The Last Highlander (30 page)

He told his cousins and kinsmen to take the young Master out into Edinburgh society. ‘It is the best piece of education that he can have, for he will learn always something by those that he visits, and it will give him countenance and forwardness in the world, which is very necessary and much more useful to him in his life than all he can learn in schools.’ This was the man-of-the-world’s philosophy: cultivate charm and interest. Lovat delayed his plan to bring Sandy to Edinburgh for as long as he could. ‘The Brig’, as he called Sandy, short for Brigadier, Lovat’s nickname for his second son, ‘is in such a bad situation every way that I cannot send him south till the spring.’ Living with the Grant cousins had failed. Simon was ‘very ill as to his health, and low in his body; but, which is worse, he is entirely lost and debauched in his education. He hardly speaks a word now without swearing, cursing, blaspheming and lying. So that I am resolved to keep him under my own eye this winter.’ The boy worried him terribly, but he could not think what to try now.

The other reason to be in Edinburgh was the Stuart Association. Balhaldies had carried Lovat’s requests for commissions, patents and honours to James Stuart. ‘His Majesty’ was generous enough to give ‘a commission to carry to me of General of the Highlanders, which I have; and several letters writ with the King’s own hand, that his Majesty would pay all the money I paid Fraserdale, and his creditors, for the estate of Lovat; and, last of all, the King was so good as to give such a singular mark of his favour to me, and to my family, that he created me Duke of Fraser etc.,’ Lovat admitted. Until the Stuarts were restored, this was play-acting. Yet if any of his old Whig colleagues got hold of letters calling James ‘the King’ or ‘his Majesty’, Lovat could have been executed the next day.

Duncan Forbes’s intelligence told him of a dissenting group, and old friends foolish enough to become members. It might be no more than another seditious club: an outlet for like-minded men to air views highly critical of Walpole’s administration. There were plenty of those. The Lord President was content to treat it as the fantasy of the dispossessed it was most likely to remain. Meanwhile, he worked to strip its activists of any power that might enable them to endanger the state. This was Walpole’s way also: not to challenge enemies openly, just dig out the ground steadily from under their feet.

From the army’s point of view, Wade reported to the King that old Lord Lovat embodied the North British problem. At the government’s expense, highly politicised, able and powerful chiefs had equipped and trained up their clansmen to create an armed force that combined the discipline of regular British troops with the martial spirit of clanship. Lovat rotated the men of his company so as many as possible capable of bearing arms experienced formal military training. Wade saw potential trouble being trained, at his expense, but there was nothing definite to fix on.

At the beginning of 1740, George II demanded action against the captains of the Independent Companies. Wade stepped in and stripped Lord Lovat of his company of Frasers and put them under command elsewhere. Lovat was mortified. There was worse to come. Wade advised the government to remove Lovat from the office of High Sheriff of Inverness-shire. Lovat complained to Lord Grange’s brother. ‘I was fitter to be Sheriff of that great and troublesome shire, to keep it in peace and good order, than any one man beyond the Grampians; nay, I may say, than any man in Scotland.’ No one disagreed, including Lord President Forbes, but the risks of letting him do the job were too high. The risk in dismissing him was to alienate him further from the establishment. On balance, they could not imagine that would be a problem at his age.

‘I have a clean conscience and upright heart,’ Lovat comforted himself, and he meant it, this short and infinitely complex statement of his position, adding: ‘My Lord Ilay is gone into measures … to ruin my person and family … I plainly see the design is to put me in prison upon the first account of an invasion, and then to make a battalion of my name for the good of the government.’ Ilay would have been startled to hear him refer so casually to the idea of a foreign invasion. Britain had been safe from that threat for a quarter of a century. That summer the Earl of Ilay and the Duke of Argyll came north and Lovat went again to Edinburgh, to see if there was anything he could do to reverse Ilay’s decision. ‘If I was such an observer of frights [omens] as I used to be, I would not have taken journey,’ Lovat commented afterwards.

Two days before he left, one his coach horses stepped into the paddock and ‘dropped down dead as if she had been shot with a cannon ball’. The next day, Lovat was on his way to say goodbye to Fraser of Dumballach and Fraser of Achnagairn and leave them their orders, when ‘one of the hind wheels of my chariot broke in pieces’. Then his chamberlain, John Fraser, broke his leg coming back from doing the chief’s business in Applecross on the west coast.

The weather was foul the entire journey south. They broke down three times, and Lovat brooded the whole way on the latest political developments. The Whigs under Walpole were in power still, after twenty-five years. In Scotland, Walpole and his managers, including Ilay, Forbes and Wade, aroused hostility and envy of their power and incomes to the extent that other Whigs, not the Tories, were their main opponents. This Whig opposition to the Court Party at present divided into two groups: the Jacobites, and a group called the Patriots. The Patriots wanted independence again. The Duke of Argyll had broken with Walpole and led the Patriots at home and in Westminster. Ilay stayed with the Court Party that served his interests so well, and with Walpole. As he rode south with his daughters, Lovat wondered if he should break with Ilay officially, and side with the Patriot opposition? Or, should he commit himself openly to the Jacobite opposition? He admitted to his cousin, Fraser of Inverallochy, that he was in a quandary.

In Edinburgh, the Duke of Argyll held a levee every morning. Once he had recovered from the journey, Lovat attended. Argyll ‘embraced me after his ordinary manner’. The Fraser chief regaled him with his nightmare journey. They both ‘laughed heartily’.

Seeing Ilay was a different matter. The Earl shunned Lovat for days, and then summoned him in for a private interview. Face to face, the Earl was cold and unamused by the old chief’s news. Ilay and Argyll had saved this man twenty-five years ago. He owed them loyalty, no matter what he thought in his heart. Ilay accused Lovat of Jacobite conspiracies, but denied having a hand in breaking Lovat’s company. Besides, the Independent Companies were going to be raised into a British regiment of the line. Lovat waxed on to Ilay that he had been ‘as faithful to him as his own heart’ over the years. Ilay objected that even if he was, it was also the case that his ‘house was a Jacobite house; that the discourse of those in my house was Jacobitism, and that I conversed with nobody but Jacobites’.

‘When I came here,’ Lovat wrote to Inverallochy after this meeting, ‘I was not determined to dispose of myself absolutely for some time.’ But then he heard the Duke of Argyll, ‘openly proclaiming’ that he and the Patriots ‘were resolved in any event to … endeavour to recover the liberty of their country, which is enslaved by the tyranny and oppression of a wicked minister [Walpole], I own my heart and inclination warmed very much to that side.’ Lovat had come to sound out Ilay, to see if he would offer anything to keep him loyal; but he ‘said nothing to me that regarded my person or family’. He just kept repeating that Walpole ‘accused me of being a Jacobite … I found that he asked nothing of me.’

This was the point. Asking no favour of Lovat, Ilay did not need to offer favours. He did not even promise Lovat some ‘equivalent for my company … I then plainly concluded that he left me to myself to do what I thought fit.’

That was not at all the conclusion Ilay thought he should draw. Lovat should conclude that he was very lucky not to be arrested, but permitted to go home and live out the remainder of his life invisible to the ministry. He had never done that. Certainly, Lovat was now old, and slowing down. Nevertheless, he was still a dangerous man to leave ‘floating between interests’. Lovat joined the Patriots.

More than the malice of enemies, Lovat was a victim of the terms of his own success. He had achieved, against all the odds, much of what he set out to achieve in life. But his natural enemy, the Hanoverian regime, had delivered it, not his beloved Stuarts.

To take his mind off his troubles, Lovat asked his son’s tutor John Halket to dine, and told him to bring his university friend, a young minister called Alexander Carlyle, with him.

The two young men went to Lucky Vint’s, a celebrated village tavern in the west end of the town. There ‘they found Lord Grange, with three or four gentlemen of the name of Fraser, young Sandy Fraser, and his father, Lovat’. The two old Lords bubbled playfully with Jacobite allusions. Lovat said the grace in French, leaving the clerics distinctly uncomfortable. After supper the claret was put on the table. It ‘circulated fast, [and] the two old men grew very merry’. Carlyle noticed that Grange, without appearing to flatter, was very attentive of Lovat, and careful to please him.

Kate Vint, the landlady’s daughter, pleased him better. When she brought in more wine, Lovat insisted she stay to dance with him. She was a handsome girl, ‘with fine black eyes and an agreeable person’; she ‘was very alluring’, the young cleric noted, but he could not get near her. ‘She was a mistress of Lord Drummuir,’ Halket told him, but Drummuir could not set her up in a house, where he could get at her when he wanted, because ‘her mother would not part with her, as she drew much company to the’ tavern. Lovat and Kate danced until she, observing Lovat’s legs as thick as posts, fell ‘a-laughing and ran off’. Skipping away from the old man ‘she missed her second course of kisses … though she had endured the first’.

Watching the chief standing in the middle of the room, Carlyle observed that ‘Lovat was tall and stately, and might have been handsome in his youth.’

Back home, when campaigning for the 1741 general election got underway, Lovat seemed to hang back. Young Simon was recovering from a serious fever and Lovat could think of nothing but the boy’s health. ‘I do not think it is proper that he should go to the college this year on account of his health, and the design that my Lord Ilay has to bring him to England – which design however shall never be execute but over my belly. And,’ he snapped ominously, ‘by all probability things will fall out before that time that will take up the ministry with more essential things than the education of my son.’

When he could not resist the call of electioneering, Lovat finally abandoned Sir James Grant, a Court man, and promoted his cousin Sir Norman MacLeod, a Patriot Party man, for the seat of Inverness-shire. Lovat had given the Grants twenty-five years of support, delivering votes, spending money, dispensing advice, and Grant had done nothing to build a faction to rival the Forbeses for Ilay’s favours. On the contrary, Lovat was stripped of his offices. This humiliated and angered the old man.

The whole winter of 1740–41 Lovat was much confined to Dounie and could not canvass much. A ‘terrible storm … which is the greatest that was ever known in this country since the memory of man or by tradition or history’, kept him indoors. ‘I bless God I stand it out very well. It is true I live in the South of France, for I never go out of my room, and I keep such fires night and day, that my room is a quite different climate from any other room in the house. The question is how to venture out at all.’ Lovat formulated a health regime. Stuck inside, hot rooms and cold baths helped keep him vigorous – and dancing. ‘Notwithstanding of this extraordinary severe storm … I take the cold bath every day, and since I cannot go abroad, use the exercise of dancing every day.’ He and his teenage daughters, Jenny and Sibyl, jigged and reeled with their servants and friends. ‘I can dance as cleverly as I have done these ten years past,’ Lovat boasted.

He told Lochiel, the Cameron chief, that if MacLeod got the seat for the Patriots ‘my family gets honour and reputation by it’. On the day, MacLeod won, but so did Walpole, fighting off again the challenge to his leadership. The Patriots got no power.

By 1743, Lovat had found contentment in his life. A prominent and successful figure in the Highlands, he seems to have reconciled himself to disappointment in the national arena. He was managing his debts and the estates were in good order for the first time in generations. Most of his children thrived. Cluny MacPherson, head of a Jacobite clan, married Jenny in 1742. The Mackintosh’s son came on a visit ‘to see me in this little hut’, Castle Dounie. The Mackintosh was an active Jacobite and was out in 1688, and 1715. ‘His visit has given me vast pleasure,’ Lovat assured the young man’s father, adding suggestively, ‘I have enjoined my son to live in great friendship with him all his life … I was so lucky as to have here the Earl of Cromartie, and Lord MacLeod, his son, and his Governor, and Dr Fraser’ – Jacobites all. ‘I never saw more delightful company than they have been and continue so. The Earl and Dr Fraser are enough to make a hundred rejoice if they were in company. There was nothing but mirth and affection among us.’

Lovat said he and the Mackintosh must stay in touch by sending letters via Lovat’s Inverness merchant, Duncan Fraser. He ended the letter on a sharp, quiet note, indicating why they might need a quick and reliable method of communicating. ‘We expect great news by this post. If I have anything extraordinary, I will acquaint you. I pray God preserve our friends, and restore the liberties of our country.’ There was rumour of an invasion.

TWENTY-EIGHT

‘A foolish and rash undertaking’, 1743–45

‘Heroic and glorious it is to venture your person for your dear country’

– LOVAT TO DRUMMOND OF BALHALDIE

The French had moved to menace the borders of Hanover. Horace Walpole, Sir Robert Walpole’s brother, reported from Florence that the Jacobites in Italy were telling each other that France would not pull back from Hanover ‘but on conditions very advantageous to the Pretender’s family … which they interpret to be the dismembering of Scotland from England and settling themselves there’.

Nearly thirty years earlier, Lockhart of Carnwath, a passionate anti-Union Scotsman, came up with a scheme whereby the Jacobites and the French, with help from the Holy Roman Empire, could seize George I’s beloved Hanover and not let it go until he abandoned Great Britain in favour of James III. Perhaps it was happening now. The Jacobite interpretation greatly exaggerated the power of the British King. George II could not, ever, form a policy that hung on him compromising British security and the very structure of the nation. The idea was inconceivable to any but desperadoes and revolutionaries. Lovat was neither of these things.

George II looked to his homeland and went to put himself at the head of his army. At Dettingen, on 27 June, George II led British forces to victory over the French. It was the last battle in which a British King commanded his armies in person.

The French reaction was towering anger. They were not at war with England. They menaced Hanover in so far as it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, with whom they
were
in dispute. In retaliation, the French decided against a peaceful withdrawal from the borders of Hanover, and prepared to send a fleet up the Channel to strike back against the British by invading and drawing home their troops. Part of the strategy involved supporting a Jacobite uprising in Scotland.

This then was the ‘extraordinary’ news Lovat mentioned to Mackintosh. Over the last few years Gordon of Glenbuchat had visited James Stuart several times to urge him to come home to Scotland and forget England. Most Scottish Jacobites were happy to break up the Union. In Edinburgh, the Association for the Restoration of the Stuarts now met with Drummond of Balhaldie and Murray of Broughton, to gather intelligence about the mood and desires of the English and Scottish Jacobites. An English opposition Whig, Philip, Earl Chesterfield, had even visited the Jacobite Duke of Ormonde in Avignon to see if the Jacobites’ action might bring down the hated Walpole.

The Edinburgh Association sent a memorial to Fleury and the French Court, exaggerating the level of support in the country. The French answered with a proposal ‘to send over 3,000 to be landed in Scotland: 1,500 near Inverness, so as immediately to join with the clan of the Frasers; the other 1,500 to land on the west coast near Lochiel’s country’. The Association repeated that French support was a non-negotiable condition of a rising in Britain. They said 10–12,000 troops should be landed as near as possible to London. Drummond of Balhaldie met Lochiel in Edinburgh (where he was renting Lovat’s house) and said that if support looked likely from the English Jacobites as well, then 1743 might be a year of great change.

Lovat sounded a warning to his younger conspirators, saying he thought the French, on past form, might drop the Jacobites if they settled their dispute with England. One British diplomat summed up what Lovat already knew about Spain and France’s attitude to the Stuarts: ‘This family is a tool in the hands of some people and made to believe great things in agitation in their behalf.’ Yet no one could afford to trust too much ‘to outward appearances … in a matter of this importance’. That was the problem. The Stuarts were a sideshow that could be moved centre stage. It meant they must all tread with great care in public, said Lovat.

In Lovat’s Edinburgh house, Cameron of Lochiel found himself bombarded with post from his friend and landlord, now at home in Dounie. ‘You are a very lazy correspondent,’ Lovat scolded him. ‘You never tell me a word of the Duke of Argyle’s death, nor of the Lady Achnabreak’s dream, nor of Prince Charles passing the Rhine, nor of King George’s beating M. de Noailles, nor of Landes being taken, nor the Germans having their quarters in Alsace Lorraine and Burgundy, nor of the Czarina having sent 40,000 men to assist the Queen of Hungary. You may think little of these events, but I think them very considerable, and would wish to know the sentiments of your great city about them.’ He then told Lochiel, all the work of Balhaldie and Murray of Broughton could bring forth was a wash of sympathetic sounds from English friends. They must wait for God to deliver them from ‘Slavery’, by which he meant the Union, and then they could act. Under all his protestations to Wade or Ilay had lain the old Lovat, instinctively Jacobite and Scottish nationalist.

The Fraser gentry in Edinburgh and London fed the information they gathered into their chief’s formidable intelligence network, often via cattle drovers going to and from Edinburgh. Dr Fraser of Achnagairn reported the rumour that John Roy Stuart had turned double agent and gone to Rome to spy for the Hanoverians at the Jacobite Court. Detected, John Roy had to flee to Italy. Lovat was doubtful. Local and European pressures churned together in his head, inseparable. He was not solely a Scot, Gael, Briton, or European, but educated all his life for all these roles. He was the oldest chief around. Few of the younger men had his experience, intelligence, or personal power to draw on.

Sick with the ague, at home Lovat treated himself with Peruvian bark infused in Spanish wine, and got better. The weather, in typical Scottish fashion, compounded the gloom. A severe storm confined him in his room for two months. He thought his constitution must be marvellous to ‘have resisted such a close confinement and continual eating and drinking and sitting up without any exercise’, since there was no escaping the need to entertain and make plans. Cluny MacPherson came with his wife Jenny and their infant daughter. They brought with them some Camerons, including Lochiel’s brother Archibald, MacPherson of Invereshi, and Lachlan MacPherson, Duncan Campbell of Clunes, and the Laird of Foulis and seven of his friends, ‘and dined and stayed all night and was very merry, so that my house was very throng, as it was almost every other day this [spring] and summer’.

When his daughter and son-in-law prepared to leave, Lovat begged Cluny to leave the little girl to cheer up her grandfather. Cluny agreed, but then changed his mind. ‘He acted the absolute chief,’ complained Lovat, ‘and carried the poor infant away in a cradle on horseback … I cannot think that a house … not finished two months ago can be very wholesome either for the child or the mother. But it seems that Cluny is resolved to wear the britches and the petticoats too.’

Lovat often sat till six in the morning, combining socialising and business. The men who came regularly were the ones excluded by the government. The government favoured the men who dined at Culloden House, where the Lord President entertained and networked as keenly as Lovat did at Dounie. The 3rd Earl of Cromartie, grandson of Lovat’s first enemy Tarbat, came to Lovat. He was broke, but ambitious to replace Seaforth as chief of the Mackenzies. Simon called him ‘the prettiest Mackenzie alive’. Seaforth was dining at Culloden.

Lovat also kept up a busy correspondence with MacLeod of Macleod, MP for Inverness-shire, whose seat he felt he had bought at great expense. He hoped his cousin (Lovat’s mother was a MacLeod) could secure him some advancement, as Sir James Grant had signally failed to do. Lovat wrote to MacLeod in London, saluting him. Lovat had been ill again, but ‘it has pleased God to keep me for some more time from the happy society of those brave upright honest persons who were an honour to their king and to their country’ – the forebears for whom they were all named, and in whose beds they slept and halls they ate in, and whom he knew he must soon join. ‘I pray for my friends as I do for myself, and particularly for the laird of MacLeod … for I presume to know a little of his private sentiments.’ Lovat tickled the Skye chief with MacLeod’s emotional Jacobitism and shared feeling for homeland and people. Then he got down to business. MacLeod was his MP, and Lovat addressed him in that capacity. ‘I took the liberty to write to you about getting the premium on naval stores.’ It was a small customs perk yielding £80 per annum. He also asked MacLeod for newspapers, especially the
London Evening Post
and
Westminster Journal
, and offered to pay him in ‘Beauly salmon and good claret’ when MacLeod came to stay at Castle Dounie.

By the end of 1743, the crisis between Britain and France was resolving itself without the declaration of outright hostilities. Some malign fate seemed to haunt ‘the affairs of poor old Scotland’, Lovat observed through the miasma of approaching peace. Yet peace did not come, and in 1744, Britain and France finally declared war on one another. Jacobite hopes revived, yet again. Lovat and his fellow conspirators continually reconnoitred the Highlands to pass on intelligence through their spy network. One thing struck them as being of particular note: their land had been emptied of its effective military presence. The government had undermined most of the work General Wade had devoted his life to since 1724. Wade strove to lay down roads, build up barracks, put galleys and patrol boats on lochs and inlets, and to maintain six well-trained, fully manned Independent Companies. His brief had been to secure the Highlands so they could never again threaten the security of the British state. As Ilay told Lovat, the administration decided to break the six Independent Companies. They were then reformed, expanded from six to ten, and raised into a regular British regiment in 1740. Called the ‘Black Watch’ to distinguish them from the Redcoats, the Highland Regiment had served to protect the Highlands for three years. Wade was very pleased. The government embodied the regiment specifically for this purpose. At the precise moment when they were needed to discourage the Jacobites and Scottish nationalists alike, to Wade’s and Duncan Forbes’s utter dismay, orders came to march the Black Watch south in preparation for embarkation to Flanders, to join the British line in Europe.

From Westminster’s point of view, by the end of 1743, the Highlands had been peaceful for nearly thirty years. The region was mostly seen as a source of tax revenue and men to bolster his Majesty’s government’s policies in Europe. Lovat and his associates alerted the Stuarts that the Highland garrisons had shrunk to skeleton forces, local informers had been paid off, and local soldiers had gone. The situation in Scotland had clearly moved into a much more promising position for potential invaders.

The empty horizon shocked Wade and the Lord President. Resentment that the Highlanders were paying to go to fight a war against the French, during a period of hardship for the country people, began to sour the atmosphere. Lovat ground his teeth as his Company of Frasers were marched from Scotland to Flanders. Lord Perth arrived from France. He asked Lochiel for permission to recruit among the Camerons for the French invasion force. He got away with it for a while and then was politely told to stop by a local government officer. Early in 1744 a French expeditionary force was assembled. Dudley Ryder, the British Attorney-General, noted there was ‘certain news that the French intend a descent, and the Brest squadron is reported to be now in the Downs, and they intended to come up the river, had got many pilots … We are very bare of soldiers, cannot collect 7,000 in a fortnight.’ You could hear the panic as he scribbled down his intelligence onto paper. Louis XV prepared to send 10,000 troops to land at Malden and, led by Maurice of Saxe, march up the banks of the Thames.

Unbeknown to the French, Charles Edward Stuart, enervated by an existence of nothing more than political gossip, had left Rome at three in the morning of Saturday 9 January. He arrived at Antibes in the South of France on the evening of the 23rd, evaded two British ships seeking to intercept him and reached Paris on 8 February. The Prince’s impetuous dash to try and join an expedition made the French very unhappy. They knew his movements would arouse British suspicions about their invasion plans.

The British minister, John, Lord Carteret, asserted that any attempt to ‘force a Popish Pretender upon the Protestant nation will produce an universal resentment against the authors and abettors of such a design and at once unite all his Majesty’s people in the defence of his person and government’. The ministers knew it was better to rely on soldiers than the people’s ‘resentment’, however, and in England they began arresting Jacobite leaders and suspended habeus corpus.

They need not have worried. Since the French had begun to win battles, and the weather turned against the invading fleet, the French abandoned the invasion, as Lovat said they would.