‘Claret?’ repeated Warriston in wonder. ‘I have never had any in the house.’
Rothes suppressed an exclamation, and changed the subject tactfully. ‘I sent you a new client yesterday, a Mr David Dickson, a virtuous minister, very forward in this work of ours. I hope you found him profitable.’
‘Oh yes, a profitable speaker to the glory of God and the confounding of His enemies. It did my heart good to hear his wrath against the bishops.’
‘Confound the bishops, man, and your heart too. What good did he do your purse?’
The furious fanatic looked like an unhappy child. With no hint of malice but the most genuine discomfort, he confessed guiltily that Mr Dickson had not seen fit to reward him for his legal services with any gold, but had very kindly said a prayer instead, ‘recommending me and my family to the Lord.’
Recommending Mr Dickson very heartily to the devil, and scolding Warriston for being so unworldly that he could not get a fee out of a client, Rothes stumbled down the narrow steps into the icy air.
‘And yet he’s an admirable lawyer, by God so he is; and curse this toe of mine – why must one always stub the gouty one?’ he added, leaning heavily on Montrose’s arm as they walked away. ‘Mark me, if he does not go clean mad, he’ll be the most useful man we can have on our side.’
‘And if he does, he’ll be the most dangerous.’
‘Why then we’ll clear him out. These frantic enthusiasts may get beyond themselves as the campaign proceeds, but at its outset they are invaluable. But you did not like him – nor he you.’
‘He was never at his ease with me.’
‘How should he be, poor devil? There’s more intolerance in health than in religion. He can excuse my excesses since they’ve rotted my body, but he’ll never forgive you your strength – and God knows why I do, unless it is that I’m more of a Christian than either he or you, young James.’
‘More of a liar,’ growled James. ‘You’d never like a man any more than I do, that’s got a perpetual pain in his belly. His ecstasies are more indigestible than game pies.’
‘And praying all night,’ concluded Rothes comfortably, ‘will wreck a man’s constitution quicker than a brothel.’
Chapter Eight
Lord traquair read King Charles’ Proclamation to his people from what had once been the Market Cross, in the square in front of the Tolbooth, where four years earlier the King had passed in his Coronation procession.
Now, as then, every inch of the square was crowded, and of the long street running downhill from the Castle, and of all the little windows in those tall crazy houses under the bleak sky. The white heads of women, tied up in their linen cloths, the curled heads of the gentry, the scrubby hair of poorer folk, of necessity kept shorter, were all craning towards that central point where a small group of men had mounted on top of the stone octagon.
The long-drawn-out voice of Traquair came in a succession of weary shouts through the raw mist. Slowly the grandiloquent phrases of the Proclamation made clear to those in front, who growled to those behind, and so to the streets beyond – that the King had refused to make himself their champion, as his native country had begged; that he was treating their just complaints as treason. And a deep groan answered the Proclamation, more alarming than the hysterical yells that had greeted the Prayer Book.
This could not be the end of the matter. The people waited; they saw a pale young man in a lawyer’s gown mount the octagon and in his turn read a paper, in protestation.
Warriston’s hour had come, but never had he felt so unprepared to meet it. Why did the Lord see fit to chasten him thus, just when His own interests demanded the best that he could give?
‘Oh Lord, this will be the worse for you,’ he had warned Him that morning.
His eyes were heavy, his weakened vitality shivered in the raw air, his voice, shrill and whining, was the voice of one crying in the wilderness – ‘an evil scraped tongue’, as he himself bitterly recognized. He even lost his place at one point; was a man who lost his place in his own speech to be a leader against a powerful King and Church?
A dull silence followed this, like a wintry fog upon all their spirits. Would nothing more happen then? It was cold work waiting there. One or two began to drift away, muttering that for all the nobility’s fine words, the King was bound to win – it was not going to be worth any man’s while to risk his neck in this matter. Their movement was one of acquiescence, the ignoblest form of despair.
But a shout like a trumpet arrested them. ‘Stop! Are you slaves to sneak away at the first breath that opposes you?’
They looked back, they saw a young man scrambling up on to a barrel, flinging up his arm to them in a gesture of command. The keen outline of his head was above all the people, his raised arm was in a velvet sleeve, slashed with red – here was another speaking to them, and in how different a voice from that of Traquair or Warriston!
‘The young Montrose,’ said those who knew him by sight, and the crowd pressed forward to see this young man who was one of Scotland’s greatest nobles, now returned from foreign lands, a fine personable young man – and what had that ringing voice to say to them?
A change had come over the spirit of the crowd, a running murmur of excitement.
Montrose was crying to them, ‘Is England to be our master yet again? Are we to be nothing now but her province?’
The crowd heaved forward like corn in the wind, and like the storm wind came the angry murmur of all those voices in assent. That collection of separate, baffled people was now a single unit, moving as one man and being moved, as that voice called to them, swayed them, bade them look forward and hope, look back and remember how again and again their country had risen to resist England’s tyranny – how Wallace had been judged and killed as a traitor by an English king, but was greater than any king in Scottish hearts.
‘Then who need fear the name of treason?’ came on a cry of exultation.
And in answer came a roar from the crowd, shouting that Montrose should lead them, that they would follow him to England, follow him to death. They surrounded him, swung him off the barrel, and on to their shoulders, crying – ‘Down with the Bishops! Down with the Prayer Book!’ and here and there was heard, ‘Down with the King!’
Bumping and staggering, Montrose swayed this way and that on his uneasy perch, clutching now at the rough heads of his bearers and now at their frieze-clad shoulders, seeing the horses climb up against the sky behind a stormy sea of shouting heads.
Behind them, above them, he could still see the head of his mother’s brother on the spike in front of the Tolbooth, a blackened, withered object, unrecognizable as human, which had once been the handsomest young man in King James’ country. And here in front of the Tolbooth his father had taken the wild justice of revenge into his own hands, and attacked in the public street the man who had murdered his kinsman. Now he too had taken the law into his own hands, before he had known what he was doing. The people round him had been depressed and sheep-like, dully waiting for a lead; and he had transformed them into this living fire.
His bearers had gone in a circle; he saw the little group of his friends once again; Madertie was laughing with tears of excitement running down his cheeks, and not knowing it at all, as he had done when they chaired Montrose in triumph after he had won his silver medal at Saint Salvator’s. He saw Rothes’ face, laughing too, but with some concern upon it; and Traquair’s, haughty and injured, looking as usual for the insult to himself; and Warriston, that nervous, crack-brained little fellow, who did not count, and could never be a leader of a national movement.
So Montrose thought, misjudging Warriston, even as Warriston had misjudged him.
But Warriston was past judging or misjudging. He was rocking in an agony of hatred. He had failed in his first essay to touch the hearts of the people and incline them to the Lord – and then this young noble, whom he had instantly distrusted, had sprung up and swayed the silly sheep this way and that, not w
ith the words of God, but with the pride of the heart and the lust of the eye. And every gesture that commanded them had been a personal insult to Warriston, since the sleeve that cloaked it lacked a certain gold and sapphire button.
Montrose struggled from his bearers; in shyness and confusion he was trying to escape through the little group of his friends, when Rothes’ heavy hand descended on his shoulder.
The young man looked into the other’s twinkling little eyes, half hidden in the surrounding folds of flesh. What was it in his own – clear and grey, calm in spite of his excitement – that made even such eyes as Rothes’ see something of his destiny?
‘James/ said the bluff voice, ‘you will never rest till you are lifted up above us all in three fathoms of rope/
Chapter Nine
The whole nation was united, as it had not been since John Knox had bound it together against the Pope of Rome. His spirit was alive today, and his Covenant against popery was revived in a new version, drawn up by Mr Henderson and Warriston, and legalized by the sanction of Sir Thomas Hope, the Lord Advocate, and his judges.
The law, religion, the respectability of old men to whom a broken shoelace is a sign from heaven, were all on the side of the Covenant. Thousands flocked to sign it – it was a bond of union among men and with God in defence of Scotland’s liberty; it ran through the nation like a fiery cross, carried by the clansmen as a call to battle; copies were even sent out to Scots serving overseas as mercenaries in foreign armies, and many of them left their commands and hope of preferment abroad in order to hurry home in readiness to fight for their country.
Sermons were preached on the text of the Covenant as though it were the Bible; it was read aloud from the pulpit, and one minister asked the nobles there present to rise and swear to uphold it by the living God. Montrose was sitting in the middle of the church; he rose, and with him rose that close-packed throng in one movement with upraised arms, in one loud sobbing cry.
There he stood and Scotland round him in a single congregation. He looked on the smooth faces of burgesses, the rugged ones of peasants, two or three of nobles like himself – on the faces of elderly women, worn into the same tired pattern by the lifelong cares of household and children – of young women, fresh and eager for those same cares that awaited them within the arms of their lovers.
All these faces were transfigured, set free of their own lives, united in a bond where there was no distinction of class or sex or age. On many of them the tears were running down, but not a hand swerved from its raised testimony to brush them away, for none were conscious of them – not even Montrose, who was looking on them. The wind of this new spirit had caught him up and was hurrying him along with them. Only long afterwards did he remember those varied faces expressing one emotion, and that his own.
At home he was thought tiresomely exaggerated. His father-in-law would compare Scotland’s proud demand for religious liberty with the sordid disturbances in England, caused by grasping citizens who refused to pay their taxes. As if they could be compared!
Yet, said Lord Southesk, ‘England squeals as loudly now for her purse as we for our conscience,’ and half the country gentlemen nodded their heads with him. They wished well to the Kirk and disapproved of a forced Prayer Book, but after all there had to be something to trouble about, whether taxes or spying bishops. But Montrose, who saw justice as a necessity, believed that so little was needed to make Scotland, and England too, the true garden of Europe.
‘Take care that in the process you do not make it into a battlefield and graveyard,’ said Southesk.
Old men were despicable, cautious, playing for safety, believing nothing, hoping nothing, fearing everything.
But he knew Southesk was not despicable, and that they loved each other; and yet, now, whenever they met, they quarrelled.
And Magdalen, who loved them both, knew all the affection and irritation that they gave each other. Her opinions were formed on her father’s, rather than on those of this reckless intruder into her father’s house – a changeling she sometimes thought him, when she remembered his own father, her father’s old friend – and the many rounds of golf and pipefuls of strong tobacco the two cronies had enjoyed together.
Often she tried to coax Jamie into a taste for tobacco, which he still could not abide, and he never knew it was because of her early memories of a delightful big man with a long pipe who used to take her on one knee and his youngest daughter Beatrix on the other, when they were very small, and tie their heads together with a piece of red twine he had pulled out of his pocket, because he said they were as much together as a pair of turtle doves.
But Jamie would not smoke, and was always riding on some hot errand of the new Covenant.
‘You are never with me now,’ she said.
‘Then do you come with me,’ he begged. ‘Be a rival to Lady Anne Cunningham and Lady Pitsligo. They work harder for the Covenant than a troop of men.’
‘They are as old as sin,’ she said, looking down on Johnnie and little James – ‘it is easy for them to work for it.’
‘But not so easy for them to draw men to it. Sweet, be a Covenanter, and see how Scotland will follow you. We will all wear your colours. What are they? Blue suits you best.’
But he could not coax her into coming. Crowds frightened her, and scenes of strong emotion. She had no great belief in the possibility of a perfect state, such as her husband thought so near to them. Women are seldom idealists in politics.
He answered her doubts and her mother’s distressful cluckings with the laughter of one who is so certain of his cause that he can afford to take it lightly; he told them to be ready to sit under him when he too preached for the Covenant, and he would have a cap of molten tar, the extreme penalty for inattention in the Kirk, all ready for their hoods, should he catch them napping.
They heard him whistling one of his old songs as he ran down the stone staircase, they heard a clatter and barking of dogs in the courtyard as he called for Gray Oliphant to be saddled, as once he had called for little Torrey or Bess, they heard his horse’s hoofs thudding hollowly over the drawbridge – and there he was gone, leaving the two women to become conscious of the emptiness growing through the house, as their smiles faded and their faces settled once again into the preoccupied, slightly harassed lines of the faces of women who have now only their immediate material cares to concern them.
And Montrose rode to Aberdeen with Mr Henderson and Mr Cant and Mr David Dickson, who had never paid Mr Johnston, and answered in nervous haste, ‘Of course, of course, the moment I return,’ whenever Montrose unkindly reminded him of it. It was an incongruous company, the three ministers in their black Genevan gowns and bands, and Montrose’s striking appearance as gay cavalier – ‘a noble and true-hearted cavalier’, so Rothes had written of him, in a most unusual strain, in his letters of introduction.
The ministers preached for the conversion of Aberdeen’s citizens to the Covenant; but the young earl commanded their allegiance. He was angry with their obstinacy, he refused to attend the fine banquet they had prepared for him in the old hall.
Nine years ago in the week before his wedding he had been feasted there as a burgess; he had come cramped from sitting to Jameson for his portrait, and hungrier from that unaccustomed stillness than from any hunt; his hosts had then been the best fellows in the world, and the wine excellent. Did the ghost of that convivial youth smile now, with rounded curves of cheek and chin, at the arrogant hawk-like face of the young man who had become so stern a Covenanter?
Yet even in his most puritan mood of rejection, Montrose could not achieve a purely negative gesture. He asked for the wine to be distributed among the poor instead, and delighted in watching the barrels being broached in the street among the ecstatic crowds. This was far better than throwing a handful of coins as he mounted or dismounted. The crowd thought so too.
‘Oh bonny Saint Covenant!’ sang the free drinkers, not quite clear as to the cause of this happy state of thing
s, and a good deal less clear as the day wore on.
The Aberdeen ministers showed less hospitality than the burgesses, and refused their pulpits to the three visiting clergy, who had to preach from a wooden gallery overlooking a yard. There was a good deal of heckling from below in the yard, in spite of the presence on a balcony of old Lady Pitsligo, in a white gown, who was perched precariously on a high stool, and jerked her head continuously like a cockatoo – in approval, said the Covenanters – in slumber, said the others.
A still more doubtful honour was paid by the learned doctors of the town, who had an alarmingly high reputation for theological reasoning, and prepared fourteen points of objection and argument with which to confute their visitors.
Words, words, words – demands, objections – fifthly, sixthly, seventhly – controversely, controversially, contradictorily – while the clouds raced like ships in full sail across the early summer sky. Montrose hated this solemn self-conceited place with all the astute businesslike faces so smugly set against their company. This Town of Granite had granite heads and hearts as well as houses. Their sturdy logic, their fierce passion for accuracy and hard facts, their contempt of the imagination, bound them, he thought, in a prison of iron complacency. All they cared about was the literal word, the legalizing of every motion of the spirit.
Did not even Messrs Henderson, Cant, and David Dickson use too many words? On the journey here they had argued until he felt that the high simplicity of the Covenant, which had shone in the spring like a new light on men’s hearts, was in danger of being obscured and fussed over and fretted away into little niggling points of mental reasoning.
He was in the unfortunate position of a man who has seen a vision, and has to hear it explained again and again, by those who have not.
His relief was in action, in winning fresh support for his cause. He rode to the fishing villages on the east coast, up the steep and narrow streets of little harsh houses like dropped pebbles of grey stone, their thatch of turf bristling with tufts of long bent and heather as rough as the rawhide shoes of their inmates, and quite different from the soft, mousy thatch of the pretty English cottages. He rode to castles and big houses, sometimes to the very houses he used to visit for summer sports and Christmas revels.
The Proud Servant Page 20