by John Buchan
* * * * *
Carbisdale, like Philiphaugh, was a surprise and a rout rather than a battle. It was the first action which Montrose ever fought with a superiority in numbers, for he had 1,200 men as against Strachan’s 660; but the only contest was between the 220 Covenant troopers and Montrose’s 40 horse and 400 foreigners. Further, infantry in those days, unless of exceptional quality or magnificently posted, had little chance against even a weak body of cavalry; so for the purpose of the battle we may rule out all the foot who were struggling in the flats, and say that the contest lay between Lisle’s 40 gentlemen volunteers and Strachan’s horse. There could never have been any doubt as to the issue, and, though Strachan deserves all credit for a bold feat of arms, yet his task was easy. Montrose was doomed when he left the heights of Craigcoinichean, and he left them, as we have seen, because of the defective information of his local scoutmaster. But indeed he was lost long before, during the days when he waited for the Mackenzies who never came. He failed because, instead of pushing on with all speed to Badenoch, he wasted time on a half-hearted clan. If Neil Macleod was the immediate cause of Montrose’s fate, his patron, Seaforth, was the ruin of the campaign; and Seaforth’s indecision was due beyond doubt to the two-faced tactics of Charles. On the 2nd of May, the day on which Montrose’s doom was sealed, the king signed with the Covenanters the draft of the Treaty of Breda.
The name of the laird of Assynt lives in Scottish history with that of Sir John Menteith, who sold Wallace. It is remembered as the solitary case of a Gael who betrayed a suppliant for gold. Ian Lom, the bard of Keppoch, has left bitter verses on the “stripped tree of the false apples, Neil’s son of woeful Assynt.” He made little of his infamy. His lands were raided by Glengarry, the Macleods, and the penitent Mackenzies. After the Restoration he was a good deal in gaol, and was twice tried for his life. His castle was burned, and his family, as if under a curse, soon withered out of existence. He was awarded 25,000 pounds Scots for his services, of which 20,000 were to be paid in coin and the rest in oatmeal. It does not appear that he ever got the money, but the receipts for the meal were long extant, and Highland tradition is positive that two-thirds of it were sour.
CHAPTER XVII. THE CURTAIN FALLS (May 1650)
No man kills his enemy, therefore, that his enemy might have a better life in heaven; that is not his end in killing him: it is God’s end. Therefore he brings us to death, that by that gate he might lead us into life everlasting. And he hath not discovered, but made, that Northern passage, to passe by the frozen Sea of calamity and tribulation to Paradise, to the heavenly Jerusalem.
— John Donne.
I
1650 May
Now that the last blow had been struck, and only death remained, the oppression was lifted from Montrose’s soul. The “fey” mood had passed, and his spirit was enlarged. The touch of haughtiness, which his contemporaries remarked in him, the self-assurance necessary for one whose daily bread was peril, had gone from him; gentleness he had never lost, but he recovered the modest simplicity which Clarendon had approved long ago in Oxford. Once more he is the clear-sighted and constant patriot, the great gentleman who, in the hour of deepest degradation, can meet the taunts of his enemies with a smiling face, the Christian who has compassion upon the frailty of mankind. For six years his name had terrified his opponents, and as their hold upon the nation had declined, so had their nerve and courage. The news of his landing in the north had shaken the Estates to their foundation. The crowning mercy of Carbisdale was at first scarcely believed, and when Strachan himself arrived post-haste to claim his reward, their exultation of relief knew no bounds. Mixed with it was the zest of coming revenge. Their tormentor had been marvellously delivered into their hands, and we can judge of their past trepidation by the punishment they devised. The measure of their vengeance is the measure of their fear.
It is not easy to judge Charles with either patience or fairness, the master was so immeasurably smaller than the servant. In the compost of graces and infirmities which made up his character, a fine sense of honour had no part, since for that some spiritual discipline is required. He was an engaging creature of impulse, with a tolerant humour which could laugh at himself as well as at others, with the courage which comes from a good constitution and a high vitality, and which could face misfortunes with equanimity — both his own and his friends’. But it is almost certain that, before signing the Treaty of Breda, this “gentle, innocent, well-inclined prince” (so he seemed to Baillie) had convinced himself, with his ready optimism, that he had made provision for the safety of his captain-general. On the 5th of May he wrote to Montrose, bidding him lay down his arms and disband his men. He seems to have received assurances from the Scottish commissioners of an indemnity for the royalist army. On the 8th of May he wrote to the Estates asking that Montrose and his forces should be allowed to leave the country in safety. A private letter was also written to the viceroy, telling him that 12,000 rix-dollars were at his call in Sir Patrick Drummond’s hands. Sir William Fleming, a cousin of Montrose’s, had further orders, dated the 12th of May, written apparently after some rumour of Carbisdale had reached the king. These latest instructions were not to deliver the letter of the 8th of May to Parliament unless Montrose was still unbeaten and at the head of a reasonable force; if he had been defeated, the letter was to be concealed. Apparently Charles did not want to ask for grace for his captain-general from the Estates if he was a fugitive; he trusted to his private arrangement with the Scottish commissioners. It is a tangled story, but it is inconceivable that the king hoped to conceal or disavow his complicity in the invasion. This was already clear from the published letter of the 12th of January, which every one in Scotland knew of, and from his personal letter of the 5th of May to Montrose, which was delivered and read to the Estates. Still another letter, dated the 12th of May, was also read to Parliament, in which Charles disclaimed all responsibility for Montrose’s doings. But it is impossible to believe that the king, who was no fool, and had the rest of the correspondence in his memory, could have been guilty of so futile and purposeless a piece of treachery by which no one could be deceived. It is more likely that this was a fabrication of Will Murray, Argyll’s emissary, with the view of alienating from the now Covenanted king the last remnants of royalist respect in Scotland and Cavalier support in England. Base and heartless as was Charles’s conduct, it is incredible that it reached the height of perfidy which Argyll and Loudoun would have had the world believe.
To Montrose royal duplicity and Covenanting intrigues had become matters of little moment. For him the long day’s task was nearly done, and the hour of unarming had struck. He was led in triumphant progress by his captors through the length of Scotland, but the triumph was not theirs. On the 5th of May Holbourn hurried him from Ardvreck by way of Invershin to Skibo, on the north side of the Kyle. A night was spent there, and the lady of the castle, finding that the rank of the prisoner was not sufficiently recognized, is said to have beaten Holbourn about the head with a leg of mutton and had Montrose given the seat of honour. He was ferried over the Kyle, and on the 8th delivered to David Leslie at Tain. Thence next morning he was carried by way of Dingwall to Brahan castle. On the following day he was at Beauly, and we have the record of Mr. James Fraser, afterwards Lovat’s chaplain, and then a boy of sixteen, who now joined the march. The viceroy sat “upon a little shelty horse, without a saddle, but a quilt of rags and straw, and pieces of rope for stirrups, his feet fastened under the horse’s belly, with a tether and a bit halter for a bridle.” It was a mode of progress which was later endured by many saints of the Covenant, notably Mr. Donald Cargill. He still wore peasant’s clothes, on his head was a montero cap, and around his shoulders a ragged, old, reddish plaid. The fatigue and privations of the past week had induced a high fever. At Muirtown, near Inverness, he begged for water, and there the crowd from the town came out to gaze on him. The two ministers of Inverness also appeared, and showed in their behaviour a decency un
usual in their profession; one of them, Mr. John Annand, had been a former acquaintance of the prisoner. At the bridge-end an old woman railed at him and reminded him of the houses which had been burned when he besieged the town. “Yet he never altered his countenance, but with a majesty and state beseeming him kept his countenance high.”
The magistrates met him at the cross, where they had set up a table of refreshments. He was offered wine, and mixed it with water. Fraser saw the other prisoners drinking heartily under a forestair, and remarked among them Sir John Hurry, “a robust, tall, stately fellow, with a long cut in his cheek.” Hurry was the true soldier of fortune, own brother to Dugald Dalgetty, and throughout his varied career and many changes of side he preserved a certain disarming audacity and humour. As was said of a more famous Sir John, the world could have better spared a better man. The provost, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, a courteous member of an honourable house, said on taking leave: “My lord, I am sorry for your circumstances.” That night the company were lodged at Castle Stewart, on the road to Nairn.
On the way through Moray many friends came to greet him, college companions at St. Andrews, and loyalists such as Pluscardine, whose clan had so grievously failed him. At Elgin he was greatly cheered by the sight of an old college friend, Mr. Alexander Somers, the minister of Duffus. His well-wishers conveyed him over Spey, and on the 11th he halted at Keith, where he lay on straw in a tent set up in the fields. The next day was the Sabbath, and he attended the ministrations of Mr. William Kinanmond, who preached from the favourite Covenanting text of the hewing of Agag and the Amalekites. He violently abused the prisoner, till he disgusted even his Covenanting hearers. “Rail on, Rabshakeh,” was his victim’s only reply. “All honest men,” says Fraser, “hated Kinanmond for this ever after.”
On the 13th the prisoner reached Pitcaple castle, the home of an Engager, John Leslie, whose wife was a kinswoman of Montrose. The quicker road to the south through Mar was not taken, probably through fear of a rescue by the Farquharsons, and the route chosen was one by which Montrose had often led his swift armies. Now he traversed the scene of his victories with a herald pacing before him, proclaiming: “Here comes James Graham, a traitor to his country.” He was probably at Fordoun on the 14th, and on the 15th he reached Southesk’s castle of Kinnaird. There he saw his two younger children, Robert and Jean. When he left them he left the last slender ties which still bound him to earth. His wife and his eldest son were gone; his best friends had perished on the scaffold; the great comradeship was broken, and its members dead or on their way to death; his cause, the clean and sane ideals he had championed, was undone; death had no terrors for one who had nothing to live for, and who had faced it so often with a lover’s gaiety. His words might have been those of Kent in Lear:
“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
My master calls me, I must not say no.”
On the night of the 15th he halted at the house of Grange, a property of the Durhams, five miles from Dundee. Here there seems to have been an attempt as at Pitcaple, to assist him to escape. The lady of the house plied the guards with strong ale and brandy, and they, being Highlanders of Lawers’s regiment, willingly succumbed. But the outer guards had not been tampered with, and the fugitive was discovered by a trooper of Strachan’s horse. Next day he entered Dundee, and to the eternal credit of that staunchly Covenanting town, which, moreover, had suffered more than most at Montrose’s hands, he was received with sympathy and respect. “The whole town expressed a great deal of sorrow for his condition, and presented him with clothes and all other things suited to his place, birth, and person.” We have no record of the two days’ march across Fife. No doubt the ministers flocked to upbraid him, and the heroes who had returned from Tippermuir and Kilsyth came to stare at one who had given them little cause to love him. From Dysart or Kirkcaldy the company took ship for Leith, and reached it about four o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday the 18th. On the same day and at the same port arrived Sir William Fleming, with the king’s letter of disbandment.
The Covenanters had made ample preparation to receive the prisoner. They knew that what they had to do must be done quickly. The viceroy must be dead before the king’s coming to Scotland, or trouble would follow; a party, now royalist in policy, could not put to death one who carried the royal commission. Further, the Commonwealth had never shown any bitterness against the great captain, and might interdict those of the Estates who favoured Cromwell from the kind of vengeance which Cromwell as a rule preferred to leave to his Maker. There were magnanimous men, too, in all parties in Scotland, who resented the unsoldierly treatment of a soldier, and there were his many friends in foreign courts, especially in the court of France, who would be certain to plead for him if time were allowed. Such an appeal was actually sent at the instigation of Cardinal de Retz, signed by the young king, Louis the Fourteenth, in which it was eloquently urged that Montrose had always acted within the terms of his royal commission, and therefore could not be condemned by those who now acknowledged the royal authority. But the appeal arrived after the deed had been done. Argyll and Loudoun were not the men to tarry when it was a matter of getting rid of a rival so formidable and so feared.
Immediately upon the news of Carbisdale, the Estates had met to consider the question of punishment. In a time of civil confusion nice questions of legality are out of place, and the condemnation of Montrose was as legal as any other act of the Parliament then sitting in Scotland. He had been attainted and outlawed in 1644, and there had been no reversal of the sentence. A commission was appointed to decide on the details of the penalty, and on the 17th of May it made its report. The captive was to be met at the gates by the officers of justice and the hangman, and conducted with every circumstance of ignominy to the Tolbooth. Thereafter he was to be hanged on a gibbet — not beheaded, as was the custom with State prisoners — with Wishart’s book and a copy of his own last declaration tied around his neck. Thus would be fulfilled the words of the prophet Rothes, and he would be “lifted up above the rest in three fathoms of a rope.” After death the head was to be struck off and placed on a spike on the Tolbooth; the body dismembered, and the limbs fixed in public places in Stirling, Glasgow, Perth, and Aberdeen. If he repented of his misdeeds, the ban of excommunication would be removed, and the body buried in Greyfriars churchyard; if not, it would go to the felons’ pit on the Boroughmuir. It was piously hoped that the common folk of Edinburgh, who had lost kith and kin in his wars, would await his entrance and show their hatred with filth and stones. For this purpose his hands were to be pinioned behind his back.
The afternoon was clear and chilly, such as is common on the shores of the Firth in late May. The magistrates of Edinburgh met him at Leith, and the procession was formed, the other prisoners on foot, and Montrose himself mounted on a cart-horse. His face was drawn and wasted with fever, and his grey eyes burned with an unnatural brilliance. The good folk of Dundee had given him clothes more suited to his condition than those he had worn when captured, and he bore himself among the hostile crowd with a gentle dignity. A smile, it is said, flickered about his mouth, not of scorn but of peace. When he passed the Netherbow, where the faubourg of the Canongate began, in which stood the houses of the nobility, he found awaiting him the officers of justice, the hangman, and a hangman’s cart drawn by four horses. He was shown the sentence of the Estates and read it carefully, saying that he was sorry that the king, whose commission he bore, should be so dishonoured. Then he entered the cart, and was tied to a high seat with cords across his breast and arms. The hangman wore his red bonnet, but Montrose, according to his sentence, must ride uncovered.
Slowly, in the bright evening, the procession moved up the ancient Via Dolorosa of Scottish history. The street was lined by a great crowd — the dregs of the Edinburgh slums, the retainers of the Covenanting lords, ministers from far and near — all the elements most bitterly hostile to the prisoner. But to the amazement of the organizers of the spectacle there was no
sign of popular wrath. Rather there was silence, a tense air of sympathy and pity and startled admiration. The high pale countenance set up in that place of public scorn awed the mob into stillness. “In all the way, there appeared in him such majesty, courage, modesty, and even somewhat more than natural, that these common women who had lost their husbands and children in his wars, and who were hired to stone him, were, upon the sight of him, so astonished and moved that their intended curses turned into tears and prayers.” In the strained quiet, broken only by excited sobs, there was one jarring note. Lady Jean Gordon, Lord Haddington’s widow, Argyll’s niece and Huntly’s daughter, is said to have laughed shrilly and shouted a word of insult from the balcony where she sat. A voice cried out of the crowd that the right place for her was in the hangman’s cart to expiate her sins.
In the lodgings along the Canongate the Covenant chiefs were assembled to witness the degradation of their enemy. In the balcony of Lord Moray’s house Lord Lorn sat with his young bride, Lady Mary Stewart, the same man who, thirty-five years later, was himself to go to a not inglorious scaffold. Inside the house, with the shutters half-closed, stood Argyll with Loudoun and Wariston. Montrose, as he passed, caught a glimpse of the anxious, unhappy face which he knew so well, and for the first time for long the two men looked into each other’s eyes. . . . The shutters were closed and the faces disappeared. There was an English soldier in the crowd who observed the incident and cried: “It was no wonder they started aside at his look, for they durst not look him in the face these seven years bygone.”
