page_title: Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat
section_title: Open violence
hierarchical_section_title: Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat / Open violence
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving of Dunvegan Castle, ca. 18 x 12.5 cm
context_page_description: Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, nicknamed 'the Fox', was a Scottish Jacobite and Chief of Clan Fraser of Lovat, known for his feuding and changes of allegiance. In 1715, he had been a supporter of the House of Hanover, but in 1745 he changed sides and supported the Stuart claim on the crown of the United Kingdom. Lovat was among the Highlanders defeated at the Battle of Culloden and convicted of treason against the Crown, following which he was sentenced to death and subsequently beheaded.
context_section_description: 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, heir to Lord Saltoun and unrelated to the highland Frasers.
  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.
caption: Dunvegan Castle circa 1790
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