Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  With the Puritans, as with the Cavaliers, many streams from remote wells were in the end canalized into a single channel. The mood of those who accepted the natural world as the gift of God was set against that which saw that world as conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity: the ancient institutions of the realm, which to the mind of the Cavalier should be reformed, but in substance retained, were opposed to a clean page on which men could write what they pleased; the conception of the State as a thing of balances and adjustments was met by a theory of government as an abstract ideal to be determined mainly by the half-understood words of an old book: the free exercise of men’s conscience in religion was confronted with a denial of freedom except to those of a certain way of thinking. The truth is that the Puritan was hampered both in civil and ecclesiastical statesmanship by that intense individualism which was also his strength. His creed was not social or readily communicable —

  “. . . a dark lanthorn of the spirit,

  Which none see by but those who bear it.”

  To him, as to Newman in his youth, the world was narrowed to “two, and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings” — himself and his Creator.

  If we put the contrast thus, it would seem that generosity and enlightenment were predominantly on the side of the Cavaliers. But it must not be forgotten that, owing to the spiritual atmosphere of the age and the tendency in such a conflict to narrower and yet narrower definition, the common creed of Puritanism did not fairly represent the best men in its ranks. Had Hampden and Falkland ever argued on fundamentals they might well have found themselves in substantial agreement. The difference, as the struggle progressed, came to lie far less in creeds than in the moods behind them, and the Puritan mood, solemn under the Almighty’s eye, austere, self-centred, unhumorous, unbending, was more formidable and more valuable than their crude apologetics. Its spiritual profundity was as rich a bequest to the future as the saner and sunnier temper of the Cavalier. The difference between the best men of the two parties was a fine one — the exact border-line between the king’s prerogative and popular liberties in Church and State; but most great contests in the world’s history have been fought on narrow margins. And in practice the narrowness disappeared, and the divergence was glaring. For the Cavalier, with his reasoned doctrine of a central authority based on historical sanctions, had to define that authority as the king, and that king not an ideal monarch, but an actual person then living in Whitehall. The Puritan, who might have dissented reluctantly from the abstract argument, was very ready to differ about Charles.

  The conflict which we call the Civil War took place under the shadow which overhung the thought of the first half of the seventeenth century. In that gloom, as we have seen, men were predisposed to define arbitrarily and fly to rigid dogma as to a refuge, for in such a constriction they found peace and strength. Those who maintained the integrity of the spirit, and refused to blindfold their minds, cloistered themselves, or, if they ventured on a life of action, were as a rule Verneys or Falklands, heartsick, distracted, “ingeminating Peace.” The effective protagonists were those Cavaliers whose loyalty knew no doubts, and those Puritans who were strong in the confidence of their Lord.

  It is the purpose of this book to trace the career of one whose campaigning ground was Scotland, where antagonisms were fiercer and blinder than in the south; one who did not drug his soul with easy loyalties, but faced the problem of his times unflinchingly, and reached conclusions which had to wait for nearly two hundred years till they could be restated with some hope of acceptance; one who, nevertheless, had that single-hearted gift for deeds which usually belongs to the man whose vigour is not impaired by thought. Montrose has been called by Carlyle the noblest of the Cavaliers, yet clearly he was no ordinary Cavalier; for at the start he was a Covenanter and in rebellion against the king — rebellion of which he never saw reason to repent, and to his dying day he remained a convinced Presbyterian.

  BOOK I — PREPARATION

  CHAPTER I. YOUTH (1612-36)

  I know the ways of pleasure, the sweet strains,

  The lullings and the relishes of it;

  The propositions of hot blood and brains;

  What mirth and music mean; what love and wit

  Have done these twenty hundred years and more;

  I know the projects of unbridled store:

  My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live.

  — GEORGE HERBERT.

  Montrose at Seventeen, after the portrait by Jameson.

  The Highland Line in the Scottish mainland, though variously determined at times by political needs, has been clearly fixed by nature. The main battlement of the hills runs with a north-easterly slant from Argyll through the Lennox, and then turns northward so as to enclose the wide carselands of Tay. Beyond lie the tangled wildernesses stretching with scarcely a break to Cape Wrath; east and south are the Lowlands proper — on the east around Don and Dee and the Forfarshire Esks: on the south around Forth and Clyde, and embracing the hills of Tweed and Galloway. Scotland had thus two Borderlands — the famous line of march with England, and the line, historically less notable but geographically clearer, which separated plain from hill, family from clan, and for centuries some semblance of civilization from its stark opposite. The northern Border may be defined in its more essential part as the southern portion of Dumbarton and Lennox, the shire of Stirling, and the haughs of the lower Tay. There for centuries the Lowlander looked out from his towns and castles to the blue mountains where lived his ancestral foes. Dwelling on a frontier makes a hardy race, and from this northern Border came famous men and sounding deeds. Drummonds, Murrays, Erskines, and Grahams were its chief families, but most notably the last. What the name of Scott was in the glens of Teviot, the name of Graham was in the valleys of Forth and Earn. Since the thirteenth century they had been the unofficial wardens of the northern marches.

  The ancient nobility of Scotland does not show well on the page of history. The records of the great earldoms — Angus, Mar, Moray, Buchan — tell too often an unedifying tale of blood and treason, and, after the day of the Good Lord James, St. Bride of Douglas might have wept for her children. But the family of Graham kept tolerably clean hands, and played an honourable part in the national history. Sir John the Graham was the trusted friend of Wallace, and fell gloriously at Falkirk. His successors fought in the later wars of independence, thrice intermarried with the royal blood, and gave Scotland her first primate. In 1451 the family attained the peerage. The third Lord Graham was made Earl of Montrose, when the short-lived Lindsay dukedom lapsed, and the new earl died with his king in the steel circle at Flodden. A successor fell at Pinkie; another became Chancellor and then Viceroy of Scotland when James the Sixth mounted the English throne. The Viceroy’s son, the fourth earl, apart from a famous brawl in the High Street of Edinburgh, lived the quiet life of a county laird till, shortly before his death he, too, was appointed Chancellor. He was a noted sportsman, a great golfer, and a devotee of tobacco. His wife was Lady Margaret Ruthven, a daughter of the tragically-fated house of Gowrie, who bore him six children, and died when her only son was in his sixth year. The family was reasonably rich as the times went, for the home-keeping Earl John had conserved his estate. They owned broad lands in Stirling, Perth, and Angus, and wielded the influence which the chief of a house possesses over its numerous cadets. They had three principal dwellings — the tower of Mugdock in Strathblane; the fine castle of Kincardine in Perthshire, where the Ochils slope to the Earn; and the house of Old Montrose, which Robert Bruce had given to a Graham as the price of Cardross on Clyde.

  1612-24

  James Graham, the only son of the fourth earl and Margaret Ruthven, was born in the year 1612, probably in the month of October — according to tradition, in the town of Montrose. The piety of opponents has surrounded his birth with omens; his mother is said, with the hereditary Ruthven love of necromancy, to have consulted witches, and his father to have observed to a neighbour that this
child would trouble all Scotland. Like Cromwell, he was the only boy in a family of girls. Of his five sisters, the two eldest were married young — Lilias to Sir John Colquhoun of Luss, and Margaret to a wise man of forty, the first Lord Napier of Merchiston. Their houses were open to him when he tired of catching trout in the little water of Ruthven, or wearing out horseshoes on the Ochils, an occupation to which the extant bills of the Aberuthven blacksmith testify. There was much in the way of adventure to be had at Rossdhu, Lady Lilias’s new dwelling, and there the boy may have learned, from practising on the roebuck and wild goats of Lochlomondside, the skill which made him in after years a noted marksman.

  1624-26

  At the age of twelve Lord Graham was entrusted to a certain William Forrett, master of arts, to be prepared for the college of Glasgow. Thither he journeyed with a valet, two pages in scarlet, a quantity of linen and plate, a selection from his father’s library, and his favourite white pony. He lived in the house of Sir George Elphinstone of Blythswood, the Lord Justice Clerk; it stood near the Townhead, and may have been one of the old manses of the canons of the Cathedral. The avenues to learning must have been gently graded, for he retained a happy memory of those Glasgow days and of Master Forrett, who in later years became the tutor of his sons. He seems to have read in Xenophon and Seneca, and an English translation of Tasso; but his favourite book, then and long afterwards, was Raleigh’s History of the World, the splendid folio of the first edition.

  In the second year of Glasgow study the old earl died, and Lord Graham posted back to Kincardine, arriving two days before the end. Thither came the whole race of Grahams for the funeral ceremonies, which lasted the better part of three weeks. Prodigious quantities of meat and drink were consumed, for each neighbour and kinsman brought his contribution in kind — partridges and plovers from Lord Stormont, moorfowl from Lawers, a great hind from Glenorchy — the details are still extant, with the values of woodcock and wild geese, capercailzie and ptarmigan, meticulously set down. If such mourning had its drawbacks, at any rate it introduced the new head of the family to those of his name and race. He did not return to Glasgow (though five years later he showed his affection for the place by making a donation to the building of the new college library), and presently was entered at St. Salvator’s College, St. Andrews, of which one of his forbears had been a founder. Master Forrett brought his possessions from Glasgow, and the laird of Inchbrakie bestowed these valuable items, the books, in a proper cabinet.

  1626-28

  We have ample documents to illustrate his St. Andrews’ days. The university, the oldest and then the most famous in Scotland, had among its alumni in the first half of the seventeenth century men so diverse as Montrose and Argyll and Rothes, Mr. Donald Cargill and Sir George Mackenzie. His secretary was a Mr. John Lambie, and Mr. Lambie’s accounts reveal the academic life in those days of a gentleman-commoner. In sport his tastes were catholic. He golfed, like James Melville a century before, and paid five shillings Scots for each golf ball. His rooms at St. Salvator’s were hung round with bows, and in his second year he won the silver medal for archery, which to the end of his college course he held against all comers. Argyll, who was some years his senior, had carried off the same trophy. He was an admirable horseman, and he seems to have hunted regularly; it is recorded in the accounts that after a day with hounds his horse was given a pint of ale. He was fond of hawking, and he went regularly to Cupar races, handing over, according to the excellent statute of 1621, his winnings beyond one hundred marks to the local kirk session for the relief of the poor. His chief friends of his own order seem to have been Wigton, Lindsay of the Byres, Kinghorn, Sinclair, Sutherland, and Colville, and he varied his residence at St. Andrews with visits to his brother-in-law (the hills of Rossdhu, complains his steward, wore the boots off his feet), the cadet gentry of his name, and Cumbernauld, Glamis, Kinnaird, Balcarres, and the other country-houses of his friends. In October 1628 he gave a great house-warming at Kincardine, which lasted for three days. In the March following he visited Edinburgh, where he appeared in gilt spurs and a new sword, and was lent the Chancellor’s carriage. The picture which has come down to us of the undergraduate is that of a boy happy and well-dowered, popular with all, eager to squeeze the juice from the many fruits of life. Nor was he above youthful disasters. When his sister Dorothea married Sir James Rollo, there was huge feasting in Edinburgh and Fife, and the young earl returned to college only to fall sick. Two doctors were summoned, who charged enormous fees, and prescribed a rest cure — strict diet, and no amusements but cards and chess. The barber shore away his long brown curls, and “James Pett’s dochter” attended to the invalid’s food. The régime seems high feeding for what was probably an attack of indigestion — trout, pigeons, capons, “drapped eggs,” calf’s-foot jelly, grouse (out of season), washed down by “liquorice, whey, possets, aleberry, and claret.”

  From the accounts preserved we can trace something of his progress in learning. He began to study Greek, and continued his reading in the Latin classics, his favourites now being Cæsar and Lucan, in his copies of which he made notes. He can never have been an exact scholar, and it is probable that the wide knowledge of classical literature which he showed later was largely acquired from translations. For it was the day of great translators, and at St. Andrews he had at his service North’s Plutarch, Philemon Holland’s Livy and Suetonius, Thomas Heywood’s Sallust, and the Tacitus of Sir Henry Savile and Richard Grenewey. Nor did he neglect romances, and he made his first essays in poetry. To this stage may belong the lines ascribed to him by family tradition, in which the ambitious boy writes his own version of a popular contemporary conceit; but he does not end, like the other versions, on a note of pious quietism:

  “I would be high; but that the cedar tree

  Is blustered down whilst smaller shrubs go free.

  I would be low; but that the lowly grass

  Is trampled down by each unworthy ass.

  For to be high, my means they will not doe;

  And to be low my mind it will not bow.

  O Heavens! O Fate! when will you once agree

  To reconcile my means, my mind, and me?”

  He had a touch of the bibliophile, for he had his copies of Buchanan and Barclay’s Argenis specially bound. To poor authors he was a modest Mæcenas. The accounts show a payment of fifty-eight shillings Scots to “ane Hungarian poet, who made some verses to my lord.” He subscribed for the travels of the fantastical William Lithgow, and was good-humoured enough to read and advise upon a poem in manuscript by the same hand which bore the unsavoury title of “The Gushing Tears of Godly Sorrow.”

  1629

  In those days the business of life crowded fast upon boyhood. After the university came marriage as the next step in a gentleman’s education. Not far from Old Montrose stood the castle of Kinnaird, where Lord Carnegie dwelt with six pretty daughters. There Montrose had often visited, and there he fell in love with Magdalen, the youngest girl. The match was too desirable for opposition either from the Carnegies or from the young lord’s guardians, and the children — Montrose was only seventeen — were married in the parish church of Kinnaird on November 10, 1629. In the marriage contract Lord Carnegie bound himself “to entertain and sustain in house with himself, the said noble earl and Mistress Magdalene Carnegie, his promised spouse, during the space of three years next after the said marriage.” Accordingly the young couple remained at Kinnaird for a little over three years, until Montrose came of age, and there two of their four sons were born. They were years of quiet study, the leisurely preparation which is all too rare in youth for the necessities of manhood; and they were the only season of peaceful domestic life which Montrose was fated to enjoy. The famous Jameson portrait, given by Graham of Morphie as a wedding gift to the young countess, shows him in those years of meditation, when he was scribbling his ambitions in his copy of Quintus Curtius. It is a charming head of a boy, with its wide, curious, grey eyes, the arched, almost fant
astic, eyebrows, the delicate mobile lips. Life was to crush out the daintiness and gaiety, armour was to take the place of lace collar and silken doublet; but one thing the face of Montrose never lost — it had always an air of hope, as of one seeking for a far country.