The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  In front of him Hurry now saw the square platform of the scaffold and on it the immense new gallows. The guillotine, long nicknamed the Maiden, stood near by for Hurry and the prisoners who would follow him. The executions would be delayed over several weeks, he had been told, so as to give full warning to the people of Edinburgh.

  ‘The Ministers’ Altar’ they were already calling that scaffold that was to run with blood in the heart of their city.

  There was a group of black-robed figures on the scaffold, and among them, as they shifted from him, Hurry saw one in scarlet. Now he saw Montrose again as he had been in his Viceregal state when Hurry had joined him after Kilsyth, and as the guest of kings abroad who had given him precedence above all the ambassadors. The ministers, who had moved a little away from him to consult together, now came again round him to try to get some word of confession from him. He did not even look at them, but turned from them and looked down the long sunlit street. Now Hurry saw his face, and his heart seemed to stop within him.

  Was this the face of a man who in a few minutes would walk up that ladder to be turned off it to hang till he was dead on that enormous engine?

  It was the face of a bridegroom.

  As he looked on that face for the last time, Hurry saw a glory shining through it that illumined the whole world to him, so that for the first time he saw its splendour, free of results, of success or failure.

  All his life he had pursued success as a glittering ball to be chased at all hazards, its capture the one thing that made life worth living, while failure was worse than criminal: it was dismal, depressing, ignoble. But nothing here was dismal or depressing. The suspicion dawned on him that success did not necessarily bring glory, nor failure bring shame; that men would turn in disgust from the memory of Argyll’s rule of Scotland or Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, when they would be proud to remember Raleigh’s last voyage, or Montrose’s death.

  Was it then indeed the wrong side on which after all his turnings he now found himself at the latter end? It was by the side of Montrose that he would die; that was as good a death as any man could choose.

  The crowd had thronged up to the very edge of the scaffold, but though it was customary for even the worst criminal to be allowed to address them, Montrose was not permitted to do so. He spoke his last words only to those nearest him, while a young man close by him on the scaffold took them down in shorthand. Hurry missed sentences here and there, but heard the most of it.

  ‘… In regard of men, they are but instruments. God forgive them and I forgive them…. What I did in this kingdom was in obedience to the most just commands of my Sovereign and in his defence, in the day of his distress, against those who rose up against him. I acknowledge nothing, but fear God and honour the King, according to the commandments of God and the just laws of Nature and nations….

  ‘It is spoken of me that I should blame the King. God forbid! …

  ‘… For His Majesty now living, never any people, I believe, might be more happy in a king. His commandments to me were most just and I obeyed them…. I pray God he be so dealt withal that he be not betrayed under trust, as his father was.

  ‘I do but follow the light of my conscience – which is seconded by the working of the Spirit of God that is within me. I thank Him I go to heaven with joy the way He paved for me. If He enable me against the fear of death, and furnish me with courage and confidence to embrace it even in its most ugly shape, let God be glorified in my end.

  ‘… I have no more to say but that I desire your charity and prayers. I shall pray for you all. I leave my soul to God, my service to my Prince, my goodwill to my friends, my love and charity to you all.’

  Then he turned aside to pray, apart, for the ministers refused in his case to pray, according to their custom, for the criminal’s departing soul. He stood there with that strange light of peace, even joy, in his face, then turned to the executioner, who came forward with the tears running down his face and tied Montrose’s own Declaration and Wishart’s History of the Deeds of Montrose round his neck to share his condemnation. He gave the executioner some pieces of gold and turned with the same simplicity and majesty to go up the ladder. There for the last time he looked down on the people.

  ‘God have mercy on this afflicted land,’ he said aloud.

  An English agent of the Commonwealth, writing of political affairs in an upper window of his lodging looking on to the Mercat Cross, had scribbled:

  ‘What with the early going away of the post, and what with the hubbub we are in – Montrose being now on the scaffold – I must cut short.’

  Yet he had found time to describe at some length the remarkable ‘composure’ of the prisoner, his ‘beauty’ and ‘majesty’, and the general belief that ‘he has overcome more men by his death than he could have done if he had lived’.

  Then that soberly dressed figure in the upper room, who kept glancing down into the street and whose hand alone was moving busily among all that still host of people, added:

  ‘I should write more largely if I had time; but he is just now turning off from the ladder; but his countenance changes not.’

  Epilogue

  ‘Beyond The Stars

  SHE had reached the end of the world – but the world went on. It went on and on past that moment when she heard of Montrose’s death, and at first it went so slowly that each hour, day, week, month, was torture; and then it was years that spun past her instead of the infinite minutes ticked out by the clock and hours struck by those hammers, – ‘four o’clock now, and so long a time since it had struck three’. She could never hear those Cupids’ hammers beating their arrows on the anvil without thinking of rain on the terrace at Rhenen and the busy sound of the French visitors talking through the open doors, and herself wandering through the empty rooms, waiting, waiting for Montrose to come to her.

  Time went so slow when one was young, so slow that sometimes it stopped altogether – as it had done when she heard that Montrose was dead.

  But it had gone on again, days, months, years, spinning a meaningless shadow-show of people who drifted past her, flat and grey, and when they moved their mouths to speak to her, said nothing – until that too passed, everything passed, the world went on and was left behind, and here she was, the elderly Abbess of Maubuisson walking through the vast grounds of her convent.

  Through the orchards heavy with ripening fruit she walked, and the vegetable-gardens cut as formally as the flower-beds of the previous century, in huge stars and pentacles of steel-blue cabbages and artichokes and the broad copper leaves of beetroot, the feathery pale bronze of carrot leaves, a garden made all of shining metals like those of the Incas of Peru, and set about it an exotic guard of tall sunflowers, their negro faces framed in gaudy rays of gold. She went down through the woods to the oblong fishpond set in the deep shade, back to the white-hot courtyard where the big Flemish cart-horses dragged their loads of gleaming corn and stamped and sneezed in the dust they raised, their harness clanking and glittering in the fierce sunlight while the cooing pigeons swooped and strutted, pecking for fallen grain between the massive tufted hooves.

  Everywhere her nuns bustled through that burning late- August scene, black-and-white figures in their Benedictine robes, their skirts looped up through broad belts to keep them out of the way of their very active work, their round country faces shining with heat and health, some feeding chickens, some stacking corn, some gardening, some fishing, some walking along a narrow plank beside a rapid rushing little stream set deep down below an old wall to the penthouse where the laundry was done, kneeling there and rinsing and floating, the fine white linen tablecloths in that turbulent underground water. An act of worship it looked, in an almost hidden chapel dug deep in the cool earth.

  And a place of worship was the vast medieval barn, its little towers at each end set with hooded windows like nuns’ coifs. Louise came out of the blazing sunlight into that cool dark, the stone pillars rising in it majestic as in a minster, soar
ing to the vaulted roof of wooden beams and the windows high and narrow as in a clerestory. The pillars ran all down the centre, dividing the building into two enormous aisles, and on either hand into side-chapels dedicated to the different products of the harvest, some for roots, some for storing corn, some for threshing it.

  Here she felt herself in a place as hallowed as in the chapel, for did not all religion spring from the miracle of the sprouting grain, the resurrection of the green blade of life from the withered dead husk? So she thought as she watched the work of those high priestesses of a faith older still than the Catholic Church.

  The nuns worked twice as hard when that cool casual glance of their Mother Superior fell on them as she strolled by, apparently paying but little attention to their activities. Yet all this heightening and exciting of their activities was for a very special occasion, much more personal to their Abbess than to themselves, for this afternoon there was to be a visit from the Abbess’ youngest sister, Sophia, the Electress of Hanover.

  Yes, this afternoon she would see her again, whom she had not seen since Sophie had left them all at Rhenen that fine spring day thirty years ago, had stepped into her pinnace to sail up the Rhine to her eldest brother Carl at Heidelberg.

  She wrote back to them of her journey, but not of the castles perched so fantastically on the tops of huge rocks beside the river, nor of the cliffs and hills such as she had never seen before. She told of uncomfortable castles, bad dinners and old- fashioned carriages; in Cologne there was ‘nothing to admire but the ramparts’, and ‘the heads of 11,000 virgins and three kings had no attraction for her’; she was careful to refuse the Duke of Neubourg’s invitation to stay the night after dining with him, since, in spite of her chaperons and his forty years’ seniority, it might endanger her reputation, as his wife was away.

  At the end of her journey she had met her brother the Elector Palatine and his newly married wife, who would have been very pretty if she had not dyed her eyebrows black in violent contrast to her fair hair; she was already bickering with her husband and making trouble about her coach, which she did not think fine enough. Sophie’s first words when apart from the already unhappy couple had been, ‘My sister-in-law is very stupid!’

  And that journey of Sophie’s had begun at the same time as that last journey of Montrose when he had been led down through the length of Scotland to his execution in Edinburgh.

  Those two journeys were passing now side by side through Louise’s mind; she was living, not in the French convent of Maubuisson on the banks of the Oise where she had been Abbess for nearly twenty years, but in two countries she had never seen; sailing up a broad river through Germany; riding a shaggy pony in a cloud of dust between guards along a rough hill-road.

  Among all the ‘imaginary portraits’ she had ever conceived, the most vivid and constant in her mind was that of Scotland.

  Night after night through the long years she had woken to realize slowly, unbelievingly, that she was in a narrow white cell, and not where she had been wandering in her dreams on a wide moor under a storm-driven sky, in union with her lover’s spirit, in race-memory of her mother’s childhood in her native country, of endless generations of the Stuart clan’s campaigning in that wild land and weather.

  There had been many Scots as well as English in the convent at Maubuisson ever since the Hundred Years’ War between France and England; of late years the Catholic refugees from the Scots Presbyterian Government had been increasing in number, and from them Louise had heard what had been going on in their country.

  ‘Stands Scotland where it did?’ Her mother’s voice echoed back to her here in this huge barn; she saw again her mother’s flashing glance and the grave smile of her visitor as he capped her quotation that bleak wintry afternoon when they were all wearing black for her uncle King Charles I, and she had seen the Marquis of Montrose for the first time.

  ‘Alas, poor country!’ he had answered.

  Just over a year later his last words on the scaffold had been a prayer for God’s mercy on that ‘poor country’.

  God’s judgement had been more evident than His mercy. In that same unending moment when Louise had heard of Montrose’s death, King Charles II had set sail with Lauderdale for Scotland, to be greeted with the sight of the severed shrivelled hand of Montrose above the gate of Aberdeen. He was crowned King of Scots by Argyll, who kept him a virtual prisoner, and allowed his armies to be decimated by Warriston’s fanatical rejection of all who had shown loyalty to the throne in the past. They were hopelessly defeated by Cromwell, who invaded and conquered Scotland, while Charles returned to the Continent, a beggared fugitive, to be hounded from one country after another, drifting through nine more years of exile before Cromwell’s death and the unhappy state of England led at last to his Restoration.

  One of his first acts after that Restoration had been the magnificent State funeral, in St Giles’ Cathedral, appointed to the withered remnants of his ‘most passionate servant’. The grisly head of Montrose was lifted down from the Tolbooth gate by Graham of Gorthie, who kissed it as he took it between his hands; and in its place was set up the head of Argyll.

  There were not many acts of retribution when Charles II came to the throne, but Argyll’s execution was one. Montrose’s son James, the young second Marquis, whom Louise had grown to know and love in Holland that year after his father’s death, different as he was from his father in his cool judicial announcements, had refused to sit on the Tribunal of those who condemned his father’s murderer to death. He could not, he said, pretend that he would be an unprejudiced judge. The spirit of greatness, manifesting itself in such different forms, had shot up in the son as in the father, and Louise had been proud to recognize it once again in the son of the man she loved.

  Warriston’s execution had followed Argyll’s, but for him it had been a release rather than a punishment.

  Major Weir’s turn did not come till ten years later, and then, so unwillingly did Fate seem to strike at him, that he had to force it on himself. He rose in the conventicle of the Bowhead Saints, aged, terrible, the evil spirit that had so long informed that frail tenement of clay, burning through his dreadful eyes as he confessed to unimagined crimes of devil-worship.

  His hearers could not and would not believe what they heard. Doctors were sent to him with instructions to prove him insane. But they could not do so, and no one could keep him silent. He would not repent, nor evade his punishment. He was burned at the stake, and the tall staff carved with strange symbols, on which he had always leaned for support through his long and hideous career, was burned with him. The doctors had no such difficulty in pronouncing his sister Jean Weir insane, but since she was proved guilty of incest and witchcraft, she too was burned, and that haunted part of Edinburgh where the horrible pair had lived, known as Major Weir’s land, had been avoided ever since as a dwelling-place, and would be, it seemed, for ever.

  Last of all had come the turn of Neil Macleod, eleventh and last of Assynt. For no heirs were ever born to him and Christian Monro of Lemlir; no money had come to him in reward of his betrayal of Montrose; he had petitioned for it again and again, and all that Argyll’s Government had ever paid him had been some sacks of meal, three-quarters of it sour.

  ‘Stripped tree of the false apples,’ the Highlanders had sung of him, and so he proved, for even the few sour apples of his possession were reft from him. He was often in prison, and ill. So desperate were his straits that he took to piracy and wreckage to try to redeem them, levied toll on all ships that touched on his coast-lines, and finally kidnapped a sea-captain and held him for ransom. He was put to the horn, declared an outlaw whom any man might kill with impunity; his powerful neighbours rose against him, stormed and burned his castle of Ardvreck, leaving only a few ruined walls, a cornice of elegant chisel-work, rare in the Highlands, and in the cellars, where Montrose had lain imprisoned, a couple of useless cannon to rust idle through the centuries.

  Argyll, Warriston, Weir, Macleo
d of Assynt, their toll had been paid.

  Robert Baillie fled to the Isle of Comray the year after Montrose’s death ‘with my lady Montgomerie, but left all my family and goods to Cromwell’s courtesy’. A moderate ever, he achieved a moderate’s reward, and was only deprived of his honours as Principal of Glasgow University at the Restoration, when in any case he was too old to be able to hold them much longer. The letters, journals and documents, public and private, he left were innumerable, but among them all not one word as to that last interview with Montrose in the Tolbooth, which his colleague Robert Traill so faithfully recorded.

  Louise had heard of that; but it was not of men’s words to each other that she thought most when she thought of Scotland, as she did now in this dim granary where the life of the harvest was treasured. She was thinking of the hills that had been her lover’s help and his destruction, and of the names that they had come to bear in consequence of him. Craigcoinichean, the Hill of the Scroggy Wood, had become the Hill of Lamentation, a word almost identical in the Gaelic, in the speech of the peasants round Carbisdale, that ‘place to perish the crows’. There was a ruined cottage there on a hillock they now called the Mount of Tears, where his Major-General Hurry had lodged the night before the battle; for years after the battle a woman had gone on living in that shattered wreck of heaped stones, a woman whose husband and six sons had all gone out to fight for Montrose against Strachan’s troopers and had been killed to a man.

  The men were killed. The women lived on.

  ‘In the wars of the future,’ prayed Louise, ‘let it be more equal, dear God, lest the burden be too great for us to bear.’

  Yet there was some pride in her burden. Montrose’s wife had borne him his children, had borne the agony of lifelong fear for him, borne all indeed that she could bear.

  But Louise had a still greater trust reposed in her. She had to bear his death.