During this reign, and shortly after the hushing-up of the Glencoe affair, there came into prominence another character, destined to play a far more important part in the history of the Highlands and of the country generally, than Rob Roy, whom he resembled in the unscrupulous means he took to attain his ends, but whose rude but genuine sense of honour and sincerity he appears to have been entirely devoid of. This was the notorious Simon Fraser, so well known afterwards as Lord Lovat. He was born, according to some authorities, in the year 1670, but according to himself in 1676, and was the second son of Thomas Fraser, styled of Beaufort, near Inverness, fourth son of Hugh, ninth Lord Lovat. Simon’s mother was dame Sybilla Macleod, daughter of the chief of the Macleods. He was educated at King’s College, Aberdeen, where he is said highly to have distinguished himself, and to have taken the degree of Master of Arts.[651] “One can easily believe that Simon, with his brain ever at work, and his ambition ever on the stretch, would let no one outstrip him.... His subsequent full and free use of the French indicates an aptitude for languages seldom equalled, and his tone of writing and speaking was that of a scholar, always when he thought fit that it should be so.”[652] In 1695, he was induced to leave the university, just as he was about to enter upon the study of law, and accept a company in a regiment raised for the service of King William, by Lord Murray, son of the Marquis of Athole, whose daughter was married to the then Lord Lovat, Simon’s cousin. Simon, who pretended the most inviolable loyalty to the exiled King James, gives as his excuse for accepting this commission, that it was only that “he might have a regiment well trained and accoutred to join King James in a descent he had promised to make in the ensuing summer.” While in Lord Murray’s regiment, he, in 1696, entered into a plan for surprising Edinburgh castle, and holding it in the interest of James, but this was stifled by the decisive victory at La Hogue.

In 1696, Simon accompanied his cousin Lord Lovat, who appears to have been of a “contracted understanding,” and Lord Murray, to London, and while there, endeavoured to worm himself into the colonelcy of his regiment, but was checkmated by Murray, whom, with the house of Athole, he thenceforth regarded as his enemy.

Lord Lovat died in September 1696, immediately after his return from London, on which Thomas of Beaufort assumed the family title, and Simon that of Master of Lovat. To render his claims indisputable, Simon paid his addresses to the daughter of the late lord, who had assumed the title of baroness of Lovat, and having prevailed on her to consent to elope with him, would have carried his design of marrying her into execution, had not their mutual confident, Fraser of Tenechiel, after conducting the young lady forth one night in such precipitate haste that she is said to have walked barefooted, failed in his trust, and restored her to her mother. The heiress was then removed out of the reach of Simon’s artifices by her uncle, the Marquis of Athole, to his stronghold at Dunkeld. Here it was determined that to put an end to dispute, she should be married to the son of Lord Saltoun, the head of a branch of the Fraser family in Aberdeenshire. As Simon saw in this match the ruin of all his hopes, he determined at all hazards to prevent it. As Saltoun and Lord Mungo Murray were returning, October, 1697, from Castle Dounie, the residence of the late lord’s widow, they were met at the wood of Bunchrew, near Inverness, by Simon and his followers, and immediately disarmed and carried to Fanellan, a house of Lord Lovat’s, before the windows of which a threatening gallows was erected. They were detained here about a week, when, on a report that Lord Murray and the red coats were coming against him, Captain Fraser sent the fiery cross and coronach through the country of his clan, and immediately had at his command a body of 500 armed men. With this small army, Fraser, accompanied by his prisoners, proceeded to Castle Dounie, of which they took possession, sentinels being placed in all the rooms, particularly Lady Lovat’s. The prisoners, after being detained for some time in the Island of Angus in the Beauly river, were dismissed.

Burton[653] very justly remarks, that the whole of these wild acts were evidently the result of a series of impulses. What followed appears to have been equally unpremeditated and the result of pure impulse. Simon determined to atone to himself for the loss of the daughter by forcibly wedding the mother, whom he himself describes as a widow “old enough to be his mother, dwarfish in her person, and deformed in her shape.”[654] For this purpose her three waiting maids were carried by force out of the room, and about two in the morning one of them was brought back and found her lady “sitting on the floor, her hair dishevelled, her head reclining backwards on the bed, Donald Beaton pulling off the lady’s shoes, and the Captain holding burning feathers and aqua-vitae to her nose, her ladyship being in a swoon.” A mock marriage was performed between Simon and Lady Lovat, by a wretched minister of the name of Munro, and the lady’s clothes having been violently pulled off her, her stays being cut off with a dirk, she was tossed into the bed, to have the marriage consummated with violence. Notwithstanding that the bagpipes were kept playing in the next room, the poor lady’s cries were heard outside the house.[655] In the morning the lady was found to be so stupified with the brutal treatment she had received that she could not recognise her dearest friends.

These violent proceedings caused much consternation in the country, and the Athole family immediately set about to obtain redress, or rather revenge. Letters of fire and sword and of intercommuning were passed against the whole of the Frasers, and the Marquis of Tulliebardine organised a force to carry these threats into execution. “On the whole, the force brought against him cannot have been very large; but in Simon’s own history of his conflicts and escapes, the whole affair assumes the aspect of a very considerable campaign, in which his enemies, spoken of as ‘the several regiments of cavalry, infantry, and dragoons,’ are always defeated and baffled in an unaccountable manner by some handful of Frasers.”[656] There does not appear to have been any downright skirmish, the only approach to such a thing being a meeting that took place at Stratherrick between the Frasers and the Athole-men under the two Lords Murray, in which the latter threw themselves on the mercy of Simon, who made them, after the manner of the ancient Romans, pass through the yoke, and at the same time swear by a fearful oath never again to enter the Lovat territories.

In June, 1698, proceedings were commenced in the court of justiciary against Fraser and his accomplices, and in September they were condemned, in their absence, to be executed as traitors.

In 1699, died old Fraser of Beaufort, at the house of his brother-in-law Macleod of Dunvegan Castle in Skye, and his son thenceforth assumed the title of Lord Lovat. He appears for some time to have led a wandering life, subsisting on pillage and the occasional contributions of the attached mountaineers.[657] Tired of this kind of life, he, at the recommendation of Argyle, who had endeavoured to secure favour for him at head-quarters, sued for a pardon, which King William granted for all his proceedings except the rape. He was willing to stand trial on this last head, and for this purpose appeared in Edinburgh with a small army of 100 followers as witnesses; but as the majority of the judges were prejudiced against him, he found it prudent again to take refuge in his mountains. He was outlawed, and finding his enemies too powerful for him, he fled to France in 1702, and offered his services to King James.

These details show, that amid the growing civilization and rapid progress of the country generally, the Highlanders were yet as barbarous and lawless as ever; the clans still cherishing the same devotion to their chiefs, and the same readiness, in defiance of law, to enter into an exterminating mutual strife. The government appears to have given up in despair all hopes of making the Highlanders amenable to the ordinary law of the country, or of rooting out from among them those ancient customs so inconsistent with the spirit of the British constitution. All it apparently aimed at was to confine the lawless and belligerent propensities of these troublesome Celts to their own country, and prevent them from taking a form that would be injurious to the civilized Lowlanders and the interests of the existing government generally. “From old experience in dealing with the Highlanders, government had learned a policy which suited temporary purposes at all events, however little it tended to the general pacification and civilisation of the people. This was, not to trust entirely to a Lowland government force, but to arm one clan against another. It seemed a crafty device for the extermination of these troublesome tribes, and a real practical adaptation of Swift’s paradoxical project for abolishing pauperism, by making the poor feed upon each other. But practised as it had been for centuries, down from the celebrated battle of the antagonist clans on the Inch of Perth, yet it never seemed to weaken the strength or abate the ferocity of these warlike vagrants, but rather seemed to nourish their thirst of blood, to make arms and warfare more familiar and indispensable, and to add every year to the terrors of this formidable people, who, in the very bosom of fast civilizing Europe, were as little under the control of enlightened social institutions, and as completely savage in their habits, as the Bosgesman of the East, or the Black-foot Indian of the West.”[658]

FOOTNOTES:

[636] Carstares’ Papers, p. 138.