Читать книгу The Last Highlander: Scotland’s Most Notorious Clan Chief, Rebel & Double Agent - Sarah Fraser, Sarah Fraser - Страница 19
Оглавление‘I despair of saving myself or my Kindred’
– LOVAT TO THE EARL OF ARGYLL
The Reverend James had educated Simon in his responsibilities to his clan, always to keep going, and to determine his own fate. He conjured,
In spite of malice you will still be great,
And raise your name above the power of fate.
Our sinking house which now stoops low with age,
You show with newborn lustre on the stage.
Typical of Celtic eulogies, the hero is praised and cajoled to ever-greater sacrifices. Other chiefs had passed by this destiny. But it inspired Simon and, as the century drew to a close, left him facing a death sentence. He believed passionately that fate or God had laid on him as a sacred duty the salvation of Clan Fraser. It was, he always said, inseparable from ‘his Nature’. Primogeniture and his personal qualities confirmed fate’s decree. Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat and then Tullibardine had tried to break and remake Clan Fraser in their own image, using all the skills and resources they could muster. Now Simon sought to restore the clan using his gifts and training.
Without heavyweight political backing, Simon could not win. He faced a long guerrilla action, a ruinous feud, fought on and over his country. While Tullibardine influenced the Edinburgh judiciary, the courts offered no path back inside lawful society. For eight long months the Atholl Murrays had harried and hunted the Frasers, trying to capture or crush their leader, but without success. In a desperate attempt to flush out the Fraser chief, Lord James, smarting from his defeat at Lovat’s hands, had his men drive off stock, smash boats, nets and fishing gear, spinning wheels and looms, and fell trees – anything that might allow the Frasers to live or do a little business. But Simon was still at large, and his messages were getting through to the south. His successes and the substantial levels of support he clearly enjoyed impressed many who sought to bring down Tullibardine and stop him (in the Highlands) and his brother-in-law Hamilton (in the Lowlands) exercising almost unassailable power in Scotland. The Duke of Argyll advised Simon to ‘lay down his arms and come privately to London’ to seek a pardon, informing William III that Tullibardine created chaos and hostility to the King in Scotland in the service of his greed. Lovat and the trouble in Fraser country were Argyll’s proof.
Late in 1699, two weeks after setting out, Simon Fraser entered London for the second time in his life. It proved a wasted trip. The King had left the country and was at Loos in Flanders. By the turn of the century, William was in a stronger position in Europe. In 1697, Louis XIV of France had abandoned his previous war aims and sued for peace. As part of this he now acknowledged the Prince of Orange as William III, King of England and Scotland, thereby denying the claim of James II. Even the Pope proclaimed William III ‘the master; he’s arbiter of all Europe’.
King William was now in Flanders taking part in another struggle provoked by Louis XIV’s ambition. The future of the thrones of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire was at stake. At present the ailing King of Spain, Carlos II, sat on both thrones. The rest of Europe was divided between whether to keep the thrones united, or split them up when Carlos died, and on who would sit on either or both thrones. Competing European interests battled over a settlement, until Louis XIV insisted on having both titles for his second grandson, the Duke of Anjou. Relations between William III and Louis XIV, only recently nosing above freezing point after three years of peace, plunged to a glacial impasse and stayed that way while Carlos II lived.
William needed a relatively peaceful and united Britain to be able to concentrate on defeating Louis. And while no government needed the entirety of its peoples on its side, it did need enough capable supporters to maintain law and order locally, raise taxes and supply soldiers for these international affairs. To be one of the regional managers, Lovat explained, he needed to live as a magnate, not an outlaw. He and his people could then ‘serve your Majesty as they are full ready to do’, as he outlined to King William in a letter Carstares read aloud to his monarch.
Argyll supported Simon by adding his voice. ‘The persecution [Tullibardine] exercised against Lord Lovat and the clan of the Frasers, is capable of exciting all the clans, and even the whole nation, to revolt against the government,’ Argyll asserted. ‘The King cannot do a more acceptable thing for the generality than send [Lovat] his pardon for the convocation of men in arms.’ More people only hesitated to speak out against Atholl and Tullibardine because ‘they threaten so hard and bite so sore’, finished Argyll.
The Murrays vehemently opposed this. ‘It will be a great reflection on the government if there be not a speedy course taken to apprehend’ Simon Fraser, Tullibardine lectured his King, justifying the turbulence and suffering he brought about in Fraser country. Other Scottish politicians petitioned Carstares, emphasising the wider British political element in Lovat’s case. ‘Although I cannot justify Captain Fraser in his proceedings, but yet, the rendering of so many men desperate is not at all to the government’s interest,’ wrote Sir James Stewart, the Lord Advocate.
Simon reiterated that the Frasers wanted peace, ‘to live the more comfortable under the rays of your Majesty’s protection, and thereby be more encouraged to serve your Majesty’s interest’. William listened to the increasing volume of this sort of talk, of Tullibardine’s abuse of his position for private gain. Tullibardine had maintained his following with the promise of positions and pensions to clever, ambitious men. The King decided to stop promoting men put forward by Tullibardine to fill posts in the Scottish executive. Tullibardine reacted by resigning from the government in a fit of humiliated fury. Having the deepest confidence in the counsel of Carstares and Argyll, the King agreed to pardon Simon for his crimes against the Crown and accepted the Fraser chief’s offer of devoted service. However, William refused to enter into the murky business of the forced marriage. The Crown had never charged him with it and logically William could not pardon him for it. He was happy to curb Murray ambitions, but he told Argyll he did not want to ‘disgust’ them too much.
It had taken nearly two years, from Argyll’s first letter to his last, for the Earl to be able to write excitedly to Simon Fraser’s friends that he was brandishing ‘Beaufort’s (now I may say Lord Lovat’s) pardon’ in his hands. Simon was free, and now officially the 11th Lord Lovat. As the chief, MacShimidh Mor, Lovat could return home and relieve his people’s sufferings.
In Europe, three deaths threatened further political instability and affected Lovat’s plans. First, the British Protestant succession failed again when, in July 1700, the surviving Protestant Stuart child of Princess Anne and the Prince of Denmark, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, died.
The ramifications of Gloucester’s death spread north to Scotland, and far south to the Courts of Versailles and St Germains when, the following summer, Mary and Anne Stuart’s father, James II, died in exile. With his eye on Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, Louis XIV no longer had reason to appease William. Happy to aggravate political tensions within Britain, he proclaimed that James II’s son would be ‘King James III of England and VIII of Scotland’ on the death of Princess Anne. Anne had not even succeeded yet. The third death was the passing of Carlos II, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.
Meanwhile, King William’s grasp on Scotland was slipping. The whole country was breaking down after five years of failing harvests and a famine that had killed up to fifteen per cent of the Scottish population. Politicians racked their brains for schemes to stimulate life in the economic mud in which Scotland drowned. Their suffering was proof of God’s displeasure at the overturning of the natural order and at the anointed Stuart ruler having been driven away. The massacre at Glencoe, the quartering of government troops on starving people, and a series of economic disasters all blighted his rule.
The most recent crisis went back to 1696, when William Paterson, Scotsman and founder of the Bank of England, had suggested to his fellow Scots merchants and landowners that they should start a foreign trading company to stimulate their weak economy. Scottish businessmen set up ‘The Company of Scotland’ to trade with Africa and the Indies. Scots flocked to invest and sank a quarter of the nation’s tiny liquid capital into the venture. Inverness merchants contributed £3,000. They almost beggared the town on the gamble of massive returns. When the profits rolled in, it was said, investors’ wives and children would rush to demand luxuries from local merchants. The economy would boom. This was Paterson’s vision for Scotland.
The Scots plumped on Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama, as the cradle of their hopes, christening it ‘New Caledonia’. The Spanish complained angrily and claimed the territory – close to Spain’s silver mines – for themselves. William III agreed to withdraw English support for New Caledonia on one condition: that Spain refuse Louis XIV’s demand to make his grandson King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.
Spain agreed. The English Parliament pressured English merchants to withdraw all their capital from the Darien Venture. The English Navy, rather than protecting its sister nation’s merchant shipping, harried and captured it. To the Scots, William was putting his English subjects’ interests over those of Scotland. The collapse of the Darien Venture induced national economic breakdown. The Scots went into shock.
The whole nation seized on Darien and the colony at New Caledonia as the image of Scotland’s impoverished world standing. The Lord Advocate – the most senior lawyer in Scotland – Sir James Stewart, tried to impress on Carstares the level of grief and despair felt in the kingdom William had never once bothered to visit. ‘Disasters increase, and the weakness of the government is more and more discovered … Was ever a people more unhappy?’ The Scots asked themselves what they gained from the Union of Crowns. Independence looked like a solution to the succession and economic crises.
Sir James Stewart identified three groups fighting to dominate the Scottish Parliament: the Jacobites, the ‘Malcontents’, and the ‘Williamites’. The Jacobites wanted to ‘break the army … [so] that, when the King dies, and neither the Princess Anne nor he having any children, they may the easier embroil the nation, and do their own business’. That is, to restore the Stuarts from France. ‘The Malcontents that are not Jacobites,’ he explained, were aggressive place-seekers. They just wanted to disrupt proceedings in Parliament and disrupt government in Scotland, to force the King to promote them to power. However, ‘the Williamites … I think, must be more numerous than the other two. Their aim solely is the peace and security of the government and the good of the country, by an industrious pursuit of honourable and profitable trade …’ This last comment was wishful nonsense to make the King feel better. William’s credibility in North Britain was disintegrating.
Simon, Lord Lovat, moved into Castle Dounie and began collecting such rents as he decently could from starving clansmen and semi-bankrupt lairds. He took debts on himself and let the ordinary tenantry off their rents for that year where he saw they had nothing.
He was not left for long to try and sort out his estates. Goaded by Lovat’s reappearance, the Murrays hurtled back to the law courts. This time they forced ‘Sister Lovat’ there with them. They petitioned the Court of Session to summon ‘Captain Fraser’ (they would not call him Lord Lovat) – to answer the private charge of ‘rapt and hamesucken’. Relative to rape, rapt was a watered-down assault. Lovat explained it to one of the King’s advisers. ‘They do not [charge] me for ravishment, but for carrying her by violence from place to place.’ They hound me ‘as if I had murdered the King!’ Lovat complained. Hamesucken, loosely speaking, was socking (sucken) it to someone in their own home (hame). A crime against property rights, it was a capital crime, unlike rapt. Hamesucken also covered ‘the ravishing of persons of rank in houses of consequence’. They had to charge Lovat with both to get a death penalty.
Argyll told the King that the court summoning Lovat was ‘not composed as it ought to be’. While the Lord Advocate warned Argyll if Lovat ‘is found tomorrow in Edinburgh, I would not give a sixpence for his head’. Years of Tullibardine infiltration of the law courts favoured the Murrays securing the clan chief’s conviction. There were ‘such wicked and abandoned judges’, Lovat wrote, ‘the innocence of an angel of light would be to no avail!’ And Lovat was no angel. Lovat did not appear and on 17 February 1701 was found guilty in absentia. He was outlawed yet again.
Argyll advised Lovat to forget Edinburgh and the Scottish legal system and come south, persuade the King to extend his pardon to cover the ‘private charge’ and fulfil William’s intention to pardon Lovat. He must demonstrate that the Atholl Murrays subverted the King’s wishes.
In the summer of 1701, William raised Argyll to a dukedom, a great sign of royal favour. Lovat, an Argyll man, waited for his patronage. He wanted Argyll to place him somewhere in the Scottish government. There he could do the King’s business and his own.
Roderick Mackenzie, Lord Prestonhall, on the bench of the Court of Session, was a Scottish Law Lord, the brother of Sir George, now Viscount Tarbat – and therefore the uncle of the young Amelia Fraser presently living at Blair Castle. Tarbat and Sir Roderick had voted for Tullibardine to declare Lovat’s forced marriage with the dowager Lady Lovat null and void, and also to condemn Lovat to death because of the ‘rapt and hamesucken’. Now Sir Roderick presented the Mackenzies’ bill. He offered his son, Alexander Mackenzie, as husband to young Amelia, now rising thirteen and of marriageable age. On his ward’s behalf, Tullibardine thought about it, and accepted. It might help reduce the Frasers to obedience. It meant that Simon Fraser could never marry her and it brought the Mackenzies back on side. Tullibardine was rebuilding his power base. Those wily old Mackenzies could be useful allies.
There was a problem: even in the terms of the corrupt marriage contract of 1685, the husband had to be a Fraser. So the bridegroom’s father made him into one. Alexander was henceforth ‘Alexander Mackenzie of Fraserdale’. It was a mockery, but it mattered little. The bridegroom got ready to wrest the chieftainship of Clan Fraser from its natural chief.
On 7 March 1702, Lovat borrowed some money from Inverness lairds and merchants and prepared to go to London to raise an action in the House of Lords against this malicious twist of fate. Everything he had tried thus far the Murrays had countered using the might of the state. They had each resorted to force, corruption or violence to crush their opponent. He needed to stop the marriage and clear his name.
The next day at Richmond Park, William III’s horse put his hoof into a molehill, stumbled and threw its rider. The King broke his collar bone and contracted a chest infection. Two weeks later he was dead. Lovat had not even left Inverness.
In March 1702, Princess Anne of Denmark ascended the thrones. The great and good rushed to London to confirm or acquire places in her administration. Lovat headed south to join them, arriving in late April. As he skulked in London to get an entrée to the new Queen’s presence, news came of the marriage of young Amelia Fraser and Alexander Mackenzie. In his absence they had moved into Castle Dounie. The news ‘was decisive in shattering and reshaping his plans’. As if to confirm the blow to his hopes, Queen Anne then raised the Earl of Tullibardine to the Duke of Atholl.
Lovat wrote to Argyll asking for his help. His old patron replied he had to tread carefully; Argyll was not favoured by Anne. He could or would not do anything. ‘I despair of saving myself or my Kindred in this government. So I am resolved to push my fortunes some elsewhere,’ Lovat wrote. ‘The restless enemies of the family of Lovat’, and the ‘indifference’ of his allies and protectors filled him with pain and disillusionment. ‘Though I have now lost my Country and Estate, I do not value my personal loss, for I can have bread anywhere.’ He predicted, though it tortured him to say it, ‘that after I am gone, in ten years there will not be ten Frasers together in Scotland’.
Scarcely eight weeks after Queen Anne ascended the thrones, her ministry opened hostilities against France in what would become known as the War of the Spanish Succession. On Carlos II’s death, Louis claimed the thrones of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for his grandson. Should he succeed, Spain, her colonial empire, and the loose confederation of European states that made up the Holy Roman Empire, would all fall within Louis XIV’s sphere of influence. Louis would interfere in Spanish colonies and overseas trade through French ambassadors in Madrid. On France’s northern frontier lay the Spanish Netherlands, buffer between France and the United Provinces. Louis would quarter his troops there if he could, and menace the Protestant Low Countries. To the south, if France influenced Spanish-held territories in Italy – such as Naples and Sicily – then Anglo-Dutch Mediterranean trade would be disrupted. In England’s nightmares, Louis XIV achieved his wildest dream, to be the first ‘universal monarch’ – effectively, ruler of the known world. That world would be largely Roman Catholic. The consequences for Protestant Britain and her allies would be dire.
Alone, Lovat concluded he could hope for nothing from Edinburgh or Whitehall and must leave the country for a short while. He lodged for a few weeks in Harwich and thought things over. While there he took a lover, a young woman called Lucy Jones. Little is known of Lucy other than her notes to Lovat. He asked her to write to him as ‘Captain John Campbell’, showing he felt the need to adopt pseudonyms, fearing perhaps that the new Duke of Atholl would hunt him down. She told him she worried about the effects of his ‘melancholy’. She counselled the sort of stoicism that showed she did not know her man very well (‘life has such mixtures, that sure all wise people must despise it. It is the mart for fools and carnaval of knaves’). When he left, Lucy disappeared from the record of his life.
Lovat collected himself. He straightened his cuffs. He must think more flexibly. The weakness of the British succession might be the key to reverse his phase of bad luck. The Stuarts’ quest for Restoration to their inheritance seemed to chime so neatly with his own. If Anne died, her nearest relative was her half-brother, James. Instead of missions to hold the line of the Highland chiefs for William or Anne, perhaps he should sway the clans to support James’s claims? The Scottish Parliament was calling officially for the end of the Union of Crowns. The Jacobites in Edinburgh saw independence as the preliminary to bringing in James. Scotland and England seethed with intrigue, action and possibilities. There must be something in all this for Lovat; his family had always supported the Stuarts.
The blending of the personal and political reinvigorated him. ‘My nature,’ Lovat explained, ‘obliged me to expose my person … in such a ventorious or rather desperate manner that none of my enemies or even my own friends and Relations thought that ever I would be able to accomplish my design,’ to save the Fraser clan from disappearing, ‘but that I must die in the attempting of it.’ Lovat told some clan members and supporters in Inverness-shire that he was going to the Continent for a few months, to gather arms and money, and maybe commissions, to buy support in the Scottish Parliament to vote for independence.
He left his young brother John Fraser as his deputy, with instructions to defend their interests and resist the Mackenzies should they try to encroach. They did. John haunted Stratherrick, still the centre of support for Lovat’s claims. From there John led a band of men into the Aird of Lovat and garrisoned Beauly. He and about thirty minor Fraser lairds and their sons roamed the Aird for months, threatening those who looked likely to accept the new incumbents at Dounie. When the government at last forced the Atholls to recall their soldiers, much of Fraser country was laid waste. It seemed to Lovat, as he prepared to leave, that all he had predicted was fast coming to pass. But he dared stay no longer.
His destination was the exiled Stuart Court outside Paris. Except for a few stolen weeks on the run, it would be fifteen years before he was back among his Fraser clan again.
