Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, ( 1667 – 9 April 1747) was a Scottish landowner and head of Clan Fraser of Lovat. Convicted of high treason for his role in the Jacobite rising of 1745, he was the last man in Britain to be executed by beheading.
Fraser's family had been associated with the Jacobite cause during the late 17th century: hoping to gain support in a dispute over ownership of the Fraser lands, he remained in contact with the exiled Stuart court. During the Jacobite rising of 1715, Fraser supported the government and was accordingly granted ownership of the confiscated Lovat estate; by the late 1730s, however, he was again secretly in contact with the exiles. During the Jacobite rising of 1745, he first gave assurances of his loyalty to both sides, but ultimately supplied Fraser levies to the Jacobite Army.
While in hiding from government troops in Lochaber following the Battle of Culloden, he was captured near Loch Morar by the Royal Navy. Brought to London, Lovat was tried for treason by his peers in the House of Lords, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed on Tower Hill on 9 April 1747. Lord Lovat was both praised by Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir AlasdairEdited by Sgàire Uallas (2020), Aiseirigh: Òrain le Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alastair, An Clò Glas, West Montrose, Ontario. pp. 84-87.John Lorne Campbell (1979), Highland Songs of the Forty-Five, Arno Press, New York City. pp. 106-115. and had his future execution accurately predicted by Maighstir Iain Mac Fhearchair"Simon, Lord Lovat's Warning", by Colin Chisholm, The Celtic Magazine, Volume 7, November 1881, pp. 49-52. in the Scottish Gaelic bardic poetry of the era. Lord Lovat has also appeared in multiple works of historical fiction published since, including novels by John Buchan, Neil Munro, S.G. Maclean and Diana Gabaldon.
Early life
Simon was the second son of Thomas Fraser of Beaufort (1631–1699) and Lady Sybilla MacLeod (d. 1682), daughter of John Mór MacLeod, 16th Chief of Clan MacLeod. The Beaufort Frasers were Lord Lovat, hereditary chiefs of the highland Clan Fraser. Simon was tutored privately at his home near Beauly. He was a capable student, becoming fluent in English, French and Gaelic, as well as gaining a solid grounding in Latin.
Simon's older brother, Alexander, died from wounds received fighting for the Jacobites at the victorious Battle of Killiecrankie. Simon, now his father's heir, left home to study at King's College, Aberdeen, where he was a "diligent student" and graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1695.
At this point Simon was at a crossroads, owing to the poor leadership of the clan by Hugh Fraser, 9th Lord Lovat (1666–1696). Recognising the threat posed to it by the expanding power of the nearby Clan Mackenzie, as well as its ally the Atholl Murrays, Simon of Beaufort needed to ensure his father's succession to the lordship. There were two avenues available to him to pursue this claim: the law or the army. He chose the latter. Accordingly, he went to Edinburgh and undertook to recruit three hundred men from his clan to form part of a regiment in the service of William III and Mary II. This was done more to ensure a body of well-trained soldiers under his influence than loyalty to the government. However, a suspicious Lord John Murray (brother of Hugh Fraser's wife, Amelia Murray) was colonel of Simon's regiment and he was only given a lieutenancy, not a salaried captainship.
In early 1696, whilst on a trip to London in the company of both Simon of Beaufort and Lord John Murray, Hugh assigned the succession of the Lovat title to the Beaufort Frasers. Hugh died that same year, and Thomas of Beaufort (Simon's father) then took on the title of 10th Lord Lovat, but the succession was to be disputed by Lord John Murray, now the Earl of Tullibardine and the most powerful man in Scotland.
Open violence
After a fierce verbal encounter in Edinburgh, when Tullibardine attempted to make Simon renounce his claim to the lordship, Simon went to Castle Dounie to negotiate with Hugh's widow Amelia for the hand of her young daughter (also called Amelia). Tullibardine responded by removing his niece to Blair Castle, stronghold of the Murrays. It was his intention that she marry Alexander Fraser of Philorth, heir to Lord Saltoun, and who was unrelated to the Frasers of the Gàidhealtachd.
Simon responded to this by kidnapping the young Master of Saltoun when he arrived in Fraser territory in an attempt win local support for the marriage. By having a gallows built outside the window of his prison and threatening to hang him, Simon successfully dissuaded Alexander from marrying the heiress. Although this incident was characteristic of a private clan feud, Tullibardine had no intention of letting the matter rest. He declared the Frasers had risen in open rebellion against the Crown, and harried the colonel in charge of the government barracks at Fort William to proceed against Fraser.
Before the Crown could respond, however, Simon undertook an act in October 1697 which was to have dire consequences for both himself and others. "If he could not have Amelia the daughter, he would have Amelia the mother". Whilst at Castle Dounie he had an Episcopal minister brought in to marry them. Her family, the most powerful in Scotland, was naturally enraged by this act of violence. He later treated it as a practical joke without legal validity; they separated in December 1697 and he married twice more before Amelia's death on 6 May 1743, without seeking divorce.
Once Simon allowed his wife to rejoin her family at Blair Castle, the Privy Council and Court of Session issued "Letters of Intercommuning", preventing people from "communing" with Simon, his father and any of his followers. Moreover, they could be brought in "dead or alive". A military expedition of both Atholl Murray men and government troops was sent to Fraser country in February 1698 to achieve this, but they failed to capture him. Simon and his father made good their escape to the highlands, and the troops could do little but destroy Fraser property.
They were eventually cited to answer two charges: forced marriage and rape, as well as raising men in arms. In September 1698 – and still notable for their absence – Simon, his father, and twenty leading men of the clan, were convicted of the capital crime of rebellion. Eventually Simon and his father took refuge at Dunvegan Castle on Skye. This was the ancestral home to the McLeods, his mother's family. It was here in May 1699 that the 69 year old Thomas died, still with a price on his head. Simon now assumed the title of Lord Lovat, but he was an outlaw and unable to claim his estates. Simon was obliged to bury his father at Dunvegan rather than the traditional burial place of Lovat Frasers, at Wardlaw, near Beauly. (Eventually, on securing the title, he erected a notably extravagant memorial stone at Wardlaw Mausoleum.)
Despite these tribulations, Fraser still commanded the loyalty of his clan, not least because of the Atholl Murrays' "systematic attempt to ravage the properties of those Fraser gentlemen well disposed to Simon's cause". After his return from Skye, Simon Fraser commanded about 300 armed followers and successfully ambushed some 600 Athollmen and government soldiers near Inverness. Simon was dissuaded from massacring them, but two of Tullibardine's brothers were forced to kiss the tip of his sword. The enemy troop were then made to run the gauntlet. In this, Simon showed he was capable of fulfilling an important role of a highland chief, that of military leader.
Royal pardon Simon was facing nearly impossible odds in his attempts to gain control of the Fraser lands, and the law offered him no opportunity for recourse. Both Tullibardine and his ally, George Mackenzie, Viscount of Tarbat, had a firm control of the Edinburgh judiciary. However, he found a powerful ally in Archibald Campbell, tenth Earl (and after 1701, first Duke) of Argyll and chief of the powerful Clan Campbell. Argyll advised Simon to go to London and seek a pardon from King William, whilst informing William in a letter of the "chaos and hostility" caused by Tullibardine in his pursuit of Simon. Other powerful voices were to support Argyll's opinion, and ultimately this was to sway the King, now concerned to keep the peace in Scotland whilst he fought a war in Flanders. Granted a pardon in 1700, Simon was at last free to assume the title of Lord Lovat in the ancestral residence at Castle Dounie. Argyll was himself elevated to a Dukedom, and his rise seemed to presage Tullibardine's fall as well as Simon's advancement.
This improvement in Simon's fortunes was not to last. The business of the forced marriage and rape was unresolved (it being a matter concerning private individuals, not the Crown), and the Murrays did not relent on this charge. When he failed to appear in court in February 1701 to answer the charge of "rapt and hamesucken", he was again outlawed. This was followed up a year later by more "letters of intercommuning" (known more dramatically as a "Commission of Fire and Sword"). In March 1702 William III died, and Queen Anne succeeded to the throne. She favoured Tullibardine, rather than Argyll.
A final blow was received in mid-1702 when Amelia, the 13-year-old daughter of Hugh, the 9th Lord Lovat, married Alexander Mackenzie, who took the name 'Alexander Mackenzie of Fraserdale'.Alexander Mackenzie of Fraserdale This supposedly made him a Fraser, and by the terms of Hugh's marriage contract of 1685, his first born son would inherit the title and estates of Lovat. The Mackenzie takeover of Fraser lands was very close to fruition. The newly married couple moved into Castle Dounie while Simon was in London, seeking to meet the new Queen. On Argyll's advice, Lovat left Britain and headed to a place that might offer a solution to the ongoing issue of his inheritance: the court of the exiled Stuarts, at St Germain-en-Laye in France.
At the court of exiles After 15 years of exile, the family of James II was still hoping to regain the thrones of England and Scotland. The elder James had died a few months before Simon's arrival, but his 14-year-old son James stood ready. However, the court-in-exile was divided into two factions. One, headed by the Earl of Middleton ("good tempered, affable and patient") favoured a peaceful accession by young James to the throne of England on the death of Anne. The other faction was headed by the Duke of Perth ("proud and passionate") which saw an armed rising in Scotland, assisted materially by France, as the most likely way to restore the family to its former glory. Simon gravitated towards the Duke of Perth's faction, not least because Simon's cousin, John McLean, already belonged to it.
One major step Fraser took to advance his cause was to convert to Catholicism. The court was ostentatiously Catholic, with James' mother Mary of Modena setting the standard for piety, and Middleton had himself recently converted. Once a Catholic, Simon was also able to secure a private audience with the King of France, Louis XIV, at Versailles. Here, speaking in "good French with a Scots accent", he put forward a plan for a rising by the Jacobite clans of the highlands, aided by French troops, arms and money. Later, he added flesh to these plans. About five thousand French troops would land on the east coast of Scotland, at Dundee. At the same time, five hundred men were to land on the west coast and seize Fort William or Inverlochy. Together, they would march towards Edinburgh, gathering men from the clans as they progressed. The involvement of the highlanders was "the main and the novel feature" of Simon's plan. It has also been suggested by later writers that this plan would form the basis of both major Jacobite uprisings, in 1715 and 1745.