The Last Highlander (28 page)

Most of Lovat’s contemporaries were ageing Highland gentlemen and nobles trying to do their duty by their families, estates, neighbours and country. They wanted a quiet life. Whatever battles life threw them were mostly over, except that of gradually disburdening themselves of responsibilities and passing them on to the next generation. They were living among ambitious young men coming to adulthood with no memory of an independent Scotland and Stuart kings, or of their allies and relations who ruled an independent nation. When Lovat badgered Sir James too strongly, Grant stopped answering his letters, or went on holiday to the South of France.

The rising generation only knew the post-Union Scotland as a peripheral poor cousin to England. They did not fall easily into line behind Lovat’s vision of the Highlands as a small state within the former realm. Lovat saw that to attract patronage they must appear to be of importance on the national stage. They must all stand together to make any real impact. They would not be allowed independence, though many in England disliked the Union. Scotland, especially the north, had nothing economically or socially to offer or to threaten to withhold in London’s eyes, except good behaviour. The poverty and isolation of their homeland forced most of them into national affairs to make a good living.

At home, even if Duncan Forbes and Lovat had begun to compete over political spoils and the competition was dividing them, Duncan still believed in Lovat’s right to his estates and, in two major judgements, helped Lovat, finally, over the winning line. In July 1733, Lord Lovat regained the clan estates.

Duncan and his fellow lawyers settled on £12,000 as fair compensation to Fraserdale and his son for their losses. The financial implications were potentially crippling. Lovat burdened his territories with debts amounting to nearly £2 million in today’s terms. It was another reason he could never retire and enjoy his achievements; he needed to compete with all the established and upcoming men in public life. Lovat thought it was a ‘terrible’ sum, but worth it to secure ‘to me, and to my kindred, and to my children, the lands of our forefathers without dispute, and takes us out of the hands of the barbarous Philistines’, remarking irritably that most of Fraserdale’s advisers were to be found in the Forbes political camp. ‘We all met this night for the first time … I never spoke to Fraserdale before.’ How odd that this man had affected his life so profoundly – and they had never met.

In the run-up to the 1734 election, Culloden fell extremely ill and it was obvious he could not stand against Grant to try and regain his seat. If Sir James kept his seat in the election, that would at least keep the Grant–Lovat presence at Westminster. But Duncan convinced Sir Norman MacLeod of MacLeod to stand against Sir James and to improve MacLeod’s chances, Duncan went to MacLeod’s castle on Skye ‘to assist him to make twelve or twenty barons, so that he’ would definitely win the seat. By the
nominal
transfer of a piece of land to men utterly subordinate to them, who would vote and do exactly what they were told to, big land owners built up a bank of ‘parchment barons’ or ‘faggot votes’.

Lovat watched this development with alarm. ‘If your father does not bestir himself and make as many barons as will balance MacLeod,’ he will lose, Lovat told Ludovick Grant. Then, Lovat finished, almost shouting with anxiety, ‘What will the ministry think of his [Sir James’s] interest and mine in this shire?’ Their ‘interest’ was their influence.

Lovat set his lawyers to work to create twenty new voters out of his own obedient kindred. Every one of them cost Lovat money, and every one alienated him further from the Forbeses, as he tried to unite the group around the Grants. At the meeting to validate voters prior to election day, Lovat, as election officer in his position as Sheriff, disallowed several Forbes–MacLeod-made voters (including some who had actually voted in the previous election) and allowed all of Grant’s. ‘In a straightforward competition in unscrupulousness he had little to fear from any normal man,’ concluded one historian of the period. But he was made very anxious by the costs – both the money and the collateral damage to relationships with those he wanted and needed to cultivate. The duty of the successful candidate was to go to Westminster, flatter the ministers who held real power and extract perks for themselves and their followers at home. That was what Lovat was buying here. ‘Let us take courage and fight it bravely,’ Lovat charged Grant, though the ‘fatiguing campaign’ left him feeling ill.

As a Forbes supporter, General Wade tried to disrupt the Fraser chief’s political activities by repeatedly mustering all his officers and their Highland Companies. A few weeks before election day, Wade ordered the Sheriff of Inverness into camp at Badenoch. Lovat was doubly furious. Interrupted his campaigning, as it was meant to, there was also the larger problem of famine in the Aviemore area in March 1734. John Roy Stuart, a known Jacobite conspirator, came to dine at Dounie and commiserate. When he had gone, Wade appeared ‘in a cursed humour; he scolded me horridly … He swears he will break us all as soon as he comes to London,’ Lovat said. Wade believed the Independent Companies were full of Jacobitism and being used for private enterprise.

In England a book appeared called
The Humours of a Country Election
. Hogarth provided the illustrations, satirising all the ‘vices attendant on rural election campaigns’: feasting, violence, bribery, corruption, menaces, and vote-rigging. The electioneering parties in Inverness encouraged satirical songs to demean their enemies and laud themselves. Lovat was under enormous pressure when he met Duncan in Inverness shortly before election day. Lovat yelled that there were circumstances in which he would not hesitate to cut his throat. It was a little excessive to threaten the life of the principal state prosecutor in Scotland, even for Lovat. Election day dawned with feelings running very high between the influential men of the north.

TWENTY-SIX

A pyrrhic victory, 1734–39

‘We are such beggars in this country
that we long after a war’

– LOVAT TO LUDOVICK GRANT

Lovat was uncontainable. Wednesday, 16 May 1734, Lord Lovat’s Independent Company of Foot patrolled the streets of Inverness to keep the peace at the polls. Victory today would change the fortunes of the Lovat–Grant axis. Soldiers everywhere attached themselves to voters, and guarded polling stations. Lord Lovat, the Sheriff of Inverness-shire, returning officer for the county and burgh seats of Inverness, presided.

The burghers and magistrates supporting the Forbeses protested that Lovat’s men intimidated them. Lovat sent Grant a ballad the Inverness mob was singing about the Fraser versus Forbes contest. Grant quailed before his brother-in-law’s vigour.

The Peer and his clan were there to a man,

His Lordship looked big, like a Hector;

No doubt he will vaunt, in the Evening Courant,

With a hey, Sine Sanguine Victor …

Though our story does boast of the Frasers and host

Before Forbes from Adam came out;

Yet the fourth of that race, with his impudent face,

Said, the Grants and the Frasers he’d rout.

‘The Peer’, Lovat, had been a presence since ‘before Adam’. The Forbeses only ‘came out’ as gentlemen of property four generations ago. Before that, as the Fraser chronicles recorded, they were Lord Lovat’s ‘pastry cooks’. The rest of polling day ‘was not then bairns’ play’, Lovat told Grant. ‘I thought to lose my life in the burgh room,’ where votes were cast. When the booths closed, no voting was private, of course, they all came out of the rooms, and ‘I was pelted with showers of stones and clods by the Patriots’ mob’. The Patriots were anti-Union nationalists, one of the Whig opposition groups. In another life, they would have been his natural allies.

Parliament was summoned on 13 June 1734. It was made up of 326 ministerial Whigs who unquestioningly supported Walpole’s administration. Ilay’s Scottish faction was among their number. There were eighty-three opposition Whigs, including the Squadrone men and the new group, the Patriots; and 149 Tories. Walpole’s majority had gone down by sixteen MPs. In the north, Sir James Grant kept Inverness-shire, thanks to his more effective vote-rigging, seeing off the challenge from Culloden’s replacement, Sir Norman MacLeod. Duncan Forbes kept the Inverness burghs. The gentry had mauled each other verbally. Now, the scrapping for places and pensions began in earnest.

Walpole and Ilay and the other men at the top settled to work out who they wished to patronise, who they had to patronise, and who they could safely ignore. Even the great patronage of the Treasury could not provide enough to satisfy the expectations of more than a third of the old and new faces. ‘The people in this country continue in much the same disposition as formerly; their own opinion of their deservings and the liveliness of their expectations gives me some uneasiness,’ Duncan wrote to Ilay’s Scottish campaign manager, Lord Milton.

When it came to the Highlands, Duncan Forbes, the Lord Advocate, never ceased to cultivate Ilay and Walpole, repeating that his family’s rise to prominence depended on them. He thwarted Ilay on specific policies or appointments, but consistently supported the ministry by hard, successful work. His reports were to the point, and requests for hand-outs came with offers to do something substantial in return. Walpole and Ilay wished to patronise Duncan. Sir James Grant toed the Walpole line, but was too patrician and lazy to thrust himself forward and strike deals. Grant did not want to do much work. The ministry could probably afford to ignore him, and his allies. This was a disaster for Grant’s brother-in-law. Lovat had thrown himself and his resources into this election in order to come out of it as a beneficiary of patronage. Lovat absolutely believed Ilay and Walpole owed him a seat in the Lords as an elected peer. He badgered Grant to represent him as worthy of any local government post with a salary that came up. As Sheriff of Inverness-shire and captain of an Independent Company he already helped maintain law and order.

By Christmas, Lovat was still looking forward to good news in his letters. He wrote to Sir Robert Walpole to wish him the compliments of the season, and copied the letter to Sir Robert Munro, Ross-shire MP and friend, just in case Lovat’s name was mentioned in conversation when Munro saw his political boss. Still nothing came for Lord Lovat.

The election had all but broken Lovat’s friendship with Duncan Forbes. Duncan’s reports on his activities were losing ‘me the favour and countenance of the Duke of Argyll’, Lovat admitted to Sir James. The cost of fighting Duncan Forbes, whom Lovat called Ilay’s ‘sycophant fiscal’ in the north, alarmed the Fraser chief. Lovat reckoned he was £3,000 out of pocket (about £500,000 in present-day values). The smaller lairds he had corralled for their votes, now ‘dun and importune me’ daily for the favours he had promised after the election – cash, appointments, and army commissions. Lovat needed ‘support’ from the administration to satisfy their expectations, and his creditors, and to build up his ‘interest’, his group. He would lose face in the Highlands if he did not get something significant out of this election. He had set himself up to be a patron. The great long party of the election campaign ended. Lovat woke up with a sore head and a horribly negative vision of the Highlands and his place in it. Through his sixties, Lovat had laboured with huge vigour to create a united team of influential Highland gentlemen under him, mutually dependent and supportive, the group bigger than the sum of its individual agents. He had the right idea, but it was not the right time or place to do it.

In previous elections, Highland in-fighting died down in the year leading away from the election itself. It did not happen this time. There were just too many dissatisfied men wielding a lot of personal power in the region and no outlet in Edinburgh or London for their energy, ambition and egos. It worried Ilay. Growling discontent in the Highlands had never been something about which a government could be complacent. Ilay considered thinning out the ranks of the combatants, perhaps by bringing some south to Edinburgh or London. Had he made Lovat an elected peer, it would have taken the voracious and capable Fraser chief out of the Highlands more, and exhausted some of his aggression and thrusting in the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, and might have changed Highland history.

But Duncan Forbes and Wade spoke against favouring him to Ilay. The fight for votes had turned too nasty, and they no longer trusted Lovat. In London, they thought Lovat’s talk of trouble on the horizon was a bluff to attract inward investment, through him, into the region. In the north, Wade thought investing in the Highlands a sound idea but warned Ilay that local talk increasingly connected Lovat with the Jacobites and he should not be funded. Lovat argued that Wade insulted him to goad him to react with violence and justify stripping him of his Highland Company.

Not promoting him was a mistake. Although well into his sixties, Lovat was capable, powerful and could deploy his talents in one of several directions. All through these years he maintained friendly relations with the Highland chiefs who had rebelled in 1715. Some Jacobites, like Cameron of Lochiel, Lord Grange, Gordon of Glenbuchat, Seaforth and John Roy Stuart were old friends and neighbours. The names that passed through his letters and doors were tinted with Jacobitism.

His failure to find enough favour with the ministry left him struggling to meet his debt repayments. He held back money where he could. He borrowed £4,000 from the Royal Bank of Scotland, thanking his nephew Ludo Grant and Sir Robert Munro for standing guarantors. More bad luck came when Ludovick failed at the third attempt in his hope to get a Lord of Session’s robe. ‘Bear with patience, temper and a good grace, what you cannot help,’ Lovat counselled his nephew. ‘Though we are now at a low ebb, I am convinced that in a little time there will be used for chiefs of clans more than people now imagine. You know I have the second sight, and I see a vast rough storm coming on very fast; and it is certain that we are such beggars in this country that we long after a war.’ It was as if he had reached a point where, in his heart, he knew the Hanoverian Whig administration could never satisfy him. Perhaps that was what Forbes and Wade picked up on in their friend Lovat. They liked him, and wanted him with them, but they were Unionist Hanoverians by conviction. Lovat had only ever been one of them out of economic and personal necessity.

For the dynamic Lovat, the inert Sir James was a catastrophe. Lovat had thought Grant’s passivity would make him malleable, and the two would find good careers on the national stage in Westminster and at home. Now, Lovat considered that he may have backed the wrong horse. He remarked sombrely to Sir James that ‘all his life if one interest failed him, he would turn to another’.

Yet about traditional clan and Highland society Lovat’s thinking was not at all compromised. As Sheriff and with an Independent Company of soldiers under his command, he still managed and controlled feuds, cattle raids and extortion with natural authority and professionalism, knowing when and who to threaten, and when to cajole and placate. He offered solutions and mediated between warring parties. The peace and well-being of the Highlands mattered to him profoundly. Apart from the election, he was an effective and impartial Sheriff. Traditional structures existed within clanship to deal with law-breaking, such as arbitration panels. Lovat preferred to use those. But he stood ready with soldiers if not. So, it was puzzling that Lovat could not make use of his influence within the Highlands to gain influence in the south. Perhaps the problem was which way he was looking – not his daily activities, but his goal. He did not seek to use his clan status as a springboard to get himself out of the Highlands and into the glamorous maelstrom of British government and society. Rather, he tried to obtain powers and investment from the south in order to strengthen the society and economy of the Gaelic clans in a way that kept them slightly independent of mainstream British society; where they could never be important.

Worse than ignoring him, questions arose about Lovat’s loyalty when Wade’s troops captured John Roy Stuart. Jacobite spies continually darted through the country, evading Walpole’s espionage and intelligence-gathering network. They travelled as cattle dealers and clerics, or disguised themselves as women. Wade committed John Roy Stuart, Jacobite, soldier, spy, poet and song-maker, to Inverness Castle. John Roy broke out within a day and disappeared off the face of the earth. They searched for him but it was useless. Then one day an informant said that John Roy had been taken to Castle Dounie, the Sheriff’s own castle, and had stayed there for six weeks.

At Dounie, John Roy and Lovat had feasted, talked and sung. They composed songs telling how ‘when young Charlie [son of ‘James III’] came over, there would be blood and blows’. They spoke in Gaelic, sang in it, composed verse in it, and plotted in it. Then, smuggled in Lovat’s chariot, John Roy was taken back through Inverness, right under the noses of the British authorities, and put on a boat to France. Lovat sent him with a message for the Pretender, it was later alleged. Apparently, Lord Lovat assured ‘his King’, James, ‘of his fidelity’. He ‘charged him to expedite his sending his commission of Lieutenant-General of the Highlands, and his patent of a Duke’.

During the days, after recovering from nights such as those with John Roy Stuart, conjuring up intoxicating visions of a remembered fantasy Scotland, Lovat juggled his debts and repayment schedules. He heard at long last from the object of his attentions, the Earl of Ilay. He opened the letter, expecting an appointment. Wade’s complaints to George II that the Highland Companies were infiltrated by Jacobitism had led the King to demand action. Wade put Lovat’s captaincy forward as the first to go. Ilay hesitated. He did not want to drive Lovat into hostile opposition. Instead, Ilay wrote to Lovat to ask him to send his son, Simon, to him, to be educated in England. Ilay intended to put him where the Master of Lovat would learn sound British values that would help the young man to govern his clan properly, in due course. Lovat controlled his bitter disappointment with difficulty. Lovat thanked Ilay for his concern. At present, the young Master of Lovat, rising ten, was ‘so tender and so much threatened with a decay’, that he preferred to keep him at home and prepare him and his brother Sandy for school in Edinburgh.

In answer, Lovat heard that Duncan Forbes had been appointed Lord President of the Court of Session, the most senior judge in Scotland. Not even an ordinary Lord of Session’s gown for Ludovick Grant, but Forbes had been raised to the Presidency. The Grants were outraged. They retired from public life, went home to Speyside and said they wanted to live privately. To show his disapproval, Sir James Grant moved into opposition to Ilay. This was nothing short of catastrophic for Lovat. He had spent decades working against the political ambitions of Duncan Forbes and his allies, and Duncan was now one of the most powerful men in the country. For the Grants, the game was up. Lovat had encouraged them to carry on for so long, he felt cast down. ‘I am but a poor old invalid,’ he told his brother-in-law. He recalled his heyday, when ‘I was a courtier and I may say a favourite, both of Lewis Quatorze and the late King George’s.’ These days, he felt old and ill, less able to withstand the wintry gusts of disfavour.