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

Middleton had some reason to pursue the policy he did. Even pro-Hanoverians admitted the level of support for James in both English Houses of Parliament. ‘There is a party in this Kingdom for the Prince of Wales,’ they wrote to the Elector of Hanover. Even his enemies called Young James the Prince of Wales. Their ‘boldness is founded, not only on their confidence in the King of France, but on an assurance with which they flatter themselves, of being countenanced and supported by the present government’. Many of the most powerful men in Queen Anne’s administration – Godolphin, Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Ormonde – engaged in friendly communications with St Germains. It did not mean they would actually vote to bring ‘King James III’ back. Lovat declared in frustration that ‘while her Majesty implicitly followed the advice of the people who were at the head of the English Parliament, Jesus Christ would come in the clouds before her son would be restored’. Middleton recalled the Queen Regent to the reports he had from Scotland, that Lovat ‘joined insinuating talents to low manners and a profligate character’.

Lovat lost patience. He had intended to be in France just a few weeks, obtaining money and stirring up opposition to Anne in the Scottish Parliament and the Highlands. He urged the Jacobites to catch hold of the opportunity the war presented and persuade Louis XIV to back them. It offered the sort of chance that might not come again for another fifteen years. An invasion of Scotland would merely be part of Louis’s larger strategy, and divert some British troops menacing his northern border through the Low Countries.

Though Mary disliked Lovat’s arrogant tone, the logic of his argument tempted her. She agreed that Middleton’s policy was not working, and if the war suddenly turned against France, Louis might recognise Anne, and then George as her successor. She would ask Louis to back an invasion.

Before she could act, the Queen Regent was distracted by a bizarre religious conversion. Middleton claimed to have been woken in the night, ‘hearing the Blessed Sacrament carried along with the sound of a little bell before it, to the apartment of his son, Lord Clermont, who was at the point of death’. Middleton’s son suddenly felt better. He was convinced it had been Mary’s husband, the late James II, ringing to exhort him to convert to Catholicism. Middleton declared that the keys to the offices of state were incompatible with the keys to heaven, and theatrically handed them back to the Queen Regent. He needed to go on retreat to clean his soul.

Mary’s attention swung ecstatically away from Perth, Sir John MacLean and Lovat, and back to her dear Middleton. She told everyone that Middleton’s conversion gave her the only joy she had experienced since the death of ‘our Saint King’, as Mary now called her late husband. It was almost beyond belief. Up to now, Middleton ‘had so mean an opinion of converts, that he used to say, “A new light never comes into the house but by a crack in the tiling”.’ It was a miracle, said the Queen, the first her dead husband had performed. Middleton slid back into Mary of Modena’s favour, and slipped the keys of office back into his pocket. Mary waited for another ‘sign’.

Living with the infighting at St Germains for even a few months made it clear to Lovat that he must go straight to the real decision-maker, or he would be trapped inside this melodrama for years. Only Louis XIV could provide effective support for an uprising. However, the French King would not meet with a heretic. All things considered, it was a good time to consult one’s religious conscience. Besides, it was clear that conversions were de rigueur for ambitious politicians at St Germains.

Lovat went to Brother McLoghlan, a priest at St Germains, and declared his intention to convert. Brother McLoghlan advised the Scot to retire to a convent to think it over. Lovat did not need to go that far: this was not a huge leap of faith for an Episcopalian, and not a very devout one. Without Catholicism he did not have the support of the Queen Regent or a recommendation to Louis XIV. By early the following year, Lovat was writing to Italy to offer the Pope his service to the Holy Mother Church ‘to the spilling of my blood … With this object I go to hazard my life and my family.’ The Pope replied, thanking Lovat and welcoming him into the Church of Rome.

Lovat’s persistence had paid off. In the autumn of 1702, he had heard that Louis XIV would grant him a private audience. Immediately Lovat started penning a grandiloquent harangue for the edification of ‘The Greatest Prince in the Universe’ from the self-appointed spokesman of his Scottish allies – les chefs des tribus montagnards – the chiefs of the Highland clans.

EIGHT

Planning an invasion, 1702–04

‘The Greatest Prince in the Universe’

– LOVAT TO LOUIS XIV

Lord Lovat, MacShimidh Mor, had abandoned his clan for exactly this sort of opportunity. As for his Most Christian Majesty, the Stuarts were loved relations. Schemes to benefit them had bubbled out of this chiefly milord for months before Louis granted him an audience.

He clattered into the courtyard at Versailles, his nerves steeled by need. Lovat felt the Sun King’s presence all round him, monumentalised in the buildings Louis had raised and the gardens he had laid down, beautifying the face of the earth and glorifying God as Louis had been glorified by the Almighty. When Louis walked in the gardens, fountains sprang to life. To bring off the effect, other fountains had to die down behind him. The plumbing was not up to his vision. Nothing quite worked as hoped.

Lovat chivvied himself down miles of corridors towards his private audience. He was shown into a small chamber off the Hall of Mirrors. Standing in his stockinged feet ‘Louis le Grand’ was just five feet five inches of global power. Lovat, broad and long, loomed over him by seven inches. He had to bow very low. The Court flunkies retired leaving just the Marquis de Torcy (son of the great Colbert), who placed himself behind the King, now seated in the royal chair, and giving the Highlander space to speak. Torcy was keen for the invasion of Scotland to happen. It would pull thousands of British troops out of the Continental field of operations and weaken the Duke of Marlborough’s army.

Addressing the King in good French with a Scots accent, Lord Lovat enlarged ‘upon the ancient alliances between Scotland and France’. He expatiated on genealogies: Louis XIV’s, ancient and connecting him intimately to the royal House of Stuart; and Lovat’s, 500 years old, connecting him to French aristocracy. The Frasers were originally a French family, Lovat reminded the King: they went to England with the last successful French invaders, the Normans. This Fraser could go with the next, the greatest Bourbon. Lovat knew Louis adored genealogy.

‘At a thousand hazards to [my] … life,’ Lovat accepted the commission of the Highland elite to come here, he said. If the Highlanders rose in rebellion and were ‘honoured with the protection of the greatest King that ever filled the throne of France’, he said they could not fail. Lovat drew to a close. ‘With a look of much benignity,’ he noted happily, Louis assured him the ‘whole French nation had their hearts unfeignedly Scottish’. The two men speculated about invasion plans. It pained Lovat to be looking back towards his homeland through the spyglass of an invading soldier, pointing out opportunities to attack it.

Back at St Germains, Lord Lovat’s mind flitted between France and home. With Louis behind him, his hopes of his own restoration had been revived. He broadcast the news of his success to the Duke of Perth, Sir John MacLean, and MacLean’s cousin, Alexander. ‘The King promised at all times to assist the Scots with troops, money and everything that might be necessary to support them against the English,’ he told them. The men were overjoyed and raised their glasses. Lovat looked at the old men around him. They had all come here to this place as optimistic young men; he was determined not to get stuck, like them, for a decade and a half.

The Middletonian faction took little notice of Lovat and his claims until gifts from Louis XIV began to arrive for Lovat, including a valuable sword and a pair of beautiful pistols. His new friends admired their lovely workmanship, with the head of ‘His Most Christian Majesty’ cast in silver on the handles, and Lovat’s full coat of arms, coronet and all. The steel barrels were richly inlaid with figures in gold with the Fraser motto, Je suis prest [prêt] and the crest of the Fraser chief at the muzzle. The presents suggest Lovat made quite an impression on the French King; and a slightly different one on Louis’s maitresse en titre, Madame de Maintenon. She saluted the tall, dashing Highlander as ‘un homme ravissant’, a loaded compliment in the light of his conviction for ‘ravishing a lady of rank in a house of consequence’, but also perhaps an amused allusion to his gift of a beautiful weapon engraved with ‘I am Ready’ on it.

Lovat retired to his room to prepare for his meetings with Louis’ ministers. The cogitations emerged in another of his memorial letters to the Sun King. ‘What is necessary to carry on a vigorous war?’ Lovat asked rhetorically. His answer was quite specific: 6–7,000 men, including 600 cavalry and 1,200 dragoons, ‘who must have their accoutrements carried along with them’; 18,000 arms, ‘firelocks with bayonets, and not muskets’; also, ammunition for an army of 30,000 men, plus artillery, plus ammunition for three garrisons and artillery for them too, ‘to be a safe retreat in case the army be obliged to winter in that country’. Finally, Lovat required about £40–50,000 cash ‘to gratify those that bring in forces … and to buy provisions’ – there would be no more quartering of troops on poor Highlanders. ‘The sooner this is done,’ Lovat continued, ‘it is certainly the better because of the season of the year and the present commodious weather.’ Spring was campaign time. No one fought through the winter if they could possibly help it. Everything got bogged down in the mud. Men and materiel rotted like turnips.

Lovat’s invasion plot was born of impatience and ambition: he had been away nearly a year and was increasingly restless to return to the Highlands. Ships with men, war chests and arms must land on the west coast of Scotland, he said, and others on the east. They could sweep through the country gathering men and seizing Edinburgh before the English were properly alerted to the threat. Sir John MacLean looked over the plans. He cavilled. Cousin Lovat had been a bit creative with the figures, he thought. He had rated some of the chiefs at about double the number of troops they could actually bring out. Lovat dismissed his criticisms; the French needed encouragement, he said.

Lovat could not hope to succeed if he did not involve Mary of Modena, young James and the Earl of Middleton. He petitioned James for gratifications. Lord Lovat ‘expects a letter of thanks from the King for the service of his family wherein he should promise to make him Sheriff of Inverness’. Wherever he was, home was the backcloth against which Lovat stood and spoke. The Sheriffs of the shires dominated both elections and the county law courts. ‘My enemies grow great in the Prince of Denmark’s [Queen Anne’s] government,’ he complained to James, ‘and they accomplish the ruin of my estate and family.’

Letters from the Highlands told of a worsening situation. At St Germains, Lovat requested a patent for the title of ‘Earl of Inverness’ from the Stuarts, though a duke’s coronet might sit better on him. Above all, he wanted to be restored to his inheritance. In his imagination, he could be the premier duke in Scotland, and unassailable. In reality he was a broke and dispossessed fugitive.

The young king-in-waiting was all in favour of Lovat’s dashing schemes, but Mary of Modena could not decide what to do. In theory, she would undertake whatever was needed to get the two of them back to the Palace of Whitehall, though she also believed that God would provide, and she must prevent her son exposing himself to danger. The Duc de Saint-Simon observed of James’s mother, ‘for all that she was so pious, loved power, and had been too strict and narrow in his [her son’s] education, either from misguided affection or because she wished to keep him obedient and fearful of her’.

The Earl of Middleton drifted through the corridors like a cloud, growing blacker and heavier. Rumours reached him that Lovat had been urging the Queen Regent to ‘use all her interest with the King of France to embrace the offers of the Highlanders’. Lovat told her the Highlanders ‘are certainly the strongest party in the three kingdoms to bring home the King or make a diversion for the armies of the Allies by a war in Britain’. Middleton’s view of them as cateran bands was wrong, Lovat explained. ‘The Highlanders’ power and loyalty is so frightful to the usurping government’ of Queen Anne, ‘that those in authority always come to them and make great offers to come into their party’. This was partly true. ‘Management’ by ‘offers’ was a recognised government tactic: ministers bought the loyalty they could not command by affection, or compel by fear. Some impoverished chiefs simply offered themselves and their men to the highest bidder. There was an element of this sort of opportunism in Lovat’s presence at St Germains.

Lovat counselled Mary of Modena against the policies of ‘a politique party in England who promise to call home the King on conditions’. ‘They are not to be believed, though they write and swear never so much. For knave will be knave still to my certain knowledge.’ This was daring – the ‘knaves’ flirting with restoring James included the Earls of Godolphin, Marlborough and Bolingbroke.

Middleton argued against Lovat’s plan as soon as he saw details of it. Lovat is ‘full of ambition and enterprise’ and has been ‘gained’ by the French to stir up ‘a civil war in Scotland’, he said to Mary. It was ‘extremely advantageous to France’, since it would draw British troops home, but ‘it would ruin instead of advancing the affairs of the King her son,’ he judged. Lovat challenged Middleton to prove his claim that the English administration had made a ‘promise to call home the King’ on the death of Queen Anne. Middleton could not produce proof. Lovat suggested the Queen Regent set a deadline. If the English ministers refused to fix a term for persuading Anne to nominate her half-brother James as heir, then ‘it was incontestable proof’ they never would. Lovat told Mary ‘that their promises were intended only to amuse and lull asleep the Court of St Germains, as they had successfully done for fifteen years past’.

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