by John Buchan
He had resolved on the craziest of ventures. He would break through the Covenant cordon in the Lowlands, and win to his own country. There, at any rate, were loyal hearts, and something might be devised to turn the tide. He chose as his companions the lame Sir William Rollo and an officer, Colonel Sibbald, who had fought under him in the Bishops’ War. They wore the dress of Leven’s troopers, while Montrose followed behind as their groom, riding one ill-conditioned beast and leading another.
1644 August
It was a dangerous road to travel. The country was strewn with broken men and patrolled by Covenant horse, and a gentleman in those days was not easily disguised. At first all went smoothly. Passing through the woods of Netherby, they learned that Sir Richard Graham had joined the Covenant, and in its interests had constituted himself Warden of the Marches. His servant, from whom they had the news, spoke freely, as if to Leven’s troopers. A little farther on they fell in with a Scot, one of Newcastle’s soldiers, who disregarded the troopers but paid great attention to their groom, hailing him by his proper title. Montrose tried to deny it, but the man exclaimed, “What, do I not know my Lord Marquis of Montrose well enough? But go your way, and God be with you!” A gold piece rewarded the untimely well-wisher.
The journey must have grown hourly more anxious till the Forth was passed. “It may be thought,” wrote Patrick Gordon, “that God Almighty sent His good angel to lead the way, for he went, as if a cloud environed him, through all his enemies.” We do not know the road they travelled — whether by Annandale and the springs of Tweed and Clyde, or up Eskdale and thence over the Tweedside range to the Lothians. The safest route was probably by the belt of bleak moorland which runs north by Carnwath almost to the Highland hills. Riding chiefly by night, the party made good progress. On the fourth day they came to the Montrose lands in Stirling and Strathearn, but they did not draw rein till they reached the house of Tullibelton, between Perth and Dunkeld. Here lived Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie, he who had seen to the ordering of Montrose’s little library at St. Andrews, and here was safe shelter for the traveller while he spied out the land and looked about for a following.
It was the hour of portents. Airy armies were seen to contend on a hill in Banff; in Buchan the sun shone clear at midnight, and a kirk was filled with a choir of unearthly music; a cannon shot echoed over the whole kingdom to warn men that an invader was landing in the west. But the true portent came in humbler form. The curtain rises, and the first act of the great drama reveals a forlorn little party late on an August evening knocking at the door of a woodland tower above the shining reaches of Tay. The king’s lieutenant-general makes a very modest entrance on the scene. Two followers, four sorry horses, little money and no baggage seem a slender outfit for the conquest of a kingdom; but in six months he had Scotland at his feet.
CHAPTER VII. TIPPERMUIR (September 1644)
Hotspur. “The purpose you meditate is dangerous; the friends you have named uncertain; the time itself unsorted; and your whole plot too light for the counterpoise of so great an opposition!” Say you so, say you so? . . . By the Lord, our plot is a good plot as ever was laid; our friends true and constant: a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation; an excellent plot, very good friends. What a frosty-spirited rogue is this!
— First Part of King Henry IV.
I
1644 August
For six days the king’s lieutenant lay close in hiding while his comrades scoured the country for news. Tullibelton was too near the lowland town of Perth, and its laird too noted a loyalist for his guest to run needless risks, and Montrose spent most of his time among the woods and hills, sleeping at night in hunters’ bothies, and soothing his soul with the lights and colours of a Scottish autumn. The scouts returned with a melancholy tale. Huntly had failed ruinously in the north, and the Gordons were leaderless and divided, while the influence of their uncle, Argyll, was driving Huntly’s sons to the Covenant camp. Some of the Graham and Drummond kinsmen even, with the alternative of prison and fines before them, were in arms for the Estates. There were rumours of Covenant levies in Aberdeenshire, and in the west Argyll had his clan in arms. Montrose in his despondency may well have wondered at this strange activity. The tide of war had rolled over the Border, and with Scotland in so iron a grip such precautions must have seemed odd to one who knew the economical spirit of his opponents.
He was soon to learn the reason, and at the same time to recognize his opportunity. The incident is best told in the words of Patrick Gordon, who had the story from Montrose’s own lips:
“As he was one day in Methven Wood, staying for the night, because there was no safe travelling by day, he became transported with sadness, grief, and pity to see his native country thus brought into miserable bondage and slavery through the turbulent and blind zeal of some preachers, and now persecuted by the unlawful and ambitious ends of some of the nobility; and so far had they already prevailed that the event was much to be feared, and for good patriots ever to be lamented. And, therefore, in a deep grief and unwonted ravishment, he besought the Divine Majesty, with watery eyes and a sorrowful heart, that His justly kindled indignation might be appeased and His mercy extended, the curse removed, and that it might please Him to make him a humble instrument therein, to His Holy and Divine Majesty’s greater glory. . . . While he was in this thought, lifting up his eyes he beheld a man coming the way to St. Johnstoune (Perth), with a fiery cross in his hand, and, hastily stepping towards him, he inquired what the matter meant. The messenger told him that Coll Mac Gillespick — for so was Alexander Macdonald called by the Highlanders — was entered in Atholl with a great army of Irishes, and threatened to burn the whole country if they did not arise with him against the Covenant, and he was sent to advertise St. Johnstoune, that all the country might be raised to resist him.”
Antrim’s levies had come out of the mist at last.
Presently Montrose received a letter from Alasdair Macdonald himself, directed to the king’s lieutenant-general at Carlisle. The messenger who carried it asked directions from Inchbrakie, who took the dispatch and promised to deliver it. In the letter Macdonald announced his arrival and begged for instructions. If Montrose needed help, no less did the Irish commander.
Alasdair Macdonald was of the ancient stock of Dunyveg in Islay, the son of Macdonald of Colonsay, commonly called Coll Keitach, or “Coll who can fight with either hand.” The name, corrupted into Colkitto, was transferred by the Lowlanders (like the Gruamach appellation in the case of Argyll) from the father to the son. Sorley Boy Macdonald, the father of the first Earl of Antrim, had been his father’s great-uncle. The Macdonnells of Antrim were near blood-relations of Alasdair’s own people of Islay and Kintyre, and the Campbell oppression of the latter clan had left bitter memories on both sides of the North Channel. Alasdair was a man of herculean strength and proven courage; self-indulgent and somewhat inclined to drunkenness; obtuse and incapable of framing or understanding any complex strategy: “no sojer,” wrote Sir James Turner, “though stout enough.” But he was a born leader of men, and so impressed Leven in Ireland that he did his best to reconcile him to Argyll, and sent him to Scotland for the purpose. But the chief of the Campbells treated the Irish commander with contempt, and Alasdair returned to Ulster with all his hereditary grievances inflamed, and burning for revenge.
Antrim, whom Clarendon thought a man “of excessive pride and vanity, and of a marvellously weak and narrow understanding,” had been conspicuous for his large promise and meagre performance. The clan of Macdonnell had a hard life under the fruitless escapades of their chief; “we are worn spectre-thin,” sang their bard, “by the earl’s oft frequenting of the wave.” But now at last he was to influence the course of history. After many difficulties he raised, by the end of June 1644, 1,600 recruits among the exiled Macdonalds and Macleans, and he invited Alasdair to lead them against the ancestral foe. Early in July the invaders landed in Ardnamurchan, an old territory of the Macdonalds, and proceed
ed to exact vengeance on the unfortunate Campbell settlers. The king’s quarrel was forgotten in a more intimate and personal strife. Alasdair ravaged the peninsula with fire and sword, and seized as a base the castle of Mingary on Loch Sunart, and the keep of Lochaline, which still stands where the little river Aline enters its sea-loch. He sent messengers throughout the West Highlands to summon the clans to help him in his task. But there was no response; Macdonalds and Macleans, Macleods and Macneils, were alike silent; the hand of Clan Diarmaid lay too heavy on the mainland and the isles.
Soon his position became desperate, for Argyll was raising an army of pursuit; so he swept back to his base, only to find that all his ships had been destroyed. Alasdair, whatever his defects as a general, was a bold fighting man; his only hope was the Gordons, and he resolved to bid for their support though it meant marching across the breadth of Scotland. Accordingly he led his forces through Morvern and round by the head of Loch Eil to the Lochaber glens, the western fringe of Huntly’s country. Here he had his second piece of ill tidings. Huntly’s revolt was over, and the Gordons had made their peace with the Covenant. There was nothing for it but to try the more northern clans, and his next venture was Kintail. But the Mackenzies, little though they loved the Campbells, had a long memory of Macdonald misdeeds, and their chief, Seaforth, warned off the intruders.
Headed back on all sides, Alasdair decided that the boldest course was the safest. He marched south again to Badenoch and the head waters of Spey, and himself issued a summons, calling upon the clans to rise in the name of the king and Huntly. This brought him some 500 recruits, most of them Gordons; but he could get no nearer to the heart of that powerful clan, for the Grants, Forbeses, and Frasers blocked the road down Spey, and a thousand of Seaforth’s Mackenzies lent their aid. Alasdair now seemed in a fair way for destruction. The Campbells intercepted his retreat to the sea, and Argyll was hot-foot on his track. Seaforth cut him off from the north and east, the new Badenoch levies were mutinous and distrustful, and south lay the unfriendly Lowlands, and clans like the Stewarts of Atholl, who would never serve under an alien tartan. He had proved that whoever might band the Highlands into an army, it would not be a man of Highland blood. Hence his despairing letter to the king’s lieutenant-general asking for help and instructions. He can scarcely have hoped for much from his appeal, for Carlisle was far from Badenoch and he had the enemy on every side.
Montrose sent back an answer, bidding Alasdair be of good heart and meet him at Blair. It must have seemed a hard saying to a man who believed that his correspondent was still at Carlisle, but he obeyed, and, guided by a Clanranald man, one Donald the Fair, who had seen service in the German wars, he marched into the braes of Atholl. The local clans resented his intrusion, the fiery cross was sent round, and there was every likelihood of a desperate conflict between two forces who alike detested the Covenant and followed the king. The Irish were stout fellows in hard condition, but they were uncouthly dressed, wild-eyed from long travel, and, after their custom, attended by a mob of half-starved women and children. The Atholl clans, living on the edge of the Lowlands, may well have looked askance at such outlandish warriors. Moreover, Alasdair’s men were Catholics, and the Reformation in some sort had come to Atholl, as had tales of Irish barbarities in the recent rebellion. The Earl of Atholl was a minor, and the pressure of Argyll kept the leaderless clan quiet, in spite of long memories of Campbell reivings and burnings. Donald Robertson, the Tutor of Struan, seems to have joined Alasdair at once, but the Robertsons as a clan held aloof; and when the Irish had taken the castle of Blair, they were faced by angry and watchful levies, waiting for the word to make an end of them.
The situation was saved by a hairbreadth. Montrose, accompanied by Patrick Graham, the younger, of Inchbrakie — Black Pate, the countryside called him — set out to walk the twenty miles of hill between Blair and Tullibelton to keep the tryst. He had acquired from Inchbrakie a Highland dress — the trews, a short coat, and a plaid for the shoulders; he wore a blue bonnet with a bunch of oats as a badge, and he carried a broadsword and a Highland buckler. Thus accoutred, he entered suddenly upon the scene in the true manner of romance. Alasdair and his ragged troops were waiting hourly upon battle, when across the moor, between the hostile camps, they saw two figures advancing. Black Pate was known to every Atholl man, and there were many who had seen Montrose. Loud shouts of welcome apprised the Ulsterman that here was no bonnet-laird, but when he heard that it was indeed the king’s lieutenant he could scarcely credit the news. He believed him to be still on the road from Carlisle, and he had looked for cavalry, an imposing bodyguard, and a figure more like his own swashbuckling self than this slim young man with the quiet face and the searching grey eyes.
In a moment all quarrels were forgotten. Montrose revealed his commission, and Alasdair gladly took service under him, thankful to be out of a plight which for weeks had looked hopeless. The Atholl clans were carried off their feet by the grace and confidence of their new leader, and the Stewarts and Robertsons brought to his side those broadswords which an hour before had been dedicated to cutting Ulster throats. Montrose slept the night at the house of Lude, and next morning unfurled the royal standard on a green knoll above the Tilt. The king’s lieutenant had got him an army.
II
We pause, on the eve of Montrose’s campaign, to consider the conditions under which, in that era, battles were fought. Some knowledge of the methods of war in the fifth decade of the seventeenth century is necessary if we are to understand the magnitude of Montrose’s achievement and the causes of his success.
It was an age when, in both Scotland and England, relatively to the population, surprisingly large numbers of men were called to arms, but only a small proportion was brought into action. Difficulties of transport, when roads were few and bad; an imperfect intelligence system; the necessity of masking fortresses and protecting communications; pay chronically in arrears; the absence of a strong central authority on either side, and the dissipation of effort in divergent operations; the lack of any adequate provision for recruiting losses — such were the main reasons why the opposing strengths were so slow in forcing a decisive issue. Success must fall to the man who could best overcome or disregard these handicaps, who could move his troops fast and far, who had early news of his enemy’s plans, who had no civil problems to perplex him, whose levies had an inducement to fight other than their pay, and who could concentrate all his powers on a single purpose.
Infantry were still held in less esteem than cavalry. A foot regiment consisted of musketeers and pikemen in the proportion of two of the former to one of the latter. The pikemen wore iron corselets and headpieces, and carried pike and sword, and their chief business was, as at Marston Moor, to repel a cavalry charge. They were heavy troops, and for rapid work the musketeer, who had no body armour, was coming into favour. The musket of the period was still, for the most part, the old matchlock, which required an elaborate rest. It fired a bullet which weighed about an ounce and a quarter, took a long time to load and discharge, and had a range not exceeding 400 yards. It demanded a great deal of match, and in the enemy’s neighbourhood it was necessary to keep the match lighted, so that the troops were at the mercy of the weather. The defects of the matchlock were bringing the flintlock into fashion, and in the Parliament armies the latter was employed for cavalry carbines and pistols and for special companies detailed to guard the artillery. The flintlock was primarily a sportsman’s weapon, and must have been used by many private citizens when the regular army weapon was the matchlock. There were certainly flintlocks in the Scottish cavalry in 1644. An infantry regiment being composed of musketeers interspersed with pikemen, its efficiency depended upon an exact discipline which could combine the movements of both arms. Only then could it hope, like the regiments of Maitland and Lindsay at Marston Moor, to beat back a charge of horse.
The infantry formation was conditioned by the time which a musketeer required to load and fire, for it was the cust
om for the first rank to discharge their pieces and then fall to the rear to reload. The ordinary formation at this time was six deep, but in an emergency the files might be reduced to three, to prevent outflanking or to obtain a broader front of fire. At first only one rank fired at a time, till Gustavus Adolphus introduced the fashion of three ranks firing simultaneously, the first kneeling, the second stooping, and the third standing upright. But armies are conservative things, and, in spite of the lesson of Leipsic, it was not till Cromwell’s New Model that the method became the accepted practice in Britain. Montrose used it, being in this, as in other things, a reformer.
Infantry tactics were elaborate. Since distinctive uniforms were unknown, it was necessary to have badges, and watchwords or “field signs.” These being settled, an action usually began by sending out a body of musketeers, called a “forlorn hope,” who fired and fell back. When the main bodies came into touch the musketeers delivered a couple of volleys, and then the pikemen charged. This was for a pitched battle; in lesser engagements there might be something like open order, the troops taking shelter in ditches and behind hedges, as at Worcester. Such cover was eagerly sought by the foot, for it was the best preventive of a cavalry charge. The ordinary soldier marched slowly, for he carried a monstrous weight — at least double the forty pounds of to-day, and in the case of the pikemen far more. The longest day’s march of the New Model during 1645-46 seems to have been thirteen miles.
