The last beheading on Tower Hill

Some men are undone by the age that ends them. A few, rarer, end an age themselves, not by resisting it but by having outlived every version of it they once played. The eighteenth century, with its commissioners and its standing armies and its surveyors drawing roads through the glens, had no further use for a man who could speak five courts in five tongues and keep ledgers in none of them. It closed him out, at last, on a wooden platform on Tower Hill, in front of an audience that had paid sixpence for the privilege; and in closing him out, it closed out something larger, of which he had been the last working specimen.

THE LONG REHEARSAL

Simon Fraser, eleventh Lord Lovat, was born under Charles II in or about the year 1667, in a country where the chief of a Highland name could still raise five hundred men on a week's notice and treat with the King of France in his own person. He lived through the reigns of James VII and II, William and Mary, Anne, the first George, and into the reign of the second. He was schooled by Jesuits in Paris and by Protestant tutors at Aberdeen, and he kept both registers warm in his mouth for the rest of his life. In 1697, to make himself Lord Lovat by force of fact rather than law, he carried off the widow of his cousin at sword-point and married her under the pipes of his own men; the marriage was never recognised by her family, and the bride, by every account that survives, never forgave him. He was attainted, fled to France, served Louis XIV, returned, was pardoned, betrayed the Jacobite rising of 1715 to the Hanoverian government and was rewarded with the chiefship he had taken by violence sixteen years earlier. For thirty years thereafter he wrote letters: to Versailles, to Rome, to St James's, to Edinburgh Castle, to the agents of three pretenders and two kings. He kept copies of none of them, and his enemies kept copies of all.

THE LAST HAND

In the summer of 1745 the young Prince Charles Edward Stuart came ashore in Moidart with seven men, and the old Lord Lovat, then seventy-eight, did the thing he had done all his life. He sent his son out with the clan for the Prince, and his letters of loyalty to King George by the same week's post. He calculated, as he had always calculated, that one of the two would win and the other would forgive, and that the man who had supplied both with men and intelligence was the man who would stand, at the end, on whichever side of the throne required standing on. The calculation broke on Drummossie Moor on the sixteenth of April 1746. The Frasers under his son went into the second line at Culloden and were cut to pieces by grapeshot in twenty minutes. The Duke of Cumberland's dragoons came north into Fraser country within the month. Lovat, eighty and gouty and unable to walk, was carried into the hills on a litter by his own gillies, and was at last run to ground on an islet in Loch Morar, hidden in the hollow of a tree. The soldiers who found him took him out as one would take a badger from a sett. His private papers, in a locked chest at Beaufort, were already in the hands of the government. The chest contained, by Lord President Forbes's later count, sixty-eight letters which he would not have wished produced. They were produced.

MORNING ON TOWER HILL

The ninth of April 1747 came in cold and bright over the river. The Tower of London stood at his back as they led him out, the White Tower pale in the early sun, the ravens shifting on the wall. Tower Hill, that low rise outside the gate where the city had carried out its public deaths for four centuries, had been carpentered over for the occasion. The Sheriffs of London had ordered three great wooden stands built, raked like the galleries at a playhouse, and they had been let out at sixpence and a shilling a place. Three thousand people, by the count of the Daily Advertiser, had paid. The women had brought fans, the men canes; pie-sellers worked the edges of the crowd. The scaffold itself stood plain, a low platform with a block of oak in the middle of it, the block bearing the cuts of the axes of every notable head that had come off in living memory: Kilmarnock the year before, Balmerino the year before that, and back through the Russells and the Sidneys to a darkness in the wood that was Strafford and beyond. The headsman, John Thrift, stood at the rail with his axe across his arm, working the edge of it with a stone. The ringing of stone on steel carried clearly in the cold air. Lovat, on his stool by the rail, listened to it with the attention of a man who had heard a great deal of metal in his time and was curious as to the temper of this particular piece.

THE SECOND OF TIME

There is a kind of moment, granted to the very old, in which the long ledger of a life balances itself without further keeping. He sat on the stool and watched the headsman work the stone, and he thought, as men think on such mornings, of pen and paper. He had asked for pen and paper that morning to write to his son, and they had refused him; they were afraid, at eighty, of what he would write. He found that funny. The French ambassador's secretary had kissed his hand outside the Hôtel de Soubise in 1716 because the secretary believed he could place a Stuart on the throne of three kingdoms, and today three thousand Londoners had paid sixpence to watch him die. The arithmetic of a courtier's life is rarely so cleanly stated. He thought, in the rhythm of the stone on the axe, of Beaufort and the venison there, and of the woman he had carried off in 1697, dead these forty years, and of his son who was at that hour in the Tower beneath him, condemned and reprieved. He thought of the letter from the Old Pretender at Rome in his own neat clerk's hand, and of the letter from the Duke of Newcastle in another, and of how the two hands had written, in their separate decades, almost the same words: you are a man we cannot do without. They had both, in the end, done without him. He noticed, with the cool attention he had always given to a room, that the new viewing stand on his left, the largest of the three, was leaning a little out of true under the weight of those upon it; the carpenters had built it in three days and the timbers were green. He filed the observation as he had once filed an indiscretion at the French court, against the chance it might be of use. The block was ready. The axe was ready. He was, by every account he had ever kept of himself, also ready, and it surprised him not at all to find that this was true.

THE STAND FALLS

Then, from the left, a noise like a heavy lid coming down on a heavier box. A splintering crack, very loud, and then a second crack, longer, and then the long descending roar of three tiers of green timber giving way under the weight of perhaps four hundred people. The stand went down in one motion, the upper tier folding onto the middle and the middle onto the lower, and the people went down with it, fans and canes and pie-papers and all. The screaming began a half-second behind the falling. The crowd around the scaffold turned, as one body, to watch the broken stand instead of the man on the platform. Soldiers ran along the front of it with their muskets held crosswise to keep order. From under the timbers came the noise that human beings make when they have been crushed but are not yet dead. Lovat stood up from his stool, took hold of the platform rail to steady himself, looked across the Hill at the wreck, and laughed. It was not a hard laugh; it was the laugh of an old man at a piece of theatre that has surprised him at the end of a long life of theatre. He had to lean on the rail for it. To the sheriff at his elbow, in a voice carried by the cold air to the front of the crowd, he said the thing that the broadsheets printed next morning and that has been quoted of him ever since: the more mischief, the better the sport.

THE BLOCK

He knelt then. He said a prayer in the Latin he had learned from the Jesuits in Paris seventy years before, and gave the headsman the customary purse, and laid his neck on the oak. Thrift, who had bungled Balmerino's stroke the year before and had never been forgiven for it, took this one cleanly in a single fall of the axe. The head was lifted by the hair and shown to the four quarters of the Hill, and the crowd cheered, as the custom of the country required. The body was carried down the steps and into the Tower, and laid that evening in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where it lies still. Beneath the platform, twenty bodies had been pulled from the broken stand, with as many more crushed but breathing; the parish of All Hallows by the Tower buried the dead at the cost of the borough through the following week, the names written into the register in the careful hand of the curate, Highlanders and Londoners and a Dutch sailor among them.

WHAT THE AGE DID NEXT

No man was beheaded in Britain after him. The scaffold on Tower Hill was taken down within the twelvemonth and the timbers sold for firewood; later traitors went to the gallows at Tyburn or to the new drop at Newgate, and the axe passed into the keeping of the Armouries, where it is. The Disarming Act of 1746 had already forbidden the tartan and the pipes and the carrying of arms in the Highlands; the Heritable Jurisdictions Act of 1747, passed while his trial was still hot in the lords, took from chiefs like him the courts in which they had judged their own people for six centuries. The roads of General Wade ran on through the glens. The Fraser title was attainted with him and was not borne again by his line until 1837, when it was restored to his great-great-grandson by Act of Parliament. The clan went on. It raised the 78th and the 71st for the Crown it had fought at Culloden, and sent Frasers afterwards to every continent on which the British army served: a Prime Minister of Australia, an explorer of the Fraser River in British Columbia, generals, judges, a long roll of soldiers. The diaspora carried the name further than any of his letters had ever reached.

CODA

The age that ended on the ninth of April 1747 was the age in which an eighty-year-old chief, schooled in two churches and three courts, could play five reigns of British and French and Stuart politics off one another for sixty years and be undone, in the end, only by a locked chest at Beaufort. The age that began the next morning kept ledgers in triplicate, sent its surveyors into the hills with chains, and did not, on the whole, find old men funny. The block on which he knelt is in the White Tower still. You can put your hand on it. The deepest of the cuts in the oak, the one made on the cold bright morning of his death, is the freshest in the wood.