The Last Highlander (21 page)

Lovat was incensed and fired off an outraged letter to Cadogan, who agreed the silver ought to be Lovat’s at least until the King’s pleasure was known regarding the Lovat estates. The issue reflected the insecurity of his position. Lovat also asked Cadogan permission to go urgently to London to speak with the King about his reinstatement. Cadogan agreed. Lovat set off just as John Forbes of Culloden reported to his brother that ‘Marlborough’s dependents at Court are provided for and the others are not … Some here do suppose our Duke [Argyll] is not so much in favour.’ This was vital news to the Forbeses and to Lovat. Argyll was their patron.

Culloden reminded Sutherland, with whom he was on good terms, that the Earl had promised to support Lovat’s bid for royal favours. Sutherland was as good as his word. On 8 June news came to Lovat that the King was ‘pleased to appoint him Governor of the Castle and Fort of Inverness’, and captain of an Independent Company of Foot. They were to be a local militia for policing the Highlands, as envisaged in Lovat’s memorial to George I, except that the companies would be independent of each other under their captains. The clans contained too many men of divided or unproven loyalty, including Lord Lovat, to trust such a big fighting force to a single commanding officer, especially one so well known for his cunning.

Even this limited recognition was too much for the Duke of Atholl. ‘I can hardly believe what is contained in the Edinburgh
Courant
! That Simon Fraser, who is there called Lord Lovat, to which he has no manner of right … has got an Independent Company!’ Atholl was aghast. ‘I have also frequently heard that the Duke of Argyll has countenanced that person, which I hope is not true.’ What did it take to get rid of the Old Fox!

Lovat rushed the notice of his appointments around the offices of
The Flying Post
. Lovat’s notice said the King had rewarded him ‘in consideration of my Lord Lovat’s service in reducing of Inverness’. Sutherland protested to Lovat that he was ‘justly offended at his assuming the sole merit to himself in that affair’. This was the second such article. He insisted Lovat publish a retraction and acknowledge the Earl’s dominant role, not only in quelling the rebellion in the north, but also in intervening on Lovat’s behalf with the King and his advisers. Lovat wriggled. He denied any involvement in writing the piece and gave vague assurances that he would make sure Sutherland’s place was known.

The next edition of
The Flying Post
came and went. Nothing appeared. Sutherland was not going to go quietly again. He summoned one of his dependants, Gordon of Ardoch, and despatched him to tell Lord Lovat to retract this nonsense or face the consequences. Ardoch found Lord Lovat dining with one of Secretary of State Townshend’s employees, and had thrust the letter in his face. It came from the Earl’s desk, Ardoch said. Lovat took it from him. He read a retraction of his own account of the rebellion in the Highlands. The letter described how the Governor of Inverness abandoned the town when he saw the Earl of Sutherland approach with his men and twelve cannon. Lovat, ‘most civilly saying that the letter was stuffed with lies and falsehoods’, tossed it back. He was not going to take this fabrication to the
Flying Post
or any other newspaper.

Gordon of Ardoch blustered, ‘he durst not have said so of it had the Earl been present’. Lovat retorted that the Earl had not even written this letter. It came from the pen of a Sutherland lackey, Sir William Gordon. Sir William was a Squadrone supporter who fed intelligence to Montrose, his political leader in the Squadrone. Sir William was happy to denigrate Lovat and establish his own claim for rewards. Ardoch could tell Sir William, said Lovat, that if he met him he would cut his throat for his mischief-making.

Next morning, Lovat made his way to the Smyrna Coffee House near Piccadilly. The company was always diverse in the coffee house, not unlike the mix of people at the Court of a Highland chief. ‘A couple of lords, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine-merchant and some others of the same sort, all sitting round the same table and discussing familiarly the news of the Court and the town,’ greeted his eyes. ‘The government’s affairs are as much the concerns of the people as of the great. Every man has the right to discuss them freely … The coffee houses and the other public places are the seats of English liberty,’ a visiting Frenchman lamented. Lovat joined some friends. Fortified, he regaled them with the previous day’s tale, news of his Independent Company and his generalship.

Mid-story, Sir William Gordon strode in, shouting and roaring that Lovat must publish the correction that had been written for him. Lovat refused. His account was more or less correct already. He knew Sir William had asked for £14,000 expenses he claimed he incurred defending King George. Sir William stormed out, but shouted he would be back next morning ‘beat up my Lord’s quarters and adjust the matter betwixt them’. They would duel. Lovat hurried round to the lodgings of his Highland neighbour, and fellow Argyll factionary, Rose of Kilravock. With great reluctance, Kilravock agreed to act as his second. Gordon of Ardoch was more than happy to second Sir William.

Dawn the next day, Lovat and Kilravock rode from Piccadilly to Marylebone Fields, threading their way through the streets as the capital shook itself awake. Across from the fields drifted a sound of lowing from the Lactarian, a herd of cows that grazed in St James’s Park and supplied the city’s morning needs. Pewterers, coppersmiths, coopers and blacksmiths began their banging to ring in the start of their working day. The first traders from the countryside plodded or rattled into the heart of the City towards Smithfield, Billingsgate, Covent Garden, their noses assailed by the stink from miles out. Streetside shops opened their doors. The first flies felt their way towards carcases and cheeses, vegetables and fruit, and rubbed their legs together with pleasure. Dust from Lovat and Kilravock’s horses coated the whole jolly array in a fine film of grey.

At Marylebone Fields, Lovat, Sir William and Gordon of Ardoch, dismounted and turned to begin. At that moment, a hooded man on a horse appeared out of the early morning haze, levelling his pistol at the cluster of men on the field. He would shoot the first man who drew, he said. The two seconds approached as near as they dared, shouting at the clansman to be gone. The eye of the pistol’s muzzle swept across them. The hooded rider refused to move. More men rode up. James and Alexander Fraser, Lovat’s cousin and business associate, and four others cantered across the grass.

Choler seized Sir William. Lovat had goaded him to the point of a fight. Sir William was a fighting soldier and he believed he would win. Now the duelling field was full of Frasers urging their mounts between Sir William and his target. Through the thicket of sweating horse flesh, boots, spurs and clanking swords, Sir William roared at Lovat that by ordering his clansmen to come and save him, he was nothing but ‘a lying knave and an arrant coward’. Lovat tried to push his way between the riders and draw his sword, but scraped it no more than half out of its sheath. The hooded clansman turned and aimed the pistol at Lovat’s chest and the whole crisis teetered over into farce. There was a substantial ritual element to this statement of readiness to defend one’s good name and reputation with one’s life. The fields now emptied as quickly as they had filled.

Bloodshed had been avoided. Lovat’s friends rejoiced. Politics and Fraser matters provoked so much passion in Lovat’s bosom, that they feared for him. In his conflicts with Sutherland and Sir William, Lovat loosed the bundle of fears and resentments that burdened him from his youth. It did him no good. His friends advised him to shoulder them more lightly.

*    *    *

Whilst in London, Lovat received news of the death of his brother, John. Before coming south, he had written to Sutherland, passing on John’s ‘last respects for he is so dangerously ill with a fever, flux and stitches that there is little or no hopes of his recovery. He was a good-natured and brave young fellow.’ Lovat spoke as if John were already dead. ‘His fatigue and drinking this winter and the sudden quitting of it has killed him. I wish with my soul that my Lord Strathnaver,’ Sutherland’s son and heir, ‘may give over his drinking in some measure, otherwise he cannot live … I have been ill too,’ Lovat confided. ‘Constant fatigue’ was wearing him down. John Lovat had lain in bed at Castleleathers’ house for his final six weeks. All through the spring, the decline of his loyal brother and heir had lowered Lovat’s spirits. ‘A simple man’, John had lived his life in his brother’s shadow, representing him, fighting Lovat’s corner while he was in exile.

John’s loss thrust into Lovat’s mind with painful force fears for the future. Without heirs, what was it all for? Lovat had been caught up in London, fighting himself to exhaustion, only for all his achievements to slip away from his family again upon his own death. His cause was going well, but he now had no family, no wife or children; no heir. He knew he must marry soon, though the forced marriage with Amelia Murray might cause complications.

NINETEEN

Living like a fox, 1716

‘Put all the irons in the fire’

– LOVAT TO DUNCAN FORBES

Lovat cast his mind about for a suitable bride. He was forty-four and had very good prospects. Many gentlemen married for the second time at his age, childbirth having carried off the first wife. Lovat already enjoyed the position of Governor of Inverness and command of a company of soldiers. He was a peer of the realm and chief of an ancient clan. He believed King George favoured making the gift of the vast Fraser lands to him. With those behind him, Lovat thought he might seek election to the House of Lords, as one of the sixteen Scottish Lords voted to a seat. He would have a wife and children as well.

Children symbolised stability and continuity. A settled man was attractive to the authorities. After John’s death, Lovat’s only male heir was a cousin, Fraser of Inverallochy, who lived many miles away from the Lovat estates. To attract the family of a suitably well-connected woman, however, he should have legal title to substantial properties. It was a circular problem. Lovat pressed Walpole and the other Lords of the Treasury for warrants of escheat for the Fraserdale-Lovat estates.

Since Lovat’s most powerful allies were the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Ilay, marrying into a clan connected to the Argylls could serve all his needs. Allied to Walpole, they had increasing amounts of patronage at their disposal. But, as Culloden explained, the Campbell brothers had recently invited the King’s displeasure. George I planned to visit Hanover. When Argyll heard of this he told the King bluntly that Britain, and especially Scotland, were far from secure. The King would be leaving an empty throne and a country still shaking from rebellion. George must empower his son and heir the Prince of Wales with decision-making powers as Regent while he was in their German homeland. George, however, loathed his son and ordered him to sit dumb, as a figurehead, until his father’s return. He was not to fill any office, not even a lieutenancy in the Guards. Argyll advised the Prince of Wales to refuse his father’s limits on his ruling powers. Better than any man in the land, Argyll knew how close the Jacobites had come to winning at Sheriffmuir. They ought to have won.

The King turned on Argyll and Ilay, his staunchest supporters in Scotland, thereby splitting the Whig Party into the King’s faction and the Prince’s faction. The Scottish Squadrone – Roxburghe, Montrose, the Duke of Atholl, Sir William Gordon, Justice Clerk Cockburn among them – were for the King. The Argyll faction insisted on an effective mandate to let the Prince of Wales rule in his father’s absence.

Lovat put his head in his hands. He needed Argyll to persuade the King to sign the warrants granting him his lands to attract a wife. And now the King was cold-shouldering the Argyll Campbells. Being Lovat, he asked to speak with George I in person.

On Saturday 23 June, Lovat wrote to Duncan Forbes explaining, ‘I had a private audience of King George this day … No man ever spoke freer language to his Majesty and the Prince than I of our two great friends,’ Argyll and Ilay. Lovat assured George that Argyll and Ilay gave the Hanoverians ‘more service and were capable to do them more service than all those of their ranks in Scotland’, by which he meant the Squadrone.

Lovat was in a hurry to marry. His eye had fixed on Margaret Grant, sister of his comrade and fellow Argathelian, Brigadier Grant of Grant. It was not clear how well Lovat knew Margaret. Dynastic and geopolitical conjunction of the Frasers and the Grants, and the prospect of direct male heirs, stimulated Lovat’s passion. The unity of Grants and Lovats would create the biggest power bloc in the Highlands. The clans had known each other for centuries, and by extension Lovat and Margaret (‘Peggie’) would know each other well enough already. Lovat flattered Argyll that one of his greatest motives to marry Margaret ‘was to secure them the joint interest of the north’. It sounded almost as if he was courting Argyll not young Margaret.

Argyll’s brother, Ilay, agreed but queried whether Lovat wasn’t already married to Fraserdale’s mother-in-law, Amelia, the dowager Lady Lovat. ‘When I told him that the Lady denied, before the justice court, that I had anything to do with her, and that the pretended marriage was declared null’ the Earl was half-satisfied. When Lovat added that ‘the Minister and witnesses were all dead who were at the pretended marriage, he was satisfied’, and said he would speak to the King.

However, on 28 June 1716, this Highland hegemony they were all constructing – Argyll, Ilay, the Forbeses, the Grants and Lovat – was rocked to the foundations when the King sacked Argyll and Ilay. ‘It seems that the best of men must have their ups and downs,’ Culloden told his brother. The dispute over the Prince of Wales’s regency had done for them. The Forbes brothers reflected on the setback with calmness and reason: they approved of Argyll acting out of principle, even to his and their detriment; they were confident they would not be ‘out’ for long.

Not so Lovat, who threw off a letter to Duncan the next day in a whirl, and in French. ‘The blow fell, the two dear brothers are disgraced … Never have gentlemen left the court with more noise or more regretted; no one knows the reason.’ This was wild talk. Everyone knew the reason. Lovat was always at his most unreliable when emotionally overwrought. ‘It’s said that all their creatures will be treated the same. Goodbye. I don’t know what I’ve written to you,’ he gasped in a panic. ‘I’m not myself and I don’t know what will become of me.’ Now his ‘freer language’ with the King marked him out as one adhering to disgraced ministers. Ilay had feared that scandal from Lovat’s past might affect their standing. If muck from this Campbell scandal stuck to Lovat, he would fall with them.

The news of the dismissal of Argyll and Ilay reached Inverness. Wightman heard it from William Strathnaver, the Squadrone Earl of Sutherland’s alcoholic son and heir. The Argylls’ disgrace ‘was reported by a certain young Lord here … [whose] head is always steeped in
aqua vitae
’, Wightman said to Duncan Forbes. ‘On my return home yesterday I meet this sweet gentleman, returning to Dunrobin, and indeed very ill, his face being of as many colours as the rainbow. But, for all that, he hopes to live to have the Regiment of Fusiliers.’ That was to be Strathnaver’s ‘gratification’ for his father’s services. ‘Good God, if it should be so, what a regiment of Flamecutters there will be in a short time.’ Wightman shuddered to think of it. Strathnaver boasted he would give no man a commission who did not swallow a pint pot of brandy in one go for breakfast, and whose breath would torch a tree at fifty paces.

Lovat was panicking unnecessarily. The King, in the week before he left for Hanover, remembered his meeting with Lord Lovat and read the memorial from his Hanoverian officers and lairds in Inverness outlining Lovat’s case. It urged the King to recall that the rebels, like Fraserdale, ‘are declared to incur the penalty of £500 and a single and life rent escheat’. That is, he explained to the German King who might not know what an escheat was, ‘the forfeiting all the goods and chattels, and the rents and profits of their estates during their lives’. Its purpose was to prevent the forfeited person from being in a fortunate enough position to raise men and money to engage in treasonable acts, yet without making a martyr of him. He was merely to be impoverished.

Lovat had not seemed to notice the implications of the escheat: it was limited to ‘the lives’ of the persons forfeit. Lovat walked into the anomalous position of wishing an extremely long life to Mackenzie of Fraserdale. ‘The value of the [Lovat] lands is generally said to be about £500 yearly, but are very much encumbered with debts … It is conceived that the immediate making … a grant to a person of credit in the country … would greatly tend to strengthen the hands of the government.’ Lovat was ‘humbly proposed’ as the right recipient of the gift. The King listened and was ‘graciously pleased to comply with what is desired in it’, Stanhope said. The secretary was preparing the warrants for his signature.

All Lovat had to do was to wait in London for written confirmation of the gift. For the moment Lovat was overjoyed.

One or two of the Squadrone objected instantly: the Duke of Atholl ordered his son, Lord James, a Scottish peer in the Lords, to ‘do what you can to have it stopped’. In the north, the creditors of the Lovat estates rushed to their lawyers to lodge objections, fearing for the repayment of the mountain of pretended and real debts. Squadrone allies of Fraserdale queried the competence of English law to resolve these Scottish cases. The Union preserved the independence of the Scottish judiciary. The ‘Squad’ doubted that Lovat’s warrant for the escheat was valid under Scottish law. Lovat started to panic again. He launched a letter to Duncan Forbes in Edinburgh. ‘The Justice Clerk [Cockburn], Montrose and all the rest’ of the Squadrone ‘were resolved to search all means to ruin me’. They had sent to Scotland to try and have his judgement overturned in the Court of Session. ‘I beg you may put all the irons in the fire to get my business through … in spite of the opposition you will meet with. I do not see how they can go against the King’s positive orders and the advice of the King’s lawyers.’

His missive clattered to a halt as he threw his plea at Duncan’s feet, ‘My dear General you must be active in it,’ he cried. In Lovat’s timetabling of his life, everything had to be done right now, ‘this morning’. The closer he came to achieving his dream, the more anxious he was that someone would keep him out again.

While he waited to hear, he pressed on with his marriage plans, asking Argyll to speak up for him. Argyll agreed. The Duke was too important a magnate to keep out forever. In the wilderness for a season, he had time to do some favours for his dependants. Argyll was like a sheepdog keeping his sheep together. He wrote to the Grant elite one by one. ‘Lord Lovat is one for whom I have, with good reason, the greatest esteem and respect, and as I confide entirely both in him and the Brigadier, I am most earnest that this match should take effect.’ He urged the Brigadier’s brother, Grant of Ballindallach, to use his influence to bring off the match ‘which will, I think, unite all friends in the north, a union which will be very serviceable to his Majesty and his Royal Family, and no less so to all of us who have ventured our lives and fortunes in defence of it’.

Argyll’s involvement flattered Grant. ‘The Duke of Argyle and Earl of Ilay were both employed by Lord Lovat to speak to me
anent
my sister Peggie,’ the Brigadier told Ballindallach when he asked his brother what was happening. The Brigadier consented to the marriage, he said, ‘providing they please each other’. Lovat had income and posts. The Forfeited Estates Commissioners listed the yearly value of the Lovat estates at £783. 2s 11d sterling. In today’s values, that means they yielded more than £100,000 per annum. It was a start. ‘The gift of Fraserdale’s escheat is passing in his fa[vour which], with good management and the debts he’s already master of, will undoubtedly enable him to make the family estate of Lovat his own.’ He knew Lovat had bought some estate debts back off the creditors already. ‘These were the reasons, joined to that of so considerable alliance that moved me to consent.’ The Frasers were an important clan and Lord Lovat was shaping up to be a powerful chief and British aristocrat.

Having exhausted all avenues of resistance between Inverness, Edinburgh and Westminster, Lovat’s enemies could not prevent the law finally coming down in Lovat’s favour. Walpole signed the Royal Warrant and Lovat prepared to marry, now able to offer his bride a share in ‘all goods, gear, debts, and sums of money, jewels, gold, silver, coined and uncoined, utensils, domiciles, horse, nolt, sheep, corns, bonds, obligations, contracts, decrees, sentences, compromitts and all other goods, gear, escheatable whatever, as well not named as named, which pertained of before to Alexander Mackenzie of Fraserdale’ and were now Lord Lovat’s. The Lovats were even free to ‘labour and manure’ the lands. In addition, his Lordship was invested with the ‘said Alexander’s’ life rent of all ‘lands, heritages, tenements, annual rents, tacks, steadings, roomes, possessions, and others whatsoever, pertaining and belonging to him, with the whole mails, ferms, kaines, customs, casualties, profits and duties on the same’.

Lovat wrote to the Brigadier that he was ready to marry but understood the decision to accept his offer must be Peggie’s. ‘I would rather marry her chambermaid than marry her contrary to her inclination,’ he told Grant. ‘For if there is not a mutual inclination in that life rent bond, it must be a curse rather than a blessing,’ as he knew only too well.

‘With Lord Lovat I am sure she will be happy in a good man and a better estate,’ Grant concluded. No one remarked that Lovat did not own the estate in perpetuity. If Fraserdale died tomorrow, it went to his son. ‘Let her want for nothing that may be proper for Lord Lovat’s Lady … to put her in the handsomest manner of my hand.’