The Earl of Traquair had superseded Hamilton as Royal Commissioner, and was attacked so savagely by the mob in Edinburgh that he only just escaped with his life. But Catherine, as the new Commissioner’s wife, only smiled more languidly than ever, as though the mob’s howls of execration were too coarse for her to notice.
‘The people?’ she inquired of her younger sister. ‘Well, my dear Magdalen, what are the people? By the way, did not your Jamie address them once from a fish-tub? Or was it a beer barrel? And does he really think they matter?’
Her indifferent questions, as of a mind too fatigued ever to answer, were but the echo of Traquair’s querulous self-advertisement, that now grew daily more indignant. His boys told their cousin Johnnie that their father was an important butter-pat.
He was the worst person to have chosen. But King Charles seemed to have an unerring flair for choosing the worst people – and for doing the strong thing at the wrong moment. He repented of disbanding his army, and called back Thomas Went-worth, just created Lord Strafford, from Ireland, to pull it together again. At once Scotland was humming like a hive, collecting troops and money again in her turn, for she was not going to have Black Tom subdue her as he had done Ireland.
Surely that would prevent even Jamie being so rash as to show his growing sympathy with the King? With the deadly knowledge of psychology of a shrewd and loving woman, Magdalen now welcomed any sign of oppression on King Charles’ part that would prevent her husband seeing the King in his turn as one of the oppressed.
Montrose pleaded openly in Parliament for the King’s authority, against Argyll’s startling innovations, which aimed at transferring the King’s power ‘to the people,’ said Argyll – but ‘to Argyll,’ said Montrose.
The answer to his fiery speeches in defence of the royal prerogative was a paper pinned to the door of his bedroom in Edinburgh, with the words, ‘Invictus armis, verbis vincitur.’
He laughed at it, saying the anonymous writer had complimented him too much in calling him unconquered in war, with only one battle to speak of behind him. As to being conquered by the King’s words, he refuted that accusation by refusing the King’s invitation to Court.
But was it refuted? People believed what they wanted; they told each other that the Earl of Montrose had been asked to Court, rather than that he had refused to go. Perhaps they guessed the reason he gave for his refusal to be far from flattering – that ‘the invitation had caused such jealousy that he thought it best to stay in Scotland.’
‘Is it safe to use those words?’
‘Dear heart, there are only three safe words in the language, and all in your keeping.’
‘What are they?’
‘I love you,’ he replied, kissing her across the paper that he was rapidly folding and sealing, so that she should not plague him to write it again.
War broke out again after less than a year of peace, and Montrose was still the army leader of the Covenanters. To have thrown up his command would have been to do nothing – which he could not bear; or to join the King’s forces against the liberty of the Kirk, and Scotland. Such a course was still impossible to the young man who had come home burning to fight for his country.
Scottish liberty – the Covenant – the Kirk that had defied Rome and England, as Scotland had always done in the past – these were still splendid abstractions, quite distinct from the sour faces of Argyll and Warriston and captious ministers.
By next summer, his Blue Bonnets were over the Border. The river Tweed ran with a fierce current after heavy rains; the army had to ford it by night, and the flood looked unfathomable beneath the tossing foam. The bland, indifferent face of the August moon swam over the hosts of men gathered on the banks. Their coats of hodden grey, of the nearly white natural colour of the wool, made them ghostly and almost indistinguishable from the shore, except where here and there the moonlight gleamed on a steel buckle or a pike’s head or the brass nails that studded their targets. Nearer, one saw their white, awed faces, lit by that unearthly light, all turned towards those swirling depths of waters.
It would be a hard thing to induce them to cross. Montrose volunteered and was met with furious protests. Let him be first in the fight, but not in the flood as well. Let it be done fairly, and lots cast for the choice.
They were cast, and he won – by cheating, all his men declared. If not, then fate itself had to truckle to him.
He dashed into the torrent up to his waist, and reached the other side so quickly that he found himself there alone, for no one had dared follow. Back he went through the torrent to encourage them, and then for the third time faced the river. This time, wagons were led down into the stream to break the current, but in spite of them one of the men was swept away from their midst, and drowned. That their leader should have escaped three times over, and alone, seemed a miracle.
‘He is born to be hanged,’ said his men proudly.
Leslie’s forces crossed the Tyne a few days later; the river was not so alarming, but there were English troops waiting to oppose them on the southern shore. There was a brief engagement in which the English, who numbered between four and five thousand, sustained under forty casualties, and then ran away. The Scottish armies swept onwards through the north of England.
Chapter Eighteen
Down in London, King Charles had had to call his first Parliament for eleven years, to ask for army supplies against the Scottish invasion. But Parliament refused to discuss the invasion unless their grievances were settled first.
Charles showed them letters from the Scots to the King of France. Argyll had promised to levy a regiment of Scots to send to France under his half-brother, the Earl of Irvine; in return, Cardinal Richelieu was to help finance the campaign against England. An odd alliance for those who were fighting against anything that smacked of Rome. What did Parliament think of that?
Parliament thought nothing of it. It wanted to know when that Ship Money tax would be taken off. Charles took it off. It was no use; there were other grievances.
‘Things must get worse before they are better,’ said one of the patriot leaders.
So Charles had to dissolve his Parliament after three weeks, and Strafford had to go north without their support, and by that time the Scots, having met scarcely any resistance from the English, were in possession of Newcastle, and of all the coal supplies for London.
Charles had to patch up peace again; he also had to call another Parliament to help him do so, and a Parliament who found the Scottish invasion a great help to their politics.
‘May it sit longer than the last,’ growled the people who were already beginning to talk of that abortive effort as the Short Parliament.
They need not have troubled, for it was guarded from the King by the Scottish army at Newcastle as securely as if every member’s chair were surrounded by their pikes. It might well sit for ever in such conditions; as it was, it sat for twenty years, and for that reason came to be known as the Long Parliament.
The Scottish commissioners, chiefly ministers, went down to London to settle the peace just as they wished, and there found, as they wrote exultantly, ‘a new world’.
They were extraordinarily popular. The mob welcomed these respectable black-gowned worthies with loud cheers, for ‘whoever is not Scot is Popish’ was the popular notion; and they had just been booing and hissing themselves hoarse at that painted old harridan, the King’s mother-in-law, a Papist, an Italian, a Medici, who had lately dared to visit the Queen, her daughter, with a troop of thievish foreign servants. After the mud and stones they had been flinging at her, and the altar rails they had been tearing up, and the one or two army officers they had murdered on suspicion of popery, it was a change now to have someone to cheer.
The grave citizens approved of them, for they would show the King and his immorally French and Catholic Queen that his people were in earnest, and would not have white-robed Romish-looking priests moving about the Communion table in their churches.
; Fashion itself went mad over them, or at least over Mr Henderson, who suddenly found himself a society preacher. All London thronged to church to hear him tell them of their sins.
Above all, the new Parliament, in which the puritan element was very strong, proved their sympathy in the most practical way, for it agreed to pay all the Scottish army’s expenses in invading England.
If only they would pay the Commissioners’ hotel bills too! The London prices were exorbitant, and no amount of preaching or arguing could convince the innkeepers of the error of their bills.
‘Two and forty shillings sterling for some dishes of little partans! Man, but it’s fair impossible! Two and forty shillings Scots, you mean.’
But the innkeeper, insolently provincial, professed never even to have heard of shillings Scots.
Still, one cannot have everything; and the new Parliament had at once put the arch-enemy Laud in the Tower, where nobody would listen to him.
‘Poor Canterbury,’ said the Commissioners, ‘is now grown so contemptible.’
They put Strafford in the Tower too, so there was the King’s greatest soldier safely out of harm’s way, and likely to be still safer, for ‘The Lower House will have Strafford’s life,’ wrote Warriston exultantly. The Lower House, too, ‘are thinking on moneys for us – this in post haste – Lord encourage and direct them!’
With the Lord encouraging and directing everything so admirably, it seemed a good time to insist on Presbyterianism being set up all over England, and so maintain ‘one form of Church government, in all the Churches of His Majesty’s dominions.’
It was just what Charles had thought, only he had thought it of the Church of England.
Substitute the Kirk of Scotland, said the Commissioners, and that would be quite different. Then there would be one great international Church of Protestants in union with that of Calvin at Geneva and in Germany, which could present an unbroken front to the international Church of Rome.
But here again, as in finance, the Scots Commissioners found the English hopelessly provincial; their Parliament not only did not care about European politics, but many of them belonged to little fussy parochial sects, scarcely to be called Protestants, since they protested against the chief protestors.
One of the new members of Parliament, a rather uncouth, ill-dressed country gentleman, but a forcible fellow, called Mr Cromwell, went so far as to say that the State ought to tolerate them all (except of course the Catholics).
Warriston was shocked almost into a fit, while Henderson began to despair of his dream for religious unity. He had discovered the essential frivolity of fashionable congregations, and wrote of the English that they were ‘so bred in Riches and Plenty that they can hardly be induced to embrace any Discipline that may any wise abridge their Liberty and Pleasures.’
And the English Parliament, though they promised money, did not pay it.
But worse than all these things – while the ministers were preaching, praying, arguing and contesting for their country and religion in this benighted, heathenish, and hellishly expensive city – they were being stabbed in the back at home, plotted against by their most brilliant and admired leader, betrayed by that cherished youth whom they had fondly called ‘A David chosen for the Lord.’
For the Earl of Montrose had entered into communication with his King.
Montrose had been growing more and more disquieted. Argyll had been appointed as solely responsible for the whole of Scotland north of the Forth. Montrose had protested; Argyll had at once shown himself amenable, and had other names placed beside his own, including that of Montrose. But it gave no check to Argyll’s real power; he did his chief work unaided by appointments.
He had refused to appear openly as a formal member of the Committee of Estates; all considered that his reason was the same as when he had been slow to declare himself on the side of the Covenanters – that he might ‘help them the better in secret’. The Committee was believed to have been his invention, and his influence was behind it. So powerful had he grown that he even relaxed a little of his accustomed caution, for he had begun to test public opinion here and there by philosophizing among his friends, as a purely abstract point, on the question whether it were in some cases permissible to depose a king.
Montrose heard of this. He boldly wrote to Charles that ‘your ancient and native kingdom of Scotland is in a mighty distemper’ – one which ‘in my opinion is contagious and may infect the rest of your Majesty’s dominions.’
And that the cause of this disease ‘is a fear and apprehension, not without some reason, of changes in religion … and therewith all their laws infringed and liberties invaded. Free them, sir, from this fear.’ …
He begged Charles to come himself to the next Scottish Parliament. ‘It is easy to you in person to settle their troubles, to disperse these mists of apprehension and mistaking – impossible to any other. If you send down a Commissioner, whatever he be, he shall but render the disease incurable.’
He warned the King not to let his subjects in Scotland dispute or meddle with his power; nor on the other hand to ‘aim at absoluteness’ – for ‘the people of the Western parts of the world could never endure it any long time, and they of Scotland less than any.’
And he braced him against any possible storm – ‘You are not like a tree lately planted, which oweth a fall to the first wind. Your ancestors have governed theirs, without interrupting of race, two thousand years or thereabouts, and taken such root as can never be plucked up by any but yourselves.’
It was a very good letter, but when he read it to Magdalen, she said, ‘What is the use of writing all that to the King? He may write a good letter, but he would never read one – he would not take it in.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he did not write it. He can only hear what he says himself. You showed me that.’
He did not know how he had done so, but he did not pursue it; he told her abruptly that Argyll was plotting to get the Crown for himself, or if not the Crown, a Dictatorship. ‘He tells his friends after dinner that he is the eighth man from Robert Bruce, and his clan brag openly that they will have King Campbell, not King Stewart.’
‘You will never trouble with such stuff as that – the after-dinner bragging of friends who can afford to be fools together?’
He shot a glance at her, amused, aware. Well he knew how her cool judgement could correct and counterbalance his impetuosity, if only he could trust it ever to follow any end but that of his safety.
So he fell silent, and began to walk up and down; but then he told her.
‘One of Argyll’s own friends – Lindsay of the Byres – has told me of a scheme to make “a particular man”, Dictator of all Scotland. That can only mean Argyll.’
She sat frozen. She had heard of this, and had wondered what would happen when it reached Jamie. She tried to pour cold water on it.
‘Why should Lindsay tell you – and he a friend of Argyll’s?’
‘He was at Saint Salvator’s with me.’
The answer was unanswerable.
He went on – ‘I am going over to Wigton’s house at Cumbernauld to see what we can do about it.’
‘What can you do?’
‘We are all going to meet there, and we shall form and sign a new bond, to uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the National Covenant, and to resist “the particular and indirect practising of the few” – that is the phrase.’
‘For Argyll again. Another bond – are there not enough of them? And you “all” – who are they?’
‘Wigton himself, Mar, Atholl, Marischal, Kinghorn, Seaforth, Home – oh, and others.’
She noticed that none of them except Montrose were men of real power, who had much to lose in the governing of the State. They were the lesser and moderate men, who were happy to get Montrose as leader, on whom all the brunt of this enterprise would fall.
She watched him marching up and down their room, past the great carved wardrobe where
the firelight flickered over the dark polished heads and wings of cherubs who gazed upwards at the twelve bearded faces of the apostles in a row above them.
In a corner was the heavy wooden cradle that had rocked him as a baby, and then each of their three young sons. He walked so blindly that he knocked his knee against it, and it started to rock, and went on of itself, slower and lower, slower and lower, until it stood still again at last.
Into the shadow he went at the end, a shadow himself now, his face showing like a ghost’s against the great door with the cross-way beams; and back he came again to her. The firelight striped his form in bars of red and black; he was like a restless tiger, turning this way and that, seeking escape from the trap of his own thoughts.
‘All this talk of plots,’ she began, and then stopped in despair. It was enough to engender plots of itself, just as it was believed one got the plague by being afraid of it. Whatever Argyll plotted, Jamie would never be able to prove anything against that cunning lawyer. He was the last person who should touch any intrigue – and so was his old guardian, Napier, who had been egging him on instead of holding him back, and the two together with no more caution than a couple of schoolboys playing at a conspiracy.
There was Jamie, hot on his rage, and if Argyll were to come in this moment, he would hurl it out at him.
‘I knew it from the beginning,’ he was saying. ‘He will pull down the King to set himself in his place – not openly, but behind some committee. – What out of hell is a committee? Men, I suppose, like the rest of us, when apart – but when banded together, they become a soulless monster. Why can he not come out from behind them, and show his own face?’
‘Because it is such an ugly one,’ she cried with a little hysterical laugh. ‘His lady love could not bear to look at him, and that is why she ran away.’
She had laughed for fear of crying. That cold spirit of Argyll’s had shown how hot it could burn in revenge. He had taken no part in the fighting of these ‘Bishops’ Wars’, but he had made them an excuse to satisfy some private hates of his own.
The Proud Servant Page 25