appears to have been in not very wealthy circumstances’, said the Reverend James Fraser.
Though there is no date for Simon’s birth, the Reverend James, who was also the chiefly family’s chaplain, recorded that at Castle Dounie, ‘at the propitious moment, many swords hanging in the old hall leapt from their scabbards, indicating how mighty a man of war had been added to the race’. Even in earliest youth, Simon’s face expressed force of will. His steady gaze gave the impression of watchfulness, as his eyes scrutinised and his ears listened to his father and the Reverend James Fraser. He and his brothers were tall, vigorous and brave, when many of the older generation were exhausted by wars.
The route that took the Beaufort Fraser children from their home, the manor house ‘Tomich’, to Castle Dounie, to play with their aristocratic cousins, led them through the village of Beauly. Hugh, the 8th Lord Lovat, assumed his social and political domination of the regional capital, Inverness, in matters of politics and business. However, it was Beauly and the beautiful Aird of Lovat, not Inverness, that defined young Simon’s horizons. Here, Simon and his brothers and sisters learned to ride and hunt. The males of the upper reaches of the clan sometimes spent as much as a third of the year hunting. It kept them fit and ready, trained to act in a body. If the fiery cross went up, they could fly together in an instant and chase men not deer.
When clans with territories north of the Highland capital, such as the Mackenzies whose lands bordered Fraser country, wanted to go to Inverness to attend to their affairs, they crossed the River Beauly at the ford in the village. Here they would have to pay Fraser men a toll and declare their business. In this way the Frasers were able to control an important point of access for the northern clans. A strong Fraser chief could use his geographic position to his advantage and help manage the north for the government in Edinburgh. The rewards he sought were the usual expressions of gratitude: perquisites and government positions. Geography blended always into geopolitics.
As well as being a soldier, Thomas Fraser of Beaufort was a thoughtful, scholarly man. When the 8th Lord Lovat was dying, Thomas sat for weeks at Castle Dounie by his deathbed, ‘entertaining him with history and divinity’. Simon inherited from his father a passion for clan and national history, theology and philosophical debate, as well as the satisfaction of training and leading a body of armed kinsmen. The Beaufort Fraser children received an informal education in clan history and their place in the world from the Reverend James Fraser. The son of a laird, Reverend James was at ease with English, Gaelic, French and Latin, and ‘had a useful knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, German and Italian’. Simon Fraser would acquire the same languages, becoming fluent in four and competent in five.
In his youth, the Reverend James ‘mounted his Highland pony, and accompanied by a Highland servant, spent three years touring Britain, Europe and the Holy Land’ in order, he said, ‘to rectify the judgement, enrich the mind with knowledge’, and give it ‘a polish’. Though by turns a Calvinist and Episcopalian, he happily posed as a Roman Catholic to get a room in European monasteries. He visited over thirty European states and on his return wrote Triennial Travels, describing every town and city of note, starting with Inverness. He would dedicate his Chronicles of the Frasers to Simon when he became chief.
For almost five decades, Reverend James ministered at Kirkhill, a tiny settlement near Beauly, and served as family chaplain to the Frasers. As chronicler the Reverend also occupied the role of seanachie, or tradition-bearer, in the clan. In him the history of Scotland, England, Europe and the clan, actual and mythic, resided; he wove them together like a plaid, surrounding the Beaufort Fraser children with a solid sense of history, their duty to the living and to the dead. Their ancestors had served kings and country. So would they. This intoxicating blend of the literal and legendary fired their imaginations. Some of the oldest Gaelic songs, and even lullabies sung by wet nurses, rioted with bloody narratives of the honour their ancestors defended, and the outrages they avenged. Through such tales the children understood the Fraser loyalty to the doomed Stuart King Charles I.
At ceilidhs3 there would be folk tales, poems, theology, history, politics, agriculture, meteorology, games, riddles, repartee, music and medicine, and gossip – all in the Gaelic they liked to speak at home. Great arguments raged over international and local news. In the martial society of the clans, Simon learned, the chief must loom larger than everyone else, keeping his enemies at bay, whilst earning the respect of close friends and allies.
If ceilidh debates grew too heated and threatened to turn bitter or to violence, someone might intervene and call for music, dance or a song – sometimes bawdy. Risqué verse was acceptable at any gathering – though satirising someone’s good name could land you in a duel or a feud. One piece of bawdy by the bravura baronet Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy entitled Bod brighmhor ata ag Donncha (‘Duncan has a Potent Prick’) extended to thirty-two lines of self-praise. Typically Gaelic in spirit, the gist of it was this:
Grizzled Duncan’s organ
I guess is no great beauty,
Adamantine, wrathful,
ever ready to do his duty …
A rheum-eyed hooded giant,
sinuous, out-thrust face, spurty,
A cubit out from its bag,
ravaging, mighty knob-kerry.
Titillation was not the point (though it amused one clergyman enough to copy it into his personal poetry anthology); what this poem conveyed was the nature of a leader, of leadership. Its outrageousness merely educated by entertainment. The hero was a beast of eye-watering proportions and energy; the thought of him made women swoon. The part standing for the whole, the poem described a proper clan chief. The Viking culture of the rampaging warrior hero contributed features to the Celtic idea of an ideal chief. ‘Victorious in battle and conflict’, ‘fearsome’, ‘violent’, ‘wrathful’, with his ‘stately-purple … broad back’, it was the heroic duty of the ‘potent prick chief’ to generate and protect his own. He repelled rivals with the baleful glare of his single ‘canny’ eye, and with his stunning virility ensured the continuance of the natural order.
Laced with humour, verses like this carried a moral to the Beaufort boys, as they sat on the floor fireside in the main room at Tomich, taking it all in. There was no space in this world for a ‘sweet’ and ‘affable’ Fraser chief. Rather, the ceann cinnidh, the head of the kin, must be King Arthur, the Irish Diarmid, the Viking Beowulf, and Scots Wallace and his companion, Sir Simon Fraser, all rolled into one. The boys practised their swordsmanship imagining they were these great heroes, Simon taking the part of his namesake: Sir Simon the ‘Patriot’ Fraser – the ‘talk and admiration of all Europe’ – who was hung, drawn and quartered for his country’s freedom on 8 September 1306, a year after his leader, Wallace.
The Beaufort boys were raised to regard their homeland as the heart of the Highland world, connected to all the exotic parts of Europe the Reverend James visited and described to them. But Alexander, Simon, and John would need more than clan stories to perform their duties as future leading men in the modern world. They would need the experience, erudition and confidence that a broad-based education offered. So the boys were put on ponies and sent to school in Inverness to prepare them for university and the battles ahead.
Though barely twelve miles distance, Beauly and Tomich were a world away from the regional capital. Born and bred Invernessians did not much like Highlanders. The Beaufort Fraser boys were a blend of Highland and Lowland. Wild hill men caused trouble to a royal burgh that prided itself on its modern civic and religious values. Townsfolk were terrorised by the ‘bare-arsed banditti’ who ‘broke open their doors in the night time, and dig through their houses, plundering and taking away the whole moveables, and oftimes assassinating several poor people in their beds’, before heading back to their strongholds in the wilderness.
As civil society settled under Charles II’s rule, Inverness was more Lowland in character. Port towns like Inverness, and the sea lanes they sat on, thronged with traffic again. Over a hundred boats and ships could be anchored in Inverness harbour at any time; they strained at their ropes,