by John Buchan
Was ever woman praised more nobly? But the glamour fell on others than the poets. “I see it is not good to be my friend,” she once wrote, and indeed a following so loyal could not but suffer in a cause so calamitous. But for Elizabeth’s sake men forgot worldly wisdom, and were back in the high days of chivalry. There were the young gentlemen of the Middle Temple, who kissed a sword and swore a solemn oath to live and die in her service. There was Sir Ralph Hopton, who, fresh from Oxford, accompanied her in the flight from Prague; and Conway, and Lord Carlisle, and Sir Dudley Carleton, and Lord Cromwell, and Sir Thomas Roe, and Christian of Brunswick. Soldiers, courtiers, ambassadors, bravos, each subscribed himself, like Christian, “your most humblest, most constant, most faithful, most affectionate, and most obedient slave, who loves you and will love you, infinitely and incessantly to death.” And there was Lord Craven, who laid his great fortune at her feet, and lived only to serve her.
What was there in Elizabeth to draw forth this wealth of love? Reckless, extravagant, exacting, perhaps a little heartless, there was about her a kind of stellar greatness, a spirit that could not be soiled or subdued by fate. Like Constance, she had “instructed her sorrows to be proud,” but it was a laughing pride which endeared as well as awed. “Though I have cause enough to be sad,” she wrote to Sir Thomas Roe, “yet I am still of my wild humour to be as merry as I can in spite of fortune.” She was a better friend than a mother, for her daughter Sophia declared that her monkeys and her dogs came before her children. The buffets of the world had a little calloused her. But her flawless courage remained, her winning humour, her subtlety, her abounding zest for life.
Montrose was a soldier after her own heart, and to him the mother of Rupert and Maurice was a joy in that rabble of half-hearted casuists. Her little sheaf of letters to him during these months shows how gracious an interlude their friendship was. She rallies the grave cavalier, and gives him the news of the court from the point of view of an ardent well-wisher. The Prince of Orange is against him, the Princess for him. “For God’s sake leave not the king so long as he is at Breda, for without question there is nothing that will be omitted to ruin you and your friends.” It was at her request that he sat for the splendid Honthorst portrait, which she hung in her cabinet that it might “frighten away the Brethren.” She is full of nicknames: Seaforth is “my Highlander,” Montrose himself, “Jamie Graham.” She commends recruits for his service, she invites him to Rhenen, her country house, to shoot at the butts with Kinnoull and exhibit his old undergraduate prowess; she sends him gossip to amuse him, and wild rumours from England. She tells him that “old Brainford” (Lord Brentford, who had once been Patrick Ruthven) was constant to him—”he says he is now too old to be a knave, having been honest ever”; no doubt he was honest, but he was rarely sober. And in every letter she sends fervent prayers for his success, and in the last for his “safety in Scotland.”
The bankrupt Palatines, men and women, were for a little the most dazzling things in Europe. Of the four daughters, Elizabeth, the handsome bluestocking and friend of Leibniz, died a spinster; the pink and white Henrietta married the Prince of Transylvania; Sophia espoused the Elector of Hanover, and became the ancestress of the royal house of Britain; Louise, charming, kind, ill-dressed, artistic, turned Catholic and died in extreme old age as abbess of Maubuisson. In the lively pages of Sophia’s memoirs there is a story of a projected marriage between Montrose and the last princess, but it may be dismissed as an idle tale. That chapter in his life had long ago been closed.
1649 Aug.-Sept.
IV
The preparations for the Scottish campaign began in June. Charles had promised that he would do nothing in any of his negotiations to prejudice Montrose’s commission as viceroy, and he had further nominated him his ambassador to the northern courts. Recruits there were in plenty, so far as officers were concerned — Scots mercenaries who had fought in the German wars and were only too anxious to find new employment; Scots patriots, such as Gustavus’s old colonel, John Gordon, who were eager to strike a blow for their country. Some of the said Scots were compromising allies, and the murder of the Commonwealth envoy, Dr. Dorislaus, at the Hague on 3rd May, did not lessen the difficulties of the king and his captain-general. But foreign troops and foreign money were also necessary, and to secure these Montrose sent his emissaries far and wide. His half-brother, Harry Graham, was dispatched to the Elector of Brandenburg, and got the promise of a large sum, which was never paid. In August Kinnoull, with 80 officers and 100 Danish recruits, set sail for the Orkneys in an ancient patched-up vessel, and after much trouble with tempests and Parliamentary frigates, arrived at Kirkwall in September. The reason for the choice of such a base is clear. The islanders were strangers to the religious strife of the mainland, and Lord Morton, their feudal superior, was Kinnoull’s uncle, and well disposed to the royalist cause. The Commonwealth navy, occupied with preventing Rupert’s escape from Ireland, was less likely to interfere with the transports if their route lay so far to the north. Further, the parts of Scotland adjoining were close to the Mackay and Mackenzie country, and Montrose looked for support from both clans. If he could command the northern apex of Scotland, then Leslie, to meet him, would have to march through the hostile hill country, and in the event of a royalist victory the central Highlands would rise to a man.
1649 Sept.-Nov.
Montrose himself arrived at Hamburg early in September. Here he negotiated for supplies with the Duke of Courland, and presently set off to Schleswig to meet Frederick, the new King of Denmark. He lingered for some time at Copenhagen, for this diplomacy was a slow business, and thence he dispatched letters to Rupert and Ormonde in Ireland, and to his friends in Scotland, which latter epistles were captured by the Estates. There, too, he had news of Kinnoull’s successful landing. Morton had welcomed him with open arms, and all was going well for the cause. The common people of Scotland, so Kinnoull reported, were on the eve of revolt against their masters. “Your lordship is gaped after with that expectation that the Jews had for their Messiah, and certainly your presence will restore your groaning country to its liberties and the king to his rights.” But he had other news less pleasing. Charles wrote from St. Germains on 19th September:
“I entreat you to go on vigorously, and with your wonted courage and care, in the preservation of those trusts I have committed to you, and not to be startled with any reports you may hear, as if I were otherwise inclined to the Presbyterians than when I left you. I assure you I am upon the same principles I was, and depend as much as ever upon your undertakings and endeavours for my service, being fully resolved to assist and support you therein to the uttermost of my power.”
This was ominous. Henrietta was at St. Germains, and Montrose knew too well her notion of policy.
1649 November
Early in November, finding it impossible to do much with Frederick, he passed over to Gothenburg in Sweden. The port was full of long-settled Scots merchants, and one, John Maclear, put his house and his wealth at his disposal. Montrose’s chief fear was that the reports of a treaty with the Covenant, at which Charles had hinted in his letter, would utterly dishearten the Scottish loyalists, and to counteract such a danger he issued what he had prepared some months before, the last and most famous of his declarations. The document is inspired by his old unhesitating courage. Montrose is as confident of the sacredness of his mission as any Covenant minister. He begins with a pertinent quotation from Tacitus; he indicts the Covenanters alike on their past and present policy; he offers in the king’s name pardon to all except proven regicides, and in a noble ending he summons all true Scottish hearts to make a last effort for freedom:
“Resolving, with Joab, to play the man for their people and the cities of their God, and let the Lord do whatever seemeth Him good; wherein, whatsomever shall behappen, they may at least be assured of Crastinus’s recompense that, dead or alive, the world will give them thanks.”
1649 Nov.-Dec.
The d
eclaration was circulated in Edinburgh in December, and, on the second day of the new year, Wariston issued the reply of the Estates, in which it was ordered to be burned by the hangman and its author denounced as “that viperous brood of Satan, whom the Estates of Parliament have long since declared traitor, the Church hath delivered into the hands of the devil, and the nation doth generally abhor.”
Christina of Sweden, Gustavus’s daughter and Descartes’s erratic disciple, was no more inclined than her neighbour of Denmark to support publicly the royalist cause. She could not afford to risk the displeasure of a great sea-power like England. It was from northern Europe that the Commonwealth looked for the expected invasion, and every port was full of its spies. The most she could do was to wink at his presence in Gothenburg and permit him to buy war stores. This was his chief task during December, and it is one of history’s ironies that certain supplies of powder and shot, which he did not take with him to Scotland, were afterwards used by the Covenanters against Cromwell. Early in that month a ship arrived from the Orkneys with melancholy news. David Leslie had marched north to Caithness in the end of October, and had written to Kinnoull advising him to depart while there was yet time. The letter was ordered to be burned by the hangman, and Leslie went south without crossing the Pentland Firth. But on the 12th of November the loyal Morton died, and a few days later Kinnoull fell sick of pleurisy and followed him to the grave. The loss of his friend and “passionate servant” was a heavy blow to Montrose. But Sir James Douglas, Morton’s brother, who arrived in the Orkney sloop, brought good news of the general feeling in Scotland. He implored the viceroy to sail at once, for “his own presence was able to do the business, and would undoubtedly bring 20,000 men together for the king’s service, all men being weary and impatient to live any longer under that bondage, pressing down their estates, their persons, and their consciences.” Montrose may well have believed a report so consonant with his desires. His ardour was always prone to make light of difficulties, and he had no wise old Napier to remind him that the feelings of Sir James Douglas and his friends were scarcely an index to the temper of burgesses and peasants, wearied out with poverty and the terrors of an Old Testament God.
1649-50 Dec.-March
In December he made an effort to leave. Transports were indeed dispatched with Danish troops and Scottish officers, as well as ammunition and stands of arms, and the wild weather they encountered gave rise to tales of shipwreck which gladdened the heart of the Estates. He wrote to Seaforth on the 15th of December saying that he meant to sail for Scotland next day. But the winds were contrary, and floating ice blocked the harbour, and it was not till January 10, 1650, that he actually embarked in the Herderinnen (“Shepherdess”), a frigate which Maclear had bought for him from the Swedish Admiralty. Still he did not start, and on the 18th we find him living in Maclear’s house on shore. We know now the reason of that delay which so puzzled the Swedish statesmen and the spies of the Commonwealth. He had received word that a dispatch was coming to him from the king in Jersey. For such a message he could not choose but wait.
1650 March
But at that season of the year, in those northern waters, communications were uncertain, and Montrose had to leave Gothenburg without the royal letter. The Herderinnen, with stores and guns, sailed at the beginning of March, and he crossed the snowy backbone of mountain that separates Sweden from Norway, and joined her at Bergen. The Commonwealth agents reported him there on 14th March, waiting to collect various officers, who were immobilized by lack of passage money at Hamburg or Bremen. Harry May, the king’s messenger, had to follow the viceroy to Kirkwall in the Orkneys, where he delivered the king’s letter on the 23rd of March. It was dated from Jersey on 12th January, and with it came the George and the blue riband of the Garter. There were two letters, one to be shown to his friends, and the other a private note for Montrose’s own eye, and enclosed in the packet were copies of the recent correspondence with the commissioners of the Estates. In the first letter the king informed his viceroy of the negotiations with the Scots Parliament and the chance of a treaty. Montrose, however, is assured that “we will not, before or during the treaty, do anything contrary to that power and authority which we have given you by our commission, nor consent to anything that may bring the least degree of diminution to it; and if the said treaty should produce an agreement, we will, with our uttermost care, so provide for the honour and interest of yourself, and of all that shall engage with you, as shall let the whole world see the high esteem we have for you.” It ends with an exhortation to “proceed vigorously and effectively in your undertaking”; and then, with an excess of candour, makes clear the reason. “We doubt not but all our loyal and well-affected subjects of Scotland will cordially and effectually join with you, and by that addition of strength either dispose those who are otherwise minded to make reasonable demands to us in a treaty, or be able to force them to it by arms, in case of their obstinate refusal.” He desires an asset to bargain with, a second string to his bow. The private note merely assured the recipient that Charles would never consent to anything to his prejudice, and bade him “not to take alarm at any reports or messages from others.”
It was a clear instruction to proceed with the invasion of Scotland, but it had an ugly air of double-dealing. The warning against reports argued that something had been done or said to give good cause for reports. Montrose, regardless of self, thought only of the danger to the king — the risk that by trusting his enemies he might walk into the same trap as his father. In his reply, on the 26th of March, he repeats that “it is not your fortune in you, but your Majesty in whatsomever fortune, that I make sacred to serve”; but he beseeches his master “to have a serious eye (now at last) upon the too open crafts are used against you, chiefly in this conjunction, and that it would please your Majesty to be so just to yourself as, ere you make a resolve upon your affairs or your person, your Majesty may be wisely pleased to hear the zealous opinions of your faithful servants, who have nothing in their hearts, nor before their eyes, but the joy of your Majesty’s prosperity and greatness, which shall be ever the only passion and study of your most sacred Majesty’s most humble, faithful, and most passionate subject and servant!”
There can be no doubt that when he wrote the letters of January Charles was loyal to Montrose, and that he counted more on Montrose’s success in the field than on the prospect of a treaty. This was the opinion of the shrewd Commonwealth agent, with an admirable gift of phrase, who contributed to the official gazette of the Council of State, A Brief Relation. It was proved by the royal warrants, dated as late as 29th March, appointing the veteran Lord Eythin to be Montrose’s second-in-command. The king was no doubt determined to secure honourable terms for his captain-general in any treaty. But he hankered after a union of all Scotland on his side, which would be linked to a royalist rising in England, and he believed that incompatibles might be harmonized by an adroit negotiator, the more if there were a triumphant army in the background. The plan was an idle dream; Montrose was the true realist when he held that Charles’s only chance lay in a policy of Scottish ways for Scotland, English ways for England, and the king for both — a policy which meant good-bye to Argyll and the theocrats of the Solemn League. Charles had no intention of bringing Montrose to catastrophe, but he made it certain by the treaty which he pursued, nay, by the very fact of negotiating at all at such a juncture. Moreover, when Montrose received the king’s message that had happened which, had he known it, might have added another protest to his reply. As early as 19th January the first letter had been published in Paris, and a précis was in the hands of the Commonwealth Government. It may have got out by a clerical blunder, for the royal secretariat was not over-competent. It may have been published by the Montrose faction in Paris to defeat the projected treaty, or the issue may have been authorized by Charles to help the treaty’s fortunes. There is evidence for each of the three explanations. But, whether we account for the publicity given to it by accident, malad
roit diplomacy, or blundering psychology, the result was disastrous. Already the letter had been broadcast over Scotland. Had Montrose been accompanied by a large and well-equipped foreign army no harm would have been done, but he had still his army to find, and it was in Scotland that he sought it. It is one thing to fight in a crusade; it is another to share in a campaign whose avowed purpose is no more than to create an object to bargain with. On such mercantile terms you cannot conjure the spirit that wins battles. The half-hearted would wait upon the result of the chaffering. Well might Mr. Secretary Nicholas write to Ormonde: “Some (not without reason) apprehend that the report of the now approaching treaty will make those of a better sort forbear to appear for him, until they shall see the issue of this treaty.” The dice had been loaded against the venture before it was begun. The king had sent Montrose to his death.
CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST CAMPAIGN (March-May, 1650)
When my affaires goe wrong, I remember that saying of Loucan, Tam mala Pompeii quam prospera mundus adoret.
— Claverhouse to Menteith, July 1680.
1650 March
It has been the fashion among historians to describe the last campaign as doomed from the start. So in a sense it was, but its hopelessness did not lie in the actual military and political situation in Scotland at the moment. That had never been more favourable. Montrose was, indeed, as far off as ever from commending himself and his faith to that Covenanting bourgeoisie which he never lost the hope of converting. But the arm of the Covenant was shortened. The disaster at Preston had depleted the fighting strength of the Lowlands, and had driven a wedge into the Estates. Many of the nobles who had once obeyed Argyll were now prepared to follow him only in so far as he allied himself with the king. A real bitterness against England had surged up in the nation, and this meant popularity for Charles, and a fall in esteem for those who had dallied with Charles’s enemies. The Estates had no war-chest; every burgh had been bled white by taxation, and all sections of the people were out of humour with the Edinburgh junta. The government of the Covenanters, now an undisguised theocracy, was as incompetent as it was oppressive. In January of the preceding year the famous Act of Classes had been passed, which excluded from every office — from a ministry of state to a burgh deaconate of crafts — all who were not of one narrow type in political and religious opinions and conduct, and which gave the Kirk an absolute veto on all public appointments. It was as if the theocracy had set out to caricature itself, and it was fast disillusioning every sympathizer who had the smallest share of practical wisdom.