Hugh Lovat’s marriage naturally affected Simon’s standing in the clan, pushing him a step away from the topmost branch of the tree. But the Beauforts expected that. They were ‘spares’ to the heir, and a chief must marry. What irked Simon Fraser was not the union with Lady Amelia, but an extraordinary pre-nuptial agreement planted in the match that affected the future inheritance of the Lovat titles and estates. It would prove to be of such dubious legality that Tarbat and Murray let it lie dormant for nearly ten years, so as not to draw attention or resistance to their schemes from other magnates. For now young Hugh and Amelia settled to the only job Sir George entrusted his nephew to accomplish without his guiding hand – to make lusty male heirs.
But it was another inheritance problem that delayed Simon from going up to Aberdeen. He was preparing to leave Tomich in the autumn of 1688 and join Alexander at university when news came of the landing of William of Orange and his invasion force at Torbay in Devon. Their Stuart King, James II, had abandoned his thrones and was now rallying support.
Tension had built up over the decade before James came to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1685, as it became clear that his brother Charles II was not going to leave an heir. The English Parliament had tried to exclude James from the succession before Charles II died, but failed. By 1688, James II already had heirs. His first wife gave him two daughters, Mary and Anne Stuart, before she died. The girls’ mother had been Protestant, and so were they. Mary married William of Orange, and Anne wed Prince George of Denmark.
Then James II married again. The second time he took for his wife Mary of Modena, an Italian Roman Catholic, in a marriage negotiated by France. Parliament’s alarm increased when James converted to Catholicism, and reached fever pitch when his papist wife was delivered of a boy. James II refused to bring him up as a Protestant, as he himself had been raised, but promised to respect the Protestantism of his administration and country. His was a rather contradictory position: delicate and full of potential pitfalls.
James refused to let his government interfere in the natural course of the Stuart inheritance of the British Crown: God willed that the King and Queen have a healthy Catholic son. Opposite him, the government refused to contemplate a papist ascending the thrones on any terms. An impasse quickly developed between Westminster and St James’s until, just after Christmas 1688, James II suddenly fled to France. His first cousin, Louis XIV, welcomed James, his wife, his son, extended family and entourage, as the victims of a heretical state. James set up a temporary Court in exile, but planned to return within months.
James saw his departure merely as a tactical retreat. He admired the absolutism of the monarchies of France and Spain and assumed his government would not be unable to function without the King to sign laws. Parliament would have to ask him back. Of course he would accept, if Parliament backed down over the succession issue that had provoked this traumatic flight.
He was correct that the government required a monarch. But Parliament reacted to the ultimatum of his departure by inviting Mary Stuart, James’s Protestant daughter from his first marriage, to become their monarch. She accepted. Her husband, William of Orange, insisted on having equal status with his wife and William and Mary jointly assumed the thrones.
The crisis escalated at speed and within weeks the Highlands exploded into lawlessness and violence. The whole event would trigger the most serious conflict to gnaw at the foundations of Great Britain for the next sixty years. James’s departure provoked yet another revolution in a century of revolutions. And it led to the birth of Jacobitism, and its followers, Jacobites, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.
All through the winter of 1688/89, Scottish politicians fought for political power in Scotland with growing intensity. In the race to get control of the Scottish Parliament all constitutional principles were dumped. On 17 December, the Privy Council, including Tarbat, now back in government, sent a letter to James II, who had fled and then returned, asking him to call a free parliament. When James fled for a second time, they lost confidence in him. By 24 December they petitioned William, urging him to call a free Parliament.
In March the following year, a divided Parliament in Edinburgh passed a vote to support William and Mary against her father, James II. In Inverness, the Presbyterian-dominated Council swore allegiance to the new joint monarchs. But not everyone in Scotland agreed with the ruling. Many of the Gaelic-speaking and Episcopalian Highlanders remained loyal to James, including the Earl of Dundee (‘Bonnie’ Dundee), and large elements of the clan elites, such as Alexander Fraser of Beaufort, Simon’s older brother. Alexander came home to raise the Fraser host for James II along with clansman Fraser of Foyers. Once more, the four kingdoms stood ready to plunge into battle along religious and dynastic lines. It was a truly awful prospect.
Inverness, harried by Jacobite troops, soon became the scene of ‘blood works, riots and fornications’, the Council minutes noted with understandable hysteria. Simon claimed that Alexander was the first man in the north to join Dundee’s Jacobite army: ‘My brother brought him all the rents in Meal and Corn’ from the Lovat estates, Simon boasted. Since Tarbat and Lord Murray had abandoned their royal patron to serve a new master, Alexander of Beaufort’s initiative incensed them.
Simon tried to follow his brother. He gathered arms, mounted a horse and rode out to join General Thomas Buchan’s Jacobite force (consisting mainly of Highlanders and soldiers from the MacDonald, MacLean, Cameron, MacPherson and Invermoriston Grants clans). He did not get very far: he was captured, confined and eventually allowed to return to Tomich. Hugh, Lord Lovat did not accompany Alexander either. As soon as his Mackenzie uncle and Murray brother-in-law had changed sides, he was told to stay at home and prevent his men from joining the rebel Jacobites. This Hugh signally failed to do. When he was told to muster the Frasers for King William he was left gathering the few men who had refused to march for James, to go with him south to his in-laws’ Atholl–Murray territory and there to retrieve his clansmen from his cousin Alexander, and put the Frasers under Lord Murray’s command.
When Hugh reached Perthshire, his soldiers lined up with some of the Atholl Militia and awaited orders. Hugh went inside to explain why so few Frasers had come with him. As they waited, Hugh’s men caught sight of the rest of their clan marching by, Alexander at their head, en route to join Bonnie Dundee. They broke ranks and rushed to the river, scooped water into their bonnets and drank the health of King James VII of Scotland and II of England. Clapping their hats back on their heads, they ran to join their kinsmen, asking Alexander for orders.
Murray and the Marquis of Atholl were enraged; they would not forget this challenge to their authority by one of the young Beauforts. The ineffectual Hugh returned home to Castle Dounie while the Marquis of Atholl packed and headed south to Bath, to take the waters for his health – and safety. The Jacobite head of a traditionally Jacobite clan, he could not be accused of treason by his new King and Queen if he was not in the country. He left Lord Murray, his son and heir, behind to take charge.
The two armies finally closed in on each other on 27 July 1689 at Killiecrankie, a rocky pass ten miles south of the Atholl–Murray seat of Blair Castle. Dundee had 2,500 men, mainly Highlanders – ‘the best untrained fighting men in Scotland’ – against 3,000 government dragoons, troops and infantry. Supposedly allies by marriage, Murray’s Atholl men and Hugh Lovat’s kinsmen fought each other at close quarters, and to the death. Though the Jacobites won the battle, inflicting terrible losses of up to 2,000 on the Dutchman’s army, over 600 Jacobite Highlanders lost their lives, including their brilliant leader, Bonnie Dundee. His death signalled the end of the uprisings, with government forces scoring a final victory weeks later, despite their losses, in Murray country at Dunkeld.
Amongst the Fraser casualties was Simon’s brother, Alexander. Badly wounded, his clansmen ‘carried him home in a litter’. Thomas and Simon laid him on his bed to rest, but weeks later Alexander died of his wounds. Simon became his father’s heir. Fraser gentlemen gathered at Tomich, wondering if Hugh Lovat at Dounie would mourn the death of his cousin Alexander and the other brave Frasermen who had died with him. Would he lament the defeat of the Stuart King and order the usual magnificent Highland wake for fallen kinsmen? Or would he celebrate with Lady Amelia her Murray clan’s share in the victory of William and Mary, and the killing of his kin at Killiecrankie?
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