To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  The Drums for Charles do beat,

  And frozen Hearts half-dead with fear,

  Revive with Loyal heat.6

  But the sudden submission to the Covenanters’ Scottish demands had an immediate, terrible and shameful cost. Charles had agreed, as one of the conditions of Scottish support, to disown his family’s great Scottish champion. Deprived of royal patronage, the Marquess of Montrose was now at the mercy of Argyll and the Covenanters.

  Charles sent Montrose a letter with confirmation that he had decided to form a pact with his deadliest enemies. It was the ultimate royal betrayal. In the same communication he let Montrose know that he had decided to honour him by making him a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in Britain. It was a meaningless gesture. Both men knew that Montrose’s life was now hanging by a thread.

  Montrose’s small force was surprised and routed by his enemies at Carbisdale, forty miles north of Inverness, on 27 April 1650. Despite being wounded in the battle, Montrose managed to escape its ensuing carnage. After wandering the hills without food, being reduced to eating his gloves, he sought refuge in Ardvreck Castle, whose owner, Neil MacLeod of Assynt, had fought alongside him five years earlier. But his host sold his name to infamy by betraying Montrose, and accepting the reward on his head.

  On 18 May Montrose was paraded through the packed streets of Edinburgh. He was made to stand in a cart, before being transferred to the hangman’s wagon, in which he was forced to sit down, and was bound to his seat for the final leg of his journey to Tolbooth prison, where conditions were famously grim. At this point his eyes are said to have met the squinty glare of his old enemy the Marquess of Argyll, watching from a window on high.

  Two days later Montrose was taken to a brief hearing, where he was sentenced to death. Unusually for a nobleman, he was to be denied the merciful swiftness of the axe, and was condemned to being hanged. Such heartlessness was the payback for the turmoil and embarrassment he had caused his enemies during his years of triumph.

  On 21 May, the day of Montrose’s execution, some of his enemies taunted him for bothering to comb his hair when death was so near. He replied: ‘My head is still my own. Tonight, when it will be yours, treat it as you please.’7

  Lord Wariston watched from a window in his home as Montrose walked to his death, defiant to the end. He had dressed himself in a scarlet cape, silk stockings and ribboned shoes. One observer said he looked more like a bridegroom than a condemned man. Montrose mounted the gallows, assembled on a thirty-foot-high platform that towered over Mercat Cross. He chose not to pray. In a short statement he said that Charles I ‘had lived a saint and died a martyr: I pray God I may end so: if ever I would wish my soul in another man’s stead it is in his’.8

  After the life had been throttled out of him, Montrose’s body was cut up. His head was stuck on a spike attached to Tolbooth’s upper reaches, and his arms and legs were dispatched to four of the other great cities of Scotland. There they were nailed up high, as deterrents to those who dared to oppose the Covenant. His trunk and bowels were buried in a casket on Burgh Moor, to the south of Edinburgh.

  Sir Edward Hyde was on a diplomatic mission to Spain when he learnt that Charles had agreed to the Scots’ demands, and that he had subsequently landed at Garmouth, forty-five miles east of Inverness, on 24 June 1650. By this stage Charles had made further concessions, including swearing to both Covenants, and disowning his loyal supporters in Ireland. ‘If there be judgement of Heaven upon him,’ Hyde wrote, ‘I can only pray it may fall as light on him as may be.’

  On his progress south to Edinburgh, Charles saw something curious hanging from the gates into Aberdeen. On asking what it was, he was informed that it was one of Montrose’s severed arms.

  From the outset, Charles found the contract he had agreed with the Scots hard to bear. His hosts insisted on most of his retinue being sent away, because of their ‘malignant’ nature. Meanwhile, to demonstrate his commitment to the Covenant, he was led through denunciations of his parents, addressing their supposed sins, while also being forced to confess his own many personal shortcomings.

  Having humbled himself before God, he was also obliged to debase himself before the Marquess of Argyll. The marquess extracted a promise from Charles that he would receive £40,000 from him if he succeeded in retrieving his English throne.

  Argyll was also keen to discuss the possibility of Charles marrying his daughter, Lady Anne Campbell. Charles’s father and grandfather had wed princesses from France and Denmark, respectively. For him to have to seriously contemplate marriage to the daughter of one of his subjects showed just how devalued Charles’s eligibility had become, by this stage of his exile from England.

  The austerity of his everyday life now, with its dour sermons and endless prayers, was far removed from the idle, easygoing court in exile that Charles had become used to. While to the world he exhibited acceptance and charm, inside he was furious at the repeated humiliations: ‘The Scots have dealt with me very ill!’ he told an Anglican dean.9

  Oliver Cromwell was recalled from Ireland in 1650, to replace Sir Thomas Fairfax as Lord General of Parliament’s army. Fairfax had retired rather than invade Scotland because, he said, ‘we are [still] joined in the National League and Covenant’. He refused to attack his old allies.

  In late July 1650, in response to the provocation of Charles’s presence on British soil and the Scots’ promise to place the English crown on his head, Cromwell invaded Scotland with 16,000 men.

  It was a testing country to fight in. The Scots held fast behind a defensive line that had Edinburgh at its core. The English, meanwhile, had to contend with a relentlessly hostile landscape. Symptomatic of this was the aggravating presence of ‘Mosstroopers’, small guerrilla bands of Lowlanders who lay in wait outside the invaders’ garrisons, picking off stragglers and disrupting supplies and communications.

  Cromwell was one of many in his army to become seriously ill, and it seemed that he and his soldiers would need to retreat unless the opportunity soon presented itself for battle. Even then, the Scots would heavily outnumber the invaders. Disease and desertion reduced the English to 11,000 fighting men, while the Scottish army was 22,000 strong.

  The two mismatched armies eventually lined up to fight in early September, near Dunbar, the port twenty-eight miles north of the border which was Cromwell’s main supply point. The Scottish generals, the Earl of Leven and his cousin David Leslie, had established an advantageous position for their troops on the formidable Doon Hill. Cromwell’s line of retreat on land had been cut off, and Leven and Leslie expected the English cavalry to make a break for it, leaving their infantry behind to surrender. But things now took a bizarre turn.

  The leading Covenanters had already reduced their army’s effectiveness. They had insisted that it be purged of eighty officers and 3,000 experienced men, because their religious beliefs were not considered sufficiently godly. The same fanatics now compromised their troops further, ordering an immediate abandonment of their advantageous position on Doon Hill.

  Despite the enemy’s needless surrender of the tactical advantage, Cromwell was extremely agitated before what would clearly be a pivotal battle: he chewed his lips so furiously that blood was seen dripping down his chin. Before dawn on 3 September he ordered an attack on the Scottish army, which was left disjointed by its new deployment. He started on the enemy’s right wing, which his forces overwhelmed before turning on their centre. When that force was also overcome, he set about its left wing. The Scots’ large numerical advantage was negated by this three-stage strike. That day the New Model Army – disciplined, professional, and sure that God was on its side – pulled off Cromwell’s most startling triumph.

  The English lost just twenty-eight men at Dunbar. Leven and Leslie had up to 3,000 killed, and a further 10,000 captured. It was a defeat of biblical proportions, in an age when God’s hand was seen in everything. Indeed, there was a suitably Old Testament ring to Cromwell’s report to
Parliament on the Royalist losses: ‘God made them as stubble to our swords.’

  Charles could not contain his joy at the defeat of the allies to whom he had been so miserably shackled, and threw his hat in the air at the news. For their part, the Covenanters tried to shift blame for the debacle onto their young king’s shoulders. They claimed he had shown a lack of commitment to his religious promises, and divine punishment had been the inevitable consequence.

  The Covenanters also rebuked the king’s followers. John Middleton was a Scot who had risen dramatically through the army’s ranks, from fourteen-year-old pikeman to lieutenant general. He had fought against the Royalists in the First Civil War, but had then changed sides, joining the Engagers and leading their cavalry in the Scottish invasion of England in the summer of 1648. Middleton had been captured at the battle of Preston, but was released on parole. He soon broke that commitment, allying himself closely to the new king of Scotland.

  The Kirk party noted Middleton’s Royalist sympathies and allegiance to their domestic political rivals, as well as his general debauchery, and in October 1650 excommunicated him. He was only allowed to return to serve in Charles’s army after the humiliation of a public penance in Dundee, when he was forced to wear sackcloth and ashes. This was an embarrassment that Middleton would never forget. It was also typical of the heavy-handed treatment meted out to Charles and his followers. The young king was finding it increasingly hard to bear.

  A month after Dunbar, Royalists under the Marquess of Huntly attempted a coup d’état in support of Charles in the north of Scotland. They intended to bring Highlanders to the king, and so free him from Covenanter control. This design was known as ‘The Start’, and though it came about with Charles’s blessing, it failed because of his indecision.

  Leaving Perth under the pretence of participating in a falconry hunting party, the king made a dash for freedom once he had got a fair distance from the city. But his absence was quickly noted, and a force was sent to retrieve him. He was soon overhauled. Two officers who led the pursuit discovered him ‘lying in a nasty room on an old bolster above a mat of sedge and rushes, over-wearied and very fearful’.10 The ignominious end to this escape attempt is of particular interest, given how Charles was to behave exactly a year later, when on the run for his life.

  On 1 January 1651, at Scone in Perthshire, the coronation took place that formalised Charles’s status as king of Scotland. The Marquess of Argyll, happy to remind the monarch of where true power lay, placed the crown on Charles’s head and installed him on the throne.

  In reality, though, matters in Scotland were turning in the king’s favour. The Covenanters had lost much credibility through their defeat at Dunbar, and Charles had an easy charm that his northern subjects warmed to. He was proving to be a popular king.

  Meanwhile, despite their spectacular triumph at Dunbar, the English still had little control over large areas of Scotland. David Leslie clung on determinedly in defensive mode north of the Firth of Forth, with his headquarters at Stirling. But on 17 July 1650 the deadlock was broken when Major General John Lambert played a masterstroke, sending a seaborne expedition into Fife, outflanking Leslie’s army. Three days later he defeated the Scottish force sent to meet him at the battle of Inverkeithing. The victory gave the New Model Army control of the Firth of Forth, and cut Charles off from his supporters in the Highlands.

  Cromwell now moved his main army north of the defeated Scots. As he did so, he deliberately left the road to England open, hoping Charles would be tempted to lead his men south. Cromwell was confident that the army he had with him, when combined with the forces he had left standing ready at home, could defeat any Scottish force the king could muster. He also believed that the people of England would unite against what would in effect be a foreign invasion, should the king of Scotland take the bait.

  Charles was unaware of the trap, and shaken by the enemy advantage gained at Inverkeithing. At the same time he was desperate to get away from Scotland, to regain some of the authority and independence that had been taken from him by the all-controlling Covenanters. He had been an exile since leaving Cornwall for the Isles of Scilly more than five years earlier. Now that he seemed to have been presented with the prospect of a clear run south, the young king dared to dream of a triumphant return to England. He ordered his forces to prepare for invasion, even though his military commanders urged caution.

  George Downing had grown up in Massachusetts, and had attended Harvard College, being one of the nine young men who comprised its first year of graduates in 1642. He had since returned to England, to support Parliament as a preacher before switching to military service. From 1650 he was Scoutmaster General of Scotland, in charge of the Commonwealth’s agents in that country. He reported to London that ‘The generality [i.e. the generals] of the Scots were against the present attempt for England, but the King told them, he would march with such as would follow him: he looks very despondingly, but must adventure all.’11

  The Parliamentary commander in north-western England, Major General Thomas Harrison, was a religious zealot with complete confidence that he and his Puritan comrades were doing the Lord’s work. He was sure that Charles and his army were destined for defeat. Like Downing, he sensed that the enemy’s decision to head south had arisen from a place of weakness: the king’s men clearly had ‘a mighty terror from God upon them’, Harrison wrote. He urged ‘every good man’ to take ‘all possible means God may put into your hands, to give a check to this vile generation until our army come up’.12

  On 31 July Charles set off from Stirling Castle with his Scottish army, hoping his English courtiers were correct when they promised him that Royalists in his homeland would rush to swell his ranks. If they did, he had a good chance of regaining his family’s throne. If they did not, his great gamble could only be seen as an appalling error of judgement, based on nothing more than the continual grind of humiliation and disappointment, and the lure of misplaced hope.

  5

  A Foreign Invasion

  The Scottish Armie, which would never bee brought to fight in their own Countrie, have now left the same for lost; and are marched into England.

  The Council of State to the Lord Mayor of London, 10 August 1651

  Charles entered England near Carlisle on 5 August 1651, at the head of forty-six regiments of Scottish soldiers. They came from all over Scotland, among them Urry’s Horse from Aberdeen and Banffshire, the Earl of Home’s cavalry and infantry from Berwick, Clan MacKinnon from Skye, MacNeil’s Foot from the Outer Hebrides, Lord Drummond’s two regiments from Perthshire, and the Duke of Hamilton’s Horse from Clydesdale.

  But the spymaster George Downing wrote to his controllers in London of the despondency that he detected at the core of this army, and not just amongst its high command: ‘They are not above 11,000 men at most; they have very little provision with them; through all the country in Scotland we find their runaways: in a word, nothing was left but a desperate cure, or a desperate ruin, wherewith my heart is filled in the confident expectation of.’1

  The same sentiment stirred in the breast of Charles’s senior Scottish officer, Lieutenant General Leslie. When, in battle, a junior officer rode to Leslie to report ‘The enemy is approaching,’ it would have been understandable if this fifty-year-old professional soldier had taken a moment to remind himself exactly who it was that he was risking his life against this time. Leslie had, in a distinguished but somewhat relentless career, unsheathed his sword, then ridden hard at Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, Spaniards, Englishmen and fellow Scots.

  He had been in command of 7,000 Covenanters when they overcame the 800 Royalists under the Marquess of Montrose at the battle of Philiphaugh in September 1645. A hundred of Montrose’s men surrendered on the promise that their lives would be spared. But Presbyterian ministers intervened, telling Leslie that such mercy was folly and urging him to go back on his word. Leslie had all the prisoners shot in cold blood, along with 300 of their camp followers, man
y of them women and children.

  Two years later Leslie defaulted on a similar promise. While besieging an enemy stronghold at Dunaverty Castle in Kintyre, he cut off the water supply, forcing the defenders to surrender. He then ordered the slaughter of 300 prisoners, three of their leaders being shot while on their knees, midway through their final prayers. Others were thrown to drown in the sea, or were cast to their death on the rocks below.

  When this effective but brutal soldier learnt that he was to march south, he must have hoped against hope that he would not be forced to fight Cromwell. Leslie had served under Cromwell at the decisive battle of Marston Moor in the First Civil War, where Charles I had lost control of the north of England in a day. The Parliamentary victory there was thanks in large part to Leslie’s timely courage and deft, soldierly, touch: the Scots’ cavalry charge had tipped the scales in favour of Cromwell’s squadrons, and guaranteed the defeat of the Royalist talisman, Prince Rupert. That day, it later became clear, Leslie had helped turn the tide not just of a battle, but of the whole war.

  The redheaded, pink-faced Scot, with his dandyish beard, knew as well as anyone, from his own observations on both sides of the battlefield, the supreme level of brilliance that Cromwell was capable of. While he had won with him at Marston Moor, he had lost against him at Dunbar. Leslie appreciated that the Lord General’s soldiers, drunk on their sense of godliness, never considered defeat a possibility. As the Commonwealth had boasted two years previously: ‘The great God of battle, by a continued series of providences and wonders [has] determined very much in favour of the Parliament.’2 They saw no reason for that pattern to change.

  Leslie had been against the invasion of England by his new king from the start, preferring to continue the attritional defensive war in his homeland. This style of fighting could be expected to provide a constant supply of reinforcements for the king, in a draining and hostile environment for the invading English. Charles’s new plan would reverse those favourable conditions.