The Last Highlander by Sarah Fraser

Author:Sarah Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Matters of life and death, 1718–21

‘The most sincere sentiments of my heart’

– LOVAT TO THE GENTLEMEN OF HIS CLAN

Coming back to his lodgings from Parliament, Lovat collapsed in exhaustion. Servants pulled shut the windows of his rented house. The panes kept out the ‘gross stinking Foggs, scents and vapours’ they believed carried disease in to the patient. Banked up with blankets, temperature rising, he longed to change the foul London air for that of the Highlands. He believed he was going to die. This was the end of his journey, to fall before the finishing post, one foot over the threshold of his home and estates, one foot hanging over the abyss. He worried that he had failed in his responsibilities. After 500 years, the Fraser name would be gone in a generation.

A physician arrived with his bag of ‘lancets, boluses, confections, and electuaries’. From the pocket of his frockcoat, he tugged out ‘a big sand glass’ and counted Lord Lovat’s pulse. The first treatment he recommended was a phlebotomising – blood-letting. British people shed more blood in peace than in time of war. The doctor then consulted manuals of the healing arts. For a pestilential fever like this, Lovat could ‘have a cataplasm of snails beaten and put to the soles of the feet’. Fevers induced sore eyes. For this he might take ‘pigeon’s blood hot to the eyes, or a young caller pigeon slit in the back’. Despite trying a selection of remedies, Lovat got weaker. By 4 April 1718, he could barely sit up or hold a pen. It was time to dictate a testament for his people. He must tell them what he died for.

‘My Dear Friends,’ he said, ‘this is the last time of my life I shall have occasion to write to you … The greatest happiness I proposed to myself under heaven was to make you live happy.’ What of lasting value would his words leave? He had produced no son. He enjoyed no permanent and unchallenged possession of his titles and clan territories. ‘I designed my poor commons live at their ease and have them always well clothed and well armed, after the Highland manner, and not to suffer them to wear low country clothes,’ like trousers, ‘but make them live like their forefathers, with the use of their arms, that they might always be in a condition to defend themselves against their enemies, and do service to their friends.’ The letter was a manifesto on clanship’s values and fears. It was also a detailed picture of Lovat’s internal landscape, a vision that combined the imaginary and the historical. To his mind, this way of life was all that preserved them ‘from the wicked designs of the family of Tarbat [Mackenzies] and Glengarry, joined to the family of Athol’.

Should the Fraser gentry, ‘falsely, for little private interest and views, abandon your duty to your name and suffer a pretended heiress and her Mackenzie children to possess your country … to chase you

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