The Last Highlander (17 page)

Mar’s rebellion ignited a series of local uprisings up and down the kingdoms. It showed the new King how widely he was rejected. The hardships the country ‘groaned under since the fatal Union’ brought them, said Marshal Keith, one of the Jacobite commanders; the men had ‘taken arms by orders of their lawful Sovereign, to free them from a burthen they were no longer able to bear’. Dynasty and religion were harnessed to the economy and pulled the people into rebellion. ‘The common people flocked in from all quarters, but there being no arms yet arrived, no use could be made of their zeal, and therefore they were dismissed,’ Keith wrote of his potential fighting men. Thousands milled about carrying hoes and scythes looking for leadership, a strategy, weapons, uniforms. Mar planned to seize Perth as a good supply base, and stop to wait for his King and the French.

At this critical juncture for the Jacobites, God called Louis XIV to him, and ‘James III and VIII’ delayed embarking from France. In Scotland, Marshal Keith observed his commander-in-chief dithering in the face of setbacks. Mar’s problem, he thought, was that the Earl was not raised to war but ‘to the pen, and was early brought into business … [He] had good natural parts but few acquired’; he was not a soldier and could not learn. Mar had not wanted to lead a rebellion. The Duke of Atholl had turned James down. James’s half-Stuart, half-Churchill brother, the Duke of Berwick, urged James forward, but also refused command. ‘[Go] with what you can get or scrape … Providence will do the rest,’ he said. Berwick, a naturalised French citizen, could not accompany him. James pleaded: ‘You know what you owe to me … of what vast consequence your accompanying me is.’ James never forgave Berwick, a brilliant general, for failing to come to his aid.

In overall command of the British forces was John Campbell, the 2nd Duke of Argyll, who had served under Marlborough. Argyll apologised to the Earl of Sutherland, Lord Lieutenant of the Northern Counties, for the lack of arms. He could not let the Earl have more than 300 firelocks and ammunition for twenty-four charges. Just ‘make the best of your way’ north, he ordered Sutherland, ‘gathering what number of men you can … Follow the enemy in the rear, and annoy them as much as possible you can.’ In this lacklustre way, Sutherland was to take command of the army and crush Mar.

Lovat wrote to Sutherland: if the Earl would ‘countenance him’ and procure him liberty and become bail for his good behaviour and loyalty, he engaged to ‘be very useful to him at the head of his clan in the North for King George’s interest’. Sutherland decided to take a risk and use the Fraser chief. The principal Whig Unionists in the Highlands joined in a bail bond of £5,000. Lovat was ‘fully resolved to expose my life for the Royal Family of Hanover’, he said, and hoped Sutherland would ask the King to pardon him. ‘Grant me your protection and friendship,’ he beseeched Sutherland.

King George instructed his Lord Advocate, Sir David Dalrymple, to Scotland, to prepare a judicial statement about the case of Lord Lovat. The Argyll Campbells and Sutherland wanted to use him. Others wanted to hang him. The King needed to be told his story. Dalrymple’s report was a model of circumspection: Lovat had been charged with ‘a riot and a rape’ in the late 1690s. He did not appear to answer the charge, Dalrymple noted, and ‘what followed I do not remember, nor the substance of the evidence then given’. Yet another lawyer said Lovat’s standing in the north was ‘of no small consequence’ to the King. On the other hand, there were the Atholl Murrays to consider. ‘What may engage the one to his Majesty will disoblige the other.’ The Earl of Ilay asked the King to consider if ‘the good the Duke of Atholl may do, may be equal to the loss the King’s service suffers for the want of Ld Lovat’s pardon’. He doubted it. Ilay also pointed out that, with regard to these old Scottish lawsuits, ‘there is a point in Lord Lovat’s case which I believe his enemies in Scotland have not considered,
viz
., that he, being a peer’ of the British Crown, ‘could not be tried in Scotland’ for those cases.

Lovat was grateful to Ilay, but it was a sobering moment to consider that so many of his travails could have been prevented if this sort of information had come to the fore earlier, in 1698/99. Lovat was bailed from the sponging house by his old Fraser allies, and the men who hoped to benefit by his presence in the north. But the bail came with conditions. First, he must wait in London until October.

Castleleathers observed to his chief that ‘the greatest friends you expected to have, look upon you as a Jacobite and Roman Catholic, and will do so till you show yourself in another shape’. The Major needed to leave for the Highlands at once, to defend his home and family. On 13 September, just a week after Mar raised his baubled standard, Inverness fell into Jacobite hands. This time Castleleathers would go with or without his chief.

FIFTEEN

Return to Scotland, 1715

‘A hundred to one at least in their interest’

– ARGYLL TO TOWNSHEND ON JACOBITISM IN SCOTLAND

Lovat and his friends learned that Inverness had not so much fallen, as offered itself, to the Jacobites, having first supplied them with food, arms and horses. At 4 a.m. on the 13th, a signal sounded and the town’s guard stood down. By 4.30 a.m., there was no one on duty when the din of men and horses echoed in the streets. Lachlan Mackintosh – son-in-law of the town’s Provost (mayor) – his kinsman Mackintosh of Borlum, and 250 armed Jacobites marched into the town centre and proclaimed King James at the market cross. No alarm bells rang. No drumbeat roused the slumbering citizens.

Next morning, at Brahan Castle, the Earl of Seaforth, high chief of all the branches of the Mackenzies, set out the fiery cross to raise his clan for the Jacobites. The Mackenzies prepared to march to Inverness through their kinsmen Mackenzie of Fraserdale’s Lovat lands, absorbing Mackenzies and Frasers en route.

In Inverness, Jacobites moved about uplifting the goods of pro-Hanoverian businessmen and gentry. The magistrates handed over most of the public funds available in the town and the people of Inverness woke to an occupied Highland capital and a Town House full of toasting and speechifying Jacobites being entertained by their Provost. The celebrations went on into the afternoon. Lachlan Mackintosh installed another Mackenzie, Sir John Mackenzie of Coul, in Inverness Castle as Governor of the town for King James. When the magistrates met again, they paid an Episcopalian minister to lead prayers for success of the rebellion. They opened the Tolbooth by the bridge across the Ness to the Mackenzies and Mackintoshes, giving the rebels access to the town’s arms and ammunition and control of the lowest crossing point of the river. Jacobite soldiers led out horses under cover of darkness, loaded with supplies for rebel groupings outside the town. In the wake of the general election, Culloden had warned the government that the Highlands were still too Jacobite and they must have men like Lovat who could sway whole clans.

Culloden was still at the Houses of Parliament when the rebellion broke out. He too immediately left for Inverness to protect his home and family. At Culloden House, two miles to the east of Inverness, his wife and servants had to hold off a force of armed men. She pleaded neighbourliness and the good manners due to a lady. They spared her – she had known most of the officers all their lives – but the ordinary men were licensed to pillage her fields and granaries.

For Lord Lovat and the Frasers, leaving their Soho sponging house without permission meant breaking bail. But if they did not go, the Fraser lairds holding out against Fraserdale and waiting for their chief in the hills of Stratherrick above Loch Ness might give up hope or be attacked by the Jacobites. Lovat had to go. In the Aird of Lovat several hundred fighting men had already answered Fraserdale’s summons to muster at Castle Dounie and march away under the Earl of Seaforth with the rest of the Mackenzies. Fraserdale was effectively the Fraser chief: he had been married to the late Lord Lovat’s daughter for ten years, managed the lands every day and lived at Dounie. He referred to himself as their chief. This was probably Lovat’s last chance to haul his clan back from the brink of destruction to be rebranded as a branch of the Mackenzies.

The allegiance of Inverness – ‘the gateway to the north’ – was seen as a vital part of national security. Inverness would be the ‘glittering prize in all that was to follow’ in the northern theatre of war. Lovat agreed they would go there. Castleleathers obtained passes for the rest of them to travel from the Secretary of State for the Northern Department, Townshend, and an alias which he gave to his chief, who remained an outlaw. They packed up and rode out of London up the Great North Road, with Lovat disguised as a servant to avoid detection.

By the time Lovat and his little band reached Newcastle, the rebellion was already a month old. Newcastle was in an uproar. Several Jacobite families in the north of England, including Lord Derwentwater and the Northumberlands, had taken up arms. The Earl of Kenmure had risen in the north-west.

The Frasers dismounted, stiff and cold in the fading autumn day, having ridden almost 300 miles. The mayor of the town arrived to get their news. He advised the Frasers not to take the east coast ‘post road’, the main road north. Jacobite forces under Derwentwater and Thomas Forster MP controlled it, he said. Though Newcastle held out for King George – the natives coming to be taunted with the name ‘Geordies’ – it was surrounded by Stuart sympathisers. Hundreds of expatriate Scots lived and worked in the region. Jacobites concealed themselves behind the façade of work and family everywhere, including here in the town. The Whig Geordies expected a bold rebel strike to seize Newcastle imminently.

Next day, the Frasers crossed the country and headed into Scotland via the west coast route. Unknown to the Geordies, Derwentwater and Forster had decided not to siege Newcastle. They thought it too well defended, and went off to pursue softer targets at Hexham and Kelso. The rebels needed to take a major northern English city though. Much of Scotland as far south as Perth was Jacobite. Gaining a major English stronghold would trap the rest of Scotland between two Jacobite armies. They could probably take the whole country before moving south into England. Yet the Earl of Mar allowed the English rebel leaders to spend ‘two weeks meandering from town to town, and otherwise dawdling’ wherever they found a congenial billet. The Jacobites ‘really had no idea what to do after they failed to take Newcastle’. Combined with Mar’s dithering, the lack of an effective leader meant the Jacobites began to lose the great advantage their popularity and the shock of their rising initially gifted them.

The Frasers reached Dumfries, turned north and eventually came to Stirling and the main Hanoverian camp. At Stirling, the Duke of Argyll was in overall command of British forces.
Eoghan Dearg nan Cath
or ‘Red John of the Battles’ to his Campbell kinsmen, Argyll was also Lord High Commissioner for Scotland. The reports of insurrection from every corner of Scotland and the north of England filled him with gloom. He reported to Secretary Townshend: the Jacobites ‘have a hundred to one at least in their interest’. He complained about the inadequate number of men and arms sent to him. Argyll’s war council was contemplating the possibility they would have to lose Scotland in order to establish the new German regime in England. There was simply too much turmoil in too many places north of the border. He could not fight everywhere at once. Argyll hated the Stuarts. ‘That family … owes me and my family two heads,’ he wrote. Perhaps this war would add his own to the debt, and pass it on to his son, though not without a fight. Argyll was in his late thirties and still in his prime.

Lord Lovat was also still in his prime. At about forty-three, he was a little older than Argyll. If only he had stayed in the army when he was a young man, and climbed the ladder of service and promotion, he reflected, he too might have been here as a highly decorated senior officer. Instead, his youthful misdemeanours meant he was in Scotland as a bail-jumper, prison-dodger, ex-Jacobite agent and freshly painted Hanoverian, and still an outlaw in Scotland. Lovat observed the levels of support for ‘King James’. By all accounts, the new regime should lose, and that would be the end of the Hanoverians and the Union in Scotland.

Castleleathers was sent ahead to announce the arrival of Lord Lovat and request an audience with the Duke of Argyll. Lovat had left London, Castleleathers told Argyll, because he knew he must go home and prevent his clan joining the rebels. They wanted permission to go to Inverness. ‘There are 300 of his name to join [Lord Lovat] … when he goes home,’ Castleleathers told Argyll. Moreover, ‘such of his name that joined Fraserdale, if we were at home this night, shall all desert Fraserdale from Perth’. This would be a substantial blow to the Jacobites. Argyll had to give him a chance. Lovat had waited for many years for someone to respond to his offers. In his heart a Jacobite, he must now dedicate himself to the Hanoverian cause, for his own and his clan’s survival.

Also in Stirling, waiting to go north, was John Forbes of Culloden. Their fellow Hanoverians around Inverness were not putting any pressure on the rebels, who were reinforcing Inverness, and expanding into the north and Western Highlands. Sutherland’s attempt to engage Seaforth and stop the Jacobite advances had failed pitifully. Seaforth, the Mackenzie high chief, had engaged and routed Sutherland on Munro clan lands (which lay north of Inverness, between Mackenzie’s and Sutherland’s territories). Sutherland fled thirty miles north by sea to his stronghold Dunrobin, and was still there, but very little blood was spilled. Only one person died in this encounter.

Highland warfare – clan warfare in other words – appeared very strange to southerners. Large bodies of militarily competent, armed men marched up to each other, as Sutherland’s and Seaforth’s men had, stated their demands, threatened each other with the nightmare they would inflict on each other to the tenth generation of their seed if they were not satisfied, reached an agreement that prevented this scenario, and marched home again. This was an over-simplification, but a considerable element of Highland warfare was a war of lurid words and violent displays by men in arms. The reason was obvious to all: the horrors of a full-blown blood feud and chaos. Partly as a result of this ethos, only two men would die in the northern theatre of war – the arena of clanship – during the entire rebellion.

News-sheets reported that some of the wild MacDonald kindred, Jacobite to their marrow, smelling weak and undefended enemy lands, were swarming out of the Western Highlands to raid Hanoverian estates around the Highland capital. All their houses and families lay in their path. Argyll ordered the Highlanders to Edinburgh to find a boat home. Reaching Inverness, the Duke said they must raise their clans and revitalise the campaign to reverse the Jacobite progress. On 18 October, Brigadier Alexander Grant wrote to his brother, Captain George Grant, who lived near Inverness: ‘My Lord Lovat is now gone north. There’s no doubt but his clan, who had loyalty enough to withstand the threats of a bullying rebel,’ their Mackenzie usurper chief Fraserdale ‘will most unanimously join him in the support of his Majesty King George’s person and Government.’

Grant urged his brother to bravery. ‘If any handsome thing is done, there’s no doubt but you’ll be rewarded for it. I wish with all my soul I could be with my friends and kinsmen on this occasion,’ he mused. ‘Let them take example of the name of Fraser, who future ages must praise for their loyalty to their prince as well as love and friendship to their chief.’

Lovat’s enemies still painted him as ‘that outlaw’ Captain Fraser of Beaufort. But the most powerful soldiers in Britain now cited him in his full rank; and his kin as a model others might copy. Lovat climbed another step up in his own and the establishment’s hopes. He watched and listened and contributed advice about the defeat of the Jacobites as diligently as he had plotted their victory. Lovat would not fall from favour again. He was determined on that.

Approaching Edinburgh, the city seemed oddly quiet. Lovat recalled it in the 1690s, when the whole carnival of an independent nation shouted and jostled, gossiped, plotted, formed alliances and slandered their enemies all around him. Edinburgh now appeared tense and subdued. Many of the towering medieval houses on the Royal Mile lay half empty, some having run to semi-ruin for want of gentle tenants. Post-Union, the economy had not sparked to life. Society tightened its belt and did not spend. Allan Ramsay, poet, Jacobite, antiquarian bookseller, and the father of Ramsay the portrait painter, complained that the Canongate, previously heaving with market traders, stock and customers, had become a ‘Poor eldritch hole!/what loss, what crosses’ it bore.

Lovat gazed up at the castle and down towards the Palace of Holyrood. The contrast between Edinburgh as the capital of a sovereign nation, and Edinburgh as a poor cousin to London, struck him, a passionate Scottish nationalist, as a scandal. He seemed to have travelled thousands of miles and suffered years of imprisonment and exile merely to end up where he started – a minor officer in an alien King’s service. But to think like that might drive him mad.

At Leith, Lovat, his brother John, Castleleathers, Culloden, their servants and a party of cattle drovers carrying gold in their saddle bags to fund the resistance to rebellion boarded a boat and set sail at night on a full tide. The boat nosed its way into the Firth of Forth, and made east for the open sea. Their course would take them north to Peterhead, and then west, to land eventually at some point close to Inverness.