over to the west coast and heading south-west from Inverness down Loch Ness, were typically Highland: peaty soil covered in rough grass; rushes and heather rising from wind-whipped moors to stony peaks of over 3,000 feet. Between them sheltered valley floors of startling greenness.
Now almost deserted, in Lovat’s lifetime hundreds of families inhabited these remote fertile glens: the kindred, or ‘family’, of up to 10,000 that was Clan Fraser. Many passed their lives without venturing even once to the regional capital, Inverness – though the young men would pour out of the hills to fight if the chief summoned them with the fiery cross. Visitors from the Lowlands or England in the early eighteenth century regarded the Highlands with appalled distaste. ‘The huge naked rocks, being just above the heath, resemble nothing so much as a scabbed head,’ shuddered an English army officer. The ‘dirty purple’ heather sickened him. Yet the 11th Lord Lovat’s wild hill country produced his most loyal and ferocious fighting clansmen and their lairds, and Lovat returned their devotion with a passion.
The common people’s year followed an ancient pastoral pattern. Their stock was their wealth and security; their economy was based on exchange, with hardly any money being involved. Visiting tinsmiths, tailors or cattle dealers received hospitality and, say, cheese, a hide, or wool in return for their services, news of wars and national crises, folk tales and songs. These Frasers struggled to produce enough to survive the snowbound winters. In their calendar, January was An t-Earrach in Gaelic – the ‘tail’ end of the year, not the beginning. By then the grain chest was empty, the livestock emaciated from a winter indoors with too little to eat and from being bled to provide blood to mix with oatmeal. When the spring grass came the poor animals had to be carried out of the byres.
A clan was divided into branches. At the top was the chiefly family, and the families of his close cousins. Each branch was headed by a laird called after his small estate – such as Fraser of Foyers, Fraser of Gorthleck, Fraser of Castleleathers – and held by tack (lease) or wadset (mortgage). He might be responsible for up to 300 ordinary kinsmen and existed in a state of genteel financial stress. The minor lairds, who managed the Highland parts of the estates, could not make ends meet without the financial support that service to their chief earned them. As a consequence, upcountry men were more old-fashioned than their low-country brethren. Unlike English landowners, clan chiefs such as Lord Lovat kept large bodies of armed men in a state of semi-militarised readiness to protect the clan, and travelled nowhere without a ‘tail’ of up to a hundred of well-accoutred followers on horse and foot. The hill lairds were the first to make up Lord Lovat’s ‘tail’. He loved them above all his clansmen.
The other half of the Fraser chief’s territories was quite different from the hills and glens and was more familiar to foreigners from the south. The area known as the Aird of Lovat, around the mouth of the River Beauly on the east coast of the Scottish Highlands, was first-class agricultural land. This part of the Lovat estates provided nearly all the chief’s income, and the farms and estates here generated more than enough to meet their lairds’ needs. They did not need the extra money earned by traditional service to the chief. The wealthier east-coast lairds might become lawyers, officers in the British Army, politicians in Inverness and Edinburgh, or serve in local government.
Simon’s eastern territory stretched from the Aird, ten miles eastwards along the sheltered Beauly Firth to the eye of the Highlands, Inverness. Here, ambitious men, keen to market intelligence about this vast semi-autonomous region of the Scottish state to the authorities in Edinburgh or London, noted everything that happened. Lovat’s estates lay at a crossroads between the expanding world of Britain and her colonies, and the self-contained world of the clans.
At the time of Simon’s birth, the clan proclaimed widespread loyalty to the ancient royal House of Stuart. The Stuarts ruled in sacred bond with the land, just as a chief was ‘married to his clan and country’. However, decades of bloody internal conflict, ending just before Simon’s birth with the restoration of Charles II, sowed a horror of uncontrolled violence. However, in the Scottish and English governments’ minds, this independent-minded civilisation on its northern frontier, half of whom did not even speak English, posed the single biggest threat to the security of the fast-changing Scottish and British nations. Fraser country was, therefore, of strategic importance to any central authority intent on imposing the will of central government.
As the brother of a chief and great-uncle to another chief, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, grew up at the heart of this world at Castle Dounie, the historic stronghold of Clan Fraser. At the centre of the Aird of Lovat, the ancient fortress loomed on a manmade mound above the banks of the Beauly River. Towers at each corner of the castle and the thick walls between them offered protection to hundreds of the chief’s ordinary kin in times of famine or feud. If necessary, over 400 people could sleep there.
At Dounie, the Fraser chief maintained an entourage of staff, kin and allies who regulated the life of a Highland nobleman and the thousands who depended on him for their safety. One kinsman was fear an taighe, the head of the household. He controlled the chaplain, piper, harpist, steward, grooms, pantry boys, cooks, and scores of scallags (servants) running around beneath them. The principal Fraser families sent their sons to the chief’s household ‘to educate, polish and accomplish them’; they were ‘exchanged at the yeares end, and others taken … in their place’. The bonds this fostering forged throughout the clan endured for life and offered mutual protection in the frequent times of trouble that were to be a feature of Simon the future 11th Lord Lovat’s life.
Simon was the second son of Thomas of Beaufort. ‘Beaufort’ was another name for Castle Dounie. An honorary title, ‘of Beaufort’ was attached to the surname of the second line of the family tree, after the chiefly family, the Lovats. The title expressed the closeness of the connection between the two (Simon’s father was often called simply ‘Beaufort’). If Beaufort’s noble cousin Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, failed to raise a living male heir, then the male Beaufort Frasers would rise to be the heirs. Acknowledging their position, they had to prepare themselves for what they hoped would not happen: their cousin’s incapacity or death. It followed therefore that the men of the second line of the clan elite filled the most important clan posts.
From this position, in 1650, Simon’s father, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort, aged just eighteen, led a thousand Fraser men south to fight Cromwell’s New Model Army on behalf of Charles Stuart, recently returned from France. On 3 September 1651 a Cromwellian army numbering 28,000 met 16,000 Royalists at Worcester, in the last battle of the English Civil War. The New Model Army captured over 10,000 prisoners, among them young Thomas Fraser of Beaufort. Cromwell deported Beaufort’s fellow Fraser prisoners to Barbados as indentured labourers, or slaves. Simon’s father was lucky to survive. He was sent north and ‘keeped several years in a dungeon in the citadel that the English made in Inverness’, as Cromwell put Scotland under heavy military occupation.
Scotland eviscerated itself in the religious and dynastic wars of the mid-1600s. The country strained to cope with the thousands of government soldiers garrisoned and quartered on the nation. The troops had free rein to get supplies where they could, with the result that ‘be-tuixt the bridge end of Inverness and Gusachan, twenty-six miles, there was not left in my countrie a sheep to bleet, or a cock to crow day, nor a house unruffled’. Women were raped, animals butchered and the harvest carried away. Inverness shrank back ‘demure under a slavish calm’, economically ruined, said the Fraser chronicler. Lairds and chiefs were bankrupt, or fought ruthlessly to restore their fortunes. Cromwell’s victory and his subjection of Scotland gave the Scots a bitter taste of union with England that they were to remember in 1707, when another English ruler pressed them to give up their sovereignty.
After the Civil War, Thomas Beaufort married Sybilla MacLeod, the daughter of another chief, John MacLeod of MacLeod. It was usual for clan elites to intermarry in order to reinforce strategic alliances. Simon’s mother, Sybilla, grew up at ancient Dunvegan Castle, towering on a rocky promontory on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Skye as if carved from the cliff. Sybilla gave Beaufort a child each year of their fourteen-year marriage, dying with the last, when Simon was just eight. Altogether nine of their children died in childhood. The surviving five, in order of age, were: Alexander; Simon; John (who adored his older brother Simon); and the girls, Sybilla and Catherine. Thomas