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Montrose

by Mowbray Morris · English · Gutenberg #45709 · 401,359 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Montrose

Author: Mowbray Morris


        
Release date: May 21, 2014 [eBook #45709]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MONTROSE ***

English Men of Action

MONTROSE

[Illustration]




_First Edition 1892_

_Reprinted 1901, 1909_


[Illustration: THE MARQUIS OF MONTROSE, K.G.

From a picture by Gerard Honthorst, painted at the Hague in 1649,
and presented by Montrose to the Queen of Bohemia; it is now in the
possession of the Earl of Dalhousie.]




MONTROSE

BY

MOWBRAY MORRIS

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1909




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER I                              PAGE

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS                     1


    CHAPTER II

FOR KING OR COVENANT                        17


    CHAPTER III

THE COVENANT                                38


    CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST BISHOPS' WAR                      58


    CHAPTER V

THE SECOND BISHOPS' WAR                     79


    CHAPTER VI

THE PLOT AND THE INCIDENT                  100


    CHAPTER VII

THE KING'S COMMISSION                      124


    CHAPTER VIII

THE CAMPAIGN IN THE HIGHLANDS
  (TIPPERMUIR--ABERDEEN--INVERLOCHY)       139


    CHAPTER IX

THE CAMPAIGN IN THE HIGHLANDS
  (AULDEARN--ALFORD--KILSYTH)              157


    CHAPTER X

PHILIPHAUGH                                175


    CHAPTER XI

THE LAST CAMPAIGN                          191


    CHAPTER XII

THE END                                    214




CHAPTER I

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS


Tradition still points to a building in the town of Montrose as the
birthplace of James Graham, fifth Earl and first Marquis of the
line,--a building also fondly cherished by the antiquary as the last
to shelter the Old Chevalier on Scottish soil. Both traditions are of
course disputed, and both are easy to dispute. The title of Montrose
was taken, not from the town of that name but, from the estate of
Old Montrose on the opposite side of the bay, which a Graham had
acquired from Robert Bruce in exchange for the lands of Cardross in
Dumbartonshire. The name is said to be of Gaelic origin, _Alt_ or
_Ald Moineros_, the Burn of the Mossy Point; but the prefix must
have been understood in its Saxon significance at least as early
as the twelfth century, for in a charter of that time the place is
styled _Vetus Monros_. The old castle has long since disappeared. The
Covenanters naturally let slip no chance of despoiling the man they
most feared and hated in Scotland; and of the three stately homes
owned by the chief of the Grahams at the beginning of the seventeenth
century--Kincardine in Perthshire, Mugdock in Stirlingshire, and Old
Montrose in Forfarshire--all went down in the storm of civil war.
Montrose's parents seem to have resided at all three impartially, and
at the last their son may have been born. If this were so, it is easy
to understand how tradition, anxious for some visible memorial of a
famous man in the town bearing his name, should have transferred the
honour of his birth there across the few miles of water that separated
it from the old home of his family. But in fact nothing is certainly
known of the place or time of Montrose's birth, except that he was
fourteen years old when his father died in 1626, and must consequently
have been born some time in the year 1612.

The Grahams had long been conspicuous figures in Scottish history.
In 1298 Sir John Graham, the chosen comrade of Wallace, had fallen,
more fortunate than his friend, at the battle of Falkirk, in the
churchyard of which town his tomb may still be seen. In 1304, at the
capitulation which seemed for the moment to have closed the Scots'
struggle for independence, Sir David, the first proprietor of Old
Montrose, had been specially marked by the English king as a dangerous
man. Through the wars of Bruce and his immediate successors the
Grahams had stood stoutly by the national cause. In the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries they had three times intermarried with the royal
blood of Scotland. A son of Sir William Graham and the Princess Mary,
daughter of Robert the Third, was the first Primate of Scotland; and
as a Graham of a later generation had held the see of Dunblane, the
indifference expressed for bishops by their illustrious descendant
should at least not have been hereditary. One of Sir William's
grandsons, Patrick, was raised to the peerage as Lord Graham in 1451,
and in 1505 his grandson William was made Earl of Montrose by James
the Fourth, only to fall a few years later by his sovereign's side
at Flodden, where he commanded a division of the Scottish van. His
grandson fell with equal glory at Pinkie, a field only less disastrous
to his country than the field of Flodden. But the most conspicuous of
the ancestors of the Great Marquis was his grandfather John, who held
in succession the offices of Treasurer, Chancellor, and Viceroy of
Scotland. He seems to have possessed his full share of the turbulent
spirit which marked the Scottish aristocracy then and for long after
an era of milder manners had dawned upon the South. When nearly fifty
years old he was engaged in a memorable brawl on the High Street of
Edinburgh between a party of his own men and the followers of Sir John
Sandilands, by whom one of his clan had been murdered three years
previously. In this affair Lord Graham fought by his father's side,
and according to one account had been the first to begin the fray. But
the general tenor of his life seems to have been unusually peaceful.
He bore the part expected of a young Scottish nobleman in the State
ceremonies and pageants of the time, and after his succession to the
title performed such duties as his position imposed on him with credit
if with no particular ability. But his tastes evidently led him rather
to the life of a country gentleman than of a man of affairs, and after
his wife's death he seems to have devoted himself almost entirely to
the care of his children and his estates. His letters show him to
have been an affectionate and indulgent father, and the precision
of his accounts proves him an exact but not illiberal manager. His
stables were well stocked and well used, and, next to riding, archery
and golf were his favourite pastimes. In these his son followed him.
His skill at the targets and on the links is one of the few memorials
of Montrose's youth that time has spared for us; the grace and
dexterity of his horsemanship were famous even in an age and a country
where all men and most women rode, and were first learned, as such
accomplishments can only be learned, in boyhood, as he cantered on his
white pony at his father's side over the fair heritage of his sires.
But another of his father's tastes he did not share. The smell of
tobacco is said to have been peculiarly disagreeable to him, and sums
for tobacco and pipes are frequent in the old Earl's accounts.[1]

Montrose was the only son of six children. Their mother was Lady
Margaret Ruthven, daughter of the first Earl of Gowrie. It was
whispered that, like her brother, she dabbled in magic, and had
learned from a witch that her son was destined to be a firebrand to
his country. If the report be true--and the Black Art found credence
in Scotland long after Lady Margaret's day--she may well have sighed
to think that the wild fate which had befallen so many of her family
was to be the portion of her son. For the Ruthvens had both done
and suffered much evil in their time. Her grandfather, who had died
in exile, a fugitive from justice, was that grim lord who had risen
from a sick-bed to lead the murderers of Rizzio into their queen's
presence. Her father, who had perished on the scaffold, one of the
many victims of Arran's intrigues, had been concerned in the violent
attempt on the young king's liberty popularly known as the Raid of
Ruthven. Her two brothers had perished by the sword before their
sovereign's face, a fate which there is too good reason to believe
that they had destined for him. Of her own life nothing more is known
than that she bore her husband six children and died in 1618 when the
youngest was but three years old. Her two eldest daughters, Lilias
and Margaret, were married soon after her death: Lilias to Sir John
Colquhoun of Luss, a union destined to an abrupt and shameful end by
his flight with her sister Katherine, who had been received into
the family after her father's death and was then little more than a
child; but Margaret, though she did not live long to enjoy it, was
more fortunate in her marriage with Archibald, first Lord Napier of
Merchiston, a wise and good man who had been particularly recommended
by King James to his son as the most judicious and disinterested of
all Scottish statesmen. Of the others, Dorothea became the wife of Sir
James, afterwards Lord Rollo, and Beatrix, the youngest and apparently
her brother's favourite, the wife of the Master of Maderty, one of the
first to join Montrose under the standard of their king. Both Margaret
and Dorothea died young, the first probably about 1630, the latter in
1638; the deaths of Lilias and Beatrix are unrecorded; of Katherine
all traces seem to have been lost after her disappearance from her
sister's house in 1631.

In his twelfth year Lord Graham was sent to study at Glasgow under the
charge of a tutor, William Forrett. Master Forrett was most scrupulous
in keeping account of his pupil's expenses, and to these we owe all
our knowledge of this time. It is not much, and, as may be supposed,
is rather sumptuary than intellectual. There is mention of certain
books bought for the young student, and there is evidence that the
tutor borrowed them for his own reading. A Latin version of Xenophon's
_Hellenics_, the works of Seneca with Lipsius' commentary, and
Fairfax's translation of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ are among them;
but the lad's favourite book at this time would seem to have been
Raleigh's _History of the World_. Our information as to the domestic
establishment is more precise. It was abundant and costly, as was
then considered becoming the heir of an ancient and wealthy house.
He had a valet and two pages, plate, furniture, and linen of the best
quality, nor was the favourite white pony forgotten. His wardrobe was
handsomely stocked with suits of English cloth and embroidered cloaks,
and his pages wore scarlet liveries. He was lodged in a large house
belonging to Sir George Elphinstone of Blythswood, who had succeeded
Napier as Lord Justice-Clerk, and for part of the time little Lady
Katherine seems to have lived here with her brother. One pleasant fact
at least stands out clear from these dim memories; there was a warm
affection and regard between tutor and pupil. Years afterwards, when
Montrose had burned his boats by the victory of Tippermuir, one of
his first acts was to send for Master Forrett, to resume his part of
purse-bearer to his old pupil and to be tutor to his sons.

The sudden death of the father in November, 1626, broke up the
establishment at Glasgow, and in the following January Montrose,
then only in his fifteenth year, was entered at the University of
St. Andrews, as was then the general custom of the young Scottish
aristocracy. The funeral ceremonies of the dead Earl give a curious
picture of the age. They lasted for one month and nineteen days,
during which time all the kinsmen and friends of the family were
entertained in the castle of Kincardine. There were Sir William Graham
of Braco, the only brother, and the Earl of Wigton, the nephew of the
deceased, with the sons-in-law Lord Napier and Sir John Colquhoun.
All the branches of the clan were represented; Grahams of Claverhouse
and Fintrie, of Inchbrakie, Morphie, Orchill, and Balgowan, with many
neighbouring nobles and lairds, some of them destined in no long time
to be the bitter foes of the House they were now assembled to honour.
Many of the guests brought with them contributions to the funeral
feast as though to a solemn picnic; and other provisions of all kinds
were purchased in quantities sufficient to have stocked the Black
Douglas's terrible larder many times over, while the wine and ale were
reckoned by puncheons and buckets.

Montrose's life at college seems to have been much the same as that
of any young man of rank and fortune to-day at Christ Church or
Trinity. He mixed freely in all the diversions of the place and time,
hunted, hawked, and shot, played golf on the links of St. Andrews and
tennis in the court at Leith. At archery he was especially skilful.
In the second year of his residence he won the prize annually shot
for by the students, a silver arrow with a medal bearing the name
of the winner, and this he held against all competitors while he
remained at the University. His walls were hung with his bows,
just as to-day the successful cricketers and oarsmen of Oxford and
Cambridge arrange round their rooms the instruments of their triumphs.
Eminent in those accomplishments which always secure the admiration
of the young, profuse in hospitality to his friends, liberal to the
poor, and especially to those needy professors of the fine arts who
were never slow in those days to scent out a generous patron, he
evidently began even in these early years to engage the attention of
his contemporaries. His own estates and tenants were not neglected;
but his vacations were mostly passed in visits to the houses of his
brothers-in-law and of the heads of the various branches of his clan,
each of whom, according to the custom of the time, was considered as
in some sort the guardian of his young chief, though Lord Napier,
Sir William Graham of Claverhouse, and Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie
seem to have had the largest share in an office which with a young
gentleman of such cheerful tastes and dispositions can have been no
sinecure.

This merry life was not, however, without a check. In April, 1628, his
sister Dorothea was married from Napier's house in Edinburgh to young
James Rollo, and both then and afterwards at Carnock in Fife, where
the honeymoon was spent, there had been high festival. The result of
all this gaiety, alternated with days of hard exercise in the saddle
and on the links, was that the lad fell sick on his return to college.
For some days he was seriously ill. Two doctors were called in, and
to judge by their fees must have been assiduous in their visits. They
ordered their patient's long curls to be ruthlessly shorn, and they
ordered also a diet which strikes our modern notions as curiously
generous for a young fellow who, to speak plainly, had probably been
only over-eating himself. However, nature and the doctors together
triumphed--or, it may be, nature in spite of the doctors; and after
a few weeks' confinement, cheered by chess and cards and the gift of
a valuable hawk from his kinsman of Fintrie, Montrose was once more
about at his old occupations--one of the first recorded acts of his
convalescence being a breakfast-party given to some of his young
friends who had been most attentive to him in his sickness.

Of his studies we know much less than of his amusements. Sums for
the purchase and binding of books appear in his accounts, which were
kept as scrupulously by his new tutor, Master John Lambye, as by
Master Forrett at Glasgow, and from the same source we learn that he
had begun the study of Greek. Plutarch's Lives, Cæsar's Commentaries,
Lucan, and Quintus Curtius were now added to his library, though the
verses found written in some of them must belong to a later date.
Undergraduates, more happy than their descendants, were not in those
days pestered with examinations; but that Montrose at least attended
lectures after a fashion is clear from an entry in his tutor's
accounts of the sum of twenty-nine shillings paid to "a scholar who
writes my lord's notes in the school." But we may suppose that his
studies were directed more by his own tastes and dispositions than
by the curriculum of the place, which, as was the case not so long
ago in our English Universities, was not likely to be very sternly
enforced on the young aristocrats who then frequented St. Andrews. It
is, however, certain that he cannot have passed his time only in play.
More fortunate in some respects than another famous member of his
House, Montrose has never been called a block-head because he spelled
no better than the rest of his world. Among his contemporaries his
reputation stood high. "He was of very good parts," says Clarendon,
"which were improved by a good education;" and posterity has accepted
the verdict. His intellect was indeed quick and eager rather than
solid. His classical knowledge was that rather of a poet than a
scholar, and his poetical fame must be content to rest upon a few
stanzas which have taken their place among English lyrics; but it
will be seen that he had read and thought much on those problems of
government which the inhabitants of this kingdom were then seriously
addressing themselves to solve. A book published after his death by
Thomas Saintserf (son of the Bishop of Galloway), who had been his
secretary during the stormiest years of his life, bears witness,
in a dedication to his son, to the polished and scholarly tone of
the conversation he loved to encourage among his associates. We are
told, and may believe, that the few and enforced pauses in his short
tumultuous career were relieved by study; but no man turns to that
solace in his hours of disappointment who has not felt at least some
touch of its enchantment in his youth. We may therefore conclude that
he found some time amid the gaieties of St. Andrews to read the books
that had been bought for him.

Among the houses that Montrose visited was Kinnaird Castle, the seat
of Lord Carnegie, his nearest neighbour in Forfarshire. The families
were already connected by the marriage of Eupheme, Lord Carnegie's
youngest sister, to Robert Graham of Morphie. The tie was now to
be drawn closer.[2] There were six daughters at Kinnaird Castle,
and to the youngest of these, Magdalene, Montrose began to pay his
court. The wooing was not long. His guardians were well pleased to
see their young chief in a fair way to carry on the line; and that
chief, in youth as in manhood, was not wont to linger over anything
he undertook. He was married in the private chapel of the castle
on November 10th, 1629. The bride's age is not known, but as the
bridegroom can only just have completed his seventeenth year, they may
be fairly allowed the conventional title of the young couple. There
is a tradition that she had been previously courted by the Master of
Ogilvy, which, if true, might suggest that she had some advantage
of Montrose in years. But nothing is certainly known of her--of her
appearance, tastes, or temper, of the course of her married life or
her relations with her husband. She bore him four sons, the second
coming into the world just as his father attained his majority, and
died in 1645.

According to the terms of the marriage-contract the next three years
were passed at Kinnaird Castle, but no record of them exists. All
the bridegroom's books, papers, and furniture were removed from St.
Andrews to the castle. We catch a glimpse of him very soon after the
marriage on the links at Montrose, and we know that he was made a
burgess of Aberdeen shortly before the ceremony. We are also told that
after the novelty of his new life had worn off, he applied himself so
assiduously to his studies as to become, in the pious old chronicler's
words, "not merely a great master, but a critic in the Greek and
Latin," of which we may believe so much as we choose. But the only
visible memorial of this time is his portrait painted by Jameson, who
was then practising his art in his native town of Aberdeen. This was
Graham of Morphie's marriage-gift to the bride, and is still to be
seen at Kinnaird Castle, where it is said to have remained since it
was first hung there more than two centuries and a half ago. Those who
have seen it pronounce it to be still in an unusually good state of
preservation. Time has dealt tenderly with the long auburn hair, the
fresh complexion, and gay clothes of the young bridegroom. The smooth
upper lip and arch expression show a mind very different of course
from that which had set its seal on the grave and resolute face seen
later by Dobson and by Honthorst. But this smiling lad in his slashed
doublet, lace collar, and gold chain is clearly father to the stately
armoured man who had risked all for his king, and was to lose all.[3]

In the spring of 1633 Montrose left Scotland for the customary period
of foreign travel. He was absent three years, but the barest outline
of the time alone remains. We know that for some part of it his
companion was Basil Fielding, son of the newly-made Earl of Denbigh,
that he visited France and Italy, and that in the spring of 1635
he was in Rome with the young Lord Angus and four other Scottish
gentlemen. He is said to have continued his studies diligently during
this period, and to have particularly affected the society of learned
men. "He studied," writes Saintserf, "as much of the mathematics as is
required for a soldier; but his great study was to read men and the
actions of great men."

Montrose returned to Scotland some time in 1636. He was then in his
twenty-fourth year, of the middle height, well and strongly made,
of graceful carriage and singularly expert in all bodily exercises,
especially in riding. His hair was of the light reddish tinge which
darkens with time, and his complexion of that clear fresh colour which
is often found with red hair; his nose was aquiline, his eyes gray,
bright, and keen. Though not strictly a handsome man, his appearance
in later life at least must have been striking, dignified, and noble.
Those who knew him only in manhood describe him as being somewhat
haughty to strangers, especially if they were his equals or superiors
in rank; but to his friends, and always to his inferiors, his manners
were singularly courteous and engaging. In his later years of exile he
is said to have been somewhat too stately and formal, and inclined,
as the saying goes, to take too much upon himself. Burnet, whose
friendship for the Hamiltons would not dispose him to think favourably
of Montrose--though he does him more justice in the biography of those
brothers than in the history of his own time--says contemptuously
that he had too much of the hero about him, and that his manner was
stately to affectation, insinuating also that his courage was not so
certain as his friends pretended. To call Montrose a coward should
be enough to put any witness out of court at once; but indeed, as
Burnet was only seven years old when the man against whom he vented
this silly piece of spite died, and as the society he knew best was
unlikely to foster any fervent admiration for the great champion
of the Throne, his evidence cannot go for much. From the accounts,
however, of men better able to judge than the Bishop of Salisbury,
it is clear that there was something in Montrose's manner that did
not please all tastes, and perhaps seemed fantastic to some. "He was
of most resolute and undaunted spirit," writes one of his friends,
"which began to appear in him to the wonder and expectation of all
men, even in his childhood." And again: "He was exceeding constant
and loving to those who did adhere to him, and very affable to such
as he knew; though his carriage, which indeed was not ordinary, made
him seem proud." These expressions fall in well with Clarendon's
famous character of him, and also with the impression made by him on
Cardinal De Retz, when they met in Paris in 1647, as the very ideal
of one of Plutarch's heroes. These are witnesses of Montrose's prime;
but the carriage that is admitted to be not ordinary in a grown man
would probably be still more marked in a young one. The Covenanters,
through their great mouthpiece Robert Baillie, declared him to be
too proud, headstrong, and wilful for their tastes. Certainly he had
little of the tone or temper of the Puritan about him, and of all
the young aristocrats who joined them was the least likely to submit
himself blindly to their dictation, or become the mere instrument of
their factions; and as he also had evidently a strong partiality for
his own opinion, which he was neither slow to form nor to declare, it
is plain that there can never have been much personal sympathy between
him and his early associates. We may think of Montrose, then, at
this time as a young man full of high resolves and romantic fancies,
ardent, aspiring, impulsive, impatient of delay, and always more eager
to lead than willing to follow. But his own verses are after all the
clearest reflection of his character, and though probably written in
the last year of his life, they describe the Covenanter as truly as
the Cavalier.

    As Alexander I will reign,
      And I will reign alone;
    My thoughts did evermore disdain
      A rival on my throne:
    He either fears his fate too much,
      Or his deserts are small,
    That dares not put it to the touch,
      To gain or lose it all.




CHAPTER II

FOR KING OR COVENANT


Montrose had returned to Scotland at a critical time. Eleven years
earlier, while he was still reading Seneca with his tutor at Glasgow,
the heralds had proclaimed from the city-cross at Edinburgh a royal
edict destined to set not Scotland only but the whole kingdom in a
blaze. By the Act of Revocation, as it was called, Charles, before he
had been a year upon his throne, succeeded in doing what his father
through nearly forty years of meddling had been careful to leave
undone. The blast of his heralds' trumpets had woke to life again
that long feud between the Crown and the aristocracy which had marked
the course of Scottish history during the two previous centuries, but
which had been gradually declining since Murray scattered his sister's
power to the winds at Langside.

It would be hard, at this distance of time and without his excuse,
to say in our haste with Knox that there was not one righteous man
among the Lords of the Congregation who had assisted him to establish
the reformed religion in Scotland; but it is certain that the large
majority looked only to the fat revenues of the old Church, and
remembered only her insolence in the day of her power. For a century
and a half she had been enriched and strengthened by successive
sovereigns as a bulwark against the fiercest and most independent
aristocracy in Europe. Under James the Fifth her haughty and dissolute
prelates had filled the highest offices of State, while the nobles
were despoiled, imprisoned, and banished at their will. The hour of
reckoning had now come, and it was to be exacted to the uttermost
farthing. But though the reformers were allowed to indulge their pious
zeal unchecked in the work of destruction, they were soon made aware
that their dangerous allies had no mind to see a new ecclesiastical
tyranny set up in the place of the old one. Within less than a year
of the establishment of the reformed religion the greater part of
the estates of the Catholic Church (estimated at rather more than
one-third of the whole wealth of the kingdom) had passed by various
and mostly violent ways into the hands of the aristocracy. This was
their paramount idea of the Reformation, an idea by which they were
determined to stand fast, though all the pulpits in the kingdom should
cry shame on them. Murray and Morton, those strong sons of Zeruiah,
treated the arguments and the anger of Knox with the same contemptuous
indifference, while the astute and mocking Maitland laughed in his
face at his scheme of Church government as at "a devout imagination."
A miserable pittance doled out of the share of the plunder allotted
to the Crown was all that the great Reformer could secure for the
maintenance of his new Church. Well might he cry, in the bitterness of
his disappointment, "I see two parts freely given to the devil, and
the third must be divided betwixt God and the devil." During Mary's
short reign, and under the regents who succeeded her, the wealth and
influence of the nobles had risen still higher at the expense of the
Crown when not at the expense of the Church. James, on attaining
his majority, had indeed done something to better the position of
the former, and when more firmly seated on his throne he had done
something to better the position of the latter. But, in his own homely
phraseology, he knew the stomach of his people too well to put a high
hand to these delicate matters. His Act of Annexation only applied
to so much of the old Church lands as still remained unalienated,
while it practically gave the sanction of Parliament to the titles of
those on which the nobles had already laid arbitrary hands. Even of
the property then resumed to the Crown he made throughout his reign
many and large grants to his favourites. The tithes he did not touch,
and it was by the tithes that his son's offence was to come. However
much, therefore, he might exasperate the Presbyterian clergy by his
Episcopalian proclivities, so long as he left the nobles' property
alone he was safe. They had no particular dislike either to the office
or style of bishop. With modified powers and under another name
bishops had indeed formed a part of Knox's original polity; and so far
as they tended to keep the clergy in order and confine them to their
proper business, their restoration was not unwelcome to a considerable
body outside the Church, and even to some of the less pugnacious
spirits within it. All the nobles took thought for was to prevent the
creation of a new spiritual aristocracy, that might come in time to be
as rich and powerful as the old Catholic hierarchy they had crushed
and despoiled. And of that, so long as they retained the mastery of
the funds which alone could make such an aristocracy possible, they
had little fear. Probably at no period since the accession of James
the First had there been such peace between a Scottish king and his
nobles as there was while James the Sixth sat on the English throne.

By the Act of Revocation the scene was changed in a moment. The
purpose of the Act was indeed both just and politic. Those writers who
will allow no virtue in Charles may claim that his real design was
but to increase the revenue and the prerogative of the Crown, and to
provide funds for the complete restoration of Episcopacy in Scotland,
without any thought for the interests of his oppressed subjects. But
his own revenues were not increased; the prerogative of the Crown was
strengthened only against an unruly and grasping aristocracy; the
oppressed were relieved from a grinding tyranny equal to the worst
exercise of the old feudal lordship. The right of tithe, where tithe
was levied in kind, gave those who held it absolute power over those
who had to pay it. It placed the small landowners and farmers, who
were now gradually forming in Scotland a middle class analogous to
the English yeomen, at the mercy of men who were, to say the least,
not famous for exercising it. The Catholic clergy, it was declared,
had been hard masters, but the little fingers of the Protestant
nobles were thicker than the loins of the Catholic clergy. The tenant
could not gather his harvest until the landlord had taken his tithe;
and the landlord took his tithe when it pleased him, regardless of
the interest or convenience of the tenant. It is not to be supposed
that all landlords pushed their rights to extremities, but it is
certain that there was much harsh dealing and much distress. The bare
existence of such rights, moreover, was subversive of the very essence
of the Constitution. They gave one class of the community despotic
authority over another class, and both Crown and Parliament were as
powerless to protect the latter as it was to protect itself. The
duties of the sovereign, no less than the liberty of the subject, made
a change imperative.

But as usual Charles began unwisely. All Church property held by
laymen, in tithe or land, was to be resumed to the Crown on the
ground of illegalities in the original concession. The opposition
was of course immediate and violent. It was headed by the Chancellor
himself, Sir George Hay, afterwards Earl of Kinnoull, an irritable,
obstinate old man, and included the greater part of the Privy
Council. A deputation was sent to remonstrate with the King; reports
were industriously circulated among the people that it was their
religion he was really aiming at; his commissioner for carrying
out the revocation was threatened with violence. For once Charles
was wise with a good grace. The obnoxious Act was withdrawn and a
commission known as the Commission of Surrender of Superiorities and
Tithes issued in its stead. The terms on which the commissioners
were empowered to treat are now unanimously allowed to have been as
conciliatory and liberal as was compatible with the redress of a
grievance to which sixty years of sufferance had perhaps given some
title of respect. Lord Napier was one of the commissioners, and
has recorded his emphatic opinion of the wisdom and justice of the
scheme. He has also recorded not less emphatically the factious and
dishonest nature of an opposition which was still, though less openly,
maintained by the discontented nobles.[4] Simultaneously with this
commission a proclamation was issued exempting from their operation
all ministers who had been ordained before the Articles of Perth
became law, and granting a general amnesty to all who were suffering
from their transgression.

Had Charles been content to stop here, Scotland at least could have
had no quarrel with him. Even the nobles, when the first heat of their
discontent had cooled, must have recognised that their property,
though slightly diminished, was now secured to them by an inalienable
title, and would be no longer a source of danger to themselves or to
the kingdom. The tithe-payers were freed from an unjust and oppressive
burden. The clergy were secured both in the receipt of their income
and in what the most tolerant of them at any rate considered the
reasonable exercise of their conscience. Could the King go on as he
had begun, he was likely to prove the strongest and most popular
ruler Scotland had known since his ancestor fell at Flodden. But when
any part of the body politic is sick it needs a wise and vigorous
physician to keep the infection from spreading. There was a dangerous
sickness rife in England, and it was not in the interests of those
who had determined on the cure to see it wrought by other means. If
one-half of the kingdom were sound, it could be used as an effectual
cure for the unsound half. The discontent in Scotland was therefore
assiduously fomented from England; and the unfortunate King, neither
wise nor vigorous himself, had in Laud an adviser whose vigour was
rarely on the side of wisdom.

Meanwhile the nobles waited. Though they could harass and delay the
Tithes Commission, they were powerless to resist it seriously. The
constitution of the Scottish Parliament rendered all opposition to the
Crown practically useless unless it was unanimous; and they knew well
that the general sympathies of the nation, lay and cleric alike, were
in this case on the side of the King. But they knew also that if he
made one step more along the dangerous path of religious innovation
their time would come. The concession in the matter of the Articles
of Perth, and the relief to be obtained from the resettlement of the
tithes, had not laid the suspicions of the clergy to sleep. They, too,
like the nobles, were waiting, and, unlike the nobles, their religion
was more to them than lands, and houses, and goods. The Protestantism
of the Presbyterian was sensitive above that of all other Protestants,
and there went along with it a deep-rooted national jealousy of
English interference. Even those who had no aversion to a moderate
form of Episcopacy, and were heartily disgusted with the intolerance
and pugnacity of the extreme Presbyterians, thought that it would
be best to let well alone, and that any further innovation would be
impolitic and dangerous. But all parties had a very shrewd suspicion,
which the English malcontents took care to keep alive, that the King
would not be content to leave well alone, and that there would soon
be further innovations. Then would come the time of the nobles.
When dissatisfied men gather together they do not pause to ask the
nature of each other's dissatisfaction. The cave of Adullam was the
rallying-ground of every one that was in distress, and every one that
was in debt, and every one that was discontented.

They had not long to wait. In the summer of 1633 Charles came to
Scotland to be crowned, and Laud came with him. He entered Edinburgh
on June 15th, and on the 18th the mischief began. The ceremonies of
the coronation confirmed the worst suspicions. A table decked in the
fashion of an altar was set up in the chapel of Holyrood; behind it
was hung a curtain of tapestry enwrought with a crucifix; the bishops
engaged in the service wore white rochets and copes embroidered
with gold, and each time they passed before the crucifix they bowed
their heads. Even the most loyal whispered to each other that it all
smelled sadly of Popery. The Tithes Bill was of course passed, but not
without an unseemly wrangle between Charles and his Parliament, over
which the Scottish law allowed the sovereign to preside in person.
Through the year following the King's return to England affairs grew
steadily worse. The creation of a see of Edinburgh, the appointment
of Archbishop Spottiswoode to the Chancellorship, and of many of his
bishops to the Privy Council,--a step odious to all the aristocracy
alike, to the tolerant and loyal Napier no less than to the mutinous
Loudon,--the Book of Ecclesiastical Canons, the foolish prosecution
of Lord Balmerino, all inflamed the rising temper of a nation jealous
above all other nations of established customs, and that had ever
shown itself quick to dispute the divine right of its kings to do
wrong. Last of all, as a torch to this fatal pyre, came Laud's new
prayer-book.

Everything, then, was ready for the explosion when Montrose returned
to Scotland in 1636. Which side was a young man of his rank, position,
and temper likely to take in the approaching conflict? That question
has been variously answered, and is still, if no longer the object of
controversy, at least a stumbling-block to many who regard him as the
Abdiel of that faithless time. That his character should have in some
degree suffered from a contrast which all can discern, and few have
been at the pains to examine, was inevitable. Between the champion of
the Throne who sealed his loyalty with his life and the leader of men
in arms against their sovereign, there must surely be a gulf which no
explanation or apology can bridge.

Both in joining and leaving the party of the Covenant Montrose has
been represented as influenced solely by wounded vanity. Disappointed
by the coldness of his first reception at court, he flung himself
into the arms of the Covenanters; disappointed by the ascendency
of Argyll in their councils, he flung himself into the arms of the
Cavaliers. On the other hand, his action has in both cases been
represented as the result of one uniform policy. After long and
careful deliberation he formed the conclusion, which was sanctioned if
not actually recommended by the most trusted of his friends, the wise
and impartial Napier, that the Covenant of 1638 was, in the spirit in
which he interpreted it and believed it to have been framed, the one
and only plan for redressing the grievances of the Scottish nation
without violating the lawful prerogative of the Crown. So long as he
believed this to be the true purpose and scope of the movement, so
long did he honestly endeavour to advance it. When he found that other
counsels were prevailing, and that the constitutional authority of the
Crown was to give place to the self-appointed authority of a handful
of its subjects--when he found, in short, that the Covenant of 1638
was ripening into the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643--he at once
transferred his allegiance to the King, whose best interests as the
appointed and hereditary ruler of his country he had always desired to
serve, and had hitherto believed himself to be serving. The truth, as
usual, lies somewhere between the two extremes; and this can surely be
allowed without casting any stain upon the good faith of Montrose.

Peter Heylin, the chaplain and biographer of Laud, has told a story
which was certainly believed in his time and has been generally
accepted down to our own. According to this story, Montrose on his
return from his travels had hastened to pay his respects to the
King. Charles was never slow to welcome to his court young gentlemen
of good position and repute; Montrose especially, the head of one
powerful family and allied by marriage with two others on which the
royal favour had already been signally bestowed, young, gifted, eager
for distinction, was surely justified in anticipating a gracious
reception. To his surprise and chagrin the King received him with
marked coldness, spoke a few formal words, gave his hand to be kissed,
and then turned away to converse with his courtiers.

This rebuff is attributed by Heylin to the intrigues of Hamilton.
James, Marquis of Hamilton, was then some six years older than
Montrose. From boyhood he had been about the person of Charles, and
was now in his most intimate confidence. Few liked him, and fewer
still trusted him; but with the unfortunate King he was all-powerful,
especially in matters of Scottish policy, on which at this time he
alone was consulted. He had done nothing, that any one could discover,
to merit this position. A few years before this date he had led a
body of troops to the assistance of Gustavus Adolphus, but had reaped
no laurels in that service, though on his return he discoursed so
learnedly on the art of war that he persuaded some people to take him
for a great soldier, just as by his grave look and reserved manner he
persuaded some to take him for a great statesman. He was not without
parts and knowledge of affairs, but incurably shifty; and though never
convicted of downright treachery, was perhaps only saved from it by
his inability to be downright in anything. None of all Charles's evil
counsellors, not even the Queen herself, wrought more mischief; and of
him, if of any man, it may be said that nothing in his life became him
so well as his leaving it.

To this dangerous man Montrose had been advised to pay his court.
Hamilton received him with every appearance of cordiality, but had no
mind to introduce so likely a rival into his master's good graces.
He therefore warned Montrose that the King was at that time much
prejudiced against Scotsmen, adding that only his love for his country
and his hopes to serve her enabled him to endure the indignities to
which he was daily subjected. At the same time he warned the King that
Montrose was a dangerous young man, very ambitious, very powerful and
popular in Scotland, and not unlikely in the event of any national
rising to be set up as king by virtue of an old strain of royal blood
in his family. This last insinuation would not fall on deaf ears.
Hamilton, indeed, had himself been accused of a similar design, for
which his descent from a daughter of James the Second, who had married
the first Lord Hamilton, gave at least as much colour as any that
Montrose's pedigree could supply; and though Charles had refused to
listen to the accusation, and was probably right in refusing, many
people still remembered it, and some in Scotland at any rate believed
it. Moreover, there was a member of the House of Graham whose claims
to the Scottish crown had lately been the subject of much wild
talk. This was William Graham, Earl of Airth and Menteith, a man of
considerable ability who had filled places of high trust in Scotland,
and had been allowed by Charles to resume the older earldom of
Stratherne, which had been cancelled two centuries ago in consequence
of its inconvenient relations with royalty. It is unnecessary to
entangle ourselves in the intricate mazes of Scottish genealogy. It
will be enough to say that the question turned on the legitimacy
of Robert the Second's children by his first wife, Elizabeth Mure,
from whom Charles was descended. Menteith came from the children of
the second wife, Euphemia Ross, about whose birth there could be no
question. All through the two centuries there had lurked a doubt,
sure to be revived whenever the sovereign was in bad favour with his
quarrelsome subjects, that the progeny of Euphemia were the genuine
Stuarts. Menteith, egged on by some unscrupulous men, of whom in these
years there was never any lack among the Scottish aristocracy, had
talked foolishly about his red blood and his "cousin Charles," and
cousin Charles had heard of it. His indiscreet kinsman got a sharp
lesson to keep that unruly tongue of his quiet. He was stripped not
only of all his offices, but of his titles as well; and though he was
almost immediately afterwards re-admitted into the peerage as Earl of
Airth and Menteith, the dangerous title of Stratherne became a thing
of the past for ever, and nothing more was heard of "Elizabeth Mure's
bastard." It can easily then be understood how Hamilton's hint would
be enough to make Charles look coldly on another of these troublesome
Grahams.

This story of Hamilton's mischief has been told twice by Heylin, with
the addition that Montrose subsequently alleged it to the King as the
cause of his early defection. Heylin was indebted, he says, to Napier
for much information on Scottish affairs, and a man who had talked
much with Napier was not unlikely to hear something of his well-loved
brother-in-law. There is no other authority for supposing that
Montrose ever made such a confession. It is not impossible that he may
have done so at Oxford when trying to convince the King of Hamilton's
treachery. Clarendon makes no mention of it in his account of the
charges then brought against the favourite, nor does Burnet, who sets
out the charges in full and the answers to them. The latter alludes
more than once to the enmity known to exist between the two men,
attributing it to Montrose's suspicion that it was Hamilton who had
betrayed to the Covenanters his secret correspondence with Charles.
But there was common talk of bad blood between them before that date.
Montrose could have had no suspicion at the time of the ill turn
Hamilton had played him, or he would certainly have endeavoured to set
himself right with his sovereign. From a story told in the appendix to
the _Hamilton Papers_, it would appear that he attributed his kinsman
of Menteith's disgrace to the favourite's jealousy. It is clear at
any rate that they bore no goodwill to each other from the first, as
indeed was natural enough, considering the temper of the times and of
the two men. Both were young and both ambitious. Hamilton was cold,
cunning, and jealous; Montrose was eager and impetuous, and jealous
too, though in a more open and generous fashion. When flint and steel
come together the sparks are apt to fly.

Those who discredit this story do so on the ground that it discredits
Montrose. Had he gone straight from the King into the arms of the
malcontents, their argument might be good. But he did not. His
interview with Charles took place some time in 1636, and it was not
till the end of the following year that he first publicly ranged
himself against the Court party. According to Robert Baillie,
assuredly no mean authority in these matters, it was the "canniness,"
or cunning, of Rothes that won Montrose over, though the latter
assigned that doubtful honour to Robert Murray, one of the reverend
agitators deputed to beat up for recruits to the Covenant in the
counties of Perth and Stirling. Rothes, with Loudon and Balmerino, had
been in the forefront of the opposition from its beginning; and it
is said that Charles had been unwise enough to put a public affront
on him in Scotland. He was a clever man, of dissolute life but good
appearance and manners; his religion he could put on and off like
his gloves; "no man could appear more conscientiously transported
when the part he was to act required it," says Clarendon, who also
calls him "the chief architect of the whole machine." The Covenant
was not publicly produced for signature till early in 1638; but ever
since that memorable Sunday in the summer of the previous year,
when the reading of the new prayer-book in St. Giles's Church had
been interrupted by an organised tumult of serving-women, various
supplications and remonstrances had been forwarded to the King, and
various meetings held among the disaffected nobles, clergymen, and
others, from which finally sprang the famous Covenant. At one of
these meetings, held in November 1637, Montrose made his first public
appearance on the side of the malcontents.

It is clear, therefore, that he had ample time for reflection, and
that what he did could not at least have been done in the heat of an
angry moment. Those who reject the idea that he was seduced against
his better judgment by the arguments of Rothes or any other agitator,
lay great stress on the probability of his having been guided by the
advice of Napier. That he and Napier must have talked much over the
evil time they saw coming may be taken for granted. It is certain too
that Napier was as honest and loyal as he was sagacious. He was a
true King's man, but in the constitutional, not in the absolute sense
of the old phrase; an upholder of the monarchy, but of a monarchy
ruling according to the established laws of the country. He was of
no faction. He sympathised with all that was genuine, and, according
to the theories of the Scottish nation, lawful in the Covenant;
but, and it is important to remember this, he would not sign it. The
Covenant of 1638 professed to be no more than a renewal of the old
Covenant, or King's Confession as it was sometimes called, of 1580-81,
which had itself been renewed in 1588, when the fear of the Spaniard
was over all the land. But it contained some notable additions. The
office of bishops and the promotion of churchmen to civil power
were declared to have no scriptural warrant, to be contrary both
to the letter and spirit of the original Covenant, which had been
subscribed by King James as well as by his subjects, to tend to
the re-establishment of Popery, and, in short, to be dangerous to
the religion, laws, and liberties of the nation, and no less so to
the King's honour. Their loyalty the subscribers to this new bond
declared to be unimpeachable, whatever "foul aspersions of rebellion
or combination" might be alleged against them by their adversaries.
The King's authority was so closely joined with the true worship of
God that they must stand or fall together; and as they repudiated all
design of doing anything that might turn to the dishonour of God,
so did they repudiate all design of doing anything that might turn
to the diminution of the King's greatness or authority. "We shall,"
they swore, "to the uttermost of our power, with our means and lives,
stand to the defence of our dread sovereign the King's majesty, his
person and authority, in defence and preservation of the foresaid true
religion, liberties, and laws of the kingdom; as also to the mutual
defence and assistance every one of us of another, in the same cause
of maintaining the true religion and his majesty's authority with our
best counsel, our bodies, means, and whole power, against all sorts
of persons whatsoever; so that whatsoever shall be done to the least
of us for that cause, shall be taken as done to us all in general,
and to every one of us in particular." This document was the work of
Archibald Johnstone of Warriston, a clever, unscrupulous lawyer, and
Alexander Henderson, a Presbyterian minister of more learning and
temper than most of his party. It was subsequently revised by Rothes,
Balmerino, and Loudon, and so took its place in Scottish history
as the Covenant of 1638. In all that related to the appointment of
churchmen to civil power Napier must have heartily agreed. He had
been bred, as Montrose had been bred, in the reformed religion, and
was, as Montrose was, a sincere though not intolerant Presbyterian.
To a moderate form of Episcopacy, which should be confined strictly
to the economy of the Church, he possibly entertained, as many good
Presbyterians from the days of Knox had entertained, no aversion.
"Bishops," Montrose declared with almost his last breath, "I care
not for them. I never intended to advance their interests." That was
probably Napier's attitude to them. It did not seem to him a very
terrible thing that one clergyman should have the power of regulating
the conduct and prescribing the duties of another, whether he was
called Bishop or Moderator. But that a clergyman should be entrusted
with civil power he thought dangerous to all parties, to King, Church,
and State. There still exists in his handwriting a paper bearing
emphatic witness to his sentiments on this head.[5] "That churchmen
have competency," it begins, "is agreeable to the law of God and man.
But to invest them into great estates and principal offices of the
State, is neither convenient for the Church, for the King, nor for
the State. Not for the Church, for the indiscreet zeal and excessive
donations of princes were the first causes of corruption in the Roman
Church, the taste whereof did so inflame the avarice and ambition of
the successors that they have raised themselves above all secular and
sovereign power, and to maintain the same have attended to the world
certain devices of their own for matters of faith. Not to Kings nor
States, for histories witness what troubles have been raised to Kings,
what tragedies among subjects, in all places where churchmen were
great. Our reformed Churches, having reduced religion to the ancient
primitive truth and simplicity, ought to beware that corruption enter
not in their Church at the same gate, which already is open, with
store of attendants thereat to welcome it with pomp and ceremony." Nor
was he likely to dispute the theory that resistance to innovations
dangerous to the peace of the kingdom was compatible with loyalty to
the King, and that to preserve the safety of the one was in effect
to preserve the authority of the other. "For a King and his people,"
he wrote, "make up one political body, whereof the King is the head.
In a politic as in a natural body what is good or ill for one is so
for both, neither can the one subsist without the other, but must go
to ruin with the other." Holding these views, and, according to one
idea, approving if not actually recommending his brother-in-law's
subscription to the Covenant, why, it may be asked, did not Napier
himself subscribe it? The answer may perhaps be found in another
extract from the same document: "They who are pressed with necessity
at home are glad of any occasion or pretext to trouble the public
quiet, and to fish in troubled waters to better their fortunes." The
snare which lured his young hot-headed relative was spread in vain
for the old and cautious Napier. A true Covenanter Montrose called
him before the Assembly at Glasgow. He was so; he was too true to the
spirit of the real Covenant to be caught by its specious copy; too
true a Covenanter to trust himself or his conscience to such keepers
as Rothes, Loudon, and Balmerino. A man of his experience in affairs,
nor less experienced in the temper of his own countrymen and of the
King, cannot but have had a shrewd suspicion whither such a movement
under such guides must inevitably tend. It may then be asked why he
did not use his influence to dissuade his relative from a partnership
he was too prudent himself to join? We do not know that he did not. We
know nothing, save that he did not sign the Covenant and that Montrose
did. But it is not unreasonable in the circumstances to suppose that
his advice may have been given that way, and given in vain. At no time
of his life was Montrose easy to persuade against his own feelings.
Confident in his own abilities, conscious of his own integrity, why
may he not have thought that in him the Covenant would find a leader
able to counteract the selfish view of those who were merely troubling
the waters to better their own fortune, persuasive enough to guide it
into the way it should go, and strong enough to keep it there? And
perhaps Napier too believed him to be such a leader.

There remains then only to consider what share, if any, his alleged
resentment at the King's behaviour may have had in determining his
action. That he joined the Covenant to revenge himself on the King
no one who has studied his character will believe, any more than
they will believe that he joined the King to revenge himself on the
Covenant. But is there anything unreasonable in believing that his
resentment at behaviour for which he was conscious of having given no
cause, and so much the reverse of what he had every right and reason
to expect, may have rendered an ambitious and impulsive young man
more amenable to the plausible arguments and misrepresentations of
artful and interested counsellors? If the story of Hamilton's intrigue
be true--and it is hard to believe there can have been no truth in
it--Montrose had been instructed that the King was ill disposed to
Scotland, and the Scots had received what he could not but consider a
convincing proof of it. With his own eyes he had seen what the King's
disposition was to the religion he had been bred in. Everything that
had happened since his return to Scotland had unfortunately tended to
confirm the original impression of his own reception and Hamilton's
explanation of it. A young man of Montrose's disposition would in such
a frame of mind be easy game for such cunning hunters as Rothes and
his crew. There was nothing in the letter of the Covenant he signed
incompatible with the peculiar nature of Scottish loyalty, which
had never been of that patient, unquestioning, one might almost say
unreasoning, nature which has sometimes marked the English loyalist.
To save the country meant to save the King in spite of himself, in
spite of those evil counsellors who stood ever at his ear to poison
him against his Scottish subjects. It was an enchanting prospect for
an ardent, aspiring young man who had fired his imagination with the
romantic pages of Plutarch. "As Philip's noble son," he had written,

    As Philip's noble son did still disdain
      All but the dear applause of merited fame,
    And nothing harboured in that lofty brain
      But how to conquer an eternal name;
    So great attempts, heroic ventures, shall
    Advance my fortune, or renown my fall.

What greater or more heroic venture could there be than to preserve
the religion, laws, and liberties of his country! Hamilton and the
unconscious King between them had provided the hour; Rothes found the
man.

It is true, therefore, to say that Montrose signed the Covenant
deliberately and on reflection, and with the assurance that in so
doing he was pledging himself only to a constitutional resistance
against an illegal attempt to subvert the religion and liberties of
his country, and in nowise combining to undermine and overthrow the
lawful authority and prerogative of the Crown. But it is not therefore
illogical to believe that various causes conspired to give him that
assurance; and that among those causes the jealousy of Hamilton and
the cunning of Rothes had their place together with the fanaticism of
Laud and the folly of the King.




CHAPTER III

THE COVENANT


Young as Montrose was, discerning eyes had already marked him for
one likely to play a conspicuous part on whichever side he might
engage. The news that he had joined their enemies filled the Episcopal
party in Scotland with consternation. So highly, it is said, did the
bishops esteem his talents, that they thought it time to prepare for
a storm when he had declared against them. Nor did his allies show
themselves less conscious of his worth. They at once appointed him to
an important place in their councils. The movement had assumed such
proportions that it was found necessary to devise some less unwieldy
method of conducting business than a large and tumultuous body of men
with no very clear notion of what they wanted or how to secure it.
It was above all things necessary for Rothes and his friends to keep
the controlling power in their own hands. A committee of sixteen,
representing the four Estates of the kingdom, was framed for this
purpose. It was known as the Tables, from the rule that all motions
were to be formally _tabled_, or recorded, before discussion, and
was authorised to act as the responsible agent and mouthpiece of the
party. The four noblemen chosen were Rothes, Loudon, Lindsay of the
Byres (one of Montrose's college friends), and Montrose himself. His
nephew, by marriage with Napier's daughter, Sir George Stirling of
Keir, was one of the four representatives of the lesser barons.

Meanwhile Charles had abated no jot of his arbitrary policy. He
had been advised by the Treasurer, Lord Traquair, to withdraw the
offending liturgy, and to content himself with enforcing his civil
authority. The advice was good, but it may well be doubted whether
Baillie was not right in holding that affairs had now gone too far
for Charles to follow it. At all events it was not followed. A
proclamation was issued announcing the King's entire approval of the
new liturgy, his responsibility for it, and his determination to
regard all further opposition to it as treasonable. This inflammatory
document was read at the city-cross in Edinburgh amid frequent and
open expressions of derision. So soon as the heralds had finished, and
before, owing to the crowd, they could come down from the platform, a
protest prepared for the occasion was read aloud by Warriston from a
scaffold raised for that purpose by the side of the old cross. He was
supported by a party of sixteen noblemen. Among them was Montrose,
who, in the exuberance of his zeal, had mounted on a cask that stood
upon the scaffold. Rothes, who was of course present, remarking the
young enthusiast's elevated position, and remembering that the place
where they were standing was also the place of public execution, said
laughingly to him, "James, you will never be at rest till you be
lifted up there above the rest in a rope." And this grim jest, its
chronicler adds, "was afterwards accomplished in earnest in that same
place; and some even say that the same supporters of the scaffold were
made use of at Montrose's execution."

And now the work was done, and Scotland was ripe for the Covenant.
Whatever may have been the motives of its originators, there can be no
question of the feelings with which the bulk of the people regarded
it. Never, even in the heat of the Reformation, had the stern Scottish
nature been stirred to such a depth and fervour of passion. Its two
strongest feelings had been artfully inflamed, national sentiment
and religious enthusiasm. It would be difficult to separate the two,
and to apportion to each its share in the general movement. But it
is clear that love for the religion they had deliberately chosen and
established with tears and blood was at this time strongly deepened by
the thought that it was menaced by a king of the hated English.

The place and time for the great ceremony were chosen. The time was
the last day of February, 1638. The place was the church but lately
raised beneath the shadow of the great castle whence had issued but
a few short years previously, with all the pomp of a monarch moving
amid a rejoicing people to assume the crown of his fathers, the King
whose authority they were now met to renounce. Of all the historical
spots in that beautiful city there is none that an Englishman surveys
with more mingled feelings than the churchyard of the Greyfriars.
There at the appointed hour came the leading members of the Tables,
with Warriston to read the sacred document and Henderson to explain
it for any who still wavered. Loudon and Rothes spoke with all their
artful eloquence, reiterating their professions of love for their
religion and loyalty to their King. Then Warriston read aloud the
Covenant from a parchment of an ell square. There were few doubters,
and they were soon and easily satisfied. The Earl of Sutherland, the
highest nobleman present, was the first to sign his name. One after
another, all within the church followed him. Then, as the shadows of
the winter evening deepened over the solemn scene, the parchment was
carried outside and read once more to the eager crowd which thronged
every corner of the churchyard. As the last words were spoken--"that
religion and righteousness may nourish in the land, to the glory of
God, the honour of our King, and peace and comfort of us all"--all
hands were raised to heaven in token of assent, while old men, in
whose ears the fiery tones of Knox might have rung, wept tears of
joy to see that the spirit of the great Reformer still lived among
his countrymen. The parchment was then spread upon a tombstone, and
all who could get near pressed forward in turn to sign it. During
the next two days it was carried round the city, accompanied by a
sobbing, praying multitude. Signatures came in apace from citizens of
all classes and every age. Even serving-women and little children, who
could neither write nor read, pledged themselves to the good cause
with the assistance of a notary. It is said that many in the ecstasy
of the moment wrote their names in blood drawn from their own veins.
Copies were made of it, bearing the names of the chief subscribers,
and entrusted to all who would undertake the office of recruiting for
this holy war. Nobles and gentlemen galloped about the country with
these copies in their pockets. Agents were sent round to all the
principal towns and to the Universities. Ministers read aloud the call
to arms from their pulpits, and exhorted their congregations to sign.
Those who refused were threatened, and even violence was sometimes
employed. Names are of course easily collected, if only trouble
enough be taken to collect them. Many signed the Covenant, as many
have always signed and will always sign whatever is laid before them,
without any clear understanding to what they were pledging themselves,
simply because others had done so. Many signed through fear of the
consequences of a refusal. But when allowance has been made for all
the arts commonly employed to foment a popular disturbance, and for
all the motives which have power to influence the popular mind at
such times, it is impossible to doubt that, so far as the Covenant
was understood to be taken in defence of the national religion, it
reflected the current of the national thought.

Scotland was now practically in a state of rebellion, and the Tables
began to assume the airs of a sovereign. Munitions of war were
collected and moneys levied. Several of the leaders had already
come forward with voluntary subscriptions, Montrose heading the
list with a contribution of twenty-five dollars. It was determined
to supplement this with a more certain source of supply. A general
tax was levied of a dollar on every thousand marks of rent. Though
delicately called a contribution, it was in effect a tax, and a tax,
moreover, levied with a strictness to which Scotsmen had hitherto
been strangers. A committee was appointed for the purpose, soon to
be known by the appropriate title of the War Committee. It was clear
that some more serious effort must be made to maintain the royal
authority than the issue of proclamations that were only laughed at.
Hamilton was accordingly commissioned to treat with the Covenanters.
He was empowered to make certain concessions, such as the King fondly
conceived, or pretended to conceive, should be sufficient to assure
all loyal Scotsmen that he had no design on either their religion or
their laws. He might promise, for example, that the new Canons and the
new Liturgy should not be pressed except in what Charles was pleased
to call a fair and legal way. Some modifications also might be made
in the Court of High Commission, a harmless invention of the previous
reign with nothing but the name in common with that tribunal so odious
to Englishmen, but which nevertheless was equally odious to Scotsmen,
as relegating to bishops that moral supervision of the Church
previously vested in the Presbyteries. But on one point the King was
firm. No concession was to be made, nothing was to be promised, until
the Covenant had been rescinded. In vain did all his advisers, Scots
and English, clerics and laymen, assure him that negotiation on these
terms was hopeless. It mattered not. The Covenant, he answered, was
a standard of rebellion, and until it was taken down he had no more
power in Scotland than a Doge of Venice.

On this bootless errand Hamilton arrived in Edinburgh early in June,
and took up his quarters in Holyrood. An immense concourse assembled
to see him enter the city. The road between Leith and Musselburgh
was lined with nearly sixty thousand people. At the most conspicuous
spot five hundred ministers were congregated in their black gowns.
The Commissioner, according to Baillie, was moved to tears at such a
sign of the national feeling. Hamilton's powers of dissimulation were
indeed remarkable; but it may be doubted whether on this occasion the
good Covenanter's emotion, and the pride he felt at the noble display
made by his own cloth, did not a little overcome his usual acuteness.
It is certain, however, that the Commissioner was extremely gracious,
bowing and smiling on every side, though he skilfully managed to
evade a speech which had been prepared in welcome by Mr. William
Livingstone, "the strongest in voice," as Baillie naïvely remarks,
"and austerest in countenance of us all." This, Hamilton suggested,
might be more properly appreciated at a private audience.

The Tables had selected six of their number as commissioners on their
part, three noblemen and three ministers. Among the former were
that inseparable pair Rothes and Loudon; the third was Montrose. To
Henderson and Dickson was added a colleague rejoicing in the ominous
name of Cant. They presented their demands: the withdrawal of the new
Liturgy, the Book of Canons, and the Court of High Commission, and
the summons first of a free General Assembly, instead of a packed
body of subservient courtiers such as had restored Episcopacy at the
will of the late King, and then of a Parliament to finally settle
all matters concerning religion. Hamilton demanded as an inevitable
preliminary to all concessions the renunciation of the Covenant and
their return to their lawful allegiance. They professed themselves
to be still as always loyal subjects, and declared that they would
as soon renounce their baptism as the Covenant. All through June the
controversy dragged its fruitless length along. Hamilton by turns
argued, pleaded, warned, and threatened. The King, he said, was ready
to grant all that honour would permit him, and all that was necessary
to establish their religion and liberties; beyond that they should
not press him. By so doing they would forfeit the sympathies of those
in England who wished well to sufferers, but would never wish well to
rebels. If they still persisted in their unreasonable and seditious
course, the King would come in person to settle the matter with forty
thousand men at his back. Unfortunately for Hamilton's argument,
Rothes and Loudon were as well informed on the state of affairs
in England as himself. They had sharp spies at Court, even in the
King's own household. They knew exactly what were the Commissioner's
instructions, and had no fear of forfeiting the sympathy of their
English partisans by persisting in their demands. There is no doubt
that the firm front of the Covenanters was now greatly strengthened
by assurances from the English Opposition. As usual, too, Hamilton
played a double part. For this indeed he had some excuse. He had
received permission from Charles to employ all means to gain time,
short of giving any promise that would have afterwards to be revoked
or of recognising the lawfulness of the Covenant. Time was of the
utmost importance now, for it soon became clear to Hamilton, and he
made it clear to the King, that an appeal to force was the inevitable
end of the negotiations, and that all that remained for him to do was
to prolong the time till force was ready. But it is doubtful whether
Charles would have understood this permission to include an assurance
to his rebellious subjects that to stand firm was the only and the
certain way of gaining their ends. Yet a very circumstantial story
seems to fix this treachery on the King's Commissioner. He had brought
with him to Scotland two forms of the royal declaration against the
Covenant; in the first it was plainly denounced as an act of rebellion
and its immediate surrender demanded; in the second somewhat more
general and conciliatory language was employed. In one of his earliest
letters Hamilton had assured the King that it would be impossible
to publish the more outspoken document; he now wished to leave even
the gentler one unread. But on that point Charles was firm. Hamilton
might return to England for further counsel and instruction, but the
declaration in its milder form must be published. The Commissioner
had recourse to one of those ignoble artifices which were his idea
of diplomacy. Pretending that he had resolved not to publish either
declaration (of whose existence the Covenanters were very well aware)
he left Edinburgh, but returning suddenly at noon of the next day
the second and milder declaration was read at the cross. But he had
to do with men as cunning as himself. A few had been deceived by his
pretended departure, but only a few. Before the herald had finished
a crowd had assembled, and among them was the inevitable Warriston
with his protest and a trusty band of supporters. The document was
longer, less respectful, and more explicit than the one hitherto used,
leaving indeed no further doubt, had any previously existed, of the
nature and extent of the Covenanters' demands, and of their resolution
to be satisfied with no compromise. The Liturgy, the Book of Canons,
the Court of High Commission must go; a free General Assembly and a
free Parliament must be summoned; the Covenant must be maintained. The
applauding crowd, excited by Hamilton's foolish attempt to overreach
them, were with difficulty restrained from putting to the sword the
few who had the courage to raise their voices for the King. So strong
was the popular feeling against the declaration that those members
of the Council who had given a grudging assent to it now wished to
retract, and threatened that, if not allowed to do so, they would
themselves take the Covenant. While Hamilton was arguing with them a
deputation from the Covenanters was announced. They came to protest
against the declaration. When they had been heard, Hamilton, excusing
himself to his colleagues, withdrew with them into another room where
he addressed them in these remarkable words: "My Lords and Gentlemen,
I spoke to you before those Lords of the Council as the King's
Commissioner; now there being none present but yourselves, I speak to
you as a kindly Scotsman. If you go on with courage and resolution you
will carry what you please, but if you faint and give ground in the
least you are undone--a word is enough to wise men." The authority
for this monstrous speech rests on two of the deputation, who heard
it and repeated it in identical terms within four-and-twenty hours of
its being spoken. One of these was Montrose himself, the other was
his colleague, the minister Cant. They told it separately to Bishop
Guthrie, then a minister at Stirling, in whose Memoirs it may be
read. The Bishop adds that the incident created an uneasy feeling in
Montrose's mind that Hamilton was playing both sides false in order to
advance those designs on the crown of Scotland of which he had been,
it will be remembered, already accused, and which many at least of his
own countrymen still believed him to entertain. He told Guthrie that
he should form no rash conclusions, but that meantime he should keep
his eyes open and look carefully to his own steps.

It will but anticipate the course of events by a few months to wind up
at once the tangled skein of these negotiations. Twice again in 1638
did Hamilton visit Scotland. Each time he came with fresh concessions,
too late to be of any real service, yet enough to convince the
Covenanters of the truth of the Commissioner's ill-omened words that
everything would be gained by standing firm. Once again a royal
proclamation was heard from the city-cross; once again it was followed
by a protest, more defiant than any of its predecessors. The King had
proposed a Covenant on his own account, made up of those of 1580 and
1590, the latter binding all who signed it to stand by the King in
"suppressing of the Papists, promotion of true religion, and settling
of his Highness's estate, and obedience in all the countries and
corners of the realm." To sign this, said the indignant protesters,
would be to make themselves guilty of mocking God, inasmuch as they
of all men needed no adjuration to suppress Popery. On another point
their language was still more emphatic. Charles had granted the demand
for a General Assembly, and had promised that the obnoxious Liturgy
should be absolutely revoked, together with the Book of Canons and
the Court of High Commission, that the practice of the Articles of
Perth should be for the present suspended till Parliament should
pronounce its final decision on them, and that the authority of the
bishops should be made subject to the authority of the Assembly. In a
word, all that they asked was conceded; but the hour for concessions
had passed. Episcopacy must go root and branch. All that the King
made by his submission was to hear that he had no power to make or
withhold it. Matters of religion were not in his hands, but in the
divinely appointed hands of the Assembly, and in theirs only. Thus
the Covenanters cast to the winds the last shred of their professed
loyalty, and practically declared war against the King's authority.

These things were done at the end of September. On November 21st the
General Assembly was to meet at Glasgow. The intervening time was
spent by Hamilton in vain attempts to influence the elections and to
procure signatures for the new or King's Covenant, as it was called.
In both he was equally unsuccessful. The Assembly was constituted
after a fashion which left no doubt what its temper was likely to be.
Going back to an Act of 1587, it was resolved to elect lay as well
as ecclesiastical members. This was what Hamilton wished to prevent.
The ministers alone he thought he might still be able to persuade
to show some respect for the prerogative of a King who was ready to
grant so much, and who had already shown himself both willing and
able to make their position easier and more secure. Nor were the
ministers themselves well pleased to see the office that was rightly
theirs shared among men who, as they knew well, were for the most part
influenced by no real love for religion, and whose lives were in too
many instances at direct variance with its teaching. But the nobles,
in Baillie's expressive phrase, had now got their feet in the stirrup,
and were not to be stopped from the game they had started. Moreover,
it was in them that the real strength of the Covenant as a national
movement against an arbitrary king still lay. The people knew this,
and the ministers were not strong enough to dictate to the people. The
Tables were the controlling power of the elections, and of that body
no member was now busier or more resolute than Montrose. The King's
Covenant proved a lamentable failure. Few could be found to sign
it compared with the crowds that still thronged daily to subscribe
its rival, and of these nearly one-half came from Aberdeen and the
neighbourhood, which through all the trouble had stood stoutly by the
Throne; while a mad woman named Margaret Nicholson, who went about the
country proclaiming herself empowered to declare the National Covenant
a direct gift from heaven, and the King's from another place, was
generally accepted as an inspired prophetess.

On the appointed day the Assembly met, a day not less momentous
in the history of Scotland than that on which two years later the
Long Parliament met in the old chapel of St. Stephen was destined
to prove in the history of England. The place appointed was the
venerable cathedral, one of the few triumphs of Gothic art which had
been preserved by the affectionate pride of the citizens from the
furious zeal of Knox's Vandals. On a high chair of state sat Hamilton
in all the pomp, the barren pomp as he was now conscious, of the
representative of the Crown. The Privy Council were ranged below
him. Directly opposite were placed seats for the Moderator and his
clerk. At a long table in the body of the church sat the Lords of the
Covenant, while the representatives of the Presbyteries had to be
content with humbler places on either side behind them. Beyond these
again was a stage for the accommodation of the sons of the Covenanting
nobility and other distinguished spectators, while every unoccupied
part of the building was thronged with a vast and miscellaneous crowd,
including many gentlewomen. Not a single bishop was present. Only
two indeed, the Bishops of Ross and Argyll, had ventured to enter
the city; they had come under the protection of Hamilton and his
friends, and were now lodged safely in the castle. Swords and daggers
were to be seen on all sides. The regularly elected members numbered
two hundred and forty in all, of whom one hundred were laymen. But
besides these there were almost as many again who had no vote nor
lawful place in the Assembly and professed to be there only in the
capacity of friends, _amici curiæ_ as it were, to impart confidence by
their presence, and perhaps aid by their counsels. Many of them could
neither read nor write, but they were strong in numbers and loud of
voice. Great care had been taken to exclude all who had not subscribed
the Covenant. The provost had issued a number of leaden tickets
stamped with his arms, without which no spectator was admitted into
the building, and the distribution of these was solely in the hands
of the Covenanters. To add to Hamilton's discomfiture, he was aware
that he could no longer trust even the members of his own council so
far as any vote on Episcopacy was concerned. "What then," he wrote
to the King on the day after this Assembly had met, "what then can
be expected but a total disobedience to authority, if not a present
rebellion?"

It was soon made clear that nothing else was to be expected, for that
nothing else was intended. After Hamilton had read his commission, and
a protestation on behalf of the bishops had been refused a hearing,
Henderson was chosen for Moderator and Warriston for his clerk. Then
began a dreary week of disputing and protesting on all sides on
every conceivable subject, to the utter weariness of everybody but
the clerk, who received a piece of gold with each fresh protest. Few
appear to have contributed more to this waste of time than Montrose
himself, who was, moreover, responsible for a general wrangle in which
the Moderator did not display the quality to be expected from his
title, and which the Commissioner found some difficulty in quelling.
It arose on a disputed election in which the Tables had overridden the
authority of the Presbyteries. Montrose was of course on the side of
the former, the dispute having indeed arisen on a rather high-handed
exercise of his power as a member of the Tables, which the more wary
of the party were desirous of concealing, and Montrose of course,
through all his life the sworn foe of all compromise, insisted on
justifying. It was doubly unfortunate for him that the candidate
he opposed should have been his brother-in-law young Carnegie, and
that his opposition should have led to an unseemly display of temper
between him and his father-in-law Southesk. The dispute did Montrose
no good with either party. The Covenanters were annoyed to find so
young a man disposed to take too much upon himself against the wiser
counsels of his elders; and Hamilton was, as will be seen, enabled to
speak another bad word for him in the King's ear.

It was not till the 28th that the real business began. The unfortunate
bishops were as usual the cause of war. They had declined to accept
the jurisdiction of the Assembly as at present constituted, and the
Moderator now put the question to the vote. Hamilton then rose. He
read again the King's offer to abolish all grievances, and to make
bishops for the future subject to the authority of the Assemblies;
but he refused to acknowledge the authority of an Assembly in which
laymen were allowed to speak and vote. A warm debate ensued. The
Moderator declined to reopen a question which the Assembly had
already decided in its own favour. "If the bishops," said Loudon,
"decline the judgment of a National Assembly, I know not a competent
judgment-seat for them but the King of Heaven." "I stand to the King's
prerogative," replied Hamilton, "as supreme judge over all causes,
civil and ecclesiastical, to whom I think they may appeal, and not let
the causes be reasoned here." It was all in vain. The Assembly were
determined to have no bishops on any terms, and no king save on their
own terms. Nothing remained for Hamilton, as representing the Crown,
but to declare the Assembly an illegal body and to dissolve it. This
he accordingly did, with tears in his eyes as some said, and left the
cathedral while the inevitable protest against his action was being
read. Returning to Edinburgh he made such preparations as time and
means allowed for garrisoning the castle, and then left the country,
not to return to it again but as leader of the King's forces against
rebels in arms.

The Assembly, thus freed from all control, made short work of the
bishops. Six out of the fourteen were simply deposed; the rest were
deposed and excommunicated on charges sometimes of the most heinous
nature, which the most trivial evidence, when any was offered at
all, was considered amply sufficient to establish. Baillie owns, for
instance, that certain acts of gross immorality brought against the
Bishop of Galloway were not in his opinion conclusively proved; but he
adds, as though to make up for this injustice, that the unfortunate
prelate had at least "all the ordinary faults of a bishop," besides
the capital one of being the first who had dared to flaunt the robes
of his office in Edinburgh. The new Liturgy, the Book of Canons, the
Court of High Commission, and the Articles of Perth all followed the
bishops one after another into the limbo of unholy things. Sentence
of excommunication was also pronounced against many clergymen who had
shown, or were suspected of, a leaning to Episcopacy: the six General
Assemblies which had sat under Episcopal government were declared
to have been illegal; and the Scottish Church was thus restored
to the pure Presbyterianism established by the Act of 1592. Thus,
when on December 20th this memorable body dissolved itself, it had
accomplished in longer time, but with equal thoroughness, a revolution
not less momentous than that which seventy-eight years earlier had in
a single day transferred the national faith from Rome to Geneva.

Nor was this the Covenanters' only triumph. The departure of Hamilton
was the signal for the appearance of an invaluable convert.
Archibald, Earl of Argyll, then in his fortieth year, and but lately
succeeded to the title and vast estates of his father, was reckoned
the most powerful subject in the kingdom. His only rival in the
Highlands was Huntly, and his revenues were larger and he could bring
a larger following into the field than the chief of the Gordons. In
intellect there was no comparison between them. Argyll, according
to Clarendon, wanted nothing but courage and honesty to make him a
very great man. The want of honesty was too common a want in the
politicians of those days to mark a man among his peers, but cowardice
was indeed rare among all classes; and though he was destined to
show that, like so many men whose nerves are uncertain, he could
face inevitable death with calmness and dignity, in the presence of
danger it is indisputable that Argyll's physical courage was, to say
the least, not conspicuous. Cool, cunning, and sagacious, he had,
though at once a Privy Councillor and a rigid Presbyterian, been
hitherto careful to identify himself prominently with neither party.
But Hamilton had gauged him truly when he warned Charles to beware
of him as the most dangerous man in the State. The same warning had
indeed been previously conveyed to the infatuate King by one who had
still better cause to know the truth than Hamilton. There had been
trouble between father and son, and Charles, with whom the latter
had been always a favourite, had ordered the Earl, who in his old
age had turned Catholic at the bidding of a young wife, to leave the
kingdom. The father obeyed without remonstrance, but before he went
he warned the King to beware of his son. "Sir," he said, "I must
know this young man better than you can do. You may raise him, which
I doubt you will live to repent, for he is a man of craft, subtlety,
and falsehood, and can love no man, and if ever he finds it in his
power to do you a mischief, he will be sure to do it." So powerful
an ally was received of course with open arms by the Covenanters.
Hitherto they had been doubtful whether they should regard him as
friend or foe. His conduct, said Baillie, had been ambiguous. This
was now explained by Argyll's assurance that he had always secretly
been on their side and had only delayed declaring himself for them
while he conceived that this ambiguity might best serve their
interests; matters had now come, he said, to such a height that no
honest man could hold back. His speech was long, pious, and profuse
in good advice. The Moderator and the rest of the ministers professed
themselves enraptured, and all parted on the best terms with each
other.

Two days before Hamilton dissolved the Assembly, but when it had
already clearly shown him what he was to expect from it, he despatched
a long letter to the King, warning him what the issue was almost
certain to be, pointing out the precautions to be taken, and taken at
once if his warnings were proved true, and commenting on the character
of the movement and of its leaders with a frankness unusual in him. In
this letter Montrose is mentioned in a way which tends still further
to confirm the truth of Heylin's story. "Now for the Covenanters,"
the passage runs, "I shall only say this, in general they may all be
placed in one roll, as they now stand. But certainly, sir, those that
have both broached the business, and still hold it aloft, are Rothes,
Balmerino, Lindsay, Lothian, Loudon, Yester, Cranston. There are many
others as forward in show, amongst whom none more vainly foolish than
Montrose." This is precisely the language of a man anxious to remind
his correspondent what he had predicted of a third party, and to point
out how exactly his prediction had been proved true.




CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST BISHOPS' WAR


Only one town of importance now refused to acknowledge the new power.
Aberdeen, then the second city in Scotland, rich, populous, learned,
and loyal from the first, still turned a deaf ear alike to the
promises and the threats of the Covenant. The citizens of Aberdeen
were no bigoted followers of Laud. They held rather of the school
of their late bishop, the wise and benevolent Forbes, content with
things as they were, and suspicious of any change which threatened
to interfere with their comfortable and studious independence. They
desired, indeed, chiefly to be let alone; but not to be for the
Covenant was to be against it, and there was, moreover, a particular
reason why Aberdeen could not be suffered to remain neutral. It was
the capital of that large district wherein the House of Gordon reigned
supreme, as the House of Campbell was supreme in the West; and the
Aberdeen burghers, whatever their religious opinions might be, could
not but be the political allies of the House of Gordon. The old
Marquis of Huntly had been always a favourite with James, who knew
that the fiery old Papist if one of the most turbulent was also one
of the most loyal of his subjects. His son George, who had lately
succeeded him, had been brought up at Court with the young princes in
the faith of the English Church, and had married a sister of Argyll.
He had for some time commanded the Scottish Guard in France, and had
served with distinction in the campaign against Austria; but the
lavish state he had maintained as captain of that famous corps had
plunged him deep into debt, and it was believed that he would listen
to any proposal likely to relieve his desperate fortunes. Overtures
had already been made to him from the Covenant on these conditions,
and had been rejected. "My house," he said, "has risen by the Kings
of Scotland, has ever stood for them, and with them shall fall, nor
will I quit the path of my predecessors; and if the event be the
ruin of my sovereign, then shall the rubbish that belongs to it bury
beneath it all that belongs to mine." The spirit which prompted this
gallant answer was sincere, but, as Charles and Montrose were both to
find to their cost, it could not always rise superior to more selfish
feelings. For the present he had been appointed Lieutenant for the
King in the North, instructed to arm his men, and promised succours
from England. But he had also been instructed to take his orders from
Hamilton, and not to act without them; for the present he had merely
to get ready, to stand on the defensive, and above all things to avoid
any open act of hostility. Huntly knew well enough the futility of
such orders. Not to move without Hamilton was to stay where he was
till he was turned out by the Covenanters. Still there was nothing for
him but to obey, and hold himself in readiness to join hands with the
unwelcome ally who had been thrust upon him.

There was no time to be lost. The King was slowly assembling an army
for the Borders, and the Covenanters could not march south with such
an enemy in their rear. If Hamilton could effect a juncture with
Huntly on the east coast, at the same time as the Irishry under
Antrim and Strafford were landed on the west, it would go ill with
the Covenanters. They had not been idle. The castles of Edinburgh,
Dumbarton, and Dalkeith had been carried by surprise within a few
hours of each other, and Mar could be trusted to hold Stirling safe.
In the West the power of Hamilton and Douglas had been dealt a serious
blow by the seizure of their strongholds in Arran and Clydesdale.
Of all the fortresses in Scotland, Lord Nithsdale's Castle of
Caerlaverock in Dumfriesshire was alone held for the King. From the
Border to the North Sea the Covenant was supreme, save only in that
dangerous district which called Huntly lord, and against the power of
Huntly the arms of the Covenant were now turned.

The command was given to Montrose. His restless and enterprising
spirit marked him for the work among men whose talents appeared to
lie rather in debate than in the field. His own estates, moreover,
lay near, and though his following was but a handful compared with
Huntly's power, he would be more likely to gain recruits than an
unknown leader. But Montrose was young, hot-headed, too fond, it was
feared, of his own way, possibly also too punctilious. Some older
man must go with him, more experienced in war and more accustomed
also to obey, who, while nominally Montrose's lieutenant, might
keep a watchful eye over him. The man for this purpose was found in
Alexander Leslie, a cadet, though an illegitimate one, of the House
of Rothes. Though a little man and deformed, Leslie had won fame and
rank in the Thirty Years' War, where so many of his countrymen had
been fighting for the Protestant cause under the great Gustavus.
During a short visit to Scotland in the spring of 1638 Leslie had seen
how the land lay. He had returned to Germany, but not for long. By the
end of the year he was back again, with good news and better than news
for the Covenanters. During his absence he had been recruiting for
them among their countrymen who, like himself, had taken service under
the Lion of the North, and collecting stores of military supplies.
Some of these were intercepted by the English cruisers, but the most
part found their way into Scotland, where Leslie was welcomed with
open arms. He was soon appointed general of the Covenanting forces,
and they could not have found a better man. Though without the
military genius of his nephew David, he was as accomplished in all the
mechanism of war as any man of his time, cool, sagacious, and certain
never to be hurried into mischief by a misguided enthusiasm for any
cause. King and Covenant were much the same to him; but fighting was
his trade; the death of Gustavus had set him free to serve another
flag; he was a Scotsman and a Protestant, above all a kinsman of
Rothes, whose "canniness" was not likely to let so useful an ally go.
Leslie was, in short, a favourable specimen of that class of soldier
of fortune which the incomparable genius of Walter Scott has fixed for
ever in the character of Dugald Dalgetty.

This was not Montrose's first visit to Aberdeen as an agent for the
Covenant. He had been there in the previous summer, but in more
peaceful guise. Instead of Leslie and a following of armed soldiers,
he had been accompanied only by a few laymen of no particular
importance, and the three apostles of the Covenant, Henderson,
Dickson, and Cant. It was not a very fruitful visit. The ministers
of Aberdeen would not give up their pulpits to the strangers, and
the apostles had to deliver their doctrine from a gallery of the
Earl Marischal's house, then occupied by his sister Lady Pitsligo,
a staunch Puritan after the fashion of Hamilton's mother and of
Montrose's own aunt Lady Wigton. Montrose was of course present,
sitting at her ladyship's side, to the regret, doubtless, of many
who recalled the different circumstances in which they had last seen
him, when the bells rang in honour of the gallant young bridegroom
who had just been elected a burgess of their loyal town. The apostles
wisely chose the hours between the church services so as to make sure
of an audience; and an audience they secured, but one not entirely
to their taste. The respectful part listened with more curiosity
than conviction, and not all were respectful. A few insignificant
proselytes were gained, and a grievous insult was cast upon the good
city. Aberdeen prided itself upon its hospitality, and when the
provost and bailies heard that their young townsman was on the road
to visit them, they prepared a collation in his honour and came to
welcome him at his lodging. But Montrose treated them with scant
ceremony, and refused to receive anything at their hands till they
had subscribed the Covenant, an affront which had never before, they
vowed, been put upon Aberdeen within the memory of man!

They prepared a different welcome now for the young Earl. The
citizens were armed and drilled, guns mounted, trenches dug, and the
town generally put into such a state of defence as was possible.
Meanwhile Montrose was at his own place in Forfarshire, beating up
for recruits. While there he heard that the few allies the Covenant
could boast in that quarter were to meet at Turriff, a market-town
on the borders of Banffshire, mostly gentry of the district, Frasers
and Forbeses, who were jealous of the Gordons and ready to join any
party against them. Huntly heard also of the meeting and resolved to
disperse it. But Montrose was too quick for him. With one of those
lightning dashes which were to be the secret of his successes against
the Covenant, he now won the first point in the game for it. Taking
with him barely two hundred of his own men, he hurried across the
Grampians by the most unfrequented routes, and when Huntly at the
head of two thousand men marched into Turriff he was greeted with a
compact array of musket-barrels levelled at him across the wall of the
little churchyard. His orders were explicit. He was not to proclaim
his commission till the time came, and that mysterious moment was to
be decided not by him but by Hamilton. Moreover he was to avoid all
risk of bloodshed for the present. He knew Montrose would fight, and,
though he was perhaps the better man for the moment, he knew also that
Leslie was at hand with a force more than double his own. Had the
positions of the two leaders been reversed there can be no doubt what
Montrose would have done. But Huntly was not Montrose. He withdrew to
Inverury, and disbanding the most part of his men left Aberdeen to
its fate.

This was not so severe as probably the citizens had expected, and as
certainly some of the Covenanters wished. A few days after the affair
at Turriff, Montrose joined hands with Leslie and entered Aberdeen
in triumph at the head of six thousand men, each of whom wore a blue
scarf, or carried a knot of blue ribbons in his cap, in opposition
to the royal scarlet which Huntly had taken for his colours. To
condescend to the devices of these godless cavaliers shocked some of
Montrose's solemn captains, but the young general was right. He knew
the value of a distinctive symbol to warm men's hearts, especially the
hearts of soldiers, and that it was none the worse for pleasing their
eyes as well. The blue ribbons were at once popular, and Montrose's
_whimsies_, as they were at first contemptuously called, soon became
the recognised badge of the Covenanters.

There was no attempt at opposition. Disgusted at Huntly's defection,
the most resolute spirits had left the city and sailed south to join
the King. The rest could do nothing but accept the Covenant and trust
to Montrose's mercy. He was not hard upon them. Having marched his men
through the town he quartered them on the links outside, with strict
injunctions to keep good order and to pay for all they consumed. The
citizens were set to work at filling up the trenches they had dug and
removing all traces of their improvised fortifications, and a fine of
ten thousand marks was imposed on the town. Then, leaving behind him a
garrison under the command of his college friend Lord Kinghorn, whom
he named governor of the town, Montrose marched north after Huntly,
who had retreated from Inverury to Gordon Castle in the Bog of Gicht.

Huntly was anxious to come to terms, and Montrose when left to
himself had no wish to make them hard. The two men accordingly met by
appointment near Inverury, each attended by eleven friends armed only
with walking-swords. The two chiefs stepped aside to talk. What passed
between them can only be conjectured, but after a long conference
Huntly and his companions returned with Montrose to his camp at
Inverury, where they were courteously received. Here Huntly signed a
paper, known in the language of the time as a bond of maintenance,
probably containing (for its exact terms were never made clear)
those clauses of the Covenant which professed respect to the King's
authority and a love for the national religion and liberties, pledging
himself also not to interfere with any of his vassals who had a mind
to mount the blue ribbon. Such of them as were Papists Montrose, on
his part, promised to protect so long as they were willing to assist
in maintaining the laws and liberties of their common fatherland.
Huntly, however, who saw many of his personal enemies in the camp,
Crichton of Frendraught in particular, the sworn foe of his House,[6]
was doubtful how far this arrangement would be allowed to hold good.
He employed one of his followers, therefore, to warn Montrose against
evil counsellors who, he said, would be certain to work him all the
mischief they could. Montrose answered that he was well aware that
Huntly had many enemies among the Covenanters, but that he should
not fail in any part of his word; "only," he added, "there is this
difficulty, that business here is all transacted by a vote and a
committee, nor can I get anything done of myself." He had already done
so much, it was urged, that he might well go on with the rest. He was
in command, and if he stood firm the others must give way. "I shall do
my utmost for Huntly's satisfaction," was the answer, and with this
assurance the Marquis and his friends were suffered to depart.

Their doubts were soon verified. Montrose returned to Aberdeen, where
he was joined by Murray, Seaforth, the Master of Lovat, and other
zealous Covenanters with a body of cavalry. Encouraged by these
reinforcements, Huntly's enemies were soon at work. A council of
war was held; it was agreed that the General had been too lenient
with a dangerous man, and the Marquis was requested to repair to
Aberdeen under a promise of safe conduct. How far Montrose was
directly responsible for what followed it is hard to decide. That he
had promised more than he was at the time confident of being able
to perform is clear; but it is by no means so clear that he did not
do his utmost to keep his promise, and it is unreasonable to brand
him with treachery because he was not strong enough to carry the
day single-handed against the vote and the committee. Yet though he
may have meant to deal honestly with Huntly, when he found himself
overborne in the council he certainly seems to have shown little
hesitation in acting as the agent of those who had no such scruples.
After a series of trifling and vexatious conditions had been offered
and refused, it was intimated that the Marquis would do well to return
with them to Edinburgh. Conscious that he was in a trap Huntly first
asked that his bond should be restored to him. When this had been
done, he asked if he was to go as a prisoner or as a free man. "Make
your choice," said Montrose shortly. "Then," was the answer, "I will
not go as a prisoner, but as a volunteer." Whatever share Montrose
may have had in this double dealing he was destined to pay dear for
it on a later day. The Marquis never really forgave him; and their
subsequent alliance proved costlier to Montrose and to the King than
their present enmity proved to Huntly.

Montrose marched south with his prize on April 13th, leaving Aberdeen
in charge of a committee composed of the Gordons' bitterest foes.
Immediately on his arrival at Edinburgh, Huntly was brought before
the Tables and pressed to subscribe the Covenant. "You may take my
head from my shoulders," was his answer, "but not my heart from my
sovereign." He was at once sent as a prisoner to the Castle, with his
heir Lord Gordon who had accompanied him from Aberdeen. His second
son, Lord Aboyne, should also have been there, but he had been allowed
by Montrose to return home on parole to procure money and other
necessaries for the journey, and when safe within his own borders
had easily been persuaded to break his word with men who had shown
so little care of their own. The House of Gordon, said his kinsmen,
could not be left without a head at such a crisis. Lord Lewis, the
third son, was too young, and it devolved therefore on him to play his
father's part, and to keep the King's flag flying in the midst of
traitors and rebels.

Montrose reached Edinburgh on April 20th. On May 1st Hamilton anchored
in the Firth of Forth with nineteen sail, five thousand men, and some
munitions of war. He came too late. Leith had been fortified. Fife and
the Lothians were in arms to a man. Among the crowds who thronged the
shore to stare at the English fleet came the old Dowager Countess of
Hamilton, riding on horseback, with pistols at her saddle, and vowing,
in a spirit worthy of her ancestor, the grim old Reforming Earl of
Glencairn, to shoot her son dead with her own hand should he dare to
set a hostile foot on Scottish soil. A stouter heart than Hamilton's
might well have shrunk from the prospect before him. His men were
raw English peasants, without drill or discipline and careless of
the cause for which they had been armed with weapons of whose use
they were ignorant. Opposed to them was a people as well equipped and
better officered, inflamed with the belief that their religion and
liberties were at stake, and resolute to accept no compromise till
both had been secured. Present action was plainly impossible; but
useful time might be gained by diplomacy, which, if it could effect
nothing else, might serve to remind the Covenanters that Hamilton,
though circumstances had placed him at the head of an English army,
was still at heart a Scotsman. He therefore landed his men on the
little islands of Inchcolm and Inchkeith, where they could be taught
at least how to handle their muskets, opened negotiations with the
enemy, and commenced a lugubrious correspondence with the King.

Meanwhile Aboyne had gone south to find Charles, and had met him at
Newcastle. The spirited young fellow undertook to raise his father's
vassals, if some help in men and money were forthcoming. Money
there was none, but some of the men now lying idle in the Forth
might be available. Aboyne was therefore sent back to Scotland with
instructions to Hamilton to furnish him with what troops he could
spare; but before he could reach the fleet the position of affairs had
again changed. The Gordons had risen without waiting for their young
chief, had scattered the Covenanting garrison in a skirmish popularly
known as the Trot of Turriff (which marks the virtual beginning of the
Civil War), and had re-occupied Aberdeen. Montrose had marched north
again with a force of four thousand men. And Hamilton, on whom the
eyes of all Royalists and Covenanters in Scotland were now anxiously
turned, had sent two out of his three regiments south to swell the
army Charles was now laboriously mustering at York!

This inexplicable movement had been made by the King's order, but
on Hamilton's advice. That advice had been given on May 21st, seven
days after the Gordons had risen. The order had been sent on the
23rd, and on the next day Charles learned the news from Aberdeen. His
position was undoubtedly serious. Leslie was advancing to the Border
with an army which, though less than rumour made it at Newcastle, was
far larger than the force Charles had as yet been able to collect,
far readier and far more eager to fight. But it is clear that such
reinforcements as Hamilton could furnish, while they could have
availed little against the trained and resolute troops of Leslie,
had been invaluable in the North, where the war was as yet rather
feudal than national, where the forces on both sides were small and
disorganised, and where five thousand men, however unskilful, would
have been sufficient to turn the scale on either side. The Royalists
held Aberdeen from the 15th to the 20th of May. Had Hamilton joined
them before the latter day it would have been necessary to place
a larger force at Montrose's disposal, and Leslie's march to the
Border must have been checked for the time. But for three weeks the
King's lieutenant seems to have remained in complete ignorance that
the King's loyal subjects were in arms for him within less than a
hundred miles. We have seen that the rising was known at Newcastle on
the 24th. It was known in Edinburgh, it was known even to Huntly in
his prison, before the regiments had left the Forth. Yet the one man
then in Scotland whom it most concerned to know these things for his
master's sake, who alone in Scotland had the means and the warrant to
profit by the knowledge, who was at liberty to come and go, to receive
messengers and to despatch them, who knew that the young Gordon was
in communication with the King, who had some experience of military
affairs, and who, with all his faults, has never been called a coward,
sat idly through all that precious time apparently in complete
ignorance of events with which all the country round him was ringing.
He was still ignorant of them when Aboyne arrived in the Forth on the
29th. Hamilton was profuse in regrets and courtesies. Men he had none
to spare; but he entertained his young friend sumptuously on board
his own ship, with discharge of cannon at every health, after the
fashion once in vogue at the Court of Denmark, presented him with a
few small field-pieces, and an officer whom he warranted to be of the
highest skill, courage, and experience, and who vindicated this praise
by earning among the Royalists the name of Traitor Gun. Two days later
news arrived from Aberdeen, and Aboyne at once sailed north with these
valuable succours. Some vague promises were indeed held out to him of
possible reinforcements, if they could be spared from England; and
it seems that Hamilton, on Aboyne's arrival, had written for more
troops, a request which, immediately following the arrival of those he
had just parted with, must have considerably puzzled his unfortunate
master. That he might possibly have done better to accompany the lad
with his remaining regiment than to stay in a place where he had
confessed himself unable to be of any service does not appear to have
entered into Hamilton's head.

Meanwhile Montrose had reached Aberdeen, and found his work already
done. The loyal barons, without any organisation or military skill,
and finding no help where they looked for it in the South, had
retreated before the Earl Marischal, and the luckless city was once
more in the hands of the Covenant. Now at least the punishment which
it had twice so righteously deserved would surely not be withheld. The
ministers, who had as usual accompanied the troops, pressed Montrose
to give up to pillage the degenerate town which had for the second
time refused to come to the help of the Lord against the mighty. But
again Montrose disappointed them. Some violence there was and some
plundering. The day after his arrival was Sunday, and while he and
his officers were at their devotions the soldiers busied themselves
in less orthodox fashion. One particular act of wanton cruelty was
long remembered. After the Covenanters' last visit the good dames
of Aberdeen, allowing their zeal to outrun their judgment, as is
sometimes still the wont of female politicians, decked their dogs
with blue ribbons in scorn of the rebel colours. Furious at this
profanation of their precious symbol the soldiers slaughtered every
poor brute they could lay hands on. But on the morrow the General took
strict order with his men. A fine of ten thousand marks was laid upon
the city. If the money was paid by eleven o'clock on the following
day, no further harm should be done; if not, Aberdeen would be given
up to plunder. This money was paid punctually, and Aberdeen was spared.

Two days later, on May 30th, Montrose marched north to punish the
Gordons. The castle of Gicht was his first point. But Gicht was
strong, its defenders were resolute and skilful, and the Covenanters
had no siege-train. For two days and nights Montrose battered the
walls in vain, and then fell back, or leaped back as his fashion
was, on Aberdeen. He had heard that Aboyne was on the sea, and
never doubted that Hamilton was with him, for Montrose had left
Edinburgh before the English troops had sailed for Holy Island. If
a superior force got between him and the capital it might fare hard
with both, and his own was not what it had been. Many of his men
had deserted, disgusted--so Baillie hints, and probably with truth,
for the Highlander was not alone then in holding free quarters and
indiscriminate pillage to be an essential part of warfare--at their
General's misplaced humanity. Resting his army for a day in Aberdeen,
he marched south on June 4th.

The day after his departure Aboyne dropped anchor in the Dee. Two
vessels of sixteen guns each and a Newcastle collier composed his
fleet. His fighting force consisted of a few young gentlemen as
inexperienced as himself, the field-pieces he had brought from the
Forth, and the vaunted Gun. For some days he lay in the harbour, in
the vain hope of more aid from Hamilton; but the only result of the
delay was the defection of some of his comrades whose loyalty was
not proof against inaction. An ally, however, appeared from another
quarter. His brother, Lord Lewis, a madcap boy of thirteen, marched
into Aberdeen on June 7th at the head of a thousand of his father's
retainers, with pipes sounding, drums beating, and flags flying. Fired
at this gallant display the citizens mustered to arms, and on June
14th Aboyne took the field with a somewhat miscellaneous army of four
thousand men.

Meanwhile Montrose and Marischal had joined forces at Stonehaven.
Their numbers were vastly inferior to Aboyne's, and they were ill
supplied with cannon. So little did they like the prospect that they
had thoughts of intrenching themselves in Marischal's strong castle
of Dunnottar. But Gun's folly, or, as some said, his treachery, came
to their aid. Within a mile of Stonehaven he turned off from the high
road and drew up his men on an open heath exposed to the full fire of
Montrose's guns. Fortunately for Aboyne they were not many; but they
were more than enough for the Highlanders. They could not face the
musket's mother, as they called the cannon, and at the first discharge
they broke and fled. The citizens followed them, raising a cry of
_Treachery_! Only the cavalry stood firm, gallant gentlemen of the
house of Gordon, and masking this ignominious scene enabled Aboyne to
fall back on Aberdeen without pursuit.

Hitherto Montrose's victories had been bloodless. He had shown,
indeed, all the qualities of a great captain that circumstances had
permitted--decision, promptness, activity; but he had not yet come
to blows with an enemy. The time was now at hand for him to show his
metal in hard fighting.

Aboyne was in a bad plight. The Highlanders were in hot flight back
to their mountains. The most part of his artillery and ammunition
was on board ship, and the ships were out of reach. The sapient Gun
had recommended that the little fleet should keep a course parallel
to the land route, and that the heavy guns and ammunition should be
sent on board not to cumber the march. But the ships had been blown
out to sea, and were now no one knew where. Still the gallant young
fellow did not despair. There was the chivalry of his House, six
hundred strong, well mounted and armed. The citizens were ashamed
of themselves and afraid of Montrose, who they knew would be soon
at their gates. Under these combined feelings they rallied to the
vigorous call of Colonel Johnston, their provost's son, and mustered
round their young leader.

Montrose had only waited to bring up some heavier guns from Dunnottar.
On the 17th an advanced party of his troopers encountered an equal
number of the Gordon horse within six miles of the town, and were
beaten back with the loss of two men. The Gordons were led by the
gallant Johnston, who implored Aboyne to let him advance with the
whole body of his cavalry. The advice seemed good to all but Gun, and
Aboyne, in the face of repeated warnings, still listened to Gun.

Yet the prospect was far from hopeless. The Dee was in flood, and the
only approach was by the bridge, a fine structure of seven arches,
two miles distant from the city. This had been hastily fortified.
The gate at the southern end had been closed and strengthened with
turf and earth; the roadway was lined with stout citizens who knew
how to handle a musket. Johnston was in command, and the cavalry
were gathered on the farther bank, ready to act should the passage
be forced. On the morning of the 18th the attack commenced. Montrose
had planted his artillery on a hill a few hundred yards south of
the bridge, and under a hot cannonade the Covenanters advanced to
the assault. But the guns made more noise than execution, and the
Aberdonians were no Highland caterans to be frightened by noise. Twice
the assailants fought their way on to the bridge-head, and twice
they were beaten back by Johnston and his musketeers. Some companies
from Dundee, which had ever been jealous of Aberdeen, made a special
request to Montrose to be allowed to try their hands. He bade them
go on in the name of the Covenant. But so hot was the fire that met
them, and so grim looked the ranks of horsemen on the other side, that
they wavered and broke before the gate was reached, amid the jeers of
the citizens who, like the three Romans on the bridge at Janiculum,
bade their rivals welcome to Aberdeen. The spirit of the city rose
high. All ranks swore to stand their ground to the last; and women,
bringing meat and drink down to their gallant defenders, moved about
unshrinking amid the storm of shot and the shouts of the combatants.
All day the fight raged, and when the sun fell the Covenanters were
forced to own themselves as far from Aberdeen as ever.

But his countrymen had now to learn that Montrose was one whose
courage and resource only rose higher in the face of defeat. During
the night he brought two of his heaviest guns up to the gate of the
bridge. In the early morning the assault recommenced. A few discharges
from this new battery soon cleared away the rude defences. At the same
time Montrose ordered a body of horse to move up the river as though
they had found a ford. Gun at once ordered a counter-demonstration.
He was told that there was no ford, that the river was passable only
by the bridge, and that so long as that was held the city was safe.
His only answer was a threat to throw up his commission if his orders
were not obeyed. Aboyne yielded to his evil genius once more, and this
time with fatal results. As the Gordons moved up the river, Montrose
ordered a general assault. Middleton led the way--a rough soldier of
fortune, whose name appears now for the first time in the history of
a country destined to know it well hereafter. Still the defenders
fought bravely, and while Johnston was at their head the issue was
still doubtful. But a cannon-shot dislodged a part of the parapet of
the bridge that fell upon Johnston and crushed his leg. He was with
difficulty extricated and carried into the town. A cry rose that he
was dead. The citizens, without their brave leader, lost heart and
gave way. The cavalry, returning from their bootless ride, might
have charged the Covenanters home as they streamed in disorder across
the bridge; but Gun, swearing that all was lost, gave the signal for
flight. "The Gordons never leave the field without charging," said one
of them. Another called Gun a coward and a traitor to his face. But
the instinct of safety was too strong. The citizens were in flight on
all sides, and the chivalry of the Gordons turned their horses' heads
north, and galloped off to Strathbogie with their young chief and the
wretched Gun in the midst of them. Montrose had won his first battle.

He was determined, however, to save Aberdeen, and he succeeded after
a hard struggle. Scarcely were they within the walls when Marischal
and the Frasers were urgent with him to give the city up to fire and
pillage, in obedience, as they reminded him, to the warrant of his
orders. Montrose bade them sleep a night on the matter. Aberdeen,
he said, was a great city, the London of the North, and would be of
more value to the Covenant and the country as it stood than when laid
smoking in ruins. He was successful in persuading his colleagues not
only to adopt his milder measures, but also to sign a paper admitting
their share in this disregard of the Covenant's orders. Even then
the passions of a victorious soldiery might have prevailed. They
had already seized and imprisoned those whom they could recognise
as having been most forward in the defence, and had committed other
acts of violence. But in the moment of time came the news of the
Pacification at Berwick, which had been actually signed on the 18th
during the heat of the fight at the bridge. This set the matter at
rest. A fine, for the second time within the month, was imposed on the
city: the prisoners were set at liberty; and Montrose, withdrawing his
army to a safe distance, disbanded it on the terms of the treaty.




CHAPTER V

THE SECOND BISHOPS' WAR


The word pacification can hardly have deceived even the most sanguine
advocates of peace. None who knew the character of Charles or of the
Scottish nation can have believed in their hearts that any final
solution to the quarrel between them had been found at Berwick. It was
at most a truce; and it was soon made clear how short and hollow a
truce it was destined to be. The Pacification was signed on June 10th,
and before the year was out both sides were arming fast again for war.

It was the old story. Charles had refused to recognise the acts of
the Glasgow Assembly, as indeed he could not but have refused while
he called himself King of Scotland; but he had agreed that a lawful
Assembly should be convened in August at which all the ecclesiastical
points at issue should be settled, and that a Parliament should follow
to make the settlement good. It had been his intention to preside
in person at both meetings, but the temper of the Scottish capital
made him hesitate. Almost immediately after the Pacification he had
issued one of his foolish proclamations, summoning the bishops to take
their places in the forthcoming Assembly. A protestation of course
followed. Charles was indeed within his legal rights, for Episcopacy
had as yet been abolished only by the Glasgow Assembly, which he
had refused to acknowledge and which the Covenanters had agreed not
to press. But though Episcopacy had not yet been legally abolished,
Charles, by renewing the assurances made in his name by Hamilton at
Glasgow, had given his word for its abolition. Within a fortnight
of this solemn promise he had issued a proclamation which, if there
were any meaning in words, could mean only one of two things; he was
summoning the bishops to vote for their own extinction, or he was
summoning them to quash the motion for their extinction by their own
votes. It is no wonder that the Scottish people, with their previous
experience of the royal diplomacy, chose the latter interpretation,
and, finding that the King was breaking his share of the treaty, made
no haste to keep theirs. The army was not disbanded; the Tables were
not dissolved; the fortifications of Leith were not dismantled. The
fortresses were indeed restored to the Crown, but Hamilton had to make
his way through sullen and menacing crowds to install a new governor
in Edinburgh Castle. A few days later Aboyne, who had imprudently
shown himself on the High Street, was forced to fly for his life,
while the unfortunate Treasurer was for the second time roughly
handled by the mob. Charles, who was still at Berwick, sent in anger
for the Covenanting leaders to explain these things. Only six obeyed
the summons. The rest were stopped, or pretended to have been stopped,
as they were leaving Edinburgh, by the citizens, who would not suffer
their champions to place themselves in the King's power. But among the
six was Montrose.

It is an infinite pity that no report exists of any interview between
Montrose and the King during this visit. We know that Hamilton was
instructed to confer with the Covenanting chiefs, and to use any
device necessary to discover their intentions. We know that there was
a stormy scene between Charles and Rothes, in which the latter was
twice called a liar to his face. But how it fared between Montrose
and his sovereign history is silent. How it was believed in Scotland
to have fared between them is sufficiently shown by an incident which
occurred soon after the meeting of Parliament. A paper was found one
morning on the door of Montrose's lodgings bearing the inscription,
_Invictus armis verbis vincitur_. It began now to be whispered abroad
that the gallant young enthusiast who had led the soldiers of the
Covenant to their first victory had in his turn been conquered by
gracious looks and fair speeches.

The belief was natural in a society where no man could trust his
neighbour. And there was possibly this much foundation for it, that
Charles had succeeded in persuading Montrose that he was now really
sincere in his intention to abolish Episcopacy and leave Scotland free
to worship God after her own fashion. It is at least unlikely that
Hamilton, whatever language he might speak, should have persuaded him
to anything. And the change that is now perceptible in Montrose's
attitude both towards King and Covenant is compatible with our
belief in his intelligence and honesty only on the ground that he
believed the work of the Covenant, as he interpreted it, to have been
done, that he believed Charles to have learnt his lesson, and that
thenceforth it was the part of every true Scotsman to stand by the
King so long as the King stood by his word.

But in truth Montrose understood his countrymen as little as he
understood the King. He had framed for himself an ideal constitution
as unlike anything possible in such a country and at such a time
as the ideal sovereign of his imagination was unlike the reality.
His political views were in truth a dream like Dante's, but, like
the great Italian's, a dream based on what had been in the past,
and an anticipation in part at least of what was to be again in the
future,--the dream of a real State, a government based on justice and
law and supported by obedience. A parallel has been drawn between
Montrose and that singularly interesting and attractive man, William
Drummond of Hawthornden. Fanciful as the resemblance may at first
seem between the fiery ambitious man of action and the shy meditative
man of letters, the parallel is on one side good. Drummond, it is
said, was a passive or theoretical Montrose, Montrose a rampant or
practical Drummond. The latter's _Irene_ indeed embodies, in more
elaborate detail and more fanciful language, the peculiar form of
Scottish Conservatism which Montrose was afterwards to express in a
remarkable paper rescued by the industry of his biographer from two
centuries of neglect. The plan of each discourse is very similar. Both
draw a picture of the hopeless state of anarchy and confusion into
which Scotland must fall if certain evil counsels prevail. Montrose,
writing later in time and influenced by personal dislike as well as
disappointment, aims clearly at Hamilton and Argyll; while Drummond
includes in his censure all the noblemen who had joined the Covenant,
and Montrose among them, openly accusing the majority of acting solely
under the influence of private revenge and ambition. Both then proceed
to appeal to each Estate particularly, to the nobles, the clergy, and
the people. In both is the same recognition of the necessity for a
paramount authority in the State, and the conviction that from the
temper of the times that authority must be vested in the hands of
a king. In both is the same dislike of all clerical interference,
whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, in matters of State. Both
show the same mistrust of any alliance between the aristocracy and
the people. Both warn the latter in almost the same strain that
they are not fit for power, and that the nobles who would persuade
them otherwise can do so only for their own selfish ends. Both, in
short, may be said to preach the doctrine of passive obedience; but
both imagine a king under whose wise and beneficent rule passive
obedience should mean no more than happy and prosperous quiescence
in the secure enjoyment of their religion and liberties. Of the two
Drummond was readiest to push his doctrine to its last conclusion, as
the man of theory always will be. Resolved on no consideration and
in no extremity to suffer himself to be dragged into the vortex of
politics, in the solitude of his beautiful home on the wooded banks
of the Esk he could weave his fairy fabric without any disturbing
sense of its impracticability. Montrose, with his active experience
of men and things, could not quite blind himself to the possibility
of a king under whom passive obedience might be only another name for
tyranny. Yet he was practical to this extent, that, while the other
was content to dream, he was ready to put his dream into action. He
would carry into the sphere of working politics the reform on which
they were both agreed. He would be the active exponent of the ideal
Constitution under Charles the ideal King. Yet both are at one in
recommending the subject patience even under the worst sovereign. It
is better, they argue, to bear the ills we have and trust to time to
cure them, than to fly to others we know nothing of. And of all forms
of tyranny, says Montrose, the tyranny of subjects over their king
is "the most fierce, insatiable, and unsupportable in the world."
Drummond, who could on occasion speak boldly enough for the liberty of
the subject, and who disliked religious intolerance in any shape and
from any quarter, foresaw that in this respect at least the Covenant
was likely to chastise with scorpions where Charles had chastised
with whips. Passive obedience to a king who had shown himself (as he,
like Montrose, believed) ready to remove the old yoke and resolved to
add no new one, was surely more tolerable than passive obedience to a
league of self-seeking nobles and fanatical clergymen.[7]

In the summer of 1639 Montrose had not formally broken with the
Covenant, nor was his scheme of political reform probably as yet fully
matured. Nevertheless, he was soon to have an opportunity of making
trial of his countrymen's temper, and of learning how utterly he had
misconceived it.

The first act of the new Assembly was to sweep Episcopacy off the
face of Scottish earth. The first act of the new Parliament was to
ratify the decision of the Assembly. But before it could effect this
ecclesiastical reform it had to consider a question of political
reform which was infinitely more important to the King's authority.
Hitherto the committee known as the Lords of the Articles had been
so formed as to be practically no more than the mouthpiece of the
Crown; and as no bills could be presented to Parliament till they had
passed this committee, and, when so presented, could only be accepted
or rejected in their entirety without amendment or alteration, it
is clear that the power of the Scottish Parliament as a national
assembly was little more than a cipher. This state of things was
due to the influence possessed by the bishops in the formation of
the committee. But now that the bishops had gone, by whom was this
influence to be exercised? Charles would have been glad to see it
exercised by a corresponding number of ministers, who might at some
more tranquil time be translated into bishops. But this was obnoxious
to all parties. The nobles would not consent to share their power
with the clergy, and the clergy would not consent to see any of their
order elevated above the rest. Business was made possible by a
compromise; but as the compromise entailed a majority of Covenanters
on the committee, the business was not palatable to the King. It
was now that the two great rivals, Montrose and Argyll, were first
brought into direct conflict. Montrose would not support Charles in
filling the bishops' places with other clergymen, though they should
wear the black gown of Geneva instead of the hated lawn-sleeves.
But he had no mind to see the authority of the Crown a cipher, and
the King without a voice among the new Lords of the Articles. He
proposed, therefore, that the bishops' places should be taken by a
corresponding number of noblemen to be chosen by the King. In his
ideal State the Crown and the nobility should mutually support and
counterpoise each other, both acting together against the dangerous
encroachments of the people. Far different were Argyll's views. With
clearer eyes than Montrose he read the signs of the times, and saw
what the victory of the Covenant really meant. He saw that it meant
the inevitable rise of the middle classes to a share in the control
of public affairs. He saw that the old monarchical supremacy and the
old aristocratic supremacy were alike doomed, and that henceforth his
order, if it would retain any vestige of its ancient influence, could
do so only by acquiescing in a partition it was powerless to prevent.
Henceforth the Scottish Parliament, like the English Parliament, must
represent the voice, not of the sovereign, but of the people. Nor
was this recognition unpleasing to an ambition far other and more
dangerous than the generous desire for fame which swelled the heart
of Montrose. As a member of the old aristocracy he was but one among
many, richer, indeed, and more powerful than most, but subject like
the rest to the caprice of a king, and to the jealousy, the intrigues,
and the violence of his peers. But with a national Parliament at his
back, speaking and acting as the mouthpiece and agent of a people, he
might rise in fact to that power his countrymen would no longer brook
in name. Conscious of mental abilities and a genius for statecraft
immeasurably superior to those around him, he felt confident of
wielding to his own ends this new force that he saw rising on the
ruins of the old. And Argyll carried the day, though not without a
hard struggle. By a majority of only one it was determined that in
future each Estate should choose its own Lords. Henceforth the nobles
would be represented by eight votes, the lesser barons and burghers
by sixteen; and thus at one stroke the voice of the sovereign was
silenced in the Scottish Parliament. In the first direct struggle
between Montrose and Argyll there could be no doubt with whom victory
rested. Under their new constitution the Covenanting majority carried
all before them. Episcopacy was abolished, not, as Charles would have
had, as contrary to the usage of the Scottish Church, but as actually
unlawful. A general tax was to be levied, to cover the expenses of
the late war, on Royalists as well as on Covenanters. The castles of
Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton were to be entrusted to the charge
of none but Scottish subjects, who, though chosen by the King, were to
be approved by Parliament. No more drastic Reform Bill has, in short,
been passed even in our own century. Charles at once sent orders to
Traquair to prorogue a Parliament under which the very existence of
the Crown was at stake. The Treasurer was at once met with the answer
that Parliament could not be prorogued without its own consent. A
short adjournment was therefore arranged, and two Covenanting lords,
Loudon and Dunfermline, were despatched to plead their case in London.

Charles had been informed of Montrose's action during this momentous
time by that Earl of Airth whose disgrace and subsequent reinstatement
has been already mentioned. The result was a summons to Court for the
repentant Covenanter. But Montrose excused himself on the ground that
the visit would breed suspicion both of himself and of the King, and
so tend to prevent the accommodation of existing difficulties which
they both desired. "I hope," he wrote, "that your Majesty will do
me the honour to think that this is no shift,--for all of that kind
is too much contrary to my humour, chiefly in what your Majesty or
your service is concerned in--but that, as I have ever been bold to
avow, there are no things your Majesty shall be pleased to command me
in--persuading myself they will be still such as befits and do suit
with all most incumbent duties--that I shall not think myself born to
perform as your Majesty's most loyal and faithful subject and servant."

These things passed in the autumn of 1639. The winter wore itself out
in barren diplomacies and preparations for war on both sides. The
Scottish Commissioners could do nothing with the King, and Parliament
was prorogued till the following June. Strafford was now supreme in
the royal councils, and that imperious voice was never for submission.
At this time, moreover, a discovery was made which gave fresh weight
to Strafford's arguments and fresh heart to his perplexed master.
A letter had fallen into Traquair's hands addressed by some of the
leading Covenanters to the French King, praying him to come to their
aid. This, it was thought, would surely establish the treasonable
nature of the Scottish movement. But when the letter was read before
the English Parliament, which met on April 13th, it made no impression
on either House. Both were too intent on their own affairs--the
pressing question of Ship-Money among others--to interfere in a
matter which, so far as it concerned them at all, made for their own
interests. The Scottish Covenanters were the very good neighbours of
the English malcontents, and no obstacle was to be put in their way to
work out their own salvation. Lewis, to whom a second letter had been
addressed on the miscarriage of the first, was too cautious to enter
into a quarrel which could be safely trusted to shape itself to his
own gain. Loudon, who was then in London as one of the Commissioners,
and whose name was subscribed to the letter, was indeed sent to the
Tower on a charge of treasonable conspiracy; but nothing could be
brought home to him, and he was soon released. Parliament did not
choose to adopt Charles's interpretation of words that could be
strained to bear a less criminal significance; and the affair passed
quickly out of sight.[8]

Among the signatories to the French King was Montrose. Whether this
was done to lull the growing suspicions of his colleagues, or done
through fresh mistrust of Charles's clerical policy, it is hard to
determine. Probably both motives were at work in a mind that could
as yet see firm ground nowhere. At all events, when on reassembling
in June the Scottish Parliament aimed a further blow at the royal
authority by the appointment of a permanent Committee of Estates with
supreme power both in military and civil matters, Montrose was named
among the noblemen, with his kinsmen, Napier and Stirling, among the
lesser barons. In obedience to the orders of this new power he at once
proceeded to his own territories to levy men for the army a second
time mustering under Leslie for the Border. While engaged in this
business he was commissioned to effect the reduction of Airlie Castle,
the main stronghold of the loyalists in the shire of Angus. The chief
of the Ogilvies, lately raised to the earldom of Airlie, was then with
the King, having left his house in charge of his eldest son. The work
was accomplished without resort to arms or any violence. Lord Ogilvy,
after conference with the commissioner, rendered his father's castle
quietly, being in truth in no position to defend it, for the good of
the public, as the convenient phrase ran; and Montrose, leaving a
garrison of his own men in charge of it, marched south to join Leslie.

Unfortunately for the loyal North, and most unfortunately for the
House of Airlie, others besides Montrose had been entrusted with
the charge of "pacification." Commissions had been also issued for
that purpose to Monro, one of the roughest and most brutal pupils of
the German wars, and to Argyll. To Monro was assigned the district
of Aberdeen, while Argyll was to take order with the more southern
Highlands. Commissions of fire and sword the style ran, and seldom can
it have been more literally vindicated. Monro harried Aberdeen and
the surrounding country, destroying what he could not remove, putting
some of the citizens to torture after a fashion practised in his
school of war, and carrying back a crowd of prisoners to Edinburgh.
Argyll did his work even more thoroughly. Montrose had advised him
of the surrender of Airlie Castle, and that all was now quiet on the
braes of Angus. But not thus was Argyll to be balked of his vengeance.
Between the Campbells and the Ogilvies there had been feud for many
generations, and so rare a chance of masking private vengeance
under the cloak of duty was not to be lost. Montrose's garrison
was dismissed, and the Bonny House of Airlie burned to the ground.
Forthar, the seat of Lord Ogilvy, was next served in the same fashion,
the young lord's wife, who was then daily expecting her confinement,
being turned out of doors, her own family only venturing at their own
risk, and after permission had been asked and refused, to shelter the
unhappy outcast. Craig, an unfortified building, and therefore not
rightly within this strange peacemaker's commission, but also the
property of an Ogilvy, shared the same fate. Argyll next turned his
attention to the lands of Breadalbane, but finding his way barred
by Athole with a force almost amounting to one-fourth of his own, he
preferred to effect by diplomacy what he dared not put to the trial
of the sword. Athole, unmindful of the fate of Huntly, was caught
in the same snare. Under promise of a safe-conduct he was persuaded
with his captains to meet Argyll in conference. The conference was
an ambuscade. The whole party were seized and sent as prisoners to
Edinburgh. Then, after settling a longstanding account with the
Macdonalds, against whom he held a twofold grudge as hereditary foes
of his House and as friends and in some sort vassals of the House
of Gordon, and laying Badenoch waste from Lochaber to Braemar, this
great warrior returned in triumph to Edinburgh to impeach Montrose for
treason against the Covenant in dealing too leniently with its enemies.

From this ridiculous charge Montrose found little difficulty in
exonerating himself. Argyll would have had him tried by court-martial,
but neither Leslie nor the Committee of Estates would entertain the
proposal, and Montrose was unanimously pronounced to have done his
duty as a true soldier of the Covenant. But he had now far more
serious matter for thought than this paltry ebullition of temper.
While in Leslie's camp at Dunse a proposal was submitted to him, which
of all men in Scotland he was the last to hear calmly. Already there
had been some secret debate among the extreme party of the right of
subjects to depose a faithless king, and Argyll had already maintained
in Parliament the right of the Estates to pass laws without the royal
sanction. How far matters had gone Montrose did not yet know, but
he had other grounds than mere pique for suspecting Argyll and his
faction of some deep design against the King's authority. The plan
now submitted to him confirmed his worst suspicions. It inflamed his
jealousy of Argyll, while threatening to break for ever the dream he
still cherished of placing Charles at the head of a constitutional
government with a Presbyterian Church. The precise details of the
scheme are rather obscure; for when it afterwards became matter of
public inquiry, those most directly concerned repudiated all knowledge
of it. There seem in fact to have been more than one scheme, that
submitted to Montrose having been chosen as least likely to alarm
his inconvenient loyalty, while at the same time offering a sop to
his ambition by assigning him a share in the executive. According to
this the government of Scotland was to be placed in the hands of a
Triumvirate, consisting of Argyll, Mar, and Cassillis. Argyll was to
rule all the lands beyond the Forth, while the southern counties were
to be in charge of his colleagues. A committee or council was to work
with the Triumvirate, and in this Montrose's name had been inserted.
But though the particulars of the various schemes may have differed,
they all practically tended to the same end. Whether he was to stand
alone, an absolute dictator, or to be one of a nominal council, Argyll
was the only man who could save Scotland in her present straits.

But Montrose had a party as well as Argyll. Besides the few who,
like Napier and Stirling, looked to him as their head, there were
many who, while not sharing his sanguine loyalty, and perhaps not
altogether trusting him, were agreed with him that the time had come
when the Covenant needed to be saved from itself. They were indeed
in much the same predicament as Montrose himself, though his peculiar
temperament and aspiring genius made impossible for him what was
merely troublesome for men of commoner mould. They had subscribed the
Covenant not to destroy their king, but to save their religion. They
had subscribed it, in short, without sufficiently considering whether
it must inevitably lead them among such a people and at such a time,
unless Charles were to undergo some marvellous change in his nature
and ideas which only dreamers could hope for, and which, it is not
too much to say, no man then wearing a crown was likely to undergo.
To dethrone Charles merely to set up Argyll in his place was to their
taste neither as Scotsmen nor Covenanters. To this party Montrose
determined to appeal. A conversation held with Lindsay during a hasty
visit to Edinburgh convinced him that this idea of a dictatorship was
no mere fancy of Argyll's ambitious brain, nor promoted only by his
creatures.

    In seasons of great peril
    'Tis good that one bear sway.

Almost in these words, and using this very illustration from the
practice of ancient Rome, did Lindsay in private approve a scheme
of which he afterwards publicly disowned all knowledge. Montrose
accordingly resolved to play these men at their own game, and to
form a counter-plot in the interests of Scotland, her Covenant, and
her King. This was the origin of the secret alliance known as the
Cumbernauld Bond, from the place where it was signed, the house of
Montrose's uncle Lord Wigton. "Montrose's damnable bond," Baillie
calls it, "by which he thought to have sold us to the enemy;" but he
is careful not to quote it, nor to give the names of the subscribers.
Among them were Mar, the governor of Stirling Castle, Almond, Leslie's
second in command on the Border, and Erskine, whose accession to
the cause Baillie had welcomed but a short while since as a signal
instance of God's mercy. The presence of such names sufficiently
proves the genuine nature of the bond, and disposes of the assertion
that it was merely designed by Montrose to further his own personal
aggrandisement or in treachery to the Covenant. The purpose of its
subscribers is plainly declared in the clause levelled against the
"particular and indirect practising of a few," by which the Covenant
that they had signed and pledged themselves anew to promote "to the
hazard of their lives, fortunes, and estates," was now brought into
danger, and with the Covenant the country. That Argyll and his scheme
of dictatorship were the danger ahead was of course understood by
all who signed; but this danger was as manifest to Mar, Almond, and
Erskine as to Montrose.

Having thus, as he supposed, provided the means of checkmating Argyll
and his faction, Montrose returned to the army. He found it on the
point of entering England. The spot chosen was the ford over the Tweed
at Coldstream. It was a strange irony of fate that twenty years later
led another army southwards by the same ford to restore to his throne
the exiled King for whom Montrose had given his life, and against
whose father he was this day in arms! The river was in flood, and for
three days the army halted on the plain of Hirselhaugh. On August
20th the passage was practicable. But whether at the last moment they
shrank from incurring the charge of rebellion against which they had
all so strenuously protested, but which, when the Rubicon was once
passed, they would no longer be able to avoid, or from a preconcerted
plan to test Montrose's good faith, there was a strange unwillingness
among the leaders to be the first to make the passage. It was agreed
to cast lots. The lot fell on Montrose. Instantly he sprang from
his horse, and entering the stream waded through waist-high to the
farther bank. Then returning he led his division across. The whole
army followed, each captain wading on foot at the head of his men.
The passage was begun at four in the afternoon, and by midnight
five-and-twenty thousand armed Scotchmen were encamped on English
ground.

His earliest biographer, the loyal and affectionate Wishart, maintains
that it was Montrose's purpose, when once fairly across the Border, to
carry his own men over to the English camp; and that, if his friends
had kept their faith, so large a part of the Scottish army had gone
with him that the rest could have effected nothing. It is possible
that some such plan may have crossed his mind for the moment. His own
regiments, men of Perthshire and Forfarshire, raised under his own
supervision and many of them his own tenants, would have followed
whithersoever he chose to lead them. Nor is it impossible that many
of his colleagues who, like him, had put their hands prematurely to
the plough, and were now, like him, looking back, might have welcomed
any opportunity of extricating themselves from a false position.
But Wishart vouchsafes no authority for his statement. No hint of
such a design is to be found elsewhere. It was not made a charge
against Montrose during his trial before the Estates in the following
year, though it is impossible to suppose that a secret shared by so
many would not have leaked out when the tide had turned against its
author. We may therefore suppose that the generous biographer was only
endeavouring to find for an action which he conceived to need some
explanation, an excuse which his own uncompromising loyalty would
prevent him from seeing in its true light. Against treason treachery
itself would in his eyes be fair. To Wishart the Covenant had
always been an unlawful and impious league, masking under dishonest
professions of reverence to God and King designs subversive of the
authority of both. He had himself stood stoutly out against it from
the first, for which he had been deprived of his ministry, despoiled
of his property, and flung a prisoner into the Tolbooth. Such a man
may be pardoned for failing to understand his hero's conduct at this
crisis; he may be pardoned for being unable to appreciate the peculiar
nature of that loyalty to the Throne which could allow a man to bear
arms against its occupant. Even passive adherence to the Covenant
was incompatible in his plain mind with duty to his King; he would
have preferred to believe his hero capable of treachery to the rebels
whose commission he had accepted, rather than of disloyalty to the
monarch whom he professed to serve. But we must hope that Wishart was
mistaken; and that if such a course of action at any time crossed
Montrose's mind, he put it away from him as unworthy of an honest
man. Yet in truth it is not easy to reconcile Montrose's behaviour
during the past few months with his presence in the army which was now
at open war with its sovereign. The time was indeed critical enough to
have perplexed an older and a cooler head. Even were he now convinced
that to declare frankly for the King was the only course consistent
with his duty to his country, to do so before he was strong enough
to make his declaration good might for ever ruin his prospects of
serving either country or King. By still siding with the Covenant he
might yet be able to guide it to a sense of its true purpose. With
what feelings Montrose saw the royal cavalry flying in disgraceful
panic before his countrymen at Newburn, and Newcastle unbar its gates
at the first sound of the Scottish drum, we cannot tell. That he
bore his part like a brave and skilful captain we may be sure; but
that figure wading sword in hand through the swollen waters of the
Tweed is the sole glimpse of Montrose that history affords through
the brief and inglorious campaign to which it has given the name of
the Second Bishops' War. Once, indeed, he is mentioned in a way which
suggests how keenly the Royalists kept their eyes on him both as a
present foe and a possible friend. Writing to the King from Darlington
on August 30th Strafford reports as the most significant item of
news a rumour that Montrose had fallen in the affair at Newburn. His
signature also appears, along with Leslie's, Almond's, and the rest of
his principal colleagues, to one of those extraordinary documents in
which the Covenanters still continued to profess their peaceful and
loyal intentions. Of this there will be more to say hereafter. For
the present we may leave to the historian the narrative of the events
which led to the Treaty of Ripon and to the King's second and last
visit to Scotland. Montrose had pressed him to come; and when he came
Montrose was a prisoner in the hands of their common enemies.




CHAPTER VI

THE PLOT AND THE INCIDENT


The suspicions which Montrose had managed to allay for a time in the
field, now broke out against him with renewed force when arms once
more gave place to diplomacy. While the Scots lay in garrison at
Newcastle, letters passed freely between them and the English camp.
Before crossing the Tweed a general order had been issued by Leslie
that no communication should be held with the enemy except under
his warrant. Anything in the nature of a secret correspondence was
declared treasonable, and he who held it liable to the punishment
of a traitor. With this offence Montrose was now charged. While
the negotiations for the Treaty of Ripon were proceeding, word was
brought to Leslie that a letter had gone from Montrose to the King
which had never passed under the eyes of the Committee. How the
secret was discovered is not clear. It may have been, as Wishart and
other contemporaries have maintained, through the treachery of some
member of the King's own household. It may have been through sheer
accident, according to Burnet's story. The manner of the discovery is
unimportant; the fact of the letter is certain. When taxed with it
before the Committee, Montrose made no attempt at denial or excuse.
At once and boldly avowing what he had done, he challenged any man
present to say that he had done wrong. He had written to the King,
professing his obedience and loyalty. What then? Had they not all,
but the other day, signed a humble petition to his majesty in the
character of his most loyal and obedient subjects? Their articles of
war forbade all secret correspondence with the enemy. What man among
them would venture to call his sovereign an enemy? Did not the same
articles declare that, "If any man shall open his mouth against the
King's majesty's person or authority, or shall presume to touch his
sacred person, he shall be punished as a traitor"? The Committee
was in a strait. They knew that Montrose was fooling them, but they
could not gainsay him. Leslie indeed, more apt at war than council
and impatient of such nice distinctions, muttered that he had known
princes lose their heads for less faults. But his colleagues dared
not accept the alternative Montrose offered them. They could not deny
the letter of their own law, and they did not feel strong enough to
refuse his wide interpretation of its spirit. They were in truth in
the uncomfortable position of being caught in their own snare.

But though victory was for the time with Montrose, it was but a
momentary gleam. His enemies were ever on the watch to catch him
tripping, and they soon found graver matter against him. In the
following November the young Lord Boyd, Montrose's relation and one
of the signatories of the Cumbernauld Bond, lay dying of a malignant
fever. In his delirium he uttered some rambling words about a secret
which, reported to Argyll, were enough to put those quick wits on
the track. Almond was then at his house at Callendar on leave from
Newcastle, and from him Argyll soon contrived to learn all about
the Bond and who had signed it. Montrose was at once summoned to
Edinburgh to answer this new accusation of treason. He took the same
course before the Estates that he had taken before the Committee at
Newcastle. He avowed what he had done, and justified it by the dangers
then threatening Scotland and the Covenant. There was hot debate, and
some, especially among the clergymen, would have made it a capital
offence. But Argyll knew that his party was not yet strong enough
to carry matters with so high a hand. Montrose did not stand alone.
Some good Covenanters had shared in his treason, Almond and Mar and
Marischal. And there were others whom half Leslie's army would have
marched on the capital to save or revenge. Montrose himself was quite
as much feared as he was hated by his accusers. They knew he had many
friends among the Covenanters, and suspected he might have more than
they knew. He must be separated from them before it would be safe to
proceed to extremities against him. Moreover there were some who still
thought it might not be too late to win this high spirit and ready
genius to their side. He was ambitious, and events might so shape
their course that the Covenant would be able to feed his ambition more
liberally than the King. So this offence too was passed over. The Bond
was surrendered and burned: the subscribers signed a declaration that
they had meant nothing by it against the common weal; and once again
the Covenant was outwardly at peace with itself.

But even after these two warnings Montrose could not keep quiet. The
very opposite to Argyll on every side of his character, while the
latter bided the time that he foresaw must come with eyes and ears
ever open and tongue ever still, Montrose roamed restlessly about the
country between the army at Newcastle and his own home, talking wildly
to whomsoever would listen. The purpose of the burned Bond, Argyll's
dictatorship, his meditated attack on the royal authority,--he poured
all these dangerous secrets out to his comrade of the hour, careless
who he might be. Once he talked in this strain in the presence of
no less a person than old Leslie himself, as they were riding from
Chester to Newcastle with a Colonel Cochrane. The prudent Colonel did
not care for such talk in such company, and begged his rash lordship
to change the subject. There might have been more dangerous listeners
than Leslie, who was an honest man not given to making mischief, and,
so long as his pay was safe and he did his duty by his soldiers,
caring as little for one faction as the other. But it had been all
one with Montrose who was by to hear him. Everything was going wrong.
He could no longer trust the Covenant; he could not yet trust the
King. His associates in the Bond, with one or two exceptions, had made
their peace with the enemy. The Bond itself had been promptly burned,
and the wildest stories circulated of its language and purpose.[9]
Even among the more moderate Covenanters there were many who believed
these stories, and looked askance at Montrose as an ambitious,
unscrupulous, designing man, careless of his country and intent only
on his own ends. Conscious of the popular suspicions, chafing against
a false position from which he saw no present means of escape, uneasy,
discontented, doubtful where to turn and whom to trust--there could
be but one issue to the struggle between such a man in such a mood
and Argyll. Nor could the issue be far distant. Argyll had but to sit
still and wait. He could not play his game better than his rival was
playing it for him.

In the spring of 1641, while the Scottish army still lay at
Newcastle and their commissioners still wrangled in London over the
price of their return, a family party of four used to meet almost
daily in Edinburgh at Montrose's lodgings in the Canongate, or at
Napier's old house of Merchiston on the Borough Moor. Besides the
two brothers-in-law there were their nephew Sir George Stirling of
Keir, and Sir Archibald Stewart of Blackhall who had married Keir's
sister. Of course the talk ran on the old lines. How was this unhappy
country to be saved, and who could save it? It was agreed that the
only possible saviour was the King. He must come to Edinburgh when
the Parliament met in the summer, and satisfy his Scottish subjects
that he meant fairly by them, as these four had satisfied themselves
he could and would. To establish their religion and liberties would
be to establish his own authority; the people would rally to the
Throne when they recognised that only under the shadow of the Throne
could they hope to enjoy the blessings of a settled government,
just laws, and a free religion. "For they assured themselves" (so
runs Montrose's vindication) "that the King giving God His due,
and the people theirs, they would give Cæsar that which was his."
It was necessary to communicate with Charles, and most necessary to
find a trusty messenger. They fixed upon a certain Walter Stewart
of Traquair, who was on the eve of journeying to London on his own
business, and whom, from his name, they conceived likely to get easy
access to the Court. It was decided to approach the King through his
cousin the Duke of Lennox, who was in high favour with his majesty,
and had been employed in a similar capacity by the supplicants of 1637
to plead their grievances against Laud's prayer-book. There exists a
paper in Napier's handwriting,--but evidently, from its similarity to
the discourse on sovereign power mentioned in the last chapter, in
great part, if not wholly, Montrose's composition,--which is believed
to be the substance of the letter sent to Charles, and the tenor of
his answer to Montrose strengthens the belief. All things, the King
is told, depend on his personal presence in Scotland, the success of
his affairs, the security of his authority, the peace and happiness of
his subjects. It is useless to send a commissioner, no matter whom; he
must come in person. The people bear him no ill-will, nor the Throne,
nor will they suffer any attack to be made on it; their religion, as
chosen by themselves, and their liberties as settled by the law of
the land, are all they want. Let what they ask, if it be for their
good, be granted, for that which tends to their good will assuredly
include his own. But though the people should be justly treated and
reasonably indulged, they should not be suffered to dispute his power.
The sovereign power, he is warned, in words almost identical with
those addressed to Montrose's Noble Sir, "is an instrument never
subject yet handled well." A king's authority should be maintained to
the height allowed by the law of God and Nature, and the fundamental
laws of the country. If not it sinks into contempt; and "weak and
miserable is that people whose prince hath not power sufficient to
punish oppression, and to maintain peace and justice." On the other
hand, he is warned not to aim at absoluteness, which of all people the
Scots will least endure. "Practice, sir, the temperate government.
It fitteth the humour and disposition of the nation best. It is most
strong, most powerful, and most durable of any. It gladdeth the hearts
of your subjects, and then they erect a throne for you to reign." He
is bid to beware of Rehoboam's counsellors: "they are flatterers,
and therefore cannot be friends; they follow your fortune and love
not your person." Finally, he is urged to settle the high offices
of State upon men chosen by himself according to his own knowledge
of their ability and honesty. Men who owe their preferment to the
recommendation of others will not serve him well if it must be to
the prejudice of their patrons. Whether this wise and liberal letter
was the only letter entrusted to Stewart by the Plotters, as they
soon came to be called, is not clearly known, but of that hereafter.
For the present, having seen his messenger safely off on his journey
south, Montrose himself left Edinburgh on a visit to Lord Stormont at
Scone Abbey.

It was an unfortunate visit. The company gathered to welcome Montrose
was the worst he could have met in his present temper. Stormont had
himself been a subscriber to the Bond, and was one of the few who
had not made his peace with the enemy. There too was Athole, still
smarting under the indignities suffered at Argyll's hands, and with
Athole was his faithful henchman, John Stewart of Ladywell, Commissary
of Dunkeld. It is easy to guess what were the subjects of conversation
among such spirits. Unfortunately Montrose was not content with
unburdening his sore mind to his friends. Some Covenanting ministers
in the neighbourhood came ostensibly to pay their respects to him,
and doubtless also to learn what such an ominous conjunction of
malcontents might mean, and Montrose must needs also talk to them.
He knew them all personally. They were John Graham of Auchterarder
hard by his own castle of Kincardine, John Robertson of Perth, and
Robert Murray of Methven. To the latter he was particularly anxious to
explain himself, as one of the chief instruments of his subscription
to the Covenant whose interests he was now accused of having sold.
All the secret history of the Bond was accordingly poured into
Murray's curious ears, of the treason it was designed to thwart,
of the Dictatorship and the Triumvirate, of his intention to clear
himself by challenging Argyll to his face before Parliament. It was
known that Murray had been talking to Montrose, and his colleagues
were not long in extracting from him all he had to tell. This was
reported, doubtless with some embellishments, at the next meeting of
the Presbytery at Auchterarder, and of course at once carried down to
Argyll. Graham, when summoned to answer for his words, quoted Murray:
Murray quoted Montrose; and so at last the long-gathering storm burst.

Never in any crisis of his life was Montrose slow to accept the
consequences of his own acts. He frankly owned that Argyll, whom
Murray had not dared to name before the Committee, was the man he
aimed at; that he had done so partly on his own knowledge, partly on
the authority of others who would bear him out; and he concluded by a
direct appeal to Argyll to say what he knew of the business. Argyll
swore that he had never heard of it before, and that the man who said
he had ever uttered treason against the King was a base liar. Montrose
then named his witnesses. Lord Lindsay of the Byres, he said, had
spoken to him of the Dictatorship. The man who had reported the talk
against the King was John Stewart of Ladywell. For the Triumvirate,
he referred the Committee to Argyll's proposed colleagues, Cassillis
and Mar, and to others, also named, who were present when the plan was
framed.

Ladywell was instantly summoned, and corroborated all that his word
had been pledged for. Argyll broke into a storm of passionate denial,
but the witness stood firm. "My lord," he said, "I heard you speak
these words in Athole in presence of a great many people, whereof
you are in good memory." Lindsay was next examined. He admitted the
conversation, but persisted that he had not named Argyll. Montrose
could say no more than that if his memory had played him false on
this point, at least the tenor of Lindsay's words had left him in no
doubt at whom they were aimed. This relieved the Committee from an
embarrassing position. Lindsay's admissions, coming on the back of
Ladywell's sworn evidence, had grievously disturbed them. If Montrose
was right, two of their stoutest champions had been dabbling in what
their own articles condemned as treason. But as Montrose had admitted
the possibility of being mistaken in one instance it was open to
assume that he had been mistaken in all. They accordingly reported
to that effect. Lindsay's words, they found, did not bear Montrose's
interpretation.

There still remained Ladywell to deal with. A man cursed with such an
inconvenient memory could not safely be suffered to go at large, and
the unfortunate creature had already been for days under close ward
in the Castle. All good Covenanters were now rejoiced, and probably
not much surprised, to hear that he had confessed to have done Argyll
wrong. The treasonable speeches made in Athole were, he now said,
his own fabrication, and further that he had been persuaded to send
copies of them to the King by Montrose's messenger, Walter Stewart. A
watch was accordingly set for Stewart; he was arrested on his way home
at Cockburnspath, between Berwick and Dunbar, and sent to keep his
namesake company in the Castle.

A man who denies his oath under pressure of fear is not easily
believed, except by those who expect to profit by his denial. But it
is probable that Ladywell's second story was the true one. For, after
all, his confession amounted to no more than this, that Argyll's
conversation had been rather historical than personal; he had spoken
generally of the relation of subjects to their kings, not directly of
Charles and Scotland. This is certainly more consistent with Argyll's
character, who was not wont to let his tongue go too freely in any
company, and would hardly have selected an audience of loyal Ogilvies
and Atholemen for such confidences. Argyll indeed still swore that he
had not broached the subject at all, and brought a crowd of Campbells
to bear him out. But Ladywell's amended version was corroborated by
the only one of his witnesses who was summoned. It seems on the whole
impossible to doubt that Argyll had been making some experiments on
the national temper in the direction of what even his own party was as
yet obliged to call treason. These things were in the air. Clarendon's
report of his conversation with Henry Martin at Westminster shows
what was in many minds at this time, and Argyll's own speeches in
Parliament during the previous year had gone some little way on the
same road. Ladywell's partial recantation did not save him. Perhaps it
was too partial; perhaps his exoneration of Montrose from any share in
his deception disappointed his judges; perhaps they resolved not to
run the risk of a third version. At all events, when he had signed his
confession, he was sent back to prison, tried under that old statute
of leasing-making which had raised such an outcry when revised four
years ago by Charles against Balmerino, found guilty, and executed. To
Guthrie, who attended him on the scaffold, the poor creature asserted
at the last that he had been induced to bear false witness against
himself by promises of pardon and reward. But when a man once begins
to go back on his own words, even his most probable version must be
received cautiously.

The other prisoner, Walter Stewart, proved a more valuable prize. To
clear Argyll was after all no great matter, for Argyll was strong
enough to clear himself. The important point was to convict Montrose.
A letter to him from the King was discovered in the lining of
Stewart's saddle. There was nothing in its language capable of being
turned to his discredit, but it could be construed as an answer to
some previous communication, and it certainly established the fact
of a secret correspondence between the two which was contrary to the
articles of the Covenant. And this was not all. Papers of a more
suspicious nature were discovered--papers in Stewart's own hand,
written in a strange jargon, where letters, phrases, and sometimes the
names of animals were substituted for the names of persons. Stewart
explained these as the heads of certain instructions entrusted to
him by the Plotters to be delivered to the King through the hands of
Lennox and Traquair. The _Elephant_ or _Serpent_ stood for Hamilton,
the _Dromedary_ for Argyll, Montrose himself was the _Genero_, the
letters _A B C_ signified the four conspirators--and so forth. The
papers also contained some suggestions as to the preferment of
Montrose and himself, and a warning that if they were neglected it
would go ill with the King.

Stewart, like his namesake, did not keep to one story. He altered
much, added something, contradicted himself many times. Traquair,
who was then in London, flatly denied all knowledge of the papers,
nor would he believe that Montrose or any man of sense, if minded
to play such a dangerous game, would have taken into his confidence
a timorous half-witted fool like Stewart. The King wrote in his own
hand to Argyll one of his ambiguous letters, committing himself to
nothing beyond a declaration that his journey to Scotland had not been
prompted by Montrose or Traquair to their own ends, but was intended
solely to settle all disputes on the terms of the new treaty, and
that he had given no promises of office to any man. He avowed his
letter to Montrose as one fit to be written by a king to a good
subject. Finally, he requested Argyll to do him right in this matter,
and not permit him to be unjustly suspected. The day before this
letter reached Edinburgh the four Plotters were arrested and sent as
prisoners to the Castle.

Stewart's story, or stories, unquestionably rested on some foundation
of truth, but on how much no man can tell. The accused, with the
exception of Montrose, confessed to have talked with Stewart, but
denied all knowledge of his hieroglyphics. Keir, indeed, owned to have
been shown a paper by him containing some general propositions on
public affairs which he understood to have been submitted to Charles
by Lennox, and the King's answers. He gave a copy of it to Napier, but
nothing seems to have been said either then or afterwards as to the
author. Beyond this we cannot go. From this point of view Argyll and
his faction were of course justified in regarding Montrose and his
friends as conspirators. They were conspiring against Argyll, whom
they believed to be the worst enemy of their country no less than of
the King. Under his rule the Covenant had sunk to a mere faction, in
which no honest patriot could any longer bear part or lot. They had
persuaded themselves that salvation could come only by the King. He
had promised all that a reasonable people could expect from him, and
if he would hesitate no more nor go back again upon his word all would
be well. While Argyll was carrying all before him, they could only
work for their country's good in secret. So far they were undoubtedly
conspirators. Napier would have been soon set free at an early stage
of the proceedings. He was an old man, much respected and liked by
all parties. But he would not accept a favour which would imply, he
said, a tacit confession of his guilt. Whatever their crime might be,
they all shared it equally. Montrose refused, always courteously but
persistently refused, to answer any questions before the Committee.
If he was guilty, he said, let him be brought to a public trial. He
was declared contumacious, and an order issued to make search for
further evidence of treason against him. His servants were examined,
his houses ransacked, his cabinets broken open, and his private papers
read; but only one document was found that could by any ingenuity
be turned against him. This was a defence of the Cumbernauld Bond,
written, he assured the Committee, for his own private satisfaction
only, now that the Bond had been burned and the whole affair, as
he had supposed, laid for ever to rest. The Covenanting historians
have described it as an "infamous and scurvey libel, full of vain
humanities, magnifying to the skies his own courses, and debasing
to hell his opposites." But as they have omitted to allow posterity
the means of determining the justice of their description, and as
Montrose's public writings and speeches certainly do not justify
it, we may conclude that party feeling had something to do with
these tremendous epithets. The Covenanters had in truth a profound
belief in the wisdom of the advice embodied at a later day in the
well-known formula, _Give your judgment, but never give your reasons_.
They burned the Bond, they burned its justification, and then they
thundered against both in safety. And they took the same prudent
course in another matter. In one of Montrose's cabinets were found
some letters written in earlier and happier years by ladies with whom
the young gallant had danced and exchanged compliments in the flowery
fashion of the time. Their contents were never made public, but evil
things were freely circulated of them to the edification of the
sterner sort of Puritans; though others held that Lord Sinclair, who
had been entrusted with the search, had played no honourable part in
chattering of such private matters.

Such was the position of affairs when the King arrived in Edinburgh
on the evening of August 14th, 1641. As usual he was received with
every semblance of respect. The nobles thronged to Holyrood to kiss
his hand; Argyll made flattering speeches to him in Parliament; he
was entertained at a splendid banquet, where his health was drunk in
right loyal fashion. He attended the Presbyterian service zealously,
and talked much with Henderson. He drove with Leslie, who had now
brought his army back from England, through the city amid the cheers
of a delighted crowd. But this halcyon weather could not last long.
The time came to fill those vacant offices of State which Montrose
was accused of claiming for himself and his friends; then Argyll put
forth his hand, and the mortified King soon found that it was the hand
which now practically wielded the sceptre of Scotland. An Act was
passed, making the King's choice of his ministers dependent on the
will of Parliament. It was next moved that Parliament should have the
right of submitting their own nominees to the King, and that no one
who had sided with him during the late troubles should be eligible.
These arbitrary measures provoked indeed much discontent among the
nobles, who had not stood up against the King to crouch under Argyll.
"If this be what you call liberty," cried Perth, "God give me the old
slavery again." But under their new Lords of the Articles the nobles,
even if united, could no longer command a majority in Parliament;
each Estate now chose its own lords, and out of the three two almost
to a man followed Argyll. Outside the House, however, they had still
to be reckoned with, and there the clamour against the popular leader
was rising high. For the moment it was aimed even more against
Hamilton, who, with his brother Lanark, was now openly courting
Argyll, as against a renegade who had deserted both his faith and
his friend. Ker, Lord Roxburgh's son, a headstrong young man who had
once quarrelled and fought under the flag of the Covenant, publicly
challenged Hamilton as a traitor. He was forced to apologise before
the House, but he came up the High Street to make his submission
escorted by six hundred armed retainers, and there were many who took
a less tumultuous way of showing their sympathy with his action. Even
Charles now found it a hard matter to keep his belief in the favourite
unshaken.

At this juncture the King received a letter on which, after much
reflection, he determined to take counsel. Twice already had Montrose
written from his prison praying for an interview on matters of the
deepest moment. The King would not see him nor answer his letters;
a man in Montrose's position, he said, would promise much to secure
an audience. Montrose now wrote a third time, no longer vaguely
hinting of danger, but directly offering to prove some one, whom
he did not name, but who was clearly Hamilton, a traitor. It was
impossible to disregard warnings that now began to match so well with
his own suspicions. Charles determined to lay the letter before the
Chancellor, Loudon, and others, including Argyll himself, and to ask
their advice.

Suddenly all Edinburgh broke into uproar. The news spread like
wildfire that a plot had been discovered to murder Argyll, Hamilton,
and Lanark, and that they had fled the city in fear of their lives.
It was true that they had gone. Late on the evening of October 11th,
the evening of the day on which the King had received Montrose's last
letter, the three men had been warned of their danger by Leslie, and
on the next day they left the city. But what was the danger, and from
what quarter did it come? Leslie, when questioned, answered carelessly
that the whole affair was a foolish business not worth talking of.
On the afternoon of the 12th the King went down to Parliament to
declare all he knew of the mystery. All he knew, if he told them all,
was little enough. It really amounted to no more than that Hamilton
had talked strangely to him of plots and calumnies, that he was very
fond of Hamilton, and that it hurt him grievously to find himself
distrusted by his friend. Finally he urged that his own credit, no
less than Hamilton's, demanded an instant and public inquiry before
the whole House. But Parliament insisted on the examination being
conducted by a select committee; and after an unseemly wrangle lasting
over several days, the King had to give way. The truth is that the
Parliament had already begun to make inquiries, and what they had
learned suggested the possibility of some awkward disclosures. The
Earl of Crawford, a fiery old Papist who had learned fighting in the
German wars and had carried Ker's challenge to Hamilton, had already
been arrested, with some lesser men. It was known that Montrose
had been in communication with the King, and they not unreasonably
suspected both of being at least privy to the plot, if not of
favouring it. It is impossible even to guess how much the King knew,
but there can be little doubt that Montrose was in the secret. The
story, first circulated by Clarendon, that he had offered at a private
interview with the King to kill both Hamilton and Argyll, as the
surest and speediest means of bringing a couple of traitors to their
deserts, is now generally and justly discredited. But Clarendon, it
should be remembered, gave two versions of this perplexing affair.
The King, he writes, was warned by certain persons in the confidence
of Montrose that Argyll and Hamilton were playing him false, and his
leave was asked to bring them to justice. The majority of the nobles,
he was told, were on his side, and ready, if he consented, to take
the two traitors out of the reach of their retainers and lodge them
securely in prison to await fair trial. While the King, doubtful of
the chance of bringing their guilt home to such high offenders, was
pondering these things, the two men (Lanark's name is not mentioned
in Clarendon's story) suddenly and secretly left the capital on the
plea that their enemies were plotting to murder them. Then followed a
confused period of debates in Parliament, appointment of committees,
examination of witnesses, charges and counter-charges, after which
the fugitives returned to Edinburgh, acknowledging to the King
that the danger, though assuredly no mere fancy, was perhaps less
pressing than they had been led to believe; and so the trouble passed
gradually away. Such in substance is Clarendon's original version of
what is known in Scottish history as the Incident, and two centuries
of research have enabled us to add little to it. But such is not the
version that first appeared in Clarendon's pages. Twenty years after
he had finished the greater part of the History of the Rebellion,
he began, in banishment at Montpellier, to write the history of his
own life. Many passages were subsequently transferred from the more
private narrative to the pages of the History, and among them one
in which Montrose's share in the Incident takes a new and startling
complexion. He is now directly charged with offering to play the
assassin. No authority is vouchsafed for the new story. For the
old one Charles, and indirectly Montrose himself, stand sponsors.
Clarendon did not live to finally revise the transcript of his
History, and we can only therefore conjecture his reasons for changing
an intelligible, if meagre, narrative of events, matching well with
all that has been subsequently learned concerning them, for a grave
personal charge which there is no tittle of evidence to prove. Such as
it was, however, the History was published with all its imperfections
on its head, nor did the world learn till more than a century later
that there was another version of this strange story, clearing the
memory of a brave and honourable man from an odious imputation.[10]

In this earlier version we probably have the true story of the
Incident in outline. But all attempts to fill the outline in lead
only to confusion. It is certain that there was a strong party among
the nobles violently incensed against Hamilton and Argyll. Some, like
Montrose, were no doubt convinced that these two men were playing
both their king and country false; others were merely jealous of an
influence won and exercised at their expense. The former were bent
only on a fair trial; but to talk of a fair trial was idle while the
culprits went at large with five thousand armed men at their back;
the sole chance of proving their guilt was to render them incapable
of resistance during its proof. Such was probably the original plan
of the Incident, and if not devised by Montrose would assuredly have
found no opposition from him; and such, it is not unreasonable to
suppose, would have been his proposal to the King had his petition for
a private interview been granted. Strange diseases, to borrow Argyll's
own words, need strange remedies; and to enforce justice by violence,
if it could be secured in no other way, would have shocked few
Scotsmen of that day. Such at least, if the witnesses spoke truth, was
the plan as it had shaped itself in Almond's mind, who intended and
would tolerate no more than was needed to ensure the straight course
of the law. But the secret was shared by more unscrupulous spirits
than Montrose or Almond. Carnwath had been heard to say with many
curses that there were now three kings in Scotland, and that two of
them must lose their heads. Crawford, who was to have been entrusted
with the seizure, was reported to have declared that the best way to
bring traitors to justice was to cut their throats. It was probably
through such wild speeches that the plot miscarried. Many a man, and
Montrose among them, had doubtless been well pleased to see Argyll
or Hamilton at his sword's point on a fair field, who would lend no
countenance to stabber's work. But it is not safe to put much reliance
on the evidence of the witnesses. All of them contradicted each other,
and many contradicted themselves. Conspicuous among them was William
Murray, a member of the royal household and high in his master's
confidence, who, unless foully wronged by history, was the most
unconscionable rogue of all that treacherous time. He seems indeed
to have been no better than a spy in the pay both of the Scottish
Covenant and the English Parliament, and he was certainly intriguing
at the same time with both Hamilton and Montrose. But in truth a
suspicion of insincerity hangs over the whole inquiry. The Parliament
were manifestly unwilling to press matters too closely. They would
have been well pleased to prove the plot, could they have selected the
plotters, and they did not want to hear too much about its intended
victims.

On one point, however, they were firm. They determined to know the
truth of the correspondence between Montrose and the King. Charles
showed them the last letter, the letter on which he had decided to
ask their advice before the storm of the Incident burst. Nothing was
to be learned from it. It was couched in general terms, promising, if
admitted to an interview, "to acquaint his Majesty with a business
which not only did concern his honour in a high degree, but the
standing and falling of his crown likewise." Montrose was twice
examined on the meaning of these ambiguous words, once in the presence
of the King at Holyrood by a special committee, and again before the
general committee of inquiry. Both examinations were fruitless. Of
the first there is no record; but from the meagre report preserved
of the second Montrose seems to have adhered at both to the literal
text of his letter, and to have declined to commit himself to any
more definite statement. He did not intend, he is reported to have
said, "neither could he, nor would he, wrong any particular person
whatsoever." This answer, it is naïvely added, did not give the House
satisfaction.

It was all the satisfaction they were to get. Wearied with an
examination that would plainly not discover what they wished to
find, and might discover what they wished to conceal, with fresh and
more serious matters for thought in the startling news of the Irish
rising, Parliament suffered the Incident to die a natural death. The
fugitives were welcomed back to the capital with the assurance that
they were honest men, loyal subjects, and good patriots. Argyll on
his return carried all before him. The offices of State were filled
with his nominees. The Privy Council was carefully weeded to make
room for his friends. The unfortunate King, to fill the cup of his
humiliation full, scattered titles with a lavish hand. Argyll was
raised to a marquisate; Almond was created Earl of Callendar; bluff
old Leslie took his seat among the peers of Scotland as Earl of
Leven. To complete the burlesque, Crawford was released from custody
without more ado, at the particular request of the magnanimous heroes
whose throats he was to have cut. Even Montrose and his friends were
suffered to share in the general amnesty, though after a colder
fashion. On November 16th, after an imprisonment of five months
without a trial, and without any specific allegation of offence,
they were discharged with a caution "to carry themselves soberly and
discreetly" for the future, and to appear for trial when required.
Charles bound himself never to employ their services again without the
consent of Parliament, or suffer them to approach his presence; and on
the 18th of November he left Scotland for the last time, a contented
prince, as he professed to believe, taking leave of a contented people.

It was not till the following March that the case against the Plotters
was finally closed. The mockery of their trial was continued at
intervals throughout the winter, but no fresh evidence was found
against them, no report of their examination was ever published, nor
indeed was any formal judgment ever delivered. It had been decided
that sentence should be left to the King. The committee, in short, was
playing the same game that had already proved so successful in the
affairs of the Bond and the Incident. By keeping the inquiry secret
the real weakness of their case was concealed, and by refraining
from a punishment that they could not inflict they acquired an
easy reputation for mercy, while leaving the accused open to every
charge that the imagination of fear or faction could devise. It was
even intimated that the prisoners owed their escape to Argyll's
clemency. Argyll's clemency consisted in refusing to press matters to
an extremity which he foresaw might prove more inconvenient to his
friends than to his enemies. But in truth he could have afforded to
be merciful. For the second time Montrose had challenged him on his
own ground, and for the second time victory, even more signally than
before, had declared for him.




CHAPTER VII

THE KING'S COMMISSION


This final rupture with the Covenant did not at once throw Montrose
into the arms of the King. The malignant star of Hamilton was still in
the ascendant. In spite of all that had passed Charles still believed
that in the Scots he would find a counterpoise to the rebellious
English, and Hamilton, for purposes known only to himself, encouraged
him in the belief. Montrose knew better. He knew, from his own past
experience, how good was the secret understanding between the two
Parliaments. He knew that the army, now again mustering under the
new Earl of Leven, was never destined to waste its strength on Irish
rebels. He knew that the Covenant was only biding its time to join
hands with the English Parliament; and he saw clearly that the only
chance of preventing this fatal union was to strike such a blow
at the former before it was ready for action as would leave it no
leisure to meddle with matters outside its own borders. He would have
warned the King of this before the war began, but Charles, mindful
of his promise to the Estates, and careful always to keep promises
it was not in his interests to break, refused to see him. He warned
Henrietta Maria of it at Bridlington Quay amid the thunder of English
guns firing on an English Queen, and he renewed his warnings again
when Newcastle had escorted her to York, and the harassed lady could
breathe and listen in safety. But Hamilton was also at her side
persuading her, as he had persuaded the King, that no danger was to
be feared from Scotland so long as no violence was attempted, and
that he might be relied upon to keep the country quiet and loyal to
its engagements. It was known that after Edgehill, when Charles was
marching on London, the Houses at Westminster had directly invited the
Scots into England to keep Newcastle's northern army in check, while
the King's own appeals to his "contented people" had been invariably
rejected. Yet the general feeling seems to have been in favour of a
temporising policy. The truth was that, though many Royalists looked
coldly on Hamilton, few were as yet inclined to trust Montrose. Among
the old thorough-going cavaliers the taint of the Covenant still
hung about him; his repentance, they thought, savoured too much of
personal pique to be altogether genuine. But with the majority it was
not so much his good faith as his capacity that was distrusted. They
considered him a brilliant adventurer, brave and daring, but too young
and inexperienced for these high matters, too rash and headstrong.
"Montrose," they said, "is a generous spirit, but Hamilton hath the
better head-piece." The King showed his opinion of the two men in
characteristic fashion; he wrote courteously to Montrose, and advanced
Hamilton to a dukedom.

So, during the first year of the war, Montrose was forced to eat his
heart out in idleness, at home among his books, in strenuous efforts
to keep alive the fainting loyalty of his party, or in despairing
consultations with his friends on the approach of the inevitable
hour that they were powerless to prevent. The Covenanters, aware of
his situation, and conceiving that his proud and restless spirit,
chafing under the sickness of hopes deferred and services rejected,
would render him amenable to their designs, sought to win him again
to their side. They offered him the command of their new army under
Leven; they even offered, as they had once offered Huntly, to pay his
debts. The Moderator Henderson (at Argyll's suggestion, it would seem,
and certainly with his knowledge) was sent to solve some doubts he
affected to entertain on the propriety of accepting these offers, and
fr

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