by John Buchan
On the day that Montrose reached Aberdeen Charles entered York. On 7th April he issued a proclamation to his rebellious subjects in Scotland, inviting them to come in and be punished. It was a blunder which he repaired by a later proclamation of 7th May, in which he announced that he would give his people all just satisfaction in Parliament as soon as the present troubles subsided, that he would not permit the Scots to invade England, but that he did not propose to invade Scotland, “if all civil and temporal obedience was shown him.” This last clause seemed to open a way to negotiation. But Leslie, on whose head a price of £500 had been set, took no risks; he mustered his army on the links of Leith, and before the end of the month was encamped at Dunglass, on his way to the Border. Meantime, on May Day, Hamilton had arrived in the Forth with nineteen ships of war and 5,000 men, to find the approaches to Edinburgh strongly fortified, and both shores of the firth in arms. His mother, the terrible old dowager-countess, arrived from the west with pistols in her holsters and the resolve to shoot her son if he set foot on Scottish soil. The king’s commissioner proved as futile in war as in diplomacy. He contented himself with landing his men on the islands of the firth, paying secret visits to Covenanting lords, and writing melancholy letters to his master.
But up in the north the Gordons and certain local barons — Ogilvies, Urquharts, and Setons — had taken matters into their own hands. In a one-sided engagement, called the Trot of Turriff, they drove out a small Covenanting garrison under the Master of Forbes, and marched on Aberdeen, which they occupied on the 15th of May. Meantime Huntly’s second son, Lord Aboyne, had made his way to Charles at Newcastle, and had offered his sword to the royal side. He was sent back to Hamilton for troops, but Hamilton gave him nothing but a few field-pieces and the services of a certain Colonel Gun, who had fought in the German wars. There was a chance now for a real diversion, but Hamilton did not take it; he sent two of his three regiments to the king, and himself remained snugly in the Forth.
Montrose was in Edinburgh on 18th May when he got word of the doings in the north. Hastily collecting a force of some 4,000, he reached Aberdeen on the 25th, to find that the barons had marched westward to get Highland support, and that the young Earl Marischal had occupied the city. Some of his colleagues pressed him to make an example of the place, but he summarily declined. The next day was Sunday, and while the officers were in church the soldiers made short work of any dog that had been decked in scorn with the blue ribbon of the Covenant. They also came to blows with the fisher-folk over sundry essays in salmon-poaching, forgetful of the sound resolution of the Glasgow Assembly. But beyond a fine of 10,000 merks levied by the visitors, Aberdeen suffered little.
On the 30th of May Montrose marched into the Gordon country and laid siege to the castle of Gight. But two days later he had news which changed his plans. He heard that Aboyne, with a large force, was on the sea, and he assumed that Hamilton was with him. At all costs he must keep his communications open, so after a day’s rest in Aberdeen he hastened south. On the 5th of June Aboyne arrived, with Tullibardine and Glencairn, two field-pieces, and Colonel Gun. His brother, Lord Lewis Gordon, who had attained the mature age of thirteen, rode into the city with 1,000 of his clan, and so aroused the spirit of the burghers that by the 14th of June Aboyne had 4,000 men at his back.
Montrose had joined Marischal, the head of the house of Keith, at Stonehaven, and when word came of Aboyne’s landing, he went north to meet him. Aboyne’s following showed the inclination, common to all Highland levies, to melt mysteriously away, but he had 600 Gordon cavalry, and he had the citizen forces of the twice-captured Aberdeen, who could expect little mercy if the war went against them. He had a strong position, for the Dee was in flood, and the narrow bridge might be held by resolute men against great odds. Had all the officers been of the stamp of Colonel Johnston, the provost’s son and a professional soldier, it would have gone ill with Montrose. The muskets at the bridge-head bit fiercely into the Covenant ranks, the spirit of the townspeople was high, and the fighting of the first day, 18th June, left the defences intact. But in the night Montrose brought up his heavier cannon from Dunnottar, and at daybreak feinted with his cavalry, sending them upstream towards an impossible ford. Gun fell into the trap, and drew off the Gordon horse to follow them, and in their absence the Covenanters made a general attack. Gun, having made nothing of his ride, fell into a panic, which communicated itself to the rest. The Gordons fled, with the unwilling Aboyne, to their own country, and the citizens, deprived of their allies, broke at last.
So ended Montrose’s first serious essay at command in the field. Marischal and others of his colleagues would have burned and pillaged the city, but Montrose pled for a respite, and, fortunately for Aberdeen, events had taken place in the south which made the truce a peace. While Leslie was at Dunglass, the king sent scouting parties across the Border, so the Scots moved to Duns Law, a strong strategic position. That remarkable camp, where good provender was abundant, and the sound of prayer and psalm rose morning and evening, and at each captain’s tent-door flew a banner with the legend “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant,” and the Lowland peasants stared, open-mouthed, at Argyll’s plaided and kilted Highlanders, may be read of in the vivid pages of Baillie. The spirit of the troops, says that chronicler, was “sweet, meek, humble, yet strong and vehement.” The same could not have been said of the royal army, which was ill-fed, ill-paid, ill-guided, and sorely troubled by a species of vermin which they called “Covenanters.” Both sides had their doubts and troubles, and the time was ripe for negotiation, since Charles could not defeat Leslie, and Leslie at the moment did not desire to defeat Charles. A conference was arranged, and ultimately Charles assented to the principle that General Assemblies should deal with ecclesiastical questions and Parliament with civil, and that a free General Assembly and a free Parliament should be convened for the coming August. The king made a good impression upon the sensitive Baillie, who had been impressed by Hamilton the previous November; he thought him “one of the most just, reasonable, sweet persons they had ever seen.” On this understanding it was agreed to disband both armies, and the Covenanters seem to have been so strangely confident that they had found a lasting basis of peace, that they prepared to send Leslie with a Scottish army to the help of the Elector Palatine. Yet the main point was evaded. The Covenanters held by the findings of the Glasgow Assembly, with its abolition of episcopacy and its excommunication of the bishops; the king might consent to a free General Assembly, but he would never consent to its decrees if, as it was certain to do, it reaffirmed the doings at Glasgow.
That hollow treaty, variously called the Pacification of Berwick and the Pacification of Birks, was signed on the 18th of June. Montrose, when the news of it arrived, imposed a further fine upon Aberdeen, released his prisoners, and dismissed his men to their homes. A few days later he himself left with Marischal—”to post to Duns,” says Baillie, “to have their part in the joy, as well they did deserve, in the common peace; where they were made most welcome both to their comrades and their king.” He had won his first battle and proved his gift for war; but as he journeyed southward he can have had little of the joy of victory in his heart. The affair with Huntly, and his experience of the mediæval temper of Huntly’s enemies, must have taught him how remote was his point of view from that of the colleagues whom fate had given him. He was no professional soldier like Leslie, but a perplexed and patriotic statesman, and by now he must have begun to realize how precarious was the future of the loyalty and the liberty which were the twin principles of his life. To Baillie he seemed a “generous and noble youth,” whose discretion was too great. There were soon to be harsher words used about that discretion.
CHAPTER IV. MONTROSE AND ARGYLL (1639-42)
If my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much;
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through th
e deeds of men; he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit
That could be moved to smile at any thing.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease.
— Julius Cæsar.
I
1639
The hollowness of the settlement between king and Covenant was soon to be revealed. On 1st July proclamation of the coming Assembly was made in Edinburgh, and to the consternation of the people the prelates were summoned to attend. Legally, Charles was in the right; if the hierarchy was formally to be abolished, it had the right to be present and to defend itself; but to the Covenanters it seemed to prove that the king had not accepted the policy of the Glasgow Assembly, and was determined to find some way of perpetuating the episcopate. In this the popular instinct was partly correct. Charles, with England in view, was not prepared to assent to the wholesale condemnation of episcopal principles which the majority in Scotland desired. But if the king was unwilling to abide by the understanding of the treaty which he must have known was in the mind of the Covenant leaders, these leaders had already broken its letter. They did not dissolve the Tables, or disband the army, or dispense with Leslie, or return the stores and ordnance to Edinburgh castle, which was now in Ruthven’s hands. Riots broke out in the Edinburgh streets on 3rd July, and Traquair, Kinnoull, and Aboyne were roughly handled by the mob. Loudoun was sent to Berwick to apologize, but the king, not unnaturally, demanded more — the presence of fourteen of the Covenant leaders to discuss the situation. Some of them, like Argyll, refused; others were forbidden by their colleagues to attend; five stalwarts only were permitted to go — Montrose, Loudoun, Lothian, Rothes, and Dunfermline — accompanied by Mr. Alexander Henderson, who had not been bidden. The discussion was a fiasco. Rothes quarrelled with the king, and warned him that, if bishops were not abolished in Scotland, the Scots would join with the Puritans in attacking them in England. Charles, deeply offended, gave up his intention of attending the forthcoming Assembly in person, and on 3rd August returned to London.
But this farcical conference had a profound effect on one man. He who embarks on the tide of a popular revolution is carried insensibly in a direction and at a speed which he has not foreseen, and it demands a scrupulous moral and intellectual integrity to keep true to his first purpose. Montrose had found himself in full agreement with the National Covenant, but the boisterous flood which now bore him along was very different from the even and disciplined stream for which he had hoped. He had opposed churchmen in politics, but the governance of Scotland was now slipping into the hands of the Kirk; he had condemned the king’s breaches of law and constitution, but in this respect the Covenant looked as if it would soon be as flagrant a sinner; on behalf of the commons of Scotland he had fought the power of nobles like Hamilton and Huntly, but there were others in his own faction with the same ambitions. Above all, he had made a central and inviolable sovereignty the foundation of his creed, and he saw this sovereignty dissolving in confusion. To this period, when his doubts first became insistent, we may perhaps assign these verses:
“Can little beasts with lions roar,
And little birds with eagles soar?
Can shallow streams command the seas,
And little ants the humming bees?
No, no — no, no — it is not meet
The head should stoop unto the feet.”
Already his path had begun to diverge ever so little from the broad road of the Covenant. The divergence was slight, and to the world he still seemed to be marching in its company, but the angle must widen, for he was aiming at a different goal.
In those July days at Berwick Montrose had his first true meeting with the king. Charles was no longer the formal and distant monarch who, under Hamilton’s influence, had received coldly his boyish offer of service. He was a man in deep distress, who had just been successfully defied by his subjects — a king without an army or a war-chest, who had insults for his daily bread, and no counsellor who was not a broken reed. That singular character is one of the paradoxes, but not one of the enigmas, of history, for its weakness and strength are abundantly plain. His mild but immovable fanaticism, his lack of any quick sense of realities, his love of wooden intrigues, his defect in candour, his inability to read human nature, his incapacity to decide swiftly and act boldly — they are as patent as his piety, his fortitude, and his fidelity to what he held to be right. But he had in the highest degree the charm of his race, and could cast a glamour over the most diverse minds. It was those who knew him best who were most under his spell, so that Clarendon could describe him as “the worthiest gentleman, the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father, and the best Christian,” and Sir Philip Warwick could write: “When I think of dying, it is one of my comforts that, when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet King Charles.”
In Montrose, the sight of his king in straits which were not kingly may have awakened a chivalrous loyalty to the person of his sovereign. Moreover, since he was not cognizant of Charles’s secret dealings with Hamilton and Traquair, he must have considered that the king had thus far kept his part of the bargain better than the Covenanters, and had granted all that the National Covenant demanded. Burnet will have it that he “was much wrought upon, and gave His Majesty full assurance of his duty in time coming, and upon that entered in a correspondence with the king,” but this story of a sudden conversion was probably Covenanting gossip of a later date, when the breach had widened and it was necessary to find some easy explanation. Montrose was still a Covenanter, and resolute to complete the work which had been begun on that spring morning in Greyfriars the year before; but he had come to think somewhat less well of his colleagues, and, after the meeting at Berwick, somewhat better of his sovereign.
The General Assembly met in Edinburgh in the east kirk of St. Giles on 12th August, with Traquair as the royal commissioner and Mr. David Dickson of Irvine as Moderator. The previous Assembly at Glasgow was not officially mentioned, but all its work was re-enacted “at a gallop.” Episcopacy was abolished in Scotland, and the terms used, in spite of Traquair’s advice, were made as offensive as possible to the king; episcopal government and the power of churchmen were held not only “unlawful to this Kirk,” but “contrary to the Word of God.” The Large Declaration, the statement of the king’s case, written by Dr. Balcanquhal, the Dean of Durham, was condemned in violent language, and the Privy Council was prayed to order that the National Covenant should be signed by every dweller in Scotland, “of what rank or quality soever in time coming.” This piece of intolerant coercion was presented by a committee, which had Montrose and Alexander Henderson among its members, and duly embodied in an Act of Council. Traquair, as royal commissioner, assented to the various proceedings, and the session closed in an atmosphere of unwonted peace. To old and staunch Presbyterians, who had fought for the Kirk as Andrew Melville conceived it, it seemed that the day of miracles had come, and a certain Mr. John Wemyss, an aged minister, speaking with difficulty, “for tears trickling down along his grey hairs, like drops of rain or dew upon the top of the tender grass,” spoke a moving nunc dimittis. “I do remember when the Kirk of Scotland had a beautiful face. I remember since there was a great power and life accompanying the ordinances of God, and a wonderful work of operation upon the hearts of the people. This my eyes did see — a fearful defection after procured by our sins. And no more did I wish before my eyes were closed but to have seen such a beautiful day, and that under the conduct and favour of our King’s Majesty.”
The Parliament, which met on 31st August, was a very different gathering. A more momentous Parliament had never sat in Scotland, for until it ratified the acts of the Assembly these had no legal validity, and the Kirk had no security. The first difficulty that arose was constitutional. One of the estates, the clergy, had dissolved itself, since the bisho
ps had fled the country. In choosing the Lords of the Articles, it had been the custom for the nobles to elect the representatives of the church, and the bishops to elect the representatives of the nobles, while both together chose the representatives of the lairds and burgesses, while the king added eight nominees of his own. By means of the bishops the Crown could in this way ensure a majority. Charles desired to fill the vacancy left by the bishops by fourteen ministers chosen by the Crown, or, in the alternative, by fourteen laymen; but the ministers suspected a trap, and the nobility were jealous of the ministers, so this scheme fell to the ground. Under protest from Argyll a temporary arrangement was come to. Traquair himself chose the nobles, who in turn chose the lesser barons and burgesses. This provisional Committee of the Articles set to work, and its reach was long. It ratified the acts of the recent Assembly, and proceeded to remodel the constitution of Scotland. It whittled away the royal prerogative, by transferring the control of the Mint and the appointment of great officers of state to Parliament, and, by one vote, passed Argyll’s motion that each estate, nobles, barons, and burgesses, should elect its own lords.
