The Last Highlander (3 page)

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
ceilidhs
³
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.