LAST HIGHLANDER EB

Sarah Fraser

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780007229505
• eBook ISBN: 9780007302642
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PERFECT FOR FANS OF OUTLANDER

The true story of one of Scotland's most notorious and romantic heroes.

He was a spy, a clan-chief, a traitor. A polyglot, a deserter and a man of philosophy.

Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, was the last of the great Scottish chiefs – and the last nobleman executed for treason. In life, his wit, ambition and dubious sense of morality kept him in the thick of political intrigue. With a taste for risk and determined to make his fortune, Lovat made pacts with Catholics and Protestants, Scots and Englishmen.

Lovat found his famous end a turncoat and a martyr: he threw himself in with the '45 rebellion and fought for Prince Charles against the crown. His execution in Tower Hill, at the age of 80, was the last of its kind.

Lovat was one of Scotland's most notorious and romantic figures: a man whose loyalty had no home, whose sword had a price. This is the swashbuckling account of his life, and a brilliant portrayal of nation in revolt.

PART ONE

Formative Years, c.1670–1702

‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’

ONE

Home, birth, youth, c.1670–94

‘A mighty man of war had been added to the race’

– THE REVD JAMES FRASER ON SIMON’S BIRTH

The future 11th Lord Lovat was born around 1670, some 550 miles north of Tower Hill, in a small manor house in the Aird of Lovat, the hub of the Scottish Highlands. The lack of a recorded date illustrates the initial inconsequence of Simon Fraser’s birth to history.

In Simon’s heyday as Lord Lovat his clan territories extended over 500 square miles of northern Scotland. ‘My country’, as Lovat called it, was bigger than King George II’s Hanoverian homeland. Fraser territories fell into two distinct regions: poor Highland and rich Lowland. The estates reaching over to the west coast and heading south-west from Inverness down Loch Ness, were typically Highland: peaty soil covered in rough grass; rushes and heather rising from wind-whipped moors to stony peaks of over 3,000 feet. Between them sheltered valley floors of startling greenness.

Now almost deserted, in Lovat’s lifetime hundreds of families inhabited these remote fertile glens: the kindred, or ‘family’, of up to 10,000 that was Clan Fraser. Many passed their lives without venturing even once to the regional capital, Inverness – though the young men would pour out of the hills to fight if the chief summoned them with the fiery cross. Visitors from the Lowlands or England in the early eighteenth century regarded the Highlands with appalled distaste. ‘The huge naked rocks, being just above the heath, resemble nothing so much as a scabbed head,’ shuddered an English army officer. The ‘dirty purple’ heather sickened him. Yet the 11th Lord Lovat’s wild hill country produced his most loyal and ferocious fighting clansmen and their lairds, and Lovat returned their devotion with a passion.

The common people’s year followed an ancient pastoral pattern. Their stock was their wealth and security; their economy was based on exchange, with hardly any money being involved. Visiting tinsmiths, tailors or cattle dealers received hospitality and, say, cheese, a hide, or wool in return for their services, news of wars and national crises, folk tales and songs. These Frasers struggled to produce enough to survive the snowbound winters. In their calendar, January was An t-Earrach in Gaelic – the ‘tail’ end of the year, not the beginning. By then the grain chest was empty, the livestock emaciated from a winter indoors with too little to eat and from being bled to provide blood to mix with oatmeal. When the spring grass came the poor animals had to be carried out of the byres.

A clan was divided into branches. At the top was the chiefly family, and the families of his close cousins. Each branch was headed by a laird called after his small estate – such as Fraser of Foyers, Fraser of Gorthleck, Fraser of Castleleathers – and held by tack (lease) or wadset (mortgage). He might be responsible for up to 300 ordinary kinsmen and existed in a state of genteel financial stress. The minor lairds, who managed the Highland parts of the estates, could not make ends meet without the financial support that service to their chief earned them. As a consequence, upcountry men were more old-fashioned than their low-country brethren. Unlike English landowners, clan chiefs such as Lord Lovat kept large bodies of armed men in a state of semi-militarised readiness to protect the clan, and travelled nowhere without a ‘tail’ of up to a hundred of well-accoutred followers on horse and foot. The hill lairds were the first to make up Lord Lovat’s ‘tail’. He loved them above all his clansmen.

The other half of the Fraser chief’s territories was quite different from the hills and glens and was more familiar to foreigners from the south. The area known as the Aird of Lovat, around the mouth of the River Beauly on the east coast of the Scottish Highlands, was first-class agricultural land. This part of the Lovat estates provided nearly all the chief’s income, and the farms and estates here generated more than enough to meet their lairds’ needs. They did not need the extra money earned by traditional service to the chief. The wealthier east-coast lairds might become lawyers, officers in the British Army, politicians in Inverness and Edinburgh, or serve in local government.

Simon’s eastern territory stretched from the Aird, ten miles eastwards along the sheltered Beauly Firth to the eye of the Highlands, Inverness. Here, ambitious men, keen to market intelligence about this vast semi-autonomous region of the Scottish state to the authorities in Edinburgh or London, noted everything that happened. Lovat’s estates lay at a crossroads between the expanding world of Britain and her colonies, and the self-contained world of the clans.

At the time of Simon’s birth, the clan proclaimed widespread loyalty to the ancient royal House of Stuart. The Stuarts ruled in sacred bond with the land, just as a chief was ‘married to his clan and country’. However, decades of bloody internal conflict, ending just before Simon’s birth with the restoration of Charles II, sowed a horror of uncontrolled violence. However, in the Scottish and English governments’ minds, this independent-minded civilisation on its northern frontier, half of whom did not even speak English, posed the single biggest threat to the security of the fast-changing Scottish and British nations. Fraser country was, therefore, of strategic importance to any central authority intent on imposing the will of central government.

As the brother of a chief and great-uncle to another chief, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, grew up at the heart of this world at Castle Dounie, the historic stronghold of Clan Fraser. At the centre of the Aird of Lovat, the ancient fortress loomed on a manmade mound above the banks of the Beauly River. Towers at each corner of the castle and the thick walls between them offered protection to hundreds of the chief’s ordinary kin in times of famine or feud. If necessary, over 400 people could sleep there.

At Dounie, the Fraser chief maintained an entourage of staff, kin and allies who regulated the life of a Highland nobleman and the thousands who depended on him for their safety. One kinsman was fear an taighe, the head of the household. He controlled the chaplain, piper, harpist, steward, grooms, pantry boys, cooks, and scores of scallags (servants) running around beneath them. The principal Fraser families sent their sons to the chief’s household ‘to educate, polish and accomplish them’; they were ‘exchanged at the yeares end, and others taken … in their place’. The bonds this fostering forged throughout the clan endured for life and offered mutual protection in the frequent times of trouble that were to be a feature of Simon the future 11th Lord Lovat’s life.

Simon was the second son of Thomas of Beaufort. ‘Beaufort’ was another name for Castle Dounie. An honorary title, ‘of Beaufort’ was attached to the surname of the second line of the family tree, after the chiefly family, the Lovats. The title expressed the closeness of the connection between the two (Simon’s father was often called simply ‘Beaufort’). If Beaufort’s noble cousin Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, failed to raise a living male heir, then the male Beaufort Frasers would rise to be the heirs. Acknowledging their position, they had to prepare themselves for what they hoped would not happen: their cousin’s incapacity or death. It followed therefore that the men of the second line of the clan elite filled the most important clan posts.

From this position, in 1650, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, aged just eighteen, led a thousand Fraser men south to fight Cromwell’s New Model Army on behalf of Charles Stuart, recently returned from France. On 3 September 1651 a Cromwellian army numbering 28,000 met 16,000 Royalists at Worcester, in the last battle of the English Civil War. The New Model Army captured over 10,000 prisoners, among them young Thomas Fraser of Beaufort. Cromwell deported Beaufort’s fellow Fraser prisoners to Barbados as indentured labourers, or slaves. Simon’s father was lucky to survive. He was sent north and ‘keeped several years in a dungeon in the citadel that the English made in Inverness’, as Cromwell put Scotland under heavy military occupation.

Scotland eviscerated itself in the religious and dynastic wars of the mid-1600s. The country strained to cope with the thousands of government soldiers garrisoned and quartered on the nation. The troops had free rein to get supplies where they could, with the result that ‘be-tuixt the bridge end of Inverness and Gusachan, twenty-six miles, there was not left in my countrie a sheep to bleet, or a cock to crow day, nor a house unruffled’. Women were raped, animals butchered and the harvest carried away. Inverness shrank back ‘demure under a slavish calm’, economically ruined, said the Fraser chronicler. Lairds and chiefs were bankrupt, or fought ruthlessly to restore their fortunes. Cromwell’s victory and his subjection of Scotland gave the Scots a bitter taste of union with England that they were to remember in 1707, when another English ruler pressed them to give up their sovereignty.

After the Civil War, Thomas Beaufort married Sybilla MacLeod, the daughter of another chief, John MacLeod of MacLeod. It was usual for clan elites to intermarry in order to reinforce strategic alliances. Simon’s mother, Sybilla, grew up at ancient Dunvegan Castle, towering on a rocky promontory on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Skye as if carved from the cliff. Sybilla gave Beaufort a child each year of their fourteen-year marriage, dying with the last, when Simon was just eight. Altogether nine of their children died in childhood. The surviving five, in order of age, were: Alexander; Simon; John (who adored his older brother Simon); and the girls, Sybilla and Catherine. Thomas Beaufort lived most of his life within a few miles of Dounie, but whether ‘from his numerous family, or want of patrimony, appears to have been in not very wealthy circumstances’, said the Reverend James Fraser.

Though there is no date for Simon’s birth, the Reverend James, who was also the chiefly family’s chaplain, recorded that at Castle Dounie, ‘at the propitious moment, many swords hanging in the old hall leapt from their scabbards, indicating how mighty a man of war had been added to the race’. Even in earliest youth, Simon’s face expressed force of will. His steady gaze gave the impression of watchfulness, as his eyes scrutinised and his ears listened to his father and the Reverend James Fraser. He and his brothers were tall, vigorous and brave, when many of the older generation were exhausted by wars.

The route that took the Beaufort Fraser children from their home, the manor house ‘Tomich’, to Castle Dounie, to play with their aristocratic cousins, led them through the village of Beauly. Hugh, the 8th Lord Lovat, assumed his social and political domination of the regional capital, Inverness, in matters of politics and business. However, it was Beauly and the beautiful Aird of Lovat, not Inverness, that defined young Simon’s horizons. Here, Simon and his brothers and sisters learned to ride and hunt. The males of the upper reaches of the clan sometimes spent as much as a third of the year hunting. It kept them fit and ready, trained to act in a body. If the fiery cross went up, they could fly together in an instant and chase men not deer.

When clans with territories north of the Highland capital, such as the Mackenzies whose lands bordered Fraser country, wanted to go to Inverness to attend to their affairs, they crossed the River Beauly at the ford in the village. Here they would have to pay Fraser men a toll and declare their business. In this way the Frasers were able to control an important point of access for the northern clans. A strong Fraser chief could use his geographic position to his advantage and help manage the north for the government in Edinburgh. The rewards he sought were the usual expressions of gratitude: perquisites and government positions. Geography blended always into geopolitics.

As well as being a soldier, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort was a thoughtful, scholarly man. When the 8th Lord Lovat was dying, Thomas sat for weeks at Castle Dounie by his deathbed, ‘entertaining him with history and divinity’. Simon inherited from his father a passion for clan and national history, theology and philosophical debate, as well as the satisfaction of training and leading a body of armed kinsmen. The Beaufort Fraser children received an informal education in clan history and their place in the world from the Reverend James Fraser. The son of a laird, Reverend James was at ease with English, Gaelic, French and Latin, and ‘had a useful knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, German and Italian’. Simon Fraser would acquire the same languages, becoming fluent in four and competent in five.

In his youth, the Reverend James ‘mounted his Highland pony, and accompanied by a Highland servant, spent three years touring Britain, Europe and the Holy Land’ in order, he said, ‘to rectify the judgement, enrich the mind with knowledge’, and give it ‘a polish’. Though by turns a Calvinist and Episcopalian, he happily posed as a Roman Catholic to get a room in European monasteries. He visited over thirty European states and on his return wrote Triennial Travels, describing every town and city of note, starting with Inverness. He would dedicate his Chronicles of the Frasers to Simon when he became chief.

For almost five decades, Reverend James ministered at Kirkhill, a tiny settlement near Beauly, and served as family chaplain to the Frasers. As chronicler the Reverend also occupied the role of seanachie, or tradition-bearer, in the clan. In him the history of Scotland, England, Europe and the clan, actual and mythic, resided; he wove them together like a plaid, surrounding the Beaufort Fraser children with a solid sense of history, their duty to the living and to the dead. Their ancestors had served kings and country. So would they. This intoxicating blend of the literal and legendary fired their imaginations. Some of the oldest Gaelic songs, and even lullabies sung by wet nurses, rioted with bloody narratives of the honour their ancestors defended, and the outrages they avenged. Through such tales the children understood the Fraser loyalty to the doomed Stuart King Charles I.

At ceilidhs³ there would be folk tales, poems, theology, history, politics, agriculture, meteorology, games, riddles, repartee, music and medicine, and gossip – all in the Gaelic they liked to speak at home. Great arguments raged over international and local news. In the martial society of the clans, Simon learned, the chief must loom larger than everyone else, keeping his enemies at bay, whilst earning the respect of close friends and allies.

If ceilidh debates grew too heated and threatened to turn bitter or to violence, someone might intervene and call for music, dance or a song – sometimes bawdy. Risqué verse was acceptable at any gathering – though satirising someone’s good name could land you in a duel or a feud. One piece of bawdy by the bravura baronet Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy entitled Bod brighmhor ata ag Donncha (‘Duncan has a Potent Prick’) extended to thirty-two lines of self-praise. Typically Gaelic in spirit, the gist of it was this:

Grizzled Duncan’s organ

I guess is no great beauty,

Adamantine, wrathful,

ever ready to do his duty …

A rheum-eyed hooded giant,

sinuous, out-thrust face, spurty,

A cubit out from its bag,

ravaging, mighty knob-kerry.

Titillation was not the point (though it amused one clergyman enough to copy it into his personal poetry anthology); what this poem conveyed ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• MAPS
• LOVAT FAMILY TREE
• PROLOGUE: Death of a Highland chief
• PART ONE: Formative Years, c.1670–1702
• PART TWO: At the Court of the Sun King, 1702–15
• PART THREE: The Return of the Chief, 1715–45
• PART FOUR: Lord Lovat’s Lament, 1739–47
• PICTURE SECTION
• FOOTNOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTES
• About the Publisher