The Last Highlander (20 page)

Lovat was mindful of the time he was a very different man. For years no one had wanted him. James Stuart had told Castleleathers he would never free him or bring him to Court. Now everyone wanted him. Correspondence with James would damn him in George I’s eyes. Yet, he could not resist finding out how far the Stuarts would go to woo him back. He cast a fly over the Jacobites. He might come over if asked personally by James and if rewarded with enough titles and honours to requite the humiliation, pain and loss of the last two decades. James replied, eagerly writing out the required petition and gilding his offer with patents for useless Jacobite titles. He offered Lovat a dukedom.

When Huntly discovered there was a chance Lovat might return to the cause, he added his own effort to bring his former comrade back round to his old self. ‘When we were young I knew your sentiments of loyalty and love to your country so strong that I could not believe anything could have altered them, till I heard of your being in Inverness … It’s not only for the King’s sake I write so pressingly, but old acquaintance and friendship contracted by young people cannot easily be forgot, which ours was.’ The letter breathed affection, regret, longing. It appealed to a youthful idealism about their future, the old confidences, memories, and hopes held in common.

Isolated from all he had ever known of this ‘old comradeship’ for so long, rejected by monarchs and governments, his clan degraded, their natural chief outlawed on both sides of the Channel, in February 1716 Lovat could not bring himself to burn these letters, though it was madness to keep them. He put them away in his private chest, and went out to fight for his property rights and to impose British rule in the Highlands.

The arrival of Castleleathers at Saumur eighteen months earlier had forced a decision on Lovat. He had answered the Major’s plea that he come back to save his people any way he could – abandon France and the Stuarts and throw in his lot with the new regime. What could he say in twenty lines now, to explain the last two decades of exile to these friends? It was laughable. Castleleathers had said the times offered clever fishermen ‘good sport in Drumly waters’ and the chance to pull out the big fish. Lovat had not imagined that both the Hanoverians and Stuarts would want him.

From London, King George I wrote to congratulate the Earl of Sutherland for ‘the good services which you are rendering me and of the skilful dispositions you have made to defend the important post of Inverness’. Cadogan and Argyll had since attacked the Jacobites in Perth. The Secretary of State, James Stanhope, added: ‘I have it likewise in command from his Majesty to tell you that in consideration of Lord Lovat’s zeal and services on this occasion, his Majesty will grant him his pardon.’ On 4 February, his friends Captain George Grant, Colonel William Grant, Culloden and Duncan Forbes, Deputy Lieutenants of Inverness-shire, added their voices, declaring that since the ‘open rebellion of Mackenzie of Fraserdale, the Estate of Lovat lately in his possession becomes forfeited to his Majesty King George’, and his representatives are ‘requiring and commanding all’ Lovat estate tenants and tacksmen pay their rent in the usual forms to ‘the Honourable Simon, Lord Lovat … authorising him or his factors to grant receipts and discharges’. Things were moving steadily Lovat’s way.

Fraserdale panicked. It was the eleventh hour. Once the pardon was confirmed, Lovat could claim back his inheritance. The Edinburgh judiciary’s amenability to corruption had worked well for him in the past. He now appealed to it, to save his home, his wife, his heir and all that he had acquired.

EIGHTEEN

The legal battles begin, 1716

A Fox may steal your hens, sir,

A whore your health and pence, sir,

Your daughter may rob your chest, sir,

Your wife may steal your rest, sir,

A thief your goods and plate.

But this is all but picking,

With rest, pence, chest, and chicken;

It ever was decreed, sir,

If Lawyer’s hand is fee’d, sir,

He steals your whole estate.

– JOHN GAY,
THE BEGGAR’S OPERA

All through the spring of 1716, legitimate merchant creditors, all kinds of money lenders and Mackenzie wadset holders began to agitate at the sight of the Lovat estates being taken over by Simon, Lord Lovat. Mackenzie of Fraserdale was their debtor; the Lovat estates were offered as his and his creditors’ security, a guarantee of Fraserdale’s ability to meet his repayments. Fraserdale asked his wife to canvass their influential friends in the Scottish judiciary to come to their defence and delay answering queries about his part in the rebellion. He had to hurry.

Fraserdale’s father, Sir Roderick, had made plans for Lovat’s possible return. Fraserdale contacted the men Lovat asserted were illegitimate creditors, and asked them to prepare to stake a claim on the Lovat estates, in case they were taken away from their cousin on a more permanent basis. In general the Scottish judiciary was reluctant to dismiss creditors’ claims on forfeited estates. If would-be money lenders believed a government might suddenly withdraw the security for their loans for political reasons, they risked interrupting the supply of credit on which the healthy running of the economy depended.

Without the complication of Lovat’s return, Duncan Forbes, deputy of the Court of Session, might have argued for a pardon for Mackenzie of Fraserdale. The government simply was not going to deal with the underlying causes of Scottish discontent. Better to have the political nation without resentment if they were also without satisfactory address to their post-Union grievances, thought Forbes and Dalrymple, the Lord President of the Court of Session. Given his and his brother’s ambitions to control the Highlands, however, Duncan Forbes supported Lovat. The expectation was that in return, Lovat would support Duncan and Culloden in their political activities.

The Reverend James used to say he prayed ‘of our Lovat’ it would ‘prove what the prophet saith, “I will overturn, overturn, overturn it, and it shall be no more until he come whose right it is, and I will give it him”.’ The chronicler implied ‘our Lovat’ was the Chosen One, and God would ‘overturn’ the usurpers when Lovat came back into his kingdom. Clan MacShimidh Mor – ‘the children of the son of the Mighty Simon’ – would emerge into the sun from under the dark ‘Hesperus cloud’ of Murray–Mackenzie usurpation. No wonder Lovat saw his role as fulfilling a duty ordained by God and history. His ancestors had taught him by example. The Reverend praised ‘the true splendour, nobleness, worth, wisdom, virtue, graces and antiquity of your renowned ancestors … centred in your excellent self, their surviving stem’. Lovat concluded he could not achieve glory by staying at Dounie. He must go to the source of patronage – London and the Court of King George I – to ensure it.

Lovat’s allies urged Westminster ministers to speed up his pardon. Whosoever secured the favour of the Crown would get the Lovat estates. Lovat associated himself with Argyll’s clique, the Argathelians, a faction vying to represent George I in Scottish affairs. Their followers included all Lovat’s Inverness friends, Grant, Kilravock, the Forbes brothers. Competing with Argyll was the Squadrone faction, which included the Earls of Sutherland and Montrose, the Duke of Atholl, and the Lord Justice Clerk, Adam Cockburn. They enjoyed backing in London from the Duke of Marlborough. Fraserdale naturally appealed to the Squadrone to support him and undermine Lovat.

Lovat’s ambitions simplified early in February 1716 when James Stuart and his leading advisers slipped out of Montrose Bay on the
Maria Theresa
and returned to Lorraine. James’s followers were in disbelief when they woke next morning to the rumour that God’s anointed one had gone from them like a thief in the night. ‘In the greatest confusion imaginable, running from house to house seeking their King,’ the Jacobites were in disarray. Even Argyll pitied them when he and the Earl of Cadogan caught up with them. Cadogan was a Marlborough man through and through, and competed with Argyll to be the man credited with ending the rebellion. In Lovat’s favour was Cadogan’s special loathing of all Mackenzies; they represented everything he hated in clanship. Against Lovat was the political antipathy between Argyll and Cadogan. They were all Whigs, all loyal to the Hanoverian settlement. However, beneath the surface some very large ambitions and egos were at play.

Lovat now went to press with his account of the action at Inverness. It dominated the front page of
The Flying Post
. When the uprising began, Lovat wrote, the Whig forces ‘marched towards Inverness in order to its relief. But finding themselves at that time greatly outnumbered by the Rebels … they thought for his Majesty’s service to’ flee and ‘wait for a more favourable opportunity for advancing that way’ again. Lovat mocked Sutherland’s retreat home. ‘About the 3rd of November, the Lord Lovat and Culloden arrived in that country. As soon as the Gentlemen of his name heard of his arrival, they immediately waited upon him. It can’t be imagined what a sudden alteration to the Advantage his coming not only occasioned in the Countenances of them, but in a great measure, in that of every honest man.’ It was only after the ‘taking of Inverness by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat’, that Sutherland, his son, Lord Strathnaver, and the Munros found the courage to venture from their castles again.

Beneath the article appeared an advert for a new map of Scotland. Hardly a tenth of Englishmen knew what lay north of the English border. Travellers’ tales told of high lands, pathless and unmapped, groaning with wild beasts. They concealed Highland bandits who spoke not a whisper of English, but lurked among the horrible crags, competing to maim the unwary traveller, or drown them in a mountain torrent.

Reading on down the front page, readers found light relief from the rebellion in Scotland in gossip about the poet and aphorist William Wycherly. The old man had fallen into bitter dispute with his nephew and heir over his estate, which the youth was due to inherit on the poet’s death. Out of the blue, Wycherly, aged eighty-one, had married a very young woman called Elizabeth Jackson, and settled three-quarters of his estate on her. Ten days later he died, to the grief and horror of his heir, the joy of the new heiress, and the glee of the reading public.

At the bottom of the page a health and beauty advert offered the ‘true royal chemical washball for the beautifying the hands and face … without mercury, or anything prejudicial … By taking off all deformities, as Tetters, ringworms,
morhey
, sunburn, scurf, pimples, pits, or redness of the small pox,’ it cured a range of skin complaints. War, political propaganda, celebrity gossip, and health and beauty tips riveted readers from London to the Highlands.

Stern rebuffs to Lovat’s self-serving account of the northern campaign appeared within weeks. His brother-in-law, Thomas Robertson of Inches, wrote a public letter decrying Lovat’s claims. He would not usually deal in politics, he said, but ‘that which excites me more to it [is] that the prints from London seem to attribute any appearance [of King George’s troops at Inverness] … to one who I assure you hath no manner of share in it’. This was not true, but Robertson was of Fraserdale’s camp.

*    *    *

In July, Cadogan ordered General Joseph Wightman to Inverness to stamp out the embers of Jacobite resistance, and impose law and order on the scrapping Highlanders. This would be Wightman’s second tour of duty in Scotland. Many of Wightman’s soldiers were Dutch and Swiss troops, ill-suited to fighting in Highland terrain. Cadogan asked Lovat to give the General what help he could, in local knowledge and armed men. Lovat had to obey but was impatient to go to London to counter Atholl and Montrose’s support for Fraserdale. Besides, until his pardon was signed, he was an outlaw, and could not possibly approach George I and his Court. ‘I am very well with General Wightman; but always very much mortified to see myself the servant of all, without a post or character,’ he wrote to Duncan Forbes. He imagined all except him were receiving thanks from the King. He worried all the prizes would be handed out to others before he got there.

Argyll and Ilay had the King’s ear though, and on 10 March, George I signed the document that left Lord Lovat a free, lawful, British subject for the first time in nearly twenty years. Written in Latin, it pardoned him and enumerated all the crimes for which it would be rescinded.

Cadogan asked Lovat to ‘send me your thoughts concerning the properest measures to be taken for reducing’ the clans who still evaded submission, ‘in case they pretend to make any resistance’. He meant especially the Mackenzies and their client kindreds, whose vast clan territories stretched from the east coast to the north-west coast of Ross-shire, and estate on the Hebridean island of Lewis, from where the Earl of Seaforth was negotiating his surrender.

Lovat’s prescription for peace was a violent purgative. The government would never be secure in the unsettled areas, he advised Cadogan, until ‘the rebels of those countrys be transplanted’. If not sent to the Colonies, then ‘not only their chiefs, but likewise the leading men of every clan, be made prisoners and keeped as hostages to guarantee the peaceable behaviour of their people’. Lovat would start with Fraserdale. The minority Whigs were obsessed with security problems. Lovat fed that obsession, stimulating their fears in one breath, and offering solutions in the next. The process of bringing round the peripheries of Britain to the idea of Union and Britishness was moving gradually. The government had been caught badly unawares by Mar’s uprising. Still, in the wake of it, they advanced as before: using ‘well-affected’ locals like Lord Lovat to police their own, while at the same time making an example of selected rebels, ruining them, and forfeiting their estates to the Crown. Lovat understood this perfectly. In his version of the policy, Fraserdale would be sacrificed, and perhaps a MacDonald or two, and Seaforth pardoned.

Lovat recommended the government raise a body of 1,500 Highlanders to supplement Wightman’s Dutch and Swiss regulars. The fitness of the Highlanders was vastly superior in mountain conditions, and ‘they wade the river commonly better than any horse’, Lovat boasted. They would ‘be absolutely useful for disarming the rebels’ on their native terrain. Three hundred active young Gaels should come from each of the five great clans which had been out for King George, he recommended, under the command of men like Lovat. They could fan out in a line from Fraser country and into Mackenzie country, sweeping west, emptying the last pockets of resistance. This would give Lovat the perfect opportunity for some private mopping up, to eliminate dissident elements from his clan lands: those who served Fraserdale and opposed Lovat’s return.

Even as Lovat penned his report, he could see that a company of trained Fraser Highland soldiers would strengthen his power base at home markedly. If Atholl ever thought to attack him again with troops, as he had done when Lovat was young, Lovat would have a properly regimented defensive force to hand.

His plans made sense to his commanding officers. They were the sort of draconian measures Cadogan and Wightman understood. Ministers in London thanked Lovat but told him his more drastic suggestions to transport chiefs and gentlemen of the rebel clans to the plantations were not practical, or desirable.

However, the stream of advice and action from Lovat was paying dividends. His reputation improved and his treasons were pushed into the shadows. Even the Earl of Ilay wrote to congratulate him on his efforts to speed up his rehabilitation, and advised him the time was right to come south: he had spoken to Townshend that day, who said ‘your Lordship might come when you pleased; all the Court, I find, are very well disposed to take care of you, and to find out such a reward as I foresaw you would, and now they are all convinced you do, deserve’. That could only mean the gift of Fraser country. Lovat’s heart surged with joy.

When Lovat first re-entered Castle Dounie in early 1715, he had immediately noticed that the family silver was missing. The trail to rediscovering it led him, strangely, to General Wightman, who had seized it as a prize of war. Fraserdale had hidden it with Mackenzie of Coul when he went to join Mar, and Wightman had taken possession of it.