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

Early next morning, at around two o’clock, Simon and a group of armed guards entered his bride’s apartments. A drunken Simon instructed the maids to undress Amelia for bed, and then withdraw. When he returned nothing had happened, so he ordered two clansmen to remove the serving women.

Amelia ‘cried out most piteously’ as two men lifted her to the bed, and struggled to prepare the lady for her wedding night. Bending over her, Simon held aquavitie4 to her nose. One man fumbled at her shoes. A maid rushed to her lady and attempted to untie Amelia’s clothes. Lady Lovat kicked her away. Determined, Simon searched for a dirk to cut his wife’s stays, found none, and told one of his men to do it.

Impatient for this to end, they ‘put my Lady on her face and spread her arms’ and cut the laces of her corset, and finally left Amelia and Simon alone. Versions of what happened that night circulated almost immediately. In one account the piper played in an adjacent room to drown Amelia’s screams, and in the morning a servant found her speechless and out of her senses. Others denied it. By dawn, however, silence hung over the castle. Simon had put the bachelor state behind him.

The Murrays erupted in fury. The sister of Scotland’s most powerful man was the ‘most violented lady’ in the kingdom, they said. Amelia’s father, the Marquis of Atholl, commanded Lords James and Mungo to get her away. Atholl pressed Tullibardine to obtain an order for government troops to ‘catch that base creature, Simon Fraser, and his accomplices’. From Inverness to Edinburgh and London, gossip and letters argued the question: had he raped a Marquis’s daughter? If he had forced her, and was not mad or stupid, what had driven him to do it?

Major Fraser of Castleleathers recorded that very quickly Lady Amelia made up her own mind. ‘Whatever new light the lady had got,’ she desired her husband to ‘send for Mr William Fraser, minister of Kilmorack, to make a second marriage (not thinking the first valid)’. The hell of that night left her not knowing where she stood.

Simon said he hoped the marriage would allay ‘the Marquis of Atholl’s fury against him’, but the news that Atholl had acquired Simon Fraser as a son-in-law, unsurprisingly, sent the old man into a frenzy. There ‘was nothing in his mind but the business of the base Frasers’, wrote his wife. Old Atholl was adamant Tullibardine must make their quarrels a government concern at the highest levels. For the next two years, the records of the Privy Council chattered with Inverness and the Frasers.

The forced marriage and consummation were brutal errors of judgement that Simon would regret all his life. Again he had used a lamented but tolerated old tradition and pushed it to new levels in order to force a match with a Marquis’s daughter against her family’s will. The practice was normally used to make a girl fall in line with her family’s wishes, against her will.

Thomas Lovat wrote to the Earl of Argyll, explaining first that the Saltoun incident had been settled by the Sheriff, and second, that his son and Amelia were now legally married. It was better to let it all die down, he said. Besides, he observed cannily, the Murrays’ ‘design of appropriating the estate and following of Lovat to themselves, is made liable to more difficulties by that match’. Argyll agreed entirely. Tullibardine’s political enemies stood by Simon as a way to attack the High Commissioner and curtail his vast ambitions to rule all Scotland with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton.

In order to convince the legal establishment in Edinburgh to act against Simon, the Murrays required their star witness: the victim of the alleged crime, Lady Amelia Lovat. Rumours buzzed around Inverness that the dishonoured Lady was now dead. When Lords Mungo and James Murray rode to Castle Dounie they found it empty. Simon and Amelia had withdrawn, with a company of armed men, to the isolation of Eilean Aigas, a wooded rocky islet in the middle of the River Beauly. Simon hoped the black, fast-flowing tangle of currents surrounding the island would make their retreat impregnable.

They stayed here for several weeks. Simon wrote to a friend in Inverness explaining he was struggling to keep up his wife’s spirits. ‘I know not how to manage her,’ he wrote unhappily, ‘so I hope you will send me all the advice you can.’ He was not used to coping with a woman, a mother, who was just a few years older than him. For a lady of rank to live an itinerant life, adjunct to a fugitive and far from her children, was very hard. Simon soothed her as best he could.

Amelia Lovat’s position was a confused one. A ‘shamed’ lady, even the daughter of a Marquis, was a social outcast; she knew this. Besides, she had sworn a deposition that her marriage was genuine when the Reverend James had visited them at Dounie. When Amelia’s father found this out he was furious, shouting that the Fraser clerics were all ‘false prophets and wizards’. She yearned to see her brothers, perhaps to find out when she might come back, or to get some degree of acceptance from her family. Though Simon did not trust them, he allowed Amelia to travel down the glen to meet with her brothers. He would never see her again.

At Castle Dounie, James Murray greeted his sister tenderly, and asked if she was ‘lawfully married to Captain Fraser of Beaufort?’ She answered that she was. Lord James pulled away, raised his foot and ‘gave her along the belly’, yelling at her that she was a bitch. Lady Amelia doubled over. An Inverness laird, Fraser of Culduthel, rushed forward to aid her, but Murray men overpowered him. They pushed Amelia onto a horse and galloped off towards Inverness.

With Lady Amelia on her way to Blair Castle, Tullibardine persuaded the Privy Council and Court of Session to issue ‘Letters of Intercommuning’ forbidding anyone to ‘commune’ with the Frasers. In effect, ‘whatever slaughter, mutilation, bloodshed, fire-raising or other violence, shall happen to be acted’, by anyone who assisted the law in ‘seizing, reducing, and bringing them in dead or alive … the same shall be held as laudable good and warrantable service to his Majesty’, but even more to the Atholl Murrays.

Colonel Hill warned Tullibardine that local people on both sides ‘talk very slightingly of the matter and say now there is no need of sending forces’. The issue was settled; no one wanted to stir it up to a savage feud where the more powerfully ambitious side used the law to inflict crushing blows and the other eventually responded in kind, having nothing to lose. Tullibardine ignored him. A first wave of troops was sent in, commanded by Amelia’s brothers. The ordinary clansmen, weakened by the famines of King William’s ill years, found increased troop numbers quartered on them and could not cope. The people began to starve.

Over the next few weeks, the Murray ladies at Blair Castle pressured Lady Amelia to condemn Simon Fraser. ‘My Lord and I has told her … over and over,’ her sister wrote to Katherine Tullibardine, ‘that if she has any regard to her own honour and reputation, she will for once lay aside her reserved humour … and tell, to all she speaks with, the abhorrence she has of that base man.’ If Amelia maintained she was married to Simon, there was no case.

Her refusal to come to court and declare she had been raped drove her family mad with frustration, and her despair is clear from her letters. ‘I have the comfort in my extreme misery to be owned by such relations … which is God’s goodness to me … one so unworthy and so unfortunate.’ If she assented to her family’s description of her as ruined, what sort of future would she face? By condemning Simon, she condemned herself. Her shame would feed scandal sheets from Inverness to Paris. Her family pushed on oblivious. She was their political pawn. Lord James Murray believed that Tullibardine and his eldest brother were prepared ‘to ruin my sister’s and niece’s interest’ – the Lovat estates – to exact vengeance, kill Simon and regain control.

* * *

Simon escaped Eilean Aigas and haunted the hill country, moving and hiding from glen to glen. At the end of the year, Simon sent his father to safety from the Stratherrick estates, to Thomas’s brother-in-law, the MacLeod chief, at Dunvegan Castle on the west coast of the Isle of Skye. The Murrays now had about 600 soldiers – government and Murray men – in the Inverness area. Lord James Murray wrote to his father, Tullibardine: ‘Except to satisfy you, I confess I expect neither honour nor credit by turning a plunderer.’ Atholl and Tullibardine worried that Lord James did not have the stomach for the fight to waste Fraser country and reduce the clan to submission.

Tullibardine had failed to secure from the Privy Council a Commission of Fire and Sword, the licence he needed that allowed him to eliminate the Frasers. Some Councillors ‘were opposing the case’, Dollery informed his master, ‘as judging it not proper to give a direct commission to one clan over against another, and others said that it was not agreeable to law either’. The government read this principally as a clan feud. The central authorities manipulated feuds as a control valve to maintain a power balance in the region, but were wary of elevating one to a matter of national security. It might all backfire. They all lived with the national outrage after Glencoe.

In Inverness, even the weather conspired to conceal Simon. ‘Severe frost and snow’ filled paths and tracks. The Murray soldiers shirked from going out on forays. No matter how much the Marquis of Atholl offered in lures and bribes, officers could obtain no reliable intelligence from turncoats. All his army could do was destroy the clan’s property, which, given ‘the most tempestuous weather of snow and great frosts’, brought more starvation to ordinary Frasers. Unless the country people, the poor, ‘be made to suffer for his being among them’, wrote one of Tullibardine’s officers, and those among the professional and landowning classes ‘that go along with him [be] punished in their goods’, they were sure it would be impossible to get hold of Simon Fraser. Tullibardine ordered the devastation to continue. It was futile. One officer spelled out the situation – ‘the whole country are entirely addicted to him’ and they should call a halt.

Atholl and Tullibardine would not relent. As the winter of 1697/98 ground on, it proved impossible ‘to march against them from a town that favours them … through a country that is friendly to them, and intangled with them, without being discovered’. The Murray spy network was proving a disaster. Simon’s functioned beautifully.

The Murrays subpoenaed scores of Frasers from all ranks to go south and testify against their chief. The road south led them by Blair Castle, thirty miles north of Perth. The old Marquis forced the military escorts to bring the witnesses to him and put them in his dungeons. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Annandale, sent tetchy letters requesting the forwarding of his witnesses. The Marquis of Atholl let the witnesses go, while he whinged that the court in Inverness, run by Brigadier Grant, was biased ‘to the prejudice of our family … It is all our enemies that has it in their hands’ – a breathtaking complaint from a man who intimidated witnesses daily and whose son manipulated the Edinburgh judiciary. Atholl asked Tullibardine to make sure the Frasers were sent back to him on their road home, ‘so that I may make them perfect what they have begun’. They know, the Marquis said, ‘they would be ruined if they did not’ appear for the Murrays, ‘which is the best argument to Highlanders’. If they ‘should fail’, he added chillingly, ‘they will still be in my power to take amends … All this has been my business night and day.’

Revenge consumed the old man. ‘I hope I have got the chief [men] of the name of Fraser who live in Stratherrick broke and divided,’ he told Tullibardine. He was determined to break Simon’s core support. Yet the Murray chief was no longer young. He carried stress in his belly, making him prone to belching and ‘gout in the stomach’. He put himself under terrible pressure to settle Simon on a gallows, before allowing himself to die a happy man.

By the spring of 1698, Atholl declared with satisfaction that ‘the estate of Lovat is altogether ruined’. Although the outlaws remained at large, the Murrays had amassed enough evidence to start their trial. Simon was cited to answer two charges: first, forced marriage and rape. Second, raising men in arms and resisting the King’s forces.

The court ‘compered’ Thomas and Simon and their followers to appear three times over the summer, with increasingly dire threats every time they declined. On 6 September 1698, the court found them guilty of the capital crime of rebellion, and they were declared forfeit in King William’s name. Tullibardine got his Commission of Fire and Sword. (The Crown prosecution refused to have anything to do with the private charge of possible marital rape.) Simon, his father and their main adherents were now ‘outlawes and fugitives frae the lawes’. They were to be ‘executed to the death … Their name, fame, memory and honours to be extinct and their armes to be riven furth and delate out of the bookes of armes.’ For the rest of time, none of their heirs could enjoy titles, positions and dignities. In effect, anything that anyone did to the Lovats and their men, since they were outside the law, would be ignored by anyone within the law. The Murrays had free rein to pursue Simon any way they chose. His family were to be wiped from the pages of history. The Lovat estates lay tantalisingly within the Murrays’ grasp.

Simon wrote to Argyll, asking that he secure a pardon from King William to let the Lovats live at peace, enjoy their estates and serve his Majesty. Someone had to control the Murrays. Argyll went to the King.

While at his brother-in-law’s castle on Skye, Simon received news that his father, Thomas, Lord Lovat, had died and been buried in the graveyard of his wife’s family. Simon could not risk bringing the body of the Fraser chief home, or honour him with the traditional huge Highland funeral and burial at Wardlaw. In hiding, Simon had no time to grieve. He believed the Atholls had hounded the old man to death. Simon now assumed the titles of MacShimidh Mor, the 11th Lord Lovat, chief of Clan Fraser – though these were worthless to a young man who was now an outlaw.

Armed with a death warrant, the Murray hunt heated up. At the head of hundreds of Athollmen and Lowland soldiers, Lord James Murray, accompanied by his brother Mungo, planned a night attack into Stratherrick where they believed Simon was hiding. ‘Having the authors of his father’s death, and of all his personal misfortunes before his eyes, he would now revenge himself in their blood, or perish in the attempt,’ Simon swore. He galloped to Stratherrick to stop more ill-treatment of his people. The hunters would become the hunted.

The Murrays struck camp for the night against a rocky crag. When they mustered the next morning, Simon calculated he had something under 300 men to their 600. Given the numerical disadvantage, a full-frontal attack would fail. Simon ordered one of his men, Alexander MacDonald, to take sixty Frasers and string them out in a thin line in front of the enemy, so they would believe his whole force faced them. Meanwhile, Simon led the rest around to their flank.

Realising late they were to be ambushed, Lord James ordered his troops to fall back towards a ‘terrible defile’, six miles in the direction of Inverness, called Allt nan Gobhar – the Blacksmith’s Burn. Alexander MacDonald guessed their goal and raced ahead of them to block the way through. The fighting men under Simon broke rank in pursuit.

Simon Fraser fought as MacShimidh, a Highland chief; not as the bewigged and breeches-clad British peer petitioning in the law courts of Edinburgh, but wrapped and belted in a plaid over the top of his linen shirt, like his ordinary kinsmen. He put a bonnet on his head, and stuck the Fraser emblem, a sprig of yew, in it. With the battle cry A’Chaisteal Dhunaidh – ‘for Castle Dounie’, and the scream of the pipes, they charged to battle. ‘Lord Lovat ran for three miles alongside them, on foot, and almost naked.’ The howling chief of Clan Fraser stampeded the government troops towards the men hidden in Blacksmith’s Burn. Drawing close, the Murrays saw what awaited them and suddenly ‘impressed with the most lively apprehensions’ of impending slaughter, most Murray men tried to surrender. Simon observed Lord James yelling at them to engage but they ‘laid down their arms and covering their heads with their plaids, cried out for quarter’. A Murray fighter came running towards them, ‘with a white handkerchief … neckcloth tied to a bludgeon, crying out for mercy’.

‘Lord James,’ Simon wrote with grim pleasure, ‘was beside himself at this declaration.’ Simon’s first response was not to take the surrender. He surveyed the noisy, trembling and quarrelling bunch of regular and irregular forces whose commanding officers had ‘deprived him of lands and title by violence, injustice, and fraud … [He was] outlawed and condemned to death, hunted on the mountains,’ he reflected. The last couple of years had not encouraged the philosophical, university-trained side of his character. They drove him in on most animal resources, to survive and fight, protect his territory. His father had died without elegy and obsequy; without his life being properly honoured. He would ‘avenge the death of his father, and the tyranny of Lord Athol and all his family’. Since birth, these men had tried to manipulate his destiny. Now Simon was clan chief.

Though his first instinct had been to massacre the lot of them, older heads among his advisers made him understand that if he did, ‘not a man in the Kingdom would either assist or pity’ the Frasers’ cause, so he contented himself with humiliation. He lifted his sword tip and made James and Mungo kiss it and swear upon it that ‘they renounced their claims in Jesus Christ, and their hopes of heaven, and devoted themselves to the torments of hell, if they ever returned’ or occasioned ‘Lord Lovat the smallest mischief’. He then lined up his men in two files and made the enemy troop run the gauntlet jostled like criminals, and sent them out of his country.

At bottom, Simon was in desperate need of a pardon to end this feud before his whole inheritance was torched beyond resurrection and his people all starved to death. More in hope than expectation, Simon Fraser thereafter took as his motto Sin Sanguine Victor, ‘Victor without Blood’.

SIX

Victory and loss, 1699–1702

‘I despair of saving myself or my Kindred’

– LOVAT TO THE EARL OF ARGYLL

The Reverend James had educated Simon in his responsibilities to his clan, always to keep going, and to determine his own fate. He conjured,

In spite of malice you will still be great,

And raise your name above the power of fate.

Our sinking house which now stoops low with age,

You show with newborn lustre on the stage.

Typical of Celtic eulogies, the hero is praised and cajoled to ever-greater sacrifices. Other chiefs had passed by this destiny. But it inspired Simon and, as the century drew to a close, left him facing a death sentence. He believed passionately that fate or God had laid on him as a sacred duty the salvation of Clan Fraser. It was, he always said, inseparable from ‘his Nature’. Primogeniture and his personal qualities confirmed fate’s decree. Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat and then Tullibardine had tried to break and remake Clan Fraser in their own image, using all the skills and resources they could muster. Now Simon sought to restore the clan using his gifts and training.

Without heavyweight political backing, Simon could not win. He faced a long guerrilla action, a ruinous feud, fought on and over his country. While Tullibardine influenced the Edinburgh judiciary, the courts offered no path back inside lawful society. For eight long months the Atholl Murrays had harried and hunted the Frasers, trying to capture or crush their leader, but without success. In a desperate attempt to flush out the Fraser chief, Lord James, smarting from his defeat at Lovat’s hands, had his men drive off stock, smash boats, nets and fishing gear, spinning wheels and looms, and fell trees – anything that might allow the Frasers to live or do a little business. But Simon was still at large, and his messages were getting through to the south. His successes and the substantial levels of support he clearly enjoyed impressed many who sought to bring down Tullibardine and stop him (in the Highlands) and his brother-in-law Hamilton (in the Lowlands) exercising almost unassailable power in Scotland. The Duke of Argyll advised Simon to ‘lay down his arms and come privately to London’ to seek a pardon, informing William III that Tullibardine created chaos and hostility to the King in Scotland in the service of his greed. Lovat and the trouble in Fraser country were Argyll’s proof.

Late in 1699, two weeks after setting out, Simon Fraser entered London for the second time in his life. It proved a wasted trip. The King had left the country and was at Loos in Flanders. By the turn of the century, William was in a stronger position in Europe. In 1697, Louis XIV of France had abandoned his previous war aims and sued for peace. As part of this he now acknowledged the Prince of Orange as William III, King of England and Scotland, thereby denying the claim of James II. Even the Pope proclaimed William III ‘the master; he’s arbiter of all Europe’.

King William was now in Flanders taking part in another struggle provoked by Louis XIV’s ambition. The future of the thrones of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire was at stake. At present the ailing King of Spain, Carlos II, sat on both thrones. The rest of Europe was divided between whether to keep the thrones united, or split them up when Carlos died, and on who would sit on either or both thrones. Competing European interests battled over a settlement, until Louis XIV insisted on having both titles for his second grandson, the Duke of Anjou. Relations between William III and Louis XIV, only recently nosing above freezing point after three years of peace, plunged to a glacial impasse and stayed that way while Carlos II lived.

William needed a relatively peaceful and united Britain to be able to concentrate on defeating Louis. And while no government needed the entirety of its peoples on its side, it did need enough capable supporters to maintain law and order locally, raise taxes and supply soldiers for these international affairs. To be one of the regional managers, Lovat explained, he needed to live as a magnate, not an outlaw. He and his people could then ‘serve your Majesty as they are full ready to do’, as he outlined to King William in a letter Carstares read aloud to his monarch.

Argyll supported Simon by adding his voice. ‘The persecution [Tullibardine] exercised against Lord Lovat and the clan of the Frasers, is capable of exciting all the clans, and even the whole nation, to revolt against the government,’ Argyll asserted. ‘The King cannot do a more acceptable thing for the generality than send [Lovat] his pardon for the convocation of men in arms.’ More people only hesitated to speak out against Atholl and Tullibardine because ‘they threaten so hard and bite so sore’, finished Argyll.

The Murrays vehemently opposed this. ‘It will be a great reflection on the government if there be not a speedy course taken to apprehend’ Simon Fraser, Tullibardine lectured his King, justifying the turbulence and suffering he brought about in Fraser country. Other Scottish politicians petitioned Carstares, emphasising the wider British political element in Lovat’s case. ‘Although I cannot justify Captain Fraser in his proceedings, but yet, the rendering of so many men desperate is not at all to the government’s interest,’ wrote Sir James Stewart, the Lord Advocate.

Simon reiterated that the Frasers wanted peace, ‘to live the more comfortable under the rays of your Majesty’s protection, and thereby be more encouraged to serve your Majesty’s interest’. William listened to the increasing volume of this sort of talk, of Tullibardine’s abuse of his position for private gain. Tullibardine had maintained his following with the promise of positions and pensions to clever, ambitious men. The King decided to stop promoting men put forward by Tullibardine to fill posts in the Scottish executive. Tullibardine reacted by resigning from the government in a fit of humiliated fury. Having the deepest confidence in the counsel of Carstares and Argyll, the King agreed to pardon Simon for his crimes against the Crown and accepted the Fraser chief’s offer of devoted service. However, William refused to enter into the murky business of the forced marriage. The Crown had never charged him with it and logically William could not pardon him for it. He was happy to curb Murray ambitions, but he told Argyll he did not want to ‘disgust’ them too much.