The Last Highlander (24 page)

She asked if there was anything the Governor could do to speed her son’s pardon with the King? Seaforth had agreed to bring out his clan in rebellion again because he had nothing to lose, she said. A pardon would give him his liberty and property and he would not jeopardise those again. Lovat understood Seaforth’s position more perfectly than his mother could imagine. He wrote back. In exchange for pleading Seaforth’s pardon, Lovat asked about ‘a paper that might be troublesome to me’. Perhaps ‘you would be so kind just as to send it to me?’, he asked. She did. When a friend of Lovat’s saw it, he said ‘there was enough to condemn thirty Lords’ in it and threw it into the fire. Lovat knew he must cut out this dangerous spiritual and emotional attachment to the Stuarts, or it would destroy him.

By the time Lovat was back on the road towards home, General Wightman had received intelligence about the Jacobites’ decision to launch an attack on Inverness, where they counted on raising the supporters who had come out in 1715. Wightman marched south-west, down the Great Glen along the banks of Loch Ness, to meet them on his own terms. He passed through Stratherrick-Fraser country and gathered Lovat’s men as he went. Some of Lovat’s lairds, such as Castleleathers, himself a committed Hanoverian, noted how his chief went out of his way not to be able to take up arms against the Jacobites, whenever he could.

On 10 June, Wightman appeared at the foot of a hill in Glen Shiel, where the Jacobites and Spanish marines were encamped. They reconnoitred the ground, and Wightman decided to attack a detachment of Jacobite soldiers placed on the right of the main rebel force, on the other side of the River Shiel.

While battle raged at Glen Shiel, Lovat was at home with his wife who was in labour. Margaret was prescribed ‘an hysteric cordial julep which is provoking and whereof she may take a third part when it comes’ – labour pains – ‘and the other third part (if she is not delivered in the time) two hours thereafter, and what remains two hours after that; in the meantime, let her walk and take snuff or what may provoke sneezing. I wish her a happy hour and safe delivery.’ The doctor did not advise lying on her back in a bed. No one would.

Margaret plodded through her labour, sneezing, and drinking vomit-inducing cordials, and eventually gave birth to a healthy daughter. Given Lovat’s passion for a male heir, it was disappointing, but this tiny lamb was his first legitimate Lovat child and he loved her for that. Even a wee girl had possibilities. He told his wife they must call her Georgina, and wrote to the King to crave his royal consent to be her godfather. This was no time to be rebelling against a Crown that, however sluggishly, was helping him in his life’s ambition after twenty years. King George agreed.

The King’s present was a silver christening plate, richly inlaid with gold gilt, twenty inches in diameter, having the Royal Arms of Great Britain and Ireland engraved in the centre, and chased round the circular edge. It weighed a satisfying eight pounds. Lovat sent it to Inverness to be engraved: ‘This is the Christening Plate that King George gave as a gift to Simon, Lord Fraser of Lovat when his Majesty was godfather to his daughter Georgina, born at Inverness, the 10th of June, 1719.’

The Mackenzies did not rejoice. In Edinburgh they asked for the entire Lovat estates to be sequestered, and a new factor to be appointed. The Law Lords of the Court of Session, smarting from the overturn of their august opinions by the House of Lords in London, agreed and insulted Lovat further by appointing Fraserdale’s old chamberlain, William Fraser, to be the new factor. In Westminster the Lords reacted swiftly, ruling that the Court of Session had contravened the wishes of their King by rendering his gift to Lord Lovat worthless. The Mackenzies were one of the most rebellious Jacobite kindreds, disaffected to his Majesty’s rule. Forfeiting the Mackenzie estates (another of the King’s wishes) was proving impossible and dangerous. One man was attacked and died in the attempt, and a third was told he also could collect the rent in lead shot. Now members of this tribe were trying to correct the King about forfeits and rents. None of the Mackenzies’ actions were acceptable to Lord Lovat or his allies.

It had become obvious over the years that the quickest way for Lovat to get rid of his plague of petitioners was to have the power to act for himself, rather than sue through intermediaries. A general election had been called. If he could become one of the sixteen Scottish peers elected to sit in the House of Lords, or if he could control tame MPs in the Commons, as Argyll and Walpole did, he could speak on his own behalf in the Lords and his loyal MPs would represent his interests in the Commons. That way his business could be done for half the time and half the money.

Yet he continued to play a perilous double game. Lovat could not resist using one of the Jacobite spies, moving between France and Britain, to communicate with James Stuart, who had married a Polish princess (Maria Clementina Sobieska) in May 1719. They resided at Palazzo Muti in Rome under the protection of the Pope. On 31 December the following year, Clementina presented her husband with a son, Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart, later known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. Now there were two generations of male Stuart claimants to the British thrones to fight for.

In September 1721 Lovat received a pardon from ‘James III and VIII’ under the Great Seals of England and Scotland ‘upon his returning to his duty’. Lovat did not consider he needed a pardon, and he certainly could not return to any duty to James. Jacobitism was a strictly private passion in this climate. The following spring, just weeks before the British general election of 1722, Lovat received from James a commission as a major-general. Lovat hid away these patents in his charter chest, and locked the lid. They helped cancel out some of the humiliation of those years of imprisonment. In the meantime, Lord Lovat was the loyal servant of King George I and his officers, and they had an election to win.

TWENTY-TWO

Networking from Inverness, 1722–24

‘All Inverness is yours’

– LOVAT TO JOHN FORBES OF CULLODEN MP

Comparing himself to Argyll, Lovat felt that a landowner such as the Fraser chief ought to control at least a couple of MPs at Westminster. He could then look after them and someone like Argyll would look after him in return for his votes. When Lovat left Britain in 1702, the new form of government was only fourteen years old. He had not paid attention to it. Twenty years and a handful of general elections later it was assuming the character it would keep for a greater part of the century.

Politics was tied up with the business of patronage: positions, pensions, places, gratifications, commissions, and all the other names for the financial and honorary rewards through which the Crown and government kept their supporters loyal and ensured their policies were carried through. It was how MPs, who received no salary, obtained their incomes. On one side, they promoted the policies of the vested interests that put them in Parliament – usually a landed magnate who sat in the Lords. On the other, they offered to serve the ministers with most patronage to offer, and were rewarded. Out of a total of 12–15,000 government perks, the Treasury (which meant Walpole, the First Lord of the Treasury and Stanhope, the Secretary of State) had seventy-five per cent in its gift – a huge patronage pot with which to buy loyalty. But patronage was not that easy to come by; there were more people after the jobs than even Walpole could satisfy. Petitioners had to come with substantial offers of support.

Lovat’s neighbours, the Forbeses – whom he unwisely still considered to be retainers, as they had been a hundred years before – had access to Argyll and Ilay. Ilay grew closer to Walpole every year. Culloden was already MP for Inverness, and voted in favour of every Argyll or Walpolean policy in the Commons. Duncan Forbes, one of the county’s leading lawyers, was MP of the Ayr burghs seat – a seat in Argyll’s gift, 200 miles away from Culloden. Duncan was looking for a seat nearer to home in the upcoming general election, and Lovat needed an MP who depended on him for his position. Duncan had been very helpful over Lovat’s legal actions. Lovat thought about what he had to offer and to whom to offer it. Inverness returned two MPs – one for the shire, the county seat; and one for the burgh. He considered these seats as traditionally in the gift of ‘my Lord Lovat’. There were several things not quite accurate about his reading of the situation, but it did not matter just for the moment. He would control the MPs and offer them to Argyll or Walpole in exchange for gratifications.

Lovat knew Culloden received a pension of £500 a year to keep the ministry informed about the state of the Highlands. Culloden did what he could to encourage clan chiefs to remain law-abiding at home. In London he gave his opinion on who should be patronised and who could be overlooked. He did it in concert with Argyll and Ilay, and even Walpole listened to them. No commoner could go higher than Walpole. He was in effect Prime Minister, though the title did not yet exist. At the polls, Duncan fought for himself and his brother. The Forbeses had no sense of Lovat’s appraising eye on them. In fact, they assumed he owed them gratitude for their support in 1715, and subsequently in the business of the Lovat estates.

The brothers positioned themselves as intermediaries, brokering information about the Highlands to Westminster, and vice versa. They were trusted. They had the ear of the powerful, and rewards flowed in at a steady pace. Lovat saw how the Forbeses worked the system. In their youth they had been famed as ‘the greatest bouzers in the north’. They still networked through conviviality, but were now serious, professional, middle-aged men. They acted with high-mindedness and integrity. This was why Duncan had been prepared to fight in the courts so energetically for Lovat’s right to enjoy his gift. He was certain Lovat had justice on his side. Yet in the months coming up to the election, Lovat ran against the sharp edge of Duncan’s principles when the Mackenzies came back to court yet again, maintaining Lord Lovat was obliged to maintain Fraserdale’s son, Hugh.

As innocent heir to the titles and estates of Lovat upon his father’s death, Hugh was legally entitled to a house and land on his inheritance. With these and some supplementary income from the rest of the estates, he could support himself until that day of grief and joy for the Mackenzies, when they lost their kinsman Fraserdale, but regained the Lovat estates for his son. Duncan Forbes supported the young man’s claim. He agreed that at present, in law, Hugh Mackenzie was the rightful heir. Lovat could not stomach the hint of it for a second. He was furious with Duncan for such an act of betrayal. Duncan was his ally, and his social inferior. Duncan thinking for himself made Lovat wonder if these Forbeses would be the right men to do his business in Parliament.

As election day, fixed for 13 March, approached, Lovat drew away from Culloden and Duncan. Blood was thicker than lawyer’s ink, he decided. He suggested his brother-in-law, Sir James Grant of Grant, contest the Inverness-shire seat with Culloden. As Culloden himself admitted, Lovat’s votes had been crucial to his electoral success in 1715. The Forbeses counted on that support; its withdrawal could be crucial. Lovat told the Fraser lairds qualified to vote that John Forbes of Culloden must be ousted to clip the Forbeses’ wings. They would support Duncan for the time being. Lovat’s brother-in-law, chief of a large and ancient clan, bound to the Frasers by marriage and history, must be voted in. Grant could then offer Argyll and Ilay a very impressive network of Fraser–Grant connections in the north. The gentlemen of both clans would profit by the commissions that came up from London, Lovat promised his lairds, to empower the Frasers and Grants to keep the peace. The Fraser bloc vote moved to the Grants: Grant was duly returned as MP for the shire seat of Inverness, and Culloden was ousted. Duncan gained the Inverness burghs seat and Lovat congratulated him.

Lovat settled to his desk and reviewed the state of North Britain for his Majesty. As Governor of Inverness, chief of one of the most prominent clans, and pensioner of George I, he felt it his duty to inform the King that things were not all well in his northern British territories. Lovat inferred the King was not kept very well informed by his informants such as Culloden, who were paid handsomely for the job. Lovat complained that the Highlanders were ‘very ignorant, illiterate and in constant use of arms’, flatly contradicting his letter of wishes from his deathbed in 1718, where he had implored them to stay true to their traditions.

To address these problems, the King must overhaul the system of royal appointments to the positions of Sheriffs, Lord Lieutenants and JPs. As a result of inept distribution of these favours, there was poor local management of the area. ‘Robberies go on without restraint’, blackmail was a thriving business for some lawless lairds, and undermined the trade in black cattle that gave the weak economy much-needed income, Lovat reported. What regular soldiers there were could not keep order because they were foreigners who spoke no Gaelic and lumbered in the wake of fleet-footed Highland bandits in the hills and moors. Ordinary Highlanders spoke only Gaelic and the English-speaking soldiers could not form any relationship with them except that of occupier and occupied. High county office must be offered to loyal men who were already eminent in their communities, thanks to their birth and upbringing, he said. Centrally, Lovat recommended that the Independent Companies of foot soldiers should be revived. George I had ordered them to be disbanded in 1717, when the threat of an uprising seemed low, many companies were inactive, and many of their captains were using the salaries intended for the soldiers’ maintenance to supplement their own private incomes.

Under both systems a group of fighting men were kept in a state of readiness to fight. The failed 1719 invasion reminded the authorities in London that some kind of militia force to guard and police the peripheries of the kingdoms was desirable. Lovat suggested the revived companies be led by loyal Highland magnates of good proven family. All this Lord Lovat humbly submitted to his Majesty for his consideration. The ministers in London thought Lord Lovat’s memorial full of stimulating observations, but found themselves tangled up in the many threads of Highland self-interest. They advised George I to send someone north to assess the situation.

In 1724, General George Wade, about the same age as Lord Lovat, arrived in Inverness with a reputation as an internal security expert. His brief was to investigate ‘how far the memorial delivered … by Simon, Lord Lovat, and his remarks thereupon are founded on facts’, and how far the ‘remedies mentioned’ by Lovat were the right ones. This chief was making quite an impression on the King. Lovat’s opinions interested George. The noble Lord Lovat’s memorial in his pocket, Wade set himself to observe the strengths and resources of the Highlands, and advise on measures necessary to ‘civilise’ them and cast out ‘barbarity’ – that is, anything distinctly Highland, Gaelic or clannish.

To Wade’s eye, the region existed entirely in ‘a state of anarchy and confusion’. He agreed with Lovat that efforts to disarm the Highlanders after the 1715 risings had left the Jacobite clans better armed than before. They had handed in obsolete weapons, which had been bought by the boatload from Holland, and were compensated for their ‘losses’, while hiding their good guns at home and leaving the law-abiding clans to obey orders properly and disarm themselves. Wade estimated there were about 22,000 fighting men in the Highlands, 10,000 of whom were well affected to King George. Most of the rest stood ‘ready, whenever encouraged by their Superiors or Chiefs of Clan, to create new Troubles and rise in arms in favours of the Pretender’.

Wade liked much of what Lovat concluded, and saw several potential security problems in the region. However, the General was extremely puzzled by the Fraser chief. Lord Lovat, MacShimidh, or both, seemed in a way Wade could not quite pinpoint to be as much a part of the problem as the solution.