The Last Highlander: Scotland’s Most Notorious Clan Chief, Rebel & Double Agent

All his life – as Episcopalian, or Roman Catholic – Simon enjoyed theological dispute. But he kept ‘charity for all mankind’ on this matter, he said. Though passionate about politics, society and culture, religious intensity bored most King’s College men. Typically, Simon’s friends were lovers of the old High Church type of Protestantism. Called ‘Episcopalianism’ in Scotland, it was roughly equivalent to Anglicanism in England. They preferred to believe in bishops appointed by the King, and both appointed by God. The idea of a clan chief corresponded with the mystique of a divinely sanctioned ruler.

When they could escape observation, Simon and his friends frequented the taverns. Failure to keep up enough praying, getting caught drinking or dallying with the serving lasses (Jean Calvin thought lust a sickness only marriage could cure), playing dice and cards, loud singing, and persisting in holding worldly and semi-seditious conversation in their rooms, all incurred punishments. ‘Some crimes are punished corporalie, others by pecunial mulct, and grosser crimes by extrusion.’ You were thrashed, fined, or thrown out.

But Simon’s claim of time-wasting at university disparages the gifts it gave him: tactics, rationale and strategy for effective resistance. All his life, he never doubted Machiavelli’s contention that the ends justified the means. It was not good enough to be merely strong and upright. Machiavelli advised that ‘a Prince … should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves’.

At the end of his degree course, in the winter of 1694/95, Regent George Fraser offered Simon the chance to continue his studies in a civil law degree, an increasingly attractive route for modern clan leaders seeking to avoid blood feuds. The courts were becoming the more usual battlegrounds for defeating clan enemies, in place of the martial law of the glens. Simon began the course at Aberdeen, but then very suddenly withdrew from it. To understand why, it is necessary to go back nine years to 1685 and the reasons he delayed coming to university in the first place: a wedding – specifically its special marriage contract – and a revolution.

TWO

To be a fox and a lion, 1685–95

‘One must be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten wolves’

– MACHIAVELLI

In 1685, Simon was at school in Inverness when he learned that his seventeen-year-old cousin, Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, had taken a wife. The choice of a chief’s bride was of key importance to the political and dynastic interests of the clan, and it would have been conventional for Lord Lovat’s closest Fraser kin to advise him, Thomas Beaufort foremost among them. But no Fraser was consulted. Hugh Lovat’s maternal uncle, Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, made sure of it: he had kept the Fraser cousins apart for many years in order to isolate and control the young boy chief.

Hugh had been orphaned at the age of six, when his father, the 8th Lord Lovat, died at home aged just twenty-nine. After his funeral, the Fraser gentlemen allowed Mackenzie of Tarbat to take young Hugh away. Thereafter he was raised apart from his sisters and his Fraser kindred in Sir George’s home, Castle Leod, fifteen miles from Dounie. That the leading Fraser men allowed a Mackenzie to step in and dominate their clan showed how weak the Frasers had become. The Reverend James harangued the clan gentry for tolerating Tarbat’s dominance of young Hugh. ‘He that hath the blood and spirit of his ancestors running in his veins,’ Reverend James thundered, ‘cannot be so much turned into a statue or idle spectator … to look what our … predecessors have been, as well as what ourselves at present are, lest falling short of the imitation of their immortal actions, we so strangely degenerate as not to understand what we ourselves ought to be!’ But no amount of eloquent rhetoric by the Reverend could stir Thomas of Beaufort or other principal Frasers to rescue the boy.

A clan could only prosper under a strong chief, but it was clear from an early age that Hugh would not be that person. The Reverend James judged him as ‘always but a man of very weak intellectuals’. Bad chiefs came in the shape of weak men, children, women or old men. During Simon’s youth, Clan Fraser entered a phase where it got all four – in that order. Two generations of ‘virulent Mackenzie women’, including Hugh’s late mother, had left the Lovat estates rundown and drowning in debt. The Frasers of Beaufort were sidelined and Tarbat inserted his own kindred to manage the clan, handing the Mackenzies leases on Fraser lands. He even gave a profitable little sinecure to the high chief of the Mackenzies, the Earl of Seaforth, as a compliment.

Sir George’s standing rose within his own clan as he interfered in that of his nephew’s. Tarbat competed for high public office for sixty years, during an era ‘of extreme ruthlessness and cunning intrigue’, according to one historian of the 1600s, which culminated in ‘the final triumph of the various egomaniacs, bigots and embezzlers who’ by the final decade of the century would rule the roost in Edinburgh. During the period of his nephew, Hugh Lovat’s, minority, Sir George was out of favour and deprived of office.

Tarbat intended to use young Hugh to boost his political ambitions in Edinburgh and build up a local power base from which to launch himself back into the political fray. His search for a suitably connected bride for Hugh took him to Lord John Murray, who had been rising high in the ranks of the Scottish administration in Edinburgh and Whitehall since the accession of King James II, and on to his sister Lady Amelia Murray. In terms of breeding the Fraser elite liked the idea. Not only was Lady Amelia the daughter of the Stuart Royalist champion, the Marquis of Atholl, but she was also related to several Scottish noble families and crowned heads of Europe. The Murrays came from Blair Atholl in Perthshire, fifty miles north of Edinburgh, between the Highlands and the Lowlands. Lord John was married to Katherine, sister of the Duke of Hamilton. These two, the Murrays and Hamiltons, intrigued to dominate Scottish politics and rule the country for absent kings.

Scotland was a sovereign nation, but the Scottish sovereign had resided in London, not Edinburgh since 1603 (when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England on the death of Elizabeth I). In 1685, James II ruled from Whitehall through a rotating oligarchy of ambitious Scottish magnates who dominated the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Lord John Murray was one of these. Murray, son and heir to the Marquis of Atholl, was a favourite of King James’s. Atholl and Lord Murray also saw the appeal of the match. Clan Fraser’s star may have been waning, but it still had many attractions. The extensiveness and location of Fraser country at the heart of the Highlands could vastly increase Murray influence in Scotland and add handsomely to Lord Murray’s growing political profile.

Tarbat only saw the marriage from his own point of view, something he almost immediately regretted. Simon wrote later that the union of Hugh and the nineteen-year-old Amelia, now Lady Lovat, should have ‘accomplished the barbarous and long-continued designs’ of the Mackenzies ‘to win the family of Lovat and extirpate the name of Fraser out of the North of Scotland’. It so nearly did, and undoubtedly would have done, had it not been for Simon Fraser of Beaufort.

Hugh Lovat’s marriage naturally affected Simon’s standing in the clan, pushing him a step away from the topmost branch of the tree. But the Beauforts expected that. They were ‘spares’ to the heir, and a chief must marry. What irked Simon Fraser was not the union with Lady Amelia, but an extraordinary pre-nuptial agreement planted in the match that affected the future inheritance of the Lovat titles and estates. It would prove to be of such dubious legality that Tarbat and Murray let it lie dormant for nearly ten years, so as not to draw attention or resistance to their schemes from other magnates. For now young Hugh and Amelia settled to the only job Sir George entrusted his nephew to accomplish without his guiding hand – to make lusty male heirs.

But it was another inheritance problem that delayed Simon from going up to Aberdeen. He was preparing to leave Tomich in the autumn of 1688 and join Alexander at university when news came of the landing of William of Orange and his invasion force at Torbay in Devon. Their Stuart King, James II, had abandoned his thrones and was now rallying support.

Tension had built up over the decade before James came to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1685, as it became clear that his brother Charles II was not going to leave an heir. The English Parliament had tried to exclude James from the succession before Charles II died, but failed. By 1688, James II already had heirs. His first wife gave him two daughters, Mary and Anne Stuart, before she died. The girls’ mother had been Protestant, and so were they. Mary married William of Orange, and Anne wed Prince George of Denmark.

Then James II married again. The second time he took for his wife Mary of Modena, an Italian Roman Catholic, in a marriage negotiated by France. Parliament’s alarm increased when James converted to Catholicism, and reached fever pitch when his papist wife was delivered of a boy. James II refused to bring him up as a Protestant, as he himself had been raised, but promised to respect the Protestantism of his administration and country. His was a rather contradictory position: delicate and full of potential pitfalls.

James refused to let his government interfere in the natural course of the Stuart inheritance of the British Crown: God willed that the King and Queen have a healthy Catholic son. Opposite him, the government refused to contemplate a papist ascending the thrones on any terms. An impasse quickly developed between Westminster and St James’s until, just after Christmas 1688, James II suddenly fled to France. His first cousin, Louis XIV, welcomed James, his wife, his son, extended family and entourage, as the victims of a heretical state. James set up a temporary Court in exile, but planned to return within months.

James saw his departure merely as a tactical retreat. He admired the absolutism of the monarchies of France and Spain and assumed his government would not be unable to function without the King to sign laws. Parliament would have to ask him back. Of course he would accept, if Parliament backed down over the succession issue that had provoked this traumatic flight.

He was correct that the government required a monarch. But Parliament reacted to the ultimatum of his departure by inviting Mary Stuart, James’s Protestant daughter from his first marriage, to become their monarch. She accepted. Her husband, William of Orange, insisted on having equal status with his wife and William and Mary jointly assumed the thrones.

The crisis escalated at speed and within weeks the Highlands exploded into lawlessness and violence. The whole event would trigger the most serious conflict to gnaw at the foundations of Great Britain for the next sixty years. James’s departure provoked yet another revolution in a century of revolutions. And it led to the birth of Jacobitism, and its followers, Jacobites, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.

All through the winter of 1688/89, Scottish politicians fought for political power in Scotland with growing intensity. In the race to get control of the Scottish Parliament all constitutional principles were dumped. On 17 December, the Privy Council, including Tarbat, now back in government, sent a letter to James II, who had fled and then returned, asking him to call a free parliament. When James fled for a second time, they lost confidence in him. By 24 December they petitioned William, urging him to call a free Parliament.

In March the following year, a divided Parliament in Edinburgh passed a vote to support William and Mary against her father, James II. In Inverness, the Presbyterian-dominated Council swore allegiance to the new joint monarchs. But not everyone in Scotland agreed with the ruling. Many of the Gaelic-speaking and Episcopalian Highlanders remained loyal to James, including the Earl of Dundee (‘Bonnie’ Dundee), and large elements of the clan elites, such as Alexander Fraser of Beaufort, Simon’s older brother. Alexander came home to raise the Fraser host for James II along with clansman Fraser of Foyers. Once more, the four kingdoms stood ready to plunge into battle along religious and dynastic lines. It was a truly awful prospect.

Inverness, harried by Jacobite troops, soon became the scene of ‘blood works, riots and fornications’, the Council minutes noted with understandable hysteria. Simon claimed that Alexander was the first man in the north to join Dundee’s Jacobite army: ‘My brother brought him all the rents in Meal and Corn’ from the Lovat estates, Simon boasted. Since Tarbat and Lord Murray had abandoned their royal patron to serve a new master, Alexander of Beaufort’s initiative incensed them.

Simon tried to follow his brother. He gathered arms, mounted a horse and rode out to join General Thomas Buchan’s Jacobite force (consisting mainly of Highlanders and soldiers from the MacDonald, MacLean, Cameron, MacPherson and Invermoriston Grants clans). He did not get very far: he was captured, confined and eventually allowed to return to Tomich. Hugh, Lord Lovat did not accompany Alexander either. As soon as his Mackenzie uncle and Murray brother-in-law had changed sides, he was told to stay at home and prevent his men from joining the rebel Jacobites. This Hugh signally failed to do. When he was told to muster the Frasers for King William he was left gathering the few men who had refused to march for James, to go with him south to his in-laws’ Atholl–Murray territory and there to retrieve his clansmen from his cousin Alexander, and put the Frasers under Lord Murray’s command.

When Hugh reached Perthshire, his soldiers lined up with some of the Atholl Militia and awaited orders. Hugh went inside to explain why so few Frasers had come with him. As they waited, Hugh’s men caught sight of the rest of their clan marching by, Alexander at their head, en route to join Bonnie Dundee. They broke ranks and rushed to the river, scooped water into their bonnets and drank the health of King James VII of Scotland and II of England. Clapping their hats back on their heads, they ran to join their kinsmen, asking Alexander for orders.

Murray and the Marquis of Atholl were enraged; they would not forget this challenge to their authority by one of the young Beauforts. The ineffectual Hugh returned home to Castle Dounie while the Marquis of Atholl packed and headed south to Bath, to take the waters for his health – and safety. The Jacobite head of a traditionally Jacobite clan, he could not be accused of treason by his new King and Queen if he was not in the country. He left Lord Murray, his son and heir, behind to take charge.

The two armies finally closed in on each other on 27 July 1689 at Killiecrankie, a rocky pass ten miles south of the Atholl–Murray seat of Blair Castle. Dundee had 2,500 men, mainly Highlanders – ‘the best untrained fighting men in Scotland’ – against 3,000 government dragoons, troops and infantry. Supposedly allies by marriage, Murray’s Atholl men and Hugh Lovat’s kinsmen fought each other at close quarters, and to the death. Though the Jacobites won the battle, inflicting terrible losses of up to 2,000 on the Dutchman’s army, over 600 Jacobite Highlanders lost their lives, including their brilliant leader, Bonnie Dundee. His death signalled the end of the uprisings, with government forces scoring a final victory weeks later, despite their losses, in Murray country at Dunkeld.

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.