Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  Baillie was soon aware that the day was lost. Haldane’s escapade brought him racing back from Balcarres’s side, but the mischief had been done. He endeavoured in vain to rally the foot at the ravine of the burn, and then in despair galloped to the rear for the Fife reserves. But the men of Fife had early despaired of the issue, and were in full flight for their homes. About the same time Montrose’s trumpets sounded the general advance. The whole royalist army swept up the hill, but no foe awaited them on the crest. The semicircle of the little amphitheatre was empty, and the outside rim was strewn with fleeing horse and foot. Of the 6,000 men who had set out that morning to fight under the Covenant’s banner only a few hundreds escaped. The murder of their women in Methven wood had not disposed Ulsterman or Highlander to a mercy which they knew would never be extended to themselves. Many of the horse, too, perished, caught in the mires of Dullatur. The leaders escaped, as commonly happened in the Covenant’s battles. The lairds and nobles had better horses, and they had no scruple of honour in saving their own necks and leaving the plain folk, who had trusted them, to die on the field. Well for themselves that the western Covenanters were too late for the fight and had ample time to escape. Lanark fled to Berwick, Glencairn and Cassilis to Ireland. Baillie and Holbourn sought sanctuary in Stirling castle, where they were joined by Balcarres, Burleigh, and Tullibardine. Loudoun and Lindsay posted to England. Argyll galloped twenty miles to Queensferry on the Forth, where he found a boat which landed him in Berwick in the safe keeping of the Scots garrison. As at Inveraray and at Inverlochy, he escaped by water from Montrose’s swords.

  The decisive battle had at last been fought. So far as Scotland was concerned, the forces of the Covenant were annihilated, and its leaders were in exile. Scarcely a year had passed since that August evening when, with two companions, Montrose had alighted at the door of Tullibelton — without men, money, or prospects, and with no resources for his wild mission save the gallantry of his heart. Since then he had scourged the Covenant from Lorn to Buchan, and from Lochaber to Angus. With halting allies and few troops, with poor weapons and scanty ammunition, amid broken promises and private sorrows and endless disappointments, he had sought out his enemies and had beaten them wherever he found them. He had excelled them in strategy and in tactics, in cavalry and in infantry movements, in the offensive and the defensive. He had shown himself able to adapt his slender resources to any emergency, and to rise superior to any misfortune. His reward had come. For the moment he was the undisputed master of all Scotland.

  CHAPTER XIII. THE WAR ON THE BORDER (August-September 1645)

  Had one seen him returning from a victory, he would by his silence have suspected that he had lost the day; and had he beheld him in retreat, he would have collected him a conqueror by the cheerfulness of his spirit.

  — Thomas Fuller.

  I

  1645 August

  “I profess to you,” wrote Digby to Jermyn on the 21st of September, a month after Kilsyth, “I never did look upon our business with that assurance that I do now, of God’s carrying us through with His own immediate hand, for all this work of Montrose is above what can be attributed to mankind.” To Charles, uneasily moving about the Welsh marches, the star that had arisen in the north seemed to herald a better dawn. Even at that late hour it is clear that, if there had been any other royalist leader with a tithe of Montrose’s genius, the king’s crown need not have fallen. But from England he received only empty praise. What had become of Sir Philip Musgrave’s 500 horse, what of the 1,500 men whom Digby had promised? Montrose had been true to his word; he had scattered the Covenant in Scotland, and deprived Leven and Leslie of a base. But to “fix his conquests” was beyond the power of mortal man unless help came from the south. He himself thought otherwise. He hoped still to lead a great army across the Border, and redress the sinking balance in Charles’s favour. He had no fear of his antagonists; “though God should rain Leslies from Heaven, he would fight them.” But his courage outran the possibilities. Scotland was subdued, not converted, and, unless the king came north as a conqueror, Montrose would have to wrestle daily and desperately to hold her to her unwilling allegiance. Never in history have Highlands dominated Lowlands for long.

  But at first the prospect had a delusive brightness. After waiting two days at Kilsyth, during which he sent a message of assurance to the city of Glasgow, the victorious general entered the capital of the west. Here, seven years before, had been held the General Assembly at which episcopacy in Scotland had been abolished, and Montrose, in his Presbyterian zeal, had shown himself the foremost in the baiting of Hamilton. The place had never evinced the fanatic virulence of Edinburgh. Pride in their great church, happily saved from the iconoclasts, had kept its citizens on the side of decency and temperance in religious affairs. A deputation from the town council met the king’s lieutenant outside the walls, offering the value of £500 in English money as a largesse to the soldiers, and praying that the city might be left unmolested. To this request Montrose readily agreed. He issued stringent orders against theft and violence, and his entry was welcomed with a popular enthusiasm hardly to be looked for in the Lowlands. Zachary Boyd, that erratic singer of Israel, wrote Latin verses in his honour. Unfortunately the sight of the well-stocked booths and the prosperous dwellings of the Saltmarket and the Gallowgate was too much for some of his followers, who had not believed that so much wealth existed in the world, and could not readily forget their Highland creed that spoil should follow victory. Looting began, and Montrose, true to his word, promptly hanged several of the malefactors. But he saw that Glasgow would prove too severe a trial to his army, so two days after his arrival, about the 20th of August, he marched six miles up the river to Bothwell.

  Here he took measures for the government of Scotland, which the fortunes of war had entrusted to his hands. The first business was to stamp out the embers of disaffection. Some of Eglinton’s levies were still threatening in the west, and Alasdair was dispatched to bring them to reason. He met with no opposition, and to his surprise was welcomed cordially at Loudoun castle by the wife of the Covenanting chancellor. The shires and burghs of Renfrew and Ayr sent in their submission and petitioned for favour. Other towns and counties followed suit, and presently arrived the nobles and gentry to greet the rising sun. The midlands of Scotland were naturally foremost. Loyalists like Seton and Fleming and Erskine, cautious men like Linlithgow and Carnegie and Maderty, declared opponents like Drummond, who had commanded the Covenant horse at Tippermuir, hastened to Bothwell. More important were the recruits from the south, the nobles whom Montrose had solicited in vain at Dumfries the year before. Annandale and Hartfell swore allegiance, as did powerful lairds like Charteris of Amisfield, and those Border earls, Roxburgh and Home, who for the past four years had coquetted with both king and Covenant. Traquair, another waverer, sent his son, Lord Linton, with the promise of a troop of horse. Carnwath’s brother, Sir John Dalziel, brought the wildest blood in the Lowlands to the standard. And to crown all came the Marquis of Douglas, who, as Lord Angus, had been the travelling companion of Montrose’s youth. The prestige of the Bloody Heart had not wholly died even in an age which had tried to bolt the door on the past, and the vast Douglas lands in Clydesdale and Dumfries promised a rich recruiting ground.

  There were other allies to be gathered. At the earliest opportunity the Master of Napier and Nathaniel Gordon were dispatched Edinburghwards on a gaol delivery. From the prison of Linlithgow they released Lord Napier and Stirling of Keir, and the ladies of the Napier and Stirling families. Arrived within four miles of Edinburgh, they summoned the city in the king’s name, and received the humble submission of a deputation from the town council. A money fine was offered, and it was explained that the city had been driven into rebellion against its will by the craft of a few seditious men. The plague, which was still raging, had sapped all civic valour, and Edinburgh was ready to promise anything for peace. The Tolbooth was full of royalists, and during the year death and
sickness had raged in that noisome place. Crawford, Ogilvy, Reay, Irvine of Drum, Ogilvy of Powrie, and Wishart the chaplain were among those set free, and the released captives, white and gaunt as a bone, stumbled out into the sunlight. Wishart never forgot the experience. It made him, as he said, “a friend of prisoners for ever”; in later years he could not enjoy a good meal at his episcopal table till he had sent part of it to the Tolbooth; and he bore the marks of the rats’ teeth to his grave. One captive they did not recover. The young Lord Graham was in the castle, and the castle was still in Covenant hands. The gallant boy refused an exchange, declaring that it would ill become one so young and useless to deprive his father of a single prisoner.

  Napier and Gordon had another mission to execute in the east. They carried a letter from Montrose to Drummond of Hawthornden, begging for a copy of his Irene, the pamphlet written in 1638 during Montrose’s Covenanting days, that it might be printed and published “to the contentment of all His Majesty’s good subjects.” He had already granted him a special protection for his house and property. The old poet promised to transcribe and send the paper, “since, by the mercy of God on your Excellency’s victorious arms, the Golden Age is returned”; but before it arrived Scotland was back in the age of iron.

  1645 September

  By the 1st of September Napier and Gordon, with their released prisoners, were in the camp at Bothwell. On that day Sir Robert Spottiswoode, the king’s secretary for Scotland, arrived with letters from Charles. He brought with him a patent, dated at Hereford on the 25th of June, creating Montrose lieutenant-governor and captain-general of Scotland. The royal instructions were to join the Border earls and march with all haste to Tweed. As these had been issued before Alford and Kilsyth, they seemed to Montrose to have redoubled force, now that he was master of all Scotland. Besides, Home and Roxburgh had written pleading with him to come to Tweedside and add their spears to his standard. Every prospect seemed rosy, and Montrose dispatched a post to the king, announcing that he hoped speedily to cross the Border with 20,000 men. On the 3rd of September he held a great review of his troops in Bothwell haugh, when the royal commission was presented to the viceroy and handed for proclamation to Sir Archibald Primrose, the founder of the family of Rosebery. Montrose’s first act under his new patent was to confer upon Alasdair the honour of knighthood. He had nobly earned it. The next four months of blundering in Argyll were to show how little of a general the Ulsterman was on his own account. Two years later he was to disappear from history, stabbed in the back in an obscure Irish fray. But as Montrose’s chief brigadier he was worth an army, and his stand at Auldearn will live as long as feats of valour can stir the hearts of men.

  As soon as the king’s commission was received, Montrose, as viceroy of Scotland, took steps for the administration of the government. He had already in the king’s name assured loyalists in the possession of lands which Argyll or the Estates had threatened. He now issued proclamation to the chief towns, summoning a Parliament to be held in Glasgow on the 20th of October following, “for settling religion and peace, and freeing the oppressed subjects of those insupportable burdens they have groaned under this time bygone.” He prepared also a statement which he probably intended to present to Parliament when it assembled. It is on the lines of his Dumfries manifesto, but a fuller and clearer confession of faith. He repeats the justification of the National Covenant — the evils of an unnatural and enforced prelacy, under which ecclesiastics intermeddled with civil government, and “the life of the Gospel was stolen away by enforcing on the Kirk a dead service book.” To every line of that Covenant he still adhered, but long ago its mission was accomplished. First at Berwick and then at Ripon the king had granted all their demands. Further no true Covenanter could go, for the cause of the Covenant was also the cause of king and country. All that had been done since had been alien to the true Covenant spirit, and every honest man must needs part company with its perverters. “We were constrained to suffer them to deviate without us, with the multitude misled by them, whose eyes they seal in what concerns religion, and whose hearts they steal away in what concerns loyalty.” He expounds his own difficulties—”wrestling betwixt extremities” — till facts decided for him. The nobles had tasted the “sweetness of government,” and they would not be content till they had destroyed “lawful authority and the liberty of the subject.” The Kirk had coerced men into a blind obedience, a tyranny worse than papacy. He took up arms, he says, first, for national religion, “the restoration of that which our first reformers had”; second, for the maintenance of the central authority, the king’s; and, third, for the “vindication of our nation from the base servitude of subjects who, like the Israelites, have their burdens doubled, but are not sensible of them.” He answers his critics, especially those timorous souls who are “so stuffed with infidelity that they can believe nothing but what they see, and can commit nothing to God.” If he had used the services of Alasdair Macdonald, a “professed Papist,” had not his opponents employed in Ireland, under Monro, the selfsame people? He repudiated the charge of blood-guiltiness. He had never “shed the blood of any but of such as were sent forth by them to shed our blood and take our lives,” adding with a touch of the Covenanters’ own idiom, “and what is done in the land it may sensibly seem to be the Lord’s doing, in making a handful to overthrow multitudes.” Freedom and toleration in religion, a strong central government, and a lighter taxation for the burdened people of Scotland — for these he had drawn the sword.

  It was the appeal to his countrymen on which he hoped to build a civil authority to correspond to that which he had won in war. As an ideal of statescraft it was profound; as tactics, as a step in the political game, it was bound to fail. The appeal was unintelligible to all save a few, and the defence did not convince. The people of the Lowlands had lost friends and kinsmen in the Highland wars, their ears had been horrified with endless tales of pillage and violence, and at the back of every Lowland heart lay a jealousy and dislike of the Celt, whether Ulster or Scottish, as of a race they did not understand. To say that Monro had used similar troops in Ireland was no more convincing to most people than to urge that the clans had once fought bravely at Bannockburn for Scottish independence. To point to Argyll’s barbarities in the Highlands as worse than any of Alasdair’s doings was to miss the point of the grievance. To a Lowlander the victims in the first case were savages and aliens, and in the latter they were “kindly Scots.” As for the king, there was still some loyal sentiment for him in Scotland, a clannish feeling, for had she not given to England the royal house? But the feeling was only sentimental, while Montrose’s royalism was a reasoned appeal for a central authority, whatever name it might be given — an appeal which nobody, except perhaps Napier, understood. As for the Kirk, no doubt its encroachments were becoming a burden, but it had the terrible mastery over its people which is given by the possession of the keys of heaven and hell. Before that tyranny could be broken there were to be long years of struggle and much shedding of innocent blood. Besides, the Lowlands had no other voice or ear than the ministers. They were the sole interpreters, teachers, and guides. No mere proclamation could break through that plate-armour of defence to the starved and puzzled souls behind it. The one argument of practical value was the promise to reduce the grievous weight of taxation. But a Lowland burgher or peasant might well have been pardoned for doubting whether Montrose, with an army of hungry kerns to keep, would prove an easier tax-collector. The remonstrance, while of the highest value as a clue to Montrose’s philosophy, shows that he wholly misread the immediate political situation. He could look for recruits only to those who were tired of the domineering Kirk and jealous of the Covenant leaders. Such were to be found among the nobles and gentry alone, and these, and the tenantry they could command, were all that appeared in his camp at Bothwell.

  Meanwhile that army which had fought under him in so many battles was beginning to melt away. The Highlanders wanted to get back to their homes. It was th
eir duty, for the families left behind had rarely food for more than a week or two, and would starve if the husbands and fathers did not return often to replenish the pot. Miserably poor, war was a business to them, and they had to deposit their winnings. They had stayed on after Kilsyth, in the hope of the plunder of Glasgow, but Glasgow was inviolate, and one or two of them, who had tried to use the rich town as they considered it should be used, were now swinging from Glasgow gibbets for their pains. Further, the £500 which the citizens had offered was not to be paid. The town council, fearing lest the meeting of Parliament would cost the city large sums, had begged to be let off the contribution, and Montrose had consented. The clans were disgusted, and began to trickle away. There were other reasons. The Macleans must look after their homes in Mull, or the Campbells would be avenging Kilsyth. Clan Donald had still grudges to avenge on Clan Diarmaid, which not even Inverlochy had satisfied. There is no reason to blame the Highlanders unduly. Organized Lowland warfare, such as Montrose now proposed, was a thing which they did not understand, and which upset the whole system and tradition of their lives. Alasdair alone deserves censure. He was an experienced soldier, and knew something of the difficulties that lay before his chief. But his knighthood and his new post of captain-general of the clans under Montrose seem to have turned his head. He proposed to himself a campaign in Argyll which should root the Campbells out of the peninsula. He promised to return, and no doubt honestly meant it, but from the moment when he marched off with half his Irishry and all the Highlanders, Montrose never saw his old lieutenant again. Five hundred Ulstermen, under the gallant O’Cahan, refused, to their eternal honour, to leave the royal standard.