The Last Highlander (13 page)

London was home to more of the Scottish nobility than usual that winter. With no Parliament sitting in Edinburgh, many nobles came south. They ‘waited and attended the English ministers … without knowing what was to be done’. The wound of the unresolved Scottish succession festered. After six or eight weeks’ increasing frustration, gossip about the problem of Scotland began to home in on one thing. One minute it was a secret; the next, it was everywhere. A terrible ‘plot had been discovered’. No one was quite sure of the details, but it involved a French-backed insurrection in Scotland to restore the Stuarts and bring down the government there, and perhaps threaten the Protestant succession, and even to break up the Union of Crowns. Scotch gossip buzzed about London coffee houses and alehouses. Some of the most highly favoured nobles were implicated in treasonable dealings with the exiled royal family. The intelligence had come from an outlawed Highland chief, rumour had it it was Lord Lovat, otherwise known as Captain Simon Fraser of Beaufort. Some claimed he was working as a double agent, controlled by the most powerful man in Scotland, the Duke of Queensberry.

The gossip made Colin Campbell of Glenadruel very jittery. He feared to deliver the passports himself and sent the apothecary Clarke in his place. Alone in his lodgings, Lovat’s spirits sank at the thought of leaving for the Continent again, without having accomplished any of his ambitions. He brooded over his situation. ‘My dear, for God’s sake take care of yourself,’ Glendaruel counselled him by letter. ‘The standing of your family is in your person … You must consider the insupportable loss it would be to your friends if you should distress yourself with melancholy.’ He was worried his cousin might lose his mind and become suicidal.

Lovat packed and confided the most precious of his intimate possessions to his beloved Glendaruel: a little self-portrait ‘James III’ had given him, his commission and the papers of the Lovat estate. He planned to be back in a few weeks and did not want to take much with him. He left everything else at Clarke’s shop.

Another plotter, called Ferguson, learned the Fraser party had passes to fly out of reach. It was time to use what he had picked up. Ferguson went to the Duke of Atholl and sold him what he knew about the movements of Lovat. He had worked out that the plot was more ‘mischief’ than danger. Ferguson repeated Lovat’s accounts of his exchanges with the Duke of Queensberry. The information showed Atholl that his fellow minister, Queensberry, schemed to ruin him. In a towering fury, Atholl demanded redress against the malice of the Duke of Queensberry, her Majesty’s representative in Scotland, and his villainous lackey, Captain Simon Fraser of Beaufort.

By the end of the first week of November 1703, Lovat was still reluctant to abandon England. It only added to his troubles when he was told that Sir John MacLean, his wife and family, a few servants and the spy, Mrs Fox, had fled France, landing on the Kentish coast near Folkestone, and been immediately arrested. Weary of the poverty, bickering and inaction at the Stuart Court in exile, Sir John had obtained permission from Mary of Modena to take advantage of the indemnity from prosecution that Queen Anne had offered to Scottish Jacobites if they returned and swore loyalty to her. Lady MacLean could barely stand, having given birth to a baby eleven days earlier. Goodness knows what Mrs Fox wanted back in England. MacLean’s children and servants fretted and sniffed. Sir John straightened himself on the crumbly Kent shingle. Could he make terms and live in peace at home, he asked?

The short answer was, no. The indemnity had expired. The soldiers arrested the lot of them. A lachrymose Lady MacLean wailed to her husband to get them out of this dreadful situation. Sir John was taken to London, locked up in solitary confinement and allowed neither ink nor paper till he told the authorities what he knew of the activities of Simon, Lord Lovat, and of a conspiracy to overthrow the Queen in Scotland.

Sir John was frightened out of his wits and in a torment of anxiety over his family’s well-being. ‘I am confounded to know that your brother [-in-law] is prisoner,’ Lovat wrote to Glendaruel. ‘His only business is to give them fair words … I’d rather see him shot and damned than that he should do an ill thing,’ he growled. A few days later Lovat’s nerve broke and on the 11th he bolted from Billingsgate to Gravesend with his brother John and a couple of followers. Lovat’s actions caused pandemonium, but he thought he had control of the game.

ELEVEN

The ‘Scotch plot’ exposed, winter 1703–04

‘All the Discovery is laid to your Charge’

– DUKE OF PERTH TO LORD LOVAT

The government snapped into action. In the Tower, in solitary confinement, security experts from the Office of the Secretary of State for the Southern Department accused Sir John MacLean of bringing his family to England as a blind for his covert mission to overthrow the monarchy. Threatened with trial and a traitor’s death, the suffering of his abandoned wife and family, Sir John collapsed in horror. He offered to become an informer, ‘upon assurance of his pardon and being treated like a gentleman’. Lovat had told him he should be ripped in two by wild horses if he ever spilled the beans.

Directed by the informer Ferguson, soldiers raided Clarke the apothecary’s shop and seized all papers, correspondence and possessions relating to his secret guests. That led to Glendaruel and Ferguson himself being taken into custody and thrown into Newgate gaol. The soldiers found a silver box with Lovat’s crest on it. Inside was a commission signed ‘J. R.’, addressed to the Duke of Hamilton. The authorities were not disposed to think it genuine: they wanted to muck out the political stables without throwing too many big beasts on the dung heap. The administration weren’t quite sure what had been going on, but Atholl, Hamilton, Ferguson and others insisted ‘Simon Fraser’ was at the heart of the problem. The search for him intensified.

In Edinburgh, Captain Neil MacLeod, in whose house Lovat stayed when he first met Queensberry, was arrested, but said nothing much. In fact the investigators struggled to get an uncompromised source to condemn Lovat. Queen Anne’s new Secretary of State, Robert Harley, wrote to Carstares, William III’s old chaplain and confidant. Harley’s anger descended on the whole of Scotland. ‘It is grievous to … find the chief [men] of the Scots nation so averse to any discovery of the French correspondence,’ he raged. Carstares replied that the most important thing was to find Lord Lovat, and bring both Queensberry and Lovat together before Harley. He agreed the mutual dislike and suspicion between the Scots and English at present left some men unwilling to add to the negative commentary about the Scots circulating in Westminster.

All this animosity was laid on Lovat’s shoulders. High-profile public figures sought to defend themselves by further blackening Lovat’s name. The impression of many at Westminster – that most Scots were practising duplicity, evasions, obstructions, and treasonable longings for independence – found expression in the image of Lord Lovat and his activities. Certainly, he had opened himself up to attack. He was guilty and a scapegoat. ‘Nothing is wanting now but Lovat, Fraser (I mean), to be found,’ Harley complained with irritation. ‘Cannot the person who knows where he is, be persuaded to let him be found?’ Neither money, nor threats of torture and execution, ‘persuaded’ anyone to produce the Fraser chief. Besides, he had already left the country.

Lovat and his small party of Fraser men had left on the
King William
, bound for Rotterdam. Queensberry knew roughly where he was. ‘We are come safe here,’ Lovat reassured the Commissioner when they landed. ‘I will have a most dangerous journey … for all the roads are full of parties and partisans, and the French insult now because of their last victory at Speirs.’ The French had just won a naval battle. Queensberry folded the letter and hoped his trust was not misplaced.

To the French, Lovat rejoiced in the naval victory at Speirs, their gains compounded by a storm. ‘A mighty English warship broke to pieces on the port at Halvent and most of its equipment drowned. Another has been destroyed on the coast with two Dutch warships lost.’ Wreckage and corpses bobbed and bumped to shore. ‘I have such a dangerous journey to make, and I fear perishing,’ Lovat added poignantly.

The grey sky was tucked in from horizon to horizon, as far as his eye could see. This flat land chilled his soul. Without the Highlands and home, he was one in the teeming colony of place-seekers, spies, and information-brokers to the merchants of power and pensions in Whitehall and Edinburgh, St Germains and Versailles. He could not shake off the melancholy that had descended in London. Letters came now to ‘John Smeaton, c/o Mr Vincent Nerinx, merchant of Rotterdam’. The man who wanted to be known as one thing, My Lord Lovat, chief of Clan Fraser, had acquired myriad aliases. Unaware that Clarke the apothecary was in the Tower, he wrote and asked him for more physic. ‘I endeavour to banish my melancholy; but I have this minute, and all day, a fever by drinking bad wine. I wish I was out of this unwholesome country.’ It seemed he could not even drown his sorrows successfully.

Early winter winds swept handfuls of rain across the land, scratching and stinging, belching foul air and water. The apothecary had nothing to relieve Lovat’s ailment, he said: exile, chronic wear and tear of the emotions, repeated failure, continual regrouping of forces, strategic adaptation. ‘That air that you are going to’ – French air – might help, suggested Clarke. Was the vagueness in the phrasing someone being careful not to betray him, or an enemy agent trying to draw Lovat into naming names and places? Clarke said he doubted a full recovery was possible until Lord Lovat returned to breathe ‘your own native air’ in the Highlands.

When Lovat recovered his spirits he wrote to Glendaruel, unaware he too was under arrest. ‘I bless God I am well in my health … I strive to recover from my melancholy every day. And I entreat and conjure you, as you love your soul, body, honour and friends, strive against melancholy,’ he advised, ‘for if anything ruin me, it will be grief; so forsake it my dear.’ When his spirit failed, it nauseated a body that was otherwise, at the age of thirty-one, in peak condition. The grip of low spirits haunted him like some febrile diseased part of him; it whispered that he had squandered his chances and there would be no success.

On 13 December, a carriage took Queen Anne to the House of Lords. She addressed both Houses of Parliament. ‘I have had unquestionable informations of very ill practices and designs carried out in Scotland,’ she announced to a packed House. They were being carried out ‘by Emissaries from France, which might have proved extremely dangerous to the peace of the Kingdoms’. She instructed the House of Lords to set up a commission to look into the furore stirred up by Captain Simon Fraser of Beaufort, erstwhile 11th Lord Lovat. The Lords and Commons agreed they must all ‘look on the Protestant Succession as your Majesty’s best security’, as well as their own.

Lovat was cited to appear. Queensberry had to admit he let Lovat go to obtain evidence to support his claims; Atholl accused him of helping Lovat get away, to remove the evidence of the High Commissioner plotting against his personal enemies. Queensberry thought Atholl wanted Lovat under lock and key in order to carry him to Scotland and execute his old death sentence on him – before Lovat could prove Atholl and his allies were traitors.

By the run-up to Christmas 1703, Lovat’s letters had become painfully delusional. ‘If we both live a year,’ he wrote to a Fraser kinsman, ‘you will, by God’s help, see me the greatest Lord Lovat that ever was. I am so already out of my country, and I hope to be so [with]in my country very shortly.’

The Fraser party arrived in Paris on Christmas Eve, and settled at lodgings in a suburb of the city. Lovat despatched a long memoir of his mission’s findings to Mary of Modena. From his meeting in the west of Scotland he had brought petitions from men such as the MacAlpine Stuart chief, who confirmed Lovat as their envoy. Middleton discredited them. Lovat had even better news from ‘a general council of war’ at Drummond Castle. He had ‘proposed to them to take up arms immediately, with an entire confidence of being speedily succoured from the Kingdom of France’. When Mary and Middleton heard such talk they were shocked. Lovat had been ordered not to make plans, but assess sentiment on the ground, and report back.

Mary was, however, delighted to hear of the Scottish Parliament’s resistance to settling the Scottish succession on Hanover. She sent Lovat a warm letter of encouragement. Louis XIV too expressed his pleasure. Middleton had to follow suit. What satisfaction to hear he was back, the Earl wrote; especially, he added spitefully, ‘after the apprehensions I had from the malice of our enemies’. Lovat was mad to come back trumpeting like an elephant if there was any truth to the rumours from England.

In London, the ‘political sensation’ of the winter 1703/04 worked itself to an unsatisfactory climax, as a Parliamentary Committee was set up by the Queen to look into the ‘Scotch plot’. All Lovat’s intimates were rueing their friendship with him, including Lovat’s beloved cousin, Glendaruel, who groaned from captivity, ‘I wish to God I had never seen him.’ When he heard, Lovat was devastated. Glendaruel’s betrayal hit him hardest. ‘Unnatural monster, this perfidious traitor, this execrable villain,’ he howled. David Lindsay, the Earl of Middleton’s secretary, who did qualify for protection under Queen Anne’s indemnity from prosecution to former Jacobites, said Lovat allied low cunning and an insinuating nature. The Lords demanded evidence against Lord Lovat. Lindsay admitted he had never met the man, but he heard an awful lot about him. The Lords dismissed Lindsay as a Middletonian stooge.

Despite all this, there were few hard facts about any danger ‘to the Peace of the Kingdoms’. The Committee seemed wilfully recalcitrant about pursuing suspects. When one witness offered to bring things to the light of day that remained hidden, their graces threw him into Newgate gaol. The Committee preferred to believe that the conspiracy was a chimera and typical of many government enquiries, no one was prosecuted as a result. One bishop concluded that some of the intended prosecutions were deliberately ‘managed ruinously’ to leave Lovat to bear most of the blame. Lovat had drawn on the Jacobite sympathies that ran deep in vast swathes of the British people. Those with vested interests in establishing the claims of the German Protestant regime knew what they were up against – an old guard, hoping to let the Stuarts back in, and yearning for old certainties. However, as long as men behaved in public, examiners did not need to expose the muddled contents of their hearts. There was an active desire
not
to expose the extent of the correspondence of British grandees with the Court of St Germains. It seemed Lovat’s worst crime was to have stirred the mud at the bottom of the political pond so vigorously and so successfully.

In early spring the enquiry closed. The Parliamentary Committee’s report concluded that two things had caused the crisis. First, it was ‘that after your Majesty … the immediate succession to the Crown of Scotland is not declared to be in the Princess Sophia’ of Hanover and her son George. When that was settled, ‘the House will do all in their power to promote an entire Union between the two kingdoms for their mutual security and advantage’.

Entire Union. When the Scots read this, they were mortified. Nothing led them to believe the English cared a hoot for ‘their mutual security and advantage’. The Scottish Parliament resented these loose and bullish comments by one legislature on the behaviour of an independent neighbouring legislature. They whipped up a response, accusing their English counterparts of ‘an undue meddling with our concerns, and an encroachment upon the honour, sovereignty, and independency of this Nation’.

Lovat had read the mood of the nation better than most, but his stock at St Germains and Versailles collapsed when the Parliamentary Committee’s report arrived from London with his name mentioned everywhere. It got worse when Middleton’s spy, James Murray, arrived in the capital on 14 February. Lord Lovat was ‘wicked, dangerous and notoriously to be suspected’, Murray reported.
Johnny
Murray knew all this, said the Middleton spy, so Lovat had had him killed. That explained why he had not returned with the Frasers. Middleton translated James Murray’s report into French as fast as he could and submitted it for Louis XIV’s perusal. Lovat was a traitor to France and possibly a murderer. There was only one punishment for capital crimes.