by John Buchan
William, Ninth Earl of Glencairn,
from a painting by an unknown artist.
In every national crisis there is some personal antagonism, where the warring creeds seem to be summed up in the persons of two protagonists — Cæsar and Pompey, Pym and Strafford, Fox and Pitt. So were to stand those present allies, Montrose and Argyll, secular types of conflicting temperaments and irreconcilable views. The head of the great house of Campbell was now some thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, eight years the senior of Montrose. He had the widest possessions of any Highland chief except Huntly, and at his back by far the most powerful clan, for he lived close to the Lowlands, and could put 5,000 men into the field. His father, to whom the sobriquet of Gilleasbuig Gruamach—”Gillespie the Sullen” — properly belonged, was an odd character and led an odd life. He was defeated at Glenrinnes in 1594 by the Gordons, but later added to his possessions by subduing the Macdonalds of Islay and Kintyre. But his fortune was not commensurate with his lands, he fell deeply into debt, married a Catholic second wife, joined the Church of Rome, and had to flee the country. He was permitted to return, and lived some ten years in England before his death. His first wife was a daughter of the house of Morton, so his son had in his veins the unaccountable Douglas blood. Like the father, the son had an unhappy childhood, for he lost his mother in his infancy, and during his youth was perpetually at variance with his wandering sire. He had to fight hard during his minority for his rights, and the experience must have made him wary and distrustful, and taught him diplomacy and dissimulation. Charles is said to have assisted him against his vindictive parent, and Clarendon reports some dubious gossip about the old man warning the king against his son, “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.”
What is clear is that in his youth he was deeply in debt, and found his great estates less of a boon than an incumbrance. He determined to husband and increase his fortune, and there is record of a curious venture to annex an imaginary island beyond the Hebrides. He took his part in policing the Highlands, and in 1636 brought to justice the outlaw Patrick Macgregor, who is famous in balladry as Gilderoy. With high politics he did not meddle. He defended the laird of Earlston against the Bishop of Galloway, and befriended Samuel Rutherford when brought before the Court of High Commission, but his motive may well have been only friendship to his kinsfolk, the Kenmures. These incidents did not predispose him to love the bishops, and in 1637 he convened a meeting of Rothes, Traquair, and other noblemen, to protest against the “pride and avarice of the prelates seeking to overrule the haill kingdom.” But up to 1638 we may regard him as principally occupied with family troubles and the care of his estates, a little suspect by Presbytery as the son of a Catholic and the brother-in-law of Huntly, well regarded by the king in spite of his father’s warnings, and with no special predilection towards the Kirk. He was one of the few nobles who, in the summer of 1638, took the king’s alternative covenant at the request of Hamilton.
In this mood he attended the Glasgow Assembly. There it would appear that he underwent a profound spiritual experience, and in the theological sense was “converted.” It was the habit of Alexander Henderson during the sittings to hold meetings at night for prayer and counsel. “I find,” says Wodrow, who must have been repeating a tradition handed down in the ministry, “that their meetings were remarkably countenanced of God, and that the Marquis of Argyll, and several others who sometimes joined in them, dated their conversion, or a knowledge of it, from those times.” It was this change of heart, and not the discovery that the Covenant was the side of the majority, that determined Argyll’s course. He was an acute judge of popular opinion, but it was something more than policy that took him over to the Covenant side. For from that day this man, who in the past had been wholly concerned with his worldly possessions, and had held himself conspicuously aloof from the Kirk, became a religious enthusiast, a fanatic; and no mortal, however consummate an actor, could simulate such enthusiasm as Argyll revealed during the remainder of his troubled life.
In assessing his character we have therefore to start from the fact that in religious matters he was most deeply in earnest, that he had the same proselytizing zeal, and the same complete assurance that the armies of Heaven were on his side, as Wariston and James Guthrie. To this add his Campbell and Douglas ancestry. He had the chief’s love of power, and it is possible that, as in Hamilton’s case, visions of a crown may have haunted one who boasted that he was the “eighth man from Robert Bruce.” Such dreams were common among the higher Scots nobility. His bitter youth had left him suspicious and aloof, without warmth, with few friends and fewer intimates. He could not charm easily; he must win his way by patience, assiduity, and talent; but he learned in time a grace of manner to which even the hostile Clarendon bears witness. He was, so far as can be judged, without any interest in humane letters; his mind was mediæval in its cast, holding firm by law and scholastic divinity. Hence it is vain to look to him for any profound ideal of statecraft. He was essentially a politician, a shrewd judge of character and opinion, able to use both the raw material of fanaticism in the ministers and of gross self-interest in the nobles to further his ends, because he shared the one and wholly understood the other. There was no quicker brain in Britain to probe the possibilities of a situation. Mr. Gardiner thinks him as much superior to Montrose as a statesman as he was inferior in the art of war; and Clarendon, after remarking that Montrose despised him, “as he was too apt to contemn those he did not love,” adds that Argyll “wanted nothing but honesty and courage to be a very extraordinary man, having all other good talents in a great degree.”
Honesty and courage are difficult matters upon which to dogmatize. Argyll was a poor soldier, because he lacked the power of grasping a tactical or strategical problem — a gift as specialized as that for poetry or the higher mathematics — and because he had not the kind of personality which can impress itself upon large bodies of men under arms. But it is idle to deny courage, even of the rude physical kind, to a man who time and again risked his neck, who was prepared to meet an enemy in a duel, and who went without a tremor to the scaffold. As for honesty, there is little enough of the high and delicate kind at any time in the political game, and, if we define it as scrupulous loyalty to cause and colleague, it was a fruit which scarcely grew in seventeenth-century Scotland. In that mad kaleidoscope Argyll had as much of the rare commodity as most of his contemporaries. His troubles came primarily from a divided soul — a clear, practical intellect pulling against an obscurantist creed, the Highland chief at variance with the Presbyterian statesman, a brain, mediæval for all its powers, fumbling with the half-understood problems of a new world. With such a one subtlety will appear as irresolution, perplexity as cowardice, and a too quick mind will seem to argue a dishonest heart.
Such a man will be a power among fanatics and self-seekers, for he can read the souls of both. But there will be one chink in his armour. He will not comprehend so readily other motives, and, in failing to understand, he will miscalculate and undervalue. Single-heartedness will not come within the scope of his capacious understanding. Sooner or later Argyll was bound to find in Montrose his stark opposite, by whom he was both puzzled and repelled — one who, in the common sense of the word, had no personal ambition, who was a civic enthusiast as Wariston and Guthrie were religious enthusiasts, and who would force the appeal to that which Argyll hated and feared — the sword.
IV
1638-39
Charles had much ado to raise that army which for the past nine months he had regarded as his ultimate argument. England was apathetic, and a growing proportion of her people looked askance at episcopacy. There had been no Parliament for ten years, so there were scanty supplies. The train-bands were called out, and the nobles were summoned to perform their feudal duties, but the first were half-hearted and ill-equipped, and the second was at the best a patc
hy volunteer service. On paper the king had some 21,000 men — 14,000 foot and 2,000 horse, and about 5,000 under Hamilton. The cavalry was under Lord Holland, and the infantry under the Catholic Lord Arundel, neither of whom had much military experience. The plan was an advance to the Border by the main forces, while Hamilton should join hands with Huntly in the north and threaten the Covenanters’ rear. Meantime it was hoped that Antrim, with his Irish, would land in Argyll, and Strafford in the Firth of Clyde. Unless the mere threat of an advance brought the Scots to terms, there was little hope in the scheme, for the main army was too weak for an invasion of Scotland, an Irish landing was improbable, and the exchequer was too low to permit of a waiting campaign. With the king went many distinguished figures: Sir Edmund Verney, already in two minds about the merits of the cause; Falkland, whose departure was attended by eulogistic poems from Cowley and Waller; Sir John Suckling, who from his own purse equipped a troop of horse clad in white and scarlet which, by the testimony of his own pasquil, had no stomach for a fight.
The Scots were in a better case. The provident Tables had already created a war-chest by voluntary assessments; their cause was supported by a widespread popular enthusiasm; the troops they could raise were of a more martial stamp than the unwilling English levies, and they had commanders of far higher talent than Holland and Arundel. For, in Spalding’s words, “there came out of Germany hame to Scotland ane gentleman of base birth born in Balveny, who had served long and fortunately in the German wars, and called to his name Felt Marshall Leslie, His Excellence.” Alexander Leslie, now a man of fifty-seven, had risen high in the service of Gustavus, and at Stralsund had been a match for Wallenstein himself. So great was his professional repute that he was given at once the unquestioned control of the Covenant forces. “We were feared,” Baillie wrote, “that emulation among our nobles might have done harm, . . . but such was the wisdom and authority of the old, little, crooked soldier, that all, with ane incredible submission, from the beginning to the end, gave over themselves to be guided by him, as if he had been Great Solyman.” With Leslie had come over many Scottish mercenaries of the Dugald Dalgetty type, who, finding their occupation gone on the Continent, welcomed the chance of turning an honest penny in their native land. Such men, as a rule, cared as little about prayer-books and General Assemblies as they cared for the international quibbles of a German princeling, but they were to provide the Covenant with that which it sorely needed and which England as yet did not possess — a body of experienced and cool-headed professional officers.
1639
The Tables were no laggards in war. Edinburgh castle, which Hamilton had bought from Mar, was surprised and taken; Dumbarton and Dalkeith followed, and soon in the south of Scotland only the castle of Caerlaverock remained hostile. The three Lowland noblemen who were still nominally on the king’s side — Traquair, Roxburgh, and Douglas — could do nothing in Clydesdale and Tweeddale. Argyll was given the wardenship of the west, and presently, by his seizure of Hamilton’s castle of Brodick and his garrisoning of Kintyre, closed the door by which Antrim and Strafford might have entered, while, with the unexpected assistance of the Camerons, he ravaged Huntly’s Badenoch domains. The immediate danger lay in Aberdeen, for Charles’s march from the south would be slow. Should Hamilton’s 5,000 sail north and join Huntly — now appointed royal lieutenant over all the country between the North Esk and Caithness — the Covenant would have to fight with a conflagration in its rear. Montrose was appointed to deal with the situation, and Leslie, whose formal commission as commander-in-chief was not issued till May 9, 1639, was sent with him to correct the inexperience of this general of twenty-seven.
In January 1639 and the beginning of February Montrose was busy beating up recruits in his own braes of Angus, where he had high words with Southesk, his father-in-law, who had not forgotten the dispute at the Glasgow Assembly, and, in a sudden fit of royalism, refused the warrant of the Tables. He had summoned the northern Covenanters — the Frasers, Keiths, Crichtons, and Forbeses — to meet him at the little town of Turriff in Aberdeenshire. Huntly heard of the rendezvous, and, resolved to prevent it, marched thither with 2,000 of his clansmen. But Montrose was to give the first proof of his speed. Getting word of Huntly’s intention, he rode through the Grampian passes with 200 horsemen, and was joined at Turriff by 800 men. Huntly, when he arrived, found the churchyard walls lined with muskets, and Montrose and his friends ensconced in the church. He had much the larger force, but he had been forbidden to fight without Hamilton’s instructions, so he could only “glare at” his enemies and withdraw to Strathbogie. His orders were not to take the offensive till the king had reached the Border.
But he could fortify Aberdeen, and this it was Montrose’s business to prevent. Presently Leslie arrived with the rest of the army, and, with a force of from 3,000 to 4,000 men, Montrose advanced on the city. Huntly, with instructions at all costs to win time, tried to make an arrangement with Montrose, but the latter had his clear instructions from the Tables, and on 30th March he entered Aberdeen. Ever in love with the spectacular side of life, he found a rival colour for the royal scarlet which the young Gordons wore, and decorated his men with knots of blue ribbon. It is curious to note that the Covenant received its famous blue badge from the man who was to prove its chief opponent. The city, deserted by Huntly, had no power of resistance. The Aberdeen doctors fled by sea, and some of the more martial citizens departed to join the king, while the Covenanting chaplains improved the occasion by pointing out in their discourses that upon Aberdeen had fallen the curse of Meroz. Montrose imposed on the city a fine for recusancy, and appointed Kinghorn to the command, while he rode west to look for Huntly.
Now follows a curious tale on which it is hard to form an opinion. Various intermediaries had been busy, and in the first week of April Huntly met Montrose in the latter’s camp at Inverurie. Huntly signed a modified version of the Covenant, binding himself “to maintain the King’s authority, together with the liberties both of Church and State, Religion and Laws” — probably a version dictated by Montrose himself, whose principles it exactly represented. The Gordons would be allowed to sign the Covenant if they pleased, and the Catholic members of the clan were to be protected so long as they stood by the laws and liberties of Scotland. When Huntly came again to Inverurie, he found the camp full of his hereditary enemies, Frasers, Forbeses, and Crichtons, and sent his friend Gordon of Straloch to Montrose to warn him that any attempt to carry him south as prisoner would be hotly resented by the countryside. Montrose, in reply, declared that he would stand by Huntly—”but there is this difficulty, that business here is all transacted by vote and a committee, nor can I get anything done of myself.”
Montrose returned to Aberdeen, where he was joined by other of the Covenanting nobles. A council was held, and the general was severely chidden for his leniency towards Huntly. Apparently his command in the field did not carry any superior authority at the council board, for Huntly was promptly summoned to attend under a safe conduct, for which Montrose made himself specially responsible. The latter had promised more than he could perform, and the chief of the Gordons found himself in a trap. He was asked to pay certain expenses, bring in certain prisoners, become reconciled to Crichton of Frendraught, and naturally refused. He was then told that he must accompany the Covenanting lords to Edinburgh. He asked if he was to go as a prisoner or as a free man. Montrose bade him take his choice, and the marquis replied that he would go as a volunteer. This is the account of Spalding, who makes Montrose throughout the leader in the sorry business; Gordon of Rothiemay, who had reason to know, since he was Straloch’s son, assigns the chief part to Leslie; Monteith says that Montrose opposed the breaking of the parole with all his power. Huntly and his heir, Lord Gordon, were carried to Edinburgh, and his suspicions proved only too well founded. He refused to subscribe any other covenant than that which he had taken at Inverurie, and he and his son were consigned to Edinburgh castle. According to his fashion, he signaliz
ed the event by a piece of noble declamation. “Whereas you offer me liberty, I am not so bad a merchant as to buy it with the loss of my conscience, fidelity, and honour. I have already given my faith to my Prince, upon whom now this crown by all laws of nature and nations is justly fallen. . . . I am in your power, and resolved not to leave that foul title of traitor as an inheritance upon my posterity. You may take my head from my shoulders, but not my heart from my Sovereign.”
It is the judgment of Mr. Gardiner that in all this affair Montrose “played but a mean and shabby part,” that it was “the only mean action of his life.” But the thing is too intricate for such a summary judgment. Montrose was clearly, in matters of policy, only one vote among many, and, moreover, he was in all major matters subordinate to Leslie. Huntly’s treatment was probably by Leslie’s order, whether or not he was present at the final meeting in Aberdeen, and it is significant that in England it was attributed to him. Moreover, it is by no means clear that Huntly, in spite of his rhetoric, was an unwilling captive. Why did he open negotiations with Montrose? Why did he sign a covenant at Inverurie? He did not want a Covenant army ravaging his lands, while he waited for instructions from Hamilton which never came. What honour was there in being the royal lieutenant when he was under a superior officer who sent neither troops nor commands? He was in an impossible position, and may have welcomed a simple way out of it; otherwise, knowing how many of the foes of his house were assembled at Aberdeen, he would scarcely have put his head into the lion’s mouth. It is to be noted that he was no sooner safe in Edinburgh castle than Charles wrote to Hamilton describing him as “feeble and false.” It is only on some such supposition that we can explain Montrose’s conduct. Had the facts been as Spalding relates them, one so scrupulous of the point of honour would assuredly have laid down his commission. Lord Gordon shared Huntly’s captivity, and he was soon to be Montrose’s closest friend; it is hard to believe that a flagrant wrong done to the father could so soon have been forgotten by the son. But it is certain that Huntly himself was aggrieved, and never forgave Montrose; it may be because Montrose was a witness of his weakness and humiliation. “He could never be gained to join cordially with him, nor to swallow that indignity, . . . whence it came to pass that such as were equally enemies to both . . . in the end prevailed so far as to ruinate and destroy both of them, and the king by a consequent.”
