The Last Highlander (5 page)

Amongst the Fraser casualties was Simon’s brother, Alexander. Badly wounded, his clansmen ‘carried him home in a litter’. Thomas and Simon laid him on his bed to rest, but weeks later Alexander died of his wounds. Simon became his father’s heir. Fraser gentlemen gathered at Tomich, wondering if Hugh Lovat at Dounie would mourn the death of his cousin Alexander and the other brave Frasermen who had died with him. Would he lament the defeat of the Stuart King and order the usual magnificent Highland wake for fallen kinsmen? Or would he celebrate with Lady Amelia her Murray clan’s share in the victory of William and Mary, and the killing of his kin at Killiecrankie?

Following the battle, the Frasers again suffered. Believing the clan to be Jacobite, government troops were given permission to ransack the Aird of Lovat as they had in the months following the Civil War. After this, Jacobite soldiers came through the Lovat estates: since Lord Lovat had led out men for William of Orange, they assumed the clan had turned Williamite. They plundered freely, robbing the people of anything they could find. By the time peace was declared, the weakness and incoherence in the Fraser leadership had left Fraser country devastated by both sides, more than once. Without a strong chief, everything in Fraser country was open to predation by all comers, apparently.

The Reverend James expressed alarm at Murray–Mackenzie control. These ‘strangers’, he said, ‘prove but spies amongst us, discover our weakness, take all the advantage of us they can, fledge their wings with our wealth, and so fly away and fix it in a strange country, and we get no good of it.’ They leased Lovat lands to men from their own clan depriving the chief’s own kin of income and breaking up their inherited territories. Then Murray had tried to take the men away and make them fight against their rightful King. These lessons were not lost on Simon. He later claimed that he was nurtured ‘to display a violent attachment’ to King James from his ‘earliest youth’.

The birth of the Jacobite cause had taken Thomas of Beaufort’s eldest son and ruined his lands. Thomas could not afford to fund Simon through university until his affairs were in better order and the country at peace. On 1 July 1690, William decisively defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. James fled for the last time, ending his rule. By the autumn of 1691, Beaufort felt secure enough to send his son and heir, Simon, to Aberdeen.

The Highlands took a long time to settle under the new regime. Simon was in the first year at university when William lost patience with his Scottish subjects’ continuing flirtation with Jacobitism and refusal to swear allegiance to him and Mary. He agreed to a gesture to pacify them once and for all, needing to release British soldiers from security duties in Scotland to fight his European wars, as head of the Protestant Alliance against the territorial and religious ambitions of France’s Louis XIV.

In January 1692, William signed instructions to separate the Glencoe MacDonalds and make an example of them, by finding a way to ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. The justification was the delay by MacIain, chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds, in submitting formally to the government’s representative and obtaining the indemnity William offered to former rebels. The commander of the Scottish army, Livingstone, wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Hill, the officer in charge of the garrison nearest to Glencoe. ‘Here is a fair occasion for you to show that your garrison serves to some use … begin with Glencoe and spare nothing that belongs to him, but do not trouble the Government with prisoners.’ Hill was horrified. Calling the order ‘a nasty, dirty thing’, he said the proposed action was uncalled-for: the district where the Glencoe MacDonalds lived was calm; they did not need violent pacification. Too late.

On the night of 13 February, MacIain’s people offered shelter to government troops whom they believed were en route to bringing in the rebel Glengarry MacDonalds. At 5 a.m., Glenlyon, in charge of the government soldiers, began the slaughter. MacDonalds were bound, shot and then bayoneted for good measure. After the killings, they burned houses and drove the stock off to Fort William to feed the garrison, leaving ‘poor stripped women and children, some with child, and some giving suck, wrestling against a storm in mountains and heaps of snow, and at length overcome’ they lay down and died.

The bloodshed at Glencoe blighted King William’s rule, and left a deep, long-standing hostility towards him in much of Scotland. To bring Lord Murray back into the government fold and dissolve the stain left on their reputation by Killiecrankie, the Scottish Secretary James Johnston persuaded William to put Murray at the head of the enquiry into Glencoe, and find a scapegoat for the atrocity. That scapegoat was Dalrymple, a rival of Johnston’s, who had added the instruction ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. Though William undertook sweeping reforms of his Scottish ministry, the enquiry’s report would do little to soothe Highlander and Jacobite anger.

By the winter of 1694/95, after ten years of trying, Hugh Lovat had failed to achieve the one thing required of him. The lack of surviving male Lovat heirs caused Murray and Atholl increasing alarm. Lady Amelia produced both girls and boys, but only the girls (Amelia, Katherine and Margaret) lived. There was another infant boy, John, but the odds on him surviving were dreadful. Hugh Lovat was the only son of an only son, both of whom had died in their twenties. It was time to return to the marriage contract, and enshrine it in law.

Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat’s family contained a lot of lawyers. He was a lawyer; his brother, Sir Roderick Mackenzie (Lord Prestonhall), was a Law Lord. They reviewed the contents of the marriage contract. The first part of it stated the obvious. The Lovat–Fraser inheritance went through the boys. Then, it asserted that
any
surviving child of Hugh and Amelia would take precedence over the next male heirs, who were the Beauforts. All that an heiress need do was marry someone who already bore the name of Fraser. The normal procedure among the clans suffering the iniquity of an heiress would be to marry her to the nearest male heir. Given Thomas’s great age, in this case it would be
his
son and heir, Simon. So far, all this contract did was state the conventions governing marriage at the top of any kindred with a sizeable inheritance at stake. In other words, the contract was completely unnecessary. However it innovated in the next clause.

In 1685, Mackenzie and Murray had stated that if the inheritance did come down to an heiress, all her husband need do was
assume
the name of Fraser to fulfil the requirement that she marry someone ‘of the name of Fraser’. Then they would both inherit the Lovat titles and estates. The heiress could be married off to anyone from any clan in effect. This threatened to write out the Beaufort Fraser men, Thomas, Simon and John.

The marriage of an heiress to a man from another clan had the most serious implications for the heiress’s clan and its territories. This freshly made ‘Fraser’ husband would enter his wife’s inheritance right at the top and the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. The clan the husband came from, to whom of course he owed all his prior loyalty and affection, could eliminate the Frasers’ presence in their own country, and take over their assets. If the heiress married a Mackenzie, the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. If she married a Murray cousin, it would be conveyed to him.

If Hugh died without signing the ratification of their contract, a Fraser with some legal training might easily have this specious document dismissed. Then the Murrays’ power base and their exercise of power in the Highlands would be seriously weakened. The old Marquis of Atholl urged his son to get a move on. The Lovat estates are ‘the best feather in our wing’ he reminded Lord Murray. They must not ‘lose’ their ‘keystone’ after a decade of growing influence.

Murray presented the ratification document to Hugh Lovat, who signed it. Murray then took it to the Court of Session to be ratified in law. With the stroke of a pen, Hugh cut Simon from his place on the family tree, and was very likely handing over his inheritance to a girl. He had four; one was going to survive. Letting himself be manipulated by ‘natures stronger than his own’, as Simon noted tersely, Hugh overturned the tradition and logic of clanship. He opened the door wider to the danger of loss of the clan to another, and put huge power in the hands of whoever controlled the marriage prospects of the heiress. For an ineffectual man, Hugh had created something that had powerful implications for the clan and his family.

In his poky student lodgings in Aberdeen in the spring of 1695, Simon saw that his family were being juggled out of position. But he had to move carefully. Hugh’s baby son
might
survive. If so, Simon would only ever be the Laird of Beaufort. Lord Murray could be a valuable connection for someone like him. King William was starting to equip Murray with all the trappings that made power work – royal patronage, commissions and influence at Court. Murray had cash and jobs to distribute. He was networking to get all Scotland and half the British administration in his hands. Simon had to remember that, dislike him though he did, Murray could bring Simon, the scion of a clan now closely allied to Murray’s own, forward in the world. For now, Simon needed to be part of his enemy’s faction in Scotland.

It was therefore no surprise that after completing his first degree, Simon started on postgraduate work in civil law – specifically property rights. By becoming a lawyer, then a judge, he fought to equip himself should the rightful inheritance of the Lovat titles and estates be questioned. But the sudden ratification of the marriage contract had upset Simon’s plans, and now redirected his life. The infant John was Master of Lovat, but Lovat heirs often died young. John’s older sister Amelia, and who she married, were of real interest therefore. Simon had a young man’s sense of time. Precious years climbing to power in the judiciary might be years squandered. Besides, a growing number of judges, those who were not Mackenzies, owed their appointments to Murray.

Simon felt a measure of contempt for the chief who had exposed his clan to such powerful and ruthless men. Hugh had proved himself incapable of protecting their interests, homes and people. ‘Lord Lovat was known for a man of feeble understanding,’ he wrote. In Simon’s view – fired by principled, naive outrage – the job of preparing the clan’s defence against a decisive assault on their name and country had fallen on his shoulders. ‘It was my duty to venture my person and Life to recover … [my] ancient family,’ he wrote. He bubbled with idealism and bravado. His whole upbringing had prepared him to rise heroically to this kind of crisis and defend them all, he said of himself. ‘His duty was inseparable from his Nature.’

Lord Murray saw it all rather differently. As a penniless bystander, Simon posed little threat. Murray did not notice him. Young Beaufort would require a lot more than family pride and passion to halt Atholl ambitions. Simon needed power, money and the backing of his clan. To acquire these he put university ambitions to one side, and headed for Edinburgh.

THREE

‘Nice use of the beast and the man’, 1695–96

‘Your destiny decreed to set you an apprentice in the school of affliction, and to draw you through the ordeal fire of trial, the better to mould, temper and fashion you for rule and government’

– THE REVEREND JAMES TO SIMON

Simon approached the Scottish capital full of doubts. He knew what to do, but not how to do it. He needed a patron to bring him forward in the world. ‘There are two ways of fighting,’ Machiavelli instructed a would-be Prince: ‘by law or by force. The first way is natural to men, and the second to beasts … So a prince must understand how to make nice use of the beast and the man.’ Simon came to learn to fight like a beast and a man.

A young man full of ambition and ability, but without employment or income, Simon lacked prospects. He had connections, but his best contacts in government were also his enemies. His cousin by marriage, Lord Murray, was his obvious port of call. Atholl and Murray were working to tighten their grip on Clan Fraser and would only help Simon if they thought he could assist in their plans to dominate the Highlands. Murray might even readily give Simon a job to control him, even as Murray worked to cut him off. Simon saw little choice but to dissemble with the Murrays, and offer to serve them, as the Murrays dissembled with the Frasers.

Edinburgh was a typical medieval city. Its buildings clung to the high back of a long hill like fleas and burrs on a sheep’s back. The old city cooled its carcase in a mire of swamp and loch. When Simon arrived for the first time it was still largely enclosed within its medieval city walls. The scarcity of space meant the old houses towered ten or even twelve floors over the streets below. The High Street (‘the Royal Mile’) formed the city’s spine and central nervous system. It was capillaried with narrow lanes – wynds, allies and closes leading to and from the main street. At the lower end, the east end of the High Street, the Canongate guarded the entrance to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the image of King William III’s presence in Scotland. Heading west, halfway up the High Street, were the Scottish Parliament and offices of the judiciary. At the top end of it, on an extinct volcano, sprawled the massed bulk of Edinburgh Castle. A sleeping giant of military power, it dominated the institutions of the fragile, Williamite Scottish state.

Tall narrow houses flanked Simon as he headed up the High Street towards Parliament to find Lord Murray. He lowered his gaze to skip around the gurgling gutters, overflowing with the effluent of the piled-up city, and skirt the fat pigs rooting excitedly through it. He moved in and out of the piazzas on the ground floors of gaunt old houses. Aristocrats occupied the first floors, clerks nested on the tenth. People lived close up, bound by the economies of architecture, space and a dearth of hard cash. Merchants’ wares – woollen stuff, linen, pots – lay in heaps among the pillars, spilling from shops too tiny to do more than keep them secure at night. Ascending the buildings like a row of semaphore flags, colourful illustrations painted on boards indicated where people could find certain wares – a cut loaf, periwig, cheese, a firkin of butter, petticoat stays, from the baker, wig dresser, cheesemonger, dressmaker.

Most men of affairs were on the go by five in the morning. Before the bell of St Giles Kirk struck seven, the pioneering medical man Dr Pitcairne was seeing patients in his underground rooms near the church. Edinburghers called it the ‘groping office’, because of its darkness and its tenant’s occupation. By 6 a.m., Law Lords and lawyers had met agents and clients in the taverns and perused over half a dozen cases.

A fellow politician observed that Lord Murray was ‘so great an admirer of his master, King William, that he mimicked him in many of his gestures’. The King loved the way Murray revered him, and he showed it. He gave him a colonel’s commission (and the funding) to raise a regiment to defend Edinburgh. William did not feel safe on Scottish soil without a heavy military presence. Only the Stuart-born Queen at his side gave the Dutch Stadtholder any sense of legitimacy in the eyes of most Scots, especially after Glencoe. But the previous winter Mary had died suddenly of smallpox, aged just thirty-two.

In public, Simon echoed the Court Party’s expressions of sympathy for William III’s loss. In private, he wrote to his father: ‘I doubt not you will be in mourning [clothes] for Queen Mary, but I am resolv’d to buy none till Ki. W. dies.’ Mourning clothes, he teased, ‘perhaps may serve for the next Summer Suit’. He penned similarly jaunty notes to known fellow Jacobites: MacDonald of Glengarry and (rashly) Lady Amelia Lovat’s Jacobite brother, Lord Mungo Murray – ‘drinking’ to the death. Apart from Lord John, the Murrays remained predominantly a Jacobite clan. These letters were a young man’s folly and Simon’s first wrong move. Glengarry was married to Hugh Lovat’s sister, Isobel, and was in Lord Murray’s pay. He passed Simon’s notes to Murray, who kept them safe. They were Simon of Beaufort’s death warrant, if one were ever needed.

Queen Mary’s death exposed the tenuousness of William III’s right to rule. Many in Scotland felt their suffering was the legacy of removing God’s anointed King, James II. A failed harvest in 1695 compounded their discontent. William needed strong support in Scotland: it was imperative that Murray raise the thirteen companies needed to fill his regiment, each under a captain. Every captain received a salary. Out of this he provided the men, paid his company’s expenses and kept the balance for himself. Murray offered one to Hugh Lovat. It would bring this Jacobite clan to heel, turn it Williamite, and display to his royal master Murray’s growing influence in the Highlands.

Hugh was not interested. It would mean leaving his wife and family, mustering in Edinburgh and becoming politically active in a way he had never desired. Murray had pressured Hugh to take the oath abjuring the Stuarts in favour of William. Now Murray wanted his brother-in-law to take a captaincy, and provide 300 Frasers for Murray’s regiment. Murray insisted. Lovat caved in, and then failed to fill the company. He had never led his men.

Simon Fraser unleashed ‘the bitterest invectives’, criticising his chiefly cousin for accepting the ‘infamous commission’. Alexander had died resisting King William; now Lord Lovat was asking them to sign up to join his killers. Behind the scenes, Simon worked to discourage Frasermen from enlisting. Above all, Simon wanted the captaincy for himself. He approached Murray’s recruiting agent, Dollery, and offered to fill the Fraser Company of Murray’s Regiment of Foot in return for Hugh Lovat’s captaincy commission. Dollery wrote to Murray recommending Simon: ‘I think him a very hopeful young man … and may be very serviceable to your Lordship.’ Simon had told him that with anything less than a captaincy he could not ‘do anything to distinguish him from the rest, which I find he very much aspires after’. Dollery picked up on the ambition, but not the scale of it; and he missed the potential irony of his observation. Murray did not.

Simon duly filled the 300 places his clan chief had failed to achieve. Pleased with himself, Simon asked for his captaincy and his money, a pound per soldier. Murray refused: he recognised that Simon was attempting to use clan operational norms – where clansmen served their leading kinsman’s cause, not a distant representative of the Crown – and subvert British regimental ones. Murray allowed Simon into his fold, but at the lowest possible level – as a lieutenant, where he believed he could not cause any trouble. Simon found himself outmanoeuvred. He ‘did not fail to be extremely disgusted’, he wrote, ‘having suffered himself to be over-reached by Lord Murray, whose treason he conceived to be of a very infamous nature’. By the end of December 1695, Lieutenant Simon Fraser was in command of Lovat’s Company of accoutred, martial-souled, Jacobite Highlanders. Some days they formed the Palace Guard at Holyroodhouse; others they marched to the other end of the High Street to form part of the force to defend the Williamite regime in Edinburgh. On their uniforms they wore the Murray badge (a mermaid with comb and mirror, and the words,
Tout Pret
, ‘Quite Ready’); and they carried the Murray colours. Simon’s saddle blanket and holster cap were embroidered with the cipher ‘WR’. It was as if the Frasers had been printed all over with the stamp of the enemy’s seal. Where was the Fraser badge of stag’s head and motto
Je suis prest
, ‘I Am Ready’; the Fraser of Lovat coat of arms – crowns and strawberry leaves – the last indicating the French origin of the clan.

William III desperately needed his Scottish soldiers: the British Army was chronically overstretched because of the King’s European campaigns, particularly his obsession with countering French aggression on the Dutch borders. High war taxes, the poor harvests and the continued heavy-handed quartering of troops was crippling the Scottish economy.William needed stability in his territories in North Britain. The King’s Private Secretary, Johnston, requested Murray come to London, and to come with panache. ‘If you have company at hand to come with you, My Lord Lovat, or Glengarry, it will look well, but no time is to be lost,’ Johnston counselled. That was Hugh Lovat’s purpose in life, Simon thought to himself – to gild another man’s lily and make a usurper feel secure. But Lovat would not leave his fireside in the middle of a hellish Highland winter. So Murray travelled south alone.

When Murray arrived he found he was to be well rewarded. On 13 January 1696, the King appointed him Secretary of State for Scotland. ‘He told me I owed it only to himself, which indeed is passed doubting,’ Murray purred with pleasure to his wife.

In Edinburgh, Murray’s officers fell over each other to congratulate their colonel. Simon led the cheers. ‘All your Lordship’s friends here are overjoyed for your Lordship’s new preferment,’ he gushed. ‘God grant your Lordship health to enjoy it!’ And ended his huzzahs with a request: ‘I hope your Lordship will not forget my captain’s act. It will certainly do me good until your Lordship is pleased to bestow better on me.’ He had his eye on the colonelcy.

Another officer simply asked Murray for the whole regiment straight out. The Secretary of State would not be expected to keep it in his own hands. Even without the personal motivation of the clan, it was not surprising Simon pushed so hard. In the lower reaches of the establishment, men like Simon saw too clearly the kind of oblivion that lay just below them. Except for a tiny minority of aristocrats, everyone was on the make. Simon, born to a little portion of privilege, knew there was a path down the social ladder that offered no one, except maybe his chief, a foothold. The weak went down; the strong rose.

Poor and failing harvests dominated the rest of the decade in Scotland. ‘The living wearied of burying the dead,’ and the population was forced to fight for scraps. These were ‘King William’s ill years’. The term showed who the Scottish people thought had brought God’s anger on them. In London and Edinburgh, Jacobite presses poured forth propaganda: ‘I hear the angel guardian of our island whispering in our sovereign’s ear … Rise and take the child and his mother, and return into your country, for they are dead who sought the life of the child.’ The ‘sovereign’ was James II, and his flight had taken him and his wife, Mary and their baby boy into ‘Egypt’/France. The biblical analogy showed the strength of feeling in the two kingdoms on the issue of rightful kings and usurping tyrannical governments.

Murray’s pleasure in his political success was interrupted in February when the government received intelligence about an invasion plot from France that would terminate ‘in an assassination’ of the King. Other informants spoke of co-ordinating action by Jacobite officers embedded in regiments guarding Edinburgh Castle. Murray’s Regiment of Foot was one of those mentioned. Murray galloped north to hold Scotland steady for the King.

The castle was ‘in a very defenceless state’, Simon noted, as he trotted his company of clansmen up the Royal Mile from Holyroodhouse. He too had been plotting – with Lord Drummond, active Jacobite and heir to the Duke of Perth – and was in communication with both of them. They agreed that ‘as soon as the King [James II] should arrive in Scotland … they should make themselves masters by a
coup de main
of the unarmed garrison, and shut the gates … They should then declare for King James.’ In the end the scheme came to nothing. But plotting made disempowered men feel powerful. If James returned, he would sweep Lord Murray away.

Murray gathered his officers. They ‘were regarded by the common men in the light of Jacobites’, he stormed; all officers must swear the Oath of Abjuration, compelling their loyalty. The oath forswore loyalty to James II and the exiled Stuart Court, and swore allegiance to William and the Revolution settlement. Simon was outraged. ‘Officers, highly attached to King James, were forced to sign … in order to preserve to themselves the means of subsistence,’ he said, disgusted that Murray insulted good men by forcing them to square up to the competing interests of their souls and their sporrans. He was one of them, and signed.