Down in England, two months ago, Cromwell’s New Model army had been formed, twelve regiments of foot, eleven of horse, under the strictest new training – and, what was far more important, every man in it received regular pay.
‘You have made your New Model army,’ he told Montrose, ‘and out of such stuff as Cromwell and every other man, alive or dead, has never been able to handle. The Highland armies of the past had the courage of the wild cat, but it was never any good against a Lowland army. All their great fights against us were heroic defeats. But look what new war material you have made of them!’
Montrose looked at the little market square below and the four streets leading out of it, full of the drunken forms of ragamuffins, staggering with their spoil, or clutching it to them even as they sprawled in slumber on the ground.
‘Your last remark was unfortunate,’ he said; and their eyes met in one of the old friendly grins that had united them since boyhood. There was no need for Montrose to say what he was thinking; but this last month had beaten down a good many of his defences, and he said it.
‘I can transform my material,’ he said, ‘I cannot alter its conditions. One of the King’s English generals said he feared unpaid soldiers worse than the Covenanters – or the devil himself. If I could pay my men, I should not have to provision them from the countryside – semi-starvation on a little oatmeal and water, or else a couple of hundred cattle! If I could give them regular pay, they would not have to leg it home across the heather, as you once warned me, driving the cattle before them, with their booty slung over their shoulders, to wives and families that would starve if they did not go. Every man who did that, I would shoot as a deserter – if I could give them regular pay to send home. I cannot – and so my army here is now barely six hundred foot and a hundred and fifty horse – less than a quarter the size it was two months ago. I cannot – and so I have to promise them loot as encouragement, and give them their heads as I am doing now, curse it!’
Black Pate laid his hand on his arm. ‘They’ve done the town no real harm,’ he said, ‘a house or two has been fired, that is all. They’re so leg weary that the drink has taken them quietly.’
‘Let them burn it to hell,’ broke out his commander, ‘it’s not that I care for now. Think of the advantage that fellow in England has over me! Cromwell is a born leader of men and cavalry trainer, I’ll grant you. But would that get him where he is now, if it were not that his side have the money? The Parliament holds London and the richest trading towns – they have all the finances of the city and the Jew moneylenders behind them. Up here, Argyll owns the money. They can afford their little luxuries – their regular pay, the price of twenty thousand crowns on my head. We cannot afford them – and that’s the real odds against us.’
He felt nearer to despair than ever in his life.
Johnnie lay dead in Bellie kirkyard, young James was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. He could not let himself think of these two, nor of Magdalen’s grief – to do so would be to tear himself in pieces.
Deliberately he set his mind to the problem of his position. He knew well that this war material of Highland regiments, that he had improvised, would outlast his time, and might become famous in history again and again. But he could not use it as later leaders would do – his hands were tied by the lack of money.
And he remembered a summer evening nine long years ago, when he had come home to his country, and sat with Napier in the fading daylight of his study, and heard him talk with such grave disquiet of the power of money.
That power might well conquer all other forces in the end.
He could not say so, for not even to Black Pate, the solid standby and consoler of his schooldays, might his commander let go so far of his despondency. So heavy and unbearable had it grown that he now looked down upon the drunkards below with envy, and wondered whether he should not seek their means of oblivion.
‘I have a good mind to get drunk,’ he said, and Pate nodded in approval, for he thought his cousin was probably near breaking-point.
‘I can take charge,’ he said. His cheerful good-humour remained imperturbable. His father was in prison at Edinburgh; his mother, in the Tower of Tullybelton which still stood intact, was persecuted by the Covenanters; the family’s principal castle of Inchbrakie had lately been burned and battered down.
They turned to come down from the mound, when they saw a man galloping furiously towards them. He shouted as he got within earshot, so breathlessly that they could not at first catch what he said. But they did the next instant – it was one of their own scouts, and he was crying that Hurry and Baillie had joined forces, and with an army of three thousand foot and eight hundred horse were now marching on the town – were within a mile of the West Port.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The best part of the men were drunk, many of them already sunk in slumber, the others settling down steadily to the business of drinking. In this state, even if they could be induced to move, it would be all but impossible to get them to abandon the plunder they had collected.
Others had heard that shouted news. As the scout reached Montrose, they ran up from all directions, and at once he was the centre of a group of officers, all giving frantic and contrary advice, though all of despair. Alasdair was not drunk, but had drink taken – the white flame of battle blazed in his eyes as he ran towards them, laughing loud, and shouted, ‘Let us make a last charge as they come in at the West Port, and see how many we can drag with us to our death.’
‘Will you throw away the King’s cause?’ cried Black Pate to Montrose. ‘Save yourself, and get another army.’
‘It is only the loss of a few hundreds,’ urged Sibbald.
‘Go – and we can shift somehow,’ came Pate’s voice again – and there against it was a boy’s voice, shrilling above the men’s – ‘Listen to the Lowlanders! Let them run! I shall get my men to fire the town, and we’ll all burn up to heaven together.’
Montrose’s hand gripped Lord Lewis’ shoulder, and shook it.
‘Get your men together and out at the East Port,’ he said. ‘Pick out the sober and get them to prod the others off the ground with their pikes if need be. And if you see a bucket of cold water, cool your head in it as you go past – that will make you fighting drunk instead of despairing drunk.’
‘Fighting? But we have to run away?’
‘You’ll get fighting too,’ Montrose promised him.
His voice was more cheerful than it had sounded all this last month. He brushed aside the clatter of suggestions all round him with – ‘Do your duty, gentlemen – leave the management to me – the event to God.’
As he gave his orders, urgent but unhurried, his eyes sought those of each man in turn, and saw to it that they would be carried out.
Black Pate, who had a minute or two ago seen him on the verge of utter failure of courage, could scarcely believe it when in this desperate moment he saw on the face of his commander that old grave smile that used to curl up the corners of his mouth into the shape of a half moon.
He now set himself to get every man out of the town in the space of a few minutes. His cavalry officers rode up from the market square through the four main streets, driving all the men in them like sheep towards the East Port and the Seagate. They shouted their orders, and used the point of a sword or pike if the men showed any reluctance to drop their weightier booty. But the news that the enemy was upon them was the best weapon. It had run like wildfire through the crowds of looters, and none of them were as yet dead drunk, for they were tough and had only just begun to get down to it seriously.
But even those who helped Montrose do it, did not know how it was done. Alasdair set his dog Bran to rout out the sleepiest, and the great wolf-hound did good work. Cursing, grumbling, calling to their comrades, the men huddled and bustled each other out somehow through the gates of the East Port and the Seagate. One of the Irish still hung on to the rare treasure of a large clock, complaining that it was terrible heavy, and
had it knocked off his back. The cavalry came last; as Montrose rode out with the rearguard through the Seagate, they heard a shot behind them.
‘There’s Hurry’s van coming in at the West Port,’ he said to Black Pate, and his voice was as quiet as ever.
The confused mass of men were flinging themselves somehow or other into the line of march. Their commander rode forwards and backwards, straightening and sorting it out, until he had got four hundred of his foot in front, with those most drunk to the fore, and the more sober driving them on behind. Then followed the two hundred musketeers, with the hundred and fifty cavalry – the strongest part of the army in the rear, in case they were overtaken.
They were, soon enough, for Hurry’s horse charged them when they were only a few miles from Dundee. But Hurry could not bring up all his cavalry at once, and Montrose’s musketeers beat off the pursuit, ‘picking them off their saddles as fast as they came up, as neat and pretty as you could wish,’ so Manus O’Cahan reported to his flustered infantry in front.
It was getting dark by now as the royal army drove furiously on along the sea-coast, up towards Arbroath. Rain fell in heavy spurts, making the night thick and black, drenching the men to the skin, and turning their road to a slippery morass. Then the wet blindness rolled away, they saw the stars and the shimmer of the sea in the clear night of a northern spring.
Somewhere about midnight their course was changed; they had been marching north-east along the coast, but now they turned inland, and were marching almost due south-west as far as they could make out. It seemed mad to the soberest – might they not crash at any moment into Baillie’s army, who could hardly be all following along behind Hurry’s horse, with their noses to each other’s tails? Baillie must know that their one hope of escape was westward in the hills, and be guarding the passes there.
But they did not crash into Baillie, and well before dawn they were marching north again. Morning showed them the hills, their refuge, only three miles off, and Careston Castle, one of the Carnegie houses on the South Esk, near by them.
Stupefied with sleep, some of them were just able to grasp what had happened. Baillie had tried to cut them off from the hills by pushing on before them to Arbroath by the shorter route across inland, instead of following the curve of the sea-coast, as Montrose had begun by doing. Thus he meant to catch the little army between his and Hurry’s forces, and the sea.
Montrose had guessed that his enemy would follow this strategy, and had acted on it, by going out of his northerly course, turning on his tracks, and then turning north again, and so managed in the darkness to get past behind Baillie’s army. They were now clear of it, and their safety in sight. His men were dead beat, falling out by the wayside, and he ordered a halt. They fell to the ground, asleep before they fell.
Montrose sent out cavalry vedettes to guard them from any surprise attack, for as soon as it grew light, Baillie and Hurry would discover how he had slipped between them, and be turning in fresh pursuit. It was a grave risk to give his men an hour or two of respite, but it was a risk that had to be taken.
They had marched nearly sixty miles in this last night and the night before – in the intervening day they had stormed and looted a town, and then, tired and famished, got blind drunk – then reeled into the line of march again, at double speed now, flying from the enemy, and having to turn and fight running engagements with their pursuers again and again. All this they had done for thirty-six hours on end without a pause.
They had had about a couple of hours’ rest when his scouts brought news that Hurry’s cavalry were hot on their trail, and the business of beating up the men began again. But this time it was far more serious. Many of them had been asleep even as they marched, and now they could hardly be induced to wake even at the ‘push of pike’. Panic itself could do nothing for them, now that they were half dead with weariness, and only wished to be entirely so. Three miles off stood the hills, but could they now reach them before they were all cut down?
Montrose and his officers just managed to get up a fair amount of musketeers to support the cavalry by the time Hurry’s vanguard was upon them. The clash and firing of a battle soon brought the rest to their senses. Blindly they groped and staggered on to their bruised and bleeding feet, heard orders somehow, or were pushed into following them, did something, they scarcely knew what. Again Hurry’s horse were driven back, and the little army stumbled on towards the hills from whence came their help.
Once there, among the bogs and rocks, no large body of cavalry could follow them. Once there, they would soon meet with the men whom Montrose had sent on to Brechin with the baggage, and who had taken to the hills, their accustomed base, at the first news of what had happened at Dundee. Once there, they could fall on the heather and sleep as though they would never wake again. By midday they were there.
Yet again Montrose had given his men their pay. No other commander, they knew, could do what he had done. This retreat was to make him more famous even than his victories, with the masters of war in England, Germany and France. Yet not for that glory, any more than for gain, did his Highlanders and Irish follow him, but because, like the magic heroes of their own stories, he enlarged the stature of their lives to the uttermost, and made it something more than human.
This monstrous fuddled nightmare in which they had been made to lurch along at top speed, bewildered with the wind and rain splashing on their faces, while their feet dragged swollen and heavy as hot lead, plunging on through the blind darkness and unknown danger, moving now north-east, now west, now north again, in answer to curt words of command that had to be repeated and urged before they could be understood – this surging nightmare had still its interior glow, its blissful indifference as to what might happen next, even while the drink died out of it, for behind it was a sense that they were in good hands, that their commander would see to it that all was well, that now, even more than in a victorious charge, they were heroes following a god.
Montrose too had his pay. A beggar, tramping his way across the Grampians, came on the camp of the wandering army, and asked to be taken to its leader. Montrose knew him instantly. He was no beggar, but James Small, son of the laird of Fotherance, who held a minor post at the English Court, and had undertaken this desperate mission of finding his way up through the enemy country in disguise, in order to deliver a letter from the King, in answer to the dispatch Montrose had written to him after his victory at Inverlochy.
King Charles had not got that dispatch until a month later, in March, and by then he had already refused the peace treaty of Uxbridge, on which Montrose had offered his advice. One of the King’s chief reasons for refusing it was that the ‘oblivion’ or pardon demanded for his enemies, was not to be extended to his friends. Montrose in particular was to be exempt from it – the sentence of execution passed on him by the Committee of Estates was to be carried out as one of the pledges of the peace.
Montrose had not known of this condition until now, when James Small told him of it as the main cause of the King’s refusal. Not again, if he could help it, would Charles betray a friend to his death.
His cause had been going badly in England ever since last July and the defeat at Marston Moor, but now he was elated by Montrose’s victories, and wrote to tell him that he was sending him five hundred horse under Sir Philip Musgrave, and that he would himself come with his army to Scotland, as fast as he could move it, and join forces with Montrose.
Chapter Twenty-three
Like a heath fire, the army of Montrose fluctuated, changed its shape and course and purpose, so that no man could tell its numbers or its chances against the enemy or when or where it would appear next.
But the results of his battles were clear enough. After Inverlochy, old Leslie, Lord Leven, had to send some of his best regiments to Baillie; and himself, thus weakened, stuck firmly at Carlisle, refusing to go and help the Parliament’s armies further south, as they demanded. This made trouble between the allies. Leven openly expressed h
is desire to cut all the Parliamentarians in pieces; and Cromwell said he ‘could as soon draw his sword against the Covenanters as against any in the King’s army.’
He was now the coming man on his own side, and it was plain that if it proved successful he would never let the Parliament keep their promise to the Covenanters of making England a Presbyterian country by law. In vain the Covenanters tried to break his power, and pressed to have ‘the firebrand’ removed from the Parliament’s armies. He was far too useful. It was the Parliament’s promises of Presbyterianism that would be broken, like so much pie-crust.
‘No King, no Scot, no Presbyterian government!’ shouted Cromwell’s army whenever they saw their Scots allies.
The Covenanters, who had thought it was only the King that broke promises, were being ingenuously disillusioned.
There was another result of Montrose’s victories, terrible to his own side; the Kirk now clamoured ferociously for reprisals on all those of royalist sympathies who were in their power. Mr Cant and Mr David Dickson were praised for their ‘zeal and piety’ in heading a deputation to the Scottish Parliament to demand the execution of some of Montrose’s friends. But Parliament thought it better not to be too drastic while Montrose was victorious; they only imposed a large fine on Napier, who was over seventy, and confined him and all the members of his family, including the women and young girls, as state prisoners.
Montrose’s nieces were closely interrogated as to their treasonable action in wearing mourning for their young cousin, Lord Graham; they were allowed no communication with their father or each other, and might only take the air from the castle tower once, or at most twice a day, in the presence of the constable of the Castle.
Lord Southesk had done all he could to keep Magdalen’s home together, but now only the two youngest of her children remained with her. How long would they or she herself be safe?
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