The Last Highlander (14 page)

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Authors: Sarah Fraser

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BOOK: The Last Highlander
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TWELVE

‘You walk upon glass’, 1704–14

‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek’

– THOMAS WYATT

Middleton demanded Lovat’s arrest and execution. The Papal Nuncio warned Lovat that he ‘walked upon glass’. If not a traitor to the cause, there was no doubt he had abused grossly their trust in him by meeting with Queensberry.

Just in time, Johnny Murray reappeared at St Germains – bearing letters that supported all Lovat’s reports about the clans and an uprising. His return had been delayed by the war, he said. He had been forced to make a detour through Northern Europe. Lovat’s hopes revived and he wrote to Louis XIV’s minister, Torcy, ‘I come tomorrow to do obeisance to your Excellency, and receive orders.’ Now was the time to go home and raise the clans.

The war over the Spanish Succession was dragging on and the French, predictably, were keen to revisit the scheme for an invasion of Scotland, to coincide with an uprising there. Louis asked the Queen Regent to issue commissions to the Jacobites, to let them serve under the French officers involved in the invasion. To Louis’s disgusted amazement, sticking by Middleton’s ineffectual diplomacy, Mary refused.

Lovat was as aghast as the French. The time was so ripe ‘there was nothing but the immediate interposition of heaven, the strange imbecility of his mother, and the ignominious perfidy of the Earl of Middleton, that could have prevented the restoration of King James to the throne of the three kingdoms’, he argued. Lovat would not draw sword in the service of the royal family again until her son came of age. Mary demanded Louis lock up Lord Lovat.

As the weeks passed, Lovat found it hard to retrieve his reputation at St Germains, despite Johnny Murray’s return. The scandal of the Queensberry, or ‘Scotch plot’, stuck to him. Louis ran out of patience with the entire Jacobite cause and banished Lovat to political exile. A horrified Lord Lovat had no choice but to obey. He and his brother John, with Lovat’s pageboy, sloped out of Paris at midnight on 27 May 1704. Lovat was banished to Bourges, in the centre of France, the former capital of the province of Roman Aquitaine.

From Bourges, Lovat wrote to the Papal Nuncio expressing feelings of disorientation, in a ‘place completely unknown … and which already looks very sad in my eyes’. He had little money, and had left unsettled bills in Paris. He worried about when he would be recalled. He appealed to Mary of Modena, apologising for his ‘cruel frustrated outbursts’ and begging her forgiveness and restoration. Mary did not reply. Lovat pleaded with Versailles for a pension to reflect his status and pay off his debts. Torcy eventually answered that Louis would give him a gratuity of 300
Louis d’or
on top of his pension so he could pay off his bills and live at some ease. For the time being, however, he had to stay put.

Lovat weighed the purse in his hand, wondering if he could make more of this. He felt ‘obliged to distinguish myself’ in Bourges, he told a new friend, a local aristocrat and courtier at Versailles called the Marquis de la Frézelière. Lovat greeted the Marquis as ‘cousin’, acknowledging the French root of Fraser, from
fraise
(strawberry). The Frasers came originally to England with William the Conqueror and worked their way north. Lord Lovat’s coat of arms showed strawberry leaves in the first and fourth quarters, and ancient crowns in the other two. The French King had ordered a
Te Deum
to be sung in every major town to give thanks to God for France’s victories in battle against the Duke of Marlborough. A dazzling gesture to flatter Louis might earn him forgiveness and liberty, Lovat thought. As soon as he had his freedom then he and John could return home and rid Clan Fraser of Mackenzie control for good. He had to admit his time in France had not advanced his cause one step.

To distinguish the
Te Deum
of Bourges, Lovat organised a huge fête. He printed and distributed lavish invitations to the city’s entire population, all 15,000 of them. Lord Lovat, it announced, ‘will make a liberality of several barrels of wine … where the people are assembled to see the fireworks that will be let off at the end of the
Te Deum
’ – the fireworks to coincide with music in a spectacular
son et lumière
. To dispense the wine, ‘this grand seigneur has made a contraption out of the fountains that will tumble abundantly with wine at the ceremony and during the best part of the following night’. Drink was running in the streets. Lovat intoxicated the whole city. Revellers ‘carried away wine in full buckets, finding themselves at last sick of drinking, several remaining vessels, still full, will be carried the following morning to the hospital’.

Lovat explained to the people of Bourges that in Scotland, ‘Milord Lovat’ was chief to 600 gentlemen and 5,000 others of varying professions. He threw himself with relish into playing the chief and mounted a military tattoo, dressing some of the townsmen in Highland dress, fully accoutred with typical weaponry of the Fraser Highlanders – a rifle, two pistols, a dagger, sword and targe. Lovat was acting out his dreams. Everyone had a wonderful time. The townsfolk were ‘exhausted with drink’. Lovat was exhausting.

Afterwards, he wrote an account of the extravaganza to the Marquis de la Frézelière. De la Frézelière talked about Lovat’s magnificent feasting and show of loyalty to Versailles. The first sign Lovat had miscalculated came when the Papal Nuncio read Lovat’s publicity material and dictated a reproach. At St Germains, where life was so frugal they sometimes hardly had enough to eat, the report electrified them with rage. Here was Lovat, in disgrace and penury, throwing a fête for an entire city and flaunting himself as if he were a prince. Riled, Middleton and the ruling council at St Germains obsessed with getting written proof of the Scotsman’s treason from England; then Louis would have to have him killed. ‘
On néglige le reste
,’ one French minister said, bored by the Stuart Court: ‘everything else is neglected’.

Louis did not respond well to Lovat’s signs in the sky over Bourges. Once again, the Fraser chief, left to his own devices, had exceeded his brief and pursued his own agenda. The money had been there to pay his debts, nothing more. The King ordered Lovat to be removed from Bourges and put in gaol, the bastille at Angoulême fifty miles south of Paris. Lovat sent John home to hide in the hills and keep their kinsmen loyal.

Since Lovat left the Stuart Court in exile, some odd realignments had taken place at St Germains. It was even more important to keep Lovat out of the way. Middleton and Mary of Modena argued it was now in France’s interest to take active steps to restore ‘James III’. The appeasers had turned warmongers. The French victories Lovat celebrated so extravagantly, the intelligence about the levels of support for James in Scotland, the resistance in the Scottish Parliament to Queen Anne’s order that the Scots declare for George on her death, and negotiate to enter a full Union with England: all this let Middleton see Lovat had been right all along. The English ministers who penned gracious letters about restoring James had led him up a blind alley.

At Angoulême, Lovat was ‘thrust into a horrible dungeon’, which had, he claimed, ‘since time immemorial been the unviolated habitation of coiners and murderers’. His little pageboy ‘conceived so extreme a horror at this dungeon’ that he became ill and had to be put under a physician for six months. The boy’s physical illness mirrored his master’s mental anguish.

The cell door banged shut. ‘Lord Lovat remained in this apartment, shut up for [the first] thirty-five days in perfect darkness, where he every moment expected death and prepared to meet it with becoming fortitude.’ He was convinced someone had moved him here to silence him for good and all, where no one would see or protest. At the same time, he ‘listened with eagerness and anxiety to every noise’. When the door creaked upon its hinges, ‘[I] believed that it was the executioner come to put an end to [my] … unfortunate days.’ As time passed and nothing happened, he ‘thought proper to address himself to a grim gaeloress, who came every day to throw him something to eat, in the same silent and cautious manner in which you would feed a mad dog’. Lovat begged for paper, ink and light. If they were not going to assassinate him he must stay in touch with friends, if he still had any.

He sweated through July into August 1704. ‘I am sad and melancholic,’ he complained, ‘shut … in an evil tower’. He repeated that he had not betrayed France and the Stuarts’ cause to Queensberry. Months turned into years. No one came.

By 1706, Lovat was desperate. From the Highlands John wrote to him that Sir Roderick Mackenzie had taken another step towards the absorption of the Fraser clan. Sir Roderick had written a letter to the Fraser gentlemen. In it, he described the Fraser coat of arms. The eminence of the Fraser strawberry leaves and current diminution of Mackenzie stag’s head on it, offended their new chief, his son. It must be reversed. Amelia Lovat, as she could be called, and his son Alexander Mackenzie of Fraserdale had been blessed with a son, named Hugh after her father, the late Hugh Lovat. Sir Roderick suggested that if his grandson Hugh ‘shall think fit, in the place of the surname of Fraser, to carry the surname of Mackenzie, and to alter the … coat of arms’ then these moves are ‘expressly ratified and approved’. The consequence would be ‘that the said surname and arms’, of Fraser of Lovat, ‘once being altered, and recorded so in the books of Heraldry … then it shall not be in the power of the said heir … ever thereafter to return to the name of Fraser’.

Lovat had always maintained that the Murrays and Mackenzies sought to swallow up his clan and its territories. This letter set out the process of final elimination.

Frantic to go home, Lovat tried to keep abreast of European politics by begging for newspapers and pamphlets; he needed to be properly prepared if a recall to Court came. He learned that they were now using his invasion plan again. It was tantalising. If only the French had let him ‘go home and organise an uprising’, three years ago, ‘Marlborough would not today be in Bavaria,’ he told Torcy when he heard of how the war swung in favour of the Protestant Alliance. ‘In spite of my youth and my faults I know best the situation [in Scotland]’, he said. The grindingly slow pace of Middleton’s preparations had killed the momentum time and again. Lovat wondered if that was still Middleton’s goal in fact, and wrote from Angoulême with haughty disdain that such ‘watery-souled’ revolutionaries would always fail.

Lovat greeted the New Year, 1707, from inside the bastille with good wishes to the Papal Nuncio: ‘I wish your Excellence a good and happy new year … I have passed the worst year of my life. I hope that this will be more favourable.’

The Nuncio replied that it was not likely to improve soon.

‘I see clearly … The violence of my persecution is not passed,’ Lovat responded wearily.

Marlborough had marked 1706 with victories at Turin and Ramillies, driving the French back towards their own borders, and out of Italy and the Spanish Netherlands. The English fleet dominated the Channel. England and France gradually emptied their coffers on the war effort: both countries were on a very long march towards military and financial exhaustion.

At the beginning of 1707, the bill for a treaty of full Union between the Kingdom of England (including Wales) and the Kingdom of Scotland was forced through the Scottish Parliament. Bribery with huge sums of money, intimidation of dissenters, clauses to enable Scotland to retain an independent Church and judiciary, and the prospect of entry to ‘the bowels of the hive’ of British trade to revive Scotland’s economy and society, all helped shove it onto the statute books. A few decision-makers approved it, in the teeth of the fury of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Scots. The sovereign Scottish nation would disappear on 1 May 1707. Tens of thousands of Scots took to the streets, shouting that their liberties, their identity and independence were being traded away in shame and perpetuity.

Lovat had to pace out his patience at Angoulême, agitated and stuck fast. No plan ever equalled his for practicality and coherence, but he could not take advantage of his talents. He had lost everyone’s trust. In prison, Lovat raged against ‘
cette Union infernelle
’.

On 14 August, after three years in gaol, Lovat finally received an order to move – to Saumur on the River Loire. He was to be made more comfortable, on an increased pension, but was forbidden from returning to Paris or Scotland. Lovat ordered his servants to pack his belongings, and bid farewell to a black period of his life.

At Saumur, the horses shouldered their way between tight, packed streets of medieval houses. First-floor windows overhung the shops, entrances to inns and the ordure below. The carters sought the next residence to which Lord Lovat found himself banished at the pleasure of the King of France. As his prison walls expanded to include the town and surrounding countryside, his pain progressed from acute to dull and chronic. He recognised his own alienation, isolation and impotence. He no longer had the spirit to attempt the sort of gesture he had made at Bourges. The years at Angoulême had trained him into submission, as they were intended to. Lovat’s brother and heir, John, whom he hailed as the ‘Chevalier Frezel of Lovat’, visited again, and accompanied him to Saumur.

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