‘Oh why does he not say what happened?’ she cried, her restraint breaking for the first time.
It was her father who consoled her with his private theory that when Huntly opened negotiations with Montrose and put himself so incautiously into the hands of his enemies, he had decided that a term of imprisonment at Edinburgh was the easiest way to save his face.
He was in an intolerable position. He got no backing from Hamilton, he was told not to fight, and he had been laughed at for marching up to Turriff with nearly three times as many men as Montrose, ‘hours after the young rebel had got there – and then if you please, Montrose giving him his kind permission to ride away through the town!’
In spite of his angry tone, and his care to call his son-in-law by his title, not his family name, Southesk could not keep the ring of pride out of his voice, nor the contempt he felt for his supposed ally, the King’s Lieutenant of the North. For what had Huntly done for his King (as Magdalen had already asked) but give himself up to his enemies, with his eldest son, Lord Gordon, and now lie helpless in Edinburgh, where he proclaimed ‘You may take my head from my shoulders, but not my heart from my sovereign.’
His sovereign had little use for either his head or his heart, as Charles showed in a distressed letter to Hamilton, complaining of Huntly as both ‘feeble and false’.
That would make Huntly no better friend to the man to whom he had exposed his weakness. In Magdalen’s eyes this ‘Bishops’ War’ was resolving itself into a conflict solely between those who might hurt Jamie, and those who might help him. Never, so she saw from the beginning, would he get help from Huntly, whose castle, the Bog o’ Gight, he was even now besieging.
And now there entered the list of his enemies the two gallant boys that Huntly had left behind to carry on his work. For Aboyne, the second son, still in his teens, joined forces with Master Lewis, and the two of them, in the name of their father, roused Aberdeen to back them under the leadership of the Provost’s son, Colonel Johnstone, a fine soldier of long experience, and got together four thousand men, including six hundred of the Gordon cavalry, a few field pieces, and Colonel Gun, another old soldier.
General Leslie and his army were down near the Border, marching to meet the King’s. Montrose, up in the north, was in danger of having his communications cut; he had to leave his siege of Gordon Castle and dash to Aberdeen, which he found fortified against him, with the river Dee in flood, and its narrow bridge, two miles above the town, strongly guarded by the Gordon horse and the Aberdeen musketeers.
There in the middle of June he fought the only real battle of the ‘Bishops’ Wars’, while down south the King’s huge army lay outside Berwick, facing Leslie’s army, and who knew what might be happening there at this very moment?
What was happening at that moment was that the King was signing a peace treaty. He and his army had been defeated by their discovery that the north could be so hot. The misty sunlight lay soft as a downy blanket on the hills across the Border, they quivered as one looked at them, as though they were a mirage that might at any moment disappear. It was too hot to move, too hot to argue, too hot to think, except of deep pools and long drinks. The imaginations in that army would have emptied all the cellars of England in an hour.
‘My native country,’ said Charles in melting mood, gazing at the bloom on those hills like ripe fruit. But he presently observed that the fruit was crawling with maggots. General Leslie knew how to take advantage of a heat wave. He had intermixed his troops with some herds of cattle so that in the haze they looked twice as many.
And then there was the expense, all those troops eating their heads off, or rather not eating their heads off, for it was impossible to get enough money out of the sullen English citizens to give them their arrears of pay; they were in bad condition; and nobody in the English army showed any quality of leadership.
And just across the Border was the disconcerting spectacle of Leslie’s army in excellent condition, and spirits too, to judge by the determined sound of prayers and the singing of psalms that rose from the camp every morning and evening. This enthusiasm, encouraged by good food and splendid banners flying the legend, ‘For Christ’s Crown and Covenant’, was the most dangerous enemy of the King, for many in his army were so much impressed by it as to say they wished that England also would show a like sturdy independence in dealing with Archbishop Laud’s fussy improvements.
All these bishops only made mischief. Now that they were up here, and could see what the Scots were at, they thought it all very reasonable, and the King had much better give in.
Besides, the lords Pembroke and Holland wanted to get back to their hunting.
So the King gave in.
‘A lot of cows? Too hot to fight? My Lord Pembroke’s hunting? Are soldiers really so silly?’ Magdalen asked her father.
Many miles farther up the east coast, the slanting sunlight slid over the sparkling grey and pink granite walls of Aberdeen, like water over oyster shells. Outside the town ran the river, frothing white in flood; and there, on one side of a granite bridge of seven arches, was a stationary mass of men, with men on horseback behind them. Those were the Gordon cavalry, backing the Aberdeen men and muskets.
On the other side of the river, little bands of horsemen came galloping up to the bridge, narrowing to three or four at a time as they mounted it – and crack, crack, crack, went all the waiting muskets of the men who guarded it on the other side, while the cavalry behind made ready to charge. Puffs of smoke hung like thistledown in the still air; as they drifted away downstream, the attacking horsemen could be seen swinging round and galloping back again, followed by shouts of derisive triumph from the Aberdonians.
All that grilling June day, Montrose’s forces attacked the bridge, made no impression, found their cannon balls all fall short.
‘They hold as pretty a position as ever I’ve seen,’ growled Major Middleton to his Commander General.
Montrose did not answer at once. He was observing a fresh movement of the enemy’s – a sortie from the town – ‘What game are they playing there?’
It proved a game more disheartening to his side than all their beaten-off attacks.
The citizens of Aberdeen – yes, the very women – yes, even the servant maids in their linen head-cloths and aprons – were coming out of their granite walls to bear baskets and jugs of refreshment to their staunch defenders.
It was exasperating to see how safe they felt their position on the other side of the river, but that was nothing to the tantalizing fury of thirst and hunger aroused by the sight of those mighty black-jacks of ale and mountainous pies.
Watching the faces of his men, Montrose swore to himself to waste no time in sleep that night.
The heat of the day dragged to a thin, northern darkness. But it grew dark enough for him to bring up his heavy cannon from Dunnottar, unobserved by the enemy. And in the sultry mist of next morning he led a body of horse up the river, as if to ford it.
Then, said his men, the enemy Gun proved more useful to them than any of their own field pieces. For the river was far too swollen after the rains for anyone to cross it except in a boat; yet Colonel Gun called off the Gordon cavalry from their defence of the bridge and sent them up the river to prevent this impossible fording, and exposed them to Montrose’s new heavy artillery for little better reason than he himself gave in the correctly tough and hearty fashion of an old soldier.
‘Very sound to let ‘em have a peppering – harden ‘em a bit – teach ‘em to be cannon-proof – that’s what they need.’
He was having breakfast himself at the time, but then he was too old and hardened a soldier to need peppering.
So the Highlanders riding along the river bank saw close in front of them Johnnie Seton, one of their commanders, riding by the side of Aboyne, blown to bits by a cannon ball that swept away the whole upper part of his body.
This then was ‘the mother of the musket’. Her hellish roar was answered with a howl, the High
landers broke and fled, nor could their young chieftain, in fury and then in tears, succeed in rallying them. They forced Lord Aboyne to fly with them to Huntly Castle; the citizens of Aberdeen broke from their defences; and Montrose crossed the bridge and took possession of the city.
But he encamped his men in the fields outside the town, and restrained them from any sack. His second-in-command, Major Middleton, objected on the score of professional etiquette – a successful storming army had a right to the reward of loot. There were orders too from the Committee of Estates that if Aberdeen were taken it was to be burned and razed.
But Montrose crushed all objections with a strong hand. He had won his victory with very little loss of life on either side, and he was not going to spoil it with wholesale destruction to please ‘a pack of bloodthirsty old women’, as he roughly called most of the Committee of Estates. They had long been urging revenge on the ‘malicious disloyalty’ of Aberdeen, and hoping that ‘the curse was alighting upon Meroz, which came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty’.
The Lord, however, came to the help of Meroz; in the middle of the angry disputes over the city’s fate came news from the south that the King had signed a treaty of peace at Berwick, two days ago, at the very moment when Montrose was defeating the Gordons in the first serious battle of the war.
It was with a curious sense of anti-climax that Montrose heard of this. What had he won his victory for, since the peace had been signed at the time of its fighting; and, for that matter, for what did ‘poor Johnnie Seton lie gasping on the ground’? according to the poetic licence of the minstrels’ report.
It was his first taste of the futility and waste of war.
The peace gave all the advantages to his side; the King agreed to allow the Scottish Parliament to settle its civil affairs, and the General Assemblies of the Kirk to settle those of the Kirk.
But he might have done that at the beginning and saved all that trouble and expense and the admission of failure.
All Montrose’s instincts as a soldier told him that Charles for his own sake should never have made this enormous gesture of mustering all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, merely in order to march them up to Scotland and march them down again.
Chapter Sixteen
Upon the eighteenth day of June,
A dreary day to see,
The Southern lords did pitch their camp
Just at the Bridge of Dee.
JOHNNIE AND JAMES wanted to get on to the cannon ball ‘that dung Pitmeddin in three’.
Magdalen dandled the new baby, Rob, up and down in time to the twanging of the harp. A fine boy he was, with large solemn eyes that stared, rather shocked, at the ferocious faces made by the travelling minstrel in his efforts to put fire into the pedestrian verses; they plodded on with their report, where once the story would have galloped into song. The ballad’s palmy days had been those of more constant and reckless adventure; the quieter latter years had gently smothered it, as in a too comfortable bed.
Johnnie objected that if
‘There’s not a man in Highland dress
Can face the cannon’s fire,’
then it was because the men in Highland dress, especially those in Gordon tartan, were cowards. James disagreed. If nobody could face the cannon’s fire without getting killed, then why face it?
His grandmother was enchanted by his wisdom, and he not yet six years old. It was just as she had always said, these new inventions of great guns would make war impossible in the long run, for everyone would run away, and then men would have to show more sense than to go on killing each other.
But Magdalen could not believe that men would ever show sense.
When they won the war, they lost the peace; no sooner was it signed, than Hamilton let out that King Charles had written to him that he would ‘rather die than yield to these impertinent and damnable demands’; so that now he had yielded, it could only be to gain time.
So the Scots kept none of their promises, since they were sure the King did not mean to keep his; riots broke out in Edinburgh; and Charles demanded the presence of the Covenanting nobles for further discussion. Argyll and his friends refused to go, as they did not think it safe to trust the King – an insult he deeply resented. Out of the fourteen nobles invited to the conference, only Montrose and Rothes went with three others.
Montrose had been greeted everywhere as a conquering hero; his victory at the Bridge of Dee was being commemorated in ballads, in compliments from all the Covenanting leaders to that ‘generous and noble youth’, that ‘valorous and happy gentleman’. The effect of success on a temper such as his was to make him eager to be generous to those who had not been so fortunate.
He found King Charles, who had apparently conceded everything, being bullied to concede more.
The Covenanters were certain that he meant to keep his bishops in Scotland somehow – Warriston told the King so to his face – else why did His Majesty refuse to ratify the act against them?
Said the King, ‘The Devil himself could not make a more uncharitable construction.’
His reddish-brown eyes were warm in anger; here was a real living man, instead of the frozen mask that Montrose had confronted at Hampton Court. Charles’ expression of his anger gave the young man a pang of indignant pity. A king should not speak so to his subjects – ‘uncharitable’ indeed – who the devil wanted the charity of that little cur, snapping and snarling at the King’s ankles?
Warriston was revelling in the discovery that he felt no vain pride in the converse of great ones. He, the small merchant’s son, who had always had to slave and struggle to keep his home together, was the only one among these nobles and ministers who refused to be pleased in any way by the King’s behaviour at their interviews. He alone could see below the surface, could perceive an insult in Charles’ grave courtesy, in the restraint implied in that slow, careful speech.
It was slow and careful because Charles had to overcome a natural impediment, which for his first few years had made people fear he was dumb, and, later, that he would stutter like his father. Had Warriston known it arose from an infirmity, he might have felt more kindly towards him – but no, nothing could excuse that sad liquid gaze, which so obviously melted his comrades’ wrath – that air of bewildered dignity, as of a prince lost in a world for which he has been ill prepared. Again and again the little clerk tried to ruffle that royal, that criminal composure. When the King at last turned sharply on him and told him to hold his tongue, Warriston was delighted. The ministers could not now go on saying the King was ‘one of the most just, reasonable, sweet persons they had ever seen’.
But nobody was reasonable – not even Rothes, who, heavy with argument and hot-weather gout, lost his temper and told Charles that if he did not get rid of the bishops up here, he would find the Scots joining with the English puritans and attacking the English bishops as well.
It was a threat of war, of attack on the King’s own country. The company stared aghast. Nobody could think what had come to Rothes, though his swollen purple veins might have told them.
Charles replied quietly that this final insult had now made it impossible for him to attend the Assembly in August as he had promised; he would return at once to London.
Montrose looked at his King; the King at Montrose. Charles saw a grave young man whom Hamilton, for one of his obscure reasons, had told him to snub when he visited him at his river palace at Hampton Court three years ago.
A lot of water had flowed under the Thames bridges since then – so also under the Bridge of Dee. This young man had been made Commander General of his rebellious Scots subjects, had proved himself a leader of fire and resource, and had won the only considerable battle in the war, against the royalist forces.
But of all that company, both of the King’s own men and the Covenanters, his were the only eyes that met the King’s in understanding, as though he saw his difficult position, and wished he were not in it.
Yet he h
ad been leading the armies of his enemies. And it might have been prevented – one never knew.
Chapter Seventeen
If the cloud on Montrose’s horizon were that of Argyll’s hand, the cloud on Magdalen’s was that of the King.
‘The hand of a dead man,’ Jamie had described its effect on him at his first disappointing interview three years ago. The seeds of defeat must lie buried deep in it.
And Jamie was feeling sorry for him, and angry with his own side.
‘If you had seen them all strutting off from the royal interviews, so well pleased with themselves for baiting the King that they could afford to approve his manners, though they themselves had shown none!’
‘Yes, for now they can say, “As I told His Majesty to his face – and very grateful he was to me, though the rest thought me mad to say it—”’
‘My sweet cynic! Your laughter is like cool water after all those hot words.’
‘With whom have you quarrelled, Jamie?’
‘With whom have I not? And all for saying that the King should be given a fair chance.’
But Magdalen, the realist, wondered what the King would do with a fair chance if he had it. For her father said he was bungling everything – and in England too. And the Covenanting leaders now said what fools they had been to trust the King’s fair words – though they had not trusted them. Their own words for all their moral superiority of roughness, were no more trustworthy.
Charles meant to break his promise of abolishing the bishops, said they, who had already broken their own promise to disband their army – a more dangerous body of men on the face of it.
‘Why did not Charles, too, stick to his guns, rather than to the surplices?’ demanded his feminine critic.
The Proud Servant Page 24