by John Buchan
“When your Highness shall be pleased to know that I was ever a silent admirer of you, and a passionate affecter of your person and all your ways, you will be pleased to allow me recourse to your goodness and generosity. And the rather that your Highness sees I am for the present at such distance with all interests, as no end but naked respect can now prompt me to it; which, if your Highness shall do me the honour to take in good part, and command me to continue, I shall hope it will not wrong the king your uncle’s service, nor what may touch your Highness both in relation to those and these parts, in either of which I should presume to be able to do you some small services.”
Rupert replied affectionately, and the stately and involved correspondence continued till January 1649. A meeting was constantly discussed, but Rupert could not leave the fleet and come to Brussels, and Montrose could hardly venture to that nest of spies, the Hague. The latter’s purpose is clear. He wanted Rupert to take the fleet to Scotland, and he did not want him to involve himself in Lauderdale’s toils.
“Since there be so handsome and probable grounds for a clear and gallant design if the measures be rightly taken, I should be infinitely sorry that your Highness should be induced to hazard your own person, or these little rests (remnants) upon any desperate thrust.”
1649 January
It does not appear that a meeting ever took place, and in January 1649, after refitting by the sale of his sister’s jewels, Rupert took the fleet to join Ormonde in Ireland.
Hitherto there had been no word from the Prince of Wales; he and his mother had still hopes of the Engagers, and feared to offend them by any intercourse with their deadly enemy. Presently, however, the young Charles emancipated himself from the queen and her set, and took up his residence with Hyde at the Hague. Montrose had friends who had the prince’s ear, and in January 1649 he received a message from him, bidding him arrange with Hyde for a secret interview. The prince had entered upon the policy of keeping two strings to his bow. While holding the Engagers in play, he wished to have Montrose as a last resort; but, as the insistence upon secrecy shows, he was anxious to make the former believe that he looked only to them. Montrose replied that he would joyfully obey the summons, but implored the prince to distinguish true loyalty from false. “If your Highness shall but vouchsafe a little faith unto your loyal servants, and stand at guard with others, your affairs can soon be whole.”
He wrote also: “I never had passion upon earth so strong as to do the king, your father, service.” This was on the 28th of January. Two days later, on a snowy afternoon, on a scaffold in Whitehall, that king “not cowardly” put off his armour.
1649 February
II
From the day when he heard from Hyde the news of the tragedy, almost to the close of his life, a strange oppression settled upon Montrose. A sense of dark and menacing fate hung like a cloud about him. He had been no sentimental cavalier; he did not believe in Divine Right; to him the Lord’s Anointed had never had the sanctity which he possessed for many royalists. But out of his inner soul he had created the image of an ideal monarch, wise with a wisdom to which no earthly king has attained, a personification of the dreams which had always haunted him. He had, too, the devotion of a loyal soldier to the master for whom he had risked so much. But, more than all, he saw in the tragedy the darkening of the skies over his own unhappy land. The savage and stupid barbarism of the Covenant, which had revelled in blood in the Lord’s name, now seemed at last to have reached omnipotence, for it had destroyed the centre of all civil order. Henceforth there could be no compromise. He knew nothing of the folly and duplicity which preceded Charles’s ultimate heroism; his rejection of compromises which would have secured to him all that was worthy in his cause; his futile search for allies who were alike perjured and impotent, and his double-dealing towards those who had on their side both honesty and power. He saw only the shedding of innocent blood, which must make a breach for all time between those who loved righteousness and those who pursued iniquity. When he heard the news he fainted among his friends. For two days he kept his chamber, and when Wishart entered he found on the table these lines:
“Great, good, and just, could I but rate
My grief, and thy too rigid fate,
I’d weep the world in such a strain
As it should deluge once again.
But since thy loud-tongued blood demands supplies
More from Briareus’ hands than Argus’ eyes,
I’ll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds,
And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds.”
From this moment there is an uncanniness about him, as of one who lives half his time in another world. He has himself painted in coal-black armour; his eyes have a fire which changes their cool greyness into something wilder and fiercer; all youthful weaknesses seem purged away — his pride, his intolerance, his condescension — for his patience becomes unearthly, and his gentleness unhuman. He has the air of a “fey” man, for whom the barriers between the seen and the unseen are breaking down.
1649 March
In the middle of February he met Hyde at Sevenbergen. Hyde never liked him as Nicholas and Hopton and Digby did, and in the writings of the future Lord Clarendon admiration is always tinged with acid. But he was a loyal servant of the new king, and he recognized capacity when he saw it; to him Montrose was the man of the “clearest spirit and honour” among the king’s advisers, and to be preferred “before any other of that nation.” Montrose proposed an immediate expedition to Scotland, but Hyde urged delay, and begged him not to show himself as yet publicly at the king’s court. But when the former heard that the commissioners from Scotland were at the Hague, he insisted on presenting himself at once to the king. He found the young Charles already in the thick of Scottish intrigues, for the immediate result of the king’s death had been to send a wave of loyalty over that distracted land. On the 4th of February Charles the Second was proclaimed at the market-cross of Edinburgh by Loudoun the Chancellor. As we have seen, there had always been an odd royalism flickering through the nation, often in the most unlikely places; the king was a poor thing, but their own, like the misguided Covenant; it might be well for his own people, the Scots, to take order with him, but it was high treason in those who hated Scotland as much as they hated Charles. The feeling was of a piece with the later Jacobitism, an assertion of nationality on the part of a small, proud, bitterly poor country, jealous of her rich neighbour, not yet confident in herself. It was sentimental, not reasoned, and was found even among the extreme Covenanters. Mr. Robert Blair of St. Andrews was anxious to attend Charles on the scaffold. “He made his account to die with the king, and would as willingly have laid down his head to the hatchet as ever he laid his head to a pillow.” In November 1650 we find Mr. Robert Baillie writing to Mr. David Dickson: “If my lord Argyll at this strait should desert the king . . . I think, and many more with me of the best I speak with, that it would be a fearful sin in him, which God will revenge.” No doubt in ministerial breasts loyalty was intertwined with the Covenant, but it was loyalty of a kind. Hamilton’s death on the scaffold in March intensified the feeling of national resentment which Preston had kindled. The luckless duke was not a brilliant figure. His epitaph has been spoken by Alison Wilson in Old Mortality: “That was him that lost his head at London. Folks said that it wasna a very guid ane, but it was aye a sair loss to him, puir gentleman.” It had been prophesied — and the prophecy had hag-ridden his mind — that he would succeed the king; but he fell heir not to a throne, but to a scaffold.
1649 March-June
Montrose, watching Scotland from a distance, may well have believed that the aspect of affairs was more promising than ever before. There were, indeed, no Gordons to appeal to. Huntly had at last fallen into his enemy’s hands, and his “bustling in the north,” as Sir James Turner called his vagrant activity, was over for ever. On 23rd March he was beheaded in Edinburgh, lamenting pathetically that he had done so little for the cause he
died for, and stoutly refusing to be released from the excommunication of the Kirk, which could not affect him where he was going. Aboyne was in exile, dying of a broken heart, and the Gordon lands were in the power of Lord Lewis, who was soon to make his peace with his uncle. But the great northern clan of Mackenzie was hopeful. Its chief, Seaforth, had arrived at the exiled court, and his brother, Mackenzie of Pluscardine, had raised his clan in March, and along with Reay and Ogilvy had taken Inverness and given much trouble to David Leslie. They were soon to be scattered, but the hope of the Mackenzies remained. Moreover, the Covenanters could not long maintain peace with the English Parliament, or Argyll continue his pact with Cromwell, since they stood for monarchy and the Covenant, while Cromwell would have none of either. In such a quarrel honesty might come by its own. During the next few months the Hague was the battlefield of contending factions. There were three parties in Scottish politics: the rigid Covenanters with Argyll at their head, who were prepared to accept Charles if he would accept the Solemn League and Covenant and agree to the imposition of Presbytery on England; the Engagers, whose emissaries in Holland were Lanark and Lauderdale, and who had similar principles, but proposed to apply them more laxly; and the royalists sans phrase, like Montrose, Kinnoull, Sinclair, and Napier, who were wholly against a Covenant which would make co-operation with the English loyalists impossible. In March the envoys of the Estates arrived, among them Cassilis and Mr. Robert Baillie, who, with many protestations of loyalty, demanded as the price of kingship the Covenant in all its rigidity and the repudiation of all excommunicated persons, “especially James Graham, a man most justly . . . cast out of the Church of God . . . upon whose head lies more innocent blood than for many years hath done on the head of any one, the most bloody murtherer in our nation.”
It is not easy to see exactly what Argyll would have been at. He was a realist in politics, and not a dreamer, but it would appear that he was losing his sense of reality. The king’s execution had broken his alliance with Cromwell; his desire was for the establishment of Presbytery in both nations, but his speech in the House of Lords on June 25, 1646, showed that he was prepared to advocate an elastic Presbytery with toleration for other sects; on such a programme he might have secured most of the Engagers, and considerable English support. But to return to the extreme Presbyterian claims, to demand a subscription from the king which must involve the sin of perjury, to refuse all alliance except with those of the same narrow creed, was to make Cromwell’s triumph as certain as the rising of the sun. He was opposed to a great soldier with a powerful army, and he began by depriving himself of the best natural fighting material in Scotland — the clans — and the only generalship of the first order — Montrose’s. Moreover, a united England and Scotland had always been one of his worthiest policies, and this intransigence was to make the fissure a gulf. The conditions which he would impose on the king brought on him the hostility of most loyalists; his fidelity to monarchy set him in opposition to Cromwell and the Independents; his insistence upon the most intolerant Scots type of Presbytery marshalled against him the whole of England. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that from henceforth this adroit politician is losing his grip. He ceased to be a realist, and fell back upon the deepest strain in his nature — the religious enthusiasm which he had acquired long before at the Glasgow Assembly; and this, shot with flickering lights of irrelevant worldly wisdom, remained his mood till his death. “My thought,” he wrote of this period to his son, “became distracted, and myself encountered so many difficulties in the way, that all remedies that were applied had the quite contrary operation. Whatever, therefore, hath been said by me or others in this matter, you must refute and accept them as from a distracted man of a distracted subject in the distracted time wherein I lived.”
The Engagers were more politic, and pressed their demands more modestly, but in substance they asked for the same thing. Lanark, indeed, in his first zeal after Preston, was prepared to “join with the lord Marquis of Montrose and all the king’s party,” and was “so far from contesting about command, that he would be a serjeant under Montrose.” But as Duke of Hamilton in his brother’s stead, he fell into timider courses; if Charles was to become king it was necessary to unite Scotland, and Montrose was a perilous bone of contention. As for Lauderdale, his pure soul had been shocked (so he said) by Montrose’s barbarities, though, on cross-examination by Hyde, he was unable to give an instance of any slaughter “but what was done in the field.” The man whose foul table-talk was the byword of the Restoration court, and sickened even the king, was an odd censor of morals. There is a picture by Cornelius Janssen in which Hamilton and Lauderdale are portrayed side by side, a scroll passing between them, and in the dark, uncertain features of the one and the gross, gobbling mouth and cunning eyes of the other may be read all the weakness of the Engagement.
It was Montrose who was now the realist. He desired a policy which would attract the maximum support in the two kingdoms — the restoration of monarchy on constitutional lines, with freedom secured to each country for the kind of church it favoured. Charles demanded an opinion from both the royalists and the Engagers as to the conditions of the Estates. Montrose’s reply is still extant, and differs from the other remonstrances and declarations through which he had already published his faith to the world only in that it is directed to a narrower issue. It traced the history of the Covenant movement from its justifiable beginnings to its impossible end; it pointed out that the Covenanters required from the king a renunciation of his own private form of worship, “and yet they made it a ground of rebellion against your royal father that they but imagined he intended to meddle with them after the like kind.” The document was read in Charles’s council on the 21st of May, the terms of the Estates were refused, and Montrose was confirmed in his vice-royalty and appointed admiral of the Scottish seas.
1649 June
Apparently the king had made up his mind. He had rejected Argyll and, having accepted Montrose, had also rejected the Engagers. He stood committed now to some such bold attempt as his captain-general had always urged. He wrote to Montrose from Breda on 22nd June that he would come to no decision touching the affairs of Scotland without consulting him, and the Duke of York a month later wrote to congratulate him on his new “occasion of employment.” At that time the plan was for the king to go to Ireland and establish there his principal base, but Cromwell’s expedition in August caused its relinquishment. Scotland remained, and in Cromwell’s absence in Ireland during the whole of the winter 1649-50 there lay a sovran chance of organizing the former country for the king. Montrose had wished the king to join him there, but he had acquiesced in the Irish alternative, for his one fear was that Charles should go to Scotland in bond to the Covenant. But already Charles had begun to regard the Scottish expedition with uncertain eyes. He favoured it chiefly that he might have another asset in bargaining with the Estates. In the wars of the Middle Ages both sides on the eve of peace endeavoured to take as many fortresses as possible in order to have something to give up when the day of renunciation came; and so it was with Charles now. The intrigues with Covenanters and Engagers still went on, though the scene was moved to Paris and the court of Henrietta. Jermyn seems to have patched up a friendship with the new Hamilton, and attempted to get Montrose’s commission as viceroy annulled in his favour. “They are all mad, or worse,” was the judgment of Elizabeth of Bohemia on that nest of futile and selfish schemers.
Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia,
after the portrait by Miereveldt.
III
Montrose, at the Hague, made a new friend, and while following Charles that summer to Breda and Brussels, and when, later in the autumn, he was recruiting among the countries of northern Europe, he had a correspondent who kept a jealous eye on his interests. In his youth sentimental girls had written him love-letters; his marriage had been a love-match; but since he had been compelled to serve a new mistress, “the first foe in the field,” no woman had playe
d a part in his life. The lady who now entered it was the most celebrated in Europe. Elizabeth of the Palatine, for some brief winter months Queen of Bohemia, had the strange compelling power of her grandmother, Mary of Scots, over the hearts of men. As a girl she had been the idol of her country, for she had the fire and brilliance and endearing simplicity of her brother Henry. Her wedding to the Prince Palatine had set all England junketing for weeks. Then came the disastrous episode of the Bohemian throne, the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, the loss of both Bohemia and the Palatine, her husband’s death, and the squalor of a court in exile, dependent upon foreign bounty. But misfortune, no more than age, could dim her charm. When Montrose first met her she was in her early fifties, as we see her in the portraits by Honthorst and Miereveldt — a woman who had left youth behind her, one who had known the whole range of mortal joys and sorrows, with a mouth a little narrowed by pain and disappointment, but with great brown eyes still full of the hunger of life. Few crossed her path but were beguiled, and either became her devotees and the sharers in her broken fortunes, or to their dying day cherished the memory of her as if in a shrine. Zachary Boyd, in far-off Glasgow, came under a spell which is patent even in his halting verses. Donne sent her his sermons and his prayers. To the staid Sir Henry Wotton she was “the eclipse and glory of her kind,” and he wrote in anguish, “Shall I die without seeing again my royal mistress?”
“You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
You common people of the skies,
What are you when the moon shall rise?”