The Last Highlander (18 page)

SIXTEEN

Fighting for the prize, 1715

‘Lovat’s arrival on the scene transformed the situation’

– DANIEL SZECHI,
1715: THE GREAT JACOBITE REBELLION

The night gave them some cover. They crossed the Forth and began to tack out of the firth up the Fife side of it. Lovat and Culloden retired to sleep, leaving the boat’s skipper, a sailor and Castleleathers at the helm. The men on deck chatted quietly about the unsettled state of affairs, the interruption to commerce and agriculture and so on. Suddenly Castleleathers felt his skin prickle. He hissed for silence. The skipper chatted on. In the dark, behind their conversation the Major was certain he caught sounds drifting in and out of earshot. He told the others to hold their tongues. A boat, said the helmsman, coming close.

Out of the darkness, a shot rattled through the sails. Castleleathers drew his pistol. Mar’s men, the skipper told them, asking if they were friends. ‘If you are friends, as I hope you are, we will slack the sail till they come up,’ the skipper looked at him with curiosity. Not liking the man’s drift, Castleleathers put his pistol to the skipper’s breast. Raise all sails ‘or you are a gone man’, he whispered.

Hearing the shot, Lovat appeared. Castleleathers told him to stay below. The captain of the Jacobite boat might have tipped someone off about the drovers’ gold being taken north for their Hanoverian chiefs. In full sail, under cover of the dark, they soon pulled away from the Jacobite raider. The skipper tried to pull in next at Aberdeen. He had some business there, he said. Castleleathers growled that he should sail on. ‘It was not time to stop their passage with such a fair wind,’ in the heart of rebel-held territory.

Halfway along the coast between Aberdeen and Inverness, the weather ‘turned a pick teeth’ and they could not make progress against it. They landed and rode the last sixty miles through Jacobite-held territory until at last the huge bulk of Kilravock Castle – twelve miles west of Inverness – loomed before them. Hugh Rose, chief of the clan, shouted to his clansmen to throw open its doors. Rose of Kilravock, staunch Hanoverian, brother-in-law of Lovat’s friend and patron Brigadier Alexander Grant, strode out to welcome them. Lovat and Culloden were family and childhood friends of the Roses.

Kilravock could hardly believe it, the sight of Lovat standing there: heavier, older; not the slim, open-gazed youth he recalled. The eyes still shone, large and prominent, but bags cushioned them below. At the bridge of his nose, experience had pinched his brows down into a two-pronged frown, but deep laughter lines reached from each side of his nose to the sides of his mouth. Lovat had always had a watchful expression, as if he looked at the world from somewhere deep behind the surface of his face, keeping his counsel in the shadow of himself. But the gaze had sharpened, become more focused. This was a big handsome returning prodigal. They embraced with warmth. Kilravock then praised Castleleathers, who had set out nearly eighteen months ago to retrieve his chief. A fool’s errand, many had then commented.

That night they were all ‘very boisterous’. Lovat rested the following day, exhausted but exhilarated. He thought he had not relaxed for twenty years, and even now could not be certain that his kin were coming to him, as he had promised the Whig grandees. Argyll’s decision to support Lovat’s mission rested in part on assurances that the chief of the Frasers’ sudden reappearance in the Highlands would have a galvanic effect, like a man back from the dead. Argyll desperately needed something to revitalise the war effort in the north.

Kilravock informed Lovat that over 300 of his kindred were holed up in Stratherrick, waiting for their ‘natural chief’s’ call. Lovat began to feel an upsurge of the old purpose, grit and energy. These Stratherrick lairds had remained and kept faith with him. Their spirit moved Lovat to his core. He could never leave them again, no matter what it cost him personally. He would set aside his nationalist longings while he climbed to power, a mature and enfranchised peer of the realm and strong Highland chief. Lovat asked Castleleathers to go and bring his men to him. They would meet at Culloden House.

Once reunited with his men, Lovat could not be held back. All the energy the other Whig officers lacked over the last two months focused in him. He had everything to gain – his pardon, his whole inheritance – and nothing to lose since he was still officially ‘obnoxious to the law’. The Jacobites were making ready to sit out the winter in Inverness until spring renewed the campaign season. They quartered the Highland Jacobite troops on known rebel families, and any foreign soldiers on known Hanoverian sympathisers.

At Culloden House, Lovat and his fellow officers planned their next moves. Lovat had to make capital out of this crisis. The same tactical skill he applied to his invasion plan for Louis XIV and the Stuarts he now applied to the problem of retaking Inverness for the Hanoverians. He headed up a force based around his clansmen and camped on the edge of the town, throwing down a challenge to Sir John Mackenzie to come and give them battle. Sir John was astonished. He could not think what had changed in the government camp that gave rise to this burst of bullish activity. His intelligence told him their commanding officer, Sutherland, still crouched at Dunrobin Castle, nearly fifty miles away. ‘Not shapen to be a warrior,’ according to Castleleathers, ‘though a very honest man in all other respects,’ Sir John declined the offer. In Inverness Castle and the Town House, the Jacobite commanders looked across the river and felt a little nervous for the first time since the rebellion began.

Inverness Burgh Council sent a messenger to Coll MacDonald of Keppoch asking for help. The chief of the Keppoch branch of the Jacobite MacDonalds was marauding through the Hanoverian Grant lands, halfway down Loch Ness. Answering the call from Inverness, Keppoch turned to veer north along the north bank of Loch Ness and attack Lord Lovat in the rear.

Lovat walked among his men at their camp at the old horse market, the Merkinch, on the opposite bank of the Ness from Inverness Castle and town centre. He stopped to talk to all ranks with love and curiosity, enquiring after their fathers and kin. Sir John Mackenzie did not like their proximity. From the castle battlements, he watched as his lovely herd of cattle, which grazed on the Merkinch, was taken for food by the Frasers. He sent a message to the Mackintosh chief at Moy Hall, ten miles south of Inverness, requesting 500 Mackintosh fighting men to reinforce the 300 Mackenzies in the Highland capital.

Lovat dealt with the threats he identified one by one. He despatched the Reverend Thomas Fraser of Stratherrick, ‘as good a soldier as a minister’, with the Stratherrick men to parlay with the MacDonalds and persuade Keppoch that the town was now under siege and he should turn away. Keppoch MacDonald did not want to fight his way into Inverness to incarcerate his men on the wrong side of a siege, surrounded by government troops. Keppoch avoided Inverness and headed south through the hills.

Lovat then switched his attention to the Mackintoshes mustering at Moy Hall. He must prevent them marching north to help defend Inverness. Lovat ordered his troops to break camp. They crossed the Ness and advanced to the south side of Inverness, threatening to descend into Mackintosh country, and waste it. The Mackintoshes backed down at once, and hurried to ‘make apology, swear they met to defend their land against Keppoch and that they will not assist the rebellion, upon which they promised to disperse’. No one wanted to shed his neighbour’s blood. Lovat seemed unstoppable. According to one historian, his ‘arrival on the scene transformed the situation’ in the northern theatre of the rebellion.

The Fraser chief returned to his camp on the north bank of the Ness to blockade Inverness from that side. This was the road that led to the Aird of Lovat, Castle Dounie, Fraser country, and beyond that into Mackenzie country. It was important to his future that Lovat was clearly visible in the vanguard of any action, even standing out as ‘the first man that appeared in the field’, as he changed his image from fugitive to ruler.

There was one other thing to do before he moved. Lovat despatched a man to ride south to Perth. The messenger announced to the Frasers serving under Mackenzie of Fraserdale that their chief was back, and ordered them home. Almost to a man the Fraser fighting men deserted and left Mackenzie of Fraserdale sitting in his tent, a rebel and colonel with hardly any men to command. At long last the Whigs were engaging the Jacobites in earnest, eager for a victory over the Jacobites in the Highlands. When he heard, Argyll was delighted.

Lovat then met in council with the gentlemen of his clan. ‘What would you think if I would go immediately, and attack Inverness?’ he asked. His fellow Whig lairds preferred a siege to starve them slowly into submission. Forbes of Culloden and Rose of Kilravock had blockaded the town from the south and east. Maybe a siege was not dramatic or eye-catching enough to suit Argyll’s or Lovat’s style. ‘I know it would put me in great favour at Court that I be the first man who appears in this country,’ said Lovat. The Earl of Sutherland was still trying to make his men come back out from their homes. ‘It will be thought a very bold action for us to attack Inverness with only 300 men,’ Lovat concluded. The government sorely needed such bold thinking from its officers. ‘So my good friends, let me have your solutions,’ he asked.

‘March!’ they responded with pleasure. They too could see that a successful attack and reoccupation would earn rewards for them all, and many Frasers were ready for a fight with the Mackenzies. But before Lovat could attack, Kilravock’s younger son, Arthur Rose, set off to speed up the siege. In the depths of the night, on 10 November, Arthur, his brother Robert, and a handful of men drifted in a little boat towards Inverness harbour, intending to seize all the boats and cut a major supply route into the town. In the darkness, they suddenly made out the shape of a guard. Arthur Rose put a pistol to the sentry’s breast and told him to edge, quiet as a cat, in front of him and take them to the town’s main guardhouse. Most of the town was asleep. No one noted their passing. If they did, they kept quiet. It was wartime, and better not to interfere. They crept up from the river towards the Tolbooth, and reached it unchallenged.

Their captive called ‘Open!’ to the men within. Rose held the sentry before him as a shield, and nudged him forward. The two men moved slowly. When the sentry got in clear sight of his fellows, he shouted ‘An enemy! An enemy!’ and threw himself forward. Rose stormed the room, sword and pistol in hand. As the sentry leapt away Rose was exposed to the Jacobites. They shot him twice at close quarters, and crushed him between an old wooden door and stone wall. Arthur Rose took several hours to die of his injuries, the second – and last – fatality in the northern war. Castleleathers lamented the loss of ‘a bold resolute man’.

In the morning, Sir John Mackenzie of Coul wrote a letter of condolence to Arthur’s father, Kilravock. Mackenzie enclosed passports saying he wanted them all to feel free to come into the town to bury their kinsman. Kilravock was so choked with grief and fury, he refused. He fired off a message to the magistrates of Inverness and his son-in-law, Sir John Mackenzie of Coul. All the Whigs were in a fury to burn ‘the town at all ends’. The Inverness Jacobites at last woke to the reality of war. In the end, Kilravock’s remaining son, with John Forbes of Culloden, Lovat, other government officers, Sir John Mackenzie of Coul and the rebel officers attended the burial. One of the government officers took Sir John to one side and advised him to render the town to the government, or Kilravock was determined to abandon the siege and reduce the whole town to little more than smoke.

The two men met the following day at a small burn to the east of the town. Sir John Mackenzie agreed to surrender Inverness, if his father-in-law would let him and his men go to join the Earl of Mar. The Earl had moved south-west of Perth, in the direction of Stirling and Glasgow, and had struck camp on the plain of Sheriffmuir. Kilravock brushed his son-in-law away. Mackenzie could go home in peace, but without his weapons and goods. The Hanoverians occupied Inverness on 12 November.

The next day, Sunday 13th, Hanoverian forces under the Duke of Argyll fought the Jacobite army under Mar at Sheriffmuir, outside Stirling, forty miles west of Edinburgh. After months of skirmishing, in the end their meeting was a messy and indecisive encounter: the two sides almost walked into each other by mistake, approaching from either side of a hill. But it was
the
battle the Jacobites needed in order to consolidate their great gains. After five hours of fighting, nightfall left the two armies at an impasse. They retired, both sides claiming victory. Argyll had fought an army two and a half times the size of his own to a standstill. The price was huge, costing him forty per cent of his effective forces.