The Last Highlander (12 page)

The pressure on Queensberry steamed to a head in the late summer of 1703. Debates in the Scottish Parliament about the succession drowned beneath shouts of ‘Liberty!’ ‘Honour!’ ‘Religion!’, and above them all ‘Trade!’ Even the Almighty appeared to take an interest in Parliament’s business. ‘While the rolls were calling upon this question, there fell the greatest rain that was ever seen come from the heavens, which made such a noise upon the roof of the Parliament house … that no voice could be heard, and the clerks were obliged to stop. “It was apparent that the heavens declared against their procedure,” one member said.’ God directed them to refuse Hanover and Union.

The MPs’ formal answer to Queensberry came in two bills ‘intended to secure their liberties and freedom from the oppression they sustained thro’ the influence of English ministers over Scots counsels and affairs’. The Scots debated an Act of Security, and an ‘Act
anent
[concerning] Peace and War’.

This second Act stated that no monarch of England and Scotland could declare war on behalf of the Scottish subjects without the specific consent of their Scottish Parliament, which, they said, ‘was absolutely necessary, considering how much the nation had lost by being brought into all England’s wars’. The two countries were approaching a peak of bitterness towards each other. The Scots deeply resented the way they had been hustled into the War of the Spanish Succession. It was partly a trade war. They accepted the English must fight to protect their trading empire; but why should Scotland have to pay and fight for it when, as the Darien Venture showed, they were to be excluded from this trade? Ordinary Scots would be paying for decades to get over that economic catastrophe.

The other Act, the Act of Security, legislated that the Scottish monarch was expressly
not
to be the person occupying the throne of England – unless England consented to conditions that would ‘secure the honour and sovereignty of this Crown and Kingdom, the freedom, frequency and power of parliaments, the religion, liberty and trade of the nation from English or any foreign influence’. Scottish grievances had piled up in the years following the Darien fiasco, economic ruin, famine, the harsh tax burden that the wars laid on Scots and English alike; and the late King’s insensitive response to this chain of social and economic depressions that strangled Scottish life in the last decade of the seventeenth century. The Scots were fed up with Whitehall mandarins and City traders.

By September, the Scottish Act of Security had been debated but not passed when Queensberry granted a first reading to an Act of Supply. The Supply was the Scots’ contribution to the maintenance of their Queen, her administration and her foreign policy. MPs packed the House for the reading. In the debate that followed, all sides raged at each other into the night. Candles were lit and for two hours nothing could be heard but a cacophony of contrasting voices with two phrases dominant: ‘Liberty!’ and ‘No Supply!’ Did Parliament meet ‘for nothing else than to drain the nation of money, to support those who were betraying and enslaving it’ someone yelled? Queensberry would not call the vote. He feared, rightly, he was losing control of the Scottish Parliament, and losing this vote would wound him fatally. The Earl of Roxburghe suggested to his fellow parliamentarians that if they could not obtain ‘so natural and undeniable a privilege as a vote’ by the normal way, ‘they would demand it with their swords in their hands’. Cheers greeted him.

Queensberry sent out an order to footguards to stand ready in the Netherbow Port, one of the gateways to the medieval city. A Lieutenant-General Ramsay sneered ‘in his cups that “ways would be found to make the Parliament calm enough”’. The Scots were stunned. Would Queensberry really use Scotland’s soldiers to take away Scotsmen’s control of their own legislature?

The English Parliament punished its riotous neighbour in Edinburgh. It invoked punitive ‘Navigation and Aliens’ Acts. The countrymen with whom the English wanted to share King and Country were now ‘aliens’ on English soil, and their meagre trading efforts were to be given no encouragement. Such measures further infuriated the Scots. The High Commissioner was at his wits’ end. Atholl, Cromartie and other important figures crossed the floor from the Court Party to the Cavaliers. Queensberry watched in anger and dismay, and did not forget it. His enemies accused him of ‘having undertaken and promoted every proposal and scheme for enslaving Scotland, and invading her honour, liberty, and trade, and rendering her obsequious to the measures and interest of England’.

Queensberry had to strengthen his hand. The Court Party was the largest single party, but when the Country and Cavalier parties united behind the big aristocratic leaders, the opposition groups dominated the House. Queensberry needed to form an alliance to get enough votes to carry his measures through. The other obvious political group was the Scottish Church, and its leader, the chief of Clan Campbell, Archibald, 1st Duke of Argyll – Lovat’s old patron. Queensberry formed the alliance with Argyll and his party. Despite this coalition, the opposition, allied under Hamilton, forced the Scottish Act of Succession through the house. Queen Anne refused to ratify it. The Scots refused to vote her any Supply. Anne wrote to Queensberry and advised he prorogue the Scottish Parliament for a year. This would prevent the working of government north of the border. The English wanted to punish the Scots. Years later, Queensberry recalled 1703 as the stormiest session of his parliamentary career.

At the height of the trouble, Queensberry’s new political ally, the Duke of Argyll, sent him a message. ‘There was a person come from France,’ he said, ‘who was willing to make great discoveries, providing that he got a pardon, and some establishment for a maintenance, and that his name should be kept secret till these were obtained’ – all fairly conventional in the churning waters of early-eighteenth-century politics. Argyll said the intelligence would give Queensberry evidence against their common enemies, Hamilton and Atholl.

On 11 August, Queensberry wrote to Queen Anne. The informant was a man of rank, who had personal dealings with the exiled royal family, and with Louis XIV. ‘If that person shall apply to me and be willing to own what he has said, how shall I use him?’ he asked her Majesty. He waited for a reply, and went to tackle the Scottish Parliament again.

TEN

The ‘political sensation’, autumn 1703

‘O, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive’

– SHAKESPEARE

The ‘man from France’ was Lovat, of course, as Queensberry must have been aware from the very first rendezvous. He had met Lovat before, and not many others fitted his Lordship’s notorious profile. Queensberry probably concealed it from Anne in the likely event of his correspondence being opened by one of his enemies’ spies, forcing his informer to flee.

After making initial contact in August, Lovat and Queensberry arranged to meet the following month. Lovat did not sit twiddling his thumbs. He rode west and sneaked into Argyll, where he met Rob Roy MacGregor, the Stewarts of Appin, and other Jacobites. He despatched a rider to invite his brother John and the leading Frasers to come and meet with them. Their chief was on his way home and wanted to see them.

Lovat assured the chiefs and nobles he met that Louis XIV would send them ‘every kind of succour’ if they rose in arms. ‘They were perfectly ravished’ by this news, he said, and clamoured to make ‘a thousand protestations of fidelity’ to James. The air resounded with their ‘resolution to hazard their lives in the cause’, but they would not commit themselves to it on paper. The big chiefs did not even appear, but sent proxies. Meeting up with his brother John, Lovat learned of the harassment of those Fraser clansmen who had rebelled, but also of the clan’s growing acceptance of Mackenzie rule. It was even rumoured that Sir Roderick’s son would resume his own family name. Lovat was aghast and asked himself hard questions as he rode through Scotland, about whether the path of invasion and restoration would lead him back to Castle Dounie. Queen Anne had issued an indemnity to her Jacobite subjects in exile. The penitent and the two-faced conspirator mingled together. Could Lovat benefit?

On 21 September, Anne assented to her High Commissioner meeting the anonymous informer from France. Argyll summoned Lovat to his house outside Newcastle, and gave him Queensberry’s pass to cross the border into Scotland. The old Duke did not live to enjoy his errant protégé’s turn as a thorn in the side of the establishment. On 25 September, after being pleasured in his private brothel at Chirton, near Whitley Bay, Argyll got into a scuffle. Reeling between fornicating and a fight, the old man died of his injuries. Lovat described being ‘touched to the bottom of his soul’ by the death of his old patron.

Under cover of darkness, Lovat slipped up the stairs to the Commissioner’s apartments in the Palace of Holyrood. Insisting on concealing his face in the shadows, Lovat talked. His information confirmed everything Queensberry feared and hoped. The ‘stranger’ spoke about Louis XIV. France was planning an invasion. (As the architect of it, Lovat could provide details.) It would not happen until the French navy was repaired and mastered the sea. Queensberry could tell the English ministry to relax their vigilance.

The informer said he knew that Hamilton was corresponding with the French Court. Lovat and James Murray had travelled with letters. He said James Murray’s correspondence to the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Gordon had been already delivered. Hamilton would draw on his influence in the Scottish Parliament and the almost universal discontent in Scotland with the English and their attitude to them, to make them vote James Stuart onto the throne of Scotland, easing his path to England on Anne’s death.

Queensberry hung on every word. The Jacobite ruling council had boundless faith in Hamilton and pushed the Scottish Jacobites to ‘enter into a league with France’.

The third letter he still had. He produced it. It was, he claimed, from Mary of Modena to the Duke of Atholl. Queensberry checked the signature. The ‘M’ was Mary’s. Yet the letter was not addressed to anyone by name. This was natural, they both agreed, to protect the receiver in case it was seized. Lovat drew Queensberry’s attention to the front of the paper. It said ‘To L. J. M’. The Duke of Atholl was known at St Germains as Lord John Murray. One thing niggled though. The cover was written in a different hand to the letter inside. Queensberry was so thrilled to be offered proof of Atholl’s treason, he did not query further.

The British Ambassador in The Hague had reported to London gossip about large sums, in gold, forwarded to men in Scotland via a Dutch commercial house. Queensberry asked where all the cash that Hamilton controlled originated? In Rome, explained Lovat, from the Papacy itself. The money then moved through France to Rotterdam and then across the sea into the hands of opposition magnates in the Scottish Parliament. Lovat had Queensberry’s full attention. The involvement of the Church of Rome in Scottish affairs would repel the Country Party – full of Protestant clergy and Whigs – and of course the Church Party, and split the Cavalier–Country coalition.

Lovat could confirm ‘by ocular demonstration’, he declared, that Hamilton had accepted a general’s commission from ‘James III’. Queensberry asked what else the two men had corresponded about. Lovat replied he had seen a letter from the Earl of Cromartie to Middleton. It prophesied the downfall of Queensberry and the passing of his seals of office into Cromartie’s hands. Queensberry felt a wave of relief at the informer’s intelligence. He knew he was right when he smelled conspiracies and Jacobite plots around these magnates, the heart of the resistance to him. Lovat observed Queensberry, and how ‘the duke … breathed the most inveterate hatred’ against Lovat’s enemies.

All Queensberry needed was hard evidence of bribery and corruption, especially concerning Hamilton and Atholl. As they fell, the tall trees would crush the smaller ones growing around them. The informer agreed to spy; his price was to be given back the territories taken by the men who, he could prove, were traitors to Queen Anne and the Revolution settlement. He said he would need a pension for life also. Queensberry replied that some reward would come.

The two men parted. Despite Queensberry’s excitement, something made him hesitant. He reported to Queen Anne. ‘I confess it hard to know how one should know or be ready to reveal so much. Yet the delivering of that principal letter’ to Atholl, or ‘L. J. M.’, ‘and the showing his own commission under the hand and seal of the Prince of Wales as King James III and VIII, these do give credit to what else could not have been so well trusted’. Queensberry wanted so much for it all to be true. He wanted to see replies in their handwriting. Lovat had nothing like this and said he would return to London and France to spy for him and obtain the incriminating material.

By 25 September, Queensberry had ordered the prorogation of the Scottish Parliament. It had refused to vote the Queen her Supply, or agree to settle the inheritance issue in accordance with England’s wishes. The MPs had merely re-presented the cursed Act of Security for royal assent. On a more positive note, Queensberry told the Queen he had found the key to breaking the deadlock with her Scottish Parliament – the anonymous double agent. Queensberry asked for her Majesty’s permission to reward the man and let him go back to France to get the proofs of treason.

Lovat now turned his attentions to the commission from Mary and Middleton. He was playing a very complicated hand. Queensberry assumed he sat and waited for his pass to go to England and France. In fact, Lovat crossed the Firth of Forth and rode thirty miles north to Perth, to Drummond Castle, home of Lord Drummond, the Duke of Perth’s son. Summoning the leading Jacobites, Lovat talked of rising in rebellion. If they concerted their rising, ‘in a little time they would make an army that would master the kingdom; and that then he was sure the King of France would send home the King, and all the necessaries that were requisite to put him on the throne’. Lovat listened to their answers, and took in the sight of empty seats and gloomy faces on the few who had come. No one wanted the leadership because they did not want to rise. No one wanted anyone else to have it for the same reason. They did not even want to be asked to make a decision. Lovat plugged away at their recalcitrance for three days. Half of them had come only to ask him to leave.

One notable absentee, whose presence would have given a significantly different feel to the gathering, was the seventy-year-old Earl of Breadalbane. Lovat sent a co-conspirator, a man he was quickly calling the dearest of all his cousins, Colin Campbell of Glendaruel, with a letter to ask him to come. Breadalbane turned his kinsman away testily. Chief of a branch of the mighty Clan Campbell, Lovat had described him to Louis XIV as ‘
un homme solide et trés sage
’. Such qualities led Breadalbane to reject these emissaries from France. An English spy described the old man as ‘cunning as a fox, wise as a serpent, and slippery as an eel’. Breadalbane sent a message to tell Lovat he ‘was too old to turn papist’. Besides, ‘no man who was a real Protestant, could meddle with a popish interest and be secure of either his Life, Liberty, or Estate’. Breadalbane intended to stay securely in possession of all three things, even at the cost of his Jacobite principles.

Privately, Lovat was beginning to agree with Breadalbane. He rode back to Edinburgh thinking over what he had heard. Maybe St Germains and the Stuarts could not deliver either his titles and estates, or even his rightful King. Johnny Murray reported from his mission that ‘none of the Low Country would stir without commissions’.

With a mixture of relief and weariness, Queensberry returned to Whitehall, and arranged to meet Lovat in the south. A few weeks later, in the October half-light, Lovat and his co-conspirators clopped through the mire of a city steaming in the early winter sun. The gleaming dome of the new and almost-finished St Paul’s Cathedral drew them. Lovat sought the house of a Jacobite apothecary called Thomas Clarke, who kept a shop in Watling Street in the shadow of St Paul’s. The party split up to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, but met or corresponded every day. Lovat’s intimate was the fellow Jacobite, Colin Campbell of Glendaruel. In letters, several each day at times, Lovat unguardedly expressed his dreams. He conjured Glendaruel to aim for greatness. ‘Let you and me take example, and let us do brave, gallant things while we live … Adieu. My dearest of all the world. Farewell.’ Clarke the apothecary was impressed by Lovat, whom he described as a ‘tall, pretty Gentleman’ with a ‘sanguine Complexion, fair Hair or a Periwig’.

Lovat’s brother John arrived in London to inform him that Sir Roderick Mackenzie’s latest move had been to secure Amelia Mackenzie of Fraserdale, nee Fraser, the legal right to use the title Lady Lovat. Argyll’s death had removed his most powerful patron. Lovat had no money, as usual, and even fewer options. He told John to disrupt the Mackenzies’ management of the Lovat estates as best he could. But the continual progress of Sir Roderick showed Lovat he could ill afford these long drawn-out exchanges of intelligence that might lead to something, or nothing. Unease of the mind emerged in aches and pains. Lovat begged physic from Thomas Clarke to ease his physical discomfort.

To add to his burdens, rumours of Lovat’s double-agenting began to circulate. They reached Clarke the apothecary’s ears, though he refused to believe them. ‘If Fraser were not true to the King’s interest’ (meaning ‘James III’s’) then Clarke ‘would never trust any man’, he said. Dismiss it as he did, the gossip endangered Lovat. It was recalled that before he came to St Germains he had been an officer in William III’s army. Lovat hoped he had not backed himself into a corner.

In talks with fellow conspirators, Lovat was quite open about his meetings with Queensberry. He explained that he met the High Commissioner to allay Queensberry’s fears of invasion and make the English less vigilant. Lovat challenged his critics, ‘had he not the heads of all … [King James’s] friends in his pocket?’ If he had been out to betray the Jacobites, he could have brought some mighty oaks crashing to the ground. Yes, he told the Commissioner of a plan to invade – but Louis continually considered an invasion that never happened. The English knew it. He had revealed certain Scottish magnates had Jacobites sympathies. Again, it was nothing Queen Anne’s administration did not know. All he did really was repeat Queensberry’s suspicions back to him.

What Lovat could not explain was his motivation, that is, his odyssey back to Fraser country. Without adding that piece of the puzzle, his dealings with the High Commissioner looked very odd, to say the least.

Lovat met in secret with Queensberry again, to request passports to travel to France and obtain intelligence. It was now imperative to get out of England. Queensberry agreed the passports must be made out ‘in an unknown name’, since Lovat ‘was declared a rebel’, and his identity must be protected if he were to continue spying. Secretary of State Nottingham issued them in false names and sent them to Glendaruel to deliver.