The Last Highlander (35 page)

Lovat looked at the list of names. The Master left with the Frasers of ‘Struy, Culbokie and Reelig’ – heads of the principal families this side of Loch Ness. Also, Foyers, Farraline and Leale-Garth ‘as principal heads of the families of Stratherrick and Abertarff … He has certainly,’ Lovat mused wistfully, ‘taken with him the flower of my clan.’ Loudon ordered a regiment to prepare to go with him to fetch Lord Lovat to Inverness. They should have done it three months ago, and saved him from himself.

THIRTY

A quick victory, and long march to defeat, December 1745–June 1746

‘I had rather be hanged than go to Scotland to starve’

– AN ENGLISH JACOBITE ON TURNING ROUND AT DERBY

Tuesday 10 December: frost and a mist creeping off the River Ness. Over 800 soldiers mustered on the Green of Muirtown, a field on the western edge of Inverness, on the road to the Aird of Lovat. Four days earlier the Jacobites began their retreat from England. In Inverness, the Earl of Loudon had decided this was the day to bring in Lord Lovat.

Loudon summoned Lovat’s friends and neighbours to fetch him in. Two companies of Sutherland’s men and two companies of Seaforth’s Mackenzies camped near Brahan; two companies of Grants, his brother-in-law’s men, two companies of Munros under the laird of Culcairn, two of Lord Reay’s Mackays, and one company of Loudon’s own Highland soldiers formed up in columns. Nearly 800 men marched out to Castle Dounie to secure MacShimidh, and disable him from doing anything else to threaten the regime.

Lovat saw and heard them outside Dounie between three and four in the afternoon, the light fading fast. The men halted. Loudon sent in Brodie and Munro of Culcairn to order the Fraser chief to surrender. He was a hostage for the peaceable behaviour of the people of the Aird of Lovat. Lovat’s wild, hunting Highland men from the hills above Loch Ness had gone out, but there was no reason the civilised, low-country farming Frasers should not stay at home. The rumour was that their chief might force them out too. It was not a risk worth taking. Lovat promised to surrender by ten the next morning. He would send out his chamberlain, tacksmen and factor to order the people to come in with their arms and deliver them up. Loudon’s men dispersed and billeted themselves among the tenantry around Dounie, asking for hot food and somewhere to sleep.

Next morning Loudon’s forces marched back up to the walls of Dounie to collect the chief. Nothing happened. Brodie and Culcairn went back in. After another wait, they came out of the door, and found Loudon. ‘Lovat was not that day in good health, and could not march,’ they told him. Loudon sent them back in to say he would hear no more excuses. If Lovat did not appear at once, he would use any force to ‘oblige him’. He turned to the officer at his side. A shout went out, and the 800 men circled Dounie.

Inside, Lovat raged. He was surrounded. Looking out of the window, he saw a couple of Coehorn mortars levelled at the walls of his beloved home and angrily sent out a servant to beg Loudon for a parlay. Loudon re-entered the castle. Six weeks ago, they had all dined here, listening to the bard and the piper, playing chess and cards, dancing, and laughing at the madness of Prince Charlie’s landing to try and take over this land. Lovat ‘still insisted to be left, but for one day’.

Loudon refused. ‘Pack immediately,’ he ordered. Hours later, Lovat was ready. Only then did he call for his carriage to be made ready to go to town. The chief groom, Riddel, and his stable boys dawdled over fetching tack, harness, checking one horse, replacing it with another, playing to the limits of Loudon’s tolerance. The Earl had worked hard to avoid this scene, and it was infuriating to have his time wasted by insolent Fraser peasants. Lovat kept looking out across the Aird. No one came.

Loudon barked an order for his sergeants to ‘yoke the horses’. They shoved the fiddling Frasers aside. At last they lifted Lord Lovat into the chariot and ‘drove him before us’ towards the edge of the sea and the road to Inverness. All the way in, the old chief kept asking them to stop. He was in such pain from his joints, he needed to stretch. They let him get out and sit down to rest. Further on, he needed to relieve himself. He asked the coachman to stop for any kinsmen who ran beside the carriage, so he could give them a
bodle
(coin) and ask who and how they were. Sentries kept a peeled eye on the surroundings; his Lordship was obviously waiting to be rescued.

Loudon told Lovat he would remain in their charge to encourage rebels to return. Lovat promised the clansmen around Dounie and Beauly who still had arms would bring them in by the Saturday, 14 December. He could do nothing about the Master and his small band of ‘mad young men’, riding to their rendezvous with Prince Charles, somewhere between Perth and Stirling. Loudon waited.

‘The surrender of the arms was all that could well be expected of him,’ Duncan Forbes told Tweeddale, the Scottish Secretary. Duncan told Lovat they had proof of his involvement, while the Lord President admitted in private to his superior that in fact it would be quite difficult to obtain. In which case, ‘committing on suspicion a man so aged and seemingly so infirm would have had the appearance of cruelty’. For this reason, and also because he was an old friend, they did not send him up the hill to Inverness Castle. They left him in his town house on Church Street, where it was warm and comfortable, and awaited the delivery of swords and guns.

Nothing came in but excuses. Saturday came and went. By the following Thursday, Loudon had had enough. He could not catch Lovat out, but was certain he had despatched letters to the Master of Lovat and other Jacobites. It was too dangerous to leave him this much space to communicate. Loudon ‘clapped sentries on the gate’ of Lovat’s home and told the Fraser chief he would be confined in Inverness Castle the next morning. Lame as he was, Lovat did not wait. There was a secret passage that led out of his house and down onto the banks of the river. In the middle of the night, loyal clansmen helped Lovat along it. ‘An escape in his state of health was what no one dreamed of,’ Duncan confessed when he heard of Lovat’s flight. They had so often underestimated him. Clansmen rowed their chief upriver to the mouth of Loch Ness, out onto the loch, landing him on the shore and carrying him into the hills. Half a century after his first flight into Stratherrick, he fled again to this wild district, to shield himself from the law.

They carried him to Gorthleck House, sited on top of a small hill, high above the black waters of Loch Ness and about two-thirds of the way towards Fort Augustus. Lovat was in a great deal of pain, and was very angry. His home, possessions, lands, everything, was exposed to the government forces. No one had come to rescue or defend him. Local Jacobites marched to rendezvous with the Prince, who was beating a retreat from England.

An anonymous letter came to Lord Lovat at Gorthleck’s house. It appealed for his return to loyalty to King George. He read it. Was it from Duncan? So many anonymous letters circulated from both sides. There were things about it that reminded him of the Lord President, though it could have been one of his own lairds too, like Balnain, who had tried to get him to send the Master to safety. ‘I own, my Lord, that if any man living has right to dispose of his estate and clan you have it, as you have recovered the one from almost nothing and the other from bondage and slavery, but will you throw away that estate and clan? … What will the world say, but that your Lordship is not the man you once were?’ All that was very Duncan-like, Lovat smiled. It was true he felt cornered in a way he seldom had in his long life, locked into a crippled body from which he would never escape, while his Jacobitism locked him into this terrible final twist in his life story.

Trapped at Gorthleck’s house, he waited to see what would happen. Enclosed too was a letter for his son, also anonymous. Lovat read it. ‘For any step you have hitherto taken, you are still safe if you will but hearken to good advice of a parent … and of friends who have it at heart to do you all the good offices that lies in their power …

‘Break through a rash, ill-digested engagement,’ and return. ‘My dear Master, be not amused with false reports. The situation of the young Adventurer gives no encouragement to any wise man join him. He is by this time between two fires’ – Wade at his rear and Cumberland in front. Lovat worried about where his boy and his men were, and why he had not heard from the Master.

By the time Lovat reached Gorthleck, he knew his son and clan were attempting to join up with a retreating rebel army. Backing away put fear into the Jacobites for the first time since Charles landed. Eventually the Master of Lovat wrote to his father to apologise that he had not sent a body of troops north to keep his father safe, and promote the cause. They could not afford to split up their forces. Simon promised to come when he could, when he had permission from the Prince to do so.

Lovat suggested his son come north to force out the rest of the clan; he was too feeble and they had ignored his call, he said. Young Simon did not believe him. ‘I know your Lordship’s influence over your clan too well to think that where your orders fail, my presence will have any weight.’ Besides, ‘that I should, at such a critical time, run home, would look ill; and the pretext (as it would be called) of raising men, would not screen me from an imputation your Lordship would … always wish me to shun.’ Cowardice. The father feared for the son though. Lovat had always liked to cover his bases. If he brought Simon home, his letters from the authorities made him confident Duncan and Loudon would pardon the Frasers. The youth refused and Lovat was left holding this heartbreaking and honourable letter, showing him a young man ready to take responsibility for actions he had not sought – a very worthy Master of Lovat.

On the desks of all the important men reports landed every day about the government’s strengthening position. The two sides approached the Highlands.

Lovat wrote from Gorthleck’s house to tell his son and the Jacobite leadership that he had broken free from Inverness and was on the run from the authorities. There was a search on for him, and he was preparing in case he had to seek shelter ‘in hills and woods and inaccessible places’. The next place he would go was to Strathfarrar, the glen that was his channel to the west. He was ‘hunted like a fox by Loudon up and down the country’, Lovat wrote, ‘which, perhaps, would cost him his life by cold and fatigue’. In Strathfarrar a little stone house was being built for him in the middle of Loch Muily. ‘That country is the strongest hold in Scotland,’ he told his son. He would go there only if all was lost, to make a last stand. ‘I will make one hundred good men defend it against all the forces that King George can have in Scotland.’

Then he wrote to Lochiel, who had written to tell Lovat of ‘the glorious retreat his Highness made from Derby’. Lovat did not believe a word. The minute he heard the Prince had turned back, he regretted sending out his clan. ‘Be so good as to comfort my languishing soul, and drooping spirits,’ Lovat begged Lochiel, ‘by assuring me that you are the same affectionate Laird of Lochiel to me that ever you was: I truly never had so much need of your comfort and assistance as at this time; for I am in vast distress of body and mind.’

Nearly thirty years after he received his pardon from George I, Lovat was once more an outlaw. He thought he must be dying. His legs had gone. He and Gorthleck could hardly get out of bed unaided, let alone go and lead a revolution. Gorthleck, eighty-seven years old, had kidney disease. ‘He lies in the next room to me; we are both much indisposed and invalids,’ Lovat told Lochiel. There they lay, the two old men, too ill to participate, too passionate to let it all pass them by.

Lovat sat up in bed, blankets piled high on him. He could not keep warm. On nights of deep frost the moon rose over the loch and a broad highway of light fragments glittered along its length. Sometimes lights flared on the opposite banks as the army searched for him. In Gorthleck’s little tower house, he waited. It was as near as he dared be to Inverness and still evade discovery. When his ancestors wanted to come here to visit their Stratherrick kindred, they commanded barges, lit by the torches leaping into the sky. A tail of a hundred men kicked their horses onto the boats, following Lord Lovat, and crossed the loch announced by pipers in the bows. They clattered off the other side and drove their spurs in, to breast the hills above them.

He had come here like a thief in the night, carried in the bottom of a mean little boat, his arms around the shoulders of his faithful kin. This was the man on whom the Prince suddenly reposed his hopes of revival. When Charles was told Lovat was free, he asked him again to come and help lead the rebellion. If Lord Lovat rose in arms, the Jacobite leaders flattered him, ‘there is not a man beyond the Forth, however timorous or cautious … but will appear with the greatest alacrity and cheerfulness’. The image of Lovat would give them courage. What the Prince ‘above all things wishes and desires is, to have your Lordship with him, to take upon you the command of the army’. How often in the past had he asked to lead the Jacobite forces and been shunned. The Prince ‘knows your Lordship’s age’ made active service as a general an impossibility, ‘yet he is sensible that your advice and counsel will be of greater value than the addition of several thousand men’. Charles flattered Lovat with everything he had ever wanted from the Stuarts, and everything he had claimed about his standing in Scotland. It was why Duncan and Loudon had taken such care to try and make him stay at home, to be an equally important example on their behalf. Charles offered him the use of his own coach and horses to ride in. He, Lovat, would sit in the place of the heir to the thrones of Great Britain when he appeared in it.