The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  As it was, he had less than an hour of drenched, faintly dawning daylight in which to draw up his battle line. There was just time and light enough to choose his ground – the straggling village of Auldearn on a ridge above a curved stream and swamp, that would give Hurry some difficulty to cross, and less chance to deploy his much larger force all at once.

  Then he set himself to outwit the enemy who had stolen the first march on him. He put a screen of a few musketeers in front of the village, and ordered them to keep firing continuously so as to give the appearance of holding it in force. Gordon’s cavalry he kept concealed behind the ridge at the south end of it; Alas-dair and his men were placed at the north end, to stand the first brunt of the attack, and with them he placed the Royal Standard, to make Hurry think that he himself was there.

  He had thus no centre to his front, and no big guns, for he had never had a chance to dig up those he had captured and buried in the bog during his autumn campaign. He had to trust for defence to a Highland infantry that he had never led to anything but attack.

  Alasdair was in a very good position for defence, on high and comparatively dry ground, with the stone walls of kailyards, orchards and farmyards to serve for entrenchments. He needed every bit of his advantage, for he had only five hundred men; and Hurry’s infantry, that now marched across the stream to the attack, were three thousand strong, and supported by a thousand horse. But a worse danger than these numbers awaited Alasdair, and that was that the regiment who led the force across the bog was that of the Campbells of Lawers, one of the two finest regiments in Scotland, and the only considerable body of the clan Campbell that had not been wiped out at Inverlochy.

  And as these Campbells splashed and squattered their way through the marsh of this dark and drizzling morning, announcing their accustomed intelligence that the Campbells were coming, they looked up at their ancient enemies, the Macdonalds, snugly entrenched behind garden and farmyard walls, and shouted insults at those dirty cowards who could not face a foe in the open, but waited in the pigsties until they were routed out.

  It was too much for Alasdair.

  ‘What is it the Campbells are calling us?’ he said softly tc Ranald Og Macdonald of Mull.

  ‘Pigs, your Honour,’ was the equally soft answer.

  ‘That is very bad manners,’ said Alasdair, ‘we had best give them a lesson.’

  Without waiting to give any signal to his men, he dashed out of the enclosure and down upon the enemy in the bad boggy ground. No signal was needed but the sight of that redhead, leaping like a flame through the murky air, and the call of his battle cry. With an answering yell, the Macdonalds came scrambling and hurtling over the walls of the yards and orchards to follow their chief. They too had heard the insults of their ancestral foes, and were burning to get to grips with them. But the sheer weight of numbers slowly pressed them back, and soon there was the danger of being outflanked and totally surrounded. Step by step, disputing every inch of the way, they were forced back to the position they had been so mad as to forgo.

  But now Alasdair made up for that folly to the best of his power, which became more than human. He had been first to charge down, he was last to go back, guarding his men’s approach to the farmyards with the mighty sweeps of his sword. The pike-men were upon him, but he caught their long pikes on his wooden targe. An ordinary man would have been borne to the earth by them, but round went Alasdair’s sword again, cutting them through at one stroke, leaving his shield bristling with their heads.

  Now he himself with his brother-in-law, Davidson of Ardna-cross, and Ranald Og Macdonald, had reached the archway in through the farmyard wall. They wished him to go in first, but he would not till they were safely in, and they were struggling with a thick surrounding group of men, who swayed back as Alasdair struck, and struck again, then stopped short, for that huge sword, that scarcely a man but himself could lift, had snapped in his hand.

  Davidson of Ardnacross handed him his own, and in that same unguarded instant was struck to his death. In the confusion, the enemy had got in through the archway, and Alasdair dashed in to clear it of them.

  Ranald, just outside, was keeping a dozen pikemen at bay; ‘he turned his face to the enemy, his sword was at his breast, his shield on his left hand, and a hand-gun in his right hand’. So said one who saw him, ’and the pikemen who were after him halted’. But at that moment some bowmen, running past, shot their arrows at him, and one went a list’s length through both his cheeks. He threw away his gun, and laid hold of his sword – tugged at it, but it would not come – tried again, and the hilt twisted round in his hand; he had to lower his shield-hand to take hold of the sheath, and this time drew it – but in that instant when he had to drop his left arm with the targe on it, he received five pike wounds in his unguarded breast.

  Yet he reached the gate of the yard, and was backing through it – but as he did so, one of the enemy, following closely to get in first and cut off his retreat, ducked his head under the arch in the wall. Alasdair cut it off with one sweep of Davidson’s claymore, and it bounced against Ranald’s shanks, while the body fell in the gateway. Ranald picked up the head and looked behind him at the door, ‘it was then he saw his companion’. Alasdair pulled him back through the doorway, cut off the head of the arrow that stuck through Ranald’s two cheeks, and drew it out.

  But many stragglers had not won back, and again and again Alasdair rushed out of the enclosure to attack the foes that beset them, and help them enter. That was the battle of giants in a saga, but only in a saga can even giants fight with the odds eight to one against them, and win.

  Montrose heard from a messenger that the Irishes were being badly worsted, but he kept that quiet – the Gordon horse were mostly untried recruits and needed encouragement. He rode down their ranks, shouting to their leaders, ‘Macdonald is winning the victory single-handed! Are there to be no laurels for the house of Huntly?’

  In the dismal rain, where the new levies sat their horses with hunched backs, and shivered, waiting for the word of command that was to put them to the test, this gay shout burned and tingled through their veins, making them certain of victory and of themselves. Their young leader, George Gordon, caught the fire, and called to them, ‘Remember Donald Farquharson and James Gordon of Rhynie! Let each man of you avenge those two today.’ The two names were their battle-cry.

  Montrose swung the Gordons round on to the enemy’s centre, and thundered in among them. It was the first time he had enough cavalry to use in shock tactics, as he had always longed to do, and as Rupert and Cromwell had shown it could be used. Now, instead of a mere support to musketeers, he led the charge home, right into the midst of Hurry’s flank guard of cavalry.

  It was led by Drummond, who had only just got across the bog with difficulty, and had thought Montrose was with the Royal Standard and Alasdair in that losing battle in the kailyards.

  In the flurry of this utterly unexpected cavalry attack, led by Montrose himself, Drummond shouted out the command to his horse to wheel to the left, when he meant to the right, and so overrode some of his own infantry, turning the confusion into panic. Montrose, Gordon and Aboyne drove the cavalry before them, and plunged up to the help of Alasdair against Hurry’s infantry.

  But Alasdair, determined to the last to show that odds of eight to one were nothing to him, had already rallied all his remaining men together, and now charged out once again upon the enemy’s shaken centre. It was all that was still needed to break it utterly; the whole Covenant army became a reeling, flying mass of men, and after them for fourteen miles sped their pursuers, the Gordons and the Macdonalds.

  Mungo Campbell of Lawers, the last fighting chief of the clan of Diarmaid, lay dead on the field, with nearly all his splendid regiment, and with the Border regiments, and the best of the Lowland officers. Seaforth, finding he had again backed the wrong horse, escaped to Inverness, and Hurry with a hundred horse to Baillie. But Hurry’s army no longer existed, for two thousand at least lay d
ead. Their ammunition, baggage, money, and sixteen colours of their regiments, were all in their enemies’ hands.

  ‘And which of us did the most slaughter, do you think?’ asked Alasdair with modest coyness at the end of the day.

  Bard, recorder and harpist were all eager to express the same opinion. But it was the eye of his commander that he sought, and then looked hastily away again, not wishing to ask too plainly.

  ‘The greatest slaughter and the greatest feats of arms I have ever even heard of among living men,’ said Montrose, ‘were done this day by my Lord Alasdair Macdonald, and Ranald Og Macdonald, and Lord Gordon – and three others.’

  He had seen Gordon’s eye flicker anxiously at his brother even as he glowed at his own praise; and now, however much they clamoured for the names of those three others, he would not give them, for they gave a chance to everyone, from Aboyne to any obscure kern in Alasdair’s forces, to think he may have been one of the three that his commander had noticed.

  As they sat eating and drinking, and the rain fell softly on the roof of the house where they had lodged themselves for the night, they went over each move of the battle, and Montrose had to admit to Gordon that he had believed the Macdonalds all but finished, when he gave that cheering news of their winning the victory – ‘but what help would the truth have been to your raw recruits? And you yourself, my lord – would you have fought singing, as I heard you, if you had believed the day lost?’

  ‘I might,’ said Gordon, ‘for loss or victory would make little odds as long as I fought with you, my lord. If all your plans should fail, and you had to wander as an outlaw on the mountains, I would be happier to share that with you than any fortune with another.’

  ‘Now would you say as much to me?’ asked Alasdair of Ranald Og Macdonald, whose chest wounds were all swaddled in bandages, but who had flatly refused to forgo the banquet – ‘or can you indeed say anything at all, since that arrow made a hole in your two cheeks?’

  Said Ranald, grinning painfully, ‘I can say the name of my preserver – Alasdair Mac Cholla-chiotach Mhic Ghiollesbuig Mhic Alasdair Mhic Eoin Cathanich.’

  And that, as they were agreed, was no bad test.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The gordons were now in full glory, and none gayer than the Lords Gordon and Aboyne. But Aboyne had put out his shoulder again in the battle; he was given sick leave to go home and rest, and departed full of confidence that he would return, bringing his father with him and the clan in full force. Alasdair had lost many of his best officers, and most of the remainder were wounded; these now went off, ‘to lick their wounds’, as their chief put it, feeling they had earned a respite. Hurry’s army had been wiped out, but there was still Baillie’s to reckon with – two thousand infantry and several hundred horse; and now, as a reserve to Baillie’s, Lord Lindsay of the Byres was raising troops from Angus and Perth.

  Montrose had seen nothing of Lindsay of the Byres since the old disastrous days of the Cumbernauld Bond, when he had first tried to grapple with Argyll in diplomacy, and had taken so bad a fall. Lindsay had been a college friend of his, he had been eager to talk against Argyll and his insufferable ambitions, and so Montrose had thought he would be willing to support himself, and later the King. That showed his simplicity.

  Lindsay was still on Argyll’s side politically, and still talking against him personally. A vain busybody under his air of good-fellowship, he was never happy unless he was criticizing, and naturally his friends provided better scope than his enemies.

  Now it was Argyll’s military incapacity that gave him so much to talk about; over and over again he showed on the dining table, with salt-cellars, mugs, and bread pellets, exactly what he would have done had he been Argyll at Fyvie, Inveraray and Inverlochy. And if he had been Elcho at Perth, and Burleigh at Aberdeen, and Hurry and Baillie now everywhere. He talked his way into the confidence of Parliament, and was soon regarded as the coming military man.

  Montrose and George Gordon, left alone for the moment with only the Irishes and the Gordon horse, decided that while they were waiting to recover their full strength again, they would nip this new hope of the Covenanters in the bud. Baillie stood in the way of the south, but they lured him on north and west in chase of them until, exhausted of provisions, he had to withdraw to Inverness; and Montrose could seize his chance to dash south to meet Lindsay in Atholl.

  ‘Nothing I desire better,’ said Lindsay, when he first got the news that Baillie had left the road to the Lowlands open for Montrose, and that he himself would soon have a chance to prove on the battlefields, as well as among the cruets, how superior was his generalship to all others in Scotland.

  But when he heard that Montrose had reached Glen Muick, he thought he had better be nearer his base, and fell back on Newtyle in Angus as fast as his enemy himself could have moved.

  Once again Montrose crossed the South Esk, he reached the river Isla, he was within seven miles of Lindsay – but there came the check.

  Lord Aboyne arrived overnight, with no reinforcements beyond a small bodyguard for himself, and in a ferociously sullen temper. His father had sent him in hot haste to demand the return of all the Gordon horse to Huntly Castle at Strathbogie. He blurted this out to Montrose and George Gordon together.

  ‘What reason did my Lord Huntly give?’ asked Montrose.

  ‘What reason should he give?’ cried George Gordon, ‘but the same one, that has been behind all his actions always – that he is jealous of your glory, my lord, and will do all he can to dull it. He has been waiting for a chance to pay off old scores – now he thinks he has got it.’

  ‘He has got it,’ said Aboyne gloomily, ‘we are finished.’

  Gordon swung round upon his unfortunate younger brother and cursed him.

  A dark flush went over Aboyne’s already injured and angry face. ‘Is it my fault?’ – he began, but Gordon cut across him –

  ‘Yes, it is your fault, you fool. Don’t I know how you worked him up, showing him how proud you were to serve with my lord of Montrose, when a grain of sense would have kept your mouth shut. Here we are within two hours of falling on Lindsay – and my father’s lunacy wrecks all our plans. But you shall not give his orders.’

  ‘All the men with me know of them, and are now telling the rest.’

  ‘Then I will go out now and tell them this – if a Gordon deserts from the Standard while I am in command here, I will have him shot – yes, though it be yourself.’

  ‘My Lord Gordon,’ said Montrose’s grave voice, ‘you cannot shoot your clan for obeying their chief, nor your brother for obeying his father.’

  Gordon looked at him, his dark eyes helpless with misery. ‘What am I to do?’ he said. ‘Are we never to win clear of this chuckle-headed peacock?’

  None smiled at the unfilial description. Gordon himself was all but sobbing in the bitterness of his shame and disappointment.

  ‘Steady, boy,’ said his commander, low to him. He had done a moment’s hard thinking while the brothers raged. ‘Lord Huntly may have had good reason to recall his clan. Baillie is uncomfortably close to his country. We may as well return and get our recruiting over before attending to Lindsay.’

  ‘And be baulked of all our plans at the last moment!’ exclaimed Gordon.

  ‘You will have to be that again and again in a campaign like this. It would only cripple us if we tried to keep to a cut-and-dried plan with such material as we have. I have one final object, – to get to the Lowlands and there join with the King’s armies, and I have been baulked in doing that every time I had a hope of it. But every victory we win in the north brings it nearer. If we smash Baillie’s army as we have smashed Hurry’s, Lindsay’s reinforcements will go for nothing. We have already given a bad jar to his recruiting. Let him think it over for the time.’

  Gordon knew it was special pleading, that his commander was making the best of a bad job. Yet so serene did he appear that almost against his will the young man felt cheered, believed that t
he maddening caprices of his family might not after all mean the ruin of their high purpose. He discussed the change of plan for some time with Montrose until he had himself well in control again; then turned to his brother, whom Montrose had already tried to bring into the discussion, and said, with that smile that showed the essential sweetness of his temper under its sudden fires – ‘I was angry with our father, not you.’

  Aboyne had responded as shortly as possible when Montrose had spoken to him. He now avoided Gordon’s eye, and said to a spot somewhere in the ceiling, ‘You threatened me as a deserter.’

  ‘Oh God damn your eyes,’ replied his brother wearily.

  Montrose was not the only commander to suffer contradictions. The ‘Committee of Defeated Generals’, as some were calling the Committee of Estates, since Argyll, Burleigh and Elcho were its most influential members, had tired of sending fresh orders each day to Baillie, and now appointed a small branch committee to remain permanently attached to him, and give him the benefit of their advice, as advised previously by the head committee.

  While Montrose sent Alasdair to call back the Clan Donald in force, and George Gordon, with his inseparable friend and cousin, Nathaniel, to recruit their troopers all over again, and Black Pate once more into Atholl for his men – Lindsay was ravaging Atholl for no particular purpose, and Baillie, having done the same in the Gordon country, began to besiege the Bog of Gight.

  Montrose joined with Gordon again, and marched up to the great castle, where they tried to draw off the besiegers. Skirmishes made no impression on them. Montrose then tried sending a trumpeter with his compliments to ask the honour of an encounter with Baillie’s army on the level ground in equal combat.