The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  The first thing he did when they got to Kintore was to call his son to him, tell him that the sack had been stopped, and would never be allowed again.

  ‘Looting there may be,’ he said, ‘but for any outrage or murder the punishment will be hanging, and so I will let them know, as soon as they are sober enough to take it in.’

  The boy stood red and sullen. He felt he had shown himself a weakling; he tried to mutter something about not caring what happened to a lot of greasy citizens. His father put his hand on his shoulder, and swung him round that he might look him in the face.

  ‘That is a lie,’ he said. ‘You know, as I do, that what I have done to this city is a foul and horrible thing, that it will be a lasting blot on my name. I ask you to help me see to it that there shall never be another.’

  Johnnie looked at him in helpless devotion. He felt, as many men had felt and would feel, how gladly he would die if it could prevent any harm or dishonour coming to this man.

  He had lost his childish confidence in the goodness of the world, but in its stead he now won, though all unknowingly, a deep knowledge of good and evil – that they might exist in the same person, even to extremes – but that the good would last when the evil had crumbled off and become merely an ill-famous story, inexplicable and unattached, throwing no light on the main character, so that in time,

  like tales

  Ill told and unbelieved, they pass away,

  And go to dust forgotten.

  But all that the boy saw of this knowledge was that already he could not believe his father had really given the order to sack Aberdeen.

  ‘It was not you,’ he mumbled shamefacedly.

  Chapter Twelve

  After they had left Aberdeen, Montrose watched his son carefully, fearing some breakdown. But it was he himself and not Lord Graham who fell ill, and that so seriously that his life was despaired of, and his enemies eagerly gave out the news of his death. It was a collapse after severe fatigue and strain. Exactly a month ago he had left Carlisle, disguised as a groom, to work his way up north, and since then he had done and dared so much that all his nerves of mind and body had been tautened to snapping point.

  In his delirium he spoke often of Aberdeen, worried that if he did not sit still, his portrait would never be done in time for his wedding – called to Lady Pitsligo, nodding like a cockatoo in the gallery at three black crows below – complained that they had broached barrels of blood in the street for the beggars to drink, and one cried, ‘Take, drink, this is my wine!’ And at that his ravings grew worse; he seemed to confuse his son with the murdered drummer-boy, and to regard himself as the slayer.

  As though his unconscious mind now paid the penalty, his delirium helped to efface the memory of the sack from his son’s. The boy’s frantic anxiety lest his father would die or go mad, left him no room for images of past horror.

  When he heard that their enemies had ordained a day of public thanksgiving to God for the supposed death of the King’s Lieutenant, he sobbed in helpless fury; and that was the moment when Montrose, recovering consciousness for the first time, asked to see his son, noticed his red eyes, and put one or two faint but penetrating questions to him. Johnnie hated to croak the ill-omened news, but there was no cheating those eyes, even now that they were dulled by fever.

  ‘They are giving thanksgiving services that they are delivered from “this ravening lion of Montrose”.’

  To his intense relief, a smile stole over his father’s wasted face.

  ‘Find me my Aesop,’ he whispered.

  Johnnie found the battered copy that Montrose had had at Saint Andrews; then with a sudden, delighted guess at his father’s meaning, he turned to the fable of the lion who shammed dead, and then arose to astound his enemies.

  ‘Here it is – and yourself, my lord,’ he said, showing it to him. The weak head on the pillow gave a nod, the eyes closed at the same moment, and Montrose had his first natural sleep since his illness.

  In a very few days he was up again and declaring that he was as strong as ever. It was Lord Graham’s good news, he said, showing how well he had put the fear of God into his enemies, that had hastened his recovery.

  Other news hastened it still more rapidly. Alasdair had determined to go west and see how his own castles there were faring, and to raise recruits among the Clan Donald by telling them of the victories he had won, together with the mighty Montrose. Hereditary bard and harpist and piper and speaker and recorder were all hard at work commemorating those victories, with so exclusive an eye to their effect on the Clan Donald that there was scarcely any room left to mention the mighty Montrose.

  So their leader was left for the present with only five hundred men, and no chance as yet of getting in the third smashing victory which he had hoped would bring in the whole of eastern Scotland to the King’s banner. So far from that, recruiting in these parts had been set back by the sack of Aberdeen. It might be the ordinary method of civil war on the Continent, but no true Scot was going to serve with a Commander who expected him to sack his native cities. Put like that, it proved a most effective piece of propaganda.

  Argyll’s activities were not so well advertised. Without the provocation of any fight, he was putting to fire and sword the houses and lands of everyone suspected of even sympathy with the King’s cause. His army overran and devastated most of Huntly estates mortgaged to him, Argyll was virtually the head George, Lord Gordon, and Lord Lewis, in helpless witness of the destruction of their father’s property. Their uncle held them in a grip stronger than armed force; it was their father’s endless debts to him that made them his prisoners. With nearly all the Huntly estates mortgaged to him, Argyll was virtually the head of the house, and now took the Bog of Gight itself for his headquarters.

  He had with him over two thousand five hundred foot and fifteen hundred cavalry, yet complained that his army was too small; so that fresh levies had to be sent to him from Leslie’s armies in the north of England. He had been careful not to reach either Perth or Aberdeen too quickly after the battles; in each case he marched into the city only when Montrose’s little army had marched out of it several days before. Scotland was beginning to complain that their uncrowned King Campbell was not a sound man to have at the head of military affairs.

  And no secretary could put on paper the complaints of old Leslie, now Lord Leven, at parting with his much-needed regiments in England, to a commander who had already more than three times the number of his opponents.

  Montrose had written a despatch to the King and sent it by Sir William Rollock, from Kintore, soon after his victory at Aberdeen, and was humanly glad that he had done so while the news could be so good. He would now have little to give beyond that of some few recruits, among them about a hundred and fifty Gordon cavalry from Strathbogie.

  With an army whose total was not a thousand, he proceeded to bait Argyll’s huge force, burned the lands of Covenanters in answer to its laying waste of loyalist country, and led it a dance all round the Gordon and Angus country – ‘a strange coursing’, Argyll’s now doubtful admirers began to call it.

  Here, there, and everywhere at once moved Montrose’s army, keeping close to the friendly foot-hills that fringed the Central Highlands, and darting from them whenever he saw his opportunity to harry the Covenanter armies that marched ponderously through the Lowlands along the east coast. The small band of wanderers was now as tough and wiry as a winter herd of deer, and travelling nearly as light, for they had buried in the bog the cannon they had won at Tippermuir and Aberdeen; and all the women and children had gone west with Alasdair.

  And after these mountaineers, all round the north-east of Scotland, and round and round again, there lumbered, at a distance of a week’s march, Argyll’s army of four thousand, with its pipers proudly announcing that ‘the Campbells were coming, hurrah, hurrah!’

  In the centre of it, more important, and certainly a deal more active than all his horses and men, was the pocket committee that he took every
where with him to represent the Government, so that through it he could issue his commands to the nation. The seat of Government had become a floating company, which, with discussion and doubt and question, argued and debated and hampered and hindered every movement that its generals wished to make, so that it was invariably made a week late.

  Until suddenly, through a piece of bad intelligence work on the part of his usually excellent scouts, Montrose found his army almost within firing range of Argyll’s, which he had thought as far away as the Grampians.

  He was in as bad a trap as any enemy could hope to drive him. He was at Fyvie Castle, on the Ythan, a house surrounded on three sides by bog. His hundred and fifty Gordon horse had just deserted in the almost inadvertent manner peculiar to the Highland regiments, whose home affairs were liable to assume inconvenient prominence in the middle of a campaign. He had no more than fifty horse and eight hundred foot in all; and, what was worse, he had run clean out of ammunition.

  Argyll’s intelligence work had been better than his enemy’s, for he knew of all these facts, and for once, with the odds at rather more than five to one, felt bold enough to attack. On the one side of the house that was not a bog, lay a rough ridge of low hills unusually well-wooded for that part of the country, and these Montrose seized upon as his only possible point of vantage. But as he hurried there, he saw that a regiment of Argyll’s foot had already occupied the dikes and low stone walls to about halfway up the hill.

  Below, was the vast body of the main army – a thousand of the Campbell clan, fifteen hundred militia, seven troops of cavalry under Lothian, Argyll’s master of horse, and fourteen more under the Earl Marischal. The infantry who had already taken possession of the lower slopes of the hill were picked marksmen with their muskets – and Montrose’s men had neither powder nor shot.

  He turned to a young Irish officer in command of one of Alasdair’s regiments, whose pluck and dash he had already noticed.

  ‘Come, O’Cahan, let us get our powder and shot out of these fellows.’

  Manus O’Cahan grinned back at him. This would be something to tell in Ballymena. At the head of his company he crashed down through the scrub; their pikes and claymores gleamed like a torrent through the brown autumn trees; then came the yell of their battle-cry – Lamh dearg aboo! – as they launched themselves on their entrenched foes, and soon cleared that formidable position of the enemy. Manus O’Cahan trudged up the hill again with some of his men, and proudly laid several bags of powder at the feet of their commander.

  Said one of them softly, ‘We’ll have to be going back again for the bullets. The stingy hucksters have left us none with the powder.’

  ‘You will have to run fast to catch up with your enemy,’ said Montrose – and they could see the flying musketeers already joining the main army down below. Movement was now visible all through it; were they going to attack in whole force? No, they were beginning to retire across the Ythan – it could only be for the moment, Montrose was certain of that. Even if Argyll wished to abandon the attack after the failure of a single regiment, Lothian and Marischal could never permit such a disgrace.

  ‘So they have gone off to hold a committee,’ cried young Lord Graham, dancing up and down in his excitement, ‘and they will dispute the next move in the battle, “and fifthly, my brethren, and sixthly, and seventhly—”’ He found that if he stood still he was shivering all over, which was most unfair, for he was not at all afraid.

  But he had no chance to stand still, nor had anyone else, for his father was commanding them to lay their hands on every pewter plate and vessel in the castle and melt them down as fast as they could, ‘and we’ll have shot to go with this powder by the time those sluggards have crawled back again.’

  All over the castle they rushed, looking for pewter and lead, dragging down the beautifully-wrought leaden cisterns and gutter-pipes from the roof. High up behind the battlements of warm red stone, there had been added in Queen Mary’s day an extra floor of sloping roofed rooms. Johnnie Graham peered in at an attic window, uttered a whoop which he quickly checked, looked round to see that no one should share his spoil, and then crawled into the attic.

  A few minutes later, he came clanking and hurtling down the stairs like a troop of knights in mediaeval armour, and plunged up to the bread-baking furnace in the huge kitchen. There, directing the boiling down of the lead into bullets, was Manus, son of the Giolla Dubh MacCahan that was foster-brother to the Earl of Antrim – a lean long young man who softly whistled a tune, while his steady slits of eyes never flickered from the seething cauldron.

  ‘Where have you been, my fine hero?’ he shouted to his General’s son – ‘Come and serve scullion under me, for it’s head cook I am here.’

  ‘Not a scullion – I’m a chambermaid,’ gasped out Johnnie, flinging his spoil down at O’Cahan’s feet.

  It proved to be a quite irrational number of pewter chamberpots that had been stored in the attic – and shouts of laughter attended their conversion into shot.

  The word came that five hundred of the Covenanter cavalry, with Lothian himself at their head, were moving out to the attack. Down charged the Irish musketeers, holding on to the looped leather stirrups of Montrose’s fifty horsemen; and delivered their volley, so well placed and so utterly unexpected, that Lothian’s attack was turned into a rout, which might easily have been a massacre had the cavalry been allowed to get still deeper into the wood. But the musketeers were too eager to start their ‘Charge of the Chamber-pots’, as this was called ever after.

  As it was, the five hundred troopers who fled back to the main army spread such terrifying reports of men who had been ammunitionless a few hours before, and had now been supplied by the devil himself, that any skirmishing that followed lost all its effect before it started. The Earl Marischal’s brother, the best of the Covenanting officers, was killed, and Argyll, utterly disheartened by his first personal attempt in the field, moved his army once again across the Ythan.

  He told Marischal that he had been unlucky to him and to his poor brother, and said something under his breath about the Lord having always loved to chasten him. But Marischal refused to play up to his appointed role as bereaved brother; he muttered venomously that any one would love to chasten a man who insisted on putting water between him and his enemy.

  Quarrels and complaints seethed round Argyll as he slowly withdrew his army, having found that during their second retirement, Montrose and his men had slipped away under cover of the night. He felt that his own clan avoided his eyes – and all because he hated to waste their lives in unnecessary risks. He could see so clearly how great would be the loss, how slight the advantage; he was the wisest statesman in Scotland, who had guided his country clear of English and royal interference, and put them into a fair way to rule themselves through the spiritual democracy of the Kirk. Yet all this counted for nothing, because he could not swagger and spill blood and say the right word on the spur of the moment in the heat of battle, like that swashbuckler, Montrose. It was unfair. He had not been brought up as a soldier, nor as a Highland chieftain. He had studied at Saint Andrews, and gone in for archery and golf.

  So had Montrose, was the exasperating answer.

  Then Argyll proved himself the statesman. He offered free passes to all Montrose’s officers (who numbered nearly half his army since Alasdair’s departure) and the surety of his protection, should they wish to go home and see to their estates, now that the winter was coming on them, and no sensible man could think of going on fighting until the spring came again.

  Montrose, now in the Gordon country at Strathbogie again, hoping that after his three victories, Huntly would surely join him, hoping too that Alasdair and his men might arrive at any moment, held a council of war.

  At this council one after the other of his officers pointed out that the days were drawing in, and the snow was creeping down the mountains, that fighting was a summer’s job, and a mountain campaign in winter might kill them all, certainly those
of Lowland upbringing – that they had homes to see to, wives to visit, cattle to put under shelter from the bitter winds – that it had been a glorious autumn and they would all meet again in the spring and make that still more glorious, but in the meantime, as Montrose must understand—

  Yes, he understood.

  Off they rode as fast as the leaves fell down, for all sensible fellows must go home before the snows fell. Even Colonel Sibbald went, and that gay adventurer, Nathaniel Gordon, slipped off without any leave taken. Forbes of Craigievar, who had been his prisoner on parole since Aberdeen, broke his parole and ran away. Montrose turned to his other distinguished prisoner, Forbes of Largie.

  ‘Do you mean to steal away too?’ he asked.

  ‘I would rather die than do so,’ he answered.

  ‘Then you may go – on your parole, to return when I want you.’

  It looked like the end of the campaign. November had settled down on them, thick with mist and rain – snow in the hills. Lothian’s horse had gone into winter quarters. Argyll was in Atholl, doing propaganda work among the loyalists. Montrose led his few remaining men across the Grampians.

  With him was Lord Airlie and his two sons, Sir David and Sir Thomas Ogilvy. Old as he was, and ‘valetudinarian’ as he was called, he had flatly refused to consider what effect the cold and fatigue of winter marches across pathless mountains might have on his constitution. Nor did he flinch now, when Montrose in a single night covered twenty-four miles of rocks and snowdrifts, flooded streams, and bogs more dangerous on a wild night than any army, and plunged down upon Dunkeld.

  He was within sixteen miles when Argyll heard of the approach of his enemy.

  Argyll had dismissed all his cavalry – but the odds were still four to one in his favour – but then they had been five to one in the last battle, and yet he had not won – but then here was his chance to redeem his position in the eyes of his clan and the nation – but no, no, not just when he had sent away the cavalry.