by John Buchan
1633-36
In June 1633 Charles came to Scotland to be crowned. Such an occasion was well suited for the introduction of a young nobleman to the court, for in that year Montrose attained his majority, his father-in-law was high in the royal favour, and his brother-in-law Napier was one of the four peers chosen to hold the canopy over the king’s head. That the world expected his presence is shown by his friend William Lithgow’s recommendation of his merits in the preposterous poem, “Scotland’s Welcome to her Native Son and Sovereign Lord, King Charles.” But when midsummer came he was on a foreign shore. The reason may be traced in the scandal connected with his sister’s husband, Sir John Colquhoun, which in the beginning of that year was the talk of Scotland. The laird of Luss, in company with a German necromancer of the name of Carlippis, had fled from his lawful wife, carrying with him his sister-in-law, the little Lady Katherine, who had for a time been Montrose’s companion in his Glasgow lodgings. The malefactor was outlawed and excommunicated, returning fourteen years later to be received into grace by Church and State; the unhappy girl disappears from history. With such a family horror on his mind, Montrose sought the anodyne of new scenes and fresh faces.
King Charles the First,
from the portrait by Vandyke.
We know little of his travels. He started probably in the beginning of 1633, accompanied by his secretary of St. Andrews days, John Lambie, and young Graham of Morphie. According to Burnet, his travelling companion was Basil Fielding, Denbigh’s son and Hamilton’s brother-in-law, who flung in his fortunes later with the Puritan party. He financed his journey by drawing bills on William Dick of Braid through the latter’s “factors” in Paris. The winter of 1633-34 was spent at Angers, where he no doubt was a pupil of the famous school of arms. In the old library at Innerpeffray there is still preserved a French Bible which he bought on his travels, scribbled throughout with mottoes which had caught his fancy, such as “Honor mihi vita potior” and “Non crescunt sine spinis.” In Rome he met Lord Angus, the future Marquis of Douglas, and others of the Scots nobility, and dined with them at the English College there. He studied all the while—”as much of the mathematics as is required of a soldier,” wrote his faithful adherent Thomas Saintserf, “but his great study was to read men and the actions of great men.” It is a phrase which aptly describes the attitude of high dedication in which the young man passed his youth. He went gravely about the business of life, and already had made certain of renown, though careless enough of happiness. Long afterwards, to foreign observers like the Cardinal de Retz, he seemed like one of the heroes of Plutarch, and there was something even in his boyish outlook of the high Roman manner. It was at this time that his interests began to move strongly towards the military art. Europe was in the throes of the Thirty Years’ War, half its gentry were in arms, the great Gustavus was but two years dead, and in court and college the talk was all of leaguers and campaigns.
The descriptions of his person and habits at this date are familiar; of middle stature and gracefully built, chestnut hair, a clear fresh colour, a high-bridged nose, keen grey eyes; an accomplished horseman, and an adept at every sport which needed a lithe body and a cool head. On his manner all accounts are agreed, and most accounts are critical. He was very stately and ceremonious, even as a young man, in no way prepared to forget that he was a great noble, except among his intimates. To servants and inferiors he was kindly and thoughtful, to equals and superiors a little stiff and hard. Burnet says of him that he was “a young man well learned, who had travelled, but had taken upon him the port of a hero too much.” “He was exceedingly constant and loving,” a friend wrote, “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.” One is reminded of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose “næve,” says Aubrey, “was that he was damnable proud.” Adventurous and imaginative youth is rarely free from the fault; its sensitive haughtiness is both defensive armour and a defiance; it believes itself destined for great deeds, and a boyish stateliness is its advertisement to the world of the part it has set itself to play.
1636
Montrose returned home in 1636, in his twenty-fourth year — a figure of intense interest to the Scottish faction-leaders, and of some moment to the king’s court. He was altogether too remarkable to please the Marquis of Hamilton, who was the interpreter of Scottish business to the royal ear, and for the first time he came into conflict with one with whom he was to fight many battles. James, third Marquis, and soon to be first Duke, of Hamilton, was not the least futile of the many schemers of his day. A vain, secret being, a diligent tramper of backstairs, and a master of incompetent intrigue, he is throughout his career the sheep in wolf’s clothing. He looks at us from the canvas of Vandyck, a martial figure, grasping a baton, but in his face we can detect what Sir Philip Warwick noted—”such a cloud on his countenance that Nature seems to have impressed aliquid insigne” — something crack-brained, uncertain and tortuous, a warning that this was no man to ride the ford with. The royal blood in his veins gave him high ambitions, and his fierce old mother, Ann Cunningham of Glencairn, strongly coloured these ambitions, so that he was for ever halting between King and Covenant, dreaming now of winning Scotland for his master, and now of reigning himself in some theocratic millennium. His life was one long pose, but the poses were many and contradictory, and the world came to regard as a knave one who was principally a fool. Burnet, the Hamilton champion, has done his best for his memory, but the verdict of history has been written by Clarendon, who was no ill-wisher to his house. “His natural darkness and reservation in his discourse made him to be thought a wise man, and his having been in command under the King of Sweden, as his continual discourse of battles and fortifications, made him to be thought a soldier. And both these mistakes were the cause that made him to be looked upon as a worse and a more dangerous man than in truth he deserved to be.”
When Montrose reached London he appeared at court, and naturally asked Hamilton to be his sponsor, announcing his wish “to put himself into the king’s service.” Hamilton did his best to dissuade him by representing Charles as the foe of Scottish rights, and then promptly sought out the king to tell him that Montrose, by reason of his royal descent, was a danger to the royal interests, and should be discouraged. The upshot was that the traveller was received by Charles with marked coldness. The king spoke a few chilly words, gave him his hand to kiss, and turned away. It was enough to discourage the most ardent loyalist, and the rebuff made it certain that personal affection for his monarch would play no part in determining the young man’s conduct on his return to his own country.
CHAPTER II. THE STRIFE IN SCOTLAND (1636-38)
It is bad policy to represent a political system as having no charm but for robbers and assassins, and no natural origin but in the brains of fools or madmen, when experience has proved that the great danger of the system consists in the peculiar fascination it is calculated to exert upon noble and imaginative spirits.
—— Coleridge, The Friend.
To understand the decision with which Montrose was confronted on his return, we must examine the elements of the storm which was now gathering to a head in the north, and to this end cast our eyes back over a tangled century of Scottish history.
James Duke of Hamilton, from the original by Vandyke.
I
The Reformation in Scotland has been often misconceived as a sudden and universal turning from an old way of life, and as sudden a birth of Presbytery fully matured in creed, discipline, and constitution. In reality it was a slow and halting process, where at the start only one thing was determined — the breach with Rome; and the positive structure suffered long delays and hesitations. The masculine genius of Knox was better fitted for action than for constructive thought; he knew when to defy and when to yield, for, in F. W. Maitland’s phrase, a shrewd worldly wisdom underlay his Hebraic frenzies; but he was nobly inconsistent, his views passed through baff
ling permutations, and, in spite of the acumen of his mind, the fabric he reared was neither well planned nor soundly masoned. But on the negative side his work was final. The old building had been razed to the ground, so that in Scotland there was at no time the remotest chance of a counter- Reformation. The faults of the pre-Reformation Scottish Church have doubtless been too darkly painted. In many ways its rule was beneficent, and it was rarely oppressive, but it had little hold upon the mind of a people which, in the Middle Ages, was notably careless about Rome. When Scotland found religion, she found it in a form which made her historic Church seem the flat opposite of the commands of Omnipotence. Moreover, the Renaissance came to her mainly through the Reformation, and, besides the religious impulse, there were stirrings towards democracy and freedom of thought which were satisfied by her new creed. Also there was her ancient dislike of foreign meddling. Rome became a hissing and a reproach, though men might differ hotly about what should take its place. When Knox thundered against the “diabolical,” “rotten,” and “stinking” ritual which had once been a familiar and comforting part of the people’s life, when he declared that the mass was more odious in God’s sight than murder, he had the assent of the bulk of the nation. “They think it impossible to lose the way to Heaven,” wrote Sir Anthony Weldon of the Scots, “if they can but leave Rome behind them.” On the destructive side the work was complete.
We may date the Scottish Reformation from the first “Band” of December 1557, which denounced the abuses of Rome and demanded the introduction of the English Prayer-book; but it was not till the Edinburgh Parliament of 1560 that we see the dawnings of Presbytery. Presbyterianism, as we understand the word to-day, is distinguished by its theory of church government, its ritual, and its creed. In each domain its special principles were slow to establish themselves.
Take the matter of church government. The cardinal doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was no doubt there in germ from the beginning, but at first there was little besides. The Presbyterian belief in the equality of ministers came neither from Calvin nor from Knox; Knox’s “superintendents,” as diocesan chiefs, were strangely like bishops, and the first reformed Scottish Church was a limited episcopacy. It was Andrew Melville who introduced the doctrine of ministerial parity, and made bishops an offence not only against the Scriptural conception of the Church, but against the new notion of democracy. “Ye may have bishops here,” the minister of Dunfermline told King James, “but ye must remember to make us all equal; make us all bishops, else will ye never content us.” The first Book of Discipline of 1561 accepted a hierarchy; the second Book of Discipline twenty years later swept it away. But the battle was not won; its fortunes seesawed during the reign of James, according as the monarch felt his power, for he had reached the firm conclusion that a hierarchy was a necessary protection for the throne against the potential anarchy of Presbytery. In 1584 came the Black Acts, and a short-lived royal triumph; in 1592 the king was forced to accept a full Presbyterian polity; by 1600 he had won again, and bishops sat in Parliament. His accession to the English throne gave him a new authority, the Melvilles were exiled, and, by means of packed ecclesiastical conventions, which he called General Assemblies, he had the Act of 1592 repealed and episcopacy established by law. But it was no more than a parliamentary episcopacy, scarcely affecting the life of the people, since kirk sessions, presbyteries, and synods continued to meet, and a staunch Presbyterian could write in 1616: “At that time I observed little controversy in religion in the Kirk of Scotland, for though there were bishops, yet they took little upon them.” In the early years of the reign of Charles I. the familiar Presbyterian régime was the rule in Scotland, with bishops affixed to it as a meaningless adminicle.
In the same way the General Assembly — that palladium of the new Church — was slow to come to maturity. When it was introduced in 1560, it was a copy of the national synod of the French Church. It was not a gathering of ecclesiastics, but representative of the whole religious life of the people, containing both clergy and laity popularly elected. From the start it possessed a representative authority which was lacking in the Scottish Parliament, and it presently became its rival. In the confused early years of James it wielded great powers and interfered much in secular policy — not without reason, for at the time every political problem had a religious connotation. But after the king’s victory in 1597 its influence declined, and before the end of his life it became an instrument in his hands. Andrew Melville had stated its claims so high that the civil authority could not choose but oppose them. “Thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdoms in Scotland,” he had told his master. “Thair is Chryst Jesus the King and his Kingdom the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and of whase Kingdom nocht a King nor a Lord nor a heid but a member. And they whom Chryst has callit and commandit to watch over the Kirk and govern his spirituall Kingdom has sufficient power of him and authoritie sa to do.” This might seem a reasonable statement of spiritual independence, were it not that the particular Assembly to which James objected had been called to discuss a question of secular politics.
We see, indeed, through the whole period between 1560 and 1638 the hardening and the magnifying of the claims of the new Church in other than legitimate matters of spiritual doctrine and discipline. It was this arrogance that made James and Charles desire a system which would bring the ecclesiastical leaders directly into the body politic, and so make them responsible to their sovereign; the trouble was that the real leaders saw that their power lay in being detached from King and Parliament, the chiefs of an imperium in imperio. There is no warrant for this separation to be found in Calvin. A preacher at Nîmes took to overthrowing images and altars, declaring that it was a matter of conscience. “God,” said Calvin, “never commands any one to overthrow idols, except every man in his own house, and, in public, those whom He has armed with authority. Let that firebrand show me by what title he is lord of the land where he has been burning things.” This was also the view of Knox, though he spoke at different times with different voices. He bade his Berwick congregation give due obedience to magistrates, however ungodly, without tumult or sedition, and “not to pretend to defend God’s truth and religion, ye being subjects, by violence or sword, but patiently suffering what God shall please be laid on you for constant confession of your faith and belief”; seven years later he was advising the faithful in England that “a prince who erects idolatry . . . must be adjudged to death.” But his considered view seems to have been that in a Christian state the last word, even in religion, lay with the civil authority. “The ordering and reformation of religion doth especially appertain to the Civil Magistrate. . . . The King taketh upon him to command the Priests.” The true father of the doctrine of the divine right of Presbytery was Andrew Melville, and under his influence the new presbyter became, in the extravagance of his claims, but too like the old priest. When ministers, called to account before the Privy Council for preaching civil sedition, declared that they could only appear before a Church court, they were laying down a principle, ancient indeed, but none the less destructive of civil society. Elizabeth in England saw what was coming, and in 1590 counselled her brother of Scotland: “Let me warn you that there is risen, both in your realm and mine, a sect of perilous consequence, such as would have no kings but a presbytery, and take our place while they enjoy our privileges, with a shade of God’s Word, which none is judged to follow right without by their censure they be so deemed.” The comparative impotence of the Scottish Kirk in the early years of Charles I. should not blind us to the fact that in the minds of some of its ablest divines there was developing a perilous doctrine of spiritual despotism.
The question of ritual was also unsettled. The first reformers in Scotland had no objection to the use of settled forms in public worship: none of them would have understood the objection of later Covenanting extremists even to the Lord’s Prayer. In 1557 the Second Book of Edward VI. had been recommended, and was generally used in churches, till Knox s
ecured its supersession by the Genevan Book of Common Order. The abhorrence of prescript prayer came into Scotland from the English Puritans. Knox disliked many things in the English Prayer-book, for it was his business to magnify differences between the old worship and the new, so as to stimulate Protestant fervour. He objected to kneeling at communion, because he believed — without historical warrant — that the first disciples sat, but he told his Berwick congregation that they might kneel if the magistrates commanded it, and made it clear that it was not retained for “maintenance of any superstition,” like “the adoration of the Lord’s Supper.” Later his attitude stiffened, and he considered that kneeling at the Lord’s table, responses, singing of the litany, services on saints’ days, and the use of the cross in baptism were “diabolical inventions.” But these were personal opinions; he disliked equally the imposition of hands at the ordination of ministers, which has long been a settled Presbyterian usage. The Scottish Kirk was content to have a liturgy, but it wanted its own Genevan version, and had the authorities been wise they might have found a method of reuniting the worship of both sides of the Tweed by some such eirenicon as John Hales dreamed of — a public form of service embracing only those things upon which all Christians were agreed. Scotland was willing to accept a ritual, but it must not be too suggestive of the Roman, and it must be her own and not an imposition from England. The five Articles of Perth, ratified by Parliament in 1621, enjoined kneeling at communion, the private administration of the sacrament to the dying, baptism in private houses, the confirmation of the young, and the keeping of certain church festivals — all English practices and foreign to the Genevan code: Scotland disliked them, but when they became law there was no further trouble, and, since they were not strictly enforced, they might soon have perished from desuetude. James, indeed, seems to have regarded the Perth Articles as the most he was prepared to demand, and to have guaranteed no increase of English innovations. Scotland had, therefore, a legal ritual, which was imperfectly observed because it was out of tune with the spirit of the Kirk, but not overtly opposed, because it had been established by means of her own law. The real strife would begin if the monarch should arbitrarily impose further Anglican forms upon her, for that would call to arms not only the Genevan purism of the Kirk, but the sleepless nationalism of the people.
