The Last Highlander (4 page)

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.