an outlaw.
Armed with a death warrant, the Murray hunt heated up. At the head of hundreds of Athollmen and Lowland soldiers, Lord James Murray, accompanied by his brother Mungo, planned a night attack into Stratherrick where they believed Simon was hiding. ‘Having the authors of his father’s death, and of all his personal misfortunes before his eyes, he would now revenge himself in their blood, or perish in the attempt,’ Simon swore. He galloped to Stratherrick to stop more ill-treatment of his people. The hunters would become the hunted.
The Murrays struck camp for the night against a rocky crag. When they mustered the next morning, Simon calculated he had something under 300 men to their 600. Given the numerical disadvantage, a full-frontal attack would fail. Simon ordered one of his men, Alexander MacDonald, to take sixty Frasers and string them out in a thin line in front of the enemy, so they would believe his whole force faced them. Meanwhile, Simon led the rest around to their flank.
Realising late they were to be ambushed, Lord James ordered his troops to fall back towards a ‘terrible defile’, six miles in the direction of Inverness, called Allt nan Gobhar – the Blacksmith’s Burn. Alexander MacDonald guessed their goal and raced ahead of them to block the way through. The fighting men under Simon broke rank in pursuit.
Simon Fraser fought as MacShimidh, a Highland chief; not as the bewigged and breeches-clad British peer petitioning in the law courts of Edinburgh, but wrapped and belted in a plaid over the top of his linen shirt, like his ordinary kinsmen. He put a bonnet on his head, and stuck the Fraser emblem, a sprig of yew, in it. With the battle cry A’Chaisteal Dhunaidh – ‘for Castle Dounie’, and the scream of the pipes, they charged to battle. ‘Lord Lovat ran for three miles alongside them, on foot, and almost naked.’ The howling chief of Clan Fraser stampeded the government troops towards the men hidden in Blacksmith’s Burn. Drawing close, the Murrays saw what awaited them and suddenly ‘impressed with the most lively apprehensions’ of impending slaughter, most Murray men tried to surrender. Simon observed Lord James yelling at them to engage but they ‘laid down their arms and covering their heads with their plaids, cried out for quarter’. A Murray fighter came running towards them, ‘with a white handkerchief … neckcloth tied to a bludgeon, crying out for mercy’.
‘Lord James,’ Simon wrote with grim pleasure, ‘was beside himself at this declaration.’ Simon’s first response was not to take the surrender. He surveyed the noisy, trembling and quarrelling bunch of regular and irregular forces whose commanding officers had ‘deprived him of lands and title by violence, injustice, and fraud … [He was] outlawed and condemned to death, hunted on the mountains,’ he reflected. The last couple of years had not encouraged the philosophical, university-trained side of his character. They drove him in on most animal resources, to survive and fight, protect his territory. His father had died without elegy and obsequy; without his life being properly honoured. He would ‘avenge the death of his father, and the tyranny of Lord Athol and all his family’. Since birth, these men had tried to manipulate his destiny. Now Simon was clan chief.
Though his first instinct had been to massacre the lot of them, older heads among his advisers made him understand that if he did, ‘not a man in the Kingdom would either assist or pity’ the Frasers’ cause, so he contented himself with humiliation. He lifted his sword tip and made James and Mungo kiss it and swear upon it that ‘they renounced their claims in Jesus Christ, and their hopes of heaven, and devoted themselves to the torments of hell, if they ever returned’ or occasioned ‘Lord Lovat the smallest mischief’. He then lined up his men in two files and made the enemy troop run the gauntlet jostled like criminals, and sent them out of his country.
At bottom, Simon was in desperate need of a pardon to end this feud before his whole inheritance was torched beyond resurrection and his people all starved to death. More in hope than expectation, Simon Fraser thereafter took as his motto Sin Sanguine Victor, ‘Victor without Blood’.
‘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