The Last Highlander (22 page)

Lovat obtained official permission to leave London and go home to marry. The Secretary of State approved. While negotiating the dowry, Lovat might check ‘if any ill designs are carrying on there’, the Secretary instructed him. Lovat noticed how anxiously the government enquired after the situation in the Highlands, and gave them what they wanted – information about subversive elements – and also what he wanted them to have – a slight unease that the Highlands was not properly settled yet, and a feeling they must put some money and positions behind men of proven loyalty and influence there. These men would make sure the area was peaceful and well managed, ensuring London did not need to bother about it.

In the depths of December 1716, the bridegroom, his servants, important household officers, and a tail of gentlemen of the clan set out from Castle Dounie for Castle Grant. Orders for quantities of provisions went out weeks before to the merchants of Elgin: ‘Sixteen pound 12 ounces of white sugar at 12s the pound,’ hops, raisins, cinnamon, ‘8 pound rice, at 6d. per pound’ and other spices, all amounting to £69. 9s 6d (Scots) were ordered in. Then, half a hogshead of wine, at £7. 10s sterling arrived, with 7½ bolls of malt, and eleven bolls of barley for ‘brewing aquavite’; plus ‘12 stones 3 pound butter, at £3. 6s. 8d. the stone’, for baking. The list went on.

For the bride, there was ‘cash sent to Aberdeen to buy necessary for Miss Margaret at the time of her marriage, as per Miss Wilson’s account – £385. 12s’. A great Highland wedding lasted for many days; every neighbour and kinsman, haughty and humble, would be welcomed into Castle Grant. Lovat insisted Grant publish a letter about it in
The Courant
. If not, they would miss a chance to show the administration how significant they were in the north.

After days of feasting and dancing, the new Lady Lovat, mounted on a fine horse, was escorted by her husband out of Speyside, through the hills to Inverness and on to Castle Dounie. Along the way, cheering clansmen were rewarded with small coin from Lovat’s purse. He stopped instantly when he recognised a face, to enquire after his ‘cousin’s’ health. The muddiest hut dweller might merit an embrace, a polite exchange and a coin. They were kinsmen, all Frasers, and in that shared heritage, equals. Lovat loved the pageantry of his chieftainship. If only his father, brothers and the Reverend James were alive to share his triumph.

They celebrated the rehabilitation of a male Fraser with feasting, music, chess, singing, bardic verse, dancing, and good conversation. The kinsmen Fraserdale had not favoured, who had stayed loyal to Lovat, came riding out of the hills to welcome home MacShimidh, their chief. Lovat cemented his friendships with the Hanoverian elites around the Highland capital. He invited them all to share his display of old-style chiefly generosity. The fires blazed, servants rushed to and fro with platters of food, the piper blew up his bag in the hall at Castle Dounie. Lovat’s guidons, swallow-tailed banners with crest and motto on them, flapped energetically from each tower.

A few miles away from Dounie, in a small grace-and-favour manor house, sat the ousted Lady Lovat, whom Lovat called Amelia Mackenzie of Fraserdale. She had no husband, and just a few servants and furnishings left. All her property had been gifted to Simon Fraser, whom she hated. She determined to get it all back with the aid of powerful Mackenzie and Murray supporters, creditors and friendly local faces, all now offering to help her lay traps for the Beaufort.

Two hundred and fifty miles south-west of Inverness, Amelia’s husband, Mackenzie of Fraserdale, was wintering in gaol in Carlisle awaiting trial for treason. Fraserdale, one of the first to surrender after the rebellion was quelled, protested his innocence to anyone who would listen. He and his fellow rebels asked for an ‘exculpation (as they call it) to preserve a livelihood to themselves and families, protesting that, if the government seized all they had, they’d as soon be hanged as be starved’. ‘Exculpation’ meant taking the culpability, or guilt, away from them. ‘What reply can one make to these miserable creatures?’ asked Bishop Nicol, who was there to witness the trials.

This was exactly the point Lord President Dalrymple and Duncan Forbes were making as the courts in Edinburgh deliberated over the rebels’ cases. If the authorities utterly impoverished the rebels, they would have nothing left to lose, and might conspire again. As the rebel leaders in Carlisle said, they might as well hang for treason trying to restore their fortunes, as starve because they had lost everything that kept them within the pale of law and order. Crushing only worked if you crushed to death. Leaving a vital spark left the rebels room to resurrect themselves. Either be properly judicious, firm but benign – or crush to kill.

Bishop Nicol continued: ‘Mr Mackenzie of Fraserdale (against whom an indictment was found by the grand jury on Saturday last) seems to be the likeliest person to bring on the debate,’ about the legality of the English courts to try Scottish cases. ‘This gentleman’s case has been so variously represented that (without a formal trial) nobody can tell what to make of it.’ Fraserdale was the test case. ‘Some stoutly affirm, as himself does,’ not surprisingly, ‘that he never bore arms in the Pretender’s camp.’

On the other hand, said the bishop, ‘Lord Lovat has seized the life rent of his estate, and will probably be desirous to continue in possession.’ Lovat did have the estates, but this remark misrepresented the situation. He had not ‘seized’ them. They were a royal gift, but Fraserdale and the Murrays got their wish. Fraserdale and his case moved to Edinburgh, where Squadrone judges and Law Lords got to work to overturn the guilty verdict, and suppress the gift of the estates to Lovat.

Amelia waited at home with their children to hear the judgement from Edinburgh. She loathed Lovat, and everyone around her said he was a brute and bandit. He led her poor father to drink himself to death; he had forcibly married and raped her mother, which led her to be subjected to a humiliating lawsuit. Her family afterwards had neglected her. The elder Amelia’s undoer seemed now to have undone the daughter. This Amelia had many reasons to fight Lord Lovat.

TWENTY

‘What a lion cannot manage, the fox can’, 1717–18

‘This Gift … the most precarious thing on earth’

– LOVAT TO DUNCAN FORBES

That winter of 1717, in her small house on the Lovat estates, friends and family continued to comfort and counsel Amelia Lovat on how to get rid of Simon Fraser. She must not accept her loss. There were three ways she could retrieve her properties. The first was already in hand – engineering the exemption of the Lovat estates from being forfeited by her husband’s rebellion. This contention rested on the claim that they belonged not to Fraserdale but to Amelia, and she was no rebel.

This first round of judgements in Edinburgh had already gone her way. By a ‘Decree of Exception’ the court in Edinburgh declared the estate was not forfeited to the Crown. Amelia’s Murray and Mackenzie connections persuaded her to lodge a claim for the estates and the resumption of her entitlement to the rents from them, under a ‘resuming clause’. The logic was, if ‘excepted’ from forfeit, she could then ‘resume’ her ownership of them. If so, the new Lord and Lady Lovat were cuckoos to be dispossessed and evicted. Atholl had then moved in Fraserdale’s favour to obtain his pardon, but in this he failed.

Second, she had a fistful of Mackenzie relations who were ready to swear they were her creditors and she and Fraserdale had defaulted on their debts. As her creditors, they were legally entitled to first call on all the rents of the Lovat estates. Coincidentally, they asserted a level of indebtedness that exceeded the total income of the estates and would bankrupt the estates if they enforced their bonds. This was the argument being adopted up and down the country by Scottish Jacobites in order to prevent the government getting their hands on their estates and income.

The third option was to play the long game. Wait for her husband to die, and then everything would revert to Hugh, her son.

On his side, Lovat had three ways to stop her. First, he could claim that most of the asserted debts were ‘trumperies’. Second, he could try to get the honours and titles of Lovat back in the male line. Third, he needed to change the terms of King George I’s gift to him from Fraserdale’s lifetime to perpetuity; he was upset this had not been the original term anyway. Without perpetual title to all he gained, he might just as well give up now; Fraserdale could die any day.

He was too determined to be down heartened for long though. He had seen such a marvellous reverse in his fortunes in the last year, he was sure it must continue. The Frasers’ preference for their natural chief had brought him back, out of exile; but one glance at the contents of his desk told him it was the machinery of the British state that would most likely let him and his family stay. It would mean more lawsuits, more time, money and energy. He already had debts. The funds just did not exist to fight in the highest courts in the kingdom, the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and the Houses of Commons and Lords in London.

No sooner had Lord Lovat and Margaret established themselves at Dounie than one summons after another was delivered to Lovat’s table, claiming that he (in his role as representative of the Lovat estates) owed monies the previous incumbents had refused to repay. Lovat set to work. He too had allies in the Scottish judiciary. In Duncan Forbes, Deputy of the Court of Session, he found an advocate who, everyone had to admit, acted for him ‘with disinterestedness, very rarely to be found in gentlemen of the long robe’.

He had to borrow more. He would take out loans secured on his only asset, his clan lands. When he won, he would get rewards, judgements in his favour, places, gratifications; his financial worries would be over. If he lost, God forbid, his clan would be set on the path to bankruptcy. The words of his old chronicler the Reverend James were wonderful and inspiring; but not in the light of common day, in early 1717, ordinary time, not mythic clan time. If he was to bring his clan out of the penury to which it had been reduced since a Mackenzie woman first married a Fraser chief, he would need to take a more modern approach.

The ordinary men of the clan waited for the change of weather to come in, mixing fine days and foul, to allow them to get back to the land. They waited to know what was going to happen to their cottages and agricultural lands, the farms and hill grazings. At Dounie, land-grabbing lawsuits poured in. The purpose of Lovat’s life now was measured in the petty remorselessness of libel actions. How would his chronicler record that and make it a feat of heroism worthy of his ancestors?

At the end of January 1717, Lovat wrote to Duncan about the looming crises. He was driven mad by the thought of how temporary was the King’s gift. ‘I have several calls from London,’ he wrote. Fraser of ‘Foyers assures me that the Squade have resolved … to break me as to my commissions, and as to my Gift … I most humbly beg of my dear General to employ Sir Walter Pringle,’ an Edinburgh lawyer, ‘and whom else you please, and consult together of some legal way of my keeping possession of this estate … which I look upon as the most precarious thing on earth … Either I must keep violent possession, which will return me my old misfortunes,’ fighting and outlawry, ‘or I must abandon the kingdoms, and a young lady whom my friends … engaged me to marry … if I do not find any legal pretence of possessing the estate but by this gift, which I now reckon as nothing. The thoughts of all this confuse my brain; so excuse my write and style.’ Surely, thought Duncan, he was not seriously thinking of returning to France.

Forbes counselled calm. Lovat must fight through the regular channels of the Court and the courts. Duncan would help him to win, he assured him. Lovat told his wife he must pack and leave to fight the legal actions seeking to take their home and country from them.

*    *    *

Were the Mackenzie creditors genuine or fraudulent, that was the question facing Lovat and his legal representatives? Some claims looked very odd indeed when Duncan unrolled them. In far too many, the original debtor was Sir Roderick Mackenzie of Prestonhall, deceased, and the creditor was a cousin. Sir Roderick entered into these debt arrangements when Lovat was in prison in France. The ‘express clause’ was that Fraserdale and his wife and their baby son Hugh were ‘burdened with all the lawful debts’ and responsible for any repayments outstanding on Sir Roderick’s ‘decease’.

Duncan Forbes and Lovat objected that Sir Roderick had died nearly ten years ago, and ever since no creditor had come before the Court of Session and pressed for repayments, or complained about Fraserdale defaulting – until today. Duncan and Lovat were well aware that the scheme in many of these Jacobite prosecutions involved the creditors, who on examination, were all friends and relations of the debtor, but had not pressed their claims for years, suddenly needing all their money back right now. The debtors could not or would not pay and the Lovat estates were signed off to the creditors in lieu of the cash. After a decent length of time, the so-called creditors then reassigned the estates back to their debtor cousin.

Lovat lost. The Court of Session found in favour of the creditors and issued warrants against the Lovats investing the creditors with ‘the lands, Lordship’ and everything else that they said was legally liable to be seized to pay their debts. This was what Amelia and her backers needed. They appointed a factor, a man called Robertson, to go onto the Lovat estates and lift the rents in cash and kind. They could use violence if the tenantry resisted, and arrest goods to the value of the rent if no rents were forthcoming.

Argyll and the Forbeses told Lovat that since the courts in Edinburgh were so partial and vulnerable to Atholl–Mackenzie influence, he would have to get his case referred to the British Parliament for appeal. Lovat packed his travelling chest. It was ironic. He, who loathed the Union, now sought to use the body at the heart of it, the British Parliament, against the Scottish legal system.

Lovat wrote to Lord Stanhope, who, as Secretary of State, shared almost equal power with Walpole in the leadership of the Commons. He wanted to come to London, he said, ‘both to represent the present condition of this country to your Excellency and to endeavour to hinder my enemies from doing anything for the convicted rebel Fraserdale’. Stanhope had to refuse permission. Intelligence about another invasion had been passed to the British and all officers had been ordered to remain at their posts. Lovat had to obey. Meanwhile, ‘I hope and beg that your Excellency may protect and support me in my gift, if it comes in dispute before the House of Commons,’ he asked the Secretary of State. No one had served them better ‘since his Majesty was pleased to give me the bread [gift] that’s now taken from me’ by the judgement of the Court of Session.

In a postscript, he added some intelligence to keep Stanhope’s attention. ‘I am certainly informed Seaforth has landed in Lewis, and arms landed … I have been at pains and expense for intelligence this year.’ Without salaries they all put in huge expenses claims.

When the threat of invasion calmed down, Lovat was allowed to go to London to listen to the debate about him in the Commons. Afterwards, Culloden wrote of it to his brother Duncan. For over two hours ‘Lovat’s gift run the gauntlet’ of their political enemies ‘this day in the House of Commons, by reason of a resuming clause in favour of Fraserdale’s lady, presented by Lord James Murray’. The ‘Squadrone were pleased to belch out a great many scurrilous reflections against Lovat; but all to no purpose; for the gift subsists as it did, and in a great measure owing to Mr Walpole and honest Mr Smith who … would not desert Lovat.’ He had trumped them! He still needed to change the condition of ownership from remaining ‘as it did’, but it was a start.

Lovat submitted an appeal to the House of Lords to overturn the judgement of the Lords of Session in Edinburgh. He instructed his kinsmen at home to resist the Mackenzie creditors’ agents wherever they appeared, whatever justification they offered. But before he could roll up these lawsuits and go to the Lords to rid himself of these phoney creditors, fever struck him down.