The Covenant flourished in an urban world of merchants, professionals and other middling men. These people were all but absent from clan Highland life. So too was the king, and central government in general. Highland chiefs were traditionally not very interested in central government, or even in the making of laws. At home, they made their own. As for the monarch, in theory Highlanders were effusive in their tributes to the Stuart kings, but in practice they recognized few real obligations to them. Highlanders also shared with their royal master King Charles a love of disguise and tricks which is especially manifest in Montrose’s generalship and tactics. Montrose would be dependent, too, on men even more monoculturally clannish than he, notably the fighter Alasdair MacColla. Masking, mumming and women dressed in men’s clothing doing strange midnight dances were ineradicable parts of the Highland scene, and alien to the Presbyterian Kirk.
But Montrose signed the fierce and rigid Covenant. It is entirely probable that he was swayed by two things: the excitement of the moment which fed his personal ambition, and a very reasonable wish to influence events. He came from one of the oldest and noblest families in Scotland, and held estates in Perth, Stirling and Angus; he was educated richly and fully, in France and Italy as well as Scotland. He was graceful and handsome, with cold, lucid grey eyes. He was also a fine horseman and an excellent archer. He was, said Clarendon, too apt to condemn those he did not love.
He had been at the University of St Andrews, majoring, as it were, in hunting and hawking, in archery and golfing, though he did do some studying. At the age of seventeen, Montrose was married to Magdalene Carnegie, daughter of Lord Carnegie, afterwards Earl of Southesk. In 1633, as soon as he was twenty-one, he left Scotland to travel on the Continent. He had come back to Scotland in 1636, and had been presented to the king in London, by Hamilton, who apparently told Charles that someone as beautiful and charismatic and arrogant as Montrose could only be a menace. So Charles merely extended his hand to be kissed, then turned away. Montrose was bright and proud; he got the message. It has been suggested that the slight to his honour was what impelled him to see the merits of the Covenant. But he himself later wrote:
This our nation was reduced to almost irreparable evil by the perverse practices of these sometime pretended prelates, who having abused lawful authority did not only usurp to be lords over God’s inheritance, but also intruded themselves in prime places of civil government; and by their Court of High Commission, did so abandon themselves to the prejudice of the Gospel, that the very quintessence of Popery was publicly preached by Arminians, and the life of the Gospel stolen away by enforcing on the Kirk a dead service book, the brood of the bowels of the whore of Babylon, as also to the prejudice of the country, fining and confining at their pleasure: in such sort, that trampling upon the necks of all whose conscience could not condescend to be of their own coin, none were sure of life nor estate, till it pleased God to stir up his own instruments, both in Church and policy, for preventing further, and opposing, such impiety.
For Montrose, then, Covenanting was not always an angry response to rule from Westminster; it could also be an angry response to rule from Canterbury. Montrose had been reading not only the Bible, but Foxe and Spenser, and from them he had learned about the global war against the evil Whore of Babylon, popery whether lodged in the so-called Church of England or in Rome. It was that war which he set out to fight. But he set out to fight it as a Highlander, and this meant to increase his own power at the expense of other Highland nobles.
He was not the only one. Archibald Campbell, Earl and later Marquess of Argyll, a Highland noble with a huge estate, much of which had been acquired from the MacDonalds by very dubious methods, similarly had an eye to the main chance. He became an ardent Covenanter because the king was willing to employ the MacDonalds under the Catholic Earl of Antrim to suppress the ‘rebellion’. The new war of religion meant business as usual among nobles and clans who had been enemies for centuries. Meanwhile, veterans from Protestant armies on the Continent were flooding back to Scotland, forming a professional army under Alexander Leslie, who had held a senior command under Swedish Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus.
It was an age that loved plotting and feared the plotting of others, but there may have been a real conspiracy. The Scots’ success at doing what some English people longed to do – rolling back the Laudian reforms – struck the English forcibly. There is some evidence of high-level contact between the king’s godly opponents in all three kingdoms from the early 1630s. John Pym, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Saye and Sele actively plotted with their natural allies among the Covenanters to force Charles to call Parliament. Contemporaries thought that the Covenanters would never have dared to rebel without friends in England. We could even think of a kind of cross-border godly culture, with exchanges of publications, and personal contacts sensibly unmarked by treasonable correspondence. Print and pamphlets allowed the godly party in England to connect the terror of Catholicism with their own godly agenda.
This meant Montrose was not alone in his dread of the pope’s divisions. He believed firmly in monarchic power, too, but also thought that it must be restrained by law. He was elected to one of the ‘tables’, committees which also contained representatives of lairds, burghers and ministers, to monitor information which passed between the king and his council.
Opposite the Edinburgh Mercat Cross, a scaffold was erected. ‘James,’ said John Leslie to Montrose, ‘you will not be at rest till you be lifted up there above the rest in three fathoms of rope.’
From England, it all looked very different; so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading about different events. From London, the conflict did not appear to be a war about who the Scots were, but a war about the Laudian Church. To Charles, the Scots’ opposition seemed like a threat, a deliberate and mean attempt to undermine him. It was victory or death. His feelings blinded him to politics. For Charles, the Scots were out to destroy monarchy and impose a republic. ‘So long as the covenant is in force,’ he declared, ‘I am no more in Scotland than a Duke in Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.’ He spoke of ‘those traitors, the Covenanters’. He murmured defensively that ‘the blame for the consequences is theirs’. In August he ordered one of their propaganda sheets burned by the public hangman, and a few weeks later proclaimed all Scots invaders traitors whose lives were forfeit.
Charles saw the Covenanters as incomprehensible aliens, not as his familiar subjects even though he had spent his early childhood in Scotland, and may even have retained a very slight Scottish accent. Charles’s warm embrace of Europe in the person of his wife, his liking for European fashion and formality in matters of court life and religion, meant that Scottish plainness struck him as boorish and threatening.
Whitehall tried to organize an army under the Earl of Essex to go to Scotland. The godly Essex’s appointment was designed to reassure those who feared that the war was a campaign against the godly, since he had fought for the Dutch; however, Henrietta insisted that her ally the Earl of Holland be general of the horse. Holland was never an especially credible military leader, and his appointment convinced some that sinister forces were at work (meaning the queen). In fact Holland was part of a warmly Presbyterian faction at her court, which included Lucy Hay, but the anxiety about popery in high places refused to abate.
A slow-paced mobilization continued. Finally, at the end of March 1639, the king left, at the head of some 20,000 men, many of them notably unwilling. ‘We must needs go against the Scots for not being idolatrous and will have no mass amongst them’, declared an anonymous news-sheet. There was a shortage of incentives. Scotland was cold and plunder-free. The loyal, brave Sir Edmund Verney wrote to his son Ralph that ‘our army is but weak. Our purse is weaker, and if we fight with these forces and early in the year we shall have our throats cut, and to delay fighting long we cannot for want of money to keep our army together.’ He also commented that ‘I dare say there was never so raw, so unski
lful and so unwilling an army brought to fight … Truly here are many brave gentlemen that for point of honour must run such a hazard as truly would grieve any heart but his that does it purposely to ruin them. For mine own part I have lived till pain and trouble has made me weary of to do so, and the worst that can come shall not be unwelcome to me, but it is a pity to see what men are like to be slaughtered here, unless it shall please God to put it in the king’s heart to increase his army, or stay till these know what they do, for as yet they are as like to kill their fellows as the enemy.’
Verney thought he knew who the mysterious agents behind the war were: ‘The Catholics make a large contribution, as they pretend, and indeed use all the ways and means they can to set us by the ears, and I think they will not fail of their plot.’ He thought that in part because Henrietta Maria was diligently trying to persuade the English Catholics to prove their loyalty to Charles with lavish donations to the war chest. She wrote individually to Catholic gentry families and especially to women. Some ladies did give up their jewellery, and peers like the Marquess of Winchester contributed four-figure sums. But a mysterious letter purporting to be from the pope urged them not to give. This may have been good advice, whoever it came from, because the main result was to make good, not especially godly men like Verney suspect that a papist plot lay behind the Scottish war. Madame de Motteville, Henrietta’s friend and confidante after the war, said Henrietta had told her that Charles was indeed trying to transform Scottish religion in order eventually to restore popery. It wasn’t likely, but she may have hoped it was true.
For the raggle-taggle army, it was hot and miserable on the way from Newcastle to Alnwick, thirsty and slow, and Alnwick was in a state of ruin, having been all but abandoned by the Percys for the urbanities of Syon House. The king tried to behave like a good commander. He lived under canvas with his men, he rode up and down to cheer his army, wearing out two mounts. At Berwick the rain set in.
People were, to say the least, sceptical – about the war itself, its causes, the army’s chances of success. George Puryer was hauled before the Yorkshire Justices for opining ‘that the soldiers were all rogues that came against the Scots, and if it had not been for the Scots thirty thousand Irish had risen all in arms, and cut all our throats, and that the king and queen was at mass together, and that he would prove it upon record, and that he is fitter to be hanged than to be a king, and that he hoped ere long that Lashlaye [David Leslie] would be a king, for he was a better man than any was in England’. This outburst aptly summarized the grievances of those unenthusiastic about the entire campaign, but there was another factor too; in fighting for the wrong side in matters of religion, the people of Stuart England feared not only that they were unjust, but that it might be a sign that they were damned, even a sign that God was deserting the nation.
The First Bishops’ War amply fulfilled the worst apprehension of Verney and the nation. The king’s army camped outside Berwick in May 1639, and on 3 June the Earl of Holland, too, managed to find in himself an even worse performance than the country had expected. He and his cavalry sprinted ahead of the disordered infantry. Late in a long afternoon, Holland suddenly saw his folly in leaving them behind. Eight thousand Scottish footsoldiers were closing in on him, in a wide sickle, as if his men were grass ripe for cutting. Holland halted, sensing disaster. He and the Scots gazed at each other in a deadly game of chicken. Blustering, Holland sent a trumpeter to ask for the Scots to withdraw. Leslie, the Scottish commander, sent the messenger back, with a cool request that Holland withdraw instead. Holland had his only flash of good sense for the day. He obeyed, and fled, pursued by the Scots’ cries of derision. They were in fine fettle after weeks of sleeping rough and singing psalms. The English were miserable; when it wasn’t raining, it was hot, and when it was hot there were midges, and what on earth were they doing here anyway?
The commanders were busy. They were not, however, busy safeguarding the army or doing the king’s bidding. Holland and Newcastle were expending their energies fighting a duel over an incident connected with the colours; colourful indeed, and full of musty rites of honour, but quite beside the point.
The king and the Scots managed a kind of peace in June 1639, signing a truce. But even while they were doing so, amicably enough, the first battle of the Civil Wars had begun, between Scot and Scot, between the Gordons, ardent supporters of the king, and the Covenanters under Montrose, at the Bridge of Dee.
The man in charge of the defence of Aberdeen had every reason to dislike Montrose, since Montrose had earlier been responsible for his captivity. Montrose had occupied the town before, on 25 May, but by then the Royalists had melted away. Montrose had marched north to besiege some local lairds, and in his absence the king’s ships, captained by Aboyne, had reoccupied Aberdeen on 6 June. By then Montrose had gone south to make sure his foe was not leading another, larger force. Finding this fear to be groundless, he marched north again.
The Dee was brimful of rain, swollen and impassable. The bridge was barricaded with earth and stones. Montrose’s guns pounded the bridge from the southern bank, but made no impact; the shot passed over the heads of the defenders. Some women came out with suppers for their men, a cosy domestic event which was to be repeated many times in the wars that followed. The day wore on till nightfall, with nothing done. Montrose knew delay would defeat him. He moved his guns, and next morning the bridge took a real pounding; nonetheless the defenders clung on to the north bank. So Montrose decided on a feint. He led his horse westwards, as if he meant to cross higher up. He set a trap with himself as the bait. The cannons kept up their pounding; one volley of shot took Seton of Pitmedden in the belly, cutting off his torso from his legs. Once enough defenders had been distracted into pursuing Montrose himself, the rest of the Covenanters charged the bridge, and the defenders retreated. Montrose marched into Aberdeen, refused to burn it, but allowed his troops to feast on its salmon and corn. But it was not subdued. As Montrose stood in the town centre, the man standing next to him was shot dead. The bullet was probably meant for Montrose.
For London it was calming and consoling when Charles finally returned from the Scottish wars, on 3 August 1639, but enthusiasm was damped by the fact that he arrived in his mother-in-law’s carriage; symbolically this seemed to signify that he was under her thumb. The arrival of a Spanish fleet was rumoured to be an instrument for invasion of Scotland, England, or both. Ballads and newsbooks stressed the Spaniards’ amazing wealth; they were said to have fired gold and silver from their cannons when they ran out of ammunition.
So in an atmosphere of fear, the stories and rumours circulated faster and faster in London and its environs. The rumpus over the prayer book was beginning to look to some ardent Protestants like the beginning of a war of Good against Evil. In June 1640, rumour tore through Woolwich and Plumstead that the high constable had searched the house of one Mrs Ratcliff, and found ten beds, still warm from their hastily-departed papist sleepers. The rumour reached the blacksmith, Timothy Scudder, in his shop at Plumstead; he passed it on to his customers, adding that he had heard that forty or fifty men had landed at Woolwich, heading for Mrs Ratcliff’s home, called Burridge House. A man named Allen Churchmen was loading his cart with bricks when he saw the men too. Meanwhile the maid at Burridge House had told the wife of the victualler that there was a vault being made at the house; could the missing men from the beds be hidden in it? At the local tavern, too, workmen from the house were questioned by townspeople eager for the latest news. The story flew from person to person, lighting up the social network as it went. As more and more stories of this kind were told, panic and terror spread. Fear is a solvent of social glues.
With the Scottish question unresolved, Charles sent for someone used to pacifying unruly Celts. He summoned Thomas Wentworth.
In the late summer of 1639, Wentworth was still in Ireland, where he had done his best to galvanize the tottering Church of Ireland as an advance unit in the onward march of civilization.
Wentworth had managed to impose his own ideas on Ireland, but at the cost of alienating moderate Irish opinion, a policy whose drawbacks would become self-evident very shortly indeed. He had also become very rich through the normal joys of Stuart government: selling offices, taking over customs farms. He was distinctly reluctant to answer Charles’s command.
Perhaps Charles was a little afraid of this Yorkshire tough. ‘Come when you will,’ he wrote, with a mixture of autocracy and timidity, rather as he had once written to his elder brother, ‘ye shall be welcome to your assured friend, Charles Stuart.’ But Charles knew his man, perhaps informed about him by Henrietta, who in turn was briefed by Wentworth’s lover and court patron Lucy Hay. Charles at once granted him the earldom Wentworth badly wanted, so that he became Earl of Strafford; he also gave him command of the army. Wentworth’s plan was to use an Irish army to put down the Scots. But the situation was irretrievable. The Scots were all over Northumberland and Durham, and the English forces were the same poorly organized rabble; there was no chance of rounding them up. Wentworth kept hoping that English loathing of the Scots would galvanize them, but he underestimated the extent to which many Englishmen now felt that the Scots were their allies against enemies nearer at hand. So he was sent back to Ireland to raise money and soldiers. All this achieved was to create a panic in the already unruly troops about Catholics in their midst. Mutinies against ‘popish’ officers became common, and one officer was even set upon and beaten to death. Young Edmund Verney said he had to go to church three times a day to show his men that he was not Irish nor a papist.
In Ireland, there had been forty years of peace after Elizabeth I’s forces had finally defeated the Gaelic leaders in 1603. James could and did claim descent from the ancient royal houses of Ireland, which further strengthened London’s authority. The population expanded to around two million, and the economy grew too; there was now a small woollen industry, and some ironworks, but still to English eyes the majority of the people lived directly off the land, off bogs and forests. English-style landownership was slowly imported. Yet there were deep tensions. The largest group, three-quarters of the population, was the ethnic Irish, the Old Irish. Little has survived written by them, so it is hard to know how they saw themselves, but we do know that they were Catholic. Then there were the Old English, descendants of medieval settlers, also mainly Catholic but with a few Protestants like James Butler, Marquess of Ormond, mainly settled in the Dublin Pale, Munster and Connaught. Pushed out of high office by the Elizabethan regime to be replaced with Protestants despite their long loyalty to the Crown, they had begun to intermarry with and ally themselves to the Old Irish. The Old Irish were being pushed out, too – evicted from land their families had held for centuries by the Plantation Scheme, which took land from Irish Catholics and handed it over to Protestant settlers. Protestants knew how to farm properly – that is, in an English manner. There were 25,000 or so Scots among the settlers, because the government hoped that by encouraging this it would drive a wedge between the MacDonnells of Ulster and the McDonalds of Clan Ian Mor, both Catholic, both keen to form a single unit. Many Catholic Irish had begun to leave; some had left for foreign military service, and they were soon recruited by Spain to fight the Dutch, where they met the likes of London soldier Philip Skippon over the battlements, while Skippon in turn formed impressions of them, that they were part of a vast Catholic conspiracy to rule the world. Those who had fought against Spain in the Low Countries never forgot this.
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