The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

MAY IT please your Sacred Majesty:

  The last dispatch I sent your Majesty was by my worthy friend and your Majesty’s brave servant, Sir William Rollock, from Kintore near Aberdeen, dated the 14th of September last. Since Sir William Rollock went, I have traversed all the north of Scotland up to Argyll’s country; who durst not stay my coming, or I should have given your Majesty a good account of him ere now. But at last I have met with him, yesterday, to his cost; of which your gracious Majesty be pleased to receive the following particulars.

  After I had laid waste the whole country of Argyll, and brought off provisions for my army of what could be found, I received information that Argyll was got together with a considerable army, made up chiefly of his own clan and vassals and tenants, with others of the rebels that joined him, and that he was at Inverlochy.

  Upon this intelligence, I departed out of Argyllshire, and marched through Lorn, Glencoe, and Aber, till I came to Loch-ness, my design being to fall upon Argyll before Seaforth and the Frasers could join him.

  My march was through inaccessible mountains, where I could have no guides but cow-herds, and they scarce acquainted with a place but six miles from their own habitations.

  I was willing to let the world see that Argyll was not the man his highland men believed him to be, and that it was possible to beat him in his own Highlands.

  The difficultest march of all was over the Lochaber mountains; which we at last surmounted, and came upon the back of the enemy when they least expected us, having cut off some scouts we met about four miles from Inverlochy. Our van came within view of them about five o’clock in the afternoon, and we made a halt till our rear was got up, which could not be done till eight at night.

  The rebels took the alarm and stood to their arms as well as we, all night, which was moonlight and very clear.

  There were some few skirmishes between the rebels and us all the night, and with no loss on our side but one man. By break of day I ordered my men to be ready to fall on, upon the first signal; and I understand since, by the prisoners, the rebels did the same.

  A little after the sun was up, both armies met, and the rebels fought for some time with great bravery, the prime of the Campbells giving the first onset, as men that deserved to fight in a better cause. Our men, having a nobler cause, did wonders, and came immediately to push of pike and dint of sword, after their first firing. The rebels could not stand it, but after some resistance at first, began to run; whom we pursued for nine miles together, making a great slaughter, which I would have hindered if possible, that I might save your Majesty’s misled subjects.

  For well I know your Majesty does not delight in their blood, but in their returning to their duty.

  There were at least fifteen hundred killed in the battle and the pursuit; among whom there are a great many of the most considerable gentlemen of the name of Campbell, and some of them nearly related to the Marquis.

  I have saved and taken prisoners several of them that have acknowledged to me their fault, and lay all the blame on their chief.

  Some gentlemen of the Lowlands, that had behaved themselves bravely in the battle, when they saw all lost, fled into the old castle, and upon their surrender I have treated them honourably, and taken their parole never to bear arms against your Majesty.

  We have of your Majesty’s army about two hundred wounded, but I hope few of them dangerously. I can hear of but four killed, and one whom I cannot name to your Majesty but with grief of mind, Sir Thomas Ogilvy, a son of the Earl of Airlie, of whom I writ to your Majesty in my last. He is not yet dead, but they say he cannot possibly live, and we give him over for dead. Your Majesty had never a truer servant, nor there never was a braver honester gentleman.

  For the rest of the particulars of this action, I refer myself to the bearer, Mr Hay, whom your Majesty knows already, and therefore I need not recommend him.

  … As to the state of affairs in this Kingdom, the bearer will fully inform your Majesty in every particular. And give me leave, with all humility, to assure your Majesty that, through God’s blessing, I am in the fairest hopes of reducing this Kingdom to your Majesty’s obedience.

  And if the measures I have concerted with your other loyal subjects fail me not, which they hardly can, I doubt not before the end of this summer I shall be able to come to your Majesty’s assistance with a brave army, which, backed with the justice of your Majesty’s cause, will make the rebels in England, as well as in Scotland, feel the just rewards of rebellion. Only, give me leave, after I have reduced this country to your Majesty’s obedience, and conquered from Dan to Beersheba, to say to your Majesty then, as David’s General said to his master, ‘Come thou thyself lest this country be called by my name.’

  For in all my actions I aim only at your Majesty’s honours and interest, as becomes one that is to his last breath, may it please your Sacred Majesty,

  Your Majesty’s most humble, most faithful, and

  most obedient Subject and Servant,

  MONTROSE

  This dispatch was written at top speed, like all that Montrose wrote, and with the battle still reeling to and fro in his brain. Tired out from it, he had had his first meal for nearly forty-eight hours, had at once fallen into the dead sleep of utter exhaustion; and as soon as he was up next morning, wrote to King Charles.

  Yet only one half of his letter was concerned with the victory he had just won, which had destroyed for ever the fighting strength of the most powerful clan in Scotland. In the other half, he went very thoroughly and carefully into King Charles’ present affairs – considering the reports he had heard of a suggested peace treaty, whose terms ‘might make your Majesty a King of straw’.

  This made him anxious to show with all his force how confident he now was that he should be able to provide King Charles with a secure base and reserve in Scotland. ‘Come thou thyself’ – it was always his appeal to the King. The bulk of the rebels in Scotland would, he knew, be shocked at the thought of any personal disloyalty to the King; they followed Argyll’s policy only because Argyll had had the whole country in his grip.

  Now Montrose had loosened that grip and utterly smashed its military power. Fifteen hundred of Argyll’s clan lay dead, together with their general, Auchinbreck. Along nine miles of the plain they lay in their green tartan, and in the waters of Loch Linnhe, that were reddened long after sunrise. Many had rushed into those waters, in their desperation to try and escape the slaughter by swimming out to the galley of their chief.

  But with her anchor weighed and her black sails filled, the Dubhlinnseach, that bird of ill omen, had drawn away from the shore, and was slipping fast over the sparkling water towards the open sea.

  Montrose had omitted, perhaps even forgotten to mention that ignominious cruise of the galley of Lorne. The cowardice of his enemies was no concern of his.

  Nor was that of his friends, if cowardice it were, or only com-monsense, that had made the bard, Ian Lom Macdonald, refuse his invitation to join in the battle, with the objection that he would do more useful work by sitting up on the hillside to see how it went, and composing a personal account of the battle by an eye-witness.

  And the report of the non-combatant (untranslatable in English) was far less cool and dispassionate than that given by the leader in the fight. Ben Nevis had trembled, the earth had shaken, as his clan swept down like a whirlwind from Loch Ness to Loch Eil, and the Campbells rushed to meet them like the waves of the sea. But like waves they were broken into spray, and no more seen. No harp would mourn for the false race of Diarmaid, but the birds of Loch Eil would cry rejoicing as they wheeled to their feast.

  Snug homes the Macdonalds had had, now a heap of cold ruins, fair had grown the braes of Lochaber, now a bare desert-white bones of the Macdonalds marked the path where the Campbells had slain and burned and driven their foes beyond the seas. Now it was the turn of the Macdonalds to put the Campbells to a colder exile, to drive their enemy at the point of the sword into the salt waves.

  Death
in fact was a game of tit for tat – and life only slightly more glorious and exciting than death.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Now that the clan of Diarmaid were finished as a fighting unit, most of the Macdonalds could not see what they were carrying on the campaign for. Montrose had to remind Alasdair that there was still a war on in England, and that it was his eventual object to join in it. It all seemed very far-fetched to Colkitto and his other two sons, Angus and Archibald. They would not go east with Montrose into the Gordon country. But they could not persuade Alasdair to remain with them.

  ‘I have fought too long with my lord of Montrose,’ he said, ‘to hope for any better sport than he can give me.’

  Cavalry must be recruited from the Gordons; he could not go south through the Lowlands without it, and he only had the little bodyguard of horse under Lord Airlie and his surviving son, Sir David Ogilvy.

  Even those few horses he had were scarecrows after all they had gone through – ‘the Beggarman’s Line down their haunches is so deep you could dig potatoes in it,’ their Irish grooms complained.

  But of cattle and weapons and all manner of good clothes the troops were now well plenished. The Major-General of His Majesty’s Irishes could go as finely dressed as any courtier, with a plumed hat and a silver-laced cloak and a pair of gauntleted Spanish leather gloves – and a special gillie to carry the lot, since, as Alasdair remarked, it was all very well to have such things about one, as long as they were not in the way.

  They marched up to Inverness and then east to Elgin, where Seaforth was holding a committee meeting with other Covenanting lords. Never was there so quick a way to break up a committee as when the news reached it that Montrose was marching on the town. It dispersed on the moment; as Seaforth’s army of five thousand at Inverness seemed to have already done.

  Previous Covenanters now tumbled over each other in their haste to serve under the royal standard; in a few days Seaforth himself marched up to sign the bond that Montrose had drawn up against him and his other enemies, when the King’s Lieutenant had been all but caught between them at Loch Ness. Down went Seaforth’s small signature, cramped by having to squeeze in after the names in large text of Montrose and Graham and Airlie, amid the surrounding rabble of scrawls and flourishes and marks that branched off in all directions from the little group of leaders.

  And soon room had to be found for another, the most welcome name of all. On one of the blustering last days of February, three riders on fine horses came clattering down the cobbled street in a mighty hurry, followed by a body of men. Johnnie at the window turned and called to his father, ‘They are wearing trews of the Gordon tartan.’

  Montrose was out on the steps of the house by the time they were dismounting – and was greeting his old friend, Colonel Nathaniel Gordon, who had so unaccountably deserted last November, and with him, Huntly’s heir, George, Lord Gordon, and his younger brother, Lewis.

  Now Nathaniel Gordon’s conduct was made clear. He had been following a plan he would not speak of till it was accomplished, for fear of disappointment or betrayal – he had pretended conversion to the Convenanters, and so was able to get in touch with young Lord Gordon, whom he had found virtually a prisoner in his own domains. But now the power of Argyll was broken, and Gordon was free in his home at the Bog of Gight to fly the Royal Standard from its tower.

  No sooner had he heard that Montrose was at Elgin, so near to him, than he and his brother and their cousin Nathaniel leaped on their horses, hastily mustered a body of two hundred troopers, and dashed off to him. They had even persuaded Lord Huntly himself to come with them, or rather Nathaniel had – ‘If you had heard him!’ interrupted Lewis; ‘a missionary is his true trade – he actually converted my father.’

  ‘But where is my lord Marquis?’ asked Montrose.

  Alas, where indeed? Huntly’s conversion had carried him so far as his horse. Once mounted, he glared into the distance, turned his horse’s head, muttered something that sounded like – ‘Two King’s Lieutenants cannot take the field together’ – and without a word more to any of them, summoned a small body of horsemen round him, and rode off in the opposite direction – ‘who knows where?’

  It sounded an insane example of jealousy and vanity; Lord Gordon tried to soften it by saying he would pass out of that mood – ‘I have seen it drop from him like a cloak that he has been hugging about him.’

  ‘And then he will fling another about him, and see how he looks in that,’ laughed Lewis.

  My lord of Huntly was evidently a family tradition, his fantastic egoism a cause for amusement and even pride, since he was so splendid to look at, so imposing to listen to, so generous and extravagant and careless of consequences. He had run through fortune after fortune, he had begot an enormous family, and scarcely noticed they were there, he had determined to fight for the King, but only when to do so would put him into the position of sole glory.

  And his sons not only resembled him, but longed to do so – all except the eldest, and, thank Heaven, the most important, thought Montrose, as he looked at Lord Gordon, and found the young man’s eyes fixed on himself.

  ‘It is seven years, my lord,’ said Gordon quietly, ‘since you rode up to our house, and I said I wished I could join you.’

  Since then he had been by his father’s side in that ‘glaring match’ against Montrose at Turriff; he and his father had been led captive by him to Edinburgh; he had as much reason as his father to resent fighting by the side of their former opponent.

  Yet he now thought only how he had at last fulfilled that wish of seven years ago, when into his crowded household, as hot with moods and jealousies and self-assertions as a rich cake is with spices, there had come the man who had made him feel what freedom it would be to serve something beyond one’s own ends or caprices.

  He had not known much freedom. His uncle Argyll had dragged him by his side while he laid waste the Gordon lands, burning and destroying all that his army could not consume. To all Gordon’s expostulations Argyll replied in a calm and gentle manner that there was no present remedy, but that he must have patience and keep fair accounts of his losses, and the Estates would pay it all back to him. And his uncle crowned this absurdity by embracing him and praying him to believe that he cared for him as his own son.

  His nephew broke out that Argyll must wish rather to ruin the Gordons than catch up with his enemy. Whereupon his uncle closed the argument in his favourite fashion by walking out of the room in the middle of what Gordon was saying, and shutting the door after him.

  ‘It was prison,’ Gordon now said; and like a man escaped from prison did he seem now, as he listened to all that Montrose said, with a delight that gave his ordinarily quiet and pleasant demeanour a shining vigour. Here at last he sat by the side of the man whom his heart had instinctively acknowledged as his commander. They talked and laughed together and drank toasts, with the ease of old friends.

  But Lewis, his flamboyant young brother, was never quite at ease. He was as finely built as a highly inbred racehorse, with all the pluck and dash and go in the world – but in which direction would he go? No one could ever be sure. As Montrose watched him he realized how steady and gentle a hand would be needed to keep this young colt from galloping off on some course more perverse even and contradictory than his father’s.

  Lewis’ vain, glancing eye shot all round his company in challenge to them not to find him amusing, as he rushed into a vivid picture of ‘the Ruling Elder’, or ‘the Merchant’, as his irreverent nephews called Argyll, who had made the Civil War itself seem a trivial thing compared with their endless money worries.

  ‘And the Merchant has given my sisters generous dowries – but how? By mortgaging every penny of them on the estate. Jean says it is my father’s fault – she swears she hates him, but women are always saying that, and never do.’

  A child’s face that suddenly sharpened into that of a vixen – a clamorous demand for seven-and-sixpence for some rather odd purpos
e – that early impression of the Lady Jean Gordon flashed back after years into Montrose’s mind.

  Lewis’ laughing voice was racing on, tumbling over itself in his excitement. ‘You should hear his own son on him, and how short he is kept. Young Lome is not a bad fellow, but his father—’

  Alasdair Macdonald was growing bored with so much crowing from the young cockerel.

  ‘Ah, your uncle is a gay lad,’ he said, ‘and here’s a toast I would be proud to drink to him – less power to his elbow, if that be possible, and more power to the sling that holds it. I hear he was still wearing it when he turned up at Edinburgh just now, as if he had been at a bones-breaking, and much sympathy he got for his poor arm.’

  ‘He can still wield a pen, though,’ said Nathaniel Gordon, ‘that is mightier than the sword in his hands.’

  ‘What has he been writing now?’

  ‘The death warrant of my lord of Montrose, that he shall be hanged, drawn and quartered whenever he shall fall into the hands of the Committee of Estates. And the offer of a prize of twenty thousand crowns to the hands that catch him, alive or dead.’

  ‘Well, now,’ said Alasdair, ‘isn’t it a pity the hands can only walk fast enough to catch my lord Marquis when they are running away from him?’

  A roar of laughter round the table greeted the latest measure of revenge on the part of their defeated foes.

  ‘You are very quiet,’ said Alasdair to Lord Graham, in what he imagined to be a low tone; ‘were you discouraged by all my fine hero’s talk?’

  His glance at Lewis made the half-heard sarcasm clear enough to that sensitive youth, and at once his handsome face was aflame with indignation. Were recruits from the noblest family in the north to be treated with mockery – and to a spoilt whipper-snapper who had no business to be there, sitting up among all the warrior chieftains when he ought to be at school?

  Already had Lewis discovered the younger generation.

  ‘And if you think I’m going to stay here to be taught my business by a brat of a boy who thinks he’s an old campaigner just because he’s been carried across the mountains on the backs of the Macdonalds – do you know what he said to me – “I should have thought any fool nowadays would know better in a battle than to retire his horse at the caracole as if he were in a riding school.”’