The Last Highlander (34 page)

MacLeod had discovered that six of his kin had gone to join the Master of Lovat’s rendezvous. ‘They were entertained in an outhouse of yours, and then sent’ on, he said to Lovat. They should have been turned in to the garrison at Inverness. MacLeod’s unhappiness was mirrored in the skies. ‘The weather is still dismal,’ he signed off.

Lovat grew more and more alienated from his old friends. He apologised profusely to Duncan for the ‘base, barbarous, inhuman and distracted attempt and behaviour of the Stratherrick men at Culloden’. He then lamented that the Master of Lovat was on the point of leaving to join the rebels, taking hundreds with him, and how the prospect filled Lovat with fear. He was powerless to stop him, he wailed.

Duncan replied instantly. This was the worst news. Duncan agreed a delinquent son was a trial, but insisted it was well within the capabilities of a father of Lovat’s quality to stop him. That, Duncan said, was everyone’s opinion in Inverness. It mortified Duncan to play these games with a venerable man he had known all his life and worked with for thirty years. He understood the election battles. They had been pushing for the same jobs. However, that this tit-for-tat, skirting the real issues, was what their joint venture to promote the Highlands came down to hurt and angered the Lord President.

Lovat answered it was easy to claim he was a strong father and chief, but the Master ‘always flew in my face like a wild cat when I spoke to him against any of his distracted opinions’. Simon entered his father’s room in the middle of this exchange of letters, as Robert Fraser was taking down the dictation. He demanded to see the letter. The secretary refused and Simon grabbed it out of his hand. Everyone watched him as he learned of his disobedience, the pain he was giving his father and that his behaviour would be the death of the old man.

When he finished reading, Simon stared at Lovat. ‘To call
me
stiff-necked and disobedient! I will set the saddle upon the right horse,’ he shouted. Lovat stepped forward to stop him and take the letter. Simon jerked it away and shouted, ‘If this letter goes, I will go … and discover all to my Lord President!’ A youth of nineteen, he could not understand the underhand dealing. They should just rise and be done with it. Hugh Fraser of Dumballach said, though his opinion had not been asked, he thought ‘if the affair could not be entirely dropped’, then his preference was, ‘that it should be put off for some time’. He did not want to turn traitor. Lovat agreed his opinion had not been asked, adding coldly that ‘some people’s opinions might be easily read in their countenances’.

Dumballach did not answer. Simon began to cry out in protest, saying ‘he had been made a fool of, and a tool from first to last … he had been one day doing and another day undoing; but that now he was determined, that whatsoever resolution Lord Lovat should come to, that he would execute it, let the consequence be what it would’. The young man needed to act, not toss it to and fro, which was in fact the saving of them. But he did not understand an old man’s tactics. In frustration, ‘the Master rose up, took his bonnet and threw it upon the floor, threw the white cockade in the fire, and damned the cockade’.

Lovat ‘rose up in a passion’ and asked what could he do? Seeing his son’s distress appalled him in some ways. Instead of facing the risk and danger himself, he ‘was forcing his son out’. Father and son switched into Gaelic. Mr Fraser the minister stood up to speak on the Master’s behalf. Fraser of Byerfield pushed the minister back down. ‘What have you to do with it? You have no estate to forfeit,’ he said.

In his heart, Lovat believed this rebellion could not succeed, but he also believed ‘himself too far engaged to go back’. He told Dumballach in private that ‘the conduct of his clan on this occasion would be his ruin, and very probably cost him his life’. At best he might be back where he started, with nothing, isolated, hunted; then all his fighting would have been for nothing, or worse than nothing. Still he would not make a decision.

Into November, Duncan went along with Lovat’s prevarications as best he could, warning that if Lovat’s ‘authority with that kindred for whom you have done so much’, retrieving them from the brink of oblivion, ‘and who with reason were so passionately fond of you’ is not used to pull the clan to safety, it would be a disaster. Make the Master of Lovat desert ‘his rash undertaking … to save you and your family from ruin’, Duncan appealed, ‘as they very remarkably did thirty years ago’. To Thomas Fraser of Gorthleck, Lovat’s best-loved Stratherrick laird, Duncan confessed it has ‘grieved me cruelly, to see my unhappy and much loved friend on the brink of destruction’ over the past three months.

‘I am so monstrously tired with writing,’ Duncan confided to a friend in London. The weariness of trying to save his neighbours, dealing with restraint with their deceits and struggles, made him feel ill. Yet he did not want his country to suffer for the compromised loyalties of the leaders. He had sympathy with their nationalism, while he loathed their method of expressing it. Forbes wrote to Lovat twice in one day. He would not give up on the old chief. Then, all of a sudden it was too late.

*    *    *

At Castle Dounie, Lovat stood on the battlements and watched the marrow of his clan, under the Master of Lovat and Charles Fraser of Inverallochy, march away. He then went to his desk in the cold, dark morning of 1 December to tell Duncan what he would know almost the moment it happened. ‘My son has left me under silence of last night, contrary to my advice, contrary to my expectations and to my most earnest requests … The consequences of his doing so are to me terrible beyond expression.’ That much was true. Here came the nightmare. Lovat unleashed it and thought he controlled the path of its devastation. He could not. People never ceased to think that once they let slip the dogs of war they could call them off or change their path to suit themselves. Even as the Frasers marched, the Earl of Loudon was still at his desk writing out the terms on which he would leave Lovat in peace.

Duncan told Lovat’s Stratherrick kinsman, Gorthleck, that the news sickened him to his stomach. As a way of saving Lovat, Gorthleck asked Duncan to turn a blind eye. ‘An expedient which to the end of time would dishonour me,’ Duncan answered coldly.

Duncan went to tell Loudon what had happened. Loudon ‘stopped short’. Lovat had just put himself beyond negotiation or appeal. Loudon was infuriated that he had swallowed Lovat’s blandishments about no one marching.

The Earl angrily accused Lovat with his own words: three months ago Lovat had boasted he ‘had the absolute direction of them’. Now Lovat claimed his son ‘seemed determined to join the rebels’. The Master apparently had ‘twenty times more to say with most of them than your Lordship has’. If so, then none of Lovat’s words carried any weight, and he should have been wise enough to say so. Seeing ‘with half an eye’ what the consequences of rebellion were, ‘in place of expostulating with me and using very earnest arguments against’ Loudon coming into Fraser country to garrison troops at Dounie when the Earl offered them, Lovat should have been begging him for help. With every word Lovat should have pressed ‘me to march immediately to support your authority over your clan, seduced by your son, from the respect due to your Lordship’.

Lovat replied he could not imagine what actions would satisfy Loudon.

‘I will tell you in two words,’ Loudon snarled. ‘Come home.’

Lovat waffled, appealing to Loudon and Duncan to ‘be a friend to old, infirm and distressed Lord Lovat … I resolve to live as peaceable a subject as the King and government has and will do all that’s within my power to make my kinsmen that will obey me to do the same.’ So many provisos, it made their heads spin.

The day after the Frasers set off to join the rebels, Loudon informed Lovat he was on his way down Loch Ness to Fort Augustus via Stratherrick.
If
all was quiet and everyone at home, ‘I shall not put the least hardship on any man.’

Frost hardened the ground to iron as Loudon led his men down the south side of Loch Ness, through the Fraser country of Stratherrick, towards Fort Augustus. Lovat regarded it as an intolerable abuse of him and his land. The fort was blockaded by the rebels and Loudon intended to break it and resupply the government troops there. Stratherrick men had also blockaded the road between Inverness and Fort Augustus (and the west coast).

The Earl marched through Stratherrick, opening the road again. He stopped and had a proclamation read, to let the people know what was coming if they did not call back their men to turn in their arms, and resume their peacetime way of life. They would be arrested and never come home again. This was not a clan feud, and not 1715.

When he got back to Inverness, the Earl ‘gave out a bloody proclamation which was read at the [Market] Cross’. He would go into the lands of those who had risen if they did not stand down at once and surrender. That meant Fraser country. The time for pacification by gentle persuasion was over. The region would be forced to submit. Tell your chief, Duncan told Fraser of Gorthleck, Loudon ‘has authority to burn and destroy’ their homes to bring them back. ‘I shall try and stop him,’ Duncan said, and persuade Loudon to finish a letter of terms of surrender for Lovat and his kin, but it ‘will be his last’. If that didn’t work, it was over. ‘From my heart,’ he said, ‘I wish that repentance may not come too late’ to prevent the total destruction of the Frasers.

Exhausted as he was, Duncan wrote to Lovat one final, cool letter, a sort of signing off after all his efforts. ‘I can no longer remain a spectator of your Lordship’s conduct, and see the double game you have played for some time past, without betraying the trust reposed in me … Methinks a little more of your Lordship’s wonted artifice would not have been amiss,’ he said with bitter humour.

‘Whatever had been your private sentiments with respect to this unnatural rebellion, you should, my Lord, have duly considered and estimated the advantages that would arise to your Lordship from its success, and balance them with the risks you run if it should happen to miscarry …

‘You sent away your son and the best part of your clan to join the Pretender with as little concern as if no danger had attached to such a step. I say
sent
them away, for we are not to imagine they went of themselves, or would have ventured to take arms without your Lordship’s concurrence … This, however, you are sure can’t easily be proved, which indeed, may be true.’

The whole long letter was suffused with passion, anger and terrible sadness, all determinedly controlled. He knew Lovat would have as little incriminating stuff on paper as he could. ‘The whole strain of your Lordship’s conversation in every company where you have appeared since the Young Pretender’s arrival, has tended to pervert the minds of his Majesty’s subjects.’

‘Those unhappy gentlemen’, who came back from exile with the Young Pretender, Duncan found easier to defend than Lovat. Some had been stripped of their titles and honours since 1715. Some, like Lord George Murray, had no expectations, and may have been moved by pity for his brother Tullibardine, who had been in exile most of his life.

‘But what shall I say in favour of you, my Lord?’ the Lord President cried. ‘You, who have flourished under the present happy establishment! You, who in the beginning of your days forfeited both your life and fortune, and yet by the benignity of the government’ was not only forgiven but ‘even restored to all you could lay claim to.

‘But,’ Duncan choked with sad foreboding, ‘there are some men whom no duty can bind, nor no favour can oblige … If a timely repentance do not prevent it, your Lordship will not unjustly be ranked among that number.’ The consequences would be dreadful. There was nothing available to Lovat now than to perform services of such magnitude that would counter the magnitude of the harm he was plotting.

Lovat read it, picked up his pen and dipped it in ink. He thanked Duncan for the letter, musing ‘I own I never received one like it.’ He paused. What had he done, losing men like this as his companions? He then threw away the chance for reconciliation and truth by insulting Duncan’s intelligence. ‘I see by it,’ he feinted crudely, ‘that for my misfortune in having an obstinate son and an ungrateful kindred, my family must go to destruction, and I must lose my life in my old age.’ He congratulated himself on having 600 Frasers, who would defend him, and piped up that he was still loyal.

The song was out of tune. When he read this nonsense, Duncan let out a groan and threw it in a drawer, slamming it shut.

Writing to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s secretary, Murray of Broughton, Lovat lamented his inability to come out and fight due to his decrepitude. ‘I send my eldest son, the hopes of my family and the darling of my life … Instead of sending him abroad to complete his education I have sent him to venture the last drop of his blood in the glorious Prince’s service, and as he is extremely beloved, and the darling of his clan, all the gentlemen of my name and clan (which I thank God! are numerous and look well and always believed to be as stout as their neighbours) are gone with him.’

As the old chief sat by his fire, and reviewed his life and achievements, 400 miles to the south, December was setting in hard around the Jacobite army. In the worst piece of timing of his life, Lovat finally sent his men out just four weeks before the Jacobites turned back at Derby. Now they hurried north, pursued by Wade and Cumberland, retreating in the worst of winter weather over terrible terrain and up through the Lake District.

Duncan sent notice to Lovat. The next day, his clerk would begin to note down who was not there, in order to stop every one of the rebels
ever
returning to live at peace in the homes and families they left. It was over, this world Lovat had brought back into being. Let your men know the danger, Duncan pleaded. They had one more day to save themselves – just one. They would never come home once he came into his old friend’s country. Did Lovat not feel the reality of that? No reply came from Dounie.