The Last Highlander (27 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

Kidnapping and election-rigging, 1731–34

‘Necessity has no law’

– THE CHIEF OF CLAN MACLEOD

In the New Year, Lovat was feeling his age. ‘Many marks appear that show the tabernacle is failing,’ Lovat wrote to his old friend Culloden. His wrinkled skin did not quite seem to fit him as tightly as it had in his youth. ‘The teeth are gone,’ he sighed, ‘and now the cold has so seized my head, that I am almost deaf with a pain in my ears. Those are so many sounds of the trumpet that call me to another world, for which you and I are hardly well prepared.’ They had both led full lives. Stinging ear pain as the sound of the last trumpet sounded horrible.

Complain as he did about his aches and pains, Lovat was fit enough by 1732, after two years of widowhood, to think about finding a mother for his four children, and a helpmeet for himself: someone to keep an old man warm. Going back and forth to his Edinburgh lawyers, Lovat’s attention had alighted on pretty young Marion Dalrymple, granddaughter of Lord Stair, Lord President of the Court of Session, where he spent so much time. She was unmarried, though was being courted by an Edinburgh buck. She came with a good dowry and was superbly connected into the upper echelons of the Edinburgh legal establishment. Between the Dalrymples in Edinburgh and Grants in London, Lovat reasoned he ought to be able to get his affairs settled to his satisfaction. If he did not live much longer she might be a wealthy and eligible widow. Lovat hoped she would be kind to his children.

In the spring of 1732, Marion Dalrymple began to receive visits and notes and small gifts from Lord Lovat as he rode between Edinburgh, Dounie and wherever General Wade was currently mustering the Highland Companies. Lovat fell from his horse one day, which should have been a sign he was too old for galloping about playing love and war games. Eventually Marion accepted his proposal. A delighted Lovat announced the banns and rode to Edinburgh to work out the details of their marriage contract with her father, who was younger than his prospective son-in-law. When he arrived in Edinburgh, a letter from North Berwick was waiting for him. Recognising the female hand he tore it open eagerly, only to read that ‘after the most serious and deliberate considerations for several months I am fully satisfied that it will not be for the happiness or comfort of either of us to match together’. Marion thanked him ‘for the honour your Lordship designed me’. Lovat was stunned. Why had she changed her mind?

Her grandfather told Sir James Grant she had liked his proposal at first. Lovat headed an ancient family, and was a prominent man in Scotland. Yes, he was old, but he was not without glamour. She might even attend Court as my Lady Lovat. Then she went home to ‘her other friends’. When Dalrymple saw her next, she had changed her mind, being ‘firm and positive in her resolution’. Lovat’s lawyer, John MacFarlane, wrote to his Lordship that Marion’s ‘own natural disposition and the observations she had occasion to make on your Lordship’s conduct and behaviour
last winter
’ made her change her mind. She was referring to the kidnapping of Lady Grange.

Lord Grange’s wife, Rachel Chieseley, kept a cut-throat razor under the pillow, Grange told his friend Lovat when he called on him over a year earlier. Lovat, listening with agitated fascination, could imagine this was not good news. The rumour about a mistress had come to his wife’s ears and her mood had darkened. He had tried to placate her, Grange told Lovat. The Grange children noticed that though intimate when seen in public places, in private there were times when for half a year at a time ‘there was no intercourse between’ their parents at all. The suspicious Lady Grange intercepted her husband’s letters, read them and took them to the Justice Clerk Adam Cockburn. Looking for evidence of adultery, she found treason. Lovat winced: Cockburn hated him. Some letters were coded but, the Justice Clerk said, delighted, they burbled Jacobite sentiment. Here was a chance to ruin many of his political enemies. Lovat grew increasingly alarmed as Lord Grange’s story developed. Had Lady Grange been listening at doorways as well as reading her husband’s post? Getting drawn into a scandal of this nature right now could be disastrous.

Lady Grange’s plans to go to London and ruin her husband – and his friends if implicated – were thrown into confusion when Cockburn, her mentor, succumbed to serious illness. Lovat wrote to Sir James Grant. ‘I am informed … the Justice Clerk is going very fast and for all his inveterate enmity against me, I am so good a Christian that I wish him very soon in Heaven.’ He could not die fast enough – though he lingered on until April 1735. Lovat called in one of his Highland servants and gave him a letter for the chief of the MacLeods on Skye. Lady Grange had become increasingly unstable and embittered. She stood in the streets waving letters and screaming at her husband, and barracked him loudly in church as a hypocrite. The poor woman was terribly unhappy and could be dangerous. Lord Grange decided she must be silenced.

On the night of 22 January 1732, no one noticed a group of men Lady Grange later identified as ‘some servants of Lovat’s and his cousin Roderick MacLeod’, their faces wrapped in plaids, as they pushed open the door of the house where Lady Grange was staying. They grabbed her, gagged her, ‘carried me downstairs as a corpse’, threw her into a sedan chair, and hauled her out into the night, heading west in the direction of Falkirk. The party disappeared through the gateway of hills into the Highlands, with what someone later called ‘the cargo’, taking the terrified woman up Loch Ness and then west till they reached the sea. Here they put her on a boat for the Monach Isles, five miles off the west coast of North Uist.

Lord Grange announced that his wife had died of a heart attack and held her funeral. One suspicious soul lifted the coffin lid, and found it empty. Flickering glimpses of the truth emerged. The city of Edinburgh ruminated over the scandal ‘for a few weeks only’. It was ‘not taken the least notice of by any of her own family or by the King’s Advocate’, Duncan Forbes. In fact, the gossip was that one of her own sons was part of the kidnapping party. Lady Grange had had an erratic temper. Her father had murdered a judge for making a judgement against him. Grange told anyone who asked that she had been removed for her own safety: ‘confining a madwoman … where she was tenderly cared for’. He professed ‘a passionate love’ for her always.

People pointed at Lord Lovat and the chief of MacLeod as Grange’s accomplices, ‘the first as being the most famous plotter in the kingdom, and the second as equally unprincipled, and the proprietor of the island of St Kilda’, sixty miles west of the Isle of Lewis, just one of the places she was imprisoned. When Lady Grange’s siblings asked the public prosecutors to intervene, they said they could do nothing ‘seeing the family were not displeased’, although one minister’s son noticed that in church on Sundays, Lord Grange would sometimes sit through the entire service in floods of tears. Lady Grange passed the last thirteen years of her life being shifted from one remote island to another, including a spell of six years on St Kilda in a tiny stone hut. She died on Skye aged sixty-six.

There were problems with Lovat’s wider reputation too. It was not the first scandal connected to his name. Marion’s friends told her that Lovat often accompanied Lord Grange on debauching revels, to drink and carry on freely with ‘tapster lasses’ in the inns of the town, and talk Jacobite treason. Marion’s mind boggled. Enjoying the gossip of the town was one thing; living with one of the most colourful objects of it might be quite another. That, and his age, and the thought of being so far away in the Highlands with servants who spoke only Gaelic (which she did not), woke Marion up from her dream of being my Lady Lovat. ‘She believed she could not be happy if she became your wife … She offered to put in my hands the presents you had given her,’ Lovat’s lawyer, MacFarlane said, ‘but I excused myself from receiving them.’

Lovat threw down the letter. A chit of a girl and her chattering friends had rejected and humiliated him. The marriage banns had been announced. Being Lovat, he had publicised it everywhere. He retired to Castle Dounie and wrote to his nephew, Ludovick Grant. To be refused privately was tolerable, but, ‘to have a marriage fully concluded, a contract writ, and every article agreed to, a day appointed for the marriage, to put it back in this manner is an indignity put upon my person and family, that I can hardly bear’, he thrashed. He would think of someone else fast, to pour balm on the humiliation. His mind roved over his political allies and came to rest on the biggest, the Argyll Campbells. The Duke’s and Earl’s first cousin, Sir John Campbell of Mamore, a general in the British Army, Whig, and Presbyterian, had a daughter of marriageable age called Primrose. At the moment, neither Argyll nor Ilay had heirs, and Sir John’s family were next in line for the dukedom. She would be perfect. This time nothing stopped Lovat.

The bride had barely left her teens when faced with a sixty-something widower. The marriage went through. Primrose’s views on it were expressed by her feet. A few months into married life Lovat looked about and wondered where his wife was. She had not been at home, at Dounie, helping him entertain up to twenty influential Highland men a night in the run-up to the 1734 general election. She had not been mothering and educating his children. She did not run his household and manage servants. She had gone west, visiting family and friends. He wrote to her. She did not respond. He thought her absence a ‘shame’, and went to fetch her back. She must support him at home while he campaigned.

Lovat sensed things were not quite right in the run-up to this election. For one thing, the Duke of Argyll had added a clause to a forthcoming bill for disarming the Highlands. The clause forbade the wearing of Highland dress. It reflected a belief that after seventeen years of peace there was no need to respect the traditional costume of the Gaels, that marked them as different from the rest of Britons, or respect their need to bear arms to hunt and protect themselves from predation. There was not going to be another uprising. Keeping the Highlanders in arms and in plaids merely reinforced a sense of separateness in them.

Dining at Culloden House, the Highland elite rowed ferociously over their attitudes to this bill, Lovat raging that Argyll, patron of most men in the room, ‘will be now the most hated above 60,000 Highlanders, men and women, who will curse him every day of his life, and theirs. And their posterity will curse him and his to all future ages.’ The bill showed up fault lines in the Scottish ruling classes, not how much they were assimilated into Britain. They divided over the bill, men like the Forbeses voting for their patron’s measure; men like Lovat violently opposed to it.

He was dismayed that his world was being dismantled by its own most ancient and eminent representatives, like Argyll. Lovat remembered Argyll’s father fondly, the first duke. He was properly Scottish. This one had been educated at Eton and knew the gentle slopes and ornamental lakes on his English estates in Surrey more intimately than the staggering mountains and lochs of Argyll, and the character and culture of the fiercely independent people that belonged there. One of Lovat’s remaining ambitions was to keep the powerful and able men of the Highlands together, fostering a strong feeling for their home and nationality. United, they had some clout with which to negotiate for positions and salaries from Walpole’s government and could offer him a bloc vote in exchange.

Ilay understood about tactical voting and grouping, and exploited the Highland lairds’ differences to rule them. He did not want a powerfully bonded Highland group that might feel strong enough to turn against him if it suited them. Having two or three factions among his supporters in the north competing for his, and through him Walpole’s, favours, balanced power there. No one man could rise too high. Duncan Forbes was Ilay’s right-hand man in the north, but from time to time Ilay set out to appoint someone who might ‘not be ruled by Duncan’, as when Lovat kept asking for the position of Sheriff of Inverness-shire. Against the wishes of Duncan Forbes, Ilay gave it to him. The Sheriff was the leading judge in a shire, civil and criminal. For a nobleman who spent so much time and money in the courts, the post was extremely attractive. Second, the Sheriff was the returning officer on election day. The Sheriff decided who had won the most votes and became elected. This was not a simple matter of counting the thirty to eighty votes cast in the election to Highland seats. Before the election, the Sheriff decided who was eligible to vote, and who could be made eligible with the right paperwork; and who was not eligible, or could be found not to be eligible. The man pushing and pushing for this post was not a man indifferent to politics.

Lovat could see more clearly than any that arguing among themselves played them into Ilay’s hands, though he was one of the most belligerent. They were united as Highlanders in defence of their country, and united behind Walpole and Argyll as a group; yet when they entered the arena of their individual needs and desires, the Earl of Ilay divided and ruled them with ease. They should pull together and use their combined power to make the Earl invest more in the area, Lovat said. He worked ceaselessly to unite them, telling his brother-in-law: ‘I had four Highland chiefs at dinner with me two days ago. Sir Alexander MacDonald, Mackintosh, McKinnon, and your son, Captain George, Dalrahany, and Grantfield were with us, and we drank heartily to healths of the Duke of Argyle and the Earl of Ilay and to Craigeallachy [a title of Sir James’s] root and branch.’ The Forbeses also hoped to unite the north, except under their patronage.