Fearsome and devilish

This life of the 11th Lord Lovat, executed on Tower Hill in 1747, in the aftermath of the ‘Forty-Five’ Rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, is primarily a work of pietas. Its author is the daughter-in-law of the last Lord Lovat, who landed with the first fighting troops of the D-Day invasion of Europe, striding ahead of them accompanied only by his piper. But Sarah Fraser deserves to be acclaimed as a notable biographer, too, for she tells a complex and sometimes bewildering story which she has amassed from a vast quantity of often intractable material. This is a brave and meaty book.

The years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the accession of George III in 1760 constituted the great age of double-dealing in British politics. There was no rightful monarch, only a parliamentary one, and no one knew who would occupy the throne for long. As a result, almost everyone of significance, from the great Duke of Marlborough down, had dealings with both sides. North of the border, and still more beyond the Highland Line, the sense of insecurity was even greater, for the stakes were higher; and virtually every head of a landowning family was in secret correspondence with both the Stuarts and Government.

Simon Lovat was a product of this duplicity. He came from a junior branch of the Frasers, a vast fighting clan who had fought for William the Conqueror, and occupied 500 square miles of territory to the west of Inverness. We cannot even be sure of the date of his birth, and for much of his early manhood he was known as ‘Captain Beaufort’. The Frasers were, and still are, an astonishingly handsome race, especially the men, and Lovat was a giant, of great strength and endurance, though he appeared to his many enemies more like an ogre.