The Last Highlander (2 page)
Read The Last Highlander Online
Authors: Sarah Fraser
Tags: #Best 2016 Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Historical, #Nonfiction, #Retail
His execution was a public holiday. Tens of thousands crowded onto Tower Hill for the entertainment. In the Tower the prisoner raged at his barber. In a few hours he would lose his head. The barber offered up the condemned man’s wig, very light on powder ‘on account of it being a rainy day’. The prisoner tossed it back to be taken away, properly groomed, generously powdered and then returned. If he ‘had a suit of velvet embroidered, he would wear it’ today; he would go ‘to the block’ he said, ‘with pleasure’. These sartorial sensitivities belonged to the last aristocrat in Britain to be beheaded.
On this damp, grey, very English, spring day, Thursday 9 April 1747, warders and friends begged his Lordship to petition the King for mercy. ‘He was so old and infirm that his life was not worth asking,’ he replied.
This was not true. His life, and the ending of it, was worth a lot to many different people.
‘For my part,’ he claimed, ‘I die a martyr for my country.’
The barber returned his wig and his Lordship thanked him. ‘I hope to be in heaven by one o’clock,’ he said, ‘or I should not be so merry now … The soul is a spiritual substance.’ It could not be ‘dissolved by time’.
The barber wished the prisoner ‘a good passage’ across. Lovat looked out of the window. He was going to slip through the bars of life and escape to heaven, he was sure of it.
* * *
The previous month, Lord Lovat had been impeached for high treason as a Jacobite rebel. The whole House of his fellow Lords, including many former friends and allies, removed to Westminster Hall especially for the trial and one by one pronounced him ‘Guilty, upon my Honour’.
Simon Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat and leader of Clan Fraser –
MacShimidh Mor
in Gaelic – was the son of ‘the great Simon’ and the last of the great Celtic–Scottish chiefs. The Frasers had fought their way from France onto the beaches of England with William the Conqueror. One of Lovat’s forebears was Robert the Bruce’s chamberlain. Another had been William Wallace’s compatriot in the Scottish Wars of Independence from England; when the English captured him he was hung, drawn and quartered.
Four hundred years after his ancestor’s bloody end, Lovat was condemned to suffer the same brutal fate, though in the end he was merely beheaded. Lovat would die for an independent Scotland – or ‘North Britain’ as many maps now called it – to secure the fortunes of the Fraser clan, and for Bonnie Prince Charlie’s lunge at the thrones of his Stuart ancestors. For decades Lovat had maintained a double life, spying for and against the Houses of Stuart and Hanover. He had made fast friends and sworn enemies. His scheming had inadvertently led to the 1707 Act of Union, in which the Parliaments of Scotland and England were incorporated into Great Britain. He cursed it as ‘
Cette Union infernelle
’.
In Georgian Britain, all convicted felons about to ‘be launched into eternity’, both common and gentle, were expected to do so showing plenty of ‘bottom’, a certain gutsy dash. According to the broadsheet reports, in the days before Lovat’s beheading, the old man (he was about eighty when he died) faced his fate with ‘jocoseness’ and ‘gaiety’. Smoking his last pipe, he knocked it out into the fire, and gave the pipe away as a relic. The ash from it fell in little clods. He watched the eddying specks as the dust rioted away in the air. ‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said to his companions, ‘the end of all human grandeur is like this snuff of tobacco.’
As he smoked his pipe, ate his last meal, drank beakers of hot chocolate, dressed and prayed, the wooden scaffold grew greasy and slippery in the morning drizzle. London life went on around it. Maids raised fires in the first-floor drawing rooms around the square on Tower Hill, to take the chill from the rumps of the curious rich and rare as they watched in comfort. Tall chimneys smoked.
Before dressing to spectate at Tower Green, a gentleman wrote to his friend over breakfast. ‘Lord Lovat is to lose his head in a few hours, and the day being rainy is likely to prove a great disappointment to the crowds that are hastening to see the execution … Perhaps such tragical scenes may do good to somebody: and though this old man be highly guilty and his guilt very inexcusable, yet a considerate spectator cannot but be led to pity and bewail the corruption and infatuation of human nature when he sees a man almost at the utmost period of human life, under no necessitous circumstances … with a plentiful fortune and everything he could reasonably desire without any danger of losing it; and yet not content therewith, he must disturb the peace of the country, and endeavour to overthrow the constitution thereof. Men should consider that when they are endeavouring to break down hedges a serpent may bite them.’
Soldiers marched to the base of the scaffold. Unhurried, they formed up in rows between the block and the mob. Many of the crowd had gathered early, clambering up the stairs to rows of wooden benches, to get a clear view across to the block on the same level as the victim. Towards ten o’clock, one of the packed timber terraces, desperately overcrowded, collapsed. Those beneath panicked and drove themselves back from the splintering beams and planks. Bodies were crushed and impaled. The injured were carted away, some ‘screaming themselves to death’. There were nine corpses. The wood was shoved to one side, to be looted for firewood by the poor.
News of the slight delay this incident caused to proceedings reached Lovat.‘Good,’ he grunted, ‘the more mischief the better the sport.’ Sensitive to omens all his life, it was a sign that God was on his side. This execution was a sin.
Lesser players in the drama came and went from the scaffold. One was Mr Baker, the chaplain from the Sardinian Embassy, and the only Roman Catholic priest licensed to practise in England. He knelt now before the image of the crucified Lord and prepared himself to oversee the release of another papist ingrate from the twists and turns of the mortal coil. Government representatives lounged about on the scaffold, chatting with Lovat’s closest clansmen and friends. The gentlemen and bureaucrats gazed with distaste on the rabble. The officials were here to get the administration of the sentence right, and to record any last words of inspiration or insurrection. Carpenters hauled an empty coffin up steep steps, and dumped it in a corner. The executioner, John Thrift, laid out and checked the tools of his trade, and fiddled around the block.
1
The huge square had the atmosphere of a gala occasion. The Bonnie Prince, Charles Stuart, had slipped the hounds. The Old Fox caged in the Tower was the government’s most high-profile prisoner. There was a clamour to see him. The press had kept the name of the unseen ‘wicked’, ‘dangerous’, ‘notoriously to be suspected’ Lord Lovat in the public consciousness. Even though they had him now, he was still talked up as a threat to national security. The masses were beside themselves. The heart of England shouted, kissed, gossiped, ate and drank. Ballads about the drama began to flow from one to another, celebrating victory over ‘Old England’s Foe’.
As through the city Lord Lovat did pass,
The people in hundreds did follow,
And cryed ‘You Old Fox you are catched safe at last’,
While some hissed and others did hollow …
It took about an hour to clear the dead and maimed from the terraces and then the Sheriffs of London sent their message to the prisoner. The axe demanded ‘his body’. When Lovat appeared, the tension ratcheted up by raucous degrees. Although ‘clogged with infirmities and pain’, the old man was an imposing presence. ‘He is tall, walks very upright considering his great age, and is tolerably well shaped,’ reported one news-sheet. ‘He has a large mouth and a short nose, with eyes very much contracted and down-looking, a very small forehead, almost all covered with a large periwig; this gives him a grim aspect, but upon addressing anyone he puts on a smiling countenance.’
No longer any harm to anyone, he had to be helped up the scaffold steps by his servants. James Fraser, a close kinsman and executor of his chief’s will, struggled to compose himself. ‘Cheer up thy heart man,’ Lovat patted his shoulder. ‘I am not afraid … My dear James I am going to heaven, but you must crawl a little longer in this evil world,’ and gave him his silver-topped cane as a memento.
Lord Lovat looked about him: ‘God save us! Why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head that can’t get up three steps without two men to support it?’ he asked, shaking off his supporters and going to test the axe for weight and keenness.
It was very nearly time. ‘Then farewell to wicked Lord Lovat, old Lovat,/Then farewell to wicked old Lovat!’ The chorus rose from the ground. The song lumbered along like an old nag beaten up to a canter, thumping out its taunts. ‘
Don’t you love it, Lord Lovat, Lord Lovat?
’
Codicils to Lovat’s will prescribed his funeral plans in his homeland, hundreds of miles and a civilisation away. ‘All the pipers from John o’Groats to Edinburgh shall play before my corpse and the good old women in my country shall sing a
coronach
2
before me. And then there will be crying and clapping of hands, for I am one of the greatest chiefs in the Highlands.’
Taking his time, he hirpled over to consider his coffin. The lid, with his name on it, hung open, a door to take his mutilated body down to the underworld. A brass nameplate announced him, ‘
SIMON DOMINUS FRASER DE LOVAT, DECOLLAT
, April 9, 1747,
AETAT SUAE
80’. He leaned against the rails a moment and murmured a line of Horace: ‘
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
’ (‘It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country’).
Lovat took in the restless thousands around him, shouting and singing, all fixed on him. In his mind’s eye, he saw his ancestors. From this point on a public scaffold, they moved off from him in a line into the past. They had fought together to make their country independent and free; but Lovat had lived to see that country absorbed into another. He quoted Ovid to himself: ‘
Nam genus et proavos et quae non fecimus ipsi Vix ea nostra voca
’ (‘For those things which were done either by our fathers or ancestors, and in which we had no share, I can scarcely call my own’).
He knelt down. A kinsman who had helped him ascend to the block knelt near him. They picked up the cloth, a scarlet sheet, to catch his head, and stretched it out between them. The executioner moved his Lordship back a bit. Lovat sat up and the two men spoke. He would bend down, raise his handkerchief and pray, the old aristocrat said. When he dropped the hankie, John Thrift must do it.
Lovat stretched out his short, thick neck as best he could. In under a minute he gave the signal and was launched by the good grace of a single chop. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ‘late unnatural Rebellion’, the failed second coming of the Jacobite Messiah, thudded a step closer to permanent extinction. The crowd roared.
The style in which Lovat met his nemesis was approved of by supporters and detractors alike. That evening Sir Arthur Forbes wrote to his cousin Duncan, a close friend of Lovat’s, in Inverness. ‘It’s astonishing with what resolution and
sang froid
Lovat dyed today,’ he reflected. ‘Lovat said he dyed as a Christian, and as a Highland chief should, that is, not in his bed.’
He was born to little of this, however.
‘A mighty man of war had been added to the race’
– THE REVD JAMES FRASER ON SIMON’S BIRTH
The future 11th Lord Lovat was born around 1670, some 550 miles north of Tower Hill, in a small manor house in the Aird of Lovat, the hub of the Scottish Highlands. The lack of a recorded date illustrates the initial inconsequence of Simon Fraser’s birth to history.
In Simon’s heyday as Lord Lovat his clan territories extended over 500 square miles of northern Scotland. ‘My country’, as Lovat called it, was bigger than King George II’s Hanoverian homeland. Fraser territories fell into two distinct regions: poor Highland and rich Lowland. The estates reaching over to the west coast and heading south-west from Inverness down Loch Ness, were typically Highland: peaty soil covered in rough grass; rushes and heather rising from wind-whipped moors to stony peaks of over 3,000 feet. Between them sheltered valley floors of startling greenness.
Now almost deserted, in Lovat’s lifetime hundreds of families inhabited these remote fertile glens: the kindred, or ‘family’, of up to 10,000 that was Clan Fraser. Many passed their lives without venturing even once to the regional capital, Inverness – though the young men would pour out of the hills to fight if the chief summoned them with the fiery cross. Visitors from the Lowlands or England in the early eighteenth century regarded the Highlands with appalled distaste. ‘The huge naked rocks, being just above the heath, resemble nothing so much as a scabbed head,’ shuddered an English army officer. The ‘dirty purple’ heather sickened him. Yet the 11th Lord Lovat’s wild hill country produced his most loyal and ferocious fighting clansmen and their lairds, and Lovat returned their devotion with a passion.
The common people’s year followed an ancient pastoral pattern. Their stock was their wealth and security; their economy was based on exchange, with hardly any money being involved. Visiting tinsmiths, tailors or cattle dealers received hospitality and, say, cheese, a hide, or wool in return for their services, news of wars and national crises, folk tales and songs. These Frasers struggled to produce enough to survive the snowbound winters. In their calendar, January was
An t-Earrach
in Gaelic – the ‘tail’ end of the year, not the beginning. By then the grain chest was empty, the livestock emaciated from a winter indoors with too little to eat and from being bled to provide blood to mix with oatmeal. When the spring grass came the poor animals had to be carried out of the byres.
A clan was divided into branches. At the top was the chiefly family, and the families of his close cousins. Each branch was headed by a laird called after his small estate – such as Fraser of Foyers, Fraser of Gorthleck, Fraser of Castleleathers – and held by
tack
(lease) or
wadset
(mortgage). He might be responsible for up to 300 ordinary kinsmen and existed in a state of genteel financial stress. The minor lairds, who managed the Highland parts of the estates, could not make ends meet without the financial support that service to their chief earned them. As a consequence, upcountry men were more old-fashioned than their low-country brethren. Unlike English landowners, clan chiefs such as Lord Lovat kept large bodies of armed men in a state of semi-militarised readiness to protect the clan, and travelled nowhere without a ‘tail’ of up to a hundred of well-accoutred followers on horse and foot. The hill lairds were the first to make up Lord Lovat’s ‘tail’. He loved them above all his clansmen.
The other half of the Fraser chief’s territories was quite different from the hills and glens and was more familiar to foreigners from the south. The area known as the Aird of Lovat, around the mouth of the River Beauly on the east coast of the Scottish Highlands, was first-class agricultural land. This part of the Lovat estates provided nearly all the chief’s income, and the farms and estates here generated more than enough to meet their lairds’ needs. They did not need the extra money earned by traditional service to the chief. The wealthier east-coast lairds might become lawyers, officers in the British Army, politicians in Inverness and Edinburgh, or serve in local government.
Simon’s eastern territory stretched from the Aird, ten miles eastwards along the sheltered Beauly Firth to the eye of the Highlands, Inverness. Here, ambitious men, keen to market intelligence about this vast semi-autonomous region of the Scottish state to the authorities in Edinburgh or London, noted everything that happened. Lovat’s estates lay at a crossroads between the expanding world of Britain and her colonies, and the self-contained world of the clans.
At the time of Simon’s birth, the clan proclaimed widespread loyalty to the ancient royal House of Stuart. The Stuarts ruled in sacred bond with the land, just as a chief was ‘married to his clan and country’. However, decades of bloody internal conflict, ending just before Simon’s birth with the restoration of Charles II, sowed a horror of uncontrolled violence. However, in the Scottish and English governments’ minds, this independent-minded civilisation on its northern frontier, half of whom did not even speak English, posed the single biggest threat to the security of the fast-changing Scottish and British nations. Fraser country was, therefore, of strategic importance to any central authority intent on imposing the will of central government.
As the brother of a chief and great-uncle to another chief, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, grew up at the heart of this world at Castle Dounie, the historic stronghold of Clan Fraser. At the centre of the Aird of Lovat, the ancient fortress loomed on a manmade mound above the banks of the Beauly River. Towers at each corner of the castle and the thick walls between them offered protection to hundreds of the chief’s ordinary kin in times of famine or feud. If necessary, over 400 people could sleep there.
At Dounie, the Fraser chief maintained an entourage of staff, kin and allies who regulated the life of a Highland nobleman and the thousands who depended on him for their safety. One kinsman was
fear an taighe
, the head of the household. He controlled the chaplain, piper, harpist, steward, grooms, pantry boys, cooks, and scores of
scallags
(servants) running around beneath them. The principal Fraser families sent their sons to the chief’s household ‘to educate, polish and accomplish them’; they were ‘exchanged at the yeares end, and others taken … in their place’. The bonds this fostering forged throughout the clan endured for life and offered mutual protection in the frequent times of trouble that were to be a feature of Simon the future 11th Lord Lovat’s life.
Simon was the second son of Thomas of Beaufort. ‘Beaufort’ was another name for Castle Dounie. An honorary title, ‘of Beaufort’ was attached to the surname of the second line of the family tree, after the chiefly family, the Lovats. The title expressed the closeness of the connection between the two (Simon’s father was often called simply ‘Beaufort’). If Beaufort’s noble cousin Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, failed to raise a living male heir, then the male Beaufort Frasers would rise to be the heirs. Acknowledging their position, they had to prepare themselves for what they hoped would not happen: their cousin’s incapacity or death. It followed therefore that the men of the second line of the clan elite filled the most important clan posts.
From this position, in 1650, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, aged just eighteen, led a thousand Fraser men south to fight Cromwell’s New Model Army on behalf of Charles Stuart, recently returned from France. On 3 September 1651 a Cromwellian army numbering 28,000 met 16,000 Royalists at Worcester, in the last battle of the English Civil War. The New Model Army captured over 10,000 prisoners, among them young Thomas Fraser of Beaufort. Cromwell deported Beaufort’s fellow Fraser prisoners to Barbados as indentured labourers, or slaves. Simon’s father was lucky to survive. He was sent north and ‘keeped several years in a dungeon in the citadel that the English made in Inverness’, as Cromwell put Scotland under heavy military occupation.
Scotland eviscerated itself in the religious and dynastic wars of the mid-1600s. The country strained to cope with the thousands of government soldiers garrisoned and quartered on the nation. The troops had free rein to get supplies where they could, with the result that ‘be-tuixt the bridge end of Inverness and Gusachan, twenty-six miles, there was not left in my countrie a sheep to bleet, or a cock to crow day, nor a house unruffled’. Women were raped, animals butchered and the harvest carried away. Inverness shrank back ‘demure under a slavish calm’, economically ruined, said the Fraser chronicler. Lairds and chiefs were bankrupt, or fought ruthlessly to restore their fortunes. Cromwell’s victory and his subjection of Scotland gave the Scots a bitter taste of union with England that they were to remember in 1707, when another English ruler pressed them to give up their sovereignty.
After the Civil War, Thomas Beaufort married Sybilla MacLeod, the daughter of another chief, John MacLeod of MacLeod. It was usual for clan elites to intermarry in order to reinforce strategic alliances. Simon’s mother, Sybilla, grew up at ancient Dunvegan Castle, towering on a rocky promontory on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Skye as if carved from the cliff. Sybilla gave Beaufort a child each year of their fourteen-year marriage, dying with the last, when Simon was just eight. Altogether nine of their children died in childhood. The surviving five, in order of age, were: Alexander; Simon; John (who adored his older brother Simon); and the girls, Sybilla and Catherine. Thomas Beaufort lived most of his life within a few miles of Dounie, but whether ‘from his numerous family, or want of patrimony, appears to have been in not very wealthy circumstances’, said the Reverend James Fraser.
Though there is no date for Simon’s birth, the Reverend James, who was also the chiefly family’s chaplain, recorded that at Castle Dounie, ‘at the propitious moment, many swords hanging in the old hall leapt from their scabbards, indicating how mighty a man of war had been added to the race’. Even in earliest youth, Simon’s face expressed force of will. His steady gaze gave the impression of watchfulness, as his eyes scrutinised and his ears listened to his father and the Reverend James Fraser. He and his brothers were tall, vigorous and brave, when many of the older generation were exhausted by wars.
The route that took the Beaufort Fraser children from their home, the manor house ‘Tomich’, to Castle Dounie, to play with their aristocratic cousins, led them through the village of Beauly. Hugh, the 8th Lord Lovat, assumed his social and political domination of the regional capital, Inverness, in matters of politics and business. However, it was Beauly and the beautiful Aird of Lovat, not Inverness, that defined young Simon’s horizons. Here, Simon and his brothers and sisters learned to ride and hunt. The males of the upper reaches of the clan sometimes spent as much as a third of the year hunting. It kept them fit and ready, trained to act in a body. If the fiery cross went up, they could fly together in an instant and chase men not deer.
When clans with territories north of the Highland capital, such as the Mackenzies whose lands bordered Fraser country, wanted to go to Inverness to attend to their affairs, they crossed the River Beauly at the ford in the village. Here they would have to pay Fraser men a toll and declare their business. In this way the Frasers were able to control an important point of access for the northern clans. A strong Fraser chief could use his geographic position to his advantage and help manage the north for the government in Edinburgh. The rewards he sought were the usual expressions of gratitude: perquisites and government positions. Geography blended always into geopolitics.
As well as being a soldier, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort was a thoughtful, scholarly man. When the 8th Lord Lovat was dying, Thomas sat for weeks at Castle Dounie by his deathbed, ‘entertaining him with history and divinity’. Simon inherited from his father a passion for clan and national history, theology and philosophical debate, as well as the satisfaction of training and leading a body of armed kinsmen. The Beaufort Fraser children received an informal education in clan history and their place in the world from the Reverend James Fraser. The son of a laird, Reverend James was at ease with English, Gaelic, French and Latin, and ‘had a useful knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, German and Italian’. Simon Fraser would acquire the same languages, becoming fluent in four and competent in five.
In his youth, the Reverend James ‘mounted his Highland pony, and accompanied by a Highland servant, spent three years touring Britain, Europe and the Holy Land’ in order, he said, ‘to rectify the judgement, enrich the mind with knowledge’, and give it ‘a polish’. Though by turns a Calvinist and Episcopalian, he happily posed as a Roman Catholic to get a room in European monasteries. He visited over thirty European states and on his return wrote
Triennial Travels
, describing every town and city of note, starting with Inverness. He would dedicate his
Chronicles of the Frasers
to Simon when he became chief.