The Proud Servant

  But Baillie was not the man to start that Froissart stuff at his time of life. He sent back a grumpy answer to the chivalrous challenge, that he was not going to take his marching orders from the enemy.

  Montrose struck camp and retired south towards the Lowlands.

  Baillie saw that it was fairly hopeless to think of taking Gordon Castle, which was being well guarded by Gordon of Buckie, and a hundred watchmen every night. His Committee were anxious about the Lowlands and their precious white hope, Lindsay of the Byres. His men had heard that Alasdair and most of the Macdonalds were absent from Montrose’s army, and clamoured for the chance to get in a blow at it while that terrible ‘red-armed knight’ and his Red Hands from Ulster were away.

  So Baillie, sick of doddering about the Gordon country, sick of the repeated signs of mutiny among even his best regiments, sick above all of his committee, who flatly refused either to leave him alone or to accept his resignation, set off in pursuit, and the hope that he might perhaps have a stroke of luck this time.

  He reached the boggy banks of the river Don by the 2nd day of July, and saw that his enemy had halted on the other side, on the rising ground called Gallows Hill, near to the village of Alford. It looked a very small force, but Baillie hesitated, for might not Montrose be concealing some of his army behind that hill, as he had heard from Hurry he had done at Auldearn? In any case he would not be such a fool as to risk a direct attack uphill, but would march round and outflank him on the right. He got all his army across the river; and then observed that Montrose had changed his line of front, and that his troops were now drawn up to face north-east as if to anticipate Baillie’s flank move.

  It gave the general a horrible fear that Montrose himself had planned that flank move for him, and had tempted him into making it, so as to lead him into a trap. He did not know the ground, and might have to go through more swamp before reaching his enemy; and if he were defeated he would certainly have a bog and a river behind him to check his retreat. He declared that he did not like the look of things, and gave the order to halt.

  At once his committee were all round him, giving him their opinions. Argyll himself had joined it two days ago, in order to see that it was carrying out his instructions properly. He could now therefore give them in person, and he thought it would be a grievous error to retire now, and would have the worst possible effect on the minds of the troops.

  ‘Dare-devil!’ growled the General, just not loud enough for Argyll to hear; but at his sarcastic look, a very ugly glance passed from the sunk yellow face of the political chief to the beefy but equally worried countenance of the Commander-in-Chief.

  Balcarres, his master of horse, eagerly seconded Argyll. He had five hundred fine cavalry and was longing to try them. The enemy could not at the most have more than half that number, even if some of them were being hidden.

  ‘And the Macdonalds are not there, he added, tactfully expressing the chief reason for attack which MacCaillan Mhor, the chieftain of the rival clan, might feel shy in uttering.

  ‘And fourthly,’ argued that chieftain, ‘the enemy opposed to us are in the habit of making the first attack; do not allow them that advantage today – engage them instantly.’

  He spoke with resolution, licking his parched lips. This was the true courage, as he had some reason to tell himself, to speak thus while his heart rolled over and lay cold as a stone in his breast.

  But while they were disputing, Montrose was already taking Argyll’s advice, and had sent George and Nathaniel Gordon to the first attack.

  Once again, his battle line was completely different in arrangement from his last. He had his cavalry on either wing, the left under Aboyne, backed by some Irish musketeers under O’Cahan; the right under Gordon, with Nathaniel in command of the infantry in support. He himself was in the centre with a mixed lot of Lowlanders and Badenoch Highlanders; and his nephew, Archie, the young Master of Napier, was in charge of reserves of infantry, concealed behind Gallows Hill, as Baillie had shrewdly suspected, but just too late.

  George Gordon on Gallows Hill looked down on the advancing enemy and saw, behind the army, in enclosures, guarded by two companies of infantry, all the cattle that Baillie had driven off from Strathbogie to feed his travelling troops. Their lowing now rose loud and mournful behind all the clash and shouts of their jailors – and ‘Do you hear that?’ cried Lord Gordon, ‘there is the lowing of our cattle, which that dirty thief has lifted from our lands!’

  His face was black with passion. The gentle, thoughtful youth, the flower of the most modern civilization among his extraordinary jumble of comrades, was transformed into the primaeval Highland chief, to whom cattle meant not only food for his clan, but wealth and power – a symbol of it older and more direct than money.

  ‘A lot of cows?’ Magdalen had asked, wondering. The cows had conquered again and again, as Montrose had found to his cost in Highland warfare. It was to take their cows home that the Macdonalds were now absent, and Alasdair in search of them. And cows now propelled the fury of the Gordon cavalry charge, stronger than any chivalrous motive in the passionate breast of their leader.

  Like a thunderbolt he came down at the head of them on to Balcarres’ horse, and for a moment it seemed that the whole of the Covenant left wing would be broken. But Balcarres, a good cavalry leader, rallied his horse, bringing up another squadron to meet the attack; and there was soon a dense and struggling mass of men and horses, into which the musketeers could not shoot without hitting their own side.

  George and Nathaniel Gordon were the first to carve a way out with their swords; and then Nathaniel shouted the order to his musketeers to throw down their muskets, draw their swords and stab or hamstring the enemy’s horses.

  His young friend turned a horrified glance on him, but, scoffed that practical pirate as he wheeled round, ‘Is a horse’s belly more sacred than a man’s?’ And they rallied all the men they could disentangle from the mass, and charged again.

  Aboyne now plunged down on Baillie’s right wing, with O’Cahan and the Irish foot close behind him. The two wings of Gordon cavalry closed in from either side on the Covenant army. Montrose advanced his centre, and unleashed his hidden reserves under young Napier. Their sudden appearance from behind the crest of the hill was the last move to unnerve the enemy, which had already begun to give way all along the line. Now Baillie’s best regiments were overborne, and the defeat became a stampede.

  All along the side of the river, Montrose’s army pursued, down even to the camp-boys, who leaped on to the baggage ponies and came yelling after the chase, so that their terror-stricken foes imagined yet another body of cavalry had been loosed upon them.

  The leaders had made a bolt for it, along with the remnants of their cavalry, and were being furiously hard pressed. Glengarry all but caught Argyll, but he got away, after changing his horse a second time for one yet faster.

  Balcarres too was galloping in a neck-to-neck with Baillie, in a way to win the Cupar races, cried George Gordon, mad with excitement. He and his cavalry had won the last battle; now it had won this.

  His joy was beyond reason, the rushing air in his nostrils was heady as wine, his horse felt the rapture in his bridle hand, in the press of his knees, and answered with a long snort of pride and delight.

  ‘We’ll not let all the rascals escape us,’ called his rider to his men – ‘I’ll bring back Baillie as prisoner if I have to drag him by the throat out of the midst of his bodyguard.’

  They answered with a cheer, set spurs to their horses, thundered nearer and nearer to that flying body of cavalry.

  Baillie heard their shouts hot in his ears, but still dared not turn his head as he drove his horse madly on. Now he saw Gordons fighting with his troopers on his right and on his left, but still he was not surrounded, and dug his heels into his horse’s bleeding flanks as he leaned his heavy body forward along its neck, his breath sobbing in short painful gasps.

  He was wrenched back, his horse plunged, wh
ile another bumped against it. Someone had caught hold of his sword-belt, he looked up into the laughing face of a young man who was shouting to him to yield himself prisoner.

  Baillie was hastening to do so, when the hold on his belt was suddenly slackened, the wild laughter fled from the face beside him, the gleam went out of it.

  Baillie stayed to see no more, he urged his horse on yet once again, and soon found he had left all pursuit behind.

  The pursuit was stopping in all directions. Everywhere the word was running – ‘Lord Gordon has been shot. Lord Gordon is dead.’

  He had been shot from behind, no one knew how – a stray shot in all probability.

  Aboyne stopped his chase of Balcarres, his clan forgot their hopes of plunder.

  Victory and gladness died in their hearts, they hurried to where their young chief lay, and stood silent round him, looking down upon him. The face that a moment since had shone like a torch to lead them to conquest was now a still carving, the dark lashes lying grave upon the cheeks, the flashing eyes and laughing mouth shut fast in death.

  At the sight of his beauty and his stillness, at the knowledge that he was indeed dead, and would never again lead them into the battle that gave him the delight of a lover, their silence broke out into wild cries of lamentation; they flung themselves down beside his body, kissed his face and hands, and praised his beauty, his courage, his nobility, and his youth that now would never leave him.

  Aboyne stood among the simpler griefs of his followers; his was sharpened by envy. Before his aching eyes, the wild geraniums and the broom spread patches of purple and gold; the young spikes of bracken danced light as feathers over the hillside, and caught the sunlight in a shimmer of green. George Gordon had taken the easier path; he had died young, glorious and happy, and left Aboyne to carry on alone.

  ‘And he is my brother, and I loved him, and he never knew how much,’ came in wave after wave of increasing bitterness – for he and Gordon had quarrelled ever since Aboyne’s return with his father’s disastrous commands nearly a month ago and Aboyne had meant to make it up and somehow had not done so, and now he never could – and there was his commander, whom Gordon had loved more than him, more than anyone in the world, kneeling by Gordon’s body, in a passion of grief that Aboyne himself would give anything in the world to share, but could not, for his heart was pent up in iron bands.

  Montrose’s best hope for his cause lay dead upon the trampled earth, but that was not now his grief.

  ‘Never did two of such short acquaintance love more dearly,’ said one who knew those friends.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  BAILLIE WENT and laid his resignation before the Government, and had it handed back to him, with speeches of thanks for his services, and polite regrets for the heavy defeat just dealt him ‘by the late Marquis of Montrose’. There was no escaping his impossible position, for the Government recognized him as the best leader they could find, and refused to lose him. They were indeed desperate, and determined to make a united effort from every part of Scotland that they could control. They passed an Act of Parliament, levying a new army of ten thousand foot and five hundred horse, most of which were to assemble at Perth by the end of July. Regiments were mustered from Fife; the lords of Cassilis, Glencairn and Eglinton raised troops from the west; Hamilton’s brother, Lanark, collected a thousand foot and five hundred horse from Hamilton’s tenants.

  Nor were these the only reinforcements. Baillie’s advisory committee was increased to sixteen, and now included all the leaders who had been defeated by Montrose, as well as Lindsay of the Byres, who had not waited to be defeated.

  These awful warnings all round him proved anything but encouraging to Baillie. Most of all he was upset by the presence of Argyll, who had now set himself to be Dictator of the Committee, as he was of Parliament, in a spirit of fanatical resolve that was oddly disturbing to a plain man.

  For Argyll believed blindly in his own propaganda, was doggedly insistent, to his colleagues as well as in his public proclamations, that the Lord of Hosts was with him, and the God of Jacob was his refuge, and evidently believed himself a chosen instrument for the Lord’s work.

  His tireless and intricate brain, his power and wealth, even the ancient enmity of his race with that of the Graham, were all dedicated to this one purpose, the destruction of his enemy, Montrose. He could be content to die, he sincerely said, did he but know that he had brought about Montrose’s death.

  Such fixed yet frantic hatred did not, as Baillie knew, make for good soldiering qualities. He was to conduct the coming campaign with Argyll like a millstone round his neck. And it would be Baillie who would get the blame. Poor Drummond had been executed after Auldearn for giving the wrong word of command in the flurry of that utterly unexpected cavalry attack from the Gordons. It was another awful warning.

  Then that clerical busybody, his cousin, the Reverend Robert Baillie, one of the Covenanting committee in England, was writing to all his leaders in Scotland to suggest that ‘those six thousand foot we hear of should be sent down into England to help the work of the Parliament there, and with them some gracious ministers’ – (General Baillie was quite willing to concede him those) – because, in Cousin Robert’s precious opinion, ‘Montrose will be cheaper and more easily defeated here in England than he can be there in Scotland.’

  This demand was all the more unreasonable because the Parliament’s armies had a month ago won their greatest victory over the King’s, at Naseby in the Midlands. In this, Cromwell, the coming man, had definitely and mightily arrived. Since he hated the Covenant, the Presbyterian Church, and the whole Scottish nation, this defeat by him of their enemies was not likely to prove an unmixed blessing to the Covenanters.

  But at least it should prevent the King from coming north to join with Montrose, or from sending reinforcements to him, according to those alarming plans discovered in the spring. And old Leven now felt it safe to leave the Westmorland border, where he had been hovering all this time to prevent that move, and marched south into England.

  But in one respect Naseby had made the professional soldier, such as himself and Baillie, very uneasy. The Parliamentarians had shown their gratitude to the Lord for their victory by slaughtering all the Irishwomen among the camp followers of the royal army and slashing the faces of all the Englishwomen.

  The ministers might talk of a just vengeance on vice and ‘deboshry’; but no soldier was going to be so partial as to imagine that all the women who followed the King’s armies were painted harlots, and all those who followed the Parliament’s and Covenant’s were respectable matrons with their marriage lines in their pockets. The plain fact of the matter was that in a war like this the families of the common soldiers on either side were bound to be following their men.

  Four thousand Scotswomen and children came straggling after Leven’s army as he slowly marched south. And now that the hosts of the Lord had started the business of slaughtering and mutilating women the idea of reprisals might well enter the heads of their ungodly enemies. So that the hardened mercenaries who had served under ‘that thundering scourge, that terror of Germany, Gustavus of Sweden,’ now cursed the clergy who had communicated their blood lusts to the soldiery.

  It was a hot, stifling summer, very helpful in the breeding of rats and lice. The plague had crept to Edinburgh, and the Parliament moved to Stirling. The plague crept to Stirling, and Parliament moved to Perth, where the levies were being mustered under Baillie.

  Nobody knew where Montrose was, nor how strong his force, until suddenly it was said that his army was within a few miles of the city, that a large force of cavalry had been seen on the hills. Instantly the city’s gates were closed, the guards were doubled, Hurry’s new bodies of horse were kept shut within its walls, and the temporary capital was put practically into a state of siege.

  Each day in the high summer weather, Parliament met in the dark old hall and debated the measures for its defence, every member in terror lest at any
moment he should hear the uproar that would mean the thunderbolt had fallen, and his last hour on earth had come. Yet they wasted hours in discussing how they should root out the house of Huntly from the face of the earth, as they considered they had done with that of Montrose, by ordering all Gordons as well as Grahams who stood for the Covenant, to change their name. The cramping fear that paralysed the whole city seemed to have crippled their wits.

  But after several days some more enterprising scouts discovered that Montrose’s cavalry consisted chiefly of baggage ponies, mounted by musketeers, a screen that had succeeded in shutting up his enemies.

  Hurry made some sorties with his cavalry after that – lost a good few, who were picked off their saddles by Montrose’s musketeers, but had the satisfaction of making the enemy retire from their camp in Methven Wood towards the hills, and so rapidly that some of the Irishwomen straggled behind, were taken and butchered.

  Baillie swore furiously at Hurry for this, telling him he had missed his chance to cut off Montrose’s retreat, by waiting to kill off a lot of women. First Naseby, now Methven. They were running up a long bill for their enemy to pay.

  Said Argyll, ‘The Lord will not give His enemy the chance to pay.’

  ‘Your Lordship knows best,’ retorted Baillie – ‘but my reverend cousin now admits that he does not know the Lord’s mind, nor what He means by humbling His servants against the expectation of the most clear-sighted.’

  Argyll showed no such ignorance. The Lord meant to humble, not His servants but His enemies, by lifting them up that their fall might be the greater.

  Some arguments are unanswerable. Baillie’s reply was to send in his resignation again; the Committee’s was to refuse it.

  Montrose’s army was moving first south and then westward of Perth; it looked as though he intended to cut off Lanark’s new army, which was marching from Glasgow, before it could join with Baillie’s.