by John Buchan
1646 September
Happily a small Norwegian sloop was in the harbour of Stonehaven, and its master, one Jens Gunnersen, agreed to sail with the exiles. Hurry, Wishart, and Drummond of Balloch; Harry Graham, Montrose’s half-brother; John Spottiswoode, one of the nephews whom old Sir Robert had entrusted to the viceroy’s charge; three soldiers, John Lisle or Lillie, whom we shall meet later at Carbisdale, Patrick Melvin, and David Guthrie; a Frenchman Lasound, who had been Lord Gordon’s valet; and a young German called Rudolf made up the little party. The sloop sailed down to Montrose roads on the 3rd of September, and that evening Mr. James Wood, a minister, and his servant put off in a wherry from the shore, and were taken aboard. The servant was Montrose. “This,” says Wishart, “was in the year of our Lord, 1646, and the thirty-fourth of his age.”
BOOK III — PASSION
CHAPTER XV. THE YEARS OF EXILE (September 1646-March 1650)
Byrhtwold spoke and grasped his shield — he was an old companion — he shook his ashen spear, and taught courage to them that fought: “Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, mood shall be the more, as our might lessens. Here our prince lies low, they have hewn him to death! Grief and sorrow for ever on the man that leaves this war-play!”
— Song of Maldon, W.P. Ker’s translation.
I
1646 September
For over two years Montrose had been living the life of the camp, his mind concentrated upon the immediate purpose of winning battles. His main strategical plan of joining hands with the king on the Border and severing the alliance of the Scots and the English Parliament had failed through no fault of his, and the lack of this larger co-operation had nullified his local victories. But he had not given up hope, even though Charles was a prisoner. Before he left Scotland he had sent Crawford to the queen in Paris with a proposal to raise the clans and rescue the king from his captors. He regarded himself as still a serving soldier, and his survey was narrowed to the field of arms. No more for him those speculations on the theory of the State, which had been his earlier interest. The time had gone by for reason and philosophy; unreason, armed and mailed, had seized the reins of power, and the philosopher must now be the warrior and appeal to a harsher arbitrament than dialectic. Some such narrowing of vision was inevitable. The king was no longer the king of his discourse on “Sovereign Power,” but the master who commanded his sword, and the kaleidoscopic changes of events and parties in England he regarded with an eye only to their military reaction. His life and thought were restricted to a single purpose.
1646-47 Sept.-Feb.
After a week’s tossing in the North Sea Montrose reached the Norwegian port of Bergen, where he found a Scot, one Thomas Gray, in command of the castle. His immediate purpose was to visit Denmark to meet Christian IV., with whom, as the uncle of Charles, he might confer on the next step. He had talked for months with none but rough-handed Scots nobles, and he needed some one with a wider survey to advise him on the complications of his task. He had sheathed his sword at his master’s bidding, but his life was dedicated to the cause, and from that devotion there could be no release but death. So on 15th September the exiles started on the overland route to Christiania, probably sailing up the Sognefiord to Leardalsören, and then traversing the backbone of mountains by the Leardal valley and Valders. From the little port of Marstrand they crossed into Denmark, only to find that King Christian was in Germany. Montrose passed on to Hamburg, where he spent the winter waiting for instructions.
1647
But no instructions came — not even his credentials as ambassador — extraordinary to France which Charles had promised him. One letter he had from the king, dated from Newcastle on January 21, 1647, in which he was referred for orders to the queen; and one from Henrietta Maria, written from Paris on 5th February, promising further dispatches, and subscribing herself his “very good and affectionate cousin and friend.” The parasites and adventurers who surrounded the queen were resolute that Montrose should not break in upon their follies with his untimely zeal. When, tired of waiting on orders that did not arrive, he left Hamburg in March, he was met in Flanders by John Ashburnham with a second letter from Henrietta, and a suggestion from Jermyn that he should return to Scotland and renew the war. As no reference was made to his own proposals sent through Crawford, Montrose naturally refused to engage in an enterprise for which he had no resources and no warrant from his master. Ashburnham then hinted that he might make his peace with the Covenanters, following the royal precedent. The proposal was indignantly rejected. “Not even the king,” he said, “should command his obedience in what was dishonourable, unjust, and destructive to his Majesty himself.”
Queen Henrietta Maria,
after the portrait by Vandyke.
In Paris the queen received him graciously, but, when he preached the immediate necessity of armed intervention in her husband’s behalf, she made it very clear that his counsels were not those most grateful to the royal ears. Jermyn and the rest gave him tepid smiles and the cold shoulder. To one of his temper the mingled silliness and vice of Henrietta’s court must have been in the extreme repulsive. The king was a captive, the flower of English and Scottish chivalry had died for his sake, and these mountebanks were turning life into a thing of backstairs gossip and idle laughter. There appears to have been a suggestion that his niece, Lilias Napier, a spirited girl in her teens, should become a maid of honour, but Montrose sternly forbade it. “There is neither Scots man nor Scots woman welcome that way; neither would any of honour and virtue, chiefly a woman, suffer themselves to live in so lewd and worthless a place.”
But if the tawdry court-in-exile had little to say to him, Paris made amends. His fame had gone abroad throughout Europe, and the most distinguished men in France came to pay him their respects. He was given precedence before the regular ambassadors. De Retz, who had followed his campaigns with admiration, welcomed him as a Roman hero reborn in a degenerate world. The great Mazarin offered him the command of the Scots in France, and a lieutenant-generalship in the French army; then the captaincy of the Gens d’Armes, with a large pension; and, last, the captaincy of the king’s own guard and the rank of Marshal of France. The young Napier, who had now joined him, was eager that he should accept. A dazzling career opened before him, for with his talents in the field he might look to be a second Condé, rich, idolized, the head of a great army, and not the impoverished captain of a few ragged exiles. But to enter the French service meant, in common decency, to give up thoughts of any other, and his sword had been dedicated and was not his own to sell.
Meanwhile strange things were happening in the country which he had left. On January 30, 1647, the Scots army, as Montrose had always anticipated, had handed over the king to the English Parliament. The carts, laden with the deferred pay of Leven’s soldiers, were soon rumbling over the Border, while the women of Newcastle were with difficulty prevented from stoning the retiring troops, and ribald songs were beginning to be sung everywhere in England and France. It is difficult to read the dispatches of Montreuil and Bellièvre, and not believe that the Scots had guaranteed to Charles personal security; their very Covenants bound them to this, and beyond doubt, when Charles committed himself to their charge, he believed that with them, even if he did not find support for his doctrine of government, he would at any rate be assured of safety. He believed it, and they knew that he believed it; they seem to have believed it themselves, for there is on record a declaration of a Commission of the General Assembly that the Scots did not deliver up the king “until sufficient surety was given by both Houses of Parliament ensuring the safety and the preservation of his Majesty’s person.” Such a guarantee, implied and explicit, was broken by his transference to other hands. But it is no less certain that the consideration for the bargain was not the money. Had Charles complied with their conditions about Presbytery, they would gladly have forfeited the arrears of the English payments and defied English Parliament and English army. They sold their king
indeed, but it was for a different price, and one which was never paid — the enforcement, urged by some on prudential and by others on mystical grounds, of an alien church polity which was rapidly becoming anathema to the English nation.
The transference of the king was the defeat of Presbyterianism south of the Border; thenceforth the struggle was of Royalist and Independent. The division between Scotland and England became sharper; monarchy and intolerance were arrayed against republicanism and toleration. In June Charles passed from the Parliament into the charge of Cromwell’s army, and on his way south he wrote to Montrose from Newmarket, bidding him again take instructions from Henrietta, and thanking him for the present of a sword. It was a strange gift to one whose career in the field was closed for ever. But the doings of Cornet Joyce had alarmed the more moderate of the Covenanters, and that party began to reveal the characteristic of all factions, and split in two. There had been much divided opinion about the transactions of the preceding January; there was now no dominant party in England to which the Covenanters as a body could adhere; English dislike of them was returned with interest; they regarded the sectaries and their gospel of toleration with scarcely more love than they regarded episcopacy and royalism. Hamilton was back in Scotland, and was busy making a party of those who favoured the Covenant but did not favour Cromwell, and professed devotion to the principle of monarchy. In November Charles escaped to Carisbrooke castle, in the Isle of Wight — a mere change of prison; and there, on 27th December, he entered into a secret engagement, with Lanark, Loudoun, and Lauderdale as signatories. The scheme was doomed from the start, both by its terms and the character of its promoters. They combined these incompatibles, the king and the Solemn League; their royalism offended the Independents, their Covenant alienated the royalists, and they had nothing wherewith to attract any substantial English following. They had not even a creed to unite Scotland. They strove for nothing which had any real meaning. There was no half-way house between Montrose and Argyll.
William, Earl of Lanark, and
John Maitland, First Duke of Lauderdale,
after the portrait by Cornelis Janssen.
1648
Nevertheless, the Estates, when they assembled in March 1648, gave the Engagers a large majority, and sanctioned the raising of an army to rescue the king from that captivity into which a year before they had sold him. Argyll went into opposition, as well he might. Apart from his dislike of the Hamiltons, who sponsored the Engagement, a man of his acumen realized that out of such a medley of half-hearted blunderers there could only come disaster. Robert Baillie, who was against the Engagement, yet deplored the intransigence of the leaders of the Kirk and his own party, was moved to write almost in Montrose’s words: “I am more and more in the mind that it were for the good of the world that churchmen did meddle with ecclesiastical affairs only; that, were they never so able otherwise, they are unhappy statesmen; that, as Erastian Cæsaro-Papism is hurtful to the Church, so an Episcopal Papa-Cæsarism is unfortunate for the State. If no man were wiser than I am, we should not make so many scruples to settle the throne and pull down the sectaries.”
One of the first steps which the Engagers took was to communicate with Henrietta and the Prince of Wales in Paris. The queen did not inform Montrose of their proposals till she had made up her mind to accept them and had already committed herself. He knew too much of Hamilton to look for great things in that quarter, but he offered to do all in his power to save the situation by enlisting under his own banner those royalists who would enlist under no other, and by supporting the Engagers in the field. Hamilton’s envoys, however, had warned the queen that Montrose must have no share in the business, and his offer was coldly declined. In despair he looked elsewhere for a sphere of action where he could further his master’s interests and raise troops for his service. Mazarin and his colleagues were half-hearted in Charles’s cause, and too cordial in their treatment of the English Parliament. So at the end of March 1648 he slipped away from Paris with some of his friends, and travelled by Genoa and Tyrol to the Emperor’s court at Vienna.
Wishart’s account in Latin of the annus mirabilis of 1644-45 had been published in Holland towards the close of 1647, and had leaped at once into a wide popularity. The doings of the Scottish soldier were the talk of every camp and city in Europe, and at the imperial court Montrose found himself welcomed as a hero. The Emperor Ferdinand IV., whom he found at Prague, gave him the crimson baton of a Marshal of the Empire, and empowered him to raise troops in any quarter of his dominions. The Emperor’s brother and successor, the Archduke Leopold, was Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and Montrose was advised that the western border of the empire was the place for his purpose. It had the further merit of being nearer Britain in case of a summons from home. Germany was too much harassed by war to make easy travelling, so Montrose returned by Cracow and Dantzig to Denmark, and thence by way of Groningen to Brussels. He found the archduke at Tournai, but it was his fate to look for help from those who at the moment had none to give. As he had met Rupert on the morrow of Marston Moor, so he found Leopold on the morrow of Lens, where, on the 20th of August, the genius of Condé had scattered the imperial troops.
He accordingly returned to Brussels, where he received startling news from Scotland. To the bulk of the English royalists the Engagement made no appeal, since it contained “so many monstrous concessions that, except the whole Kingdom of England had been likewise imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle with the king, it could not be imagined that it was possible to be performed.” Scotland was wildly divided. The great bulk of the ministers were opposed to it, for though they liked the English sectaries little they liked the king less; the pulpits rang with denunciations, and in May there was an armed rising at Mauchline, in Ayrshire, which was with difficulty suppressed by Middleton and Callander. Argyll, Eglinton, Balmerino, Elcho, Cassilis, and Balcarres, the leaders of the opposition, were joined by Loudoun the Chancellor, who suddenly turned his coat. The Engagers were in desperate straits for money, and in still more desperate straits for leaders, for David Leslie belonged to the other faction. Hamilton, who had not a vestige of military talent, was their commander-in-chief, with Callander, who was no more than a disciplinarian, as his second-in-command; Middleton, his master of horse, was the only able soldier.
Leaving their enemies mustering behind them, the Engagers crossed the Border on 8th July, with Sir Marmaduke Langdale as their solitary English ally, and their only appeal to the English people their proposals to free the king, disband the Parliament army, and restore the Covenant. Lanark would have liked to take order with Argyll and the ministers before leaving Scotland — the wiser plan; but indeed the wisdom of any plan signified little under such generalship as Hamilton’s. He had 10,500 men, Langdale had nearly 3,000, and Sir George Monro joined him at Kendal with part of the Scots army from Ireland. The history of the disastrous march may be read in Clarendon and Burnet and the memoirs of Sir James Turner. The Scottish forces were under no central command, and their division was their undoing. Lambert was waiting for them in Yorkshire, and Cromwell joined him on 13th August. On the 17th Callander and Middleton, with the cavalry, were as far south as Wigan; Hamilton was at Preston, about to cross the Ribble, with Langdale behind him, while Monro was far behind with Musgrave in the north. Cromwell, having made, in Montrose’s fashion, a swift flank march over the Lancashire hills, fell upon the centre at Preston — it was “St. Covenant’s Day,” the anniversary of the signing of the Solemn League — routed it and cut the army in two. The dismembered van dribbled south, Baillie with 4,000 foot surrendering at Warrington bridge, and Hamilton with the cavalry at Uttoxeter.
During the next weeks Scotland was in dire confusion. Eglinton and Loudoun organized the Whigamore Raid of west-country peasants, which occupied Edinburgh. Monro almost captured Argyll at Stirling, and Lanark, with Monro’s aid, could no doubt have destroyed the Whigamores, had not his colleagues overruled him. The Estates capitulated on shameful terms to
the Kirk. On 21st September Cromwell crossed the Tweed and met Argyll, and on 4th October was in Edinburgh. He stayed in Lord Moray’s house in the Canongate, dined with Argyll and Wariston, and met the leading ministers like Blair, Dickson, and Guthrie. Of the nobles he wrote that “he found nothing in them other than what became Christians and men of honour.” Mr. Blair thought him “an egregious dissembler, a great liar . . . and a greeting deevil.” Argyll, as usual, was right in his diagnosis. With his keen eye for political values he had attached himself to the strongest force of the day. But he cannot have thought hopefully of the future, for the extremists of the Kirk, to whom both by conviction and policy he was bound, held no single article of Cromwell’s creed except his distrust of the king, and they had rejected the only help which could enable them to stand against him. He must have felt the foundations cracking under his feet. He had begun that half-hearted alliance with Oliver which was to bring him to the scaffold.
1648-49
The news from home revived in Montrose the old eagerness to strike another blow for the king. He had appealed in vain to the queen and her circle; he was excluded from the dreary and futile schemes of the Engagers; he had failed with middle age, and during the winter of 1648, in Brussels, he tried an appeal to youth. He wrote to the Prince of Wales, to the Duke of York, and to Prince Rupert — repeatedly to the last, whose temper resembled his own in so far as its besetting sin was not supineness. Rupert was now at Helvoetsluys in charge of the small royalist fleet, much beset by the Parliamentary ships of war under Lord Warwick, and in constant difficulty from mutinous crews and short supplies. On 7th September Montrose wrote to him: