The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  His hosts came out into the courtyards to greet his arrival, half expecting the boy who used to swing himself out of the saddle and call for ale for his horse while he drank his stirrup cup. Then he had come to hunt and shoot and fish and dance, to summon the fiddles and pipes from the nearest town.

  But now their sudden guest was an ardent young man who came with the Covenant inscribed on a sheepskin parchment on his saddle-bow – a man who set them on fire with his own zeal, and that not only because his glance and voice were those of one to whom command came unsought, yet inevitably.

  To those lonely houses and little towns his arrival brought something from another world than that of their humdrum everyday. Here was their own youth, riding up to their doors – their own desire for adventure, beyond the skirmishings of their self-interest – their own dreams, that they had left behind in their struggle for existence in this workaday world.

  Another piece of land, more cows or sheep, bread, meat, clothes, dowries for the daughters, college for the sons, all that they had tried to think their chief concern in life, now slid back into an only relative importance – as the focus of their lives shifted under the eager and imperious gaze of this young man.

  In his world, as in their youth, men served something greater than themselves. And because men breathe more freely in that world than the other, they signed and swore to support the Covenant, as the badge of his knight-errantry as well as of his mission.

  They did more, for they even left their homes to give their testimony to his cause. They wished to follow him – not merely to Aberdeen and Edinburgh, but back to the heroic age, where all men at one time or other, in their dreams, in their cups, or in their lonely walks over the hills, have felt a desire to be.

  Chapter Ten

  Yet montrose’s biggest failure in this part of the country was from the most romantic-minded person in it. That was the Marquis of Huntly, chief of the clan of the Gordons, who bore the proud title of Cock o’ the North.

  The trouble with all the Gordons was that they were romantic. The father of the present Marquis had so delighted in slender French tourelles with fish-scale slates, that the grim old mediaeval castle looked as though it were decorated with a quantity of inverted mermaids. Every time he took a walk round the policies his eager imagination would be struck by the need of a new Italian fountain or a little Dutch garden or a wall to the deer park. His estates were left heavily encumbered at his death; but that was nothing to the scandal of his burial, according to the rites of the Roman Church. It was done in great state, at night, by torch-light, with hundreds of gentlemen attending it – an appalling disgrace for the presbytery of his parish, who had converted him in his lifetime at least five or six times.

  It was an astounding proof of their power that so arrogant an old gentleman should have had to truckle thus to the ministers. The Gordons of Huntly were men who made their own laws, as the Huntly of the last reign had shown when he killed the ‘Bonny Earl of Moray’ on the somewhat thin excuse of his being ‘the Queen’s love.’ Said that handsome man as he lay dying, ‘You have spoiled a better face than your own.’

  Few could say that to the present Huntly. A superb creature with the body of a Viking and flashing eyes, it took one some time to realize that the bird-like shape of his face was really too thin and narrow to complete him properly. He cuts a fine figure, one would say, but it wants a head. So it was in his life. He cut a fine figure everywhere, with dash and verve and high principles, but never a thought behind any of it.

  He complained of living in a drab age, when every year clothes got plainer, life got safer, and more and more tradesmen pushed their way into circles that used to be reserved for the nobles – though, thank God, not yet as much as in England. He was as improvident as his father had been, and proud of the family debts, as of a dash of colour in this too respectable world. There was always that tame, plodding fellow, his brother-in-law of Lorne, to lend him money when he needed it.

  His wife died on the birth of her eleventh child. Huntly was left with a turbulent family of all ages, a mortgaged estate, and a world that was beginning to crumble round him without his noticing it.

  He received clear warning of this last when the young Earl of Montrose rode up to his doors with the National League and Covenant rolled up on his saddle-bow.

  Huntly gave it a dull glance, like a hen discarding a pebble that it had hoped was a pea, and asked Montrose what he would drink. Montrose chose ale as usual. The stirrup cup was handed him in the hall by the eldest Gordon lad, after some delay, caused by the younger son Lewis, who had been sent to fetch it and drank it himself instead. A little rascal of eleven or twelve, he was handed howling to judgement by his elder brother, Aboyne, and Montrose had a glimpse of a scarlet monkey face, tousled hair, and an irrepressibly merry eye as if enjoying the fuss he was making, before his father cuffed him out of the way.

  Even the girls of the family kept thrusting themselves forward. One tiny chit came running down the stairs to ask if the newcomer was the King’s camel, and burst into tears with disappointment when told it was only my Lord of Montrose.

  Through her clamour there shrilled the demand of the Lady Jean, some years older, for seven and sixpence ‘to go to the dwarf’s marriage’ – and when her father turned his purse inside out to show it was empty, she reminded him in vicious tones that he had promised her and Lewis six shillings by tomorrow morning to buy a cock for the Shrove Tuesday cock-fighting. A roar from her father blew her out as on a blast of wind, and then young Lord Gordon said quietly, ‘If my Lord of Montrose has anything of importance to tell us, sir, we had best go into the library.’

  Montrose looked at him and liked him. Lord Gordon looked back, and Montrose realized from his dark and thoughtful eyes what it must be to be the eldest son of such a family, and to have, inappropriately, a sense of discipline.

  In the library, he unfolded the mighty roll of ‘The National League and Covenant’ – four feet by three feet eight. The sheepskin parchment was already so thickly inscribed with the names of those who had sworn to support it that the signatures had to wriggle into every corner and finally to descend to initials only, all down the margins, since there was no room for the whole name. But rings had been inked out in the centre of the sheet for the great names of the nobles; and there, between Rothes’ name and Montrose’s, was an empty ring, into which Montrose now did his best to make Huntly insert his own.

  But again that discontented eye rejected it.

  What, am I to sign here between you – and every Tom, Dick and Harry sprawling round on the top of us! Why should we fight the ministers’ battles for them? They harried my father into his grave – a pack of dirty mice nibbling at a lion. Do you know why he wouldn’t go to the Kirk? “Because,” as he said to their snuffy long faces, “there are no gentlemen there.” ’

  ‘A man cannot answer for his own gentility,’ said Montrose, smiling, ‘but my brother-in-law Carnegie is elder for his presbytery at Brechin.’

  ‘Yes, and fine friends you are, aren’t you!’ retorted Huntly with superb irrelevancy, pursing his small mouth into a button.

  There was no holding him to any point.

  At one moment Montrose succeeded in firing him, and that was when he quoted to him the letter by which their ancestors had forced the Pope to acknowledge Bruce as King of Scotland. ‘As long as there shall but one hundred of us remain alive, we will never subject us to the dominion of the English.’

  ‘By God, you are right, boy,’ he cried, slapping his hand down on the trews of Gordon tartan that clothed his lengthy legs. ‘I never hear the tune of the Gay Gordons, if it’s only one of my brats playing it on a penny whistle, but I vow to kill an Englishman or two before I die.’

  And then with a sudden brilliance, ‘Let this be our business. Keep the ministers out of it. Leave it to the nobles. I’ll consent then to be your leader – As Cock o’ the North, there can be no question of that.’

  Montrose explained tha
t as the whole trouble had been started by King Charles forcing an English Prayer Book on the Scottish ministry, it would be impossible to keep that ministry out of it.

  The lustrous eyes before him dulled again. Huntly was growing convinced that this young fellow who thought he knew everything, was jealous of his generous offer to be their leader. The Grahams had always been jealous of the Gordons.

  ‘From the pride of the Grahams—’ he breathed.

  ‘From the wind of the Gordons—’ paraphrased Montrose,

  ‘Good Lord, deliver us,’ prayed both.

  Something had to be done. They could not sit on, glowering at each other. Montrose had refused his invitation to stay and dine, pleading the pressure of his business.

  Huntly had to give a decisive answer.

  ‘I don’t like ministers—’

  ‘I want to be leader—’

  Neither of them expressed the nobility of his spirit. He had to find something better. Suddenly he had it.

  ‘All this,’ he said, laying his hand heavily upon the parchment, ‘is aimed at the King.’

  ‘No, for the King himself does not know the situation. He has only been in Scotland once for a few weeks since he was an infant. It is aimed at those who advise the King, wrongly, for their own ends.’

  Huntly hardly waited till he had finished, for he had now got his answer ready.

  ‘Same thing,’ he said airily, ‘all the same thing. And you can tell your precious ministers this – that my house has risen by the Kings of Scotland, and that if the King were to fall, then I would bury my life, honour and estate under the rubbish.’

  He looked round him. Montrose was obviously impressed by the splendid simplicity of such loyalty.

  But his own son looked shy and uncomfortable, anxious to avoid both his own eye and that of their guest. Confound these modern young puppies – they were so afraid of fine words that they would soon rule out all fine feelings too, and fine actions as well.

  ‘What are you looking sheepish for?’ he growled at Gordon, ‘don’t care about your King, do you – prefer a presbytery in black coats? Wouldn’t lift a finger to fight for him, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I would.’

  Montrose was rolling up the Covenant. That ring would have to remain empty of Huntly’s name. His hosts came out on to the steps to see him off, Huntly reiterating questions as to whether he were sure he wouldn’t take anything more before he went. His high-stepping walk was that of a peacock.

  Gordon led his visitor’s horse through the courtyard in a burst of spring sunshine.

  ‘I wish I could join you,’ said Gordon.

  He went back to Aberdeen at the head of his army of converts, back to those theological controversies, in which nothing had been settled, and Henderson’s practical wisdom stood no chance against the arid logic of the learned doctors, and Cant and Dickson were so flustered and blown about by the bludgeoning of the contrary arguments that their very gowns flapped about them the more loosely, and their crestfallen faces looked to Montrose like a couple of deflated footballs.

  ‘You do no good here,’ he told them curtly. ‘Better go before their “fourteenthly” explodes you altogether.’

  Back they went to Edinburgh in his wake among the host of his devoted followers, who only completed the ministers’ sense of failure, since they testified to this young man’s triumph. The ministers who had not accompanied him called him a lovely and gracious youth, a very David before the Lord. But Mr Cant and Mr Dickson and several others began to complain of his high-handed ways, though not to his face.

  And at Edinburgh he met his brother-in-law, Carnegie, who told him what he thought of him, for it was high time somebody did something to stop the young fellow making a fool of himself. Montrose’s temper was savage enough after that to justify any of the ministers’ complaints.

  Nor was it improved by the plum of good news that Rothes had been preserving in secret for him, and now told with a wink and a sly, fat finger held to his jolly red nose.

  It was an odd story, Montrose hoped a false one, of Lord Lorne, who had just become Earl of Argyll, and his incongruous friendship with that insignificant little lawyer’s clerk, Mr Johnston of Warriston. No doubt it would be indiscreet for the fiery anti-royalist, Warriston, to be seen visiting the house of the great Earl of Argyll, who sat on the King’s Privy Council with the Marquis of Hamilton, and had been sent for to London to help advise the King.

  But Argyll had certainly been visiting Warriston, and frequently, though the little clerk had never admitted it – Rothes had got it all out of his wife, Helen (again that wink) – ‘more useful that, than your conquest of the daughter. Ah well, you young men can afford to take long views.’

  And then came the point of the story, pure supposition as it was. Again and again the Covenanters had got wind of the King’s plans in time to circumvent them; and no one, not even Rothes, knew what the means of communication had been. But certainly those most possible would be from Argyll to Warriston.

  ‘And Argyll himself has given reason enough to think so, for he has refused to join our side, saying he can help us better in secret.’

  ‘Then he can be nothing but a sneaking cur, and I pity the side that has him on it.’

  ‘Tut, tut,’ said Rothes comfortably, ‘you young men are so narrow-minded, you can never see more than one quality at a time. The new Earl of Argyll has a sincere sense of religion, and would do much for the Kirk.’

  ‘Then I say again, the Kirk is to be pitied for such an ally – yes, and for Warriston too. I trust neither of those men.’

  ‘And the ministers are blinded by their pedantry? And Mr Dickson is a low fellow? And Mr Cant can’t say a word but cant. And if David Carnegie had not been your wife’s brother, you’d have run him through last Tuesday. Eh, James, James, but you’ll never make a party larger than one.’

  ‘Give me soldiers to deal with, and see if that is true.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have your soldiers before we have done,’ said Rothes.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lord southesk saw more clearly than most the confusion of cross-purposes that had fallen on the land. As mediator, he suggested a General Assembly of the Kirk to express the views of all classes, convince the King that he must not interfere with the Kirk, and convince the Kirk that the King was willing to make concessions.

  But what he hoped might be a safety valve proved an explosive.

  The Assembly sat in the Cathedral at Glasgow in the November of ’38, a couple of years after Montrose had come home; it sat for weeks, and day by day the fog stole up from sea and river, hung about the little cobbled streets, and filled the cathedral with a raw damp in which men’s breaths hung like visible signs of suspense. The crowd was so dense both without and within the Cathedral that the town guard had to fight with fists and sticks to force a passage for the members to their seats.

  The great church was ice-cold, stuffy to smothering point, thick with the stench of sweat and damp sheepskin and onion and salted herring, munched with oatmeal bannocks by the onlookers in the galleries, who had waited up there for twenty-four hours to secure their places. This was a national contest, and everyone concerned in it. The excitement reached hysteria; they stamped and shouted; called and whistled and roared their greeting of each member who entered – booed Hamilton, who had been appointed to preside as Royal Commissioner and representative of the King, and yelled applause of the more popular nobles, among them the Earl of Montrose, whom they had seen in their streets in his schoolboy days, scattering cash to the beggars.

  He and Lord Southesk sat at the table of the nobles, just below Mr Henderson, who had been unanimously elected as Moderator, and Warriston as Clerk. These two sat alone at their table, the focus point of the discussions. Down at the lower end of the church were the representatives of the lesser nobility, the rows of the peers, and on either side the burgess and clerical members. But not a bishop dared show his face, for the main object of the Assembly w
as their destruction.

  At the top end of the church, Hamilton sat enthroned in his Chair of State; and nearest him, the Lords of the Privy Council, who had been acting as an advisory committee to the King – among them, as Montrose could see whenever he leaned far enough forward, the red hair and pale ambiguous face of the new Earl of Argyll.

  The colours of splendid cloaks showed dimly among the massive pillars, and here and there the gleam of a steel pistol butt or the winking yellow eye of a cairngorm in the hilt of a whinger. The King had forbidden any to wear arms; but all wore them, even the ministers under their black cloaks – for who could tell what might happen at any minute?

  November darkened into December, the fogs thickened, the nights lengthened, the church was dark nearly all day; all hope of settlement died, and nothing but war became possible between the opposing parties.

  And the immediate cause of that war was Montrose’s quarrel with his brother-in-law Carnegie.

  Montrose had set aside Carnegie’s election as the representative elder for Brechin, and appointed another, Erskine of Dun, in his stead. As Warriston, the Clerk of the Assembly (‘only half-awake as usual,’ growled Rothes) read out the notice of this appointment, he inadvertently read aloud as well Montrose’s peremptory message, scrawled on the back of it, saying that Carnegie’s election was to be cancelled. It all happened so casually, in Warriston’s high sing-song scraping voice, that only a few noticed it.

  But one of them was Hamilton, all ready to seize his opportunity to dissolve the Assembly. Here was his chance, in this intolerably high-handed action – the elections had been tampered with, the Assembly ‘packed’ by the nobles – and Hamilton was justified in declaring that he would dissolve it straight away.