The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘God help me, but I’m glad to have left his service!’ he would say, puckering up his eyes in the wizened smile that made him look like a benevolent goblin. ‘His men complain he has wings to his horse’s hoofs – have I not known it, when I was too stiff and sore to get down from the saddle! He’s dashing here, there and everywhere, raising troops and money out of nothing, subduing the whole country with his forced marches – all before anyone can forestall him, or even guess that he’s within fifty miles. He moves like a mountain torrent. Ah, his men are proud of him! Grumbling is a soldier’s best way to show it. He has the sense to learn his trade too – for all he’s the Commander General, he’s not too proud to take hints from little Leslie.’

  Magdalen had heard Rothes speak affectionately of ‘that rascally bastard cousin of mine,’ Alexander Leslie, who had served for years as a soldier of fortune under the Swedish king-captain, Gustavus Adolphus, and like many other Scottish mercenaries had hurried home to fight for the Covenant.

  ‘What can the Covenant mean to him?’ she asked in contempt; but the answer was that it meant his country, for which he had grown homesick after years of hardship and iron discipline in a foreign land. And it meant too the independence of that country from a foreign yoke.

  He was a small, insignificant-looking, elderly soldier, tough and wiry as a terrier, whose rough, good-humoured authority carried weight over all his fellows. He was the practised professional where Montrose was as yet only the dashing amateur. His young Commander General had the modesty of good sense in spite of his haughty manner, and was glad to ride out by Leslie’s side and breakfast with him in the open on those biting winter mornings, with their napkins on their knees and a leather black-jack of ale beside them, and hear Leslie’s stories of the greatest commander that the north had ever seen, stories bitten off between huge mouthfuls of food, while they blew on their frosty blue fingers.

  Gustavus Adolphus had known how to treat the Marquis of Hamilton, when His Wobbliness had fooled about as envoy to Sweden. Took Hamilton’s hat from his head, he did, flung it on the floor and stamped on it, and why? Just because that was what any sensible fellow would do, who had looked long enough at Hamilton and Hamilton’s hat.

  And having breakfasted, they buckled up their buff coats, sounded the call to arms, and rode down into Aberdeen at the head of eleven thousand men, horse, pikemen, and musketeers, to take that recalcitrant city in the name of the Covenant. But not a blow was struck, and Magdalen hoped that Jamie was only picnicking, and that nothing very serious might happen after all.

  The clouds of armies rolled up and up, the long thunder was heard of men marching, of the mustering of great horses and the hauling of cannon; and the price of peat went up, because the peat-men ran away from the Covenanters; still the war did not begin, so that people went on saying, ‘Something will surely happen to prevent it.’

  But the old country-women who came to the kitchen at Kinnaird in search of a bite and a sup, and would sit there for hours, rocking themselves to and fro, letting out an occasional croak under their black hoods, told how martial music had been heard on an ancient hill fort in Aberdeenshire, much frequented by the fairies. Drums and fifes were heard playing the marches of Scotland, England and Ireland, night after night.

  For nearly a century Scottish women had possessed their homes and their men in comparative safety. Now that there was the threat of war once again, it was the more agonizing, because of the late, treacherous security.

  ‘Will the world ever be safe?’ asked Magdalen, and Master Forrett doubted that people desired it. For look at England, so envied abroad for her mild-tempered King and her prolific Queen, and still more for her good trade, increasing manufactures, and the high credit of her merchants.

  Yet the spirit of that country had grown stern in safety. Prosperous conditions only gave a man more leisure to trouble about his soul; and that, so far from sharing in the material security, had become more and more a frightened, lonely thing. No longer was it knit to its neighbours by the sense of unity in national danger and victory that had inspired it in Elizabeth’s day, when pride in his country and wonder of the half-known world were as the breath of an Englishman’s nostrils. Now his soul had to look to itself, in growing distrust with its spiritual advisers. England was in danger of being ruled by a religious clique, headed by the King and Archbishop. Bishops grew increasingly unpopular. A Cambridge scholar referred to them in an elegiac poem, called Lycidas, as ‘blind mouths’, whose congregations, like ‘hungry sheep, look up and are not fed.’

  The fare provided was in fact too sweet for the congregation. They hated to hear the King’s Book of Sports read to them from the pulpit, telling them that as long as they attended divine service on Sunday they could spend the rest of the day in field sports and dancing round the maypole. Who was the King, any more than the Pope, to decide these things for them?

  In men’s minds at different times there is a craving for restrictions, for things to be made hard. Pleasure has become too easy, people ask, not – ‘will they enjoy this or that?’ but – ‘is this or that necessary for salvation?’

  The drab clothes of tradesmen became more conspicuous; bright colours and music less and less respectable. Since beauty was shunned in worship, it could scarcely be respectable anywhere else. When the Queen danced and acted on the stage before her subjects, men disapproved, and thought they had a right to say so. Mr Prynne did say so in a rude tract, calling theatres the Devil’s chapels, and had his ears cut off in the pillory in consequence. It was no more than he suggested should be done to all actors; and as for his lèse-majesté, men had lost their lives for less in days past. But now people felt more and more that queens may not do what they like, but that men may say it.

  Therefore they looked approvingly towards Scotland, where, in a Cathedral, a mixed assembly of nobles, clergy and burgesses had held what was practically a parliament, and without the King’s consent.

  For the last eleven years the King had ruled the country without a parliament. But here was a parliament without a King – the notion sank in.

  And just as the puritans in England had begun to grasp what the puritans in Scotland were demanding, and to feel sympathy with it, the King was forced to call on his country for supplies of money for an army against these same Scots.

  Grudgingly, he was provided with as few supplies and as many objections as possible. Yet that army slowly gathered together, a mighty force, they heard in Scotland, and up came Hamilton in the spring with a fleet of ships.

  But he sailed away again without even landing. His mother rode down to the shore to meet him with a brace of pistols on her saddle-bow, all ready to shoot him, should he dare come ashore at the head of an English force. He did not dare. He went back to Charles to say it was all impossible in Scotland. These family complications made everything so difficult.

  Charles did not want to begin the war. He told Hamilton to refrain from fighting under any provocation; and Hamilton told Huntly, who had been made Lieutenant of the North, in command of the Royalist forces. So the Cock o’ the North had got his leadership of all the provinces ‘benorth the Granbeam.’ And Montrose was in opposition to him as Commander General of the Covenanters.

  Lord Southesk said to his small grandsons – ‘Huntly’s children are all tying red ribbons round their arms to show they are the King’s men – even the youngest, and that’s a brat of three. Would you not like to wear the King’s colours too?’

  James looked at Johnnie. Johnnie looked at his grandfather, his face red enough for any royalist badge.

  ‘I’ll wear my father’s colours,’ he said.

  Southesk was as much pleased as exasperated with the boy’s loyalty to his father.

  He showed his sympathy with Magdalen by helping to arrange that Montrose should come to Kinnaird for one night that spring. He himself would ride to Brechin during his visit, which was to be kept as secret as possible.

  ‘It would be wiser not to meet,’ he
told Magdalen, and tried to make his tone sound political, not bitter. She kissed his hand with greater tenderness than she had felt for months; and he said, ‘There, there, it is a bad business, but don’t let us exaggerate. There will be better times soon.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  She stood at the window over the courtyard; spurts of rain and flecks of white sunshine flew over the bare sweep of country below; at last she saw three men riding at the gallop, one of them a good way ahead.

  Once more she was in his arms. Broken words came tumbling out from him, unheeded by her. ‘I ought not to have come. It is generous of your father. Dear love, I had to come.’

  Ah, that last made sense. And now she too was saying things, striving to extend this present bliss into the future. ‘We should not be here. If I were at your own house at Kincardine, you could come as often as you like.’

  And leave her and their boys unguarded? No, he could not have that. What a tangle it was.

  Here were Johnnie and young James, solemnly bearing a stirrup cup and jug of ale between them, for Master Forrett had divided the labour to leave no room for jealousy.

  They stood close by him, one against each knee, staring at him, putting up an inquiring finger now and then to touch his sword or his sleeve of chrome leather; and occasionally he put his hand on their heads, but not in the casual, tousling way he used to rumple up their hair. He asked them questions of the ponies he had given them, Dapple and Drake, almost as though they were men; he was gentler and graver than in that home-coming from Italy only three years ago, when he had swung them to the ceiling, a boy himself, still astonished to find himself a father.

  Now he was like a real father, she thought, and longed to keep him so, at her side and theirs – and how in the world could anything matter to him more than that? Resentment was welling up again in her, the salt, bitter taste of tears through her joy in him; but she would not let them come.

  They talked of one slight, happy thing after another, trying to keep other thoughts and questions at bay. She told him how Johnnie would not wear red ribbons when her father wanted him to do so, like Huntly’s children.

  ‘He shall wear my colours,’ said his father.

  ‘So he said. But what do you mean?’ for he was unwinding a broad blue ribbon that he had been wearing across his breast like an order of knighthood. He cut off the end of it with his whinger and tore the piece in strips, fastening a bunch of them into each of the boys’ bonnets.

  ‘That was my answer to Huntly’s boys. The poorest shepherd in my ranks has a bunch of blue ribbons now in his bonnet, and half the cavalry have thrown away their plumed hats and are wearing only bonnets and blue ribbons. I told you blue was your colour, Magdalen, and we should wear it. Well, Johnnie, will you be a true-blue Covenanter?’

  But his gaiety dropped from him as he turned to her from the children, who were proudly strutting round the room with their new colours. He said, ‘Huntly wears red ribbons, and I, blue. Is that after all the only difference between us?’

  ‘Dear heart, you are happy? Do things go well?’

  But she knew as she asked how difficult it would be for him to give an answer.

  His arm tightened about her, for he had felt the knowledge pass to her from himself. This it was to be married; they had been separated for months, but hope and fear had only quickened their sympathies and made them now able to share together what they had missed.

  Later, she said, ‘You distrust Argyll – is that what troubles you?’

  Yes, there it was – that cloud on the clear horizon of his belief in his cause – a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, than that nervous, tenacious hand of Argyll, a lawyer’s hand rather than a chieftain’s, clutching at his cloak as he spoke before the Assembly in the Cathedral at Glasgow, months ago – ‘showing his hand at last’, as Rothes had said in satisfaction.

  Argyll was now Montrose’s most powerful ally, holding sway in all the councils, and practically ruling the new civil governing body, the Committee of Estates.

  ‘Yes, but you have the army,’ she said, ‘and they worship you. He cannot rival you there. Can you not leave it like that?’

  But he was thinking how odd it was that Argyll must be his friend; while his foe was Huntly, the King’s Lieutenant of the North, whose splendidly loyal answer to the Covenant had stirred an envious echo in his heart.

  Huntly stood for his King, and he himself for his nation’s rights – but who could say where rights began and ended? A niggard quality of senseless tyranny had already developed in the very Kirk which was fighting for freedom. When that was won, how soon would it in its turn oppress the freedom of others?

  ‘These ministers,’ he burst out, ‘they are like carrion crows in their lust for carnage. They would have had me sack Aberdeen, which had yielded to me without a blow. But they wanted an example made of the ungodly city, and I was blamed for my “too great discretion”.’

  ‘Oh Jamie, for the first time then in your life!’

  He laughed with her, but she could see how much graver his face had grown, and older. He would not now override her brother’s election, and flout her father before all the Assembly, so she told herself – wondering if she could ever make her father see this.

  Yet it gave her a pang to find that headlong boy grown into a man. He was leaner too, and weather-beaten with cold winds and hard riding; the strain of always thinking, moving, acting at higher speed than anybody else had made his muscles like wire.

  A few weeks ago he had prevented Huntly and his army of twenty-five hundred from occupying the town of Turriff; had done it by dashing along the Mearns with two hundred cavalry, scarcely pausing to rest or even eat on the way; met eight hundred more, to whom he had managed to send word; and so cut off from the town a force two and a half times the size of his own.

  Her pride in him now made her ask about it, but he told her disconsolately that there had been no fight – ‘They had a chance to crush us, and nothing happened.’

  ‘Does that disappoint you?’ she smiled.

  ‘It disappointed Huntly, I know. He must have had his orders from Hamilton not to fight. We waited there all day, entrenched in the churchyard, our muskets guarding the dikes, expecting an attack that never came. All that they did was to parley for peace and I gave them leave to ride up through the town, and so they went away, going past us, so close under the wall of the churchyard that there was I sitting not two pikes’ length from Huntly as he rode by and glared at me.’

  He paused, seeing again the barbaric swirl and flurry of that angry march past of the Gordons, the hereditary foes of his house. How defiantly the pipes had shrilled, and the lean rumps swung in their kilts, and the plaids and rough beards tossed past him on the wind. And then in their midst, the magnificent figure of their leader had deliberately drawn rein to stare at him in fury. Huntly would never forgive him for this shame, done to him in front of all his clan – his family too—

  ‘—His sons were with him – Gordon, whom I had liked – and young Aboyne, hot-headed enough to attack without any backing – and even that little rascal, Lewis, a scamp of thirteen, who has run away from school, and stolen his grandmother’s jewels to raise a force of his own—’ His admiration rang in his voice, and his generous indignation on their behalf.

  ‘Yes, but what has Huntly done for the King?’ asked Magdalen.

  He did not hear her; he was breathing again the keen air of that spring evening in the little churchyard. Through the stir and music of the Gordon pipes just under his ears, there had echoed the refrain that had called on Huntly’s name a generation ago:

  Oh wae betide ye, Huntly,

  And wherefore did ye sae?

  That wailing reproach might well have been uttered by Huntly’s own pipers – a cry from his own baffled friends. Yet the reproach had seemed to Montrose not to Huntly, but to himself.

  Why, if Huntly and his sons so stirred his sympathy, were they on opposite sites – not merely of a low stone wall?
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  Chapter Fifteen

  The ‘blue bonnets’ were famous in a few months. ‘Montrose’s whimsy’, said the veterans with an indulgent smile; ‘true-blue Covenanters’, said the sympathetic; ‘Covenanting dogs’, said the antipathetic, tying blue ribbons on all the curs in Aberdeen in token of their derision; ‘an army of blue caps and jockeys’, said the contemptuous English, who were still more impolite in calling their lice, Covenanters; ‘our panache’, said Montrose’s devoted followers, for whom their leader’s exploits were already making it a crest as symbolic of daring and high honour as the panache of Cyrano or the white plume of Navarre.

  And now they were all marching to a new tune, singing:

  ‘March, march, why the de’il dinna ye march?

  Stand to your pikes, lads, fight in good order!’

  The rhyme to that in grim earnest as in the song would be when

  A’ the Blue Bonnets are over the Border.

  Johnnie and James were marching through the gardens at Kinnaird, shouting it, banging on the toy drums from Holland that their grandmother had bought for them from the pedlar, and now cursed her ill-judgement in doing so. One could stop the children from making that noise in the house, but not from singing their father’s marching songs in the gardens – ‘and for mercy’s sake tell Daniel to keep the boys away from the library windows.’ This it was to have the shadow of civil war across the land, she groaned.

  Only in the north round Aberdeen was the country loyal as a whole to the King and his bishops – but the new young Commander General was subduing all that part before the King came north. What would happen then? Montrose surely would not fight against the King himself?

  ‘God knows what he will do next,’ growled Southesk.

  The most disconcerting thing he did, to himself as well as everyone else, was to bring Huntly to Aberdeen, where he was taken prisoner by the Covenanters and brought to Edinburgh. Huntly said that Montrose had promised him his safeguard – so that either he had broken his word (‘but that is fair ridiculous,’ said Lady Southesk) or that he had not been able to force the rest of his side to keep it. But Magdalen was certain Jamie would never have let himself be overruled; if he gave his word and it was not regarded, he would resign his commission.