The Last Highlander: Scotland’s Most Notorious Clan Chief, Rebel & Double Agent

The Last Highlander: Scotland’s Most Notorious Clan Chief, Rebel & Double Agent
Sarah Fraser

Saltire First Scottish Book of the Year 2012The story of the life of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat : a clan chief of the Scottish nobility, rebel and Jacobite conspirator. He became the last British peer to go under the axe, marking a moment in history when the rest of Britain turned decisively away from the Celtic heritage.Lord Lovat was a spy, clan-chief, traitor, polyglot, deserter and philosopher. His wit, ambition and dubious morality thrust him repeatedly into the thick of political intrigue. A treacherous turncoat, and yet a martyr for Bonnie Prince Charlie’s dreams to retake the British throne, Lovat conjured a legend: a man whose loyalty had no home, whose sword had a price, and whose taste for risks led him into pacts with Catholics and Protestants, Scots and Englishmen.The last nobleman to be executed for treason, Lovat was one of Scotland’s most notorious and romantic figures, and this swashbuckling account of his life creates an extraordinary portrayal of a nation in revolt. As Sarah Fraser argues, the defeat at Culloden led directly to the end of traditional Gaelic civilization; to the brutal clearances and ‘pacification’ of the Highlands which followed and the lost civilisations of Scotland that were destroyed after 1745 by English repression.

The Last Highlander

SCOTLAND’S MOST

NOTORIOUS CLAN CHIEF,

REBEL & DOUBLE AGENT

SARAH FRASER

HarperPress

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperPress in 2012

Copyright © Sarah Fraser 2012

Sarah Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007229499

Ebook Edition © April 2012 ISBN: 9780007302642

Version: 2018-06-21

Dedication (#u6af4f6a3-feff-551f-b6ae-ed8f155b28de)

For Kim

&

For Arabella Vanneck

1959–2011

Epigraph (#u6af4f6a3-feff-551f-b6ae-ed8f155b28de)

‘[The soul] demands that we should not live alternately with our opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to common end … The soul demands unity of purpose, not the dismemberment of man’

– ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

‘A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair’

– NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

CONTENTS

Title Page (#u8ba1b0ca-90ef-599b-9dc7-41d732b965b7)

Copyright (#udfecfcc2-c672-5bcf-a3ff-b1acda8a18f7)

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Maps

Lovat Family Tree

Prologue: Death of a Highland chief

PART ONE: FORMATIVE YEARS, C.1670–1702

ONE: Home, birth, youth, c.1670–94

TWO: To be a fox and a lion, 1685–95

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

FOUR: ‘No borrowed chief!’, 1696–97

FIVE: ‘The Grand Fornicator of the Aird’, 1697–99

SIX: Victory and loss, 1699–1702

PART TWO: AT THE COURT OF THE SUN KING, 1702–15

SEVEN: The Stuart Court of St Germains, 1702