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The curriculum gave him more than training in rhetoric and disputation. Many decades ahead Simon would tell a friend: ‘I always observed since I came to know anything in the world, that an active man with a small understanding will finish business and succeed better than an indolent, lazy man of the brightest sense and the most solid judgement.’ His conclusion reflected his reading list at Aberdeen where they studied the recorded writings of Cicero, who pronounced ‘the active life is of the highest merit’. Machiavelli, also on the curriculum, agreed with the Roman: ‘An active man can achieve anything if he repudiates half-measures,’ he suggested. This was the intellectual discourse of Simon’s formative years: Cicero, Virgil, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Petrarch, Pufendorf and Grotius. These men taught Simon the power of human action to direct affairs, and jurisprudence. A strong man could be an agent of change, progress and power thanks to his own efforts – if he was wholehearted, ruthless and prepared. Simon’s life was not merely the effect of God’s, or godly government’s, design. If he needed a rationale for his relentless activity as an adult, Aberdeen and raw necessity supplied it.
After the day’s work, the ‘Hebdomadars’ – a sort of saintly university security force – received the keys of the college gates at nine at night. They would go to check on every room to ‘observe the absents’, or ‘inquire if prayer and reading a part of the Scripture be gone about’. Examination of sacred lessons, and testing students through ‘public disputes … in the Common School’ on Saturday mornings kept Simon busy, honed his debating skills. Sundays meant mortification and endless opportunities, or obligations, for copious prayers.
All his life – as Episcopalian, or Roman Catholic – Simon enjoyed theological dispute. But he kept ‘charity for all mankind’ on this matter, he said. Though passionate about politics, society and culture, religious intensity bored most King’s College men. Typically, Simon’s friends were lovers of the old High Church type of Protestantism. Called ‘Episcopalianism’ in Scotland, it was roughly equivalent to Anglicanism in England. They preferred to believe in bishops appointed by the King, and both appointed by God. The idea of a clan chief corresponded with the mystique of a divinely sanctioned ruler.
When they could escape observation, Simon and his friends frequented the taverns. Failure to keep up enough praying, getting caught drinking or dallying with the serving lasses (Jean Calvin thought lust a sickness only marriage could cure), playing dice and cards, loud singing, and persisting in holding worldly and semi-seditious conversation in their rooms, all incurred punishments. ‘Some crimes are punished corporalie, others by pecunial mulct, and grosser crimes by extrusion.’ You were thrashed, fined, or thrown out.
But Simon’s claim of time-wasting at university disparages the gifts it gave him: tactics, rationale and strategy for effective resistance. All his life, he never doubted Machiavelli’s contention that the ends justified the means. It was not good enough to be merely strong and upright. Machiavelli advised that ‘a Prince … should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves’.
At the end of his degree course, in the winter of 1694/95, Regent George Fraser offered Simon the chance to continue his studies in a civil law degree, an increasingly attractive route for modern clan leaders seeking to avoid blood feuds. The courts were becoming the more usual battlegrounds for defeating clan enemies, in place of the martial law of the glens. Simon began the course at Aberdeen, but then very suddenly withdrew from it. To understand why, it is necessary to go back nine years to 1685 and the reasons he delayed coming to university in the first place: a wedding – specifically its special marriage contract – and a revolution.
TWO (#ulink_56ebcf25-6e4d-5bb3-a0c0-5a4be6ca1b1b)
To be a fox and a lion, 1685–95 (#ulink_56ebcf25-6e4d-5bb3-a0c0-5a4be6ca1b1b)
‘One must be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten wolves’
– MACHIAVELLI
In 1685, Simon was at school in Inverness when he learned that his seventeen-year-old cousin, Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, had taken a wife. The choice of a chief’s bride was of key importance to the political and dynastic interests of the clan, and it would have been conventional for Lord Lovat’s closest Fraser kin to advise him, Thomas Beaufort foremost among them. But no Fraser was consulted. Hugh Lovat’s maternal uncle, Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, made sure of it: he had kept the Fraser cousins apart for many years in order to isolate and control the young boy chief.
Hugh had been orphaned at the age of six, when his father, the 8th Lord Lovat, died at home aged just twenty-nine. After his funeral, the Fraser gentlemen allowed Mackenzie of Tarbat to take young Hugh away. Thereafter he was raised apart from his sisters and his Fraser kindred in Sir George’s home, Castle Leod, fifteen miles from Dounie. That the leading Fraser men allowed a Mackenzie to step in and dominate their clan showed how weak the Frasers had become. The Reverend James harangued the clan gentry for tolerating Tarbat’s dominance of young Hugh. ‘He that hath the blood and spirit of his ancestors running in his veins,’ Reverend James thundered, ‘cannot be so much turned into a statue or idle spectator … to look what our … predecessors have been, as well as what ourselves at present are, lest falling short of the imitation of their immortal actions, we so strangely degenerate as not to understand what we ourselves ought to be!’ But no amount of eloquent rhetoric by the Reverend could stir Thomas of Beaufort or other principal Frasers to rescue the boy.
A clan could only prosper under a strong chief, but it was clear from an early age that Hugh would not be that person. The Reverend James judged him as ‘always but a man of very weak intellectuals’. Bad chiefs came in the shape of weak men, children, women or old men. During Simon’s youth, Clan Fraser entered a phase where it got all four – in that order. Two generations of ‘virulent Mackenzie women’, including Hugh’s late mother, had left the Lovat estates rundown and drowning in debt. The Frasers of Beaufort were sidelined and Tarbat inserted his own kindred to manage the clan, handing the Mackenzies leases on Fraser lands. He even gave a profitable little sinecure to the high chief of the Mackenzies, the Earl of Seaforth, as a compliment.
Sir George’s standing rose within his own clan as he interfered in that of his nephew’s. Tarbat competed for high public office for sixty years, during an era ‘of extreme ruthlessness and cunning intrigue’, according to one historian of the 1600s, which culminated in ‘the final triumph of the various egomaniacs, bigots and embezzlers who’ by the final decade of the century would rule the roost in Edinburgh. During the period of his nephew, Hugh Lovat’s, minority, Sir George was out of favour and deprived of office.
Tarbat intended to use young Hugh to boost his political ambitions in Edinburgh and build up a local power base from which to launch himself back into the political fray. His search for a suitably connected bride for Hugh took him to Lord John Murray, who had been rising high in the ranks of the Scottish administration in Edinburgh and Whitehall since the accession of King James II, and on to his sister Lady Amelia Murray. In terms of breeding the Fraser elite liked the idea. Not only was Lady Amelia the daughter of the Stuart Royalist champion, the Marquis of Atholl, but she was also related to several Scottish noble families and crowned heads of Europe. The Murrays came from Blair Atholl in Perthshire, fifty miles north of Edinburgh, between the Highlands and the Lowlands. Lord John was married to Katherine, sister of the Duke of Hamilton. These two, the Murrays and Hamiltons, intrigued to dominate Scottish politics and rule the country for absent kings.
Scotland was a sovereign nation, but the Scottish sovereign had resided in London, not Edinburgh since 1603 (when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England on the death of Elizabeth I). In 1685, James II ruled from Whitehall through a rotating oligarchy of ambitious Scottish magnates who dominated the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Lord John Murray was one of these. Murray, son and heir to the Marquis of Atholl, was a favourite of King James’s. Atholl and Lord Murray also saw the appeal of the match. Clan Fraser’s star may have been waning, but it still had many attractions. The extensiveness and location of Fraser country at the heart of the Highlands could vastly increase Murray influence in Scotland and add handsomely to Lord Murray’s growing political profile.
Tarbat only saw the marriage from his own point of view, something he almost immediately regretted. Simon wrote later that the union of Hugh and the nineteen-year-old Amelia, now Lady Lovat, should have ‘accomplished the barbarous and long-continued designs’ of the Mackenzies ‘to win the family of Lovat and extirpate the name of Fraser out of the North of Scotland’. It so nearly did, and undoubtedly would have done, had it not been for Simon Fraser of Beaufort.
Hugh Lovat’s marriage naturally affected Simon’s standing in the clan, pushing him a step away from the topmost branch of the tree. But the Beauforts expected that. They were ‘spares’ to the heir, and a chief must marry. What irked Simon Fraser was not the union with Lady Amelia, but an extraordinary pre-nuptial agreement planted in the match that affected the future inheritance of the Lovat titles and estates. It would prove to be of such dubious legality that Tarbat and Murray let it lie dormant for nearly ten years, so as not to draw attention or resistance to their schemes from other magnates. For now young Hugh and Amelia settled to the only job Sir George entrusted his nephew to accomplish without his guiding hand – to make lusty male heirs.
But it was another inheritance problem that delayed Simon from going up to Aberdeen. He was preparing to leave Tomich in the autumn of 1688 and join Alexander at university when news came of the landing of William of Orange and his invasion force at Torbay in Devon. Their Stuart King, James II, had abandoned his thrones and was now rallying support.
Tension had built up over the decade before James came to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1685, as it became clear that his brother Charles II was not going to leave an heir. The English Parliament had tried to exclude James from the succession before Charles II died, but failed. By 1688, James II already had heirs. His first wife gave him two daughters, Mary and Anne Stuart, before she died. The girls’ mother had been Protestant, and so were they. Mary married William of Orange, and Anne wed Prince George of Denmark.
Then James II married again. The second time he took for his wife Mary of Modena, an Italian Roman Catholic, in a marriage negotiated by France. Parliament’s alarm increased when James converted to Catholicism, and reached fever pitch when his papist wife was delivered of a boy. James II refused to bring him up as a Protestant, as he himself had been raised, but promised to respect the Protestantism of his administration and country. His was a rather contradictory position: delicate and full of potential pitfalls.
James refused to let his government interfere in the natural course of the Stuart inheritance of the British Crown: God willed that the King and Queen have a healthy Catholic son. Opposite him, the government refused to contemplate a papist ascending the thrones on any terms. An impasse quickly developed between Westminster and St James’s until, just after Christmas 1688, James II suddenly fled to France. His first cousin, Louis XIV, welcomed James, his wife, his son, extended family and entourage, as the victims of a heretical state. James set up a temporary Court in exile, but planned to return within months.
James saw his departure merely as a tactical retreat. He admired the absolutism of the monarchies of France and Spain and assumed his government would not be unable to function without the King to sign laws. Parliament would have to ask him back. Of course he would accept, if Parliament backed down over the succession issue that had provoked this traumatic flight.
He was correct that the government required a monarch. But Parliament reacted to the ultimatum of his departure by inviting Mary Stuart, James’s Protestant daughter from his first marriage, to become their monarch. She accepted. Her husband, William of Orange, insisted on having equal status with his wife and William and Mary jointly assumed the thrones.
The crisis escalated at speed and within weeks the Highlands exploded into lawlessness and violence. The whole event would trigger the most serious conflict to gnaw at the foundations of Great Britain for the next sixty years. James’s departure provoked yet another revolution in a century of revolutions. And it led to the birth of Jacobitism, and its followers, Jacobites, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.
All through the winter of 1688/89, Scottish politicians fought for political power in Scotland with growing intensity. In the race to get control of the Scottish Parliament all constitutional principles were dumped. On 17 December, the Privy Council, including Tarbat, now back in government, sent a letter to James II, who had fled and then returned, asking him to call a free parliament. When James fled for a second time, they lost confidence in him. By 24 December they petitioned William, urging him to call a free Parliament.
In March the following year, a divided Parliament in Edinburgh passed a vote to support William and Mary against her father, James II. In Inverness, the Presbyterian-dominated Council swore allegiance to the new joint monarchs. But not everyone in Scotland agreed with the ruling. Many of the Gaelic-speaking and Episcopalian Highlanders remained loyal to James, including the Earl of Dundee (‘Bonnie’ Dundee), and large elements of the clan elites, such as Alexander Fraser of Beaufort, Simon’s older brother. Alexander came home to raise the Fraser host for James II along with clansman Fraser of Foyers. Once more, the four kingdoms stood ready to plunge into battle along religious and dynastic lines. It was a truly awful prospect.
Inverness, harried by Jacobite troops, soon became the scene of ‘blood works, riots and fornications’, the Council minutes noted with understandable hysteria. Simon claimed that Alexander was the first man in the north to join Dundee’s Jacobite army: ‘My brother brought him all the rents in Meal and Corn’ from the Lovat estates, Simon boasted. Since Tarbat and Lord Murray had abandoned their royal patron to serve a new master, Alexander of Beaufort’s initiative incensed them.
Simon tried to follow his brother. He gathered arms, mounted a horse and rode out to join General Thomas Buchan’s Jacobite force (consisting mainly of Highlanders and soldiers from the MacDonald, MacLean, Cameron, MacPherson and Invermoriston Grants clans). He did not get very far: he was captured, confined and eventually allowed to return to Tomich. Hugh, Lord Lovat did not accompany Alexander either. As soon as his Mackenzie uncle and Murray brother-in-law had changed sides, he was told to stay at home and prevent his men from joining the rebel Jacobites. This Hugh signally failed to do. When he was told to muster the Frasers for King William he was left gathering the few men who had refused to march for James, to go with him south to his in-laws’ Atholl–Murray territory and there to retrieve his clansmen from his cousin Alexander, and put the Frasers under Lord Murray’s command.
When Hugh reached Perthshire, his soldiers lined up with some of the Atholl Militia and awaited orders. Hugh went inside to explain why so few Frasers had come with him. As they waited, Hugh’s men caught sight of the rest of their clan marching by, Alexander at their head, en route to join Bonnie Dundee. They broke ranks and rushed to the river, scooped water into their bonnets and drank the health of King James VII of Scotland and II of England. Clapping their hats back on their heads, they ran to join their kinsmen, asking Alexander for orders.
Murray and the Marquis of Atholl were enraged; they would not forget this challenge to their authority by one of the young Beauforts. The ineffectual Hugh returned home to Castle Dounie while the Marquis of Atholl packed and headed south to Bath, to take the waters for his health – and safety. The Jacobite head of a traditionally Jacobite clan, he could not be accused of treason by his new King and Queen if he was not in the country. He left Lord Murray, his son and heir, behind to take charge.
The two armies finally closed in on each other on 27 July 1689 at Killiecrankie, a rocky pass ten miles south of the Atholl–Murray seat of Blair Castle. Dundee had 2,500 men, mainly Highlanders – ‘the best untrained fighting men in Scotland’ – against 3,000 government dragoons, troops and infantry. Supposedly allies by marriage, Murray’s Atholl men and Hugh Lovat’s kinsmen fought each other at close quarters, and to the death. Though the Jacobites won the battle, inflicting terrible losses of up to 2,000 on the Dutchman’s army, over 600 Jacobite Highlanders lost their lives, including their brilliant leader, Bonnie Dundee. His death signalled the end of the uprisings, with government forces scoring a final victory weeks later, despite their losses, in Murray country at Dunkeld.
Amongst the Fraser casualties was Simon’s brother, Alexander. Badly wounded, his clansmen ‘carried him home in a litter’. Thomas and Simon laid him on his bed to rest, but weeks later Alexander died of his wounds. Simon became his father’s heir. Fraser gentlemen gathered at Tomich, wondering if Hugh Lovat at Dounie would mourn the death of his cousin Alexander and the other brave Frasermen who had died with him. Would he lament the defeat of the Stuart King and order the usual magnificent Highland wake for fallen kinsmen? Or would he celebrate with Lady Amelia her Murray clan’s share in the victory of William and Mary, and the killing of his kin at Killiecrankie?
Following the battle, the Frasers again suffered. Believing the clan to be Jacobite, government troops were given permission to ransack the Aird of Lovat as they had in the months following the Civil War. After this, Jacobite soldiers came through the Lovat estates: since Lord Lovat had led out men for William of Orange, they assumed the clan had turned Williamite. They plundered freely, robbing the people of anything they could find. By the time peace was declared, the weakness and incoherence in the Fraser leadership had left Fraser country devastated by both sides, more than once. Without a strong chief, everything in Fraser country was open to predation by all comers, apparently.
The Reverend James expressed alarm at Murray–Mackenzie control. These ‘strangers’, he said, ‘prove but spies amongst us, discover our weakness, take all the advantage of us they can, fledge their wings with our wealth, and so fly away and fix it in a strange country, and we get no good of it.’ They leased Lovat lands to men from their own clan depriving the chief’s own kin of income and breaking up their inherited territories. Then Murray had tried to take the men away and make them fight against their rightful King. These lessons were not lost on Simon. He later claimed that he was nurtured ‘to display a violent attachment’ to King James from his ‘earliest youth’.
The birth of the Jacobite cause had taken Thomas of Beaufort’s eldest son and ruined his lands. Thomas could not afford to fund Simon through university until his affairs were in better order and the country at peace. On 1 July 1690, William decisively defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. James fled for the last time, ending his rule. By the autumn of 1691, Beaufort felt secure enough to send his son and heir, Simon, to Aberdeen.
The Highlands took a long time to settle under the new regime. Simon was in the first year at university when William lost patience with his Scottish subjects’ continuing flirtation with Jacobitism and refusal to swear allegiance to him and Mary. He agreed to a gesture to pacify them once and for all, needing to release British soldiers from security duties in Scotland to fight his European wars, as head of the Protestant Alliance against the territorial and religious ambitions of France’s Louis XIV.
In January 1692, William signed instructions to separate the Glencoe MacDonalds and make an example of them, by finding a way to ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. The justification was the delay by MacIain, chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds, in submitting formally to the government’s representative and obtaining the indemnity William offered to former rebels. The commander of the Scottish army, Livingstone, wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Hill, the officer in charge of the garrison nearest to Glencoe. ‘Here is a fair occasion for you to show that your garrison serves to some use … begin with Glencoe and spare nothing that belongs to him, but do not trouble the Government with prisoners.’ Hill was horrified. Calling the order ‘a nasty, dirty thing’, he said the proposed action was uncalled-for: the district where the Glencoe MacDonalds lived was calm; they did not need violent pacification. Too late.
On the night of 13 February, MacIain’s people offered shelter to government troops whom they believed were en route to bringing in the rebel Glengarry MacDonalds. At 5 a.m., Glenlyon, in charge of the government soldiers, began the slaughter. MacDonalds were bound, shot and then bayoneted for good measure. After the killings, they burned houses and drove the stock off to Fort William to feed the garrison, leaving ‘poor stripped women and children, some with child, and some giving suck, wrestling against a storm in mountains and heaps of snow, and at length overcome’ they lay down and died.
The bloodshed at Glencoe blighted King William’s rule, and left a deep, long-standing hostility towards him in much of Scotland. To bring Lord Murray back into the government fold and dissolve the stain left on their reputation by Killiecrankie, the Scottish Secretary James Johnston persuaded William to put Murray at the head of the enquiry into Glencoe, and find a scapegoat for the atrocity. That scapegoat was Dalrymple, a rival of Johnston’s, who had added the instruction ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. Though William undertook sweeping reforms of his Scottish ministry, the enquiry’s report would do little to soothe Highlander and Jacobite anger.
By the winter of 1694/95, after ten years of trying, Hugh Lovat had failed to achieve the one thing required of him. The lack of surviving male Lovat heirs caused Murray and Atholl increasing alarm. Lady Amelia produced both girls and boys, but only the girls (Amelia, Katherine and Margaret) lived. There was another infant boy, John, but the odds on him surviving were dreadful. Hugh Lovat was the only son of an only son, both of whom had died in their twenties. It was time to return to the marriage contract, and enshrine it in law.
Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat’s family contained a lot of lawyers. He was a lawyer; his brother, Sir Roderick Mackenzie (Lord Prestonhall), was a Law Lord. They reviewed the contents of the marriage contract. The first part of it stated the obvious. The Lovat–Fraser inheritance went through the boys. Then, it asserted that any surviving child of Hugh and Amelia would take precedence over the next male heirs, who were the Beauforts. All that an heiress need do was marry someone who already bore the name of Fraser. The normal procedure among the clans suffering the iniquity of an heiress would be to marry her to the nearest male heir. Given Thomas’s great age, in this case it would be his son and heir, Simon. So far, all this contract did was state the conventions governing marriage at the top of any kindred with a sizeable inheritance at stake. In other words, the contract was completely unnecessary. However it innovated in the next clause.
In 1685, Mackenzie and Murray had stated that if the inheritance did come down to an heiress, all her husband need do was assume the name of Fraser to fulfil the requirement that she marry someone ‘of the name of Fraser’. Then they would both inherit the Lovat titles and estates. The heiress could be married off to anyone from any clan in effect. This threatened to write out the Beaufort Fraser men, Thomas, Simon and John.
The marriage of an heiress to a man from another clan had the most serious implications for the heiress’s clan and its territories. This freshly made ‘Fraser’ husband would enter his wife’s inheritance right at the top and the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. The clan the husband came from, to whom of course he owed all his prior loyalty and affection, could eliminate the Frasers’ presence in their own country, and take over their assets. If the heiress married a Mackenzie, the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. If she married a Murray cousin, it would be conveyed to him.
If Hugh died without signing the ratification of their contract, a Fraser with some legal training might easily have this specious document dismissed. Then the Murrays’ power base and their exercise of power in the Highlands would be seriously weakened. The old Marquis of Atholl urged his son to get a move on. The Lovat estates are ‘the best feather in our wing’ he reminded Lord Murray. They must not ‘lose’ their ‘keystone’ after a decade of growing influence.
Murray presented the ratification document to Hugh Lovat, who signed it. Murray then took it to the Court of Session to be ratified in law. With the stroke of a pen, Hugh cut Simon from his place on the family tree, and was very likely handing over his inheritance to a girl. He had four; one was going to survive. Letting himself be manipulated by ‘natures stronger than his own’, as Simon noted tersely, Hugh overturned the tradition and logic of clanship. He opened the door wider to the danger of loss of the clan to another, and put huge power in the hands of whoever controlled the marriage prospects of the heiress. For an ineffectual man, Hugh had created something that had powerful implications for the clan and his family.
In his poky student lodgings in Aberdeen in the spring of 1695, Simon saw that his family were being juggled out of position. But he had to move carefully. Hugh’s baby son might survive. If so, Simon would only ever be the Laird of Beaufort. Lord Murray could be a valuable connection for someone like him. King William was starting to equip Murray with all the trappings that made power work – royal patronage, commissions and influence at Court. Murray had cash and jobs to distribute. He was networking to get all Scotland and half the British administration in his hands. Simon had to remember that, dislike him though he did, Murray could bring Simon, the scion of a clan now closely allied to Murray’s own, forward in the world. For now, Simon needed to be part of his enemy’s faction in Scotland.
It was therefore no surprise that after completing his first degree, Simon started on postgraduate work in civil law – specifically property rights. By becoming a lawyer, then a judge, he fought to equip himself should the rightful inheritance of the Lovat titles and estates be questioned. But the sudden ratification of the marriage contract had upset Simon’s plans, and now redirected his life. The infant John was Master of Lovat, but Lovat heirs often died young. John’s older sister Amelia, and who she married, were of real interest therefore. Simon had a young man’s sense of time. Precious years climbing to power in the judiciary might be years squandered. Besides, a growing number of judges, those who were not Mackenzies, owed their appointments to Murray.
Simon felt a measure of contempt for the chief who had exposed his clan to such powerful and ruthless men. Hugh had proved himself incapable of protecting their interests, homes and people. ‘Lord Lovat was known for a man of feeble understanding,’ he wrote. In Simon’s view – fired by principled, naive outrage – the job of preparing the clan’s defence against a decisive assault on their name and country had fallen on his shoulders. ‘It was my duty to venture my person and Life to recover … [my] ancient family,’ he wrote. He bubbled with idealism and bravado. His whole upbringing had prepared him to rise heroically to this kind of crisis and defend them all, he said of himself. ‘His duty was inseparable from his Nature.’
Lord Murray saw it all rather differently. As a penniless bystander, Simon posed little threat. Murray did not notice him. Young Beaufort would require a lot more than family pride and passion to halt Atholl ambitions. Simon needed power, money and the backing of his clan. To acquire these he put university ambitions to one side, and headed for Edinburgh.
THREE (#ulink_c71e58ad-6a13-5575-9284-24fa2ab982e3)
‘Nice use of the beast and the man’, 1695–96 (#ulink_c71e58ad-6a13-5575-9284-24fa2ab982e3)
‘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’.
FOUR (#ulink_22b35d47-a94c-5f35-abac-b61e4a3a6400)
‘No borrowed chief!’, 1696–97 (#ulink_22b35d47-a94c-5f35-abac-b61e4a3a6400)
‘Men must either be pampered or crushed’
– MACHIAVELLI
There was no time to lose. Under feudalism, Atholl–Murray interest in the Frasers died with the late chief. Therefore, ‘my father did take upon him the title of Lord Lovat, and possessed himself of the estates’, wrote Simon.
Captain Simon Fraser, now the Master of Lovat, returned to his regiment. He had precedent and history and the desire of much of his clan on his side. He possessed youth, determination, righteous indignation, courage and acute financial need to power the claims of his birthright. This might not be enough. But Simon had already asserted the cause of the thousands of the ordinary Fraser clansmen, and of their chief, more vigorously in a couple of years than the Fraser chiefs had in a couple of generations.
As soon as he had the chance, Tullibardine came for Captain Fraser. Manipulating the Privy Council, Tullibardine obtained the gift of his niece, nine-year-old Amelia, ‘in a trustee’s name’, though the child had a mother and close Fraser kin, and did not need an externally appointed guardian. As trustee, he would manage her clan and choose her husband. It was his duty to make the most advantageous match possible for her. This was usually the male heir.
Simon returned to command the guard at Holyroodhouse. Late one night Tullibardine arrived. Simon heard a shout from the guard, saw the flaring of torches, and watched the Earl clatter into the palace courtyard, calling for light and ‘a bottle’. He then summoned Simon to join him. ‘Having drunk to a good pitch,’ Tullibardine ‘took a paper out of his pocket and called for pen and ink’. He wanted Simon to sign a retraction of his claims. Simon must know, he said, how he entertained an ‘extreme friendship’ for him, a mere ‘Cadet of the family of Lovat, but of no Manner of Estate’. Tullibardine was aware of the ‘meanness’ of his situation, he told Simon, who sat there stony-faced. However, ‘I am told you have assumed the title of Master of Lovat, and that you have sent the opinions of [legal] counsel to your father, recommending him to take possession of the property of my late brother-in-law.’ Tullibardine ended on an accusatory note.
Simon put down his drink and forced himself to be civil. Of course his father Thomas, Lord Lovat, enjoyed his inheritance: the honours and estates of his late great nephew. Why would Simon consult lawyers about a natural course of events, and send results north?
Tullibardine too had gone to the law. His lawyers agreed Thomas had a right to the title. They would all call the old fellow ‘Thomas, Lord Lovat’. Why not? However, under the terms of Hugh and Amelia’s marriage contract, ratified and signed by the late Lord Lovat, the property and estates belonged to his ward and niece, Amelia.
