The woman who headed Jacobite military intelligence in Scotland and helped plan French invasion

The little-known life of a woman who became the head of Jacobite military intelligence in Scotland and who helped in the planning of a French invasion of Scotland in the early 1700s has been illuminated in a new book.

Lady Anne Drummond, Countess of Errol of Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire, was a woman surrounded by noblemen but who was met with her own levels of high regard after opening lines of communication between France and Scotland after James VII was deposed from the throne.

READ MORE: What if the Jacobites had won at the Battle of Culloden?

From Slains, Lady Anne became central to the campaign to bring the House of Stuart back to rule with her support for the Jacobites deeply embedded in her own family line.

CC

Author Mike Shepherd, of Cruden Bay, features the life of Lady Anne in his new book Unquenched Rage, The Jacobites of the North of East Scotland, 1688-1708.

Mr Shepherd found that, under Lady Anne’s watch, Slains Castle became a “secret post office” for communications between Jacobites and the French Court with some of her letters written in code and others in lemon juice to hide key information from sight.

The letters may then have been smuggled out of Aberdeen in ships bound for France packed with salmon.

Author Mike Shepherd with Merlin Hay, 24th Earl of Errol at Slains Castle. The Earl is a direct descendant of Lady Anne Drummond. | Mike Shepherd

Crucially, Lady Anne received Colonel Nathanial Hooke, an Irishman and envoy to Louis XIV, who was sent to Scotland in 1705 and 1707 to ferment a French invasion of Scotland and a Jacobite rising.

This was calculated to offset the pressure posed by the Spanish Wars of Succession, in which the French were under attack from English and Scots troops fighting alongside the Spanish.

Hooke’s visits resulted with the planned invasion of Scotland in 1708 when 5,000 Jacobite troops sailed north with the Old Pretender - James VII son - on board.

At the heart of planning for the mission, which was later abandoned due to mishap and poor weather, was Lady Anne.

Mr Shepherd said Lady Anne was the third woman in her family to take on such an insider Jacobite role. He said: “These women are not very well known. They weren’t your typical Jacobite women, rowing boats ashore or distracting redcoats to stop them grabbing their men.

“These women had real agency. They were poweful women and they made a huge difference.

“You often hear about women in history being invisible but what is unusual about Lady Anne Drummond is that, because of her clandestine activity, she wanted to be invisible.”

He described Lady Anne as a woman” well acquainted” with the ideas of the early European Enlightenment who contributed two articles to a French foundational text for the intellectual movement, which found a natural home in the North East.

Only one painting is known to exist of her. Privately owned, it is held in storage by National Galleries Scotland.

Lady Anne married John Hay, the 12th Earl of Errol, aged 18 with her role as a clandestine operator truly cemented by the position of her brothers. They were James Drummond, the 4th Earl of Perth and Lord Chancellor, who ran Scotland for James VII. Her younger brother, John Drummond, Earl of Melfort, was Secretary of State for Scotland.

When the Jacobite court was set up near Paris, the brothers became major figures within its ranks with their sister playing her support role from the Aberdeenshire coast. Mr Shepherd said: “Lady Anne established an intelligence network in Scotland and she passed information over to France as well.

“Secondly, Slains Castle was used as a glorified post office, a secret post office, and the Jacobite court in France sent letters to her and she would distribute them as required and vice versa.

“A lot of these letters actually survive. Most of them are in secret code which was quite easy to crack and other messages, invisible messages, were written in lemon juice.

“It sounds like something that people could overblow - that this woman was a spy mistress. But she was.”

Mr Shepherd described the “big set piece” planned by Lady Anne - the 1708 invasion of Scotland and her reception of Colonel Hooke as talks advanced about a potential Jacobite rising.

After receiving a lukewarm reception to a potential mission among Edinburgh Jacobites, he came back to Slains Castle again in 1707 to pursuing talks once more.

Mr Shepherd added: “Then, there was of course a great deal of unrest in Scotland. He wandered around the country trying to talk to various Jacobites, picking up the mood.

“He wrote reports for the French court in great detail, they were first hand reports of everything he came across in Scotland.

“There is a lot of double dealing going on. He found himself getting totally tangled up in negotiations.

“His main objective in 1707 was to gather military intelligence to set up an invasion of Scotland, which he did . He basically told the French court is what this was going to work.”

In March 1708, the invasion fleet was set up in Dunkirk. A total of 28 ships set sailed with more than 5,000 soldiers on board along with Colonel Hooke and James Stuart , known to history as the Old Pretender.

“He was going to be set up as King of Scotland if this invasion was going to succeed,” Mr Shepherd said.

It is understood the ships got lost somewhere near Leith with the fleet making landfall instead at Dunnottar Castle. Ultimately, they ended up back on the Firth of Forth between Crail and Pitenweem before being chased back up the coast by the newly-formed British Navy. As the British came up the French rearguard, a skirmish was recorded around half a mile off the coast at Inverbervie.

Onwards the French went with the ships coming in near Buchan Ness. Poor weather, ultimately, thwarted the mission.

Mr Shepherd said: “They had to abandon mission but they almost succeeded. They would have landed about 5,000 French Jacobite soldiers in Scotland at a time when all of Scotland was extremely upset about the Union and there would have been an uprising, a rebellion.

“And it was Lady Anne Drummond who worked with Colonel Hooek to help plan part of it.”

Unquenched Rage, The Jacobites of the North of East Scotland, 1688-1708, by Mike Shepherd is available from Amazon.