The Last Highlander Read Online Free Page A

in Inverness to prepare them for university and the battles ahead.
    Though barely twelve miles distance, Beauly and Tomich were a world away from the regional capital. Born and bred Invernessians did not much like Highlanders. The Beaufort Fraser boys were a blend of Highland and Lowland. Wild hill men caused trouble to a royal burgh that prided itself on its modern civic and religious values. Townsfolk were terrorised by the ‘bare-arsed banditti ’ who ‘broke open their doors in the night time, and dig through their houses, plundering and taking away the whole moveables, and oftimes assassinating several poor people in their beds’, before heading back to their strongholds in the wilderness.
    As civil society settled under Charles II’s rule, Inverness was more Lowland in character. Port towns like Inverness, and the sea lanes they sat on, thronged with traffic again. Over a hundred boats and ships could be anchored in Inverness harbour at any time; they strained at their ropes, ready to take scholars, curious travellers and merchants and their goods to and from the Continent. The Baltic ports, the great medical and ecclesiastical centres at Leyden and Paris, and the trading cities of the Hanseatic League, were more accessible and more familiar to educated Highlanders than most English cities and ports. Thousands of skiffs, fishing boats and ships hauling iron, coal and timber, fish and exotic commodities from all over the known world, sailed in and out of the lesser ports round the coast of northern Scotland.
    Between Tomich and Inverness, the men and places that shaped young Simon Fraser’s outlook were at once insular and remote from Edinburgh and London, but also cosmopolitan and Europhile. Dutch Leyden was closer in every way than English London. Thomas Beaufort wanted to educate his boys to belong in all these worlds – Continental and clan, Highland and Lowland, theocratic and Renaissance humanist. A period at grammar school in Inverness would brush up their Presbyterian theology, and their Latin and Greek. Simon would later study at university in Aberdeen, where he would be taught in these classical languages, as young men were across Europe. He needed to be articulate and literate in both.
    The grammar school at Inverness was a room under the roof of the Presbyterian church on Kirk Street. The building stood on the banks of the River Ness. The Kirk Session of Elders that administered the school’s business also interfered freely in the lives of the townsfolk. In fact, they saw it as a duty, and ran themselves ragged to keep the people ‘godly’ in the face of Highlanders’ fondness for ‘uncleanness, riots, and extravaiging ’ – that is, strolling about the streets when they should be at Divine service. When Simon was a boy, Scotland was a Presbyterian theocracy and men could be hanged for blasphemy, such as denying the reincarnation of Christ or doubting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
    Along with the Town House, the Market Cross, the Court House, the Gaol and Armoury, the church was one of the matrices of Inverness life. Not only did it house the box pews in which each family shut themselves up to worship; in the body of the kirk, there were also desks for various traders to work from, as well as the school in the attic. Many of Simon’s classmates could not buy a seat in the schoolroom, let alone a table. The children would peer through the holes in the floorboards, watching the men below negotiate with locals and strange-looking foreigners. Heather and grass on the floors muffled draughts and softened the boards under their bottoms. A Lowland minister unhappily stationed to the Highlands, described the students crouching there ‘like pigs in a sty’. Slates in hand, they gazed up at their dominie, Mr Jaffray, who also yearned to return south as soon as possible from this strange place. ‘English ministers did not know much more of Scotland than they did of Tartary,’ another Lowlander