by John Buchan
To this sudden essay in parliamentary government Montrose was opposed, and there were many other doubters in the Covenant ranks. It must be clearly understood that Argyll’s proposal, for all its modern sound, was not an early stirring of democratic ideals. The common people of Scotland had no say in the government of the country, and were to have none for many a year, except through the General Assembly. It was a provision aimed directly against the royal prerogative, and, considering the recent use made of that prerogative, it had its justification. But such a change was not a reassertion of ancient liberties, but a wholly new departure, and so violent an innovation roused suspicion. The new régime would throw the government of Scotland into the hands of him who was the most adroit electioneer, and in this connection all men’s thoughts turned to Argyll. It altered, but it did not seriously liberalize, the basis of representation. Moreover, it was a demand which struck at the whole conception of monarchy as then existing. At one stroke it reduced the king to a cypher in matters in which hitherto he had been all-powerful. To Montrose it seemed to weaken sovereignty, the central sanction of law, without putting a reasonable equivalent in its place, for, if the king had his faults, a legislature of factious lairds and nobles was not without them. Further, it had no finality. If the king assented, he would be pressed to greater concessions, and the foundations of order would crumble. This was also the doubt of Mr. Robert Baillie. “Whatever the Prince grants, I fear we press more than he can grant; and when we are fully satisfied, it is likely England will begin where we have left off.”
It was the turning-point of Montrose’s political career. His enthusiasm for the National Covenant had made him an active member of the late Assembly, as an elder from Auchterarder, and he had supported the compulsory signature of that Covenant — an extreme step for one of his beliefs. At the moment he had no quarrel with the Kirk. He was prepared to accept every act of the Assembly, even its wholesale condemnation of episcopacy as hostile to God’s Word. Two months later, when the king summoned him to London, he asked to be excused, after consulting with the Covenant leaders, on the ground that at such a time his going to court would be misconstrued — conduct which Wariston lauded as “noble.” To the clerical side of the movement he was still profoundly sympathetic. But the proposed constitutional revolution made him pause, and presently sent him into opposition, for of the two sections in his party he distrusted the nobles more than the ministers. Six years later he put his position before his countrymen. “Members of the said Parliament, some of them having far designs unknown to us, others of them having found the sweetness of government, were pleased to refuse the ratification of the acts of Assembly with the abjuration of episcopacy and the Court of High Commission introduced by the prelates, unless they had the whole alleged liberty due to the subject; which was in fact intrenching upon authority, and the total abrogation of his Majesty’s royal prerogative; whereby the king’s commissioner was constrained to rise and discharge the Parliament.” Men began to whisper that the young Covenant general had been seduced by the royal blandishments at Berwick, and a paper with the words “Invictus armis verbis vincitur” was presently found pinned to his chamber door.
Traquair, who had been severely censured by Charles for his conduct as commissioner to the Assembly, refused, on the king’s instructions, to accept the decisions of Parliament. The ostensible ground, in which Montrose ingenuously believed, was the attack on the prerogative; the true reason was the ratification of the Assembly’s abolition of episcopacy. With England in view, Charles could scarcely be expected to assent to the condemnation of episcopacy as “unlawful,” though he might admit it to be contrary to the constitution of the Kirk; he clung to his intention to restore the bishops at some later date, and therefore would not assent to the act rescinding the old acts which had established them. On 14th November Parliament, after it had protested against the illegality of the proceeding, was prorogued till the following June. On the part of Charles it was a grave blunder, for the people of Scotland were not slow to grasp the true explanation. He could have found some support for the defence of the prerogative; he could even have mustered to his side tender consciences like that of Mr. Robert Baillie, who was not prepared to condemn episcopacy as in itself unlawful; with these points, if honestly stated, he might have driven a wedge into the Covenant party. As it was, a conviction that the king was playing fast and loose with them on the main question of the episcopate, and dislike of the egregious Traquair, rallied the doubters for the moment. Napier, the typical moderate, sat on the committee which represented the prorogued Parliament. As for Montrose, we have seen his refusal to go to court in December, and we find him a signatory, along with Loudoun and Leslie, of a letter addressed to the King of France, representing to Louis the “candour and ingenuity” of the Covenanters towards their king.
II
1640
With the abortive Parliament of 1639 went one of the last embankments of the old régime, and henceforth the tide of revolution runs fast. Parliament had been prorogued that the king might muster his forces, and the Covenanters did not let the grass grow under their feet in a similar duty. It was clear that the Covenant could only be defended on the field of battle. Through the early months of 1640 levies were being raised and drilled throughout the Lowlands, and on 17th April Leslie was given his commission as commander-in-chief. In the same month Charles in England, in desperation for supplies, summoned the Short Parliament, but no supplies were forthcoming, and in three weeks he dissolved it. The Covenanters were much heartened thereby, for it was plain that England in the coming war was not behind the king. By the end of the summer Leslie had under him some 22,000 foot and 3,000 horse, and by freewill offerings, and offerings not so free, a considerable war-chest had been created. Charles could only scrape together less than half these numbers of ill-disciplined and reluctant recruits, and after trying every device, legal and illegal, he was still lamentably short of money. Strafford had come over from Ireland to advise his master, and on Strafford’s counsel the Short Parliament had been summoned. But Strafford misread the temper of England no less than Charles, and his plan of using an Irish army in Scotland (which, misunderstood by Vane, was to be damning evidence against him at his trial) was not accepted. With a starved and slender force, and lacking the goodwill of the country which formed his base, the king went out to war against what was virtually a united nation in arms.
The prorogued Parliament of Scotland was due to meet on 2nd June. Charles, by a proclamation in May, prorogued it for a further month, but the proclamation was disregarded. There was some technical informality about it, which the acute Covenanting lawyers were not slow to seize upon. But the Parliament which met was clearly unconstitutional, for there was no royal commissioner; it constituted itself a Parliament by its own act, and appointed Lord Burleigh its president; but it still maintained a show of loyalty, declaring that it acted by his Majesty’s “tacit consent” and “presumed allowance,” and that it was only “receiving and making use of that benefit which his Majesty, in his justice and goodness, had publicly granted to us and never recalled.” It was the fiction which the Long Parliament in England was presently to adopt and maintain for seven feverish years. The true state of the case was summed up in a phrase which was probably Argyll’s, “to do the less was more lawful than to do the greater”; the alternative to holding an unauthorized Parliament was to depose the king. Having embarked upon this bold course, the new Parliament did not lag. It ratified all the acts of the previous Assembly, created free parliamentary committees in place of the old Committee of the Articles, organized the military preparations against the king, and passed a triennial act. In five weeks it had accomplished a huge body of legislation, which must have been carefully prepared beforehand, and thereafter it prorogued itself till the following November.
Revolution had thus been openly declared, for by no ingenuity of argument could these proceedings be defended as constitutional. Montrose opposed them to the utmost of
his power, but his was the only voice; since war was declared against the sovereign there was less need to be scrupulous about minor prerogatives. But his opposition made him a marked man. A Committee of the Estates was appointed with dictatorial powers to act as a Government while Parliament was not sitting, and to this body, which was virtually a Committee of Public Safety, and consisted of “about forty members, from earls to tailors and saddlers,” Montrose was appointed, no doubt with the intention of paralyzing his opposition. There was no alternative before him but to accept. He still held the greater part of the Covenant creed; he was in favour of the coming war, believing that it was necessary to open the king’s eyes to the anti-episcopal resolution of Scotland; had he resigned he would have been impotent, and must either have fled to the king, like Airlie, or, like Huntly, hidden himself in northern fastnesses. The moment had not yet come for the final breach. Argyll was not a member of the Committee; that lover of secret power was happier pulling the wires behind the scenes. Besides, he had much business in the west, on the watch for Strafford’s army. His countrymen did not attribute his abstention to modesty. “All saw he was major potestas, and, though not formally a member, yet all knew that it was his influence that gave being, life, and motion to these new-modelled governors; and not a few thought that this juncto was his invention.”
The first care of the Covenanting lords, as in the former war, was to prevent trouble in their rear. Angus, the Gordon country, and the Atholl domains in Perthshire were something less than lukewarm for the Covenant, and to Argyll was given the congenial task of taking order not only with the enemies of true religion, but with the ancestral foes of his house. For this commission of the Committee of Estates Montrose must share the responsibility, and his name was the first appended. He realized the need in war of safeguarding the country behind an army, and he recognized that gentler means than a commission of “fire and sword” would scarcely suffice. Argyll was authorized to pursue the clans “until he should either bring them to their bounden duty, and give assurance of the same by pledges or otherwise, or else to the utter subduing and rooting them out of the country.”
He was not slack in the execution of his warrant. With 5,000 of his clan he left Inveraray on 18th June, entrapped Atholl by a ruse similar to that employed by Montrose’s army with Huntly a year before, and presently arrived in the lowlands of Angus, where the Campbells were regarded with the same detestation and fear as was felt elsewhere for Antrim’s Irishry. Airlie was in England with the king, and his son, Lord Ogilvy, was persuaded by Montrose to surrender Airlie castle for “the use of the public.” Montrose accordingly wrote to Argyll saying that his presence in Angus was needless, but Argyll was not minded to take instructions from Montrose when an ancient enemy was at his mercy. He burned the “bonnie house o’ Airlie,” and the other Ogilvy dwelling of Forthar in Glenisla; and from the latter Lady Ogilvy was driven, so the story goes, in circumstances of extreme barbarity. He then carried fire and sword into Lochaber, and completed his commission to the satisfaction of the Estates. In it all he had behaved like the ordinary feudal baron with grievances to avenge. This zealot of the Kirk had conducted a Highland campaign according to the most ruthless traditions of the past, and had thereby compiled against himself a reckoning which Highland memories were not likely to forget.
In July Montrose marched south with his contingent to join Leslie’s army, which now lay in camp near the town of Duns. He had with him the Stirling and Strathearn levies — 2,500 men, says Napier, 1,600 the English spies reported. In the camp the breach with Argyll widened. Argyll accused him of undue lenity in his recent work in Angus, and of needless delay in moving his regiments; but he was absolved from blame by Leslie and the other members of the Committee. But his distrust of Argyll promptly received a full justification. The Committee of Estates was too large and heterogeneous to be an effective instrument in time of war, and proposals were being privately made to narrow it. This was common sense, but the actual scheme took an ominous form. There were already stories abroad that in his recent northern foray Argyll’s soldiers had declared that they were not King Stewart’s but King Campbell’s men, and a Gaelic song was made of which a verse ran: “I gave Argyll the praise, because all men say it is truth, for he will take gear from the Lowland men, and he will take the Crown perforce, and he will cry king at Whitsunday.” The throne, as we have seen, was never far from the imagination of the great Scots nobles who had the blood of Bruce in their veins. But that was for the future; for the moment the proposals were more modest — that one man, Argyll, should be made responsible for the country north of Forth, and two men for the country south of it. Montrose protested, and had the draft commission for the north altered, so that beside Argyll’s appeared his own name, with Mar, Cassilis, and others.
But, alarmed by the incident, he posted back to Edinburgh, where he met his old college friend, Lord Lindsay of the Byres, and heard of a scheme to make “a particular man” dictator of all Scotland, after the Roman fashion. The man, in view of Lindsay’s antecedents, could only be Argyll. To check this intrigue, before returning to the army, Montrose summoned a meeting of his friends at Lord Wigton’s house of Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, and signed an agreement to resist “the particular and indirect practising of a few.” The Cumbernauld Bond bound the signatories to uphold the letter and spirit of the National Covenant “to the hazard of our lives, fortunes, and estates,” and concluded with words not usually found in Scottish “bands,” for they swore to adhere to each other “so far as may consist with the good and weal of the public.” Among others, Marischal, Wigton, Kinghorn, Home, Boyd, Atholl, Mar, Seaforth, and Almond (Leslie’s second in command) appended their names. None, except Montrose, were men of power; they were the moderates, the Girondins, of the revolution, and of little moment compared to the “lawless resolutes” who opposed them.
Though the Bond was kept secret, the general antagonism to Argyll’s project was known, and this was sufficient for the moment to defeat it. Montrose returned to the army at Duns, and Leslie prepared for the invasion of England — the ostensible purpose being merely to present to the king a petition praying that the recent acts of Assembly and Parliament be ratified. The armed petitioners at once took the offensive. On 20th August, the day on which Charles left London to assume the command of his army with Strafford as his lieutenant-general, Leslie crossed the Tweed at Coldstream, by the very ford which Scott makes Marmion ride on the eve of Flodden. His Lowlanders were in hodden-grey with blue caps, and each, in the ancient Scottish fashion, bore oatmeal in a haversack. The Highland contingent were scantily clad, and carried broadswords and bows and arrows. The colours of the foot had the motto “Covenant for Relligion, Crowne, and Country.” “We are sadder and graver than ordinary soldiers,” Lothian wrote, “only we are well provided of pipers.” They had fiddlers, too, but these were “intolerably given to drink.” By a curious fate the privilege of leading the van fell by lot to Montrose. Tweed was in high flood, so he first forded it alone on foot, and then returned to encourage his men.
The campaign was short and inglorious. Conway, at Newcastle, had a force far inferior to Leslie’s in both numbers and quality, and he was an indifferent general. “I am teaching cart-horses to manage,” he wrote, “and making men that are fit for Bedlam and Bridewell to keep the Ten Commandments, so that General Lesley and I keep two schools: he has scholars that profess to serve God, and he is instructing them how they may safely do injury and all impiety; mine to the utmost of their power never kept any law of God or the king, and they are to be made fit to make others keep them.” “I fear,” he wrote also, “unpaid soldiers more than I do the Scots, and the devil to boot.” He had cause for his forebodings. Leslie marched without opposition to the ford of Newburn, four miles above Newcastle, the crossing of which would not only give him command of the Tyne, but enable him to attack Newcastle on the unfortified side. There Conway attempted a stand, but on 28th August he was blown out of his position by the Scott
ish guns. His cavalry fled to Durham, while his foot fell back on Newcastle, which next morning surrendered. It was, Clarendon wrote, “the most shameful and confounding flight that was ever heard of.” A battle, which played a major part in our constitutional history, and which was to Charles what Bouvines was to King John, was won in an afternoon with a loss of a dozen to the victors and sixty to the vanquished. Charles fell back on York; he could not do otherwise, for he had no force which could have withstood Leslie for an hour.
The Covenanters’ occupation of Newcastle, with the surrounding district, gave them a powerful lever in subsequent negotiations, for they controlled the supply of coal to London, and thereby £50,000 of the king’s revenue. They behaved discreetly, for they had no desire to antagonize the English people. The first problem was that of subsistence, and Charles consented to their raising a daily levy from the four neighbouring counties. Negotiations began at Ripon, and were presently transferred to London, but it was not till August 7, 1641, that the dispute, mainly financial, was finally settled. Meantime his difficulties forced Charles to call a Parliament, and on November 3, 1640, as a direct result of the Scottish invasion, the Long Parliament assembled. Already many communications had passed between the English malcontents and the Covenanters, beginning with Lord Savile’s assurance, with its forged signatures, in June 1640, when Leslie’s army was mustering. Now, with London as the venue of discussion, Covenanters like Henderson and Wariston were brought into close touch with Pym and the Puritan leaders, and we find the idea first mooted of the forcible introduction of Presbytery into England. Wariston had suggested something like it to Savile in June 1640, and Henderson, in London, came to believe that the one hope of safeguarding Presbytery in Scotland was by securing its establishment south of the Tweed. The Scottish commissioners were instructed to table, as one of their propositions, “a desire for unity in religion and uniformity in Church government as a special means of conserving the peace between the two countries,” and they found much support in Parliament. The London “root and branch” petition for the abolition of episcopacy was presented to Parliament on 11th December, and others flowed in from the shires. Parliament for the moment rejected the Scottish plan, but the Scottish commissioners continued to hope. The papers drafted at that time by Henderson on the subject contain the policy which, two years later, bore fruit in the Solemn League and Covenant. “Nothing so powerful to divide the hearts of people as division in religion; nothing so strong to unite the hearts of people as unity in religion; and the greater zeal in different religions the greater division, but the more zeal in one religion the more firm union. In the paradise of Nature the diversity of flowers and herbs is pleasant and useful, but in the paradise of the Church different and contrary religions are unpleasant and hurtful.”
