Worst of all, the Commissioners held a warrant under the Great Seal of Scotland to borrow £300,000 to give King Charles, if he would come to terms with them; if not, they were to give him no money at all. To all those who knew the really desperate straits of the young King, his family and followers, such a bribe seemed as though it must prove irresistible. ‘I do not yet know of any actual death from lack of bread, which yet I wonder at,’ Hyde had written lately in his carefully moderate fashion.
Hyde himself was no longer with Charles. He had at last accomplished that appointment on a mission as foreign ambassador, and was slowly journeying south in the early spring sunshine towards the golden fruit and heavy-scented white blossom of the orange groves of Spain that had dangled so temptingly in his dreams as he lay racked with rheumatism in his damp Dutch lodging. To be a traveller and ambassador without money was proving no such idyll, as he was bitterly learning. But his experience was bought at heavier cost than his own discomfort; his ‘unnecessary and unskilful absence’, as Montrose’s friends were calling it, had left the King without the very adviser that he needed at this moment.
Rupert would have been even better. But Rupert and his ships, and indeed all Ireland, might have been sunk beneath the stormy waves of the Atlantic for all that could now be learned of them. His mother, who still wrote almost as constantly as his sister Louise to Montrose, had first told ‘her most affectionate friend’ that all Irish affairs were ‘so in a cloud as we hear nothing of certainty, which I hope is a good sign’ – a vain hope, as she recognized when she wrote a little later that ‘Rupert le Diable is out of Kinsale and most believe him now at Jersey.’ Charles also was then at Jersey and ‘without question the King will go with Rupert’s ships. But whither, God knows, since many letters say all goes ill in Ireland.’ And then came the last report: ‘Since Rupert was at Cape St Vincent on the coast of Portugal I have not heard from him.’
Montrose must reckon without Rupert as without Hyde. Whatever had ‘gone ill’ in Ireland (and there were horrible rumours of massacre and devastation and artificially induced famine wrought by that enormous iron machine of Cromwell’s invading army), that country was clearly out of action now as far as the Scottish campaign was concerned. But Rupert had had to go to Ireland when he did, as it had been the most necessary thing at that moment. And now the whole Parliamentary fleet with Admiral Blake at its head must be preventing Rupert’s handful of ships from sailing north to Montrose.
But Cromwell’s army was still out of England, and this should give Montrose his best chance of mustering an army to meet him on that return. On the Continent he was being cited by all the military experts as the one commander in Europe whose genius for war was superior to Cromwell’s.
Politically, too, the odds were in his favour. The Irish invasion was unpopular in England; the Parliament was clamouring for Cromwell’s return to quell the risings at home. If Cromwell met with one disaster on top of this year of tyranny and discontent, the bulk of England would take heart to join in rebellion against his rule.
It was the golden moment for Montrose’s enterprise, if all could be done on the moment and not a moment wasted.
‘In regard of the shortness and pressingness of the time,’ Montrose had written to Hurry when giving him his marching orders from shipboard, and the phrase stuck in both their heads in the midst of all the maddening delays that beset them.
Time was their chief enemy. No commander should have less reason to fear it than Montrose, whose lightning speed in forced marches had been the wonder of Europe. But when all was ready to embark he had had to wait at the Swedish port for a dispatch from Charles at Jersey until it was impossible to wait longer, and the King’s messenger had to follow him to Orkney, bearing with him the Order of the Garter. Montrose would gladly have forgone it for a different pair of letters.
For there were two from Charles; the one, private to Montrose, again warned him ‘not to take alarm at any reports’ he might hear; the other, public, showed what grave reason there was for alarm. In it Charles told him that he would discuss terms with the Commissioners, assured him that if they arrived at an agreement he would so provide for Montrose’s ‘honour and interest as shall let the whole world see the high esteem we have for you’; and also besought him yet again to ‘proceed vigorously and effectively in your undertaking’.
With Montrose victorious, it was obvious that Charles could make better terms for himself with the Commissioners; but the very fact that he was considering a treaty with Montrose’s enemies would put off recruits until they saw the issue of that treaty. Harry May, the royal messenger, told Montrose that on the very day Charles wrote to him he had also written to the Commissioners, appointing a meeting with them at Breda.
There was then no time to be lost. Charles I had hastened his path to the scaffold by trying to play off his enemies against each other; now his son was trying to play off his enemies against his friends.
Montrose saw the danger both to himself and to the King; it was the latter that he considered most in his reply, warning him ‘to have a serious eye, now at last, upon the too open crafts used against you’ – and to be ‘just to yourself’. Yet, in spite of the sternness of that warning, he assured him of his service, howsoever Charles might hamper it, for ‘it is not your fortune in you, but Your Majesty in whatsoever fortune, that I make sacred to serve’.
To Hurry, that confirmed soldier of fortune, the quiet resolution of that reply brought a surprised sense of release. His master might be mad to disclaim fortune, but it saved him a deal of bother; he had not to reckon up his chances of coming out on the winning side as Hurry had done so furiously all his life; he had only to go forward in what he had undertaken, and consider the chances not for himself but for that undertaking.
Nor were the chances at all bad – if they could be used in time, before the news of Charles’ equivocal dealings spread to spoil them. Before that could happen, Montrose must summon the clans to him. They had heard on every side that all Scotland was ready to rise against the tyranny of the Covenant, and that Montrose was ‘gaped after with that expectation that the Jews had for their Messiah’.
Once again, the cry was ‘Oh for one hour of Montrose!’ Sir James Douglas had set sail for Sweden expressly to tell him that he need not wait for troops or supplies, for once he set foot in Scotland his own presence would be enough in itself, and ‘undoubtedly bring 20,000 men together for the King’s service’. Montrose had not had more than a quarter of that number when he won his greatest victory at Kilsyth, which had placed him as the acknowledged Governor of Scotland.
And his potential allies had increased since then; his enemies also had diminished. Lord Seaforth, chief of the Mackenzie clan, at present at The Hague, had been against Montrose and was now warmly partisan, according to the Queen of Bohemia, who always referred to him in her letters as ‘my Highlander’, as no doubt he was, though that did not entirely convince Montrose that Seaforth was therefore his. Elizabeth, always optimistic, was apt to trust people according to herself. But he had certainly promised the help of his clan, and it was into the Mackenzie country that Montrose was now advancing.
The Covenant’s former military leader in Scotland, General Baillie, as busy and efficient a general as his cousin Robert was a minister, had been discredited by Argyll and had lost his command. Hamilton, who had raised his men against Montrose, was now saying all over again that he would be glad ‘to trail a pike or ride as a private trooper under him’, though he said this, it is true, at a comfortable distance.
As for old Lord Leven, the official Commander-in-Chief of the Covenant armies, or, as Hurry preferred to call him, ‘that crooked little bastard, Scrubby Sandy, he is crawling round with one foot in the grave, – I doubt if he could even run for it now as he did from Rupert’s troopers at Marston Moor, bawling out for the quickest way back to Tweed. I was the best man they had against you, sir, and now I’m with you instead, and that’s the best thing we’ve got against ‘em.
’
But there were some scores on the other side too. The ‘Gay Gordons’, those three young brothers, George Gordon and Aboyne and Lewis, and the Gordon Highlanders, had been a fiery though uncertain aid to Montrose. But George Gordon, the only sure and constant one, had been killed in battle by the side of his commander five years ago; and Aboyne had lately died abroad of a broken heart – at King Charles’ execution it was said, though remorse may have had more to do with it, since he had deserted Montrose at the very moment when he had most chance to prevent that ‘too rigid fate’ of their King’s.
And Lewis, the youngest of the three, the wildest and most erratic, had been so much under the thumb of his uncle Argyll that Argyll was said to have executed the Earl of Huntly chiefly that his youngest son should succeed to the title and play into the Covenanters’ hands. At the moment, however, Lewis was in a loyal mood and only waiting for his King’s command to join with Montrose; unfortunately he was also waiting for the Garter, and if he did not get it his loyalty was unlikely to be as strong as his wounded vanity. Even as an ally, Lewis had always given more trouble than help.
‘And so did your precious ruffian Alasdair Macdonald, whom you dubbed “Major-General of His Majesty’s Irishes”!’ So Hurry muttered, carefully inaudibly, determined not to recognize that Montrose’s chief cause for regret in this campaign was that he no longer had that tribal chieftain to fight by his side. Alasdair had left Montrose with the bulk of his clan after his final victory at Kilsyth. At least he had deserted after victory and not, as Hurry had done every time, after defeat; but that only increased Hurry’s jealousy, his annoyance that Alasdair’s defection should have been sanctified as it were by the tragic chance of his death.
For that mighty Irish giant who had dealt destruction in battle with his own hand like the hammer of Thor, whose only sign of human weakness had been on a day in Belfast when he had been met walking with his wrist tied up in a string, having a little tired it by killing fifty Englishmen and forty Scots (Protestants) in one morning, Alasdair Macdonald, or, to give him his proper name, Alasdair Mac Cholla-chiotach Mhic Ghiollesbuig Mhic Alasdair Mhic Eoin Cathanich, had been stabbed in the back in battle, fighting the Protestants in Ulster.
The MacVurich, his hereditary minstrel, and the MacArthur, his piper, had escaped from that unhappy and futile fray and had set out to join Montrose in Scotland as soon as they had heard of his project, and were now with that oddly assorted company of large dark flat-faced Orcadians and a sprinkling of Danish and German soldiers. That couple of men from what had been Montrose’s main force of Highlanders were the only common soldiers among his force who had shared his ancient glories – and Alasdair’s; and naturally it was those of Alasdair that they now sang in their laments for his death.
‘Alasdair, brave son art thou
Of Coll the Splendid - o - ho - o!
‘Twas thy hand that struck the blow,
Thine the brave deed - o - ho - o!’
Their dirge for their chieftain found its echo in Montrose’s heart. Here he was back on the heather again with the wind coming down the hill, and the smell of bog and bracken again in his nostrils, released at last from those many different yet monotonous Courts of Europe where he had served his King as he had promised, ‘in passion as in action’, and found how much harder was that passive course. Now it was action for him again, and the old fierce joy of comradeship in arms.
But Alasdair his greatest comrade was dead, the ‘Shepherd of the Isles’ as his men sang of him, ‘whose shape was a fiery blaze over-topping the warriors of Erin. – Stag amongst the deer, salmon amongst the trout, loftiest ship that makes harbour, -
‘The gloom of every night is dark
Since earth was put over Alasdair.’
The wild tune came again and again on the pipes like the cry of the sea-birds through the mist. His name would live for centuries, they cried, in song and in the hearts of his people.
To Montrose that immortality of his friend was here and now, his spirit alive on the hill as in the songs of his men, that fury of life continuing strong and swift in the very course of nature. He beloved, as Alasdair had done, in an eternity of courage and high endeavour, believed that the length or shortness of a life counted for nothing, but that the moment where a man strikes into life, and what he does with it, is all.
And now once again he was being given his moment here in his own country where he had so longed to be. He was leading his men there once again. It was better luck than a man could hope for, to be given his chance all over again.
That was how he thought of it.
It was different with Jack Hurry. He had had almost as many campaigns as casks of wine in his belly, but never yet the one he had always hankered after. Now it lay before him, that campaign of gay, miraculous conquest that Montrose had already known.
They talked of it as they walked by the nor’-eastern shore of Scotland and felt the sea-wind come in sharp and biting on their cheeks, that strong easterly frost-bitten wind with the tang of the Northern sea in it, and behind them the clang and clatter of an armed camp that they had both so longed to hear again, the sound of movement and comradeship and action. And now Hurry was beside Montrose instead of against him, and though in his sturdy Aberdeen conceit of himself Hurry tried to present that as the best asset in his Commander’s chances, he knew well that it was the best in his own.
‘Fine you tricked me at Auldearn,’ he said, ‘when I had the chance for once to take a leaf out of Your Lordship’s very own book.’
‘And fine you took it,’ Montrose answered, ‘turning on your tracks to attack us in the middle of a forced night march just when I thought we were comfortably chasing you towards Inverness.’
‘Much good it did me! My “surprise” found you as ready as on the parade-ground! Was it the devil himself gave you word of it?’
‘You’ll say it was, when I tell you it was the Macdonald scouts. They’d heard your men firing off the damp powder in their muskets, so I guessed you’d turn to attack us.’
‘Why, that was five miles from Auldearn and on a night thick with mist and rain. They must have as long ears as the mountain deer.’
‘That may well be, and I wish to God we had ‘em here again.’
Hurry did not echo that. Surely to God an officer like himself, trained in the ‘civilized warfare’ of the Thirty Years’ carnage and pillage in Germany, was worth more than the barbaric asset of the long ears of the mountainy men.
‘Just when I’d managed to steal the first march on you at last,’ he grumbled ruminatively, ‘and with four thousand men and a full quarter of them cavalry. Christ! how did I ever throw away such a chance?’
He knew well enough how it was, for Montrose, even when surprised into a position of defence, the worst possible for his Highlanders, had yet managed to outwit him with a thin screen of musketeers, keeping the Gordon cavalry hidden in reserve and placing the Royal Standard with Alasdair and the Macdonalds so as to draw the first brunt of Hurry’s attack. Even then the small advantage had been all but thrown away by Alasdair’s leaping out from behind the farmyard walls that served for entrenchments, and leading a mad charge out into the open against an enemy that numbered eight to one.
‘Will I ever forget the sight of that redhead shooting up like a flaming pole, and the yell of his battle-cry, just when I thought I’d got them all safely tucked up behind the pigsties!’
Hurry heard the amused admiration as well as exasperation in his General’s voice, and it went to his head like new wine. Alasdair had made a fool of himself by throwing away his position at the start, but had fought like a Berserker to recover it. The first to rush out from it, he had been the last to return; Hurry had seen him guarding his men’s retreat to it with the scythe-like sweeps of his huge sword, had seen him catch on his wooden targe the points of half a dozen pikes that would have borne any ordinarily strong man to the ground, but round went that sword again and cut them through at one stroke, leaving his shi
eld bristling like a pin-cushion with their pike-heads.
Then that mighty two-handed sword that any other man could scarcely lift had snapped like a twig, but Alasdair took a claymore from a friend and struck off an enemy’s head with a single blow; he rushed out again and again from the enclosure that he had swept clean of their enemies, to bring in any stragglers that had failed to win through; his battle rage and battle laughter were those of a giant in a fairy-tale – nor was a fairy-tale the end of it.
No, it was the raw, untried Gordon cavalry that had won the fight, swung round as they waited shivering in the rain by Montrose’s gay shout to them that the Macdonalds were winning the day, and were there to be no laurels for the house of Huntly? (Of all God-almighty lies when the Macdonalds were paying for their folly at the rate of a Jewish usurer’s interest!) But Montrose with young George Gordon had led the charge home, plumb into the middle of Hurry’s flank guard of cavalry.
‘It was the first chance I had to use shock tactics,’ Montrose said, ‘as Rupert had shown cavalry could be used, and now Cromwell.’
‘And that finished it,’ said Hurry, ‘neater than any mopheaded, raw-hide-shod, bloody Highland infantry could do.’
It finished Hurry’s army. He left two thousand dead upon the field, his ammunition, money, baggage, and the colours of sixteen regiments in Montrose’s hands. All he saved from the rout was a hundred horses with which he fled headlong through the raining night. God how it had rained on their grim defeated faces as they rode! ‘I’d never have got my ragged leavings of horse past your scouts if it hadn’t been for that thick night—’
The Bride Page 28
