The Last Highlander (26 page)

Listening to men like Lovat, and his friends and enemies, Wade went further than his initial brief demanded. He addressed the question that was always avoided: What was the longer term policy for accommodating the Gaelic-speaking Highlands into the wider culture of Great Britain? Wade responded by asking for finances to improve the country’s infrastructure; to repair and upgrade existing roads and fortresses and build new ones; and to put commercial and Royal Navy vessels on the major lochs. Wade intended to open up the Highlands to immigration and commerce.

Lovat vehemently disagreed with Wade, hating the prospect of his country being overrun by foreigners. They did not need more forts. The chiefs of the significant clans loyal to King George already lived in fortified castles. If funded from central government, these focal points could hold enough men to enable effective local policing. Wade said that was not desirable; for various reasons it would be insulting to Lovat to dilate upon. The forts must be independent of interference by local magnates like Lovat, answerable only to London. Lovat insisted there was plenty of commercial activity in and around Inverness, since the port of Inverness had been a royal burgh for 500 years. It did not need new roads, while the sea lanes were mighty highways, packed with traffic connecting Inverness to the whole world.

*    *    *

In Inverness, on Church Street, Lovat kept a house. He did business of all sorts here but only kept a small table: the public dining of scores of people at Castle Dounie exhausted his stomach and his purse. He needed to trade with Inverness merchants such as his cousin Bailie John Steuart, who bought the commodities Lovat’s estates produced in commercial quantities. The Bailie only wholesaled as a merchant, and had cellars and a warehouse in the town.

The Bailie’s ships went all over Europe and brought back everything desired by both the humble and haughty all over the Highlands. Barrel staves, knapwood, timber, iron, window glass, copper, soap, flax and rope came in to Inverness harbour from Danzig, Stockholm, Norway and Frankfurt. Writing paper, flint stones and prunes arrived from the Channel Islands; sago and linen from Hamburg; linseed oil, madder, azure, white lead, verdigris, indigo, linens, muslin, aniseed, cloves, nutmeg, tea, sugar, and cork from Rotterdam; raisins, lemons, oranges, coffee beans, rhubarb, ipecacuanha,
⁵
olives, olive oil for burning in lamps, eating oil, and rice from Leghorn (Livorno); and large quantities of brandy, claret, sherry, burgundy, champagne, sack, and other wines from Bordeaux and Guernsey, Rotterdam and Hamburg. Lord Lovat ordered olives, almonds, walnuts, anchovies, coffee beans and ‘the best eating oil’ and the freshest of fruit. Musty walnuts infuriated him.

For his and his friends’ houses and families, the Bailie’s captains picked up copper tea kettles, lint hankies, iron pots, metal trenchers, house lanterns, warming pans, pewter dishes, branders, flesh hooks, flamers, leather, dressed calf skins ‘soft as cream’, silk plaids, clothes for the men and hats for the boys when they were too old for Scotch bonnets. A blue frockcoat the Bailie ordered for himself must have buttons of the latest fashion; and silks and other articles of clothing for all their wives and daughters.

Every time Lovat came to Inverness there seemed to be some change. There were a score of merchants apart from the Bailie. Some were shopkeepers. Lovat’s kinsman, Sandy Fraser, sold him necessities for Castle Dounie. Lady Lovat sent a rider to him daily with a list to command tea, coffee, bread, salt, sugar, wheat flour and spices. Lovat added paper, lead shot by the pound, ink, and so on. Broken pots and knives went to the tinkers for repair.

All the latest books could be ordered from men like Allan Ramsay – father of the artist – in Edinburgh. News-sheets like the
Caledonian Mercury
and the
Courant
came regularly when the Bailie’s credit was good. To be able to buy in these commodities, the Bailie first had to send out cargos, exporting anything that could be traded and turn a profit. He courted big estate owners like Lord Lovat to sell him whatever the estates produced in excess.

Though Lovat protested against clansmen who abandoned traditional clanship in favour of the modern world, he modernised his estates in order to maximise revenues and preserve the traditional practices such as feasting. He harnessed some of the most up-to-date methods to fish and extract timber on his estates. Timber was taken from Glen Strathfarrar and Strathglass, then rolled into the rivers and floated to Inverness for shipbuilding, processing or export. When he thought his salmon ‘was fishing slowly’ Lovat invested in improvements. He applied for a £300 loan from the Bank of Scotland to improve his
cruives
, the wicker traps attached to the stone groynes protruding into the river and the firth on the way to Inverness. Wade’s soldiers noticed that the rivers were so plentiful in fish on the Lovat estates, they watched ‘above a hundred large salmon brought to shore at one haul’. So important was the trade that catching salmon fry was a criminal offence, punished by transportation to the Colonies – except for the little children who caught them for fun on ‘a crooked pin’.

The soldiers were puzzled by the seasonal running-in and then disappearance of the salmon. The Fraser Highlanders explained that the fish bred in the Ness and the Beauly went to sea for several years and for some reason returned to the place they were spawned in order to lay their eggs. Analysing their commodity, ‘by way of experiment, they clipped their tails into a forked figure like that of a swallow, and found them with that mark when full grown and taken out of the
cruives
’. The Frasers understood the life cycle of this precious asset as well as how to kill it and market it.

Lovat worried that General Wade’s plans for improving the infrastructure of the Highlands would undermine the ancient power of the chiefs. Wade sought a scaling back of clan society, much as he enjoyed certain things about it.

Lovat memorialised George I to provoke investment in the Highlands in the form of cash payments direct to local magnates to buy peace, as William III had done in Lovat’s youth. Wade reported to King George that investment in improving the infrastructure would improve communications. Improved communications would open the Highlands to penetration by modern British culture. This would increase national security and undermine clanship. Arming clans against one other to preserve the peace through a balance of power was an outmoded policy; it could no longer work. The government agreed with Wade and not Lovat, and gave the General up to £60,000 to start his public works.

Wade’s pet project was the construction of a series of metalled roads connecting the Highlands with the Lowlands. Just now, there were none at all. Diggers and engineers, soldiers and officers were sent out on the moors where they stayed for several years. The ordinary soldiers could earn an extra sixpence a day for labouring; the officers as much as two shillings: there were tables to be kept, even in the middle of the wilderness.

The first road to be hacked, thumped, detonated and packed down, cut right through Lovat territory, to the south of Loch Ness and through Stratherrick. Lovat had said he would rather forgo influence in any part of his land than Stratherrick. The Aird of Lovat was better agricultural land and produced good income. Close to Inverness, its people were open to modern ways and values. Stratherrick was his, body and soul; every unyielding, stony inch of it. When Wade completed the road, in 1727, Lovat rode out to look at it. The sight of it made him sick. It connected the government’s garrison at Fort William to Inverness via the newly named settlement of ‘Fort Augustus’. Until three years ago, this was
Cill Chuimein
, a village which for hundreds of years had been the meeting point of the drove roads between the east and west coast. Wade renamed it Fort Augustus when he built his huge fort there, recognising the spot as hugely important strategically, being halfway up the Great Glen between Fort William and Inverness. In renaming it Wade claimed it for Great Britain.

It all seemed to be unstoppable, this gradual reeling in of the north closer to the rest of Britain. But Wade’s work was paying off. Duncan Forbes wrote to Whitehall: ‘I made several small progresses into the Highlands’ from Inverness to assess ‘the tranquillity of those parts’ and ‘in the whole of my journey I had not seen one Highlander carry the least bit of arms, neither did I hear of any theft or robbery’. He was determined to maintain his and Culloden’s positions as purveyors of intelligence to the government in the face of the competition that was coming from men like Lovat.

Duncan, now Lord Advocate to Scotland, did however agree with Lovat that it was better for the government to feel relaxed about North Britain, and leave local matters to local men. Anxiety would only express itself in an occupying military force. He did not want hundreds of foreign soldiers quartered and garrisoned all over the Highlands for years on end, a focus for resentment, repressing unrest with force, not addressing the causes. Garrisons consumed scarce resources. The quartermasters’ list of supplies drove up prices in a semi-subsistence, traditional clan economy. The army created markets but also shortages in the basics of life.

Lovat looked around at what felt like the inevitable melting of the Highlands into Great Britain. He needed to obtain greater leverage in central government if he was going to manage the relationship between the Gaelic-speaking world of the clans and early imperial Britain. On the other hand, Lovat had a wife, daughters, a son and heir, and was chief. In Edinburgh his lawsuits to make his temporary ownership permanent dragged on so slowly and expensively, yet seemed to inch his way. He felt a certain peace and satisfaction.

*    *    *

On 11 June 1727, George I died at Osnabrück during one of his trips to Hanover. He was sixty-seven, but had felt well before he left. Three days later, Walpole received the news while at dinner and went to salute the Crown Prince as George II. Everyone with a pension, place, salary, gratification, or other financial sign of the old King’s favour lost them at a stroke, including Lovat. These were the gift of a Crown that now circled another head. They would have to be reconfirmed, renegotiated, reassigned to another, or simply withdrawn. And there would have to be another general election.

The opposition to the Walpole faction jumped for joy. This was their moment to sweep away the Treasury Lord and his thousands of placemen and pensioners. Lovat got to work, writing to men he knew in the administration, including Duncan Forbes, Argyll and Ilay. He asked them what he could do to ensure his pension was not stopped. He tried to stir up his brother-in-law, Sir James Grant, to political activity. Since his election for the seat of Inverness-shire, Sir James had not been active on his own or anybody else’s behalf in Parliament. The only speech he had made was to defend a cousin who was blatantly guilty of fiddling the funds of a charity he was involved in.

Lovat also had his eye on General Wade’s position, in charge of defence and development in the Highlands, and the Lord Lieutenancy of the Northern Counties, formerly held by the Earl of Sutherland. Regional power, a budget, salary, control of the armed forces, and the opportunities increased personal prestige and profit offered, came with these posts. Step by step he could acquire land and influence and make himself totally secure. When his lawsuits concluded to his satisfaction, then surely he would become one of the Scottish peers in the House of Lords. He could then represent himself and his clan at the centre of power and interest, the Houses of Parliament at Westminster.

TWENTY-FOUR

Tragedy, 1727–31

‘Secure the estate of Lovat to Simon’s bairns’

– LOVAT TO DUNCAN FORBES

In the election of 1727, both Sir James Grant and Duncan Forbes held on to their seats. The new Parliament would not sit until November. The following year Lovat wrote to Grant. He had heard the new King might continue the pension he received under his father, George I. It was a great relief. Lovat wrote ‘a letter of thanks to my Lord Ilay for obtaining it, being persuaded it was by his means’. He liked to imply that Ilay was his patron.

Lovat needed every penny. The Lovat estates remained heavily burdened with debts and ongoing legal costs meant he could seldom lower the level of debt on his territories. In Edinburgh, Duncan Forbes prosecuted one of Lovat’s major cases: his claim that the titles and honours of Lovat reside
in perpetuity
in his own family. He had been fighting in the courts for ten years; it all threatened to grow into one of those interminable actions that drag a family to near penury and distraction over several generations and seems only to satisfy the lawyers.

In Inverness, Lovat called on Bailie Steuart to negotiate the best prices for his salmon, timber and grain. He discussed when his chamberlains would bring in the cattle to be driven to Edinburgh to market. Lovat could hardly hear himself think above the detonations, crashes and bangs of Wade’s workmen. They were digging out the gravel at the foot of the hill on which Inverness Castle perched. The path between the hill and the River Ness was very narrow and Wade had ordered his men to widen it to improve access to the river bank. Lovat kept his eyes before him, not wanting to see what was happening. He had lost his governorship of the castle and town with the accession of George II.

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, stayed at the castle during her visits to Inverness. Its walls reared high above the town, the tiny eyes of its windows giving a view of all that went on below. Partly ruined, it was in no shape to defend the town. In his day, Lovat had repaired what he could without funds. Three soldiers digging near the main door turned up a long-dead body. One of the soldiers reached down to touch it, and the thing collapsed into dust. The workers dropped everything and ran. As the news of it spread, people came for a look. ‘Troth,’ an Inverness man decided, ‘I dinna doubt but this was ane o’ Mary’s lovers.’

Day after day, Wade’s men dug and carted away the loose gravel at the base of the castle until a road big enough to take a cart opened between Castle Hill and the River Ness. One night, the townsfolk woke to a tremendous cacophony: above a roaring noise came the sounds of shouting and running about, of names being called. People jumped from their beds. Perhaps the town was on fire. Many houses had enclosed wooden staircases running up their fronts, the way up to the private living areas above shops or warehouses. As the shouts and crashes grew louder, men, women and children rushed into their wooden stairwells and looked out through the peepholes, like little birds peeping out of a nest in a wall. There was no sign of fire, thank God. They relaxed and chattered to neighbours.

A boy came running from the direction of the castle; they stopped him to ask what was happening. General Wade’s improvements to Castle Hill had given way. The new cart track had fallen into the river. The castle was on the verge of following it. Lovat, always superstitious, called it an omen when the news was brought to him at his town house. Inverness Castle had sat tight above the town for hundreds of years and throughout his time as Governor. In foreign hands it now teetered on the brink of collapse; the land had just slipped away through their greedy grasping fingers.

Certain gentlemen of the clan always bothered Lovat. They turned this way and that, seeking to escape their chief one day, and then serve him the next, looking for a way to make a good living for their families, partly outwith, and in part within the clan. Lovat returned to Castle Dounie one evening to find a letter waiting for him. It was from James Fraser of Castleleathers, informing him that his brother-in-law, Fraser of Phopachy, had prepared a memorial about Lord Lovat’s Jacobite sentiments and secret dealings. Phopachy had recently lost his chamberlain’s position. Lovat said it was because of sharp practice; Phopachy said it was because he knew too much. Details of Lovat’s treason would go to London soon where it would be presented by ‘a Lord in the south’ to the government. It ‘is full of all the crimes that ever was invented, and capable to hang all England if it were proven’, Castleleathers explained to his Lordship.

Lovat answered that he feared nothing from this ‘wicked calumny’, though he would have to go and deny it. He accused Castleleathers and Phopachy of having cooked it up between them, to blackmail him into reinstating Phopachy as chamberlain and into giving Castleleathers a farm. He was outraged that a Fraser should be ready to ‘give a scandalous impression of’ his chief ‘to the world’, though he believed he was too secure to be knocked down by anything they could say. This kind of smear could be damaging. Though the accusations of treason were ignored, Lovat found himself out of favour once more. His name was taken off the lists of those recommended for places and pensions from the Crown and government and his pension of £500 a year was not renewed. Such signs of distrust angered him.

In July 1729, Lovat was in Edinburgh on legal business, leaving a heavily pregnant Margaret in charge of the growing family and bustling estates at Dounie.

From his Edinburgh house, Lovat sallied out to the Advocate’s library, repository of legal documents. He sat and researched among the records as thoroughly as had Duncan and his other legal retainers, amassing evidence to support his claims to the titles and estates of Lovat in perpetuity. He produced detailed historical examples and precedents in his favour – he would have made a brilliant lawyer. His findings were printed and bound and he gave the book to his lawyers. He paid his respects to friendly Law Lords, especially anyone concerned with the Court of Session. Duncan Forbes received almost daily visits. One judge, James Erskine, Lord Grange – a Lord of Session, and former Justice Clerk – became a close friend.

Grange was one of the judges drawing up the Fraser entail to ensure that, as soon as Lovat regained his estates, they could not be alienated from Lovat’s descendants and from male heirs again. Lord Grange ‘was understood to be a great plotter … and supposed to reserve himself for some greater occasions’, political and spiritual. As brother of the Earl of Mar, the failed leader of the ’15 rebellion, he always carried about the whiff of Jacobitism. His diary teemed with records of his dreams, prognostics and his encounters with persons supernaturally gifted, or possessed by demons. Demonology was a passion. An elder of the Presbyterian Church, it was common knowledge that Grange had a secret life in tandem with his ferocious piety.

In London, where his male friends said he went to indulge Jacobite fantasies and communicate with his exiled brother, he kept a mistress – ‘a handsome Scotch woman’, named Fanny Lindsay, who ran a coffee house at the bottom end of Haymarket. Grange and Lovat were as complicated and principled, wild and Rabelaisian as each other. It was obvious that their business relationship extended to real friendship. Grange was also fighting for the restoration of a lost inheritance. He wanted the Mar titles and estates, forfeited to the Crown after the collapse of the 1715 rebellion, restored to his nephew. He and Lovat always found much to talk about.

It was with Grange and Duncan Forbes that Lovat shared his joy the day news came from Dounie that Margaret had given birth to another healthy boy. Lovat sent back a command that he was to be baptised Alexander – ‘my little Sandy’ – after his late brother. It was a good Lovat name. He told Margaret to order the chamberlain to bring champagne and claret from the cellar. They were to drink the boy’s health. His sent for his wig and his boy to barberise his head and went out to celebrate.

When Lovat rose the next day, his housekeeper announced the arrival of another messenger. In the parlour stood a clansman. The chief must return immediately to Castle Dounie, he said. Complications had set in after the baby’s safe delivery. Margaret was dead. Puerperal fever, plague of the birthing chambers of Europe, had swept her away.

A devastated Lovat poured out his grief in his letter to his brother-in-law, Sir James Grant. ‘My loss is inconceivable to any but myself that feels it every hour and every minute,’ he wrote. ‘If I lost a most affectionate and good wife, I am sure you lost the most affectionate sister that ever was born … So I hope, my dear brother, that whatever comes of me, you will support my poor infants, your own nephews and nieces, the dear and tender pledges of my lovely soul’s affection for me.’ He had been married to his ‘lovely soul’ for thirteen years. So much he had been starved and deprived of in France he had found in Margaret. A clan home without the chief’s lady to preside over it and sweeten it with her spirit and style lacked a heart.

Lovat now had total responsibility for four children: two girls under ten, a boy aged three and the newborn Sandy. He packed and made his way home to bury his wife and arrange for a nurse for his ‘poor infants’. He found them utterly bewildered, seeking their mother. In exile for so long, he had married late, bred late. His brother-in-law’s son, Ludovick Grant, was getting ready to go to university, while Lovat’s sons were babies. The funeral cortege stretched for miles from Castle Dounie to the thatched church in Kirkhill.

Margaret had always been there at Castle Dounie, orientating him. Now he was alone and getting old. He found domestic matters did not run as smoothly in his absence as they had under Lady Lovat’s control. Servants ran away, and the cellars and grain stores fell into disorder and were continually raided. Using his powers of hereditary jurisdiction, Lovat put out an arrest warrant on one runaway. ‘John Fraser, my domestic servant, that plays on the violin and hautbois, a black fellow, about five foot eight inches high, who run away out of my house with his liveries, and with several other things that he stole … both gold and silver and clothes … in order to go and play at the assemblies in Aberdeen’, and should be apprehended ‘’til I send for him, to be tried according to law’. If found guilty, he would be thrust into the pit of Beauly – an underground cell – or strung by the heels for a few hours in front of the castle, as a lesson to the others not to take liberties.

He had no one to listen to his defeats and triumphs in his great odyssey. Margaret was not there to share his joy the following year when Duncan triumphed in the Court of Session in the matter of the Lovat titles. On 2 July 1730, Lovat wrote to John Forbes of Culloden from Edinburgh ‘I have this afternoon gained my cause, two to one.’ His son, Simon, was the Master of Lovat and heir to the ancient titles after his father. ‘I cannot tell you how much I owe to Duncan,’ he admitted to Culloden. ‘I hope he has established a family that will be forever faithful to the rooftree of Culloden,’ he cheered, invoking the alliance of friendly clans that would serve each one by serving them all.

The loss of the titles fatally weakened Fraserdale’s chances of keeping the Lovat estates. The Mackenzies were humiliated by losing this case. It signalled that they were judged not to be the heirs. If the courts forced them to hand over the land and houses as well, they would beggar Lovat for them; his family would never recover financially. Though Lovat expected this outcome, it still outraged him. He would have to put the clan in difficult circumstances for decades in order to own what he should have inherited in 1698.

He needed more and more income. Lovat berated his brother-in-law, Sir James Grant, MP for the shire of Inverness, demanding to know why he did not make more capital out of his position. His constituency was vast, and effectively included all Lord Lovat’s country, as well as the Grant estates down the north side of Loch Ness, and some MacDonald of Glengarry and Cameron country towards Fort William. Why was Grant not establishing himself and Lovat with Ilay and Walpole as the key men to patronise in the region? Lovat felt his bargaining position at Westminster would be enhanced by the settlement of the Lovat estates on him and his boys. It would reinforce the impression of an established clanned power. He criticised Duncan Forbes for not getting on with the case, for wasting time on other things.

On Christmas Day, 1730, Lovat was in Edinburgh asking Culloden to find out if ‘the infatuate family of Fraserdale are resolved, or not, to agree, really and finally’. Lovat told Culloden ‘[Duncan] says that they are such mad fools that he can make nothing of them. However he will put the thorn in their side, and make them excuseless before God and man. If you can bring this about … you secure the estate of Lovat to Simon’s bairns.’