The Last Highlander (39 page)

The people stampeded through the hills, brought down by musket shot, or brought in. This formerly useless landscape would soon be exploited properly, as a nursery for the armed forces. What Sir Norman MacLeod began as a cottage industry when he sold his people to the plantations, would now go ahead on a proper commercial footing. Chiefs could farm kindred, once the land had been cleansed of its vicious streak, its troublesome elements culled. Regular warfare would breed out any insurrectionary instincts, and turn them into a desire to obey. He and that old woman Duncan Forbes at least agreed that the Highlanders would make very good soldiers in the end.

In June, two government sloops,
Terror
and
Furnace
, spent several weeks nosing in and out of the inlets and bays along the west coast of Scotland. They poked their prows among the Western Isles, seeking the Young Pretender and his senior command, coming eventually to Loch Morar. Captain Fergusson of the
Furnace
had intelligence that the loch was worth probing more deeply. Fergusson ordered his men to tow a boat up the mouth of the River Morar. Then they set about their search. One island beckoned more than the others. Small boats creaked on their moorings on the edge of it. Yet there was no sight or sound of human life. The sailors trod soft through the undergrowth. Suddenly it opened out and they caught their breath – a little house and a popish chapel.

A commotion of breaking branches made them turn. A group of men leaped into their boats, loosed them and were pulling as hard as they could away from the island and up the loch. Some of the Redcoats on the banks ran up each side to catch them where they landed, but the boats were too fast. All but one man escaped. The soldiers brought down a brother of MacDonald of Morar and marched him back to the coast.

The troops on the island ‘quickly gutted and demolished’ the ‘popish bishop’s house and chapel’. It was a seminary, withdrawn from the world; a MacDonald Catholic bishop had worshipped God here, said Mass, and trained up any young man who came thinking they had a vocation for the life of a hermit living close to nature. The soldiers got busy, ‘merrily adorning themselves with the spoils of the chapel’. They took back church relics, vestments, chalices and plates, sacred vessels, but no rebels of note, to their captain, waiting on the bridge of the
Furnace
.

The men on the banks of the loch, hearing that there were no rebels to be taken off the island, pressed forward away from the coast and in towards the steep hills that rose higher as they got nearer the eastern end. If Lovat had been helped this way he was not going far. No lame old man could attempt those hills.

In the end, they nearly walked onto him. He was lying on ‘two feather beds not far from the side of the lake’. Captain Campbell, the officer in charge, stepped forward and seized hold of an old man reclining in the heather. ‘I surrendered my sword in the Desert of Morar,’ Lovat said. ‘Desert’ was his own English translation for
fasach
, the Gaelic word for the Highland wilderness. He gave up his other weapons and his strong box, full of his precious papers.

The captain who received them was serving under John Campbell of Mamore, a decent man, government officer and Highlander – and Lord Lovat’s father-in-law. They put Lovat into one of their boats and rowed him down the loch, then carried him down the short stretch of the river to the sea. Local Frasers gathered. Some wept as he was put in the boat. Pipers came, and as he was rowed away, the pipers ‘all the while playing the tune called “Lord Lovat’s March”, with which his Lordship pretended to be pleased’. He smiled and his hand beat time, too much a chief to sink into despond in public. Lovat watched the pipers as the boat rose and dipped, till the music faded and silence fell.

Men hung over the edge of the man o’war to see the prize. Unable to climb the rope ladder, they lowered a sling for him. Two men hauled him up in jerks, swung him over the bows, and lowered him onto the deck. He was taken below, while they kept up the hunt for others who might be close by. One young officer guarded Lovat. He sat and talked with him to pass the time. After a while, he plucked up the courage to ask him why he engaged with the Prince after ‘having received so many favours from the government?’ He replied that ‘he did it more in revenge to the ministry for having taken away his Independent Company, than anything else’.

On the deck of the
Furnace
, the captains of the two British ships, Fergusson and Duff, discussed what to do. They decided they should open Lovat’s strong box. It might give hints as to what the rebel leaders planned to do next, and where they might find others. The captains instructed another officer, David Campbell, to take an inventory of everything in the chest. A thick pile of letters covered the bottom. Campbell reached in and took them out. The captain told him to read them all. Campbell sighed. Lovat assured him he would find nothing in the box that had to do with the rebels. Nearly all of them concerned the ownership and management of the Lovat estates. It was dreary stuff. At its base, under the procedural papers of a chief’s domestic life, was a letter written to his son, Simon. Campbell picked it up with a bit more enthusiasm, and scanned its contents.

He caught his breath. In Campbell’s hands was Lovat’s attempt to explain to his son what he had done and why. It told so much about how he joined the Jacobites years earlier, and what they should do to overturn the government and change the regime. A masterwork in treason going back over decades, it declared ancient and undimmed love and allegiance to the House of Stuart. Campbell looked up at the old chief. ‘I think your Lordship had better not have had this letter here,’ he murmured. Lovat said Campbell was right.

Orders arrived to take Lovat to Fort William to see if he might be persuaded to reveal the whereabouts of other rebel leaders. The authorities needed someone close to the top to turn King’s evidence and bring down the rest.

The Duke of Cumberland sent his Private Secretary, Sir Everard Fawkener, a man well into middle age, a big London silk merchant in peacetime. Sir Everard came to talk with him, but Lovat was disappointed to find he had no hope of mercy to hold out in exchange, just a clean conscience, as the government saw such things. Lovat refused to deal. He merely boasted of his influence in the Highlands. He complained of the humiliation of being deprived of his public offices and, worst of all, losing his Independent Company of Highland soldiers. He could still render service to the government, Lovat insisted. Fawkener agreed he could – by giving evidence to use against the rebels.

Lovat meant ‘no more than to bring his clan for the future into the service of the government, instead of employing them against it’. The government had tried that course of action for thirty years.

One thing struck Sir Everard in particular. Lovat spent a long time trying to make him understand that it was possible to reconcile ‘his principle of loyalty to the family of Stuarts, and the services done for the late King [George] and royal family’. In Lovat’s head he negotiated a way of living with these contrary pulls on his loyalty, while keeping his good name and honour.

If only he could get back to the clan, he might protect his people and begin to rebuild his estates. He could help re-establish the peace, and civil society again. Lovat asked for pen and paper, and wrote to the Duke of Cumberland pleading for his life. What would it add to the government’s honour to execute a crippled old man?

He recalled Cumberland to when Lovat was in high favour at Court. ‘I carried your royal highness in my arms in the parks at Kensington and Hampton Court,’ Lovat reminded the young prince. Cumberland ignored him, and sent Lovat’s letter to London. It was published to universal mockery, provoking ballad versions from the presses that ridiculed Lovat with his own words:

When first the proud Scotchman rebelled,

In your great, good old grandfather’s days,

He loved me and did all he could

Both my fame and my fortune to raise …

It harked back to the 1715 uprising and Lovat’s pardon from Cumberland’s grandfather, George I:

’Twas then, I remember it well,

Your Highness was wondrous pretty,

And what is more wonderful still,

Though a child, most exceedingly witty.

Who then in more favour than I?

Who hugged you and kissed you like me?

And can you behold your old nurse,

Who thus fondled you, swing on a tree?

The Duke’s answer to the last was in the emphatic affirmative. Cumberland gave orders to move Lovat south, writing to Secretary of State Newcastle with relish. ‘I imagine that the taking of Lord Lovat is a greater humiliation and vexation to the Highlanders than anything that could have happened.’ They had not got the Bonnie Prince yet, of course, but Lovat was a very big fish. The Prince was a fleeting and remote image of an ideal Scotland and Gaelic nation. MacShimidh Mor, the 11th Lord Lovat, was a man many had known of by experience or repute in Scotland all their lives. ‘He is dignified with great titles, and ranks high in command,’ Cumberland went on as if writing Lovat’s obituary. ‘They had such confidence in his cunning, and the strength of the country, that they thought it impossible for anyone to be taken who had these recesses open, well known to him to retire into, especially as they had a high opinion of his skill to make the best use of these advantages.’

The Duke had been determined to prove that the hills and glens would be no barrier to British law, and Lovat’s capture confirmed it. He gave orders to take all the prisoners at Fort William to Inverness for imprisonment, trial and sentence, transportation to the Colonies or execution. They made up a cradle, strapped it between two horses and put Lovat in it. The party of guards and prisoners made their way north-west, up Loch Lochy and along the road by the River Oich to where it flowed into Loch Ness at Fort Augustus. Lovat was back in his country.

The government garrison came to look at the prodigy of evil. ‘Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing that old rebel, Lord Lovat, with his two aide de camps, and about sixty of his clan, brought in here prisoners,’ one wrote. ‘He is seventy-eight years of age and has a fine comely head to grace Temple Bar, and his body is so large that I imagine the doors of the Tower must be altered to get him in. He can neither walk nor ride and was brought in here in a horse litter, or rather a cage.’ Looking into his face the man thought he looked ‘as hardened as ever’. The hardness was on both sides. Lovat showed no fear or pain. They would show no mercy.

*    *    *

The 20th Regiment of Foot, under their colonel, Thomas Bligh, clattered into Fort Augustus after several weeks pacifying the surrounding area, ‘burning houses, driving away cattle and shooting those vagrants who were to be found in the Mountains’. The term ‘vagrants’ covered any non-combatant who looked suspicious. The 20th Foot brought in hundreds of cattle and cartloads of meal and property. One of Bligh’s men watched Lovat in the few days he was there. ‘He had been a great courtier and a great knave,’ he said, ‘but how[ever] abominable for ever his character is represented in England, ’tis not half so bad as his North British countrymen make it,’ he concluded. The English press made a monster of him for the British people. His Highlanders portrayed him as an unconquerable terror to the government. Here he was, suffering quietly and with dignity.

The procession restarted and they trudged up Wade’s road on the south side of Loch Ness, onto the high ground through the Glen of the Birds, and into Stratherrick. There, the Frasers who were left after the incursions by the government army, slowly gathered and joined in procession behind him. They began to sing and lament as if it was his coffin passing them, not a cage for a living man. The women began to keen the clan lamentations, elegies to mark the rite of mourning. One man swore he would not shave again in memory of his attachment to MacShimidh. Lovat’s
seanachie
, his family chronicler, chanted aloud the heroism of the Frasers for hundreds of years, embodied in the person of the chief. He was them; they were him. The family mausoleum at Wardlaw kept a place for him. It was an odd feeling for Lovat. He was a pre-emptive spectre at his own funeral.

They would not kill him here, their priceless piece of plunder. They carried him south. His litter rocked between the horses. People came out to stare at the mythical beast, half-fox, half-lion, in his wicker-work cage. They walked south out of the Highlands to Stirling and then across to Edinburgh.

At Edinburgh Castle they dared not leave him alone in case Jacobites or clansmen moving anonymously in the capital tried to release him. Somewhere imprisoned in the castle was his son, but he was not allowed to see him. Lovat’s heart ached horribly. Two Highland women slept at the head of his bed, to attend to his needs, and two Highland men at the foot. The old chief lay ‘in a hundred flannel waistcoats and a furred nightgown’. The officer in charge of the castle assigned an officer, Captain Maggett, to his Lordship, and ordered him to sleep at the foot of his bed every night.

Soon the journey resumed, through Berwick-upon-Tweed, across the border and into Northumberland. There were hostile demonstrations near Newcastle, followed by a peaceful journey south. They had to pause often to let the old man rest. No one wanted him dead on arrival. They had to get him to the altar of state power, to Westminster. One young Redcoat officer wanted to see the ‘great Leviathan’, terror of the Highlands, but Lovat kept his cradle’s curtains drawn. He was not to be gawped at by the onion-crunching crowd. He heard the officer approach, knowing what he wanted, lay back and shut his eyes. The young man crept up and pulled back the veil, and gazed on the architecture of that huge body. Lovat’s arm shot up, he grabbed the youth’s nose and tweaked it till his eyes watered, then slumped back laughing.