The Last Highlander (6 page)

The following March, 1696, King William summoned Murray south again to reward him further, creating him Earl of Tullibardine, so that he could be a King’s Commissioner in the next session of the Scottish Parliament. Murray insisted he must have his brother-in-law at his side this time and summoned Hugh to London. The Earl promised Hugh he would be presented at Court and said he would ask the King to make the whole Regiment of Foot over to him. Simon pushed to accompany his cousin. He and Hugh had grown close since Simon left university and Simon now occupied a traditional place in the clan hierarchy: commanding his chief’s soldiers. Murray reluctantly agreed.

After nearly two weeks on the roads, Hugh Lovat, Simon Fraser and their servants reached London, long black boots, full-skirted thick wool coats, linen and wigs all caked with sweat and muck. They found their lodgings and prepared to enjoy the city, keenly anticipating their royal audience. It was the perfect opportunity to make a favourable impression on the King, and who knew what ‘gratification’ might follow – the regiment, a government post perhaps? At Kensington Palace, they met Tullibardine who conducted them into the King’s presence. Lord Lovat was ‘one of the most ancient peers of Scotland … head of one of the bravest clans’. Tullibardine announced. Lovat and Tullibardine ‘could venture to assure his Majesty of their fidelity’. As the Highland chief stepped up to speak, Tullibardine told Hugh to ‘fall upon one knee and take leave of his Majesty’. Ever ‘of a contracted understanding’ Hugh ‘did as he was directed’, Simon later wrote of his cousin. Not for the first time, Simon despaired of his chief’s passivity. Some men did not merit their opportunities.

Before Simon could urge Hugh to re-present himself at Court, Tullibardine was recalled to the Scottish Parliament to deal with the ongoing fears of invasion and assassination. The Earl briefed Hugh and Simon that, all things considered, this was not the moment to bother the King with personal requests. He would be forced to hold on to the Regiment of Foot, he said, ‘till the fears of an invasion should be blown over’. They had heard all this before, Simon told Hugh. Had they come all this way, at great expense, to show the King of England that a great Highland chief would dance a jig before him, to the Earl’s tunes? When Tullibardine ordered them to return to Edinburgh, both young Frasers ignored him.

Instead they met with Tarbat’s son and Alexander Mackenzie, son of the Earl of Seaforth. As a Guards officer, Alexander was familiar with London’s best clubs and watering-holes. It would be chance too for the Mackenzie men to pick up the threads of their relationship with their Fraser cousins. Since the Murrays had taken over, Mackenzie influence at Castle Dounie had ceased.

Hugh and Simon, choked by Lord Murray’s condescension, patronage, expectations and favours, now threw ‘themselves into the hurly-burly of fun-making, love-making, noise-making’ offered by the English capital. ‘Come at a crown ourselves we’ll treat,/Champagne our liqueur and ragouts our meat’, the Highlanders joined in with the songs in the alehouses. ‘With evening wheels we’ll drive o’er the park,’ then ‘finish at Locket’s and reel home in the dark’. Locket’s, near Charing Cross, was a popular gentleman’s club. The area roughly bordered by the Strand, Covent Garden and Charing Cross teemed with life. The theatres around Drury Lane brought taverns, coffee houses and bagnios in their wake. Socialising levelled all the classes, aristocrats, intellectuals, merchants and tradesmen, foreigners, Gaels, and the people who fulfilled all whims and desires. When the young men spoke Gaelic, very loud and very fast, they could talk treason with impunity, though many taverns and coffee houses welcomed Jacobites.

Simon worked on his chief, showing Hugh ‘very plainly, that Tullibardine made a jest of him, and had brought him to London, in order to make
his
court to King William at Lord Lovat’s expense’. He and the Mackenzies counselled Hugh ‘to break with’ Murray, and free Clan Fraser from its predators. For once, Hugh openly defied his brother-in-law. He sent out a waiter for pen and paper, wrote to Murray, and resigned his commission. ‘I hope … you will be so kind as to bestow it on my cousin Beaufort,’ he added. Simon clapped his cousin on the back. This was the spirit they had looked for in him all these years. Simon followed up Hugh’s letter with one of his own. ‘If your Lordship have use for all my Lord Lovat’s men, I have, next to himself, most influence on them.’ It was a thinly veiled threat to take them away. Tullibardine made his own brother captain of Lovat’s men.

A worried Tullibardine wrote to his wife Katherine, sister of the Duke of Hamilton, who had remained in London, and asked her to find out what the young Frasers were up to. ‘I am extremely angry Lovat is not come off,’ he wrote. ‘I blame Beaufort who I believe occasions his stay till he gets … [Lovat’s] captain’s act.’ Katherine replied that she had seen Hugh. ‘O! He is a sad creature, and keeps the worst of company. It is not fit to tell you here the way he lives,’ she told her husband, ‘but he says … he’ll stay here, and spend of his own, and take his pleasures a while … I’m afraid he’ll fall into some inconveniency.’ Besides the ‘inconveniency’ of drink, Hugh was whoring himself to a physical breakdown and keeping other very ‘inconvenient’ companions.

The merry-making soon stopped with news from Dounie that Hugh’s only son, three-year-old John, had died. He still had his girls, but now no male heir. Simon could not help but be aware that with the infant’s death, the Beaufort Frasers were once again the only male heirs
if
the illegitimate marriage contract could be overturned. Simon discussed it with his cousin. The Fraser inheritance was nothing to do with an alien clan, he said. Murray had been deceiving him for years about what was best for the Frasers and disguising his real intentions. Even this trip: there was no colonelcy of the regiment or meaningful royal recognition for Hugh Lovat. Retrieve some loss of face, Simon urged him, and use the law to put right and undo what the Murrays had put wrong.

Hugh conceded that his in-laws probably ‘despised him’. He was an easy-going fellow and he had let them do as they liked with his titles and estates. The worm now turned. On 26 March, ‘Lord Lovat obliged’ Simon ‘to send for an attorney … Convinced of his Error, and the injury done to his own family, he … executed a Deed, in favours of Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, his Grand Uncle, Father to … Simon, upon the Failzie of Issue-male of the Marriage, and restored the Succession to the ancient Channel of the Heirs-male.’

While he had Hugh pointing in the right direction, Simon also persuaded him to draw up a legal bond. Lord Lovat bound himself to pay 50,000 Scottish merks to Simon ‘for the special love and affection I bear to my cousin, Master Simon Fraser … and for certain onerous causes and others moving me’. Were Simon to enforce this bond, it would utterly ruin his heavily indebted cousin. Fifty thousand Scottish merks was about £2,750 sterling (or £350,000 in today’s values).

Simon’s motives were so mixed. On the one hand he believed a weak chief threatened the very existence of the clan. He also believed in the unbroken male inheritance of Clan Fraser, and was determined to throw off the over-mighty Murrays. This bond was the Frasers’ security should the Murrays trespass too far and try to marry the heiress, Hugh’s eldest daughter Amelia, away from the male heir, Simon Fraser.

Eventually Tullibardine wrote to Simon. He coldly commanded his lieutenant to escort his cousin home, and then report for duty. Tullibardine was Master of the Privy Council, King’s High Commissioner and ruled Scotland with ‘the authority of a monarch in right of his office, and sometimes a greater power in virtue of his abilities’. The man representing the constitution and the King was supreme. Simon could ill afford to defy him openly. To his face Simon hailed him ‘the Viceroy of Scotland’. Behind Tullibardine’s back he was learning to plot with more craft.

Simon and Hugh did not return to Edinburgh until 30 June, when Lord Lovat inspected his old company of Frasers. ‘To my singular satisfaction,’ Simon told Tullibardine, ‘there is none of … his company deserted … My Lord Lovat told two or three that he saw of them that he would hang them without any judgement if they offered to go home without their pass.’ Simon made sure his colonel knew that the Fraser men only stayed loyal because their chief ordered it, not their new captain, Tullibardine’s brother, James Murray.

Hugh Lovat continued his journey north from Edinburgh alone. He had left London with a chest infection. By the time he reached the borders of Murray territory in Perthshire, some forty miles north of Edinburgh, his illness had developed into something like pneumonia. He managed to get to a Murray house at Dunkeld. There he received a letter recalling him to the Scottish Parliament. Obediently, Lovat turned south, but only got as far as a tavern at Perth. Some Murray ladies despatched a physician for their in-law, though they never offered to take him in. They had heard from Katherine Tullibardine that Hugh had annulled his marriage contract with their family, and had debauched himself, spending money he did not have. The old Marquis of Atholl visited Hugh: he had drawn up another marriage contract, reversing the annulment. The Murrays looked down on Lord Lovat in his sickbed, and forced him to sign.

Reports of Hugh’s collapse and the Murrays’ presence reached Simon, who rode to Perth immediately. He had to defend his new interests and protect his chief. By the time he reached Dunkeld, Hugh was delirious. He ‘quite lost the use of his reason for several days, and lay in his bed in a manner incapable of motion’, Simon informed Lady Lovat. It was hard for Lady Lovat at Dounie to gauge precisely what was going on in that airless little box-bed in a Perth tavern as the only eyewitness account she had was Simon’s. However, she did not come.

On the morning of 6 September, the fever left the clan chief’s body and Hugh cooled down. Simon lay next to him and wrapped him in his arms. He might now start to recover, and things could be different. This crisis must cast off the Murray yoke. Hugh slept quietly. Every now and then there erupted from deep in the young man’s body a roaring, snorting breath. After one harsh intake of breath, like a wave rushing over shingle, Hugh’s heart stopped.

Simon lay there a while. The room echoed his chief’s stillness. Poor Hugh. His father had died aged twenty-nine. He had barely made it into his thirties. Simon escorted his cousin’s body home where it was interred in the family mausoleum at Wardlaw. He then went to his father, bowed, and addressed him as ‘My Lord Lovat’.

FOUR

‘No borrowed chief!’, 1696–97

‘Men must either be pampered or crushed’

– MACHIAVELLI

There was no time to lose. Under feudalism, Atholl–Murray interest in the Frasers died with the late chief. Therefore, ‘my father did take upon him the title of Lord Lovat, and possessed himself of the estates’, wrote Simon.

Captain Simon Fraser, now the Master of Lovat, returned to his regiment. He had precedent and history and the desire of much of his clan on his side. He possessed youth, determination, righteous indignation, courage and acute financial need to power the claims of his birthright. This might not be enough. But Simon had already asserted the cause of the thousands of the ordinary Fraser clansmen, and of their chief, more vigorously in a couple of years than the Fraser chiefs had in a couple of generations.

As soon as he had the chance, Tullibardine came for Captain Fraser. Manipulating the Privy Council, Tullibardine obtained the gift of his niece, nine-year-old Amelia, ‘in a trustee’s name’, though the child had a mother and close Fraser kin, and did not need an externally appointed guardian. As trustee, he would manage her clan and choose her husband. It was his duty to make the most advantageous match possible for her. This was usually the male heir.

Simon returned to command the guard at Holyroodhouse. Late one night Tullibardine arrived. Simon heard a shout from the guard, saw the flaring of torches, and watched the Earl clatter into the palace courtyard, calling for light and ‘a bottle’. He then summoned Simon to join him. ‘Having drunk to a good pitch,’ Tullibardine ‘took a paper out of his pocket and called for pen and ink’. He wanted Simon to sign a retraction of his claims. Simon must know, he said, how he entertained an ‘extreme friendship’ for him, a mere ‘Cadet of the family of Lovat, but of no Manner of Estate’. Tullibardine was aware of the ‘meanness’ of his situation, he told Simon, who sat there stony-faced. However, ‘I am told you have assumed the title of Master of Lovat, and that you have sent the opinions of [legal] counsel to your father, recommending him to take possession of the property of my late brother-in-law.’ Tullibardine ended on an accusatory note.

Simon put down his drink and forced himself to be civil. Of course his father Thomas, Lord Lovat, enjoyed his inheritance: the honours and estates of his late great nephew. Why would Simon consult lawyers about a natural course of events, and send results north?

Tullibardine too had gone to the law. His lawyers agreed Thomas had a right to the title. They would all call the old fellow ‘Thomas, Lord Lovat’. Why not? However, under the terms of Hugh and Amelia’s marriage contract, ratified and signed by the late Lord Lovat, the property and estates belonged to his ward and niece, Amelia.

Simon countered: he either had ‘a just right to the succession, or … had not’. It was quite simple. ‘If he had
no
right, it was to little purpose to’ renounce his claim to nothing. ‘But, if he had a right, he would not renounce it for the revenues of Scotland.’ It was his birthright.

Tullibardine convulsed with ‘violent passion’. He had always known Simon ‘for an obstinate, insolent rascal’, he raged. ‘I do not know what should hinder me from cutting off your ears and throwing you into a dungeon, and bringing you to the gallows, as your treasons against the government so richly deserve!’ Tullibardine referred to Simon’s treasonable letters on the death of the Queen, which were now in his hands.

Although he felt awed by ‘his formidable person, in the midst of his state and authority’, Simon knew he had to stay calm. He stuck his hat on his head. He was off. ‘As for the paltry company I command in your regiment … it is the greatest disgrace to which I was ever subject to be under your command, and now, if you please,’ he said, jerking his head towards a lackey in the corner, ‘you may give it to your footman.’ And out he strode, shaking with emotion. Simon resigned from Tullibardine’s regiment.

The next day Tullibardine sent to the King the letters Simon had written on Queen Mary’s death. Tullibardine demanded that young Beaufort be arrested, court-martialled and hung for high treason. William consulted the commander-in-chief of his Scottish forces, Sir Thomas Livingstone. Men much more highly placed than young Simon Fraser could be compromised by their ambivalent stance to his rule, he counselled the King. William would be advised not to reagitate feelings that had led to the plotting in Scotland the previous summer.

The King ordered Livingstone to cashier Simon Fraser. Livingstone obeyed but told his Majesty that he suspected ‘the Viceroy’ was abusing his public position in a private vendetta against Simon Fraser in his and old Atholl’s lust to acquire the Lovat estates. It was a view Simon had keenly encouraged. Tullibardine’s growing number of enemies believed that ‘if the Secretary of State could turn out and in officers at their pleasure, upon their private pique, no officer in the army was sure of his commission’. With this sort of reportage, Simon cleverly and noisily drew attention to the Murrays’ pursuit of him and his clan. Men such as Archibald Campbell, the 10th Earl of Argyll, were keen to ally themselves to Simon, to prove that Tullibardine was too eager to use the tools of public office to build his personal power base. By favouring him so completely, it looked as if King William was colluding in the schemes of the Atholl Murrays to extend their territorial and political power in Scotland.

Argyll murmured to William Carstares, a Presbyterian minister and one of the King’s most trusted confidants, that Tullibardine’s activities around Inverness threatened national security. If ‘Tullibardine be allowed to go on … it may occasion a deal of bloodshed; for if one begin, all the Highlands will in ten days fly together in arms … I am most particularly concerned in Highland affairs,’ he said. Simon Fraser had called on the right man to help him. The Frasers were historically ‘sword vassals’ of the Campbells. It meant that in exchange for protection by the bigger clan, the Frasers brought out their men to fight Campbell battles. To bring down Tullibardine’s over-mighty schemes to dominate Scottish politics, men who otherwise supported William’s rule would go into opposition.

Tullibardine did not meet with this growing barrage of criticism calmly. He was, said a contemporary, ‘endowed with good natural parts, tho’ by reason of his proud, imperious, haughty passionate temper, he was no ways capable to be the leading man of a party. He much affected popularity,’ but his ‘kindest addresses were never taking: he was selfish to a great degree, and his vanity and ambition extended so far, that he could not suffer an equal. He was reputed very brave, but hot and headstrong.’ He would destroy Simon Fraser.

At the end of the summer, Simon left Edinburgh. Scottish law had not been able to solve his problems and Simon struggled to see how the traditional path – a clan feud – might be avoided. Everyone feared a feud, ‘for Highland feuds never die’, as the Reverend James Fraser counselled him. If it came to a feud he could not see how he might expect to win. Over the last two decades the Murrays had amassed a regiment and a militia force of their own. Tullibardine, as King’s High Commissioner, enjoyed huge power over the courts and Parliament. If Simon provoked the Murrays, they would surely attack. In the end the solution seemed obvious. The two sides must be brought together. He and the heiress, young Amelia, must be contracted to marry. This was the path of peace.

In April 1697, Simon headed to Castle Dounie to negotiate with Hugh’s widow for the hand, at puberty, of the heiress Amelia. Tullibardine reacted immediately. He ordered the girl to be whisked from her mother, the dowager Lady Lovat, and be taken to his Perthshire stronghold, Blair Castle. Simon meanwhile moved into Castle Dounie itself and sent his father to a safehouse on the Lovat Stratherrick estates.

When Simon said of his kin that ‘the Highland clans did not consider themselves as bound by the letter of the law, like the inhabitants of the low country’ around Inverness, ‘but to a man would regard it as their honour and their boast, to cut the throat, or blow out the brains of anyone … who should dare to disturb the repose of their laird’, he had his Stratherrick clansmen in mind. High above Loch Ness, Stratherrick concealed itself and its people behind the trees and rocks scaling the steep slopes along the south shore of the loch. Fertile fields around lairds’ houses nurtured cattle and rigs of corn in a sea of moorland wilderness. The Frasers who lived there existed in accordance with the values of the clan system. Financially, they depended on a traditional chief of the sort Simon desired to be. The elderly Lord Lovat would be safe among these men.

From Dounie, the dowager Lady Lovat complained to her family: ‘Young Beaufort is still here and does not intend to go from this place till his own time. They are more obdurate than ever, and delude the people extremely.’ Simon, the chief’s son, felt that the chief’s son living in the chief’s stronghold was not delusional. The widow of a dead chief had to make room for the living one, or move to a dower house.

‘The neighbourhood are all knaves, and for him,’ the Marquis of Atholl growled when he read his daughter’s letters. It maddened him that they had failed to kill young Beaufort in Edinburgh when they had the chance. After seizing Amelia, Atholl wrote to the Fraser lairds advising them to trust him rather than rally to ‘Captain Fraser’. The old Marquis ‘would find out a true Fraser and a man of handsome fortune that would support their whole name’. This was a dangerous time for the Murrays. Removing young Amelia gave them possession of a serious claimant to the inheritance, but it removed her from the objects of her claim.

Simon was dismayed to find that some Fraser lairds from the rich low-lying country around Inverness were hesitating to enlist for him. Others, such as Robert Fraser and his brother – both lawyers – had thrown over the ties of clanship in order to advance themselves. Even they advised the Murrays it was a step too far not to bring in a Fraser as chief and suggested they could find an alternative within the impoverished Saltoun Frasers from along the coast towards Aberdeen. Simon cursed the two lawyers like an Old Testament prophet. ‘Robert, the prime author of these misfortunes, died under the visible judgement of God,’ he wrote. Robert’s brother ‘may yet be overtaken with the just punishment of his crimes’, he added hopefully.

The response Atholl received from the Highland lairds was unequivocal. They ‘would have no borrowed chief!’ Moreover, if Saltoun ‘dared to enter their country in hostility to Thomas, Lord Lovat … his head should answer the infringement … We have put on a full resolution to defend our lands, possessions, goods, lives, wives, children, liberties and privileges of free subjects which lie at the stake against all invading and insulting avaricious ambition and oppression
pro aris et focis contra omnes mortalles
.’ The judicial phrasing in Latin (suggesting Simon’s hand in it) sealed the threat of an old-fashioned Celtic clan feud.

The letter left Lord Saltoun windy about his venture into Lovat territories to arrange a marriage between his son and Amelia Lovat. He wrote to Simon, claiming disingenuously that he only desired to help arbitrate in the Murray–Fraser dispute. Simon thanked him, and suggested they meet. Lord Saltoun agreed.

At the end of September 1697, Saltoun and Lady Lovat’s youngest brother, Lord Mungo Murray, rode to Beauly. They looked forward to their time at Castle Dounie working out the details of a pre-nuptial agreement. They would hunt, dance and feast. The intention was then to go back via the Murray stronghold and celebrate the contract by letting the young people meet. Simon, meanwhile, hoped to dissuade Lord Saltoun from acting as go-between for Tullibardine’s schemes.

At daybreak, Simon and his lairds set out to rendezvous with Saltoun from the Stratherrick estates, where he had been enlisting gentlemen to his cause. As their party crossed the River Ness and headed west towards Dounie, ‘the inhabitants, observing their alert and spirited appearance lifted up their hands to heaven, and prayed God to prosper their enterprise’, Simon wrote. Dollery, Tullibardine’s recruiting agent, confirmed their support. ‘It is certain the generality of the country about Inverness favours’ Simon, Thomas and their followers, he told his master. ‘In the very town of Inverness I hear they call the young rogue the Master of Lovat.’ Even the professional classes were coming over to Simon’s side.

The party rode on with confidence. The Beauly Firth sparkled on the right as they entered the woods of Bunchrew, about three miles out of Inverness. Suddenly, one of Simon’s lairds noticed a group of ‘running footmen’ scampering out of the woods. These runners accompanied gentlemen of any standing, holding their stirrups as they mounted and dismounted; opening gates in their path; fording rivers and burns and leading the gentleman’s horse to steady its progress. Simon was shocked to see that they were followed by the Lords Saltoun and Mungo Murray and their tail of armed followers. Saltoun was very chatty, apparently ‘in great hopes to have his son [become] Lord Lovat when the girl was ripe’. Seeing and hearing all this, Simon erupted. He and Saltoun had arranged to meet that day to prevent this very thing. He, Simon, was the obvious candidate for young Amelia’s hand. The Lords were reneging on their agreement on every count.