The Last Highlander (40 page)

When they could, they stopped at taverns and hotels. At St Albans, a day’s journey north of London, Lovat sat having his head and chin shaved in a room at the White Hart Inn. The door opened and Hogarth came in. Lovat turned and when he saw who it was, he erupted from the chair, and came to embrace the artist. They had met before in London, in better days. When he drew back, both men looked at each other, the two of them lathered in Lovat’s shaving cream. Hogarth asked for Lovat’s permission to make a portrait. All London was agog to know what he actually looked like. Lovat graciously agreed. He cleaned his face, pulled on his wig, well down on his forehead, and leaned forward. Hogarth moved him about a bit and began.

Lovat’s left index finger tapped the thumb of his right hand, as if he enumerated some point. It might have been the number of clans who would rise and rebel. It might have been the men he could count on subverting. It was any old argument from a man who had spent his life in debate. Big, beautiful hands stuck out from the gathered wrists of his linen shirt. His legs were lumpy from gout and the amount of flannel wrapping them up. His feet squeezed into buckled shoes. Above his necktie, his face thrust short-sightedly forward at Hogarth, to see better what was coming. He might have been short-sighted for decades, but he appeared to stare, his eyes hooded, watching, penetrating. Hogarth told a friend ‘that the muscles of Lovat’s neck appeared of unusual strength – more so than he had ever seen’. It lent to the sense of leonine force that emanated from the man.

Hogarth returned to London, reproduced his oil painting as an engraving, and offered it for sale. The impressions could not roll off fast enough, the printers worked all through the night to keep up with demand. It earned Hogarth £12 a day for many weeks, and became one of his most popular prints. English news-sheets crowed about the ‘monstrous papist’ of the north, now coming to the capital. The composer Handel was commissioned by his patron, George II, to celebrate Great Britain’s ‘release from danger’ and wrote an oratorio, ‘Judas Maccabaeus’, to toast Cumberland’s victory. It included the triumphant song ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes!’ Elsewhere a verse was added to ‘God Save the King’ in honour of General Wade. It was sung in the inns and on the streets, though the old soldier Wade had been superseded as supreme commander of British forces by the King’s son.

God grant that General Wade

May by Thy Mighty aid

Rebellious Scots to crush

And like a torrent rush

Seditious plots to crush

God Save the King!

At last, Lovat’s prison convoy reached the City of London, and went straight to the Tower. In the courtyard before the building were the bumpy planks of an old scaffold. The Earls of Kilmarnock and Balmerino, Jacobite peers captured at Culloden, were to be beheaded for their roles in the uprising. Having attended his own funeral procession as he left Stratherrick, now Lovat was given a vision of how he would die.

He turned to his attendants: his approaching end brought back his life. He spoke to them of its ups and downs – his youth spent dodging the Murrays around the mountains; his life at St Germains and Versailles and the dreary French prison houses; his return and restoration and final grasp on his inheritance after fifty years of trying. It had all come to this.

In the Tower he wrote to his solicitor William Fraser, in Inverness. Lovat prepared for his trial. ‘I am sorry that you are not with me,’ he said. ‘Your presence here is necessary, and your presence there is necessary, but I am so unlucky that I cannot have you in two places at the same time.’ He asked that ‘Thomas Mor G______’, probably Gorthleck, who knew too much, be kept out of the witness box.

‘According to the laws of England … women are sufficient and credible witnesses,’ he told William Fraser, odd as it seemed to both of them to ask irrational creatures to follow a line of reasoned argument. He asked his solicitor to find witnesses in Scotland who will ‘be very proper to give evidence in my defence’. He could do so little from the Tower. ‘I hope God will reward you … for I cannot.’ Lovat thought there might be a case for moving the trial to Edinburgh. The crimes of which he was accused had been committed in Scotland and the Scottish judiciary was independent of English law. But Parliament passed a law that they could try traitors to the British Crown in other countries than those in which the treason was committed. This special Act only affected those who had taken up arms and fought to bring down the Crown. He had not taken up arms, he said.

On 11 December, almost a year to the day after the Earl of Loudon escorted Lovat from his room at Castle Dounie, Articles of Impeachment were moved and carried in the House of Commons. Along the Thames, in the Tower, Lovat received the news.

On 13 January 1747, the Governor of the Tower accompanied his Lordship to the House of Lords to answer the Articles of Impeachment. Lovat stood and lodged a petition. He denied the charges, and complained that ‘the factor appointed on his estate had not complied with the orders of the House’ to let him have income for his expenses here. Moreover, his strong box had not been returned since it was taken at Morar. These two problems meant he had none of his papers, and was without money to buy things to be sent to his room in the Tower and make life tolerable. How could he pay his barber? His wig dresser? How to get decent food and drink? He requested that he be allowed to see certain friends.

His old patron Ilay, now Duke of Argyll, rose and looked at him. ‘Something more was couched in this petition than appeared openly,’ Argyll said to his fellow peers. ‘It was meant to throw dust in their eyes.’ As far as the factor of the Lovat estates not paying him an allowance was concerned, he could give Lovat nothing because there was nothing to give, due to the rebellion and its aftermath. This was something for which the defendant was in part responsible.

Lovat ‘seemed to be very much moved on the order for his withdrawing. There was a very full House of Commons, and his Royal Highness the Duke attended, as did almost all the members of our House in Town,’ reported MacLeod of MacLeod. Lovat had hoped to be one of the elected members of this House. He came among them now as a fugitive. So many old friends and sparring partners were here – Wade, Cumberland, Ilay/Argyll, MacLeod, Grant. The Commoners stood in the gallery. The Lords sat on their benches. It was very odd, to be sitting there awaiting the trial for his life before them. His old friends were miserable, but resigned.

The Duke of Argyll proposed that Lovat’s solicitor have access to his chief. The Lords granted the request, and rose. Lovat was to be impeached for high treason. MacLeod told Duncan Forbes, who was very ill at home, that everything happened rightly: that is, according to ‘the laws of England … of nations … and of common sense’. The elision of ideas rolled forward, crushing the Gaelic nation beneath it.

Impeachment was a mongrel legal weapon, a mixture of ‘popular proscription’ and ‘judicial trial’. It was a way for the state to deal with enemies who might not be contained by the regular legal tribunals. Something of it was close to
salus populi suprema lex
– the will of the people is the supreme law. Mob rule was its less illustrious expression. In special cases, it took precedence over the strict rules of courts. Impeachment by your peers allowed for the thrilled recounting of rumours, and the excitable speculations of all sorts of individuals, and conjectures that would have been disallowed in a regular law court.

In the Highlands, as soon as a date for impeachment was set, the Earl of Loudon set himself to find evidence against Lovat. He had a court erected at Inverness ‘for taking evidence and proof against the Lord Lovat’. The Master of Lovat’s old tutor, Mr Donald, was summoned from his manse at Kiltearn on the Black Isle. There was a lot of fear and fury, doubt and anger. It was very difficult to get anyone to speak in a clear and convincing way.

People confined in the gaol in the Gaelic church in Inverness, on the prison ships and in the Tolbooth; many who might be used to condemn Lovat, had died in the last six months. The prison ship
Liberty and Property
had received 157 prisoners since Culloden. Only forty-nine came back ashore alive. When the officer opened the hold to haul out a few witnesses for Loudon, ‘what a scene open to my eyes and nose all at once; the wounded festering in their gore and blood; some dead bodies quite covered over with piss and dirt, the living standing to the middle in it’. Up to their waists in excrement, urine and decomposing bodies, the men stared ahead, like men being sucked alive into the grave. The officer regretted approving the use of these ships for this purpose.

The men proving too wretched to be witnesses to anything except the horror of their experience, on 14 January another court set up in a separate place in the ‘suburb of the Green of Muirtown’. Hugh Rose of Kilravock was judge. Eventually, they interrogated Mr Donald again about Lord Lovat. He signed what ‘they thought proper to insert of what he said’, not all he actually said. When he was finished, Mr Donald protested that the enquiry was not asking all the questions. If they did, he could, ‘from proper knowledge, say many strong things in his exculpation and favourable’ to Lord Lovat. The court dismissed him. Mr Donald hung around all day. The next day he went with the court when it moved back into the town of Inverness. Those coming out spoke to the spectators thronging around the courthouse. ‘Lord Lovat was undone by the scrutiny,’ they said. Soon enough the day appointed for the trial, Monday 9 March, arrived.

THIRTY-TWO

Dying like a lion

‘Justice is an excellent virtue’

– OPENING REMARK IN THE TRIAL OF LORD LOVAT

Invitations went on sale; the tickets sold like hot cakes. Westminster Hall’s hammer-beam roof formed an arch over the crowds coming in for Lord Lovat’s trial. There was beauty to this rite, the cool process of law taking the sting out of killing a traitor.

The public assembled in the upper galleries, and stared down on the scene. Below, Hogarth waited with paper and ink to make sketches. He greeted journalists and hacks, the men who bought up trial reports to turn them into publishing gold. They jostled with members of the smart set – the aristocrats, wits, rich merchants; all classes greeting each other and gossiping. It was very English, one of the democratic hot spots, like St James’s Park, where you even saw ‘the first ladies of the Court mingling in confusion with the vilest of the populace’. Parliament brought Lovat to trial to fight to the death to defend this wonderful semi-democratic ‘confusion’. It was a pearl without price.

First entering the floor of the hall were the most humble players. ‘The Lord High Steward’s gentlemen attendants, two and two.’ Then followed ‘the clerk’s assistant to the House of Lords; and the Clerk of the Parliament, with the Clerk of the Crown in the Court of Chancery’. Then, the Masters in Chancery, two and two. The judges, two and two. The peers’ eldest sons, two and two. Then the peers themselves. And so on. Last to come was Philip, Lord Hardwicke, the Lord High Steward, representing the Crown. When all were assembled, two places stood empty – the dock and the throne. Hardwicke read. The King, ‘considering that justice is an excellent virtue’, has appointed Hardwicke to impeach Simon, Lord Lovat, for high treason.

Then the Garter, and the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod ‘jointly presented the white staff to his grace the Lord High Steward’. Hardwicke sat and gave the White Rod to the gentleman usher of the Black Rod on his right hand. He would not need the White Rod again until the end. It was the ritual by which the state would visit a horrible death on the prisoner. Lovat waited in a small antechamber to emerge before his fellows. They were ready, and summoned him to the bar. Then the old man entered, lame, escorted by the Deputy Governor of the Tower of London. In front of him the Gentleman Gaoler carried the axe. He stood on the prisoner’s left with the axe’s cutting edge symbolically ‘turned from him’.

Lovat approached the bar, bowed three times, and got down to his knees. Hardwicke told him to sit. He unrolled the Articles of Impeachment and handed them to the prosecutor to read aloud the account of Lovat’s actions over the last few years. Throughout Lovat shook his head and denied the articles jointly and severally.

The Commons were present also and upheld the Lords’ charges. Lovat squinted at them, slowly recognising the scores of familiar faces. They were all here. He turned back to hear the continuing accusations: Cope’s defeat at Prestonpans and the march south into England. At the moment of penetration of Britannia by a hostile force, ‘a noble spirit immediately arose throughout the nation’, the prosecutor said. ‘Not an artificial false clamour for liberty, but the true old British spirit of liberty, the true Revolution spirit, that exerted and signalised itself, out of hatred to Popery and arbitrary power.’ And, ‘thanks be to God, it still remains in its full vigour amongst us: it cries aloud in our streets for justice against those that would have made them slaves and papists; it cries aloud for justice against the prisoner at the bar’.

An emotional crackle of approval went up from the audience. Lovat needed big shoulders to carry all their fury.

One MP, Sir William Young, accused Lovat of helping to bring ‘civil wars: a calamity of all others the most to be dreaded’. Voices muttered agreement. Tying Lovat and civil war together damned him. In addition, Young asked them to ‘remember the distress of public credit, the stagnation of trade, the loss of our manufacturers, the reasonable, yet dangerous apprehensions, which seized on the minds of all the loyal inhabitants of these great and opulent cities of London and Westminster’. The City certainly had imploded with panic.

What will be the standing of Britain in Europe if the armies ‘employed abroad to humble the pride of an assuming nation, her fleets to protect our trade, or to annoy our enemies’, are liable to be called home to deal with domestic upheavals, the Commons representative wanted to know? Civil strife meant no forces available to protect ‘our trade’ and ‘annoy our enemies. What pretence can we have to be umpires in the common cause of Europe?’ he asked. Britain could ‘justly claim that title’ when at peace with itself. Even now, the British wanted to be thought of as this – not one of the hotheads, but the cool-headed umpire, holding the casting vote on the world stage.

After the scene-setting – half-reason, half-melodrama – Sir Dudley Ryder, the Attorney-General, rose to begin prosecution proper. He went back to Drummond of Balhaldie being sent to Rome and then to France by seven chiefs who had banded into the ‘Association for the Restoration of the Stuarts’ in 1738. They had planted treason a decade ago.

And so the trial began, and went on, from ‘Monday the 9th Day of March, and continued on Tuesday the 10th, Wednesday the 11th’. On the Thursday, Lovat begged a day’s respite, given his age and infirmities. Granted. Proceedings would resume on ‘Friday the 13th, 20 George II. AD’, the twentieth year of the reign of King George II. That day, the case for the prosecution would begin.

Horace Walpole went home and wrote with a sigh that ‘it hurt everybody at old Lovat’s trial, all guilty as he was, to see an old wretch worried by the first lawyers in England, without any assistance but his own unpractised defence’. On the morning the trial was meant to resume, Lovat again asked for a break in the proceedings: ‘I fainted away thrice this morning before I came up to your Lordships’ bar; but yet was determined to show my respect … or die on the spot.’ The last thing they wanted was to deny the hungry axe its moment to swing its averted head in towards Lovat. They gave the old man another rest.

Then the Attorney-General produced his witnesses, starting with the defendant’s kinsmen, including Robert Fraser, Lovat’s secretary for the last two years of his freedom. Their evidence described life at Dounie over the last few years, including during the period leading up to the rebellion. They recorded Lovat’s discontent, but they had no hard evidence of treason.

Then their star witness was led in: John Murray of Broughton, Private Secretary to Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Lovat had egged on the Prince to invade, busied himself as an important agent of the rebellion, stirring up people at home and abroad, for he, Murray, shared every secret of his Prince. He was in the position of most intimate trust. Once caught, Murray of Broughton ratted to save his own life. One of the ladies who came to watch the trial each day remarked that Murray of Broughton and Robert Fraser made very good evidences (witnesses) but very bad secretaries. A private secretary knew all his master or mistress’s business, and practised complete discretion.

When Lovat saw Murray he knew he was done for. This man had written evidence enough to kill him. Lovat knew what was coming if Broughton had handed over his letters. He had. An unpleasant atmosphere hung about the man. Lovat had dignity in his decrepitude. Murray shifted about and laid blame as hard as he could, reeling off lists of names. In Murray’s shadow Lovat did not dye blacker. He had not tried to buy his life with that of his friends and Jacobite comrades. Sir Everard Fawkener had tried to get him to turn coat. Lovat refused. But Murray of Broughton accepted. He became the high-profile witness the Crown had sought. The loathing in the hall for Murray of Broughton was palpable.

After five days of the case for the prosecution, the sixth day, Wednesday 18 March 1747, Lovat was called to defend himself against the charges. ‘The most abandoned of mankind,’ Lovat began, Murray was there ‘to patch up a broken fortune upon the ruin and distress of his native country … Today stealing into France to enter into engagements upon … the most sacred oaths of fidelity … Soon after … he appears … to betray those very secrets, which he confessed he had drawn from the person he called his Lord, his Prince and master.’

Yet Lovat too had taken and broken oaths to George II. Lovat separated oaths sworn from the heart from oaths sworn to get a job – a company of Highlanders, the Governorship of Inverness, the Sheriff’s job. You could not hold positions in government unless you swore. He had often said a man must be practical and not ‘over fine’ in his moralising. He told Ilay’s man in the north, Lord Milton, success in the world came to men of action not ‘fine words’.

‘I am now fourscore years of age,’ Lovat complained. ‘I hope in your Lordships’ hands my old life is safe; and that your Lordships … cannot find me guilty upon the evidence of such witnesses as have defiled your bar.’ He added that bringing forward witnesses for the prosecution who were themselves due to be tried, ‘to me, who am no lawyer … appears extremely strange’. He knew that deals had been cut.

The Solicitor General, William Murray, a relative of Lovat’s old enemy Atholl, countered that Lord Lovat ‘perseveres in denying the charge’, but ‘has called no witnesses, but rests his defence altogether upon complaints, observations and objections to the force and credibility of the evidence against him’. William Murray thought there could be little left to say. Lord Hardwicke intervened to point out to Lovat that he must call witnesses in his defence, not just object to the prosecution’s. Lovat retorted he wanted to call witnesses to testify that they had been intimidated not to appear. Hardwicke had had enough. He called a halt. He asked each of the Lords present to pronounce their verdict in the case. Each one found him ‘Guilty, upon my honour’.

*    *    *

Next day, Lovat was brought back from the Tower by coach. Hardwicke told him to stand. He had previously addressed him with the presumption of innocence, but ‘now must address you as a guilty person’, he said. What gave bulk to the dreams of ‘abandoned traitors’ like Lovat, he said, was the nature of society in North Britain. The security of the nation called aloud for clanship to be crushed. Cumberland was already getting on with the job.

Finally he pronounced ‘that you, Simon, Lord Lovat, return to the prison of the Tower; from thence you must be drawn to the place of execution; when you come there, you must be hanged by the neck, but not till you be dead, for you must be cut down alive; then your bowels must be taken out and burnt before your face, then your head must be severed from your body, and your body divided into four quarters, and these must be at the King’s disposal’.

‘Would you offer anything further?’ Hardwicke asked. It would have been crueller to let him live and see everything he lived for taken from him – his position in society stripped from him, his titles, honours, lands, people, home, all gone and Lovat left to wither to death in impoverished solitude.

The sentence left Lovat unmoved, relieved as he was of the burden of having to fight any more. He made a short speech asking for clemency but seemed far from desperate. Beyond this, there was ‘nothing’, he said, ‘but to thank your Lordships for your goodness to me. God bless you all, and I bid you an everlasting farewell: we shall not meet all in the same place again.’ He believed he was heading straight to heaven and his forebears – ‘I am sure of that.’ He bowed, and nodded. He was ready to go.

Lovat was taken from the bar and silence called for. Then the White Rod, ‘being delivered to the Lord High Steward by the gentleman usher of the Black Rod upon his knee, his grace stood up uncovered; and holding the staff in both his hands, broke it in two, and declared that there was nothing further to be done’. The hall emptied, two by two as it had filled.

*    *    *

Back in his room, the Major of the Tower came in to see how he was doing. ‘Why – I am about doing pretty well, for I am preparing myself, sir, for a place where hardly any majors and very few lieutenant-generals go.’ His wide mouth and still well-cut, curved lips, moved between humour and seriousness. The Major nodded. The old man seemed prepared in himself.

A few days later, the Major had some news. His Majesty had commuted the sentence to a beheading, thank God.

The trial fascinated Londoners. For the previous ten months, his presence in the Tower, unseen but present in rumours and the stories of the leading rebels, had brought Lovat to the public eye. The Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino were dead, but they still had Lovat. Any scrap of gossip, any anecdote, was on everyone’s lips as they waited for the final execution. Lovat’s rumoured Roman Catholicism bloomed into stories that he had been a Jesuit or a monk, and that debauched young women came to him to confess while he lived in France. One story had him seduce a maid, then use the maid to seduce the young mistress while the maid looked on. No story was too salacious. It built up a great enthusiasm for the day when their man would appear on the scaffold. They would all get a piece of him to look at and talk about and judge.