The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
The Old Fox turns out to be more of a young vixen
Mystery surrounds headless skeleton found in graveyard
Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, was the last man in Britain to be beheaded as a traitor.
But quite where his final resting place is has remained shrouded in a mystery spanning nearly three centuries – until last night.
A new probe was launched last year to solve the 271-year-old mystery.
Nicknamed the Old Fox, Fraser was a Jacobite sympathiser who did deals with the cause’s enemies and was executed at Tower Hill in London in 1747.
It is said several people who had gathered to watch the beheading died after the scaffold they were on collapsed.
Lord Lovat found this incident funny and is said to have been so visibly amused when he was executed that his death led to the phrase “laughing your head off”.
The mystery of his resting place deepened with the discovery of a headless body in a damaged lead coffin in the family cemetery in Kirkhill, near Inverness.
Official accounts maintain the remains of the Clan Fraser chief were buried under a chapel floor in the Tower of London, but the clan has maintained his body was intercepted by his supporters and returned to Scotland.
An expert team led by Professor Dame Sue Black of Dundee University has carried out detailed investigations to determine whether the body is that of the Old Fox. But the body was more young vixen! Professor Black told an audience of more than 400 at a special event in Inverness that the headless body in the coffin was that of a 25-year-old woman.
Prof Black said: “We can say with absolute certainty that these are not the remains of the Old Fox.”
However that leaves a debate over how the remains of a headless young woman came to lie in a coffin thought to have been designed for Lord Lovat.
The Old Fox is today known to TV audiences as the grandfather of Jamie Fraser, the lead character in the popular Outlander series.
He was among those who supported Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was defeated at the battle of Culloden in 1746.
Fraser had requested his body be taken back to his family cemetery, but the crown decided it may become a rallying point for further trouble and buried him under the floor of the chapel in the tower.
However, there were nine days between his execution and burial in which his body could be viewed, and family lore maintains during this period his body was taken from the tower and smuggled north to Scotland by ship.