government troops were given permission to ransack the Aird of Lovat as they had in the months following the Civil War. After this, Jacobite soldiers came through the Lovat estates: since Lord Lovat had led out men for William of Orange, they assumed the clan had turned Williamite. They plundered freely, robbing the people of anything they could find. By the time peace was declared, the weakness and incoherence in the Fraser leadership had left Fraser country devastated by both sides, more than once. Without a strong chief, everything in Fraser country was open to predation by all comers, apparently.
The Reverend James expressed alarm at Murray–Mackenzie control. These ‘strangers’, he said, ‘prove but spies amongst us, discover our weakness, take all the advantage of us they can, fledge their wings with our wealth, and so fly away and fix it in a strange country, and we get no good of it.’ They leased Lovat lands to men from their own clan depriving the chief’s own kin of income and breaking up their inherited territories. Then Murray had tried to take the men away and make them fight against their rightful King. These lessons were not lost on Simon. He later claimed that he was nurtured ‘to display a violent attachment’ to King James from his ‘earliest youth’.
The birth of the Jacobite cause had taken Thomas of Beaufort’s eldest son and ruined his lands. Thomas could not afford to fund Simon through university until his affairs were in better order and the country at peace. On 1 July 1690, William decisively defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. James fled for the last time, ending his rule. By the autumn of 1691, Beaufort felt secure enough to send his son and heir, Simon, to Aberdeen.
The Highlands took a long time to settle under the new regime. Simon was in the first year at university when William lost patience with his Scottish subjects’ continuing flirtation with Jacobitism and refusal to swear allegiance to him and Mary. He agreed to a gesture to pacify them once and for all, needing to release British soldiers from security duties in Scotland to fight his European wars, as head of the Protestant Alliance against the territorial and religious ambitions of France’s Louis XIV.
In January 1692, William signed instructions to separate the Glencoe MacDonalds and make an example of them, by finding a way to ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. The justification was the delay by MacIain, chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds, in submitting formally to the government’s representative and obtaining the indemnity William offered to former rebels. The commander of the Scottish army, Livingstone, wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Hill, the officer in charge of the garrison nearest to Glencoe. ‘Here is a fair occasion for you to show that your garrison serves to some use … begin with Glencoe and spare nothing that belongs to him, but do not trouble the Government with prisoners.’ Hill was horrified. Calling the order ‘a nasty, dirty thing’, he said the proposed action was uncalled-for: the district where the Glencoe MacDonalds lived was calm; they did not need violent pacification. Too late.
On the night of 13 February, MacIain’s people offered shelter to government troops whom they believed were en route to bringing in the rebel Glengarry MacDonalds. At 5 a.m., Glenlyon, in charge of the government soldiers, began the slaughter. MacDonalds were bound, shot and then bayoneted for good measure. After the killings, they burned houses and drove the stock off to Fort William to feed the garrison, leaving ‘poor stripped women and children, some with child, and some giving suck, wrestling against a storm in mountains and heaps of snow, and at length overcome’ they lay down and died.
The bloodshed at Glencoe blighted King William’s rule, and left a deep, long-standing hostility towards him in much of Scotland. To bring Lord Murray back into the government fold and dissolve the stain left on their reputation by Killiecrankie, the Scottish Secretary James Johnston persuaded William to put Murray at the head of the enquiry into Glencoe, and find a scapegoat for the atrocity. That scapegoat was Dalrymple, a rival of Johnston’s, who had added the instruction ‘extirpate that sept of thieves’. Though William undertook sweeping reforms of his Scottish ministry, the enquiry’s report would do little to soothe Highlander and Jacobite anger.
By the winter of 1694/95, after ten years of trying, Hugh Lovat had failed to achieve the one thing required of him. The lack of surviving male Lovat heirs caused Murray and Atholl increasing alarm. Lady Amelia produced both girls and boys, but only the girls (Amelia, Katherine and Margaret) lived. There was another infant boy, John, but the odds on him surviving were dreadful. Hugh Lovat was the only son of an only son, both of whom had died in their twenties. It was time to return to the marriage contract, and enshrine it in law.
Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat’s family contained a lot of lawyers. He was a lawyer; his brother, Sir Roderick Mackenzie (Lord Prestonhall), was a Law Lord. They reviewed the contents of the marriage contract. The first part of it stated the obvious. The Lovat–Fraser inheritance went through the boys. Then, it asserted that any surviving child of Hugh and Amelia would take precedence over the next male heirs, who were the Beauforts. All that an heiress need do was marry someone who already bore the name of Fraser. The normal procedure among the clans suffering the iniquity of an heiress would be to marry her to the nearest male heir. Given Thomas’s great age, in this case it would be his son and heir, Simon. So far, all this contract did was state the conventions governing marriage at the top of any kindred with a sizeable inheritance at stake. In other words, the contract was completely unnecessary. However it innovated in the next clause.
In 1685, Mackenzie and Murray had stated that if the inheritance did come down to an heiress, all her husband need do was assume the name of Fraser to fulfil the requirement that she marry someone ‘of the name of Fraser’. Then they would both inherit the Lovat titles and estates. The heiress could be married off to anyone from any clan in effect. This threatened to write out the Beaufort Fraser men, Thomas, Simon and John.
The marriage of an heiress to a man from another clan had the most serious implications for the heiress’s clan and its territories. This freshly made ‘Fraser’ husband would enter his wife’s inheritance right at the top and the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. The clan the husband came from, to whom of course he owed all his prior loyalty and affection, could eliminate the Frasers’ presence in their own country, and take over their assets. If the heiress married a Mackenzie, the chieftainship would be conveyed to him. If she married a Murray cousin, it would be conveyed to him.
If Hugh died without signing the ratification of their contract, a Fraser with some legal training might easily have this specious document dismissed. Then the Murrays’ power base and their exercise of power in the Highlands would be seriously weakened. The old Marquis of Atholl urged his son to get a move on. The Lovat estates are ‘the best feather in our wing’ he reminded Lord Murray. They must not ‘lose’ their ‘keystone’ after a decade of growing influence.
Murray presented the ratification document to Hugh Lovat, who signed it. Murray then took it to the Court of Session to be ratified in law. With the stroke of a pen, Hugh cut Simon from his place on the family tree, and was very likely handing over his inheritance to a girl. He had four; one was going to survive. Letting himself be manipulated by ‘natures stronger than his own’, as Simon noted tersely, Hugh overturned the tradition and logic of clanship. He opened the door wider to the danger of loss of the clan to another, and put huge power in the hands of whoever controlled the marriage prospects of the heiress. For an ineffectual man, Hugh had created something that had powerful implications for the clan and his family.
In his poky student lodgings in Aberdeen in the spring of 1695, Simon saw that his family were being juggled out of position. But he had to move carefully. Hugh’s baby son might survive. If so, Simon would only ever be the Laird of Beaufort. Lord Murray could be a valuable connection for someone like him. King William was starting to equip Murray with all the trappings that made power work – royal patronage, commissions and influence at Court. Murray had cash and jobs to distribute. He was networking to get all Scotland and half the British administration in his hands. Simon had to remember that, dislike him though he did, Murray could bring Simon, the scion of a clan now closely allied to Murray’s own, forward in the world. For now, Simon needed to be part of his enemy’s faction in Scotland.
It was therefore no surprise that after completing his first degree, Simon started on postgraduate work in civil law – specifically property rights. By becoming a lawyer, then a judge, he fought to equip