The Last Highlander (41 page)

In the days before his death, Lovat travelled in his mind to the Highlands. He could hear the sound of the pipes playing the chief’s
pibroch
, Lord Lovat’s Lament, as they drew his coffin to the family chapel at Wardlaw, with thousands in attendance. All the pipers from John o’Groats to Edinburgh were to be paid to pipe his body north. Should the government forbid it (they hated the pipes, symbol of the clans, and the effect they had on Highlanders) then the women of his clan would extemporise keenings for the chief. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘there will be old crying and clapping of hands, for I am one of the greatest chiefs in the Highlands.’

The warrant came to the Tower to execute him the following Thursday, 9 April, almost a week’s time. The Governor apologised for bringing the news. He was obliged by law to announce it to him formally. Lovat stood and squeezed his arm: ‘God’s will be done.’ He took the man’s hand and drank his health. He was ‘so well satisfied with his doom’, he said, ‘he would not change stations with any Prince in Europe’. They shared part of a bottle of wine, let down with a little water.

At ten at night it was the warders’ habit to come and undress him. One crouched to unbuckle his shoes. ‘Not long now, my boys,’ he said. He would be leaving this world next Thursday.

Lovat slept well and was awake before 7 a.m., to say his prayers, as was his habit. He lay in bed, glass on a table by his side, eyes closed in prayer, memory, contemplation. Talking about his life, he said he had been involved in every scheme to restore the Stuarts since 1688. He wrote to the Master of Lovat, still in prison in Edinburgh Castle. ‘You are always present with me, my dear Simon,’ he told him. ‘It is the blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that can deliver you and me from our present melancholy situation. We have provoked God by our sins, which most certainly have brought those troubles upon us.’

God acted in the world to balance the books. A belief in submission to the will of God sustained him. He had sought to be ‘the greatest Lord Lovat’ that ever was. If young Simon went on to live a good life, Christ ‘will certainly bring you out of all your troubles and make you the happiest Lord Lovat that ever was’, and you will ‘bring God’s blessing upon yourself, your family, and your kindred’, the trinity of blessings a chief wished for.

For himself, Lovat was confident he was destined for heaven, and had very little time to wait. He decided he should rehearse his execution, as his neck was so broad and thick. He puffed up a pillow into a block shape and leaned forward to see what it felt like. He shuffled backwards and forwards, kneeled up and told his warders ‘he believed by this short practice he should be able to act his part in the tragedy very well’. He asked the warder whether he thought the executioner would be reliable about taking his head off with a single blow? He’d heard that Lord Kilmarnock suffered some awful hacking about before they got it off. ‘I have reserved ten guineas in a purse,’ Lovat told a gentleman who was visiting and watching the little rehearsal. ‘He shall have [it] if he does his business well.’

‘I’m sorry you should have occasion for him at all,’ the man muttered. Lovat nodded. He showed him the letter he had written to young Simon, wanting to know what he thought of it. ‘I like it very well. ’Tis a very good letter,’ he told him.

‘’Tis a Christian letter,’ Lovat said. There were other letters to write, but it was too late, and they might not be delivered further than the government censor.

On his penultimate night on earth, Lovat was restless. By two in the morning he was awake and praying, calling on the Lord for mercy. Eventually, he slept until about six then woke to his ordinary routine. Dressed, breakfasted, he seemed happy. He sang part of a Gaelic song and declared himself ‘as fit for an entertainment as ever he was in his life’ – he had enjoyed some wild entertainments in his days.

More friends visited to say goodbye. They smoked a pipe and took some wine, and discussed business. There was a bill going through Parliament to break the power of the clans. Lovat disliked it and wished a bad dose of dysentery on those who wanted to vote it in. Then they might be in the privy when the vote was called. Sir Hector Munro and Lovat’s nephew, Ludo Grant, both MPs, appeared in the door to take their leave of him. Lovat kissed their cheeks and welcomed them in. They had come from the House of Commons where the anti-clan, anti-Gaelic legislation was being debated, and would be passed. Lovat said ‘if he had his broadsword by him, he should not scruple to chop off their heads’ if he thought they had gone along with the bill ‘for destroying the ancient jurisdiction and privileges of the Highland Chiefs’. He looked hard at them. They would not fight with the old Lord now. ‘For my part,’ Lovat told them, ‘I die a martyr for my country.’

That night he ate very well and then called for his pipe. ‘Now Willy,’ he said to his lawyer and friend William Fraser, ‘give me a pipe of tobacco, and that will be the last I shall ever smoke.’ The Governor came in again to check on his important prisoner’s spirits. Lovat got up and offered him his chair by the fireside. The Governor refused, apologising that he had disturbed the old man from his seat. It was clearly a terrible struggle to rise. Lovat laughed, ‘I hope you would not have me unmannerly on the last day of my life.’

He talked ‘a good while’ with Willie Fraser and James Fraser, one of Phopachy’s sons, now an apothecary in Chelsea, about family affairs and the management of his funeral. They discussed his conversion to Roman Catholicism. ‘This is my faith,’ he shrugged, ‘but I have charity for all mankind, and I believe every sincere honest man bids fair for heaven, let his persuasion be what it will, for the mercies of the Almighty are great, and his Ways past finding out.’

He reached into his coat and pulled out a silver crucifix and kissed it. The men looked on in Protestant disgust. ‘Here’s a crucifix.’ He handed it about. ‘Observe how strong the expression is, and how finely the passions are delineated.’ He noticed their discomfort. ‘We keep pictures of our best friends, of our fathers, mothers, etc. Why should we not keep a picture of Him who has done more than all the world for us?’

In the end they each stood and shook Lovat’s hand and embraced him and wished him a good journey. He ordered a piece of veal minced for his breakfast and asked them one last favour. Would they ‘go upon the scaffold with me’? They had been with him all week. He could not be without them now, ‘and not leave me till you see this head’, he pointed, ‘cut off this body’. They promised to be back early.

Those among his friends who defended his actions accounted his deeds as ‘the Machiavellianism of a Prince, not simple transactions between man and man. He was endowed with the privileges of a monarch, who is not to be tried by the ordinary rules applicable to a subject; and with whom deeds that amongst mankind at large are called treachery and falsehood, take rank as kingcraft and state policy.’

Very tired, Lord Lovat retired about 9 p.m. The warders undressed him. His breeches, stockings and shoes off, he liked to stand before the fire and warm his rump and feet. After a while they asked, was he ready for bed?

He looked round and raised a hand. ‘I will warm my feet a little more first.’

The man bent down to blow up some heat into the dying embers. Looking up, he said he was sorry tomorrow would be such a bad day for his Lordship. Lovat brushed away the man’s fears from in front of his face. ‘Bad! … Do you think I am afraid of an axe? ’Tis a debt we all owe, and what we must all pay … Don’t you think it better to go off in this manner than to linger with consumption, gout, dropsy, fever, and so on? Though,’ he said, slapping his sides, ‘I must needs own my constitution is so good that I could have lived twenty years longer, I believe, if I had not been called hither.’

Some time later, the warder reminded him he was still out by the fire. ‘I had forgot that I was so far from the bed,’ Lovat said. ‘You might have forgot it too, had your head been to be cut off tomorrow.’

The day of his death dawned dreary. He woke at three and saw it in with prayers and a glass of wine and water, lying up in bed. His helpers thought he ‘seemed still as cheerful as ever’.

At 7 a.m. they helped him to his chair by the fire. He examined his wig, and sent it back with the barber that he might ‘have time to comb it out in a genteel manner’. Then he counted his money and called for a purse for the executioner. The warder brought two – a green knitted silk one, and a yellow canvas one. Lovat said either would do, no man could dislike any purse with ten guineas in it.

The warder observed him closely to try and gauge his mood. ‘He had a great share of memory and understanding,’ the warder thought, ‘and an awful idea of religion and an afterlife’, but he saw not a shadow of ‘fear or … any symptoms of unease’. This was in the Tower. It would all change when they went out into the cart and faced the thousands of people scrapping now to get a good place.

The Sheriffs of London called for his body at 11 a.m. They helped Lovat into the Governor’s carriage and it moved slowly to the great entrance gates. There he was extracted from the coach with great difficulty, crippled with the pain in his joints. The Tower guards handed him over to the Sheriffs of the City of London and the County of Middlesex. Lovat had been Sheriff of Inverness-shire, he said, and greeted his fellow officer bearers. They put him in another coach and took him through the roaring crowd to a little house near the scaffold.

Its inside was lined with black linen and the walls lit by sconces. He shuddered. It was like a sepulchre. His friends and kindred were denied entry. Lovat immediately turned to call to the Sheriffs to allow him his relations and friends at this extreme moment of his life. One Sheriff, Mr Alsop, went and called them back. He did not mean to torment the old man as well as kill him. Lovat thanked him and said, ‘it is a considerable consolation to me that my body falls into the hands of gentlemen of such honour’. Give the command, he said, and he would obey. He had been an officer in the army many years, he said, and was good at obeying orders. Lovat asked someone to help him kneel so he could pray. He bowed his head and asked one of the Frasers to read a prayer. He then murmured a private prayer, inaudible to anyone, and looked up and asked to be seated. Then, ‘I am ready,’ he said, affirming the Clan Fraser motto,
Je suis prest
.

‘I would not hurry your Lordship,’ said the Sheriff, ‘there is a half hour good – if your Lordship don’t tarry too long upon the scaffold.’

‘I hope my blood will be the last spilt on this occasion,’ Lovat prayed.

They opened the exit, letting in a wall of light and sound as he came to the doorway, leaning on the men on either side of him, looking up a narrow passage between thousands of yelling heads, and gripping the arms he leaned on. The scaffold rose up huge behind the yelling heads. Lord Lovat stepped across the threshold. The door shut behind him.

PICTURE SECTION

James II and family, though Mary and Anne, James’s daughters by his first wife, are not shown here. This is the Roman Catholic Royal Family in exile, the putative James ‘III and VIII’ on the left.

Mary II, wife of William of Orange, and eldest daughter of James II by his first – protestant – wife, Anne Hyde.

William of Orange, William III, widely loathed in Scotland, a country he neither visited nor understood.