The Last Highlander (16 page)

FOURTEEN

A necessary change, 1714–15

‘Grant me your protection and friendship’

– LOVAT TO THE EARL OF SUTHERLAND

After reaching London along the Thames, Lovat’s party hid out in a Jacobite haberdashers in the City. Next morning, Lovat sent Castleleathers to the Earl of Ilay to ask what encouragement he might expect from him and his brother, Argyll, the two sons of his old patron. But Ilay would talk to Castleleathers of nothing but ‘the Young Pretender’. Britain remained unsettled. Ilay quizzed the Major on what he had made of James. Having gone round and round in circles hundreds of miles wide in France to free Lovat, now the Major went round and round in slightly smaller circles to try to make progress from London.

On 19 November, Lovat wrote to Brigadier Grant from his hideout in the haberdashers: ‘I must own I am the most unhappy of mankind, to have been barbarously treated as a Hanoverian by the Court of St Germains this twelve years by past without intermission.’ Now the Argyll Campbells held back because they thought he was a Jacobite. ‘They tell me … my life is not safe!’ he cried, and ‘that they know not what to say to procure my remission’. They could not see how he could be pardoned for his crimes. ‘It’s a very desperate case; but there is nothing but a stout heart to stay brave. I did foresee all the scaffolds that could be before me.’ The fear haunted him and left him constantly under stress.

Brigadier Grant, Sheriff of Inverness-shire, chief of the Frasers’ neighbours and an old friend from his youth, came to wait on Lovat. Ilay had confessed to Grant he hardly knew what to make of Lovat’s reappearance. With the country so turbulent, the arrival of a notorious spy and intriguer like Lovat to offer intelligence and service tantalised the Campbell brothers. Lovat pressed Grant to ‘convince the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Ilay, that the Rosses, Roses, Monros, and all the Moray lairds’, who supported the new King, would address George I, and say they would ‘be overjoyed to have me join them when the Pretender comes to that country, which they may depend upon, in spite of their security and precautions’. What the Highland chiefs should do, said Lovat, was ask the King for a ‘remission’ of the sentence against him. Then he could at least travel without fear of a knife being plunged into his neck. Without a pardon, he could not relax his guard. Atholl, whose spies had already alerted their master to his enemy’s presence, wanted another chance to arrest Lovat and execute the old death sentence: it seemed Atholl always underestimated Beaufort’s tenacity. No matter how they stamped on him, he sprang up again.

When Mackenzie of Fraserdale heard the news of Lovat’s return and that he was petitioning for a pardon, he sped to Edinburgh to see the Justice Clerk and obtain a copy of the ‘Extract of the Process and Sentence against’ Simon Fraser. The second most senior civil judge in Scotland, the Justice Clerk Adam Cockburn had been a close friend of Fraserdale’s father, Sir Roderick Mackenzie, and he was still on good terms with Amelia Lovat’s uncle, the Duke of Atholl.

Atholl paid informers to scour London for Beaufort. A Tory ‘tainted with Jacobitism’, Atholl was falling from favour with the government and the Court, but he could still bring down Simon Fraser as he fell. Lovat had been spotted ‘in a remote coffee house at the far end of the City’, Fraserdale told Atholl. ‘I am informed there are several of our Scots Commoners at a great deal of pains to procure a remission for these two brethren [Lovat and his brother John].’

The ‘Scots Commoners’ were the MPs Grant and John Forbes of Culloden. ‘I must beg your Grace will once more write to your friends in London in this matter, and I am satisfied if they are unsuccessful this time,’ getting his pardon, then ‘we shall be free of any further trouble this way’. He signed his letters, Alexander Mackenzie now, without a hint of the lumbering designation ‘Fraserdale’.

Ilay and Argyll were not indifferent to Lovat. They were well aware that support for the Stuarts was most passionate in the north, strengthened by anti-Union sentiment. Much better let the natives control their own region than import foreigners from the south. There was no successful tradition of government-appointed outsiders to manage the Highlands, and the Frasers and Campbells were traditionally allied. Now, when Brigadier Grant called on Ilay again, the Earl told him he had spoken to the King about Lovat. The King’s ministers required an address to King George I, signed by the friends of whom Lovat boasted in Scotland, as security for the Fraser chief’s good behaviour and loyalty.

Lovat got to work, writing to Duncan Forbes and his brother John in Inverness. Duncan was a rising lawyer in Edinburgh, and John was laird of Culloden. The Forbeses had known the Lovats for generations; they used to serve the Lovat chiefs. Bit by bit they rose to be landowners in the Inverness area and numbered themselves among the strengthening Argyll interest in Scottish politics. They were just the sort of men who might help Lovat.

Astutely, Ilay ordered Castleleathers into Scotland when Lovat’s address to the King was ready, so he could collect the signatures from Highland chiefs. Castleleathers and his brother-in-law, Fraser of Phopachy, trudged through the five counties of the Northern Highlands – Caithness, Sutherland, Ross-shire, Cromartie and Inverness-shire – ‘in the winter storm, and got the subscriptions of every leading man’ in a land divided into Whig and Tory clans. Both sides signed. ‘When they met with the Jacobites they made them believe that this address was from the Pretender. To King George’s friends [they] unravelled the story,’ the Major reported, and wound it round the other way, ‘telling them the whole plot, and that the paper was drawn up by my Lord Ilay to work out Lord Lovat’s remission with King George.’

While Castleleathers and Phopachy travelled through the Highlands in January 1715, George I dissolved Parliament and called a general election. Since his accession the previous autumn, the King had been settling scores, rigorously dismissing Tories and reappointing Whig supporters of his foreign policies. The Argyll Campbells rose. George believed all Tories were covert Jacobites. Whigs like the Argyll group colluded in this prejudice. The Forbes brothers, ambitious to exercise political domination of the Highlands, realised that an enfranchised Whiggish Lord Lovat might serve their ends very well in a constituency teeming with Jacobites. Culloden (John Forbes) was seeking to hold on to the Inverness-shire seat at Westminster. ‘I cannot well be returned,’ he calculated, ‘unless Lovat has his remission and is in this Country at the time of the Elections.’ He calculated that a restored and grateful Lovat would bring in all the votes the Fraser chief controlled, and hand them to the Forbeses.

Despite the widespread dislike of George I, the election on 24 February 1715 was a landslide for the Whigs and swept the Tories from power. In Inverness, Fraserdale ‘makes a great bustle here against his clan’, Culloden told his brother Duncan, ‘because they disown him for their chief’. Rumours of the return of their real chief buzzed in everyone’s ears. No one knew when he was coming, but they knew his wishes and most voted for Culloden. John Forbes held his seat, but the Jacobites retained their domination of Inverness Burgh Council. ‘Were Lovat in this Country,’ Culloden ruminated gloomily, ‘we would not be browbeaten by the Jacobites on every hand, as we now are, nor half the trouble that now is in our Elections … We look for the Pretender with every fair wind, and let me tell you this, If he does come, there will be bloody bricks … and they,’ the Jacobites, ‘will have raised a devil that they cannot so easily lay.’

The ‘devil’ was civil war. The region divided itself violently between support for George I and James Stuart. It was odd, Lovat said, how the administration delayed his pardon ‘at a time when the Kingdoms are like to swim in blood, for now, you may fully depend on it, that the Pretender will be over in the month of March next’.

But the Pretender did not come in March and the country was no calmer. When the new Parliament met to vote money for the Civil List on 14 May 1715, Culloden wrote to Duncan in Inverness that he had just come out of an eight-hour session in the Commons. The money was at last voted ‘after a very hot debate that was stuffed with a deal of scurrilous reflections from both parties’, he wrote. ‘You may perceive that though Jacobitism be decaying with you, as you think,’ in Scotland, ‘yet it is prevailing here … much more than ever I thought it would have done … I cannot express the endeavours that are used to alienate the hearts of the people from his Majesty’ by the Tories. Culloden hoped to God nothing would come of it.

Spring drifted into summer in the English capital. Castleleathers returned to his chief in London, his mission not yet accomplished. Still the Frasers scuttled among the dust and shadows of the day. It could not last. In the middle of a June night, troops under the Duke of Montrose’s direction ran them to ground in a house off Soho Square. Montrose was joint Secretary of State with Atholl, and they were close political allies. At 3 a.m., ‘two baillies and so many constables came into their rooms, and desired them to surrender themselves prisoners in the King’s name’. Castleleathers grabbed his weapons and demanded they declare ‘if they were for King George’.

The baillies retorted that of course ‘they were for, and in the name of, King George’. Major Castleleathers replied that all of the men of that room were so too. Probably, said one baillie, but ‘his orders was to bring them as prisoners’.

Castleleathers knew his chief ‘lay close within the curtains’ of a box bed, ‘and heard all this debate’. The Major was nervous about ‘some
pater nosters
and
ave marias
… [his chief] had got about him in his pockets, and if a search was made would bring him timely to Tyburne’. They would signify Catholicism, loyalty to the Stuarts (and France), and treason.

Castleleathers darted behind the curtains and told Lovat to get up. Spotting Lovat’s breeches, he searched them and removed all his papist paraphernalia. Where could he conceal them? He spied ‘a
house of office
near my Lord’s bed’. A chamber-pot that had done its work recently – the perfect thing. He opened the lid and poked the incriminating bits and pieces beneath the surface. The troops escorted the Highlanders out and marched them to a ‘sponging house’ – a secure holding house for debtors in custody – until they came before the courts.

The capital was on fire with news that James, the Young Pretender, was on the move. Lovat’s ‘great friends’ were going to drop them, in the Major’s view. They needed another plan of escape. Lovat was nervous and asked Castleleathers to sleep by him. It was hard to stay calm when everything was so different from 1703. He did not know who had ordered him to be locked up – Atholl or Ilay?

None of them slept ‘over the next few nights, but talked, contriving how to make their escape’. Other than that one subject, they were very quiet and heavy, with ‘no friend coming near them’. The best they came up with was to make a run for it. They could bribe the Frasers on the door to make up a party of Highlanders and ‘carry them off with flying colours’ to the north. Lovat felt depressed. After fifteen years it looked as if he was going home the way he had left: on the run from the law.

On 6 September 1715, the Earl of Mar raised his standard at Braemar and declared for ‘King James III and VIII’. The rebellion so long dreaded and rumoured, had started. This was a home-grown uprising. For this reason it caught the British authorities unawares. Lovat had warned them it was coming more than once, but they detected no military preparations on the Continent, and there had been no flare-up of diplomatic hostilities with a foreign power. The Earl of Mar did not know what to do next, however. His King seemed worse than useless. James had issued an order countermanding his previous order to rise, but issued it too late for it to be obeyed. The chopping and changing left Mar, a reluctant rebel commander, dizzy with indecision.

As he raised the banner proclaiming James, the flag, newly made for the occasion, unfurled and was tugged this way and that by a brisk breeze. Suddenly, a gilded wooden globe on top of the standard popped off. The men standing round watched it thud into the mud. They looked on it as ‘a bad omen and did call to mind the story of King Charles the 1st whose staff head fell off when he stood before the judges’. Bad harvests, good ones, infant death, disease and fine weather, all life thrived or withered under the pitiless gleam of the Divine gaze. Someone picked up the golden ball and screwed it back on. Mar’s banner billowed above his lodgings. On one side, the pennant showed the Scottish arms embroidered in gold; on the other was the thistle, and the motto
Nemo me impune lacessit
, ‘No one attacks me with impunity’ (later the motto of the Black Watch) and under it the words ‘No Union’.