The Last Highlander (8 page)

In Inverness, even the weather conspired to conceal Simon. ‘Severe frost and snow’ filled paths and tracks. The Murray soldiers shirked from going out on forays. No matter how much the Marquis of Atholl offered in lures and bribes, officers could obtain no reliable intelligence from turncoats. All his army could do was destroy the clan’s property, which, given ‘the most tempestuous weather of snow and great frosts’, brought more starvation to ordinary Frasers. Unless the country people, the poor, ‘be made to suffer for his being among them’, wrote one of Tullibardine’s officers, and those among the professional and landowning classes ‘that go along with him [be] punished in their goods’, they were sure it would be impossible to get hold of Simon Fraser. Tullibardine ordered the devastation to continue. It was futile. One officer spelled out the situation – ‘the whole country are entirely addicted to him’ and they should call a halt.

Atholl and Tullibardine would not relent. As the winter of 1697/98 ground on, it proved impossible ‘to march against them from a town that favours them … through a country that is friendly to them, and intangled with them, without being discovered’. The Murray spy network was proving a disaster. Simon’s functioned beautifully.

The Murrays subpoenaed scores of Frasers from all ranks to go south and testify against their chief. The road south led them by Blair Castle, thirty miles north of Perth. The old Marquis forced the military escorts to bring the witnesses to him and put them in his dungeons. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Annandale, sent tetchy letters requesting the forwarding of his witnesses. The Marquis of Atholl let the witnesses go, while he whinged that the court in Inverness, run by Brigadier Grant, was biased ‘to the prejudice of our family … It is all our enemies that has it in their hands’ – a breathtaking complaint from a man who intimidated witnesses daily and whose son manipulated the Edinburgh judiciary. Atholl asked Tullibardine to make sure the Frasers were sent back to him on their road home, ‘so that I may make them perfect what they have begun’. They know, the Marquis said, ‘they would be ruined if they did not’ appear for the Murrays, ‘which is the best argument to Highlanders’. If they ‘should fail’, he added chillingly, ‘they will still be in my power to take amends … All this has been my business night and day.’

Revenge consumed the old man. ‘I hope I have got the chief [men] of the name of Fraser who live in Stratherrick broke and divided,’ he told Tullibardine. He was determined to break Simon’s core support. Yet the Murray chief was no longer young. He carried stress in his belly, making him prone to belching and ‘gout in the stomach’. He put himself under terrible pressure to settle Simon on a gallows, before allowing himself to die a happy man.

By the spring of 1698, Atholl declared with satisfaction that ‘the estate of Lovat is altogether ruined’. Although the outlaws remained at large, the Murrays had amassed enough evidence to start their trial. Simon was cited to answer two charges: first, forced marriage and rape. Second, raising men in arms and resisting the King’s forces.

The court ‘compered’ Thomas and Simon and their followers to appear three times over the summer, with increasingly dire threats every time they declined. On 6 September 1698, the court found them guilty of the capital crime of rebellion, and they were declared forfeit in King William’s name. Tullibardine got his Commission of Fire and Sword. (The Crown prosecution refused to have anything to do with the private charge of possible marital rape.) Simon, his father and their main adherents were now ‘outlawes and fugitives frae the lawes’. They were to be ‘executed to the death … Their name, fame, memory and honours to be extinct and their armes to be riven furth and delate out of the bookes of armes.’ For the rest of time, none of their heirs could enjoy titles, positions and dignities. In effect, anything that anyone did to the Lovats and their men, since they were outside the law, would be ignored by anyone within the law. The Murrays had free rein to pursue Simon any way they chose. His family were to be wiped from the pages of history. The Lovat estates lay tantalisingly within the Murrays’ grasp.

Simon wrote to Argyll, asking that he secure a pardon from King William to let the Lovats live at peace, enjoy their estates and serve his Majesty. Someone had to control the Murrays. Argyll went to the King.

While at his brother-in-law’s castle on Skye, Simon received news that his father, Thomas, Lord Lovat, had died and been buried in the graveyard of his wife’s family. Simon could not risk bringing the body of the Fraser chief home, or honour him with the traditional huge Highland funeral and burial at Wardlaw. In hiding, Simon had no time to grieve. He believed the Atholls had hounded the old man to death. Simon now assumed the titles of MacShimidh Mor, the 11th Lord Lovat, chief of Clan Fraser – though these were worthless to a young man who was now an outlaw.

Armed with a death warrant, the Murray hunt heated up. At the head of hundreds of Athollmen and Lowland soldiers, Lord James Murray, accompanied by his brother Mungo, planned a night attack into Stratherrick where they believed Simon was hiding. ‘Having the authors of his father’s death, and of all his personal misfortunes before his eyes, he would now revenge himself in their blood, or perish in the attempt,’ Simon swore. He galloped to Stratherrick to stop more ill-treatment of his people. The hunters would become the hunted.

The Murrays struck camp for the night against a rocky crag. When they mustered the next morning, Simon calculated he had something under 300 men to their 600. Given the numerical disadvantage, a full-frontal attack would fail. Simon ordered one of his men, Alexander MacDonald, to take sixty Frasers and string them out in a thin line in front of the enemy, so they would believe his whole force faced them. Meanwhile, Simon led the rest around to their flank.

Realising late they were to be ambushed, Lord James ordered his troops to fall back towards a ‘terrible defile’, six miles in the direction of Inverness, called
Allt nan Gobhar
– the Blacksmith’s Burn. Alexander MacDonald guessed their goal and raced ahead of them to block the way through. The fighting men under Simon broke rank in pursuit.

Simon Fraser fought as MacShimidh, a Highland chief; not as the bewigged and breeches-clad British peer petitioning in the law courts of Edinburgh, but wrapped and belted in a plaid over the top of his linen shirt, like his ordinary kinsmen. He put a bonnet on his head, and stuck the Fraser emblem, a sprig of yew, in it. With the battle cry
A’Chaisteal Dhunaidh
– ‘for Castle Dounie’, and the scream of the pipes, they charged to battle. ‘Lord Lovat ran for three miles alongside them, on foot, and almost naked.’ The howling chief of Clan Fraser stampeded the government troops towards the men hidden in Blacksmith’s Burn. Drawing close, the Murrays saw what awaited them and suddenly ‘impressed with the most lively apprehensions’ of impending slaughter, most Murray men tried to surrender. Simon observed Lord James yelling at them to engage but they ‘laid down their arms and covering their heads with their plaids, cried out for quarter’. A Murray fighter came running towards them, ‘with a white handkerchief … neckcloth tied to a bludgeon, crying out for mercy’.

‘Lord James,’ Simon wrote with grim pleasure, ‘was beside himself at this declaration.’ Simon’s first response was not to take the surrender. He surveyed the noisy, trembling and quarrelling bunch of regular and irregular forces whose commanding officers had ‘deprived him of lands and title by violence, injustice, and fraud … [He was] outlawed and condemned to death, hunted on the mountains,’ he reflected. The last couple of years had not encouraged the philosophical, university-trained side of his character. They drove him in on most animal resources, to survive and fight, protect his territory. His father had died without elegy and obsequy; without his life being properly honoured. He would ‘avenge the death of his father, and the tyranny of Lord Athol and all his family’. Since birth, these men had tried to manipulate his destiny. Now Simon was clan chief.

Though his first instinct had been to massacre the lot of them, older heads among his advisers made him understand that if he did, ‘not a man in the Kingdom would either assist or pity’ the Frasers’ cause, so he contented himself with humiliation. He lifted his sword tip and made James and Mungo kiss it and swear upon it that ‘they renounced their claims in Jesus Christ, and their hopes of heaven, and devoted themselves to the torments of hell, if they ever returned’ or occasioned ‘Lord Lovat the smallest mischief’. He then lined up his men in two files and made the enemy troop run the gauntlet jostled like criminals, and sent them out of his country.

At bottom, Simon was in desperate need of a pardon to end this feud before his whole inheritance was torched beyond resurrection and his people all starved to death. More in hope than expectation, Simon Fraser thereafter took as his motto
Sin Sanguine Victor
, ‘Victor without Blood’.

SIX

Victory and loss, 1699–1702

‘I despair of saving myself or my Kindred’

– LOVAT TO THE EARL OF ARGYLL

The Reverend James had educated Simon in his responsibilities to his clan, always to keep going, and to determine his own fate. He conjured,

In spite of malice you will still be great,

And raise your name above the power of fate.

Our sinking house which now stoops low with age,

You show with newborn lustre on the stage.

Typical of Celtic eulogies, the hero is praised and cajoled to ever-greater sacrifices. Other chiefs had passed by this destiny. But it inspired Simon and, as the century drew to a close, left him facing a death sentence. He believed passionately that fate or God had laid on him as a sacred duty the salvation of Clan Fraser. It was, he always said, inseparable from ‘his Nature’. Primogeniture and his personal qualities confirmed fate’s decree. Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat and then Tullibardine had tried to break and remake Clan Fraser in their own image, using all the skills and resources they could muster. Now Simon sought to restore the clan using his gifts and training.

Without heavyweight political backing, Simon could not win. He faced a long guerrilla action, a ruinous feud, fought on and over his country. While Tullibardine influenced the Edinburgh judiciary, the courts offered no path back inside lawful society. For eight long months the Atholl Murrays had harried and hunted the Frasers, trying to capture or crush their leader, but without success. In a desperate attempt to flush out the Fraser chief, Lord James, smarting from his defeat at Lovat’s hands, had his men drive off stock, smash boats, nets and fishing gear, spinning wheels and looms, and fell trees – anything that might allow the Frasers to live or do a little business. But Simon was still at large, and his messages were getting through to the south. His successes and the substantial levels of support he clearly enjoyed impressed many who sought to bring down Tullibardine and stop him (in the Highlands) and his brother-in-law Hamilton (in the Lowlands) exercising almost unassailable power in Scotland. The Duke of Argyll advised Simon to ‘lay down his arms and come privately to London’ to seek a pardon, informing William III that Tullibardine created chaos and hostility to the King in Scotland in the service of his greed. Lovat and the trouble in Fraser country were Argyll’s proof.

Late in 1699, two weeks after setting out, Simon Fraser entered London for the second time in his life. It proved a wasted trip. The King had left the country and was at Loos in Flanders. By the turn of the century, William was in a stronger position in Europe. In 1697, Louis XIV of France had abandoned his previous war aims and sued for peace. As part of this he now acknowledged the Prince of Orange as William III, King of England and Scotland, thereby denying the claim of James II. Even the Pope proclaimed William III ‘the master; he’s arbiter of all Europe’.

King William was now in Flanders taking part in another struggle provoked by Louis XIV’s ambition. The future of the thrones of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire was at stake. At present the ailing King of Spain, Carlos II, sat on both thrones. The rest of Europe was divided between whether to keep the thrones united, or split them up when Carlos died, and on who would sit on either or both thrones. Competing European interests battled over a settlement, until Louis XIV insisted on having both titles for his second grandson, the Duke of Anjou. Relations between William III and Louis XIV, only recently nosing above freezing point after three years of peace, plunged to a glacial impasse and stayed that way while Carlos II lived.

William needed a relatively peaceful and united Britain to be able to concentrate on defeating Louis. And while no government needed the entirety of its peoples on its side, it did need enough capable supporters to maintain law and order locally, raise taxes and supply soldiers for these international affairs. To be one of the regional managers, Lovat explained, he needed to live as a magnate, not an outlaw. He and his people could then ‘serve your Majesty as they are full ready to do’, as he outlined to King William in a letter Carstares read aloud to his monarch.

Argyll supported Simon by adding his voice. ‘The persecution [Tullibardine] exercised against Lord Lovat and the clan of the Frasers, is capable of exciting all the clans, and even the whole nation, to revolt against the government,’ Argyll asserted. ‘The King cannot do a more acceptable thing for the generality than send [Lovat] his pardon for the convocation of men in arms.’ More people only hesitated to speak out against Atholl and Tullibardine because ‘they threaten so hard and bite so sore’, finished Argyll.

The Murrays vehemently opposed this. ‘It will be a great reflection on the government if there be not a speedy course taken to apprehend’ Simon Fraser, Tullibardine lectured his King, justifying the turbulence and suffering he brought about in Fraser country. Other Scottish politicians petitioned Carstares, emphasising the wider British political element in Lovat’s case. ‘Although I cannot justify Captain Fraser in his proceedings, but yet, the rendering of so many men desperate is not at all to the government’s interest,’ wrote Sir James Stewart, the Lord Advocate.

Simon reiterated that the Frasers wanted peace, ‘to live the more comfortable under the rays of your Majesty’s protection, and thereby be more encouraged to serve your Majesty’s interest’. William listened to the increasing volume of this sort of talk, of Tullibardine’s abuse of his position for private gain. Tullibardine had maintained his following with the promise of positions and pensions to clever, ambitious men. The King decided to stop promoting men put forward by Tullibardine to fill posts in the Scottish executive. Tullibardine reacted by resigning from the government in a fit of humiliated fury. Having the deepest confidence in the counsel of Carstares and Argyll, the King agreed to pardon Simon for his crimes against the Crown and accepted the Fraser chief’s offer of devoted service. However, William refused to enter into the murky business of the forced marriage. The Crown had never charged him with it and logically William could not pardon him for it. He was happy to curb Murray ambitions, but he told Argyll he did not want to ‘disgust’ them too much.

It had taken nearly two years, from Argyll’s first letter to his last, for the Earl to be able to write excitedly to Simon Fraser’s friends that he was brandishing ‘Beaufort’s (now I may say Lord Lovat’s) pardon’ in his hands. Simon was free, and now officially the 11th Lord Lovat. As the chief, MacShimidh Mor, Lovat could return home and relieve his people’s sufferings.

In Europe, three deaths threatened further political instability and affected Lovat’s plans. First, the British Protestant succession failed again when, in July 1700, the surviving Protestant Stuart child of Princess Anne and the Prince of Denmark, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, died.

The ramifications of Gloucester’s death spread north to Scotland, and far south to the Courts of Versailles and St Germains when, the following summer, Mary and Anne Stuart’s father, James II, died in exile. With his eye on Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, Louis XIV no longer had reason to appease William. Happy to aggravate political tensions within Britain, he proclaimed that James II’s son would be ‘King James III of England and VIII of Scotland’ on the death of Princess Anne. Anne had not even succeeded yet. The third death was the passing of Carlos II, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.

Meanwhile, King William’s grasp on Scotland was slipping. The whole country was breaking down after five years of failing harvests and a famine that had killed up to fifteen per cent of the Scottish population. Politicians racked their brains for schemes to stimulate life in the economic mud in which Scotland drowned. Their suffering was proof of God’s displeasure at the overturning of the natural order and at the anointed Stuart ruler having been driven away. The massacre at Glencoe, the quartering of government troops on starving people, and a series of economic disasters all blighted his rule.

The most recent crisis went back to 1696, when William Paterson, Scotsman and founder of the Bank of England, had suggested to his fellow Scots merchants and landowners that they should start a foreign trading company to stimulate their weak economy. Scottish businessmen set up ‘The Company of Scotland’ to trade with Africa and the Indies. Scots flocked to invest and sank a quarter of the nation’s tiny liquid capital into the venture. Inverness merchants contributed £3,000. They almost beggared the town on the gamble of massive returns. When the profits rolled in, it was said, investors’ wives and children would rush to demand luxuries from local merchants. The economy would boom. This was Paterson’s vision for Scotland.

The Scots plumped on Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama, as the cradle of their hopes, christening it ‘New Caledonia’. The Spanish complained angrily and claimed the territory – close to Spain’s silver mines – for themselves. William III agreed to withdraw English support for New Caledonia on one condition: that Spain refuse Louis XIV’s demand to make his grandson King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.

Spain agreed. The English Parliament pressured English merchants to withdraw all their capital from the Darien Venture. The English Navy, rather than protecting its sister nation’s merchant shipping, harried and captured it. To the Scots, William was putting his English subjects’ interests over those of Scotland. The collapse of the Darien Venture induced national economic breakdown. The Scots went into shock.

The whole nation seized on Darien and the colony at New Caledonia as the image of Scotland’s impoverished world standing. The Lord Advocate – the most senior lawyer in Scotland – Sir James Stewart, tried to impress on Carstares the level of grief and despair felt in the kingdom William had never once bothered to visit. ‘Disasters increase, and the weakness of the government is more and more discovered … Was ever a people more unhappy?’ The Scots asked themselves what they gained from the Union of Crowns. Independence looked like a solution to the succession and economic crises.

Sir James Stewart identified three groups fighting to dominate the Scottish Parliament: the Jacobites, the ‘Malcontents’, and the ‘Williamites’. The Jacobites wanted to ‘break the army … [so] that, when the King dies, and neither the Princess Anne nor he having any children, they may the easier embroil the nation, and do their own business’. That is, to restore the Stuarts from France. ‘The Malcontents that are not Jacobites,’ he explained, were aggressive place-seekers. They just wanted to disrupt proceedings in Parliament and disrupt government in Scotland, to force the King to promote them to power. However, ‘the Williamites … I think, must be more numerous than the other two. Their aim solely is the peace and security of the government and the good of the country, by an industrious pursuit of honourable and profitable trade …’ This last comment was wishful nonsense to make the King feel better. William’s credibility in North Britain was disintegrating.

Simon, Lord Lovat, moved into Castle Dounie and began collecting such rents as he decently could from starving clansmen and semi-bankrupt lairds. He took debts on himself and let the ordinary tenantry off their rents for that year where he saw they had nothing.

He was not left for long to try and sort out his estates. Goaded by Lovat’s reappearance, the Murrays hurtled back to the law courts. This time they forced ‘Sister Lovat’ there with them. They petitioned the Court of Session to summon ‘Captain Fraser’ (they would not call him Lord Lovat) – to answer the private charge of ‘
rapt
and
hamesucken
’. Relative to rape,
rapt
was a watered-down assault. Lovat explained it to one of the King’s advisers. ‘They do not [charge] me for ravishment, but for carrying her by violence from place to place.’ They hound me ‘as if I had murdered the King!’ Lovat complained.
Hamesucken
, loosely speaking, was socking (
sucken
) it to someone in their own home (
hame
). A crime against property rights, it was a capital crime, unlike
rapt
.
Hamesucken
also covered ‘the ravishing of persons of rank in houses of consequence’. They had to charge Lovat with both to get a death penalty.

Argyll told the King that the court summoning Lovat was ‘not composed as it ought to be’. While the Lord Advocate warned Argyll if Lovat ‘is found tomorrow in Edinburgh, I would not give a sixpence for his head’. Years of Tullibardine infiltration of the law courts favoured the Murrays securing the clan chief’s conviction. There were ‘such wicked and abandoned judges’, Lovat wrote, ‘the innocence of an angel of light would be to no avail!’ And Lovat was no angel. Lovat did not appear and on 17 February 1701 was found guilty
in absentia
. He was outlawed yet again.