The Last Highlander Read Online Free Page B

concluded.
    He could have added that they cared less than they knew. They did not see the multi-layered and shifting array of words and images that entered Simon and his brothers’ minds. Simon’s clan homeland was so remote from the rest of Britain that southerners often made out their wills before venturing there. One traveller to the Highlands returned hugely relieved to get out. ‘I passed to English ground, and hope I may never go to such a country again. I thank God I never saw such another.’
    It was traditional for the Master of Lovat (the eldest son), any potential heirs, and the principal gentlemen of Clan Fraser to attend Aberdeen University. Simon Fraser went there later than his peers, after a gap of a few years. The young man who arrived in Aberdeen in 1691 to study was about twenty years old, high-minded, intellectually curious, charming, extremely ambitious and proud. Six foot tall in his stockinged feet, he was bright-eyed with a wide, well-shaped mouth half-smiling above a strong, set jaw. A lace jabot foamed at his neck and a toffee-toned extravaganza of a wig tumbled down his back. Every inch of him proclaimed a self-conscious young Highland gentleman, and a Royalist.
    In the 1690s half the population of Scotland lived north of the Highland line; Aberdeenshire was the most densely populated county. Aberdeen was divided into two parts: Old and New, the traditional and progressive incarnations of the town. The university had two colleges. Marischal College in New Aberdeen, founded in 1593, which was governed by a modern, Calvinist spirit; and King’s College in Old Aberdeen, where Simon came to study, as had his father, Thomas, his brother Alexander, and his mentor, the Reverend James, before him. King’s was founded in 1494 to the glory of James IV King of Scots, who died at Flodden Field. Roman Catholic until the mid-seventeenth century, King’s was established on a European Renaissance model, mimicking the universities at Paris and Bologna.
    On the chapel tower rose one of the glories of King’s: an open lantern spire. ‘A double arch of crossed stone’, its two stone arms cross over. On top of the lantern spire ‘there standeth a royal crown … upon the top of the crown a stone globe; above it a double cross gilded; intimating as it were by such a bearing, that it is the King’s College’. Here the Crown of earthly power was supported and raised on top of the House of God. Finally, a double cross perched like a gull on the summit of the globe. No one could fail to read the message: at King’s the power of Monarchy, Bishops, Lords and the Lord intertwined. Divine right led to global domination.
    As if to sober up the Royalists, God had smitten the crown on the spire in the previous generation, and it ‘was overthrown … by a furious tempest’. The Calvinists at Marischal College cheerfully mocked the Divine pretensions of the King’s College Stuart affiliation after the disaster, but Royalists recalled it was ‘quickly afterwards restored’ and ‘in a better forme’.
    Simon Fraser lived in its shadow for five years. As a young man of his times he was steeped in this sort of apprehension of the immanence and intervention of the Divine in human life. He had already known four monarchs, despite his young age: Charles II ruled at his birth, followed by the short reign of Charles’s brother, James II, before James had fled the thrones three years ago, refusing to renounce his Roman Catholicism and the rights of his Roman Catholic son and heir. By 1691, the solidly Protestant William III and Mary II co-ruled England, Scotland and Ireland. Like Cromwell before them, they maintained an experienced standing army in North Britain, quartered throughout Scotland with no regard for the local capacity to feed, water or house all these extra men.
    Haars , the sea mists breathed out of the North Sea when the cold sea air meets the warm air off the land, haunted the mud streets around the King’s