The Last Highlander (23 page)

TWENTY-ONE

Matters of life and death, 1718–21

‘The most sincere sentiments of my heart’

– LOVAT TO THE GENTLEMEN OF HIS CLAN

Coming back to his lodgings from Parliament, Lovat collapsed in exhaustion. Servants pulled shut the windows of his rented house. The panes kept out the ‘gross stinking Foggs, scents and vapours’ they believed carried disease in to the patient. Banked up with blankets, temperature rising, he longed to change the foul London air for that of the Highlands. He believed he was going to die. This was the end of his journey, to fall before the finishing post, one foot over the threshold of his home and estates, one foot hanging over the abyss. He worried that he had failed in his responsibilities. After 500 years, the Fraser name would be gone in a generation.

A physician arrived with his bag of ‘lancets, boluses, confections, and electuaries’. From the pocket of his frockcoat, he tugged out ‘a big sand glass’ and counted Lord Lovat’s pulse. The first treatment he recommended was a phlebotomising – blood-letting. British people shed more blood in peace than in time of war. The doctor then consulted manuals of the healing arts. For a pestilential fever like this, Lovat could ‘have a cataplasm of snails beaten and put to the soles of the feet’. Fevers induced sore eyes. For this he might take ‘pigeon’s blood hot to the eyes, or a young caller pigeon slit in the back’. Despite trying a selection of remedies, Lovat got weaker. By 4 April 1718, he could barely sit up or hold a pen. It was time to dictate a testament for his people. He must tell them what he died for.

‘My Dear Friends,’ he said, ‘this is the last time of my life I shall have occasion to write to you … The greatest happiness I proposed to myself under heaven was to make you live happy.’ What of lasting value would his words leave? He had produced no son. He enjoyed no permanent and unchallenged possession of his titles and clan territories. ‘I designed my poor commons live at their ease and have them always well clothed and well armed, after the Highland manner, and not to suffer them to wear low country clothes,’ like trousers, ‘but make them live like their forefathers, with the use of their arms, that they might always be in a condition to defend themselves against their enemies, and do service to their friends.’ The letter was a manifesto on clanship’s values and fears. It was also a detailed picture of Lovat’s internal landscape, a vision that combined the imaginary and the historical. To his mind, this way of life was all that preserved them ‘from the wicked designs of the family of Tarbat [Mackenzies] and Glengarry, joined to the family of Athol’.

Should the Fraser gentry, ‘falsely, for little private interest and views, abandon your duty to your name and suffer a pretended heiress and her Mackenzie children to possess your country … to chase you by slight and might … out of your native country … you will be like the miserable … Jews, scattered and vagabonds throughout the unhappy kingdom of Scotland.’ Their children will curse them in their graves as ‘cowardly, knavish men, who sold and abandoned their chief, their name, their birthright, and their country for a false and foolish present gain, even as most of Scots people curse this day those who sold them and their country to the English by the fatal Union which I hope will not last long.’ The Scottish nationalist cursed the Union which the British peer served George I to defend. A cash-based economy; private enterprise that favoured the individual over common endeavour – new values were creeping into the homes of the Gaelic-Highland lairds and pushing apart the foundations of their society. Lovat sank back onto his pillows and despatched the letter to the Highlands. He glanced here at the basis of quarrels he had with certain Fraser gentlemen, who had thrown over the bonds of clanship to live and work contentedly under the Mackenzies.

As he lay in what he believed was his deathbed, the Mackenzie creditors contested the authority of the British Parliament to reverse the decision of Scotland’s highest judicial body. Under the Articles of Union, the Scottish judiciary was independent and kept jurisdiction in these cases, they said. They asserted they were owed over £6,000 (over £750,000 in today’s money). Duncan Forbes responded tartly that the British Parliament was the last resort for all Britons seeking justice, and the Scots were also British. The impasse could not hold. Duncan tried to cheer him up. ‘I got your mock letter of my burial,’ Lovat thanked Duncan. A month later, Lovat was pleased to report that after taking a vomit he felt better at last. He could not afford to stay away from the Highlands any longer.

Lovat climbed the stone turnpike stair at Castle Dounie, and bent his head to go through a narrow arched door on the first floor, entering the great hall. It gave him the most powerful pleasure to be here. Rooms led off it in the other three corners. One was his. One was his wife’s. One was a withdrawing room, the privy. In her room, Lady Lovat sat before a fire. She pushed herself from the chair. Lovat liked the way her swelling belly lifted the belt of her dress. She was delighted to see her Lord back home, but thought he looked careworn, thin and ill.

He greeted Margaret, Castleleathers and Fraser of Phopachy in Gaelic. He had made Phopachy his chamberlain. The clan elite, the
fine
, attended her Ladyship to advise on managing the estates in her Lord’s absence. Phopachy and Castleleathers told their chief they were struggling to control the Mackenzies gathered around Amelia. On his own behalf, Phopachy presented his debt for settlement, contracted when Lovat had to flee in 1702. It had fallen due when Lovat was reinstated. Still worn out, Lovat raged that he had nothing to pay with, and it was not matured until he had permanent title to his lands. This he did not have, though Phopachy must agree he was trying as hard as he could to rectify that. Neither of them had foreseen this scenario of temporary restoration when they agreed the terms of the loan. Phopachy must wait. Phopachy demanded something back. The two men rowed bitterly.

Castleleathers’s brother-in-law would not climb down. He insisted the two of them, the chief as the debtor and Phopachy the creditor, submit the decision on Phopachy’s bond to arbitration. Lovat had to agree. Arbitration had the binding force of Scottish and British law, though it was a native Gaelic regulating structure. Phopachy presented his account. Lovat’s defence was quixotic – he said he was mad with fear for his life at the time he entered into the arrangement. He could not be held liable for decisions made during the period of lunacy. The arbitrators heard him out, and declared unanimously for Phopachy. Lovat offered to reissue the bond to Phopachy, with a five-year term. Phopachy accepted it, and even loaned his chief more money.

Typical of a man brought up in proximity to a great house, but not the son of the person responsible for the day-to-day problems of thousands of tenants and their homes and livelihoods, their hundreds of requests and complaints, Lovat lived out an idealised image of his role. The ideal inspired him to achieve the impossible, but made it hard for him to adapt to his role in a changing world. While he had been in exile, Highland society had changed, yet he imagined it was still as he had left it. When the largely self-sufficient members of his clan gentlemen queried his actions, he overreacted to any criticism and dismissed them with impatience. These men should not challenge his authority. Even Castleleathers, who had risked his life to bring Lovat home, now sided with his brother-in-law against his chief.

The following January, 1719, Duncan stepped in to help Lovat win his appeal in the House of Lords. No wonder Lovat had no money. His legal actions passed back and forth between the Court of Session in Edinburgh and the Houses of Parliament. The costs appalled him. Money melted in London. Although finding in favour of Lovat, the Lords issued a proviso. ‘Such debts of the creditors … as were real,’ were still binding and chargeable against the estates. Always, thought Lovat, the partial victory, the limited prize to temper his joy. The Mackenzie lawyers fell on the word ‘real’ debts. It was a terrible tug of war between two evenly matched sides. Both hung on to their claims for dear life. Lovat sent out Phopachy to collect his rents.

Amelia’s agent, Robertson, also rode through Lovat’s country to collect rents to meet the ‘real’ debts and the allowance she had to live on. When Phopachy called on the tenantry after Robertson, he was told Amelia’s ‘receiver’ had already taken them, in cash and kind. This could not go on. Robertson’s house was within two miles of Dounie. Lovat rode across and ordered him to stay off Fraser lands. Robertson ignored him. Like his mistress, Robertson regarded Lovat with contempt, as an outlaw and a rapist. This
arriviste
chief would be gone the minute his mistress’s husband died anyway. Lovat and Robertson quarrelled violently.

In the middle of the night a couple of days later, Robertson woke to the sound of animals in a panic, and the smell of burning timber. Horrified, he roused his household. They rushed outside to see ‘corn, barns and other outhouses’ collapsing to the ground, ‘to the great loss and terror of the owner and his family’. A lot of Amelia’s farm rents were in those buildings. The Mackenzies conjectured who was behind the arson. ‘Wilful fire-raising is regarded as a crime of a very deep dye, and is punishable as treason,’ said a contemporary account. Under feudalism all property was the King’s property. To attack his property was to attack his person. Unnerved, Robertson did not stay to press his suit, despite Mackenzie pressure to do so, and left Lovat country.

The previous spring, the death at St Germains of James II’s widow, Mary of Modena, exposed how unsettled Britain still was five years into George’s reign. Mary’s pensions, the subsistence of many leading Jacobites for so many years, died with her. She was the last link with real power for the Jacobites. Her death threw her followers into panic.

Philip V of Spain offered to help. Eager to reassert Spanish authority in Europe, he had diverted a fleet, equipped for him by Pope Clement VI, to be used to defeat the Ottomans. Instead, Philip sent it to seize Sardinia and Sicily. For some time, Spain had also been stopping British shipping on the high seas, demanding to search for contraband. The Spanish suspected the British of trading illegally with Spanish colonies in America. On 17 December 1718, the British declared war on Spain. The Spanish first minister, Cardinal Alberoni, took the war to mainland Britain, and in the spring of 1719 persuaded Philip to fund the Jacobites to invade Britain and return the Roman Catholic ‘James III and VIII’ to power.

On 7 March 1719, the first wave of the campaign, with the Irish Duke of Ormonde at the head of several thousand men, sailed from Cadiz. When the news reached England, Walpole ordered his intelligence network to find out their destination urgently.

Off Cape Finisterre in Brittany, Ormonde’s fleet encountered a severe storm that scattered and damaged it, forcing a return to Spain. The second prong of the attack, a little diversionary fleet to Scotland, knew none of this when the Earl Marischal, the Earl of Seaforth, the Marquis of Tullibardine (eldest son of the Duke of Atholl) and 307 Spaniards reached Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in late April 1719. They moved to the mainland on the Scottish west coast, landing at Eilean Donan Castle.

Unable to suppress his latent Jacobitism, Lovat wrote in secret to his ‘Cousin Seaforth’ to ‘encourage and desire him to come down with his men; and that he, Lord Lovat, would join with all his’. Lovat hated some of Seaforth’s Mackenzie kin as predators to his estates, but he felt affection for their high chief as a devoted supporter of their rightful Stuart King. George I was never more than a usurper; Lovat’s support for him was opportunistic. Jacobitism was always with Lovat, though mostly hidden under lock and key.

His next letter was as Governor of the Castle and troops in Inverness. Lovat wrote to Stanhope to ask for arms, men and money to defend the country from the rebel force lying on the west coast. Instead of getting more funds from the Secretary of State, Lovat received a furious reply, reporting some political gossip from their Squadrone opponents: apparently Lovat had offered Inverness to the Earl of Seaforth. The administration ordered General Wightman north at once to take charge of the government resistance to the invasion. Lovat galloped south to defend himself, and deny the allegations. Before leaving he ordered his gentlemen to raise the clan and put themselves under Wightman.

It was not difficult for Lovat to deny the rumour. He had worked with energy and diligence on the government’s behalf for nearly five years now, sincere in wanting to serve his political masters well to earn places and positions. His friends and patrons were sure this rumour was a hate campaign by Lovat’s political enemies. Among the letters waiting for Lovat in London, however, one made his heart skip a beat. It was from the dowager Countess of Seaforth.