire laird. They were unaware that Middleton had already despatched his own spy ahead of them, a man named James Murray.

Middleton instructed James Murray to reach the Scottish Jacobites first and prepare the ground
against
Lovat’s mission. Lovat would tell them France was on the brink of invasion, but James Murray was to warn the Scots that the French would never ‘venture on matters that are not decisive’. The Scots would have to do it all alone, before French support came.

The Middletonians also wanted Murray to sound out Atholl’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton, in whose leadership of the Scottish Jacobites they put unlimited faith. ‘Assure Lord Aran [the Duke of Hamilton] of the great sense we have of his sufferings, services, interest, and prudence, in advising, managing and performing what is practicable in the present conjuncture: that you have orders for our friends to use all their credit in opposing abjuration, Hanover and Union.’ They must vote against naming George as successor to Anne in the Scottish Parliament, and vote young James Stuart onto the throne of Scotland as his half-sister’s heir – as if the English would ever accept their decision.

The virus of the incapacitating factionalism at St Germains was being spread to Scotland. The two groups of spies took it with them when they left.

NINE

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

‘The first thing to be done was to make an Invasion upon Scotland; to facilitate which, it was necessary to foment an Insurrection in the Highlands’

– JAMES FRASER,
a genuine narrative

Lovat and Johnny Murray left St Germains in May 1703, accompanied by Major George Fraser, Colonel Graham and servants. Lovat knew he faced major obstacles. His standing in France was not replicated in Scotland, where he was an outlaw ‘under sentence of death … [and] with whom,’ sniffed a Scottish minister, ‘no honest man in Scotland would converse’. From this position, Middleton sent Lovat to persuade chiefs to rise in arms against the Queen, and fully expected him to fail.

For a month Lovat and his fellow plotters lurked at the sea ports in northern France, prevented from crossing by the war being waged in the Channel. Eventually they sneaked away in a prison boat, disguised as English prisoners of war being exchanged for French ones, and sailed out of Calais under cover of darkness. The sea slopped and sighed; the men hunched their shoulders against the cooling air. Lovat recalled his last conversation with Mary of Modena. He was
not
to make plans ‘till you have particular orders from myself’. It was to be an information-gathering exercise only. If it became anything more interesting, he would have to make it so.

Lovat listened to the water slapping at the boat’s sides. Daylight and the open road always seemed denied to him. Ever since the marriage of his late cousin, Hugh Lovat, almost twenty years earlier, his eye had had to adapt to the darker corners of intrigue. In the shadows, men could not easily make him out. Even to his allies, he was a puzzle. Few saw how events at home positioned him in the world, and at best only partly understood his motives. His friends advised him to ignore slights and minor quarrels and to get on with the main task of regaining his titles and lands and restoring his ‘true King’.

The little ‘prison ship’ approached the English coast with caution and the party was landed during the night ‘at some place in the neighbourhood of Dover’. From there they sped straight to London.

By 12 June, Lovat had already gathered intelligence from the capital, telling St Germains that ‘the big merchant’ – the Duke of Marlborough – is cooling. Lovat never missed the chance to pour cold water on Middleton’s policies. And even if hit upon unconsciously, to codename the ‘the big merchant’ suggested both Marlborough and St Germains saw the great General’s loyalty as a potentially tradable commodity. Lovat inferred that Marlborough needed an explosion of action – an invasion – to spur his interest. Meanwhile, Marlborough led Queen Anne’s armies out against Louis and the Jacobites. From London the conspirators decided to head north, to pursue their commission.

The group reached Northallerton in Yorkshire without attracting unwelcome attention and stopped at an inn, where the gentlemen retired to a private room to discuss progress. Edinburgh was a few more days’ ride away. The inn keeper served the servants beer and food and asked them about their journey. Travellers’ news was an attraction of the inns. Local people would gather there to get news of the outside world. The country being at war, there was an especially large interest. Lovat’s servants remained vague in their talk of business north of the border, except for their French valet de chambre. Intoxicated on beer and attention, the man boasted that ‘Mi’lord’ is a man of substance, a passionate ‘partisan of James III’. They were on a mission from the French Court, he said. Lovat, John Murray and the other officers sat in an upstairs sitting room, drinking and smoking and talking while the servant blabbed beneath their feet.

Sitting quietly in the valet’s audience was the local Justice of the Peace. He slipped out, roused all the constables he could find, armed them and marched with them to the inn. One of Lovat’s guards heard whispers and clattering. He looked from the window and ran to warn his master. The gentlemen leapt up. Lovat said they would have to fight and break free, or die in the attempt. John Murray shook his head. He was a naturalised French subject and they would not dare harm him. The reprisals would be terrible for English prisoners in France.

Lovat dismissed his friend. If this was not his fight, then Murray should retire to his own room, and wait and see. Lovat had no choice, ‘since,’ he shrugged, he ‘expected no better, if … taken, than to be hanged and quartered’. The noise of the constables and their officer grew louder. Lovat pointed to the table. On it lay two pistols and a ‘blunderbuss that carried eight bullets’. Take those and go onto the stairs, Lovat instructed his men, while arming himself to the teeth.

Soon they heard the Justice at the foot of the stairs, the crowd of constables shuffling in behind him. It was the middle of the evening. Most of these part-time government servants had been dragged from their firesides by their superior’s excited summons. Lovat listened behind the door. The Justice moved towards his prey, confident of the element of surprise.

Lovat whispered to his men that the minute they heard fire, they could assume their chief had shot the Justice. One soldier should then immediately ‘discharge his blunderbuss upon the constables on the stairs’. They had seen that most of the local men bore nothing but long staves. Then, said Lovat, they must run for it, forcing their way through the injured men blocking the stairwell. ‘The night was very dark,’ and moonless, Lovat noted. ‘Once gain the street, [then] nothing would be easier than escape,’ he reassured them. His men took heart and waited. The one hovering in the recess at the stair head cocked his weapons.

Moving in silence to the fireside, Lovat checked his pistol, and took a moment to review their position. There was a crash at the door. The latch clicked up. The Justice piled in and opened his mouth to shout to the occupants to disarm and surrender. Lovat glared. The two stood ready to blow out each other’s brains.

In a blink, Lovat’s face dissolved from outrage into a hundred creases of smiling recognition. ‘My dear Sir, how happy I am to see you,’ Lovat began, coming towards him, his arms akimbo. It had been two years since he had ‘had that pleasure – with the Duke of Argyll – at the races near this town’, he said, trying to conjure up happy days. The Justice looked stumped, then relieved. He cast about his mind for some memory of this big, mobile face. Nothing came. Although he could not place him, the man was obviously noble. It was a simple matter for Lovat to slip a frame or two of false memory past his well-greased vanity.

The Justice ‘begged him to be seated’ so his Lordship could be served with a bottle of wine in this town, where, the JP said with a bow, he was ‘a man of some consequence’. The Justice darted ahead of him. The Justice insisted on finding the wine himself and left the room. He dismissed his constables and sent for their hostess to fetch up the ‘best Spanish wine she had in the house’. The two men enjoyed a bottle together, and exchanged gossip about their smart mutual friends.

A few hours of deceit and chat accomplished what bloodshed might have failed to. The men sat on either side of the fire and talked and talked. Lovat drank hard – but drink never seemed to affect him. He thought he had never been drunk. Not so the Justice, who by midnight was ‘obliged to be carried off without sense or motion to his own house’.

Alone again, Lovat advised Johnny Murray and his gentlemen they must all take to their horses and ‘quit the town’, though it was one o’clock in the morning. They galloped away, furious with the valet who had exposed them to such danger. It gave Lovat ‘more trouble to hinder … Murray from stabbing the French valet’ than ‘to outwit the penetration, and escape from the hands, of the Justice of Peace’, he grumbled.

*    *    *

After a tense and weary ride, full of half-imagined voices and fearing the rattle of pursuers’ bridles, they came to Durham. Lord Lovat was within a hundred miles of Edinburgh, and less than half that distance from the Scottish border at Berwick-upon-Tweed. It would be madness to cross the Tweed with the Murrays’ price on his head. Lovat sent Colonel Graham and Major George Fraser on to Edinburgh to scout ahead.

At Northumberland, Lovat visited the major Jacobite families. He showed them a portrait of their exiled monarch. They had never seen a picture of him. It was a typical Stuart face – long and thin, full-lipped, with a prominent nose and dark benign eyes. They gazed at it, knelt down, kissed it and prayed before the image. Lovat watched and listened. They bent at the knee, but their minds were far from ‘supple’, he thought. Not liking what he saw he accused them of being frightened to tell their rightful King they would fight for him. They retorted they were ready to venture everything on the day James came home with an army, and raised his banners. Lovat could not get any of them to commit their treason to pen and ink.

The men returning from Edinburgh carried more bad news. James Murray, whom they all knew from St Germains, had been there for two months, alerting the Duke of Hamilton to their arrival. Hamilton was about fifty, wealthy, swarthy, energetic, and full ‘of good sense … haughty and ambitious’ and ‘covetous’. He led the anti-Union Cavalier Party in the Scottish Parliament. Lovat’s men told him the Duke of Atholl was often with Hamilton, although Atholl, who now held the post of joint Scottish Secretary of State with the Earl of Cromartie (formerly Viscount Tarbat), was a member of the Court Party under the Queen’s High Commissioner, the Duke of Queensberry. The Cavaliers, many of them old Stuart-style Royalists, inclined to Jacobitism. They favoured an independent Scotland and perhaps thinking back to the fiasco of William III, a different monarch. Another Atholl ally, the Duke of Montrose, was Lord President of the Privy Council – one of the great officers of the Scottish state. How could Lovat possibly find a space here?

Queensberry and the Court Party represented the wishes of Queen Anne’s ministry. Their instructions were to force the Scottish Parliament to vote for a full Union with England, and to accept George of Hanover as the heir to Queen Anne in Scotland. Lovat’s men said Atholl was increasingly disillusioned with Scotland’s prospects in a fully united kingdom under the Hanoverians, and was irritating his boss, Queensberry, by associating so much with his brother-in-law Hamilton’s Cavaliers. Another big political grouping in the Scottish Parliament was the Country Party. They were firmly Scottish nationalist and might come in with the Cavaliers, except for the religious issue. Most Country men were Presbyterian, and vehemently anti-Catholic. The Cavaliers’ Jacobitism carried with it the whiff of Rome.

Mary of Modena had asked James Murray to ‘break [the news of] Fraser’s business by degrees, the Queen apprehending [that Hamilton] would be averse to it’. The minute Atholl heard about Lovat’s involvement he called an extraordinary meeting of the Privy Council to reissue Lord Lovat’s death sentence. How this man was not dead and buried twice over amazed and infuriated the Duke.

Meanwhile, failure to get agreement on the government’s measures was causing Queensberry frustration. Endless letters came to him from Westminster; the government was getting anxious. As the Queen’s High Commissioner he needed to know what was going on behind the scenes. Queensberry made friends by making promises. He would reward good intelligence handsomely. One Queensberry man said he had found ‘there was nothing he had promised to do for me but what he made good’. His enemies thought him in ‘outward appearance and in his ordinary conversation … of a gentle and good disposition, but inwardly a very devil, standing at nothing to advance his own interests and designs’. Queensberry was, they said, both grasping and lavish with the money he received; both sincere and deceitful in the handling of his power.

As he waited near Newcastle, Lovat knew he had a problem. He could not work within the system because of Hamilton, Atholl and the Mackenzies. He could not work underneath it to foment rebellion because of Middleton, Mary of Modena and even Louis’s fluctuating enthusiasm for an invasion. Yet there was no doubt Scotland was approaching a crossroads – on into full Union, or off towards independence. The Scottish Parliament was roaring against its handling by Queensberry. The majority were determined to resist her Majesty’s Commissioner until he guaranteed certain concessions, and demonstrated he worked for Scottish interests as well as London’s. The destabilising mix of passions and empty purses made for a Scottish legislature that rocked with turbulence and resistance to management. One good push and they would all rise and break free, thought Lovat.

In Paris, Louis had asked his trusted intelligence adviser, Eusebius Renaudot, to interpret developments for him. Renaudot told his Majesty there was no enterprise ‘more certain, easier or more speedy’ for restoring James to the throne in Edinburgh than ‘to profit by the general disposition of the whole of Scotland to take up arms’. This view of the situation was ‘so public’, Renaudot concluded, ‘that none doubt of it, except the Ministers at St Germains’. Back in Edinburgh, the Duke of Queensberry could not steer debates his way. He looked across at Hamilton and Atholl and wondered what was behind their vehement opposition. Outside Newcastle, Lovat listened to his officers’ reports and mulled things over.