Читать книгу The Last Highlander: Scotland’s Most Notorious Clan Chief, Rebel & Double Agent - Sarah Fraser, Sarah Fraser - Страница 16

THREE

‘Nice use of the beast and the man’, 1695–96

‘Your destiny decreed to set you an apprentice in the school of affliction, and to draw you through the ordeal fire of trial, the better to mould, temper and fashion you for rule and government’

– THE REVEREND JAMES TO SIMON

Simon approached the Scottish capital full of doubts. He knew what to do, but not how to do it. He needed a patron to bring him forward in the world. ‘There are two ways of fighting,’ Machiavelli instructed a would-be Prince: ‘by law or by force. The first way is natural to men, and the second to beasts … So a prince must understand how to make nice use of the beast and the man.’ Simon came to learn to fight like a beast and a man.

A young man full of ambition and ability, but without employment or income, Simon lacked prospects. He had connections, but his best contacts in government were also his enemies. His cousin by marriage, Lord Murray, was his obvious port of call. Atholl and Murray were working to tighten their grip on Clan Fraser and would only help Simon if they thought he could assist in their plans to dominate the Highlands. Murray might even readily give Simon a job to control him, even as Murray worked to cut him off. Simon saw little choice but to dissemble with the Murrays, and offer to serve them, as the Murrays dissembled with the Frasers.

Edinburgh was a typical medieval city. Its buildings clung to the high back of a long hill like fleas and burrs on a sheep’s back. The old city cooled its carcase in a mire of swamp and loch. When Simon arrived for the first time it was still largely enclosed within its medieval city walls. The scarcity of space meant the old houses towered ten or even twelve floors over the streets below. The High Street (‘the Royal Mile’) formed the city’s spine and central nervous system. It was capillaried with narrow lanes – wynds, allies and closes leading to and from the main street. At the lower end, the east end of the High Street, the Canongate guarded the entrance to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the image of King William III’s presence in Scotland. Heading west, halfway up the High Street, were the Scottish Parliament and offices of the judiciary. At the top end of it, on an extinct volcano, sprawled the massed bulk of Edinburgh Castle. A sleeping giant of military power, it dominated the institutions of the fragile, Williamite Scottish state.

Tall narrow houses flanked Simon as he headed up the High Street towards Parliament to find Lord Murray. He lowered his gaze to skip around the gurgling gutters, overflowing with the effluent of the piled-up city, and skirt the fat pigs rooting excitedly through it. He moved in and out of the piazzas on the ground floors of gaunt old houses. Aristocrats occupied the first floors, clerks nested on the tenth. People lived close up, bound by the economies of architecture, space and a dearth of hard cash. Merchants’ wares – woollen stuff, linen, pots – lay in heaps among the pillars, spilling from shops too tiny to do more than keep them secure at night. Ascending the buildings like a row of semaphore flags, colourful illustrations painted on boards indicated where people could find certain wares – a cut loaf, periwig, cheese, a firkin of butter, petticoat stays, from the baker, wig dresser, cheesemonger, dressmaker.

Most men of affairs were on the go by five in the morning. Before the bell of St Giles Kirk struck seven, the pioneering medical man Dr Pitcairne was seeing patients in his underground rooms near the church. Edinburghers called it the ‘groping office’, because of its darkness and its tenant’s occupation. By 6 a.m., Law Lords and lawyers had met agents and clients in the taverns and perused over half a dozen cases.

A fellow politician observed that Lord Murray was ‘so great an admirer of his master, King William, that he mimicked him in many of his gestures’. The King loved the way Murray revered him, and he showed it. He gave him a colonel’s commission (and the funding) to raise a regiment to defend Edinburgh. William did not feel safe on Scottish soil without a heavy military presence. Only the Stuart-born Queen at his side gave the Dutch Stadtholder any sense of legitimacy in the eyes of most Scots, especially after Glencoe. But the previous winter Mary had died suddenly of smallpox, aged just thirty-two.

In public, Simon echoed the Court Party’s expressions of sympathy for William III’s loss. In private, he wrote to his father: ‘I doubt not you will be in mourning [clothes] for Queen Mary, but I am resolv’d to buy none till Ki. W. dies.’ Mourning clothes, he teased, ‘perhaps may serve for the next Summer Suit’. He penned similarly jaunty notes to known fellow Jacobites: MacDonald of Glengarry and (rashly) Lady Amelia Lovat’s Jacobite brother, Lord Mungo Murray – ‘drinking’ to the death. Apart from Lord John, the Murrays remained predominantly a Jacobite clan. These letters were a young man’s folly and Simon’s first wrong move. Glengarry was married to Hugh Lovat’s sister, Isobel, and was in Lord Murray’s pay. He passed Simon’s notes to Murray, who kept them safe. They were Simon of Beaufort’s death warrant, if one were ever needed.

Queen Mary’s death exposed the tenuousness of William III’s right to rule. Many in Scotland felt their suffering was the legacy of removing God’s anointed King, James II. A failed harvest in 1695 compounded their discontent. William needed strong support in Scotland: it was imperative that Murray raise the thirteen companies needed to fill his regiment, each under a captain. Every captain received a salary. Out of this he provided the men, paid his company’s expenses and kept the balance for himself. Murray offered one to Hugh Lovat. It would bring this Jacobite clan to heel, turn it Williamite, and display to his royal master Murray’s growing influence in the Highlands.

Hugh was not interested. It would mean leaving his wife and family, mustering in Edinburgh and becoming politically active in a way he had never desired. Murray had pressured Hugh to take the oath abjuring the Stuarts in favour of William. Now Murray wanted his brother-in-law to take a captaincy, and provide 300 Frasers for Murray’s regiment. Murray insisted. Lovat caved in, and then failed to fill the company. He had never led his men.

Simon Fraser unleashed ‘the bitterest invectives’, criticising his chiefly cousin for accepting the ‘infamous commission’. Alexander had died resisting King William; now Lord Lovat was asking them to sign up to join his killers. Behind the scenes, Simon worked to discourage Frasermen from enlisting. Above all, Simon wanted the captaincy for himself. He approached Murray’s recruiting agent, Dollery, and offered to fill the Fraser Company of Murray’s Regiment of Foot in return for Hugh Lovat’s captaincy commission. Dollery wrote to Murray recommending Simon: ‘I think him a very hopeful young man … and may be very serviceable to your Lordship.’ Simon had told him that with anything less than a captaincy he could not ‘do anything to distinguish him from the rest, which I find he very much aspires after’. Dollery picked up on the ambition, but not the scale of it; and he missed the potential irony of his observation. Murray did not.

Simon duly filled the 300 places his clan chief had failed to achieve. Pleased with himself, Simon asked for his captaincy and his money, a pound per soldier. Murray refused: he recognised that Simon was attempting to use clan operational norms – where clansmen served their leading kinsman’s cause, not a distant representative of the Crown – and subvert British regimental ones. Murray allowed Simon into his fold, but at the lowest possible level – as a lieutenant, where he believed he could not cause any trouble. Simon found himself outmanoeuvred. He ‘did not fail to be extremely disgusted’, he wrote, ‘having suffered himself to be over-reached by Lord Murray, whose treason he conceived to be of a very infamous nature’. By the end of December 1695, Lieutenant Simon Fraser was in command of Lovat’s Company of accoutred, martial-souled, Jacobite Highlanders. Some days they formed the Palace Guard at Holyroodhouse; others they marched to the other end of the High Street to form part of the force to defend the Williamite regime in Edinburgh. On their uniforms they wore the Murray badge (a mermaid with comb and mirror, and the words, Tout Pret, ‘Quite Ready’); and they carried the Murray colours. Simon’s saddle blanket and holster cap were embroidered with the cipher ‘WR’. It was as if the Frasers had been printed all over with the stamp of the enemy’s seal. Where was the Fraser badge of stag’s head and motto Je suis prest, ‘I Am Ready’; the Fraser of Lovat coat of arms – crowns and strawberry leaves – the last indicating the French origin of the clan.

William III desperately needed his Scottish soldiers: the British Army was chronically overstretched because of the King’s European campaigns, particularly his obsession with countering French aggression on the Dutch borders. High war taxes, the poor harvests and the continued heavy-handed quartering of troops was crippling the Scottish economy.William needed stability in his territories in North Britain. The King’s Private Secretary, Johnston, requested Murray come to London, and to come with panache. ‘If you have company at hand to come with you, My Lord Lovat, or Glengarry, it will look well, but no time is to be lost,’ Johnston counselled. That was Hugh Lovat’s purpose in life, Simon thought to himself – to gild another man’s lily and make a usurper feel secure. But Lovat would not leave his fireside in the middle of a hellish Highland winter. So Murray travelled south alone.

When Murray arrived he found he was to be well rewarded. On 13 January 1696, the King appointed him Secretary of State for Scotland. ‘He told me I owed it only to himself, which indeed is passed doubting,’ Murray purred with pleasure to his wife.

In Edinburgh, Murray’s officers fell over each other to congratulate their colonel. Simon led the cheers. ‘All your Lordship’s friends here are overjoyed for your Lordship’s new preferment,’ he gushed. ‘God grant your Lordship health to enjoy it!’ And ended his huzzahs with a request: ‘I hope your Lordship will not forget my captain’s act. It will certainly do me good until your Lordship is pleased to bestow better on me.’ He had his eye on the colonelcy.

Another officer simply asked Murray for the whole regiment straight out. The Secretary of State would not be expected to keep it in his own hands. Even without the personal motivation of the clan, it was not surprising Simon pushed so hard. In the lower reaches of the establishment, men like Simon saw too clearly the kind of oblivion that lay just below them. Except for a tiny minority of aristocrats, everyone was on the make. Simon, born to a little portion of privilege, knew there was a path down the social ladder that offered no one, except maybe his chief, a foothold. The weak went down; the strong rose.

Poor and failing harvests dominated the rest of the decade in Scotland. ‘The living wearied of burying the dead,’ and the population was forced to fight for scraps. These were ‘King William’s ill years’. The term showed who the Scottish people thought had brought God’s anger on them. In London and Edinburgh, Jacobite presses poured forth propaganda: ‘I hear the angel guardian of our island whispering in our sovereign’s ear … Rise and take the child and his mother, and return into your country, for they are dead who sought the life of the child.’ The ‘sovereign’ was James II, and his flight had taken him and his wife, Mary and their baby boy into ‘Egypt’/France. The biblical analogy showed the strength of feeling in the two kingdoms on the issue of rightful kings and usurping tyrannical governments.

Murray’s pleasure in his political success was interrupted in February when the government received intelligence about an invasion plot from France that would terminate ‘in an assassination’ of the King. Other informants spoke of co-ordinating action by Jacobite officers embedded in regiments guarding Edinburgh Castle. Murray’s Regiment of Foot was one of those mentioned. Murray galloped north to hold Scotland steady for the King.

The castle was ‘in a very defenceless state’, Simon noted, as he trotted his company of clansmen up the Royal Mile from Holyroodhouse. He too had been plotting – with Lord Drummond, active Jacobite and heir to the Duke of Perth – and was in communication with both of them. They agreed that ‘as soon as the King [James II] should arrive in Scotland … they should make themselves masters by a coup de main of the unarmed garrison, and shut the gates … They should then declare for King James.’ In the end the scheme came to nothing. But plotting made disempowered men feel powerful. If James returned, he would sweep Lord Murray away.

Murray gathered his officers. They ‘were regarded by the common men in the light of Jacobites’, he stormed; all officers must swear the Oath of Abjuration, compelling their loyalty. The oath forswore loyalty to James II and the exiled Stuart Court, and swore allegiance to William and the Revolution settlement. Simon was outraged. ‘Officers, highly attached to King James, were forced to sign … in order to preserve to themselves the means of subsistence,’ he said, disgusted that Murray insulted good men by forcing them to square up to the competing interests of their souls and their sporrans. He was one of them, and signed.

The following March, 1696, King William summoned Murray south again to reward him further, creating him Earl of Tullibardine, so that he could be a King’s Commissioner in the next session of the Scottish Parliament. Murray insisted he must have his brother-in-law at his side this time and summoned Hugh to London. The Earl promised Hugh he would be presented at Court and said he would ask the King to make the whole Regiment of Foot over to him. Simon pushed to accompany his cousin. He and Hugh had grown close since Simon left university and Simon now occupied a traditional place in the clan hierarchy: commanding his chief’s soldiers. Murray reluctantly agreed.

After nearly two weeks on the roads, Hugh Lovat, Simon Fraser and their servants reached London, long black boots, full-skirted thick wool coats, linen and wigs all caked with sweat and muck. They found their lodgings and prepared to enjoy the city, keenly anticipating their royal audience. It was the perfect opportunity to make a favourable impression on the King, and who knew what ‘gratification’ might follow – the regiment, a government post perhaps? At Kensington Palace, they met Tullibardine who conducted them into the King’s presence. Lord Lovat was ‘one of the most ancient peers of Scotland … head of one of the bravest clans’. Tullibardine announced. Lovat and Tullibardine ‘could venture to assure his Majesty of their fidelity’. As the Highland chief stepped up to speak, Tullibardine told Hugh to ‘fall upon one knee and take leave of his Majesty’. Ever ‘of a contracted understanding’ Hugh ‘did as he was directed’, Simon later wrote of his cousin. Not for the first time, Simon despaired of his chief’s passivity. Some men did not merit their opportunities.

Before Simon could urge Hugh to re-present himself at Court, Tullibardine was recalled to the Scottish Parliament to deal with the ongoing fears of invasion and assassination. The Earl briefed Hugh and Simon that, all things considered, this was not the moment to bother the King with personal requests. He would be forced to hold on to the Regiment of Foot, he said, ‘till the fears of an invasion should be blown over’. They had heard all this before, Simon told Hugh. Had they come all this way, at great expense, to show the King of England that a great Highland chief would dance a jig before him, to the Earl’s tunes? When Tullibardine ordered them to return to Edinburgh, both young Frasers ignored him.

Instead they met with Tarbat’s son and Alexander Mackenzie, son of the Earl of Seaforth. As a Guards officer, Alexander was familiar with London’s best clubs and watering-holes. It would be chance too for the Mackenzie men to pick up the threads of their relationship with their Fraser cousins. Since the Murrays had taken over, Mackenzie influence at Castle Dounie had ceased.

Hugh and Simon, choked by Lord Murray’s condescension, patronage, expectations and favours, now threw ‘themselves into the hurly-burly of fun-making, love-making, noise-making’ offered by the English capital. ‘Come at a crown ourselves we’ll treat,/Champagne our liqueur and ragouts our meat’, the Highlanders joined in with the songs in the alehouses. ‘With evening wheels we’ll drive o’er the park,’ then ‘finish at Locket’s and reel home in the dark’. Locket’s, near Charing Cross, was a popular gentleman’s club. The area roughly bordered by the Strand, Covent Garden and Charing Cross teemed with life. The theatres around Drury Lane brought taverns, coffee houses and bagnios in their wake. Socialising levelled all the classes, aristocrats, intellectuals, merchants and tradesmen, foreigners, Gaels, and the people who fulfilled all whims and desires. When the young men spoke Gaelic, very loud and very fast, they could talk treason with impunity, though many taverns and coffee houses welcomed Jacobites.

Simon worked on his chief, showing Hugh ‘very plainly, that Tullibardine made a jest of him, and had brought him to London, in order to make his court to King William at Lord Lovat’s expense’. He and the Mackenzies counselled Hugh ‘to break with’ Murray, and free Clan Fraser from its predators. For once, Hugh openly defied his brother-in-law. He sent out a waiter for pen and paper, wrote to Murray, and resigned his commission. ‘I hope … you will be so kind as to bestow it on my cousin Beaufort,’ he added. Simon clapped his cousin on the back. This was the spirit they had looked for in him all these years. Simon followed up Hugh’s letter with one of his own. ‘If your Lordship have use for all my Lord Lovat’s men, I have, next to himself, most influence on them.’ It was a thinly veiled threat to take them away. Tullibardine made his own brother captain of Lovat’s men.

A worried Tullibardine wrote to his wife Katherine, sister of the Duke of Hamilton, who had remained in London, and asked her to find out what the young Frasers were up to. ‘I am extremely angry Lovat is not come off,’ he wrote. ‘I blame Beaufort who I believe occasions his stay till he gets … [Lovat’s] captain’s act.’ Katherine replied that she had seen Hugh. ‘O! He is a sad creature, and keeps the worst of company. It is not fit to tell you here the way he lives,’ she told her husband, ‘but he says … he’ll stay here, and spend of his own, and take his pleasures a while … I’m afraid he’ll fall into some inconveniency.’ Besides the ‘inconveniency’ of drink, Hugh was whoring himself to a physical breakdown and keeping other very ‘inconvenient’ companions.

The merry-making soon stopped with news from Dounie that Hugh’s only son, three-year-old John, had died. He still had his girls, but now no male heir. Simon could not help but be aware that with the infant’s death, the Beaufort Frasers were once again the only male heirs if the illegitimate marriage contract could be overturned. Simon discussed it with his cousin. The Fraser inheritance was nothing to do with an alien clan, he said. Murray had been deceiving him for years about what was best for the Frasers and disguising his real intentions. Even this trip: there was no colonelcy of the regiment or meaningful royal recognition for Hugh Lovat. Retrieve some loss of face, Simon urged him, and use the law to put right and undo what the Murrays had put wrong.

Hugh conceded that his in-laws probably ‘despised him’. He was an easy-going fellow and he had let them do as they liked with his titles and estates. The worm now turned. On 26 March, ‘Lord Lovat obliged’ Simon ‘to send for an attorney … Convinced of his Error, and the injury done to his own family, he … executed a Deed, in favours of Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, his Grand Uncle, Father to … Simon, upon the Failzie of Issue-male of the Marriage, and restored the Succession to the ancient Channel of the Heirs-male.’

While he had Hugh pointing in the right direction, Simon also persuaded him to draw up a legal bond. Lord Lovat bound himself to pay 50,000 Scottish merks to Simon ‘for the special love and affection I bear to my cousin, Master Simon Fraser … and for certain onerous causes and others moving me’. Were Simon to enforce this bond, it would utterly ruin his heavily indebted cousin. Fifty thousand Scottish merks was about £2,750 sterling (or £350,000 in today’s values).

Simon’s motives were so mixed. On the one hand he believed a weak chief threatened the very existence of the clan. He also believed in the unbroken male inheritance of Clan Fraser, and was determined to throw off the over-mighty Murrays. This bond was the Frasers’ security should the Murrays trespass too far and try to marry the heiress, Hugh’s eldest daughter Amelia, away from the male heir, Simon Fraser.

Eventually Tullibardine wrote to Simon. He coldly commanded his lieutenant to escort his cousin home, and then report for duty. Tullibardine was Master of the Privy Council, King’s High Commissioner and ruled Scotland with ‘the authority of a monarch in right of his office, and sometimes a greater power in virtue of his abilities’. The man representing the constitution and the King was supreme. Simon could ill afford to defy him openly. To his face Simon hailed him ‘the Viceroy of Scotland’. Behind Tullibardine’s back he was learning to plot with more craft.

Simon and Hugh did not return to Edinburgh until 30 June, when Lord Lovat inspected his old company of Frasers. ‘To my singular satisfaction,’ Simon told Tullibardine, ‘there is none of … his company deserted … My Lord Lovat told two or three that he saw of them that he would hang them without any judgement if they offered to go home without their pass.’ Simon made sure his colonel knew that the Fraser men only stayed loyal because their chief ordered it, not their new captain, Tullibardine’s brother, James Murray.

Hugh Lovat continued his journey north from Edinburgh alone. He had left London with a chest infection. By the time he reached the borders of Murray territory in Perthshire, some forty miles north of Edinburgh, his illness had developed into something like pneumonia. He managed to get to a Murray house at Dunkeld. There he received a letter recalling him to the Scottish Parliament. Obediently, Lovat turned south, but only got as far as a tavern at Perth. Some Murray ladies despatched a physician for their in-law, though they never offered to take him in. They had heard from Katherine Tullibardine that Hugh had annulled his marriage contract with their family, and had debauched himself, spending money he did not have. The old Marquis of Atholl visited Hugh: he had drawn up another marriage contract, reversing the annulment. The Murrays looked down on Lord Lovat in his sickbed, and forced him to sign.

Reports of Hugh’s collapse and the Murrays’ presence reached Simon, who rode to Perth immediately. He had to defend his new interests and protect his chief. By the time he reached Dunkeld, Hugh was delirious. He ‘quite lost the use of his reason for several days, and lay in his bed in a manner incapable of motion’, Simon informed Lady Lovat. It was hard for Lady Lovat at Dounie to gauge precisely what was going on in that airless little box-bed in a Perth tavern as the only eyewitness account she had was Simon’s. However, she did not come.

On the morning of 6 September, the fever left the clan chief’s body and Hugh cooled down. Simon lay next to him and wrapped him in his arms. He might now start to recover, and things could be different. This crisis must cast off the Murray yoke. Hugh slept quietly. Every now and then there erupted from deep in the young man’s body a roaring, snorting breath. After one harsh intake of breath, like a wave rushing over shingle, Hugh’s heart stopped.

Simon lay there a while. The room echoed his chief’s stillness. Poor Hugh. His father had died aged twenty-nine. He had barely made it into his thirties. Simon escorted his cousin’s body home where it was interred in the family mausoleum at Wardlaw. He then went to his father, bowed, and addressed him as ‘My Lord Lovat’.