A soldier who was a poet, and might have been a scholar, he stood dreaming for a moment of the gentle interchange of hospitality and learning, that would surely outlast these wars, while an almond blossom drifted in against the grey stone, and ‘these are the eternal things’, he said to himself.
Book III
ANNUS MIRABILIS
1644–1645
Chapter One
Montrose rode out of Oxford to raise Scotland for the King.
He rode at the head of a small body of horse. The King had solemnly blessed his cause by presenting him with the sword of his dead brother, Prince Henry; and when in lighter mood, benignly told him to ‘take his chance’, in faint echo of the Duke of Buckingham’s favourite phrase, which had so often sent the blood racing through young Charles’ sluggish veins. His two dead heroes Charles thus invoked to the aid of his servant; they were likely to do as much for him as would his living King.
The Queen had kissed him on both cheeks and added ‘Dearest’ to the title of Cousin. She was with child again and very ill; but her pluck was indomitable.
The grey city melted behind him; there were primroses by the roadside and the birds sang high and clear; the air grew keener as he rode north.
There was as little mortal hope for his enterprise as ever man could have; but hope is immortal. In spite of his cautious words to King Charles – ‘if it fail, it will at least have done your cause no harm’ – he did not believe that he would fail. He discussed his movements with his two subordinates, Colonel Sibbald and Sir William Rollock, the brother of Sir James, and as he had long ago tactlessly told his sister, Dorothea, the only one of that family that he really liked. Odd that she should have preferred James, a smooth oily creature, when here was old William, blundering as a colt, but a real good fellow.
They were riding into a hostile and fully prepared country. It was bad enough to pass through England with so small a force in the turmoil of civil war – but if England were divided into friends and foes, Scotland was united against him, the whole country calm in acceptance of Argyll’s rule. And this he proposed to upset, single-handed, and redress the balance in favour of the King.
Unlike that King, he would not wait and see what happened; he was going to show his intentions, and so force fate as far as possible to take their colour.
He reached Durham; found the Marquis of Newcastle absorbed in some delightful old French music, and in any case incapable of giving any help in the way of men or arms – ‘but stay and listen to an enchanting little thing, a “fantaisie” … I’ll swear this old fellow, Jacobus Clemens non Papa, is worth all your strident, affected young moderns.’
They left him sitting in his satin doublet, slashed with lace, his fair, bowed head attentive to the sedate notes of the harpsichord; and rode out among the rolling curves of the hills.
They heard nothing of Antrim’s Irish forces, who seemed to have earned the name of another clan, the Children of the Mist. Colonel Sibbald always referred to these promised allies as the Irish fairy tale. He was a lean, long soldier of fortune, bow-legged from much riding, who had served for years in Germany. His casual, cynical drawl of lazy indifference belied an eye as keen as a hawk’s for a good inn or a pretty girl or a chance to plant a barb in the sides of their enemies. They could do nothing for the time but snatch such chances in the way of desultory fighting along the Border.
The Covenanters loudly complained that Montrose was ‘ravaging at his pleasure.’ The measure of his success could be learned by the speed with which ‘that generous and noble youth’ became ‘that bloody butcher and viperous brood of Satan’ – a kind of compliment, as William Rollock remarked, on hearing that his leader had been excommunicated by the Kirk. On the same day arrived the King’s patent of his new nobility, for he was made a marquis. The two things were certainly complementary.
He harried backwards and forwards, always hoping for news of the Irish, seeking his chance to cut a way for his small force through Leslie’s armies. He got messengers through to his friends and relatives in the Lowlands, but none dared join him.
‘If you had come a year ago,’ said they, ‘it would have been possible – but now Argyll has his grip on the whole country.’
He heard that the Queen was besieged at Exeter; then, late in June, that she had been delivered of a daughter there, but forced to rise from childbed a week or two later and abandon her new-born infant to escape from the Parliament’s armies into France. ‘Where at least the King will be safe from her “woman’s wit”,’ remarked Colonel Sibbald in approval of the news that disgusted his companions.
A piece of news that followed within a few hours of this met with all their approval, for here at last was a chance of real action. Prince Rupert had sent an urgent message to Montrose to come to his aid in relieving the siege of York.
He dashed south; but heard that Rupert had changed his mind, attacked without waiting for him, and attacked a double foe. The English Parliamentary army had been joined by Leslie at the head of the Covenanters’ armies, and together, upon Marston Moor, they dealt Rupert his first and smashing defeat. He had fallen back on Richmond in Yorkshire.
There Montrose sought him, riding down through the long sultry folds of Wensleydale and Swaledale, that lay as soft as velvet in the deep sunshine of the first days of July. The tower of Richmond Castle rose grey upon the horizon from nearly forty miles away, was lost among the hills, then suddenly was above him, shadowing the sky – the castle walls overhanging the river at a height of nearly three hundred feet. But this vast monument of ancient warfare was obsolete – as unimportant as an old suit of armour.
The town clustered round the slopes of the hill beneath it, a huddle of little climbing streets, crooked roofs and smoking chimneys. At the foot of the castle hill flowed the encircling river, broad and bland and shiningly blue in a smooth green country.
Montrose was directed to the Market Square, which was full of sullen-looking troopers and their horses, the hot sunshine glinting on their harness, the air dusty and smelling of straw and sweat – noisy with the harsh, interrupted sounds of hoofs on cobble-stones, and men’s tired voices calling directions.
In a little inn in the square, in an upstairs room that sloped unevenly down to a low window, sat Rupert – a dazed, empty hulk of a man, unable to believe what had happened to him. The green and golden light from the window rippled upwards over his face, but that remained passive.
‘Boy is dead,’ he said, and Montrose wondered for the first instant whom he meant. Then he added – ‘he was killed in action. I left him tied up with the baggage, but he must have got loose, and he followed me into battle.’
Montrose asked him outright what had happened. Rupert had had less than two-thirds of his opponents’ numbers; but even so his charge had been on the point of breaking the Parliamentary horse under their new leader, Cromwell, when the Covenanter cavalry had swung in and attacked the flank of Rupert’s horse, and he had got cut off from the main body of his army. And that had given Cromwell, whose troops had just begun to break, his opportunity to attack the weakest spot in the Royalist army. And how had that chance been taken!
Four thousand men lay dead on Marston Moor, most of them of the King’s. Newcastle’s Whitecoats had fought to the death, long after the battle was lost to their side. Newcastle himself, who had driven down into the field of battle, just before it began, in his coach and six, so that he might smoke a quiet pipe in it, had now, in far less leisurely fashion, fled overseas. All the Royalists’ guns had been taken, and about fifteen hundred prisoners, many of high importance; the city of York had surrendered to the Parliament; the whole of the north of England had been lost to the King by this one blow.
As Montrose had warned, the Scottish Covenanter army had been given the chance to come in and turn the scales against the King. The Covenanters, in conjunction with this new factor, a leader ‘who can never have known cavalry before,’ broke out Rupert, ‘except his own nags to ride on to market
, or the neighbours’ horses he grazed in his fields. And now my men are calling his cavalry “Ironsides”.’ (He forgot to add that he had first given that title to his enemy.) ‘I tell you, it was the first thing I asked of the prisoners we took at the beginning of the battle – “Is Cromwell there?” ’
But as that generous light died from his eyes, they wore again the vacant look Montrose had first noticed. Something more had gone from him than his unconquerable reputation, or his dog, or his hopes of the north of England.
Why had he sent for Montrose, and then not waited for him? He was badly outnumbered, yet he had attacked long before there was any possibility of Montrose arriving. He wore a look both desperate and sullen when Montrose pressed his questions – but did so because he knew the danger of leaving that mood upon him, that bitter and helpless sense of injury which if left to fester is halfway to madness.
Rupert flung from him, threw open the door and called to his servant to bring them brandy. His head bumped against the beams of the low ceiling, and he stood rubbing it ruefully until the man came stumping up the wooden stair in his great boots, and set down a round black lop-sided bottle on the table with two pewter mugs beside it. Then he went out, and the latch creaked behind him. Rupert sat at the table and drank, and Montrose drank as he stood, looking down on him.
‘You would have smashed Cromwell’s horse at the outset,’ he said, ‘had it not been for Leslie’s Scots. We must provide a counter to them, and at once. Give me a thousand of your horse and I will cut my way through the Lowlands and get Scotland for the King.’
The heavy-lidded, lustrous eyes were raised to his – the eyes of a dog, eyes of a deer, eyes like his uncle, King Charles. In them, as in his uncle’s, lay the doom of his family – childishly personal, and too much concerned with family matters.
At last he was looking the other in the face. Having got his gaze, Montrose held it, so that the young man could not look away when he next spoke.
‘You have not answered me. Why did you fight?’
Rupert’s face went a dark red. ‘I was told to,’ he muttered.
There is only one man in England whom you would obey, and that not always. Why did you, now?’
‘He charged me to fight, on my honour, however the day might turn.’
‘Show me the letter.’
Unwillingly Rupert drew a letter from inside his doublet. He had been carrying it next his heart.
‘It will be there till I die,’ he said, with a simplicity that robbed his words of extravagance. ‘I show it to you, because I see what you think of me, and I cannot bear it, though it is what all the world will think. I shall not show it again.’
Montrose read King Charles’ letter to his ‘Loving nephew’, its involved messages of affection, and then its directions, ‘very philosophical and parabolical’, as he had himself once said of Hamilton’s cloudy meaning.
But the purpose of this letter eventually came through, obstinate in its repetitions like the blows of a sledge-hammer. Rupert, as he valued his honour, and his uncle’s cause, must fight at once and come to Charles’ assistance.
Had Montrose had such a letter in Rupert’s place, he would have ignored it and given his respectful reasons afterwards for doing so. It was of little use to say so to this broken-hearted boy. Rupert had quarrelled with his uncle, defied him, insulted him, but that was in their family quarrels, affairs of personal jealousy, when the King had blamed him or listened to somebody else rather than him. But when his uncle made it a matter of his own private honour that he should obey him, then he must fling away the lives of his best men, and, far worse for their cause, his own prestige.
The Parliament’s armies would never again fly at the very name of Rupert. No Wizard Prince this, the friend of the devil, but the conquered foe of Cromwell, a middle-aged, middle-class country gentleman. Even his familiar spirit, that had struck terror into men’s hearts, was now only a dead dog.
All this he had lost, and the best hopes of his uncle’s cause, because his uncle had said he would be a coward if he did not do so.
Montrose handed back the letter; Rupert folded it, and put it into his doublet. As he did so, Montrose knew that he had spoken the truth, that he would carry it there till he died, a vindication of himself that he would never show again.
Chapter Two
Instead of getting the thousand horse he had hoped for, Montrose gave Rupert nearly all his troops; then turned back again towards Oxford, to own that his venture had failed. So he gave out, with a cheerfulness that astonished his companions. All his plans of that spring had crumbled like a sand-castle; but other plans, secret, incredible, were forming in his mind.
Cromwell once wrote, ‘You never go so far as when you do not know where you are going.’ His greatest antagonist was now to prove the truth of this.
At Carlisle, he sent on all his men, horses and baggage to Oxford, keeping with him only Colonel Sibbald and Sir William Rollock. These were disguised as Covenanter troopers, himself as their groom, and the three of them determined to make their way alone, where an army had failed to pass, up into the heart of Scotland.
Montrose was not easy to disguise. He cut his hair shorter, but then his hands gave him away. Some walnut juice, however, worked wonders, and a judicious hacking, not paring, of the finger-nails with his whinger. But his bearing and his eyes remained untranslatable. Sibbald told him to stoop, and not to look at anybody.
On three horses, with the ‘groom’ leading a fourth, and none of them too good, lest they should arouse suspicion or envy, they threaded their way north again through the network of troops, cautiously inquiring as to their position from the country people on their line of march. The main part of these were far more concerned with their coming harvest than with the progress of the war, and never troubled to know whether they were on one side of it or the other.
A sleepy summerlike indifference lay over the hot countryside. They came on its incarnation as they rounded one of the many bends in an inconsequent lane, where the mud was baked into crumbling white ruts, and the smell of meadowsweet and honeysuckle was lush and heady.
They heard him singing long before they saw him – a raucous, lewd, and inconceivably happy voice:
‘Oh the cherry lips of Nelly,
They are red and soft as jelly;
But too well she loves her belly,
Therefore l’ll have none of Nelly—
No, no, no, no, no, no,
I’ll have none of Nelly, no, no, no.’
The singer seemed to be repudiating every female in the calendar, for bonny Betty was pretty but she was sweaty – and he could dally with Dolly or with Molly, so fair and fat and jolly, but one had a trick of folly, and t’other of melancholy – and in a flax shop he spied Rachel but her cheeks hung like a satchel.
They turned another twist in the lane and saw him sitting in the ditch. The tall purple spears of foxgloves rose all round him; buttercups grew betwen his legs, each flower a disc of polished enamel, gleaming in the sun.
He was one of Newcastle’s Whitecoats, though his coat was now purple with grease and wine-stains. It was unbuttoned all the way down, showing a torn dirty shirt and the fat red creases where his neck folded into his hairy chest. His red face was wrinkled into smiles; a little blue eye rolled up at them with a cock as impudent as a sparrow’s, but too contented to question. He had no hat and no weapons. His hand clasped lovingly a round black demijohn.
If this meant that Newcastle’s men were round here, it would be awkward for them, disguised as Leslie’s troopers. Colonel Sibbald asked him where he came from, but he had no idea;
asked where he was going to, but he knew still less; asked where his company was, but he had lost them, lost his way, lost his pike and his knife – ‘and let them all go,’ he cried, hiccuping, as he waved his bottle up at them. ‘Have a drink. I’ve had – plenty.’
That was evident. Nothing could be got from a man so blissfully oblivious of his circumstances. They wer
e riding on, when once again the blue eye cocked upwards, rolled from each of the Scottish troopers to the groom behind; the fat grin spread all over his face, and he said, ‘And there’s my lord, for all he tries to look like a groom.’
‘You’re blind drunk,’ said Rollock sharply.
‘Drunk I am, and glad of it, but I’m not too blind to see a brand new marquis, and the best man we’ve got, for all he’s a Scot:
The – best man we’ve – got,
For all he’s – a Scot.
And here’s to your Honour’s very good health.’
As his chin fell back and the bottle obscured his face, the three men looked quickly at each other, and Sibbald dropped his pike to a level with the man’s chest. It would be the work of half a minute to run him through and leave him safely dead in the ditch, instead of alive to prattle of this encounter through the countryside.
There was not a soul to see it done; the larks shrilled overhead in the hot blue sky; the fields spread green and gold all round them; the hedges were white with the late wild roses; in all the wide, lovely scene, there was no human being but the three men on horseback and the drunkard in the ditch.
But as the trooper lowered his pike, the groom pushed his horse forward and struck it aside. The soldier hearing the scuffle, but quite incurious as to its cause, lowered his bottle and peered up over the top of it, his lips still glued to its mouth.
Right in the middle of that swaying coloured scene, between him and the sun, hung the face of the new marquis, dark against the sun. It leaned down towards him; in front of it, between my lord’s outstretched fingers, was a coin as gold as a buttercup. A cool voice, that he would remember, pierced into the depths of his fuddled brain; it said:
The Proud Servant Page 30