A Republican Descended From Kings ...

In which John discovers that his royal ancestor killed MacBeth ...

There are few things more galling for a passionate republican like myself, than to uncover a gang of kings amongst your ancestors. 

So when I discovered recently a line of descent among my forefathers stretching back to King Malcolm III of Scotland (and hence to King Robert the Bruce's family), I had to go and have a quiet sit down and a cup of chamomile tea. The fact that Malcolm III killed the villainous King MacBeth from Shakespeare's play, made me feel slightly better.

Then further research revealed MacBeth had been the subject of a hatchet job by Shakespeare, and was actually not a bad chap at all, at least by comparison with the generally murderous Scottish kings of the time. 

I've nursed a life-long animosity to the British royal family ... the antiquated accents; the improbable marital dramas; the opulence and waste of their palaces, castles and stately homes - notwithstanding a chance meeting with Princes Charles in London in the 1980s. On this occasion, to my surprise, the man struck me as having a suavite and charisma that I wasn't expecting. And a damn sharp suit. Until then, I'd thought of him as a faintly risible figure, with his strangled enunciation and suspect views on a whole range of social issues.

The encounter was at the first British Conference on Community Architecture. As an activist in Kings Cross, London, intent on a saving a violent, neglected and decayed Victorian housing estate from demolition, we had approached him in a shameless attempt to get royal backing. He had gone on record as favouring the retention of 19th century buildings in the face of the wholesale redevelopment of Victorian London in the late 20th century. Teetering as we were on the brink of obliteration we would take any allies would could get. 

And whatever else you say about Prince (now King) Charles, he had a fair bit of clout.

I've written about the Hillview Estate in previous blogs. 'Kings Cross Estate of Shame' as it was known in London's daily newspaper, the Evening Post, was as desperate and degenerate a place as you could find in 1980s London.

But I digress. I was telling you about my ancestors, the kings. Some years ago a relative had sent me the family tree of my grandmother, Jamesina Fraser. Jamesina and her ancestors had lived in Aberdeenshire in north-eastern Scotland for multiple generations. The family tree went back as far as a forester called Alexander Fraser, who had been born in Pitsligo in 1778 and had worked on the estate of the 17th Lord Saltoun. 

Oddly enough, the 17th Lord Saltoun was also called Alexander Fraser. 17th Lord Saltoun was descended from King Malcolm III of Scotland and also the family of King Robert the Bruce. Two Alexander Frasers, one a lord, one a commoner. Could employer and employee be related?

Lord Saltoun was a renowned warrior who had fought with the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The Clan Fraser history on the Electric Scotland website: "In the first four hours of the Battle of Waterloo ... he had two horses shot under him and a bullet through his shako. His rolled cloak was strapped across the pommel of his saddle, which was hurriedly shifted to successive mounts; and when it was later unrolled no less than seventeen French bullets were found in it!"

Lord Saltoun kept extensive journals, travelled the world on various military campaigns, and the Duke of Wellington referred to him as 'a pattern to the army both as a man and a soldier ...' 

17th Lord Saltoun

This was no upper class twit then, with a dissolute lifestyle and a habit of oppressing his peasant vassals. Despite my hostility to the aristocracy of Britain, this seemed like a man I could admire, even if much of his military career was in imperial ventures. 

I was rather pleased that my great, great, great, great grandfather had been his employee, and managed his forests while he was away dealing to Napoleon, the scourge of Europe. 

They were both called Alexander Fraser, and on further research, it became clear they were almost certainly related. 

A direct line of hereditary Lords named Saltoun (previously called the Lords Philorth) stretched back pretty much unbroken to the period when the Scots were struggling for their independence from the English in the 14th century, during the reign of the famous King Robert the Bruce. And these Scottish nobles were almost all called Alexander Fraser.

In these early years of King Robert the Bruce's reign, Sir Alexander Fraser of Touch Fraser was the head of Robert the Bruce's royal household. As a companion of King he shared his perils, fought at the famous Battle of Bannockburn, where King Robert vanquished the English. Sir Alexander Fraser sealed the Declaration of Scottish Independence in 1320 and then spawned a line of a dozen or so Lord Alexander Frasers, by marrying King Robert the Bruce's sister. 

Aside from setting up the date with his sister Mary, Robert the Bruce then conferred vast lands, confiscated from others, upon Lord Fraser, as his loyal follower. 

Alexander Fraser's wife Mary was captured by the English and spent four years in a cage in Roxburgh Castle. Edward I of England sent the following instructions: 'Let her be closely confined in an abode of stone and iron made in the shape of a cross, and let her be hung up out of doors in the open air at Berwick, that both in life and after her death, she may be a spectacle and eternal reproach to travellers.’

Water-boarding sounds like a breeze by comparison. 

Sir Alexander Fraser, Mary's husband, was killed at the battle of Dupplin 1332, and his son William killed at the battle of Neville's Cross. These were bloodthirsty times as the Scots continued to struggle to throw off the yoke of England. 

The next descendant in this lordly line, according to a chart entitled The Clan Fraser in Scottish History, the 1st Laird of Philorth, also called Alexander Fraser 'fought in the moonlight fight between the Douglases and the Percys in the Chevy Chase at Otterburn in 1388'. 

The Englishman Henry Percy, or 'Hotspur' as he was known to the Scots because of his haste into battle against them, appears as a character in Shakespeare's great play Henry IV. An ancient English ballad, 'The Ballad of Chevy Chase' retells this battle between the Scots and the English at Otterburn.

So far, these Alexander Frasers were distinguishing themselves by rabid hostility to the Sassenachs, and a predilection to getting themselves killed in battle. Remarkably, they all sired sufficient offspring before their deaths, to get my ancestors - and then eventually me - onto the planet.

The next notable Lord in this line, Sir Alexander Fraser, 3rd Laird of Philorth, who attended the Papal Jubilee in Rome 1450, 'made a mutual entail with his beloved cousin Hugh, Lord Fraser of Lovat, settling their estates on each other if their male descendants died out'. This Alexander established the 'Frasers of Memsie' - a tiny town in Aberdeenshire, in the15th century. I have a photograph of my grandmother, Jamesina Fraser, with her family in Memsie at the turn of the 19th century.

The multiple Lords Philorth (and then called Saltoun) that followed, through the 15th to 19th centuries, most of whom were called Alexander Fraser, had numerous younger brothers, called cadets, who although also called Fraser, didn't inherit the aristocratic lands, or title. This was the principal of primogeniture, which protected the hereditary booty of the lords from dissipation. Tough for the younger brothers, many of whom then went off to the colonies to make their fortunes.

But many stayed in the small area south of Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire, and barely moved at all, and thus the birth records of both my ancestor the forestor, Alexander Fraser, and his descendants, give the same birthplaces - Pitsligo, for several generations, until my grandmother, Jamesina.

So given the the concentration of the lordly Fraser 'cadets' in the same small area south of Fraserborough, and given the disposition of the Frasers in my family tree to also remain in this small area for generations, it seems certain the Lord Alexander Fraser, hero of the Battle of Waterloo, and my 4 x great grandfather, Alexander Fraser, his forester, were related, perhaps through the 3rd Laird of Philorth who established the Frasers of Memsie in the 15th century.

All in all, worthy of at least one cup of nerve-settling chamomile tea.

It would be fair to say that King Robert the Bruce of Scotland, much lionised in legend and myth, was about as bloodthirsty as the Sassenachs he opposed. He ruthlessly annihilated his chief rival for the kingship of Scotland, Comyn and his relatives and supporters. However his achievements as a guerilla fighter against the English were unparalleled and his determination to establish sovereignty against his southern neighbours both unrelenting and successful. 

That his plucky sister Mary - kept hung up outside in a cage for four years - appears to have been my ancestor is reassuring. The independence movement of Scotland, although lead by kings - in this case Robert the Bruce - was one of the first, and most successful secessionist movements in British history, and arose from the desire of the Scots to reclaim their ancient Gaelic identity, customs and freedom.

And we can all identify with that.

Robert the Bruce's vision of an independent Scotland lasted for a several hundred years - until in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, and established an uneasy union of the two crowns, which was finally cemented in 1707. 

Down the centuries, the Lords of Philorth / Saltoun continued to administer their estates and castles just south of Fraserburgh on the Scottish north coast, and continued to populate the small towns of Pitsligo, Rathen and Memsie with my ancestors.

It's an odd fact that my father, a Scottish musician, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the kings and queens of Scotland and England. I was baffled by his unaccountable expertise in this area, and his ability to reel off their multiple lines of descent. And yet he never knew he was a direct descendent of at least two of them - Malcolm III and David I. It is one of those strange ironies of modern life, that the internet has opened up genealogical riches denied previous generations. 

I guess there is some solace for a republican in knowing that these murderous kings were trying to protect the imperiled Scottish identity against the English. But they were as inclined to slaughter their fellow Scots as they were the imperial Sassenach. Reading the accounts of these early battles is a vivid lesson in how painfully democracy has been snatched from the bloody age of kings and autocrats.