The Last Highlander (7 page)

Simon’s reaction was phrased in the clan rhetoric of pride and ‘face’: such ‘an affront was too atrocious … not to exact satisfaction for it, or perish in the attempt’, Simon later wrote. William of Errochit, a Stratherrick laird, shot forward and levelled a carabine at Saltoun and Mungo: ‘Stop, traitor, you shall pay with your hide your irruption into this country in hostility to our laird!’ The party skidded to a halt. Simon cantered up to Mungo Murray, yelling at him, ‘Fire traitor, or I will blow out your brains!’ Mungo dropped his reins and threw up his hands. ‘My dear Simon,’ he retorted. ‘Is this the termination of our long and tender friendship?’

Simon looked at him along his pistol. ‘You are a base coward, and deserve no quarter,’ he replied, ‘but I give you your life.’

Simon’s men moved among the group and disarmed them all, ‘without the smallest resistance from any individual’, except Lord Saltoun’s
valet de chambre
, who only gave up his weapon after Simon ‘struck him a blow on the head with the flat side of his sword’. The two Lords and their company of gentlemen were rounded up and taken to Fanellan, two miles from Castle Dounie, where Simon ordered the party to be locked up. A gallows was erected outside Lord Saltoun’s cell window. The unhappy noble sat alone in a tiny room and, in between the sawing and banging, listened to his fate being discussed. The door of Saltoun’s cell opened and another of Simon’s lairds, Major Fraser of Castleleathers, entered, swathed in plaid from top to toe, his face as red as his tartan. Taunting him, Castleleathers instructed his Lordship ‘to prepare himself for another world … He had but two days to live.’ The pro-Murray Frasers who had called Saltoun in to their country were then made to cast dice, ‘to know whose fate it was to hang with him’. This was ritualised violence, a tool in old-fashioned clan diplomacy; a display of seriousness of intent.

Lord Saltoun did not react well, Castleleathers recorded. As the effect of the news sank in, ‘the poor gentleman, finding this a hard pill to digest, contracted a bloody flux, of which he almost dyed’. Saltoun passed out cold, crashing to the floor. ‘Upon his recovery he begged his life, the gallows having stood all the time beneath his window – and 500 men waiting on in arms.’

Not wanting the death of a nobleman on his hands, Simon released them all immediately, though not before pressing his sword under Saltoun’s and Mungo Murray’s chins and making them swear never to come back to Fraser country. Happy to agree to anything, the nobles touched the tip of his weapon, swore the oath and fled.

The kidnapping had started out as what most Highland Scots recognised as a clan raid – a wild spree by the young bloods of one clan against another. However, the Murrays went to court to move the insult into quite another quarter. They declared the Frasers had risen in ‘open and manifest Rebellion’. This was a capital charge. The Murrays demanded legal endorsement – a ‘Commission of Fire and Sword’ – to send in soldiers to arrest the Beaufort Frasers and devastate their lands. The court had to distinguish between the private and public offence in all this. The government had an interest in rather than a monopoly on violence as a tool of justice in North Britain. Representatives of the Crown knew Tullibardine was trying to use Scottish law against a kindred he himself was provoking into a clan feud. The Privy Council in Edinburgh hesitated.

To Simon the kidnapping and high jinx was a Highland, private matter, between the Master of Lovat and the Murrays. He did not see himself as being in rebellion against the Crown. It might all have been diffused, had British justice not been even more vexed by what Simon did next.

FIVE

‘The Grand Fornicator of the Aird’, 1697–99

‘The Lady not yielding willingly, there was some harsh measures taken …’

– MAJOR FRASER OF CASTLELEATHERS

Simon did not stop to think. He did not know what would happen or leave enough time to scheme at every twist and turn. On 15 October, days after freeing Lord Saltoun, his Frasers galloped over the hill from Fanellan. Runners fanned out across the slopes around them, like the clan’s hunting dogs, and fell on Castle Dounie. Simon ordered a guard to be placed on all the avenues to the castle ‘to prevent the Dowager from sending to her father’, or brother. Simon made Lady Amelia pen a soothing note to Colonel Hill, the officer in charge of the government barracks at Fort William. ‘We are still in hopes to take away this riot friendly,’ she reassured him.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff of Inverness-shire did what was required to mollify the victims and rein in the aggressively exuberant Fraser youth. Simon and his associates would appear before him to answer for the kidnapping of Lords Saltoun and Murray. Simon travelled to Inverness, accompanied by his father, where he was rebuked by the Sheriff for letting things get out of hand, told to quieten down and dismissed. The Sheriff Court did not care to consider the issue of Simon’s occupation of Castle Dounie. Impatient heirs often bumped against a dowager trying to hang on in the old family home. Besides, Lady Amelia seemed cross, not terrified.

In Fort William, Colonel Hill relaxed. Brigadier Alexander Grant, the Sheriff of Inverness-shire, was a competent man and chief of Clan Grant, friends and neighbours of the Frasers for hundreds of years. Grant was a follower of the Earl of Argyll and ‘is judged competent for the Riot’, Colonel Hill assured Tullibardine. ‘I conclude there will be no more trouble about that affair,’ Hill said, turning his mind back to organising supplies. The campaigning season was drawing to an end, and his troops needed to winter in at the garrison.

Tullibardine threw Hill’s reply aside and composed a cold note. Hill should not act as if the feuding Frasers and Murrays were just two barbaric clans locked into a territorial dispute. ‘Not only on the public account, but also on mine,’ he said – as if Scotland and the Murrays were mirrors of each other. The colonel must use government troops to quell this ‘uprising against the King’. He
must
send a ‘strong party of the King’s soldiers amongst them … to apprehend the Beauforts … which,’ Tullibardine gritted his teeth, ‘I wish you had sent on the first account.’

At Dounie, Simon had thought of another way to settle the feud, as audacious as the first. If he could not have Amelia the daughter, he would have Amelia the mother. Then he would have both of them. He walked through to Lady Lovat’s chambers. She loved and esteemed him. They had known each other most of their lives. They must marry. Lady Lovat refused. ‘He urged the more, fearing that troops’ from the Atholl Murrays ‘would march against him’. Still she would not yield.

Simon considered for a moment, then shouted for a couple of men and despatched them to Inverness. They returned after dark. In their wake, they towed an inebriated Episcopal minister on a pony, the Reverend Robert Munro of Abertarff, a ‘poor, sordid fellow’.

‘The Lady not yielding willingly,’ Fraser of Castleleathers noted with foreboding, ‘there was some harsh measures taken, a parson sent for, and the bagpipe blown up.’ Too late, Lady Amelia realised how vulnerable she was. Two men hauled her, in tears, before Reverend Munro, Simon taking his position grim-faced by her side. The deafening groan of the pipes bounced off the walls of the small room. The minister kept his head down, and pronounced Amelia and Simon man and wife.

An overwrought Amelia was dismissed to her maids. Simon joined his men to drink the health of bride and groom, and the settlement of their troubles. The clan was safe. The Master of Lovat sent a man to Stratherrick to tell his father the news.

Early next morning, at around two o’clock, Simon and a group of armed guards entered his bride’s apartments. A drunken Simon instructed the maids to undress Amelia for bed, and then withdraw. When he returned nothing had happened, so he ordered two clansmen to remove the serving women.

Amelia ‘cried out most piteously’ as two men lifted her to the bed, and struggled to prepare the lady for her wedding night. Bending over her, Simon held aquavitie
⁴
to her nose. One man fumbled at her shoes. A maid rushed to her lady and attempted to untie Amelia’s clothes. Lady Lovat kicked her away. Determined, Simon searched for a dirk to cut his wife’s stays, found none, and told one of his men to do it.

Impatient for this to end, they ‘put my Lady on her face and spread her arms’ and cut the laces of her corset, and finally left Amelia and Simon alone. Versions of what happened that night circulated almost immediately. In one account the piper played in an adjacent room to drown Amelia’s screams, and in the morning a servant found her speechless and out of her senses. Others denied it. By dawn, however, silence hung over the castle. Simon had put the bachelor state behind him.

The Murrays erupted in fury. The sister of Scotland’s most powerful man was the ‘most violented lady’ in the kingdom, they said. Amelia’s father, the Marquis of Atholl, commanded Lords James and Mungo to get her away. Atholl pressed Tullibardine to obtain an order for government troops to ‘catch that base creature, Simon Fraser, and his accomplices’. From Inverness to Edinburgh and London, gossip and letters argued the question: had he raped a Marquis’s daughter? If he
had
forced her, and was not mad or stupid, what had driven him to do it?

Major Fraser of Castleleathers recorded that very quickly Lady Amelia made up her own mind. ‘Whatever new light the lady had got,’ she desired her husband to ‘send for Mr William Fraser, minister of Kilmorack, to make a second marriage (not thinking the first valid)’. The hell of that night left her not knowing where she stood.

Simon said he hoped the marriage would allay ‘the Marquis of Atholl’s fury against him’, but the news that Atholl had acquired Simon Fraser as a son-in-law, unsurprisingly, sent the old man into a frenzy. There ‘was nothing in his mind but the business of the base Frasers’, wrote his wife. Old Atholl was adamant Tullibardine must make their quarrels a government concern at the highest levels. For the next two years, the records of the Privy Council chattered with Inverness and the Frasers.

The forced marriage and consummation were brutal errors of judgement that Simon would regret all his life. Again he had used a lamented but tolerated old tradition and pushed it to new levels in order to force a match with a Marquis’s daughter
against
her family’s will. The practice was normally used to make a girl fall in line
with
her family’s wishes, against her will.

Thomas Lovat wrote to the Earl of Argyll, explaining first that the Saltoun incident had been settled by the Sheriff, and second, that his son and Amelia were now legally married. It was better to let it all die down, he said. Besides, he observed cannily, the Murrays’ ‘design of appropriating the estate and following of Lovat to themselves, is made liable to more difficulties by that match’. Argyll agreed entirely. Tullibardine’s political enemies stood by Simon as a way to attack the High Commissioner and curtail his vast ambitions to rule all Scotland with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton.

In order to convince the legal establishment in Edinburgh to act against Simon, the Murrays required their star witness: the victim of the alleged crime, Lady Amelia Lovat. Rumours buzzed around Inverness that the dishonoured Lady was now dead. When Lords Mungo and James Murray rode to Castle Dounie they found it empty. Simon and Amelia had withdrawn, with a company of armed men, to the isolation of Eilean Aigas, a wooded rocky islet in the middle of the River Beauly. Simon hoped the black, fast-flowing tangle of currents surrounding the island would make their retreat impregnable.

They stayed here for several weeks. Simon wrote to a friend in Inverness explaining he was struggling to keep up his wife’s spirits. ‘I know not how to manage her,’ he wrote unhappily, ‘so I hope you will send me all the advice you can.’ He was not used to coping with a woman, a mother, who was just a few years older than him. For a lady of rank to live an itinerant life, adjunct to a fugitive and far from her children, was very hard. Simon soothed her as best he could.

Amelia Lovat’s position was a confused one. A ‘shamed’ lady, even the daughter of a Marquis, was a social outcast; she knew this. Besides, she had sworn a deposition that her marriage was genuine when the Reverend James had visited them at Dounie. When Amelia’s father found this out he was furious, shouting that the Fraser clerics were all ‘false prophets and wizards’. She yearned to see her brothers, perhaps to find out when she might come back, or to get some degree of acceptance from her family. Though Simon did not trust them, he allowed Amelia to travel down the glen to meet with her brothers. He would never see her again.

At Castle Dounie, James Murray greeted his sister tenderly, and asked if she was ‘lawfully married to Captain Fraser of Beaufort?’ She answered that she was. Lord James pulled away, raised his foot and ‘gave her along the belly’, yelling at her that she was a bitch. Lady Amelia doubled over. An Inverness laird, Fraser of Culduthel, rushed forward to aid her, but Murray men overpowered him. They pushed Amelia onto a horse and galloped off towards Inverness.

With Lady Amelia on her way to Blair Castle, Tullibardine persuaded the Privy Council and Court of Session to issue ‘Letters of Intercommuning’ forbidding anyone to ‘commune’ with the Frasers. In effect, ‘whatever slaughter, mutilation, bloodshed, fire-raising or other violence, shall happen to be acted’, by anyone who assisted the law in ‘seizing, reducing, and bringing them in dead or alive … the same shall be held as laudable good and warrantable service to his Majesty’, but even more to the Atholl Murrays.

Colonel Hill warned Tullibardine that local people on both sides ‘talk very slightingly of the matter and say now there is no need of sending forces’. The issue was settled; no one wanted to stir it up to a savage feud where the more powerfully ambitious side used the law to inflict crushing blows and the other eventually responded in kind, having nothing to lose. Tullibardine ignored him. A first wave of troops was sent in, commanded by Amelia’s brothers. The ordinary clansmen, weakened by the famines of King William’s ill years, found increased troop numbers quartered on them and could not cope. The people began to starve.

Over the next few weeks, the Murray ladies at Blair Castle pressured Lady Amelia to condemn Simon Fraser. ‘My Lord and I has told her … over and over,’ her sister wrote to Katherine Tullibardine, ‘that if she has any regard to her own honour and reputation, she will for once lay aside her reserved humour … and tell, to all she speaks with, the abhorrence she has of that base man.’ If Amelia maintained she was married to Simon, there was no case.

Her refusal to come to court and declare she had been raped drove her family mad with frustration, and her despair is clear from her letters. ‘I have the comfort in my extreme misery to be owned by such relations … which is God’s goodness to me … one so unworthy and so unfortunate.’ If she assented to her family’s description of her as ruined, what sort of future would she face? By condemning Simon, she condemned herself. Her shame would feed scandal sheets from Inverness to Paris. Her family pushed on oblivious. She was their political pawn. Lord James Murray believed that Tullibardine and his eldest brother were prepared ‘to ruin my sister’s and niece’s interest’ – the Lovat estates – to exact vengeance, kill Simon and regain control.

*    *    *

Simon escaped Eilean Aigas and haunted the hill country, moving and hiding from glen to glen. At the end of the year, Simon sent his father to safety from the Stratherrick estates, to Thomas’s brother-in-law, the MacLeod chief, at Dunvegan Castle on the west coast of the Isle of Skye. The Murrays now had about 600 soldiers – government and Murray men – in the Inverness area. Lord James Murray wrote to his father, Tullibardine: ‘Except to satisfy you, I confess I expect neither honour nor credit by turning a plunderer.’ Atholl and Tullibardine worried that Lord James did not have the stomach for the fight to waste Fraser country and reduce the clan to submission.

Tullibardine had failed to secure from the Privy Council a Commission of Fire and Sword, the licence he needed that allowed him to eliminate the Frasers. Some Councillors ‘were opposing the case’, Dollery informed his master, ‘as judging it not proper to give a direct commission to one clan over against another, and others said that it was not agreeable to law either’. The government read this principally as a clan feud. The central authorities manipulated feuds as a control valve to maintain a power balance in the region, but were wary of elevating one to a matter of national security. It might all backfire. They all lived with the national outrage after Glencoe.