The Last Highlander (38 page)

At the Market Cross, soldiers turned salesmen offered ‘all manner of plaids, broadswords, dirks and pistols, plaid waistcoats, officers’ laced waistcoats, hats, bonnet blankets and oatmeal bags’. Women badgered soldiers in the streets wanting the plaids on the soldiers’ arms. Some of them simply asked to buy back what had been taken from them.

Once they had gone into the Aird, Gorthleck and the other lairds forced their chief to move. It was too dangerous for him to lie in a house on the road to Fort Augustus, in the middle of rebel country. If they did not find MacShimidh in the Aird, the next place they would look was here in Stratherrick. He must go to the glens. The Stratherrick lairds constructed a litter for their chief. When it was ready they gently put him into it and ferried him across Loch Ness, and up into the hills, passing near the Aird of Lovat in darkness. Lovat called for them to stop to watch the glow like a sunset over the Aird. Flames spewed up out of the towers of Castle Dounie into the night sky.

When Dounie did not yield Lord Lovat, Cumberland made plans to launch boats onto Loch Ness with men and supplies, and to march with fifteen battalions and some dragoons through Stratherrick to Fort Augustus. He would penetrate the Highland heart along Fraser veins, Mordaunt through the Aird of Lovat and up the rivers into Fraser country; Cumberland down Loch Ness.

The Argyll Militia and the Independent Companies were to shadow Cumberland’s flotilla on the loch. They had to thread through the hills on both sides of the Great Glen, in pursuit of rebel Frasers, Grants and MacDonalds, expanding a cordon sanitaire, clean of rebel Highland filth, around the Highland capital. Another piece of intelligence said that Lovat had fled across the loch and into the Grant country around Glenmoriston, leading away from the north side of Loch Ness. Thorough and severe search parties were ordered up into their country. Pain would make the Highlanders vomit up the Fraser chief. It was full springtime now, the loveliest time of the year in the Highlands. By the middle of May the sun did not set until ten in the evening.

Behind the reek of burning and unseen rotting things, wild bluebells shimmered in the breeze, ready to open and carpet the floor with vibrant blue in the cool of the woods. Deep yellow flag irises shook their pennants along the banks of burns and ditches. Any other year, the young women of the clans would be preparing to take their sheep and cows up to the shielings, the summer grazings, to fatten their beasts and make butter and cheeses to last the next winter. The young men used to come and find them there, and sit beside them in the evenings and court them. For now, the shieling might provide the young men with temporary safety from the hunters.

At Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, two days after the battle of Culloden, Duncan Forbes handed two shillings to ‘Lord Seaforth’s servant that brought a letter’, with news of the great victory that let Duncan come back to the home that had hosted the battle. On 23 April, the Lord President set off from the Western Highlands, and by the 26th he stood on the Black Isle looking across the Firth to Inverness. He took the ferry and crossed to the town, full of apprehension.

Ten days after the battle, the business of the town still revolved around the buying and selling of the spoils of war. The bridge over the Ness seethed with traffic carrying goods plundered from forfeited estates. Duncan heard the soldiers had gone into the Lovat estates the previous week. The news about the condition in which they left them made him feel ill. He rode up to Culloden with increasing misery. His home, where the Prince lodged in the days leading up to Culloden, was a scene of chaos, but had not been plundered – though his unexpected royal guest and his officers had emptied the cellar of sixty hogsheads of claret. Many of the Highlanders would know well where to find it. They had dined here with Duncan and Culloden scores of times over the years.

The borders of his estates were something else. Blood, weapons, bodies, clothes, dead animals, and the pervasive, nauseating reek of rotting flesh soaked into his land and home. Duncan rode back into the town. The main army camp spread over the part of the town called the Crown, a flat-topped piece of ground overlooking the town below. The castle stood on the hill between the Crown and the River Ness. All Duncan’s work was mocked by the carnage on his own doorstep. Between Culloden House and Inverness, the land was speckled with corpses. He would see them again whenever his eye strayed that way in springtime. He had to go and congratulate the Duke of Cumberland on his decisive victory. Looking and listening, he intended to press him to temper justice and authority with mercy for the losers.

‘As yet we are vastly fond of one another,’ Cumberland wrote to Newcastle, ‘but I fear it won’t last.’ Duncan ‘is as arrant Highland mad as Lord Stair or Crawford’. They were all foreigners in their way. They were compromised by their loyalty to their homelands and way of life. Britain had been brought to the brink of civil war. They were traitors and deserved no mercy. ‘He wishes for lenity, if it can be done with safety, which he thinks probable(?), but I don’t.’ Cumberland trusted his instincts. Duncan might be the Lord President, the senior state prosecutor in Scotland, but martial law marched over his arguments for the time being.

The civilians had not prevented this. Lord President Forbes had tried every kind of diplomacy. Cumberland was trying everything he knew for a while. Utterly exhausted, Duncan forced his sore head and body on to beg for justice with mercy. Cumberland took no risks. Even loyal Invernessians found their accent inclined to condemn them. John Hossack, Duncan’s friend on Inverness Council, told the Lord President the problem of achieving anything that would restore order was that ‘we are all accounted rebels … We have no persons to complain to, nor do we expect redress.’ None were to be trusted. Most were to be crushed.

Hossack and the town’s Provost, a Fraser, also went to pay their respects to Cumberland and repeat Duncan Forbes’s request. The Town House and Tolbooth were operational headquarters for the occupying force. The two Highlanders moved among the staff officers, trying to speak to them so they could talk of their fellow Highlanders in other ways than as actual or potential prisoners and corpses. They overheard an officer give out an order to kill all the wounded prisoners wherever they were found. Hossack stepped up to the man. He ‘could not witness such a prodigy of intended wickedness without saying something’. Hossack asked the officer to mingle ‘mercy with judgement’.

Old General Hawley boggled and shouted, ‘Damn the rebel dog!’ at him. Hossack harboured no rebellious thoughts, and opened his mouth to speak again. Hawley silenced him with an order to ‘Kick him downstairs and throw him in prison directly.’ The junior officers pushed him towards the top of the stairwell. The last one ‘gave him [such] a toss that he never touched the stair until he was at the foot of the first slate of it’. His friend, Provost Fraser, ran to his aid. Soldiers grabbed both of them and threw them into the Gaelic church, commandeered for a gaol.

They had pushed hundreds of men into the church and locked the door, taking the instrument bag from a Jacobite surgeon, forbidding him on pain of death to treat any of the stripped and wounded men. The prisoners consoled themselves that at least they were not in the prison ship with the pretty name,
Jean
, that lay at anchor in the harbour. The Hanoverians had had to tow it far enough out into the firth for the town not to be troubled by the growing smell from it. It grew more rank by the day, despite the salt sea air blowing through.

Eventually, Lovat arrived at the little stone house on the island in the middle of Loch Muily in Strathfarrar. Mountains rose over 3,000 feet on either side of the glen. The wide valley was good land for cattle and some corn, with the line of the River Farrar drawn in a squiggle down out of the hills, and along the valley bottom, falling towards the east coast, the Aird of Lovat and Beauly. It was fertile enough to sustain several hundred people on small farms and clustered in tiny townships. Lovat’s kinsmen pulled out into the loch and rowed him across to the island. There was no sound but the splash of oars and the breeze. The silence was enormous. By his passion for the Stuarts, he had contributed to the making of this story, in its entirety, including the final act. Many Highlanders simply did not want to be ruled by Germans in London. His anger grew. They could not give up without a fight. Perhaps this was a setback, not the last act of the drama.

Murray of Broughton and Lochiel came to meet him in Strathfarrar. They stood on the shore watching Lovat being rowed to them. From the top of Sgurr na Lapaich, at over 3,500 feet the highest mountain in the glen, you could see the smoking ruins of the Aird thirty miles away. Standing at the foot of the mountain, the chief and his fellow Jacobites were dots in the middle of a vast flat plain in the centre of the Highlands.

Lochiel did not expect Lovat still to be there. He came for the Fraser chief’s ‘advice and assistance’. Lochiel had sent a couple of men to Dounie for any wine or food that might be left. The men returned with news that the Redcoats were coming into the glen to look for Lovat. The two clan leaders sat to decide what to do. Lovat could not stay. He had to move on, and it had to be soon. They decided to meet at Lochiel’s house, forty miles to the west.

Fraser clansmen carried Lovat further and further from home. He did not know where his boys were. Simon, the Master, was on the run; so too was Sandy. Jenny was at her husband’s home, trying to keep out the military raiding parties, while Cluny hid in the wilds of Badenoch. Sibyl, his youngest daughter, stayed in Inverness with friends. Lovat heard her half-brother, young Archie, was with her. He hoped so. Their home was gone and all their things, while men hunted their father. It was not safe to be anywhere near to the heart of Fraser country.

They met at Loch Arkaig – Lord Lovat, the MacDonalds of Barrisdale and Clanranald, Murray of Broughton, old Gordon of Glenbuchat, John Roy Stuart, Cameron of Lochiel, and his brother Dr Archibald, with whom Lovat had been lodging en route to the west coast. Lovat said he might escape to France, as he had nearly fifty years ago. Everything was coming full circle, like a noose. Some of the most wanted men in the land were here, with high prices on their heads. Most of them had had brushes with search parties. Providence and their kin concealed them. Lovat had a plan. He always had a plan. The country would protect them. They must gather a tight cadre of 3,000 men. These must be brought into the mountains. Forget the House of Stuart. If the Prince was still running to the islands, then all he had left for them was death and devastated homes. Their royal master was abandoning them without a backward glance.

Our duty is ‘dying sword in hand’, Lovat argued. They would play cat and mouse with Cumberland. His troops performed poorly in this terrain. Cumberland had said he wanted the job complete within six weeks so he could go back to Flanders. Making him stay longer might bring him to the negotiating table.

Nothing like the number they hoped for appeared when they met again at Achnacarry, home of the Cameron chief, Lochiel, two days later. There were only 4–500 in total. They had no choice now but to split up and save themselves. At his age Lovat saw no place to rest. He worried all the time about his kindred and family. The only thing to do was try to make for France from his estates on the west coast. He must go there and hope a boat might pick him up. From France he could help them. He climbed back on his litter. His men carried him towards Morar.

The Atlantic bounded Fraser country. The short neck of the River Morar, only a mile long, separated Loch Morar from the sea. The people were Roman Catholic, loyal to Lovat, and lived out of the way of rebellions and battles. Small islands studded Loch Morar. The deepest loch in Britain, it plunged in the centre into a hole 1,700 feet deep, much deeper than the Atlantic seabed at its western end. Tales abounded of monsters nurtured in its dark womb. At the eastern end of the loch, the mountains shot down precipitously to the black water. Waterfalls and small Highland rivers gouged out cracks in the hillsides as they threw themselves downhill. Winds created treacherous conditions for fishing boats along its eleven and a half miles, but particularly at the eastern end among the bowl of hills. At the western end, little green islands lay quiet near where the loch ended in a sandy bay on the coastal side. They descended to Morar at the end of May. Lovat was rowed to one of these islands. It would have been safer had he been nearer to the churning and forbidding eastern end.

Lovat lay by Loch Morar, half asleep, half dreaming. Since 1688, when a teenage Simon Fraser of Beaufort heard in his chief’s hall that God’s anointed King, James II, had been chased away and was not invited back, and that Mackenzies and Murrays had dismissed his father and kindred, the stories of clans and nations had inspired him. Everything lately had unravelled so fast. A year ago, he was at home, anticipating handing over to Simon a clan and estate unencumbered by debt, free of intruders for the first time in generations. Now he was told the news that the Master of Lovat had surrendered and been committed to Edinburgh Castle.

Castle Dounie had gone, dissolved in the air; gone too were so many of the things he had loved and lived among, touched and admired and used every day. Some of his friends had sent their chamberlains to Inverness to buy items taken from their friend Lovat’s home, lying in the mud by a soldier’s boot. The Baillies of Dochfour had (and still have) his casement clock. The Earls of Cromartie bought one of his bedposts (now a standard lamp). By these things he could be recalled home.

Cumberland was determined to break the Highlanders’ loyalty to their homes, rather than the Duke’s father, the King. That link had to be smashed so they could bend at the knee to gods other than chief, clan, country. The Highlanders must look to their conquerors for life, not each other. Camped at Fort Augustus, Cumberland gazed about and reviled the wilderness. He had planned to be out of here in a few weeks following his victory at Culloden. The verminous clansmen scurried into so many cracks in the land, flushing them out took longer than he anticipated. Some of them were even breeding there. His men found women and children, waiting for their men, making a home of a cave, dropping babies onto the floor. Cumberland thought the prettiest things about his surroundings were the British forts. They were ornaments, pearls in the Highland muck.