Free The Last Highlander by Sarah Fraser Page A

feuds never die’, as the Reverend James Fraser counselled him. If it came to a feud he could not see how he might expect to win. Over the last two decades the Murrays had amassed a regiment and a militia force of their own. Tullibardine, as King’s High Commissioner, enjoyed huge power over the courts and Parliament. If Simon provoked the Murrays, they would surely attack. In the end the solution seemed obvious. The two sides must be brought together. He and the heiress, young Amelia, must be contracted to marry. This was the path of peace.
    In April 1697, Simon headed to Castle Dounie to negotiate with Hugh’s widow for the hand, at puberty, of the heiress Amelia. Tullibardine reacted immediately. He ordered the girl to be whisked from her mother, the dowager Lady Lovat, and be taken to his Perthshire stronghold, Blair Castle. Simon meanwhile moved into Castle Dounie itself and sent his father to a safehouse on the Lovat Stratherrick estates.
    When Simon said of his kin that ‘the Highland clans did not consider themselves as bound by the letter of the law, like the inhabitants of the low country’ around Inverness, ‘but to a man would regard it as their honour and their boast, to cut the throat, or blow out the brains of anyone … who should dare to disturb the repose of their laird’, he had his Stratherrick clansmen in mind. High above Loch Ness, Stratherrick concealed itself and its people behind the trees and rocks scaling the steep slopes along the south shore of the loch. Fertile fields around lairds’ houses nurtured cattle and rigs of corn in a sea of moorland wilderness. The Frasers who lived there existed in accordance with the values of the clan system. Financially, they depended on a traditional chief of the sort Simon desired to be. The elderly Lord Lovat would be safe among these men.
    From Dounie, the dowager Lady Lovat complained to her family: ‘Young Beaufort is still here and does not intend to go from this place till his own time. They are more obdurate than ever, and delude the people extremely.’ Simon, the chief’s son, felt that the chief’s son living in the chief’s stronghold was not delusional. The widow of a dead chief had to make room for the living one, or move to a dower house.
    ‘The neighbourhood are all knaves, and for him,’ the Marquis of Atholl growled when he read his daughter’s letters. It maddened him that they had failed to kill young Beaufort in Edinburgh when they had the chance. After seizing Amelia, Atholl wrote to the Fraser lairds advising them to trust him rather than rally to ‘Captain Fraser’. The old Marquis ‘would find out a true Fraser and a man of handsome fortune that would support their whole name’. This was a dangerous time for the Murrays. Removing young Amelia gave them possession of a serious claimant to the inheritance, but it removed her from the objects of her claim.
    Simon was dismayed to find that some Fraser lairds from the rich low-lying country around Inverness were hesitating to enlist for him. Others, such as Robert Fraser and his brother – both lawyers – had thrown over the ties of clanship in order to advance themselves. Even they advised the Murrays it was a step too far not to bring in a Fraser as chief and suggested they could find an alternative within the impoverished Saltoun Frasers from along the coast towards Aberdeen. Simon cursed the two lawyers like an Old Testament prophet. ‘Robert, the prime author of these misfortunes, died under the visible judgement of God,’ he wrote. Robert’s brother ‘may yet be overtaken with the just punishment of his crimes’, he added hopefully.
    The response Atholl received from the Highland lairds was unequivocal. They ‘would have no borrowed chief!’ Moreover, if Saltoun ‘dared to enter their country in hostility to Thomas, Lord Lovat … his head should answer the infringement … We have put on a full resolution to defend our lands, possessions, goods, lives, wives,