Allan Massie
Taking the Low Road
The Last Highlander: Scotland’s Most Notorious Clan Chief, Rebel & Double Agent
By Sarah Fraser
HarperPress 448pp £20 order from our bookshop
Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, was found guilty of treason and beheaded on Tower Green in 1747, the last aristocrat in Britain to be killed in this manner. He was almost eighty and went to his death cheerfully. He declared that he died ‘a martyr for my country’, though few would have agreed with this claim, and said that he hoped ‘to be in heaven by one o’clock, or I should not be so merry now’. His numerous enemies might have thought the alternative destination more probable. Hogarth sketched his portrait while the old man was travelling as a prisoner from his native Highlands to London; ‘There he sits, almost sprawls,’ Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson wrote in his history of the first three Jacobite Risings, ‘obscene, gross, faintly satanic, still bursting with life, awaiting the axe with cynical amusement.’
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