A voice cried out from the crowd below, an alien voice, the voice of an English stranger:
‘Small wonder you cowards cannot look upon the face of Montrose! You’ve never dared do so these seven years past.’
Argyll slammed the other shutter to. Now they were shut in together, he and Warriston, whom he loathed, who feared him.
Outside by the Mercat Cross, stark against the pale brilliant light of the May evening, stood the new thirty-foot-high gallows erected for their victim, who had proved victorious.
XII
It was just on seven o’clock when he reached the Tolbooth where he was to be imprisoned. The City Guard of Edinburgh were drawn up before it, with their Captain, Major Weir, in command. It was he now who would take charge of the prisoner.
Montrose’s bonds were cut; he climbed down from the condemned cart and gave the driver a piece of gold.
‘There, fellow, is drink-money for driving the cart,’ he said, and turned towards his new jailer.
He saw a tall dark man about fifty years old, in a black cloak, who held in his hand a long staff with a crooked head of thornwood. It was no symbol of office for the Captain of the City Guard, but since his retirement from active military service a year or two ago, Major Weir never went anywhere without it.
He kept his eyes on the ground while General Leslie spoke with him, a practice which Montrose soon observed to be customary with him, but when the General and the troops had departed, he looked at last at his prisoner.
In that instant Montrose saw something he had not seen since as a youth he had looked, uncomprehending, at the bloated, battered face, with its round red cheeks and purposeful joviality, of the Italianate German, Carlippis, servant to Montrose’s brother-in-law Sir John Colquhoun, the man who had helped his master seduce and abduct Montrose’s younger sister by means of witchcraft.
Major Weir’s appearance was as different from that servant’s false bonhomie as it was possible to be, for it was commanding, almost majestic, and with so great and formal a gravity that it seemed he must carry that staff to strike upon the ground and give warning whenever he was about to make a pronouncement. And the pronouncement, as Montrose already knew, for Weir’s reputation as one of the Covenant’s most fervid saints had spread far beyond Edinburgh, was certain to be one of impassioned sanctity.
Yet something had left the same mark on him as on that gross sceptic who had helped wreck the home of Montrose’s two sisters.
Terrible as his past journey had been, Montrose had been cheered on it by the sight of human beings going about their business, some of them old and patient with the wisdom learned by inevitable experience, some young and glad with the vigorous promise of life. These people had been human, even the Macleods, that unhappy weakling and his brutally grasping wife.
But now as he stood before Major Weir, at first sight of that ravaged terrible face, the eyes like live coals on either side of the big aggressive nose, he felt that he was to be shut in with a devil. Here was a man to whom life itself, its powers and opportunities, were not enough; who needed to supplement them by unholy means; a man who early in life had sworn himself to the old perverse creed – ‘Evil, be thou my good.’
He came in out of the clear sunlight, the fresh winds and swiftly falling rain of the open country of these past days, into the tomb-like cold and dark of the prison room in the Tolbooth where the light of day never reached, and by Major Weir’s orders only one small tallow candle was allowed to give its guttering yellow light.
He had only just entered the room when there arrived representatives from the Committee of Estates and several ministers, all of whom questioned him and exhorted him to confess and repent his heinous crimes against God and man.
He refused to answer, indeed at that moment he could hardly have done so, whoever had spoken to him. He was worn out physically; he had just looked once again upon his two greatest enemies, and upon the gallows on which in three days’ time he was to hang; he had this moment felt in the person of his jailer a stronger will and determination towards evil than could be accounted for by merely human agency.
The power of evil seemed paramount in his country, and indeed in the whole world at this time. Of what use to try to meet it with answers and arguments?
Yet he met it with a smile; for, said he, ‘You must excuse my talking with you now. The compliments you have put on me this day have proved something tedious.’
They went uneasily away. He was left with his guards, and Major Weir.
By Weir’s orders the guards who stayed in the room with him night and day smoked continually, for he had discovered how intensely his prisoner disliked the smell of tobacco. It might be only a small annoyance, but nothing was too small for Major Weir’s attention if it could give pain of whatever sort. He remained in the room himself nearly all the time, and kept up a current of abuse of Montrose in which ‘Dog’, ‘Atheist’ and ‘Excommunicate traitor’ were some of the milder epithets.
If, as sometimes happened, the common soldiers with him showed any sign of discomfort at this, if only by getting a convenient fit of coughing when he was most violent, he turned and jeered at them, telling them that it was such half-hearted milksops as they that did God’s cause most harm.
‘God is not mocked with such feeble service. God has forsaken this heathen dog utterly and spewed him out of His mouth, – lifted him up for a little and given him victory only that he might be the more utterly cast down. And this is the proof of it, that in no one thing will God let him succeed. Look at his attempt to escape, when he had got clear away through all his ordinary guards; but God sent guards extraordinary, as it might be His own angels from heaven, to prevent him.’
Mat Caldy, private, under cover of filling his pipe, stole a glance at his Corporal to see how he took this definition of troopers who left their appointed quarters to get a drink, but quickly turned away his eyes as he saw the Corporal did not dare meet them.
It wasn’t good to cross Major Weir by even so much as a wink. There were some mighty odd things whispered about him, but none dared do more than whisper; if they did, they got the worst of it. There was a woman just lately who had complained to the minister of New Mills of the Major’s conduct in a field near by, and by order of the Magistrates of Lanark had been whipped through the town by the common hangman as ‘a slanderer of such an eminent holy man’.
That was the sort of thing that happened to anyone who ventured to cross Weir. So they kept silent while their Major, standing, as if he were addressing one of the ‘house-coventicles’ of the elect where he had acquired so great a reputation as a preacher, and leaning a little forward on his long staff, fixed those restlessly burning eyes on his prisoner and told him what imbecile hypocrisy and effrontery it was in him to try to pray.
‘Look at him, you fellows – there on his knees, pretending to pray to God, who would not let him repent even if he could!’
Montrose raised his head and met those dreadful eyes with a look so piercing that the soldiers remembered it long afterwards, and declared that it made Weir’s hand shake so that he nearly dropped his staff.
‘You hate me to repent of my sins,’ Montrose said. ‘That means that you too, Major Weir, wish to repent, and one day will try to do so.’
‘Liar!’ shrieked the Major, clutching his staff firmly into his grasp again. From the terror in his voice, Montrose might have prophesied the most appalling doom for him, but he quickly recovered and continued to preach, or rather to pray for damnation on his prisoner, with the frantic fluency that had won him an almost miraculous reputation among the ‘Bow- head Saints’. The pious women around his lodging in the West Bow by the Grassmarket were wont to speak of him as ‘Angelical Thomas’.
The ministers worked their utmost to counteract the impression that Montrose’s entry into the city had made on the people. All the next day, being Sunday, the heavy hour-glasses on the pulpits were turned and turned again while the preachers poured forth their fury for thre
e hours, in some cases four, against James Graham, excommunicated by the Kirk, accursed of God; and against the stubborn and craven populace that had refused to throw their stones and filth at him.
And all that day both ministers and members of the Scots Parliament preached at him, striving to wring from him some confession of his own guilt, or at least a complaint of King Charles’ treatment of him.
For that latter purpose they told him that Charles had signed the Treaty of Breda with them on the ist of this month, ‘that their Commissioners and the King’s Majesty were agreed, and that his Majesty was coming here to this country with them’.
So that had been done while he was wandering on the desolate moors round Assynt. The news struck him a blow, but he did not show it. He saw what his enemies would be at – to try to ruin Charles through his servant, as they had ruined him through his King.
And the next day, Monday, they were there again by eight o’clock in the morning. He was to be summoned at ten o’clock before the bar of Parliament to hear his sentence. He had not yet had any breakfast, and not one moment of quiet in which to prepare an answer to his judges.
Instead, he had now to summon all his wits to answer these men who were pestering him, in defiance of the fever that throbbed in his brain, so that some of those sturdy citizens present who had slept comfortably in warm feather-beds and breakfasted heartily that morning, considered his manner rather ‘airy and volage’ for the gravity that they expected from a great nobleman under sentence of death, though at the same time they accused him of being ‘aspiring and lofty’.
It did not seem to matter much which he owned to; he admitted that God had made men of different dispositions (how long was this futility to continue?). One of them told him ‘he was a faggot of hell and he already saw him burning’.
There was no answer to make to that, whether ‘aspiring and lofty’ or ‘airy and volage’.
At last came the main charge: that he had taken the Covenant in his youth, then turned against it and broken it. To that he answered quickly that the National Covenant which he had taken, he still owned, a Covenant that had aimed only at keeping the Scots ordinance of religion free from interference.
‘But when the King had granted you all your desires, and you were every one sitting under his vine and his fig tree, – that then you should have taken the King’s enemies in England by the hand, and entered into the Solemn League and Covenant with them against the King, that was a thing I judged it my duty to oppose to the yondmost.’
Certainly none of them at this moment could have called his manner ‘airy and volage’. It was he who had become the accuser and they the guilty parties. He sternly told them, ‘that course of yours did not end until it brought about the King’s death and overturned the whole Government’.
They looked nervously at each other, hesitating in their search for an answer. One said in excuse that it was not they but Cromwell’s sectarian party that had ‘carried things beyond the true and first intention’.
‘Error is infinite,’ he answered, and wondered when and where he had said those words before.
He would say no more.
They told him that since he would not submit himself in repentance to them he must die excommunicate, in ‘the fearful apprehension that what is bound on earth, God will bind in heaven’.
They left him to eat a little bread dipped in ale, and then be taken immediately before the bar of Parliament.
He wore a black and scarlet suit of his, laced with silver, which his niece Lilias Napier, then in Edinburgh, had been able to send to him, though neither she nor any of his friends was allowed to visit him. He looked magnificent in spite of his white, gaunt face; and the very men that showed their agreement of the charges of ‘boundless pride and ambition’ in this ‘the most cruel and inhuman butchery of his country’, admitted in private his ‘courage and modesty, unmoved and undaunted’.
He still gave no hint of reproach of King Charles, but maintained that his last campaign was ‘by His Majesty’s just commands’.
He warned them: “Be not too rash; let me be judged by the laws of God, the laws of nature and nations, and the laws of this land.’
And if they would not judge by the laws of men, he bade them remember ‘the righteous Judge of the world who one day must be your Judge and mine’.
But the only answer to that was the command to kneel and hear his sentence. It was read by Archibald Johnston of Warriston, whom Montrose had known and instantly disliked as the sickly, raving clerk who had been used to engineer emotional propaganda in the early days of the troubles. Since then his propaganda had grown into one long howl for blood.
Now surely it should be appeased, as he mouthed the horrible words condemning the prisoner to be hanged tomorrow on a gibbet at the Cross of Edinburgh until he died, and to hang for three hours after in the view of the people, then to be beheaded and quartered, his head to be set on a spike above the Tolbooth in Edinburgh, his legs and arms at the gates of Stirling, Glasgow, Perth, and Aberdeen; the rest of the body, if he died repentant, to be buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, but if he remained obdurate, to be thrown into the unhallowed ground of the Boroughmuir.
That ‘evil scraped tongue’, as Warriston had himself lamentably called his own harsh voice, reached the end of the sentence in shrill ecstasy. Montrose, kneeling before him as commanded, lifted up his face and looked the neurotic in the eyes.
Then he was taken back to the Tolbooth, where still the ministers and magistrates thronged in on him in their ceaseless nagging persecution. It lasted till late on this his last evening.
There was one plea for mercy, with narrow limits. The Provost of Edinburgh, an ardent Covenanter, asked: ‘What need of so much butchery and dismembering? Has not beheading, and publicly affixing the head, been thought sufficient for the most atrocious State crimes hitherto?’ He even went so far as to call the sentence ‘unmanly’. But his mild protest went unheeded; and those who were in the little dark cell with the prisoner kept on insisting on every hideous detail of the execution.
It made no odds to Montrose.
‘Let them bestow on every airt a limb!’ he flung at them. It would make no difference what happened to his broken body once his spirit had left it and returned to the God who had created it. So—
‘Let them bestow on every airt a limb.’
The words came again in his mind through all the clash of reproach and argument and ceaseless questioning round him; they strung themselves to others in the same rhythm; once again, on this his last night, he was making verses, as Raleigh had done on his last night in the Tower of London.
‘Scatter my ashes, strew them in the air,
Lord, since thou know’st where all these atoms are.
I’m hopeful thou’lt recover once my dust
And confident thou’lt raise me with the just.’
He had need of that confidence. One voice after another was insisting, praying, that eternal death and damnation were now the certain fate of his soul. All he wanted now was to be alone with his soul, and he was not allowed it. Their voices clacked and clamoured, unmeaning but disturbing; he was only half conscious of them, but they would not let him think.
The ministers drew back, consulted together, decided that, since their combined efforts had proved fruitless, Mr Robert Baillie, who had once admired and been on friendly terms with the prisoner, should see what he could do by himself to bring the sinner to repentance. They pushed him forward, Mr Baillie for once reluctant to make a move. He went forward hesitatingly and stepped back as Montrose swung round, his patience suddenly at breaking-point.
‘I pray you, gentlemen,’ he flung out, ‘let me die in peace.’
And he walked away to the furthest corner of his cell, but Mr Baillie, urged on by his fellows, came after him, and stood there looking up at him, with none of the bold inquisitiveness and confidence in his own sound judgement and upright dealing that he had shown at their last encounter on the terrace of the Hou
se in the Wood, but with a puzzled humble expression rather like a spaniel’s in his round blue eyes. He faltered out a few words so low and confused that Montrose could only distinguish ‘my lord’, but that in itself was surprising, since the Government had decreed his titles forfeit and when he stood before the bar of the Parliament all had been careful to address him only as ‘sir’.
‘My lord,’ said Baillie again, with an anxious glance over his shoulder to make sure the rest of his company were not listening, but they had gone through into the outer cell to give him his chance with the culprit, ‘it may be a sin and vanity in me to address Your Lordship thus, for indeed I do not find in the New Testament that Christ has any lords in His house, which was the reason I gave long ago for refusing a bishopric.’
He stopped, having lost his thread.
‘Bishops? I care nothing for them,’ Montrose answered wearily, thinking that the whole subject of the Kirk and the Bishops’ War was to be dragged up again.
But that was not Mr Baillie’s intention; he had some difficulty in saying his intention or in knowing it himself. His thoughts were flustering in his head and he did not know which of them to get out nor how to do it, though God knows words had never failed him in his life before whether in speech or writing, they had always come bubbling out of him as fast as a river in spate, – and now, when he most wanted them, they failed him.
He had watched and heard Montrose before his judges that morning and had felt, as he had done at the trial and death of the great Earl of Stratford, that ‘huge things are here in working – the mighty hand of God be about this great work’. But he could not feel as sure as he had done that time, when nine years younger, in what way that ‘mighty hand’ was moving.
He had come here with his fellow-ministers meaning to pray and wrestle with the Devil once more for this man’s proud and obdurate soul that he had once called noble and generous. But all that he had meant to say had gone out of his head as he watched them swooping and striking their talons into this wounded lion who would tomorrow be their carrion.
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