Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  Charles’s determination to come to Scotland, so puzzling to Clarendon, was due to the belief that he had still a powerful following in that kingdom, which needed only to be heartened by his presence. But a few days in Edinburgh were sufficient to disillusion him. With Lennox and Hamilton as his companions he recovered neither popularity nor authority. He had come north largely in the hope of securing part of Leslie’s army for use in the struggle which he saw to be imminent in England, and for this he was prepared to pay a high price. He paid the price, but he did not secure his end, for Leslie’s army was disbanded. Non-Covenanting nobles like Lennox, Hamilton, Morton, and Roxburgh were compelled to take the Covenant. Hamilton, always, as Charles said, “very active in his own preservation,” made his peace with Argyll. Henderson became the royal chaplain, and the king was obliged to listen to many sermons and attend endless services conducted under the austerest Presbyterian forms. He was prepared to ratify the Acts of the unconstitutional Parliament of 1640, but he was not permitted. These Acts, he was curtly informed, were already valid, and he was instructed merely to sanction their proclamation. Parliament demanded, and he granted, a control over the executive and judiciary far more complete than anything claimed by the English Parliament at Westminster. Its triennial meeting was guaranteed, independent of the royal assent. Loudoun was nominated Chancellor; for Treasurer, the king’s suggestions first of Morton and then of Almond were vetoed, and the office was put into commission. There was no proposal of the Covenanters, however drastic, to which the king did not assent. In return he received much lip loyalty and many fine speeches, but no general popularity or confidence. As was his fatal habit, he had been too late in his concessions, and what, if voluntarily given, might once have re-established his power, now, taken by force, left only distrust and contempt.

  Meanwhile, what of Montrose, now fast in prison? Was he to go the way of Strafford? There was an ominous sentence used by Argyll at the opening of Parliament in his reply to the speech from the Throne, when he spoke of the State as a ship in distress and the need of casting out “some of the naughtiest baggage to lighten her.” The old statute against “leasing-making” might be used as a weapon against nobler game than the humble commissary of Dunkeld. On 15th September Sir Patrick Wemyss wrote to Ormonde that the king had promised Montrose not to leave Scotland till he was brought to trial, “for, if he leave him, all the world will not save his life.” On 28th August the four prisoners were called before Parliament, when the king nodded friendlily to Napier, but their case was postponed. It would have been highly inconvenient to Argyll and Hamilton to have Montrose at this juncture pleading his cause before his peers.

  Back again in the castle, Montrose was in a state of miserable anxiety and impotence. He heard of the new Act making the choice of Ministers dependent upon the will of Parliament — a piece of constitutionalism which, lacking the machinery and safeguards of modern government, was simply a premium set upon faction and sectarian tyranny. He heard of the decision that no one who had shown himself active on the king’s side should be eligible for office. He must have exclaimed with Perth: “If this be what you call liberty, God give me the old slavery again.” He heard that among the nobles there were many who, whatever their past attitude, now saw with alarm the road which Argyll was taking. His one hope was Charles. He alone, if he clearly understood the situation, had the power of making it clear to Parliament and checking this drift towards oligarchy. Twice he wrote from prison praying for an interview with the king, that he might reveal matters “which not only concerned his honour in a high degree, but also the standing or falling of his crown.” These matters could only have been Hamilton’s previous duplicity and Argyll’s present ambitions. The third time he put his cards on the table, and on 11th October offered to prove that Hamilton was a traitor to the commonwealth. Charles was impressed, and prepared to lay the business before the Chancellor and others of the Privy Council.

  But in the meantime there had begun the curious performance known to history as the “Incident” — a thing as obscure in its origins as the Popish Plot. For some weeks there had been a mysterious influx of armed men into the capital, against which Loudoun, on 5th October, had warned Parliament. We know that Hamilton and Argyll had 5,000 of their friends, and in the other faction Lord Ker, Roxburgh’s son, had 600 Borderers. On the evening of 11th October, the day on which Montrose’s third letter was received, Hamilton went to the king in the garden of Holyrood, complained of being traduced, and asked permission to leave the court. Next day Charles told this story to Parliament, but on that morning Hamilton, Argyll, and Lanark had retired to the Hamilton house of Kinneil, near Bo’ness. Their story was that they had learned through Leslie that there was a plot against their lives. For a day or two king and Parliament faced each other in a strange mood, the former protesting with tears against the insult done to his honour, the latter in complete bewilderment. A Committee of the Estates investigated the business, and Montrose’s correspondence with the king was laid before them; but no definite conclusion was reached, and the truth must remain one of the secrets of history.

  Charles was clearly innocent; so was Montrose, who at the time was close in prison. No doubt there were nobles, such as Ker and Crawford, with bands of retainers at their heels, who would gladly have taken the old Scots way of settling matters with their enemies. There were others, such as Carnwath, who made no secret of their view that there were now three kings in Scotland, and that two of them could be dispensed with. But the study of the confused evidence leaves a strong impression that the whole affair was a trick, a device of Hamilton’s and Argyll’s to escape from the difficulties in which Montrose’s third letter might have placed them. Argyll was a master of electioneering ingenuities, and he knew that the suspicion of being in peril is a supreme asset to a leader. The impression abides, too, that there was an agent provocateur at work behind the scenes, and this may well have been William Murray, a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber, the son of the minister of Dysart and the nephew of Montrose’s friend, the minister of Methven. Beginning as the king’s whipping-boy, he was to finish his career as Earl of Dysart, and the father-in-law of Lauderdale. By general consent he was one of the most degraded characters of the age, and he was already suspect of meddling with the king’s letters; it is at least possible that the Incident was mainly his work, a bogus conspiracy staged to give Hamilton the chance of discrediting his opponents.

  1641-42

  On 28th October, while the Incident was at its height, the king was playing golf at Leith, when a letter was put into his hands. It contained the news of the outbreak of the Irish rebellion. In a week the atmosphere in both England and Scotland had become tense and ominous, fear of popery spread like a flame, and the king’s enemies had no need to create suspicion, for suspicion rose like a mist from every corner of the land. Charles could not linger in the north. On 18th November, at eight o’clock in the morning, he rode south, leaving for ever the country which he had so loved and misgoverned. He departed with a lavish shower of honours. Henderson was made dean of the Chapel Royal at Holyrood, Wariston was knighted, Loudoun and Leslie became earls, and Argyll was made a marquis. The day before the king left, Montrose and his friends were released on probation, and in March 1642 the case against them was finally closed. The four gentlemen, who had been five months in prison without trial, were informed that they owed their escape only to the clemency of Argyll. Montrose had engaged, ingenuously and amateurishly, in the difficult game of subterranean Scottish politics, and had taken a heavy fall. The new marquis could afford to be generous to an antagonist whom, in the business of plots and counterplots, he had so signally outplayed.

  CHAPTER V. THE RUBICON (1642-44)

  In all questions of wide and deep interest it is scarcely less than a fatal necessity that the best cause should be the worst defended; the consequence of which is, the temporary victory of the false and the superficial, and its establishment in the chair of learned as well as popula
r opinion. The cause is in the instinct of the mind to aim at the highest in the first instance — and hence with imperfect means, and in the absence of all the main conditions of its attainment.

  — Coleridge, Notes, Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous.

  I

  1640-41

  During these years of ineffectual politics, Montrose, in his long journeys and in quiet hours of retreat at Kincardine, was steadfastly endeavouring to clarify his own mind. Some time between the autumn of 1640 and the summer of 1641 he set down his views on the principles of government in a letter to a “noble sir,” who may have been Lord Napier or Drummond of Hawthornden. The paper was found by Mark Napier in a small quarto in the handwriting of Robert Wodrow, and is among the manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland. It is one of those confessions of faith by which, at all periods in history, sorely perplexed men have striven to ease their souls. The seventeenth century saw no more searching political treatise, for it reveals a capacity for abstract thought rare at any time in a man of action, and especially rare in an era when, as soon as the lists were set, half-truths were vested with the authority of Sinai.

  He begins by laying down a doctrine of Sovereign Power. If a land is to be stably governed there must be some unquestioned centre of authority which he calls Sovereignty, “a power over the people, above which power there is none on earth.” It is limited indeed — by the laws of God and nature, the laws of nations, and the fundamental laws of the country; but these limitations are moral, religious, and constitutional, and inherent in its very being; it cannot be limited by division among competing authorities. Springing ultimately from a free people, it may in practice be delegated to a king, as in Britain; a council of nobles, as in Venice; or the estates of the people, as in ancient Rome. It “cannot subsist in a body composed of individuities”; if it is “divided amongst several bodies there is no government, as if there were many kings in one kingdom there should be none at all.”

  Montrose holds no brief for monarchy, except in so far as it is the form of sovereignty which has been accepted by the British people. He proceeds to analyse the nature of kingship. It is strong when it is temperate and recognizes its moral and constitutional limitations. “It is weak . . . when it is extended beyond the laws whereby it is bounded; which could never be at any time endured by the people of the western part of the world, and by those of Scotland as little as any.” But the ills flowing from undue restraint are not less than the ills which spring from undue extension. No section of the people can seize a part of sovereignty, for, if sovereignty be divided, there follows anarchy, “the oppression and tyranny of subjects, the most fierce, insatiable, and insufferable tyranny in the world.” He desires free and frequent parliaments and stern dealing with any law-breaking king; but he insists that, when sovereignty has been granted on conditions, it must be inviolable so long as these conditions are observed. Parliaments are guardians of the subjects’ liberties, but not less of the delegated rights of the sovereign king.

  He passes to the menaces to sovereignty — and therefore the causes of anarchy — and he finds them in “the ambitious designs of rule in great men, veiled under the specious pretext of religion and the subjects’ liberties, seconded with the arguments and false positions of seditious precedence: first, that the king is ordained for the people, and the end is more noble than the means; second, that the constituter is superior to the constituent; third, that the king and people are two contraries, like the two scales of a balance — when the one goes up the other goes down; fourth, that the prince’s prerogative and the people’s privilege are incompatible; fifth, that what power is taken from the king is added to the Estates of the people.” On this text he preaches an acute sermon. The two first points, as he explains them, do not mean that he holds that there is any absolutism in a free monarchy, but that, the choice of monarchy having been made by the people, such monarchy, which is their own creation, must be reasonably exalted, since in its exaltation lies their security. With the fear of the encroachments of the nobility and the Kirk in his mind, he appeals to the commons of Scotland:

  “And you, ye meaner people of Scotland — who are not capable of a Republic, for many grave reasons — why are you induced by specious pretexts, to your own heavy prejudice and detriment, to be the instruments of others’ ambition? Do you not hear, when the monarchial government is shaken, the great ones strive for the garland with your blood and your fortune? Whereby you gain nothing; but, instead of a race of kings who have governed you for two thousand years with peace and justice, and have preserved your liberties against all domineering nations, shall purchase to yourselves vultures and tigers to reign over your posterity; and yourselves shall endure all these miseries, massacres, and proscriptions of the Triumvirate of Rome — (till) the kingdom fall again into the hands of One, who of necessity must, and for reasons of State will, tyrannize over you. For kingdoms acquired by blood and violence are by the same means retained.”

  It is the old profound lesson of history, eternally taught and eternally forgotten. After anarchy comes the dictator; the successors of the Gracchi are the Cæsars; the fury of the French Revolution is stamped out by Napoleon; the confusion of a Russia emancipated from her old masters is imperfectly disciplined by a harsher tyranny. In the England of that moment the “One” of whom he prophesied was already walking about in his sober country clothes and great buff boots. Montrose, it is to be noted, preaches the organic nature of the State to the common people, but to the Kirk and the nobility he addresses a different argument. He only warns them that their ambition will fail — the preachers, that the nobles will use them for their own interest, “as a cunning tennis-player lets a ball go to the wall where it cannot stay, that he may take it at the bound with more ease”; the nobles, that, like Aesop’s dog, they will lose the substance for the shadow in the well. It would seem that he had made up his mind that the Kirk and the aristocracy were no longer amenable to reason.

  We must be on our guard against reading into this philosophy of politics more than Montrose intended. If he saw beyond his age, he was also the child of that age. Much in his creed is not new. Fortescue in the fifteenth century had laid down the doctrine of constitutional monarchy. “The King of England cannot alter nor change the Lawes of the Realme at his pleasure; for why, he governeth his people by power, not only royall but politique.” The Tudor monarchs had established the principle of an indivisible sovereignty by suppressing local immunities and crushing all rival authorities. But Montrose shows in many respects a startling originality, especially as contrasted with the writers of his own political party. He does not, like James I., identify sovereignty with monarchy; he is willing to accept any form of government, provided it fulfils the requirements which are indispensable in all governments. Unlike his friend Drummond of Hawthornden, he has none of the contemporary belief in Divine Right, and he is no advocate of passive obedience. He is primarily a realist, and he is curiously free from mediæval ideas on monarchy or on religion. His central principle may deduce from Bodin, but its application was based upon his personal observation of Scots affairs.

  To orientate his political creed in relation to his age would require a treatise. Many philosophers of diverse schools, like Hobbes and Milton, accepted his doctrine of sovereignty. Montrose did not go into the metaphysics of political origins, the question which has agitated thinkers from Aristotle to Rousseau, whether the title to rule be natural or conventional. He would have accepted Hooker’s view that sovereignty should be founded on consent, and while agreeing with Milton that sovereignty is from the people, he would have shrunk from Milton’s addendum that the popular liberty of decision is only to be respected so long as the people accept a particular creed. In the realism of his method of thought he has affinities with Hobbes, but not in his conclusion: he has much in common with Samuel Rutherford, whose Lex Rex, published in 1644, lays down the thesis that sovereignty comes from the people, who may, in time of extreme necessity, resume
this power, and nothing in common with Sir George Mackenzie, whose reply to Buchanan’s De Jure Regni is a proof of the extravagant lengths to which a Scot could go in defending the alien dogma of Divine Right. His doctrine of sovereignty is at the opposite pole from that of Strafford, who believed that the security of a nation depended in emergencies upon an executive authority above and outside the ordinary law, an inalienable and overriding prerogative — a view which in one form is a truism to-day, but which in the seventeenth century, if generally accepted, would have put an end to popular liberties.

  But Montrose is not a metaphysician. He is a student of history and an observer of facts. His inquiry is a practical one — how to stave off anarchy, and the maxims which he offers have their direct contemporary applications. He is modern in his doctrine of the organic unity of the State, but in two matters he is very clearly of his age.

  The first is his attitude towards parliamentary government. “It is curious to observe,” says Coleridge of the early seventeenth century, “that the thinner the realm was (the less both in wealth and influence, and the less they were diffused) the greater was the division of power.” In the constitution of that age there was no clear determination of function between the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature. “The ‘rule of law,’ which the power of the state existed to enforce, worked through no specialized machinery, the organization was still fluid, only here and there hardening into conventions. . . . The conception of an exclusive sovereignty, inherent in any one branch of the Constitution, was still far distant.” In strict theory, the true sovereign was the law fundamental, the “law of the land,” which was regarded as beyond the reach of legislative change. Magna Charta had been a solemn embodiment of one portion of that law. In 1604 the Speaker of the House of Commons divided the laws into (1) the Common law, not mutable; (2) the Positive law, to be altered by the occasion of the times; (3) customs and usages which have time’s approbation. The distinction appears in Sir Walter Raleigh’s Prerogative of Parliaments; Sir Edward Coke maintained that the function of king and parliament was not jus dare but jus dicere — to declare the law; in 1659 Nicholas Bacon told Richard Cromwell’s Parliament that, as regarded bicameral government, “long usage hath so settled it, as Acts of Parliament cannot alter it.” The doctrine of the legislative supremacy of Parliament was still in the womb of time.