by John Buchan
The fate of his heart is a curious romance, like the tale of that ring which Marie Antoinette gave to Axel Fersen. Shortly after the execution young Lady Napier sent her servants by night to the grave on the Boroughmuir, and had the heart taken from the body. It was skilfully embalmed, and placed in a little egg-shaped case of steel made from the blade of his sword. This in turn was enclosed in a gold filagree box, which had been given to her husband’s grandfather by a Doge of Venice. She sent the box to the young Marquis of Montrose on the Continent, who duly restored the heart to the body in 1661 at the second funeral. The casket after a time passed out of the possession of the family. It was recognized in a Dutch collection by a friend of the fifth Lord Napier, who procured it for him. Napier bequeathed it on his death to his daughter, who had married a Johnston of Cairnsalloch, an officer of the East India Company. It was carried to India, and on the way out was struck by a shot in a battle with a French squadron off Cape Verd Islands, and the gold filagree box was shattered. But the adventures of the case were not ended. It remained for some time in the Johnstons’ house at Madura, where the natives came to reverence it as a talisman. It was stolen, and was purchased by the Nabob of Arcot, in whose treasury it long lay. The young Johnston in a hunting expedition happened to save his life, and the Nabob in gratitude restored the relic to his family. It was brought home to Europe by the elder Johnstons in 1792, and, as they travelled overland through France, they heard of the edict of the Revolution Government requiring the surrender of all gold and silver trinkets. Mrs. Johnston entrusted it to an Englishwoman at Boulogne till it could be sent to England, but the lady died soon afterwards, and in the troubled days that followed the relic disappeared. Since then it has been lost to the world. Some day, perhaps, an antiquary, rummaging in some back street in a French town, may come on a casket of Indian work, and opening it find the little egg-shaped case. It would be a precious discovery, for it once held the dust of the bravest of Scottish hearts.
Tomb of Montrose in St. Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh.
CHAPTER XVIII. “A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY”
Truly I know not whether to mervaile more, either that he in that mistie time could see so clearly, or that wee in this cleare age walke so stumblingly after him.
— Sir Philip Sidney.
I
Montrose founded no school and left no successor. He was a lonely figure in his day, and for almost two centuries his bequest remained unnoted and unshared. Cromwell, indeed, came north into Scotland the same year, and enforced one part of his message. Dunbar was the avenging of Philiphaugh and Carbisdale, and the heavy hand of the greatest of Englishmen was laid on the strange edifice which had been built out of the rubble of the Middle Ages. The nine years of the English occupation saw the plain man raising his head once more. Sir Alexander Irvine of Drum was moved to tell the Moderator of the Assembly that his wild charges were “but undigested rhapsodies of confused nonsense,” and none could gainsay him. Monk bade the ministers of Perth leave politics alone and “preach the gospel of Jesus Christ,” which, the chronicler adds, “it seems is not their business.” Wariston had the “strange thought” that, like Hamilton and Montrose, Cromwell would ere long be brought to public justice in Edinburgh, but no such fate befell the great iconoclast. He enforced his views on religious toleration, and did his best to curb the appetite of the Kirk for witch-finding. He made an attempt at uniting Scotland and England, reduced taxation, established free trade with the south, took the sting out of ex-communication by preventing any civil penalties attending it, and finally, to the infinite comfort of the lieges, suppressed the General Assembly. For the first time for generations even-handed justice was done between all classes. And, as we know from Mr. Robert Law, the spiritual life of the country, long bound under the desolate frosts of faction, began to put forth hopeful shoots.
Cromwell passed, and the king who had so cheerfully betrayed his servant came to his own again. The old strife was renewed of nobles and king and Kirk, and again the commons of Scotland were the victims. One thing had indeed been gained — the impossible theocracy had perished. The Kirk, as always happens, having asked too much, was to get less than her due, and the spiritual liberty which she had denied to others in her heyday was now to be denied to herself. The later Covenanters, whose sufferings have left so dark a memory among their countrymen, fought for a cause similar only in name to that of their predecessors before 1660. They resisted a despotic “bond” imposed on them by the Government to the outraging of their consciences, as Montrose had resisted the “bond” of Guthrie and Wariston. The men who suffered on the western moorlands, though his name was anathema to them and they revered his executioners, yet stood confusedly on the principles for which he died. The best of them asked for that spiritual liberty he had pled for, and resisted that constraining of men’s consciences he had warred against. But the evil had been wrought. Fanaticism had raised a counter-fanaticism, and the struggle had to continue till both were dead of their wounds. The way was prepared for the long lack-lustre régime of eighteenth-century Scotland, when the Kirk was ossified into a thing of forms and dogmas, and civil government sank to a dull and corrupt servitude to the powers of the moment. The spiritual fires of the Covenant had burned too murkily to be allowed to last, and the clear flame of Montrose had gone from a world that was not worthy of it. We can look back upon that tangled era and judge both parties without bitterness. Argyll’s monument stands close to Montrose’s in St. Giles’s, and the most fervent admirer of the latter can admit the value of the tradition bequeathed by the founders of the Kirk. But it must not be forgotten that that tradition, which has at once educated and ennobled their countrymen, was a by-product, and was never the chief aim of the pre-1660 Covenanters. For that enduring work, the liberty of the Church and the elevation of the lowliest citizen to the dignity of an immortal soul, Montrose laboured as zealously as they. In their declared and paramount objects, which were the establishment of a theocracy above any civil power and an inquisition over every man’s conscience, they failed utterly, and in their failure brought their land to the last misery and degradation.
The history of Scotland was written first by the divines and then by the Whigs, so it is small wonder that Montrose has fared badly. A kind of literary convention arose, according to which the most pagan of Edinburgh lawyers, when he took pen in hand, thought it his duty to pay tribute to the Solemn League and its abettors. It is only within recent generations that the balance has been redressed. Hagiology is not an exact science, and that of the Covenant, born in frenzy and confusion, and nurtured in bitterness, has not withstood the slow sapping of a fuller knowledge and a more critical temper; yet it was able for the better part of two centuries to hide from his countrymen the rarity and majesty of Montrose’s character. But popular tradition was more just. The fame of the great marquis in the Lowlands seems always to have been attended by a kind of respect. Stories of his humanity, his beauty, and his tragic fate were handed down — a curious interlude in a memory of blood and suffering. Lowland legend never gave him the name of “persecutor,” and he never sat at that grim tavern-board in hell with the “fierce Middleton, and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale.” It would be strange if he had, for these were the men who brought him to his death. To royalist and Jacobite Scotland he became an almost mythical figure, little understood, and valued chiefly, perhaps, as the legendary victor over the Campbells. “The banes of a loyal and a gallant Grahame hae long rattled in their coffin for vengeance on thae Dukes of Guile and Lords for Lorn.” As for Celtic Scotland, she has taken him to her heart. Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel “had Montrose always in his mouth.” In the account of the proceedings of the Estates on December 3, 1689, it is recorded: “That which gave the late Viscount of Dundee so much credit with, and authority over them, though he understood not their language nor was of their country, was his name and relation to the great Marquis of Montrose, for whose memory these Highlanders have all imaginable respe
ct and veneration, and believe that fortune and success was entailed on that name of Graham.” To the Highlands he was their chosen knight, the only Lowlander who has ever entered the sacred circle of Gaelic folk-tale and song. Under him the Celt reached his apotheosis, and for one short year held the Saxon in the hollow of his hand. Clan rivalries have been forgotten in the homage to a racial hero. Said an old gillie on the Beauly: “My name is Campbell, but my heart is with the great Montrose.”
On the political side Montrose was a modern man, as modern as Burke and Canning, and speaking a language far more intelligible to our ears than that of the Butes and Dundases of a later Scotland. The seventeenth century produced two curiously premature characters in the great Marquis and Sir George Mackenzie; but Mackenzie, lawyer-like, made a sharp distinction between theory and practice, and while his theory was modern his practice was of the Dark Ages; whereas Montrose knew no cleavage between thoughts and deeds. Most great men have been in advance of their day. Some have had the insight to see several stages ahead and have tried to expedite the wheel of change; some have thrown out ideas which were to fructify afterwards in a form of which they did not dream. Montrose was before his time, not from paradox or from hurry, but because almost alone in his age he looked clearly at the conditions of all government, and, having formed his conclusions, was not deterred by prudence or self-interest from acting upon them. As we have seen, he was notably free from contemporary prejudices. He had none of the current belief in Divine Right; he had no excessive reverence for a king as such, and very little for a nobility; he would not have shrunk from the views of Cromwell’s Ironsides as to the historical origin of the peerage, which so scandalized the decorous soul of Richard Baxter. He was willing to accept any form of government, provided it fulfilled the requirements which are indispensable in all governments; and these he defined with an acumen and a precision which cannot be challenged.
Statesmanship demands two gifts — the conception of wise ends and the perception of adequate means. The first Montrose possessed in the highest degree, the second scarcely at all. He was a most fallible politician, and he was without skill in the game of parliamentary intrigue. He did not read the temper of the people with the accuracy of Argyll, or the possibilities of the moment with the profound sagacity of Cromwell. He was an optimist about his dreams; he saw the Lowland peasantry looking for a deliverer, when they regarded him as a destroyer; he did not understand the depths of the antipathy of Saxon to Celt, or how fatally the use of Alasdair’s men prejudiced his cause; he looked for loyalty in quarters which knew only self-interest, and courage among those who had it not. Practical statesmanship works essentially by compromises, accepting the second or third best as an instalment, and by slow degrees leading the people to acquiesce in an ideal which they have come to regard as their own creation. It must judge shrewdly the situation of the moment, and know precisely what elements therein are capable of providing the first stage in the great advance. It must have infinite patience, and infinite confidence in the slow processes of time.
Such a gift Montrose did not possess — indeed it may be questioned whether the problem before his age permitted of such evolutionary methods. There was no material to his hand in the shape of a nation at least partially instructed or a group of like-minded colleagues. But he was a statesman, if it be the part of statesmanship to see far ahead and to stand for the hope of the future. He stood for the Scottish democracy against those who would have crushed it and those who betrayed it with a kiss. In views and temperament it is not easy to find his parallel. He had Marlborough’s contemptuous superiority to parties, but he lacked his passionless Olympian calm. With his kinsman Claverhouse — Montrosio novus exoritur de pulvere phoenix — he had little in common except the power of leadership. There is some resemblance to Ireton in political creed, in his scorn of abstractions, and his belief in the need of a strong central government, monarchical, parliamentary, or both; he shared the same view with Strafford, but, unlike him, he did not come to regard monarchical and parliamentary authority as mutually exclusive. He never relinquished his doctrine of a just balance, and if in his last years he was compelled to put the emphasis on the royal power, it was for the same reason as Sir Thomas More was forced into opposition to Henry VIII — because the balance had been unduly depressed.
The truest kinship is perhaps with the troubled humanity of Cromwell. The Lord Protector fought for “the poor godly people”; Montrose for the plain folk without any qualification. Both were tolerant, both were idealists, striving for something which their age could not give them. Montrose had one obstacle in his way above all others, and that was Scotland. Her jealous nationalism was not ripe, even had the century been ripe, for his far-sighted good sense. She was still hugging to her breast her own fantastic creations, her covenants, her barren survivals, her peculiar royalism, still prepared to sacrifice peace and fortune to her pride. If Cromwell shipwrecked upon the genial materialism of England, Montrose split upon the rock of the sterile conservatism of his own land. Scotland was not ready for civic ideals or luminous reason. She had not found the self-confidence which was to give her a far truer and deeper national pride. She had still to tread for long years the path of coarse and earthy compromises, lit by flashes of crazy quixotry, till through suffering and poverty she came at last to find her own soul. Montrose was in advance of his age, he was in advance of England at her best, but he was utterly and eternally beyond the ken of seventeenth-century Scotland. Yet of the two great idealists he has had the happier destiny. Cromwell, brilliantly successful for the moment, built nothing which lasted. Except for his doctrine of toleration, he left no heritage of political thought which the world has used. The ideals of Montrose, on the other hand, are in the warp and woof of the constitutional fabric of to-day.
The moderate man is slow to appeal to arms. He sees too clearly the values on both sides to commit himself readily to that desperate hazard. But in a revolution it may be the only way. If men’s passions are deeply stirred there must be recourse to the last and sternest arbitrament. In such a crisis it is the soldier who turns the scale, whether it be Cæsar’s army of Gaul, or the Puritan New Model, or Washington’s militia, or Napoleon’s Grande Armée, or Garibaldi’s Thousand, or Lincoln’s citizen levies. A Holles or a Vane may dream his dreams, but it is Cromwell who brings his into being. Montrose both courted and warred against revolution. He desired to preserve the monarchy as against its anarchical assailants, but he was as ardent a revolutionary as Lilburne in his crusade against the existing régime in Scotland, with its dull tyranny of kirk and nobles. For there is a moderation which is in itself a fire, where enthusiasm burns as fiercely for the whole truth as it commonly does for half-truths, where toleration becomes not a policy but an act of religion. Such inspired moderation is usually found in an age of violent contraries. Henri IV. of France possessed it, as did William the Silent. Montrose, like Henri, was the supreme moderate of his age; and, like Henri, he realized that it needs a fiery soul to enforce moderation in a rabble of fanatics and debauchees. In such a strife, the ultimate word can only be spoken by one who is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. To enter into the kingdom of the spirit a man must take his life in his hands, as martyr or as soldier.
II
As a soldier Montrose ranks by common consent with the greatest of his age, with Cromwell and Condé. The historian of the British army has described him as “perhaps the most brilliant natural military genius disclosed by the Civil War.” Like Cromwell, he seems to have learned his art rather by intuition than by experience, for, till his great campaign, his only training was the inglorious Bishops’ War. He had never, like Leven or David Leslie, served under eminent foreign generals; he was as unprofessional as Rupert, and, like him, he had that natural eye for country and dispositions, that power of quick resolution and that magnetism of leadership, which discomfited the more prosaic commanders who found themselves his opponents. He had learned the lesson of which his friend, the Cardinal
de Retz, has given a famous epitome: “Il n’y a rien dans le monde qui n’ait son moment décisif; et le chef-d’oeuvre de la bonne conduite est de connaître et de prendre ce moment.”
It has been sometimes urged that it is easy to overpraise Montrose’s military capacity, since he usually fought against inferior troops and incompetent generals, and that on the only occasion on which he met a commander of ability and a seasoned army he was defeated. But the argument does not bear examination. The men he scattered at Tippermuir and Aberdeen were, it is true, raw levies, though present in great numerical superiority; but they were precisely the men with whom he had been victorious in his first campaign, and his conquering Highlanders were of the race which he had routed in 1639, when they fought under Aboyne. At Inverlochy he had against him the best disciplined of the Highland clans, and Auchinbreck had ten times his own experience of war. At Dundee and Auldearn and Alford he faced regular cavalry and foot, the pick of the men who had won renown under Leven in England; and Hurry and Baillie had a high repute among the commanders of the day. Philiphaugh and Carbisdale are too much unlike normal battles to be made the basis for any judgment of one side or the other. No doubt Montrose’s Highland and Irish troops, nourished on beef and game, were of a more stalwart physical type than the Lowland second line. But the regular Covenant foot were stout fellows, and they had the priceless advantage of a strict discipline and freedom from the endless clan jealousies. So far as equipment went, Montrose won his victories in the face of crushing odds. His army was always a fluid thing; after every success a large part of it departed with their booty to their homes; more than half his time was spent in the work of shepherding back to his standard the volatile clans. Under such conditions it is hard to make a plan of campaign, and harder still to execute it.
