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

It had taken nearly two years, from Argyll’s first letter to his last, for the Earl to be able to write excitedly to Simon Fraser’s friends that he was brandishing ‘Beaufort’s (now I may say Lord Lovat’s) pardon’ in his hands. Simon was free, and now officially the 11th Lord Lovat. As the chief, MacShimidh Mor, Lovat could return home and relieve his people’s sufferings.

In Europe, three deaths threatened further political instability and affected Lovat’s plans. First, the British Protestant succession failed again when, in July 1700, the surviving Protestant Stuart child of Princess Anne and the Prince of Denmark, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, died.

The ramifications of Gloucester’s death spread north to Scotland, and far south to the Courts of Versailles and St Germains when, the following summer, Mary and Anne Stuart’s father, James II, died in exile. With his eye on Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, Louis XIV no longer had reason to appease William. Happy to aggravate political tensions within Britain, he proclaimed that James II’s son would be ‘King James III of England and VIII of Scotland’ on the death of Princess Anne. Anne had not even succeeded yet. The third death was the passing of Carlos II, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.

Meanwhile, King William’s grasp on Scotland was slipping. The whole country was breaking down after five years of failing harvests and a famine that had killed up to fifteen per cent of the Scottish population. Politicians racked their brains for schemes to stimulate life in the economic mud in which Scotland drowned. Their suffering was proof of God’s displeasure at the overturning of the natural order and at the anointed Stuart ruler having been driven away. The massacre at Glencoe, the quartering of government troops on starving people, and a series of economic disasters all blighted his rule.

The most recent crisis went back to 1696, when William Paterson, Scotsman and founder of the Bank of England, had suggested to his fellow Scots merchants and landowners that they should start a foreign trading company to stimulate their weak economy. Scottish businessmen set up ‘The Company of Scotland’ to trade with Africa and the Indies. Scots flocked to invest and sank a quarter of the nation’s tiny liquid capital into the venture. Inverness merchants contributed £3,000. They almost beggared the town on the gamble of massive returns. When the profits rolled in, it was said, investors’ wives and children would rush to demand luxuries from local merchants. The economy would boom. This was Paterson’s vision for Scotland.

The Scots plumped on Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama, as the cradle of their hopes, christening it ‘New Caledonia’. The Spanish complained angrily and claimed the territory – close to Spain’s silver mines – for themselves. William III agreed to withdraw English support for New Caledonia on one condition: that Spain refuse Louis XIV’s demand to make his grandson King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.

Spain agreed. The English Parliament pressured English merchants to withdraw all their capital from the Darien Venture. The English Navy, rather than protecting its sister nation’s merchant shipping, harried and captured it. To the Scots, William was putting his English subjects’ interests over those of Scotland. The collapse of the Darien Venture induced national economic breakdown. The Scots went into shock.

The whole nation seized on Darien and the colony at New Caledonia as the image of Scotland’s impoverished world standing. The Lord Advocate – the most senior lawyer in Scotland – Sir James Stewart, tried to impress on Carstares the level of grief and despair felt in the kingdom William had never once bothered to visit. ‘Disasters increase, and the weakness of the government is more and more discovered … Was ever a people more unhappy?’ The Scots asked themselves what they gained from the Union of Crowns. Independence looked like a solution to the succession and economic crises.

Sir James Stewart identified three groups fighting to dominate the Scottish Parliament: the Jacobites, the ‘Malcontents’, and the ‘Williamites’. The Jacobites wanted to ‘break the army … [so] that, when the King dies, and neither the Princess Anne nor he having any children, they may the easier embroil the nation, and do their own business’. That is, to restore the Stuarts from France. ‘The Malcontents that are not Jacobites,’ he explained, were aggressive place-seekers. They just wanted to disrupt proceedings in Parliament and disrupt government in Scotland, to force the King to promote them to power. However, ‘the Williamites … I think, must be more numerous than the other two. Their aim solely is the peace and security of the government and the good of the country, by an industrious pursuit of honourable and profitable trade …’ This last comment was wishful nonsense to make the King feel better. William’s credibility in North Britain was disintegrating.

Simon, Lord Lovat, moved into Castle Dounie and began collecting such rents as he decently could from starving clansmen and semi-bankrupt lairds. He took debts on himself and let the ordinary tenantry off their rents for that year where he saw they had nothing.

He was not left for long to try and sort out his estates. Goaded by Lovat’s reappearance, the Murrays hurtled back to the law courts. This time they forced ‘Sister Lovat’ there with them. They petitioned the Court of Session to summon ‘Captain Fraser’ (they would not call him Lord Lovat) – to answer the private charge of ‘rapt and hamesucken’. Relative to rape, rapt was a watered-down assault. Lovat explained it to one of the King’s advisers. ‘They do not [charge] me for ravishment, but for carrying her by violence from place to place.’ They hound me ‘as if I had murdered the King!’ Lovat complained. Hamesucken, loosely speaking, was socking (sucken) it to someone in their own home (hame). A crime against property rights, it was a capital crime, unlike rapt. Hamesucken also covered ‘the ravishing of persons of rank in houses of consequence’. They had to charge Lovat with both to get a death penalty.

Argyll told the King that the court summoning Lovat was ‘not composed as it ought to be’. While the Lord Advocate warned Argyll if Lovat ‘is found tomorrow in Edinburgh, I would not give a sixpence for his head’. Years of Tullibardine infiltration of the law courts favoured the Murrays securing the clan chief’s conviction. There were ‘such wicked and abandoned judges’, Lovat wrote, ‘the innocence of an angel of light would be to no avail!’ And Lovat was no angel. Lovat did not appear and on 17 February 1701 was found guilty in absentia. He was outlawed yet again.

Argyll advised Lovat to forget Edinburgh and the Scottish legal system and come south, persuade the King to extend his pardon to cover the ‘private charge’ and fulfil William’s intention to pardon Lovat. He must demonstrate that the Atholl Murrays subverted the King’s wishes.

In the summer of 1701, William raised Argyll to a dukedom, a great sign of royal favour. Lovat, an Argyll man, waited for his patronage. He wanted Argyll to place him somewhere in the Scottish government. There he could do the King’s business and his own.

Roderick Mackenzie, Lord Prestonhall, on the bench of the Court of Session, was a Scottish Law Lord, the brother of Sir George, now Viscount Tarbat – and therefore the uncle of the young Amelia Fraser presently living at Blair Castle. Tarbat and Sir Roderick had voted for Tullibardine to declare Lovat’s forced marriage with the dowager Lady Lovat null and void, and also to condemn Lovat to death because of the ‘rapt and hamesucken’. Now Sir Roderick presented the Mackenzies’ bill. He offered his son, Alexander Mackenzie, as husband to young Amelia, now rising thirteen and of marriageable age. On his ward’s behalf, Tullibardine thought about it, and accepted. It might help reduce the Frasers to obedience. It meant that Simon Fraser could never marry her and it brought the Mackenzies back on side. Tullibardine was rebuilding his power base. Those wily old Mackenzies could be useful allies.

There was a problem: even in the terms of the corrupt marriage contract of 1685, the husband had to be a Fraser. So the bridegroom’s father made him into one. Alexander was henceforth ‘Alexander Mackenzie of Fraserdale’. It was a mockery, but it mattered little. The bridegroom got ready to wrest the chieftainship of Clan Fraser from its natural chief.

On 7 March 1702, Lovat borrowed some money from Inverness lairds and merchants and prepared to go to London to raise an action in the House of Lords against this malicious twist of fate. Everything he had tried thus far the Murrays had countered using the might of the state. They had each resorted to force, corruption or violence to crush their opponent. He needed to stop the marriage and clear his name.

The next day at Richmond Park, William III’s horse put his hoof into a molehill, stumbled and threw its rider. The King broke his collar bone and contracted a chest infection. Two weeks later he was dead. Lovat had not even left Inverness.

In March 1702, Princess Anne of Denmark ascended the thrones. The great and good rushed to London to confirm or acquire places in her administration. Lovat headed south to join them, arriving in late April. As he skulked in London to get an entrée to the new Queen’s presence, news came of the marriage of young Amelia Fraser and Alexander Mackenzie. In his absence they had moved into Castle Dounie. The news ‘was decisive in shattering and reshaping his plans’. As if to confirm the blow to his hopes, Queen Anne then raised the Earl of Tullibardine to the Duke of Atholl.

Lovat wrote to Argyll asking for his help. His old patron replied he had to tread carefully; Argyll was not favoured by Anne. He could or would not do anything. ‘I despair of saving myself or my Kindred in this government. So I am resolved to push my fortunes some elsewhere,’ Lovat wrote. ‘The restless enemies of the family of Lovat’, and the ‘indifference’ of his allies and protectors filled him with pain and disillusionment. ‘Though I have now lost my Country and Estate, I do not value my personal loss, for I can have bread anywhere.’ He predicted, though it tortured him to say it, ‘that after I am gone, in ten years there will not be ten Frasers together in Scotland’.

Scarcely eight weeks after Queen Anne ascended the thrones, her ministry opened hostilities against France in what would become known as the War of the Spanish Succession. On Carlos II’s death, Louis claimed the thrones of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for his grandson. Should he succeed, Spain, her colonial empire, and the loose confederation of European states that made up the Holy Roman Empire, would all fall within Louis XIV’s sphere of influence. Louis would interfere in Spanish colonies and overseas trade through French ambassadors in Madrid. On France’s northern frontier lay the Spanish Netherlands, buffer between France and the United Provinces. Louis would quarter his troops there if he could, and menace the Protestant Low Countries. To the south, if France influenced Spanish-held territories in Italy – such as Naples and Sicily – then Anglo-Dutch Mediterranean trade would be disrupted. In England’s nightmares, Louis XIV achieved his wildest dream, to be the first ‘universal monarch’ – effectively, ruler of the known world. That world would be largely Roman Catholic. The consequences for Protestant Britain and her allies would be dire.

Alone, Lovat concluded he could hope for nothing from Edinburgh or Whitehall and must leave the country for a short while. He lodged for a few weeks in Harwich and thought things over. While there he took a lover, a young woman called Lucy Jones. Little is known of Lucy other than her notes to Lovat. He asked her to write to him as ‘Captain John Campbell’, showing he felt the need to adopt pseudonyms, fearing perhaps that the new Duke of Atholl would hunt him down. She told him she worried about the effects of his ‘melancholy’. She counselled the sort of stoicism that showed she did not know her man very well (‘life has such mixtures, that sure all wise people must despise it. It is the mart for fools and carnaval of knaves’). When he left, Lucy disappeared from the record of his life.

Lovat collected himself. He straightened his cuffs. He must think more flexibly. The weakness of the British succession might be the key to reverse his phase of bad luck. The Stuarts’ quest for Restoration to their inheritance seemed to chime so neatly with his own. If Anne died, her nearest relative was her half-brother, James. Instead of missions to hold the line of the Highland chiefs for William or Anne, perhaps he should sway the clans to support James’s claims? The Scottish Parliament was calling officially for the end of the Union of Crowns. The Jacobites in Edinburgh saw independence as the preliminary to bringing in James. Scotland and England seethed with intrigue, action and possibilities. There must be something in all this for Lovat; his family had always supported the Stuarts.

The blending of the personal and political reinvigorated him. ‘My nature,’ Lovat explained, ‘obliged me to expose my person … in such a ventorious or rather desperate manner that none of my enemies or even my own friends and Relations thought that ever I would be able to accomplish my design,’ to save the Fraser clan from disappearing, ‘but that I must die in the attempting of it.’ Lovat told some clan members and supporters in Inverness-shire that he was going to the Continent for a few months, to gather arms and money, and maybe commissions, to buy support in the Scottish Parliament to vote for independence.

He left his young brother John Fraser as his deputy, with instructions to defend their interests and resist the Mackenzies should they try to encroach. They did. John haunted Stratherrick, still the centre of support for Lovat’s claims. From there John led a band of men into the Aird of Lovat and garrisoned Beauly. He and about thirty minor Fraser lairds and their sons roamed the Aird for months, threatening those who looked likely to accept the new incumbents at Dounie. When the government at last forced the Atholls to recall their soldiers, much of Fraser country was laid waste. It seemed to Lovat, as he prepared to leave, that all he had predicted was fast coming to pass. But he dared stay no longer.

His destination was the exiled Stuart Court outside Paris. Except for a few stolen weeks on the run, it would be fifteen years before he was back among his Fraser clan again.

PART TWO

At the Court of the Sun King, 1702–15

‘A Perfect Romance’

– GUALTERIO TO LORD LOVAT

SEVEN

The Stuart Court of St Germains, 1702

‘The dismallest place in all Europe’

– THE EARL OF MIDDLETON

Lovat trotted out through the forests west of Paris. His goal was the palace at St-Germains-en-Laye, twelve miles out of the city, and ten miles north of the new and still-expanding Palace of Versailles.

It soon loomed above him. Birthplace and childhood home of Louis XIV, the French King had only moved from St Germains on the completion of Versailles seven years earlier. Until then it was the premier royal palace in France, fit for a king-in-waiting. Louis XIV and James II’s grandparents, Henry IV of France and Marie Medici, laid out six formal terraces descending from the palace in huge, graceful steps to the Seine. Mary, Queen of Scots, lived at St Germains as Queen of France when she was married to Francis II. By offering James II sanctuary and a pension at St Germains after he fled England in December 1688, Louis showed how highly he regarded his Stuart cousins, and how acutely he felt their injury. James had died the previous September and spent his final years depressed and obsessed with religious devotions. His body was buried in the chapel at St Germains, and his brain in a sarcophagus at the Scots Chapel in Paris.

The Stuart Court had been looking for a way home, scanning the vistas from the palace’s uppermost terraces, across northern France, for almost fifteen years. The hills of Montmartre lay in the distance to the east. Below the chateau, deep avenues cut long ago, lined with chestnuts and oaks, disappeared into the forest. The woods nurtured wild boar, deer and birds. Louis XIV’s children came regularly from Versailles for the sport. It was imperative Lovat improve his prospects. He had borrowed money from Principal Carstares to go home and from the Fraser lairds and merchants to return to London. He was ‘in a starving condition’ and needed funds and protection. He tormented himself with thoughts of what his life should be: Dounie and all that went with it, the chief at ease in his own hall. Instead, Amelia and Alexander Mackenzie of ‘Fraserdale’ sat in his chairs and made heirs in his bed.

Lovat’s first contact was a cousin, Sir John MacLean. The two had communicated as soon as Lovat landed in France. Sir John addressed his letters to Lovat’s new alias, ‘Donald Campbell’, or ‘Dole Don, Ambassador Extraordinaire of the Devilish Cantons’ as he was in MacLean’s crazy demotic. (Dole is the phonetic rendition of the Gaelic for Donald, Domhnall. Donn is dull brown – in hair or mood. The ‘devilish cantons’ were their beloved Highlands.) Lovat was vic mo chri, ‘son of my heart’, and ‘I am yours and yours I will be to all eternity or may God confound me. Your own, In saecula, seculorum. Amen.’ Sir John mixed Gaelic, English, French and Latin promiscuously.

Before Louis XIV moved to Versailles, he had spent years upgrading the irregular pentagon of his grandparents’ medieval palace to the sprawling monster Lovat now gazed on. Louis’s architect, Hardouin-Mansart, added five projecting wings, regularising each façade. To allow for the crush and scramble of courtiers milling around the French King as he moved from room to room, the architect collapsed walls dividing the cramped medieval rooms. Wind-tunnel passages now stretched from end to end of the vast building, creating walkways for processing, parading and plotting in. Dogs, servants, politicians and courtiers tripped over each other as they jostled to keep close to the Sun King, his family, his favourites and his succession of mistresses. Then one day they all left for the new palace at Versailles.

Neglected, St Germains fell fast into disrepair. The ‘Accounts of the Royal Buildings’ record the condition of the empty palace when James II arrived in winter 1688/89: broken glass; dried-out, un-waxed, shrunken parquet flooring heaved out of line; locks stuck with rust that bled down doors and windows in damp weather; blown plaster and warping woodwork needed repairing. St Germains reeked of neglect. Nevertheless, in 1702 the new war and Louis’s opportunistic proclamation of ‘James III and VIII’ gave Lovat optimism: plans and counter-plans changed as news of the progress of the war arrived.

The layout of the palace made day-to-day management hard. Louis’s half-completed building works failed to open up a way to allow internal communication between the royal apartments of the Queen Regent, and sixteen-year-old James, and their ministers. The royal accommodation spread over most of the bel étage (the second floor was the ‘beautiful floor’). Everyone here was forced to live modestly. Lovat wandered with counsellors and royalty alike, scurrying rat-like from one suite to another between floors via exterior gangways. He would soon understand that the palace’s rambling and incoherent structure mirrored deep problems amongst the leading Jacobites at St Germains.

Lovat was introduced by Sir John to one of the most senior politicians and nobles, the Duke of Perth. An energetic man, ‘always violent for the party he espoused, and … passionately proud’, Perth was impatient for the Jacobite call to action. He was very sociable and open hearted, lively but quixotic. He ‘tells a story very prettily, is capricious, a thorough bigot, and hath been so in each religion while he professed it’, observed one of the British Secretary’s spies. Perth converted – more than once – and dashed through a spiritual palette that took in Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, and Roman Catholicism.

Lovat’s reports about the discontent in Scotland and England were sweet music to Perth’s ears. Perth was happy to make the Scottish throne available to James as a first step, whether by Act of Parliament or at the point of a sword. Lovat claimed to have met ‘the chiefs of the clans and a great number of the Lords of the Lowlands’ before he left Scotland. Never deserted by the rhetoric of self-promotion, Lord Lovat claimed he had pleaded their Majesties’ case ‘in so spirited a manner … urged with so much force’ that the leading men of the Highlands begged him to go and represent them in Paris, and tell their King to come now, and rule over them. The country suffered grievously under the yoke of the Union of Crowns, Lovat said. Hence, he ‘arrived in Paris with this important commission’.

If this accorded exactly with Perth’s hope, it was anathema to the other dominant character at St Germains. The Earl of Middleton was a moderate Jacobite and an English Protestant. He had come over in 1693 to be James II’s chief minister. The Duc de Saint-Simon, recorder of everyday life in Louis XIV’s Court, described Middleton and his wife as ‘fiendishly spiteful and scheming, but Middleton, because he was admirably good company, mixed on equal terms with best people at Versailles’. Though the Earl hated St Germains, calling the palace ‘the dismallest place in all Europe’, he remained ferociously loyal to young James and his mother, Mary of Modena. Guided by Middleton, devout Catholics though they were, the Stuarts were committed to preserving the Protestant settlement in Britain, and offering religious tolerance to all. Middleton’s secretary recalled the late James II counselling his son that ‘if ever he came to Rule over that People, to be a strict Observer of … the Laws of England … that he might not split upon that Rock which had been so fatal to him’.

In Middleton’s judgement, strict observation of ‘the Laws of England’ and diplomatic exchanges between magnates – not threats of violence by Gaelic-speaking Highlanders like Perth’s kin – was the correct strategy for restoration. When speaking to Middleton, Lovat emphasised the need to strengthen resistance in the Scottish Parliament, to vote for independence and then the restoration of the male Stuarts. Someone should be sent back with money to buy votes, he argued. He, Lovat, could do it.

By living at daggers drawn (‘like cats and dogs’ was how Louis XIV’s daughter-in-law put it) Perth and Middleton terminally weakened the Jacobite ruling council. Lovat tried to avoid taking sides, or being treated with contempt by one side or the other. However, the minute Middleton heard of Lovat’s strategy for restoration and the key role of the Highland clans, he opposed it. The Earl then worked to ruin Lovat’s credibility, gleefully repeating at Versailles gossip about ‘the Grand Fornicator of the Aird’. Lovat hit back that the Earl’s strategy had slowly suffocated the cause: his many missives lay smothered under a mountain of paperwork in the English administration. While some English ministers nodded and gave verbal support to Middleton, they prevaricated with questions, delaying commitment to bring back James, even as they worked to proclaim George of Hanover King of England and Scotland when Anne died. Their measured, meaningless exchanges with the Court at St Germains damped down the Jacobite threat while satisfying their own residual Jacobite sympathies.

Middleton soon hated Lovat for his views. He truly believed the Fraser chief was wrong. Yet it was plain to Lovat that Middleton’s group were out of touch with national sentiment. They had been away from the British political and social scene for at least a decade and more. What Parliament might have accepted then was not so obviously attractive now. Bringing in Anne instead of James, and negotiating with other claimants to the thrones, should have alerted old hands at St Germains to the new political realities. Only force would carry them home.

Perth countered, citing Lovat, that only a rising in Scotland, backed by France, would give them what they wanted. He bemoaned ‘the counsel that prevails here is that which advises inaction and waiting for a miracle’. The ultra-pious Mary of Modena liked to believe waiting for a miracle was a viable policy and would retreat frequently to the convent at Chaillot to pray for one.