Manus O’Cahan would not follow the rest of his clan. He and five hundred of his Irish were determined not to leave their general – ‘for now that your Lordship has so many fine new friends,’ he told him, ‘it is possible you may still need a few old ones to keep the balance.’
Those new friends caused a deal of dissension. The inflammatory Aboyne, even the quiet and casual O’Cahan, who was apt to flick his light eyelashes open at a stranger without speaking, in a manner very disconcerting, were with difficulty restrained from telling Montrose’s new followers that they had waited till the war was won before they would come into it.
Aboyne indeed regarded the newcomers as a personal insult to himself, inasmuch as his commander’s easy and friendly welcome of them made him certain that they were being preferred before him. To feed his discontent there came every day some fresh messenger with letters from Huntly, peevishly reproaching his son for adhering to the man who had always loved to slight their family pride – that form of worship which Aboyne had been taught to regard as the noblest sentiment in the world.
Tortured by indecision, Aboyne told Montrose of his father’s demands that he should instantly return home. He tried to make his application for leave with stiff formality, but the keen eyes before him would not permit it.
‘Come, boy, this is not the crux of the matter. What is it?’
Out tumbled all his complaints in an untidy, unimpressive heap. Each of them shrank and withered as he exposed it to that cool and kindly gaze, so that it did not seem worth the telling.
Montrose had sent him back twice over for more cavalry before Kilsyth, because he had not brought enough the first time – and his brutally frank cousin, Nat Gordon, had told him he was a feeble recruiting sergeant. That was what it boiled down to in words, but it had been twice as large while it tossed and tumbled in Aboyne’s uneasily ambitious brain.
And then a pamphlet had been written on the campaign, giving all the praise for the victory of Kilsyth to the Ogilvys, ‘when everyone knows it was the Gordons who won Kilsyth as well as Alford’ – but at thought of Alford and his brother’s death, and the deep friendship that had existed between him and Montrose, something seemed to turn and twist in Aboyne’s heart.
Montrose had been very careful of him at the later battle, had tried to keep him in the rear, and had insisted on his recall when he was pursuing the flying enemy, lest he should meet the same fate as his brother. All this only fed his obscure resentment. Not for love, but conscience, did Montrose so guard his life. To Gordon, who was like his own brother, he had allowed the recklessness that he would permit himself. Aboyne longed to win a like friendship with this man before him – to force him to acknowledge him his equal.
He broke out, ‘I wish I were dead like my brother Gordon. He was the only one of us who was not under a curse.’
‘Will you lay one on yourself of your own making?’ asked his commander sternly.
The young man’s fiery and uncertain glance fell before his eyes.
He heard Montrose say to him, ‘Your uncle Argyll is behind all this. It is he who prompts your father’s demands. You know well enough how all his threats and promises to your house have been aimed at its ruin. Will you let him ruin even its honour?’
‘No man shall say that of us!’ flared up Aboyne.
‘They will say it if you help Argyll’s purpose to destroy your King. You can do it in no better way than by removing your cavalry from the only victorious army the King now has.’
There was a few seconds’ pause. Aboyne was wrestling with his confused emotions rather than with these statements, which he knew to be true. As Montrose had said, they were not the crux of the matter, and he had suffered a vague disappointment while they were dispatched. But he dared not speak again of his complaints, they had sounded so silly.
Montrose put his hand on his shoulder. ‘If I have done you injustice,’ he said, ‘I did not know it. But, Gordon, will you let it destroy this that we are fighting for?’
He had called him by his brother’s name, which Aboyne would now have borne but for his own title. His face reddened in a painful pleasure and quickened towards denial of the question.
But Montrose did not wish any protestations. Instead he shared with him his plans of meeting new forces on Tweedside. It was rumoured that David Leslie had raised the siege of Hereford and turned his army to march north to Scotland, but King Charles’ armies should intercept him before he reached the Border. If they did not, ‘God may rain Leslies from Heaven if He choose. We have shown that we can fight them.’
In the high air of these impersonal ambitions, Aboyne’s sense of injury dropped from him like the chains of a prison; his spirit rushed out to meet the sun at last, and he eagerly flung himself into his commander’s plans. This it was to be free; he had no time even to notice it until he went to bed, and was suddenly aware that he had not been so happy for weeks.
But happiness could not stay with him. He woke at two in the morning with an attack of indigestion; he had drunk too much whisky with Manus O’Cahan last night, for his unwonted elation had made him want to increase it, and the whisky was raw and heady stuff, and O’Cahan an imperturbable drinker, difficult to keep pace with.
In the cold hours before dawn, Aboyne remembered all the people to whom he had already complained bitterly of Montrose’s treatment of him, and to whom he would now have to show that he was of a meeker temper. He had already given orders to his cavalry to come back with him to the Gordon country. Was he to tell them he had changed his mind? Perhaps he had better go, after all, for a time, and then when he returned he would be all the more appreciated.
And at once in a row, like goblins, swelling ever larger and larger, there stood again all the wrongs that had been done him, and the determination of all Montrose’s army not to acknowledge where their victory was due to his house.
Montrose had received the King’s Secretary of State on September 1st; had held his review of the troops and his own investiture as Viceroy on the 3rd, seeing off Alasdair’s men on that day.
In the evening of it, he talked with Aboyne, and thought him settled; on the next day, the 4th, he broke up his camp at Both-well, and began to march south to Tweed.
On the 5th, Aboyne left him with all his cavalry.
‘Do you mean to steal away too?’ he asked of Nathaniel Gordon.
‘I would rather die than do so,’ he replied.
‘May you not be taken at your word, then!’
‘Why should I, my Lord? Because Leslie is on the march against us? They say he has already passed Newcastle and picked up Argyll there. He may be over Tweed by now.’
‘Then Home and Roxburghe would send us word of it while they are dealing with him.’
Nat Gordon was scowling, and did not answer. Manus O’Cahan had already that day asked him, ‘What news of those fine heroes?’
Nat had none beyond his own vague distrust, which he had seen shadowed in the keen light eyes of the Irishman.
Lord Erskine came in with fresh news. Leslie’s army had been picking up troops near Berwick; it could not be less than six thousand by now, and of these more than five thousand were cavalry. His advance guard was commanded by Colonel Middleton, who had served under Montrose at the battle of the Brig o’ Dee, when they had taken Aberdeen for the Covenanters. He and his men were certainly across the Border – report said that all the army were.
Erskine advised a retreat to the Highland line. ‘Your Lordship has only Lord Airlie’s horsemen now, and that is less than a hundred. You cannot meet Leslie’s with that number.’
Back to the hills again – that was the course they were all urging. His help had come from the hills again and again. And now yet again he had to conjure up another army before he could meet his enemy – and ‘Raise the clans again,’ said his advisers round him, for that was the way he had always done it.
To do so now would mean a long delay, while leaving Leslie an open field in Scotland to win back again al
l that the Covenant had lost.
But more than this, Montrose had learned to his cost how little stomach for fighting the Highlanders had when they came too far south of the Highland line. If he were to lead his army into England, as he had promised his King, it would not be an army of the Highland clans.
He must now look to the Lowlands and the Border counties for his troops. Douglas had been dispatched some time ago to raise cavalry from Clydesdale and Nithsdale, and he was to meet him next day at Torwoodlee. In two days more he would be meeting the Border earls at Kelso, and their forces would be at least twice as many as those of Douglas, so that he would be able to keep his promise to the King.
His hopeful assurance infected his friends. Everything would probably work out according to plan after all.
And there were surely other armies as well as Leslie’s coming north. Where were those troops of horse promised by Digby, whose praises of Montrose’s victories showed a positively religious fervour?
The Secretary for Scotland, old Sir Robert Spottiswoode, wrote with urgent frankness to the King’s secretary, Lord Digby. There they were moving towards Tweedside according to the King’s plan, having carried out all their part of the programme, and ‘dispersed all the King’s enemies within this kingdom. We had no open enemy more to deal with, if you had kept David Leslie there, and not suffered him to come in here, to make head against us anew. It is thought strange here that at least you have sent no party after him. … If you would but perform that which you lately promised—’
He stopped; how could he at this distance make Digby understand that here was King Charles’ last chance to win back his throne? Yet not even on that could he concentrate his thoughts.
They were filled with the image of his new master, and the quiet courage with which he had met blow after blow. He told Digby how the Viceroy had been ‘forced to let his Highlanders go for a season’, how, no sooner had they gone, than ‘Aboyne took a caprice’ and carried away the greater part of the cavalry.
‘All these were great disheartenings to any other but to him, whom nothing of this kind can amaze.’
Would Digby understand from that what manner of man was this, whom the greatest of men should be proud to serve?
It was Montrose’s cause he was urging now, rather than Charles’, as he wrote, ‘You little imagine the difficulties with which my lord Marquis has here to wrestle with. The overcoming of the enemy is the least of them; he has more to do with his seeming friends.’
Those seeming, sliding, shadow friends included the King. Highlanders who must go home after every battle – boys, touchy and quarrelsome as hysteric women – lords of the same rank as himself, and therefore furiously jealous of his superiority – soldiers without pay – all these he had contended with, and won.
But now came the ultimate factor. He had conquered Scotland for the King; whose song to him was all of ‘shall be’.
When Montrose had vowed his service to the King in Holy-rood Palace, he had known that he was doing it to a man who was conscious that he had betrayed his servant, Strafford – conscious that he had earned his own doom, which would involve that of others.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Contrary to the fears of the most sceptical, Lord Douglas was at Torwoodlee with a large body of horse. But he gave a brutally frank account of them. ‘I doubt if the half of them can stick on a horse at the gallop,’ he said, ‘they have all grown flabby on peace and oatmeal. Their grandfathers drove off the English cattle, and grew strong and red-blooded on it, but now they all sit at home and grow oats. Half a century of union between Scotland and England has turned all our moss troopers into old women.’
It was true enough, as Montrose had regretted in his boyhood, little knowing what it would come to cost him; the days of the Border raiders were over, their deeds an old song; the farmer of today, who had never seen his fields in flames, nor driven his cattle into his peel tower, was not going to be in any hurry to bring back the bad old times.
As they rode down Gala Water towards Kelso, another recruiting sergeant joined them, and that was Magdalen’s nephew, young Lord Linton, who had also gone home to raise mounted troops from Peebles. His father, the Earl of Traquair, accompanied him, for his house was near by, and he could not resist this opportunity, he said, of paying his respects to His Majesty’s gallant Viceroy.
He looked much older than when Montrose had last seen him; there was something incredibly ancient, white and secretive about that long sheep’s-face, framed in its venerable locks. His praises of Montrose’s military genius were fulsome, his reminders of their family connexion frequent and obsequious; and all the time that he talked and talked, his glances flickered out from under his heavy white eyelids and went wandering over the troops, until Douglas bluntly asked him if he were finding the numbers too small.
Down shut the eyelids again very quickly, and Traquair, in a voice at once injured and courtly, explained both that nothing was further from his thoughts, and that the small numbers of the Viceroy’s army only added to his glory, for he had shown that he could win against any odds.
He bade a tender farewell to his son, who looked as though he would be sick when his father kissed him, and reminded Linton of many injunctions, since in all probability they would not meet again for many weeks.
‘Mouldering corruption!’ breathed Douglas to Montrose as they watched him ride off. ‘I believe he came for no other purpose than to spy out the nakedness of the land. He never asked of the Macdonalds or the Gordons – that shows he had already found out that they had gone.’
‘He has left his son and his troopers as hostages,’ said Montrose, ‘so he can intend no harm for the present at any rate.’
‘If he hates Linton as much as Linton hates him, that can be no good hostage. But yet, I suppose as long as he and his troop are here, we are safe. There goes one of the Border earls. Let us see what the other two will have to show for themselves at Kelso.’
They rode into Kelso on the 8th, and went clattering over the cobblestones in the great market square. But the market square lay bare in the September sunshine until their coming, and the tall grey houses round it looked blankly down on them. There was no sign of any troops, nor of the ‘other two’ of the Border earls. There was no news of them.
For twenty-four uneasy, anxious hours, Montrose waited for them. What could have happened? They had had their instructions from the King. More than that, they had written to Montrose on their own account, over and over again, urging him to come to the Border and join forces with them.
Douglas was certain that Traquair was at the bottom of this – he had let them know how weak Montrose’s army was now, and they had shirked joining him until it was stronger. It was a vicious circle, for if everyone waited for security, it never would grow strong enough to provide it. But the majority of the Scots nobles were too long accustomed to playing their own game to consider any other.
After waiting a day and a night, startling news came suddenly to Kelso. Home and Roxburghe were with Leslie, had been taken prisoner by Middleton’s advance guard, was the official report. Nobody believed it. The two lords had had good warning of Leslie’s coming, and there had not been the shadow of a fight. Instead, they had gone twenty miles out of their way to surrender to his army.
They had joined Montrose while he was the winning side, but when his army dwindled so rapidly, and his enemy’s, six thousand strong, rushed up from England, it was plain that they had been too hasty; and this was the best way to back out while there was still time.
Now seemed to be the right moment for Douglas to prove his cynical philosophy, and back out too. But he did not. He suggested turning west, and believed that the ancient power of his name would have more effect in recruiting there.
But he was wrong, for the power of the ministers had overborne tradition; everywhere was the new belief that nobles and kings were but ‘God’s silly vassals’ like everyone else, coupled , with a belief of infinitely greater magic –
that what the Covenant bound on earth, God would bind in heaven. The man who fought against it not only risked ruin and death in this world, but earned a certainty of hell fire to all eternity.
So they went on a fruitless journey to Jedburgh, and there stayed the night, and Montrose slept in a bed which they said was the one Queen Mary had slept in when, ill as she was, she had ridden eighty miles to Bothwell’s bedside where he lay wounded. She had nearly died after that; they had opened the windows in this room, as she lay delirious, that her soul might go out into the free air.
‘Would to God that I had died in Jedburgh,’ she said later.
Perhaps the bed was haunted by her unhappy spirit, for those words seemed to echo in it all the night. ‘Would to God that I had died that time in Jedburgh.’
Death, defeat, despair, raised their heads and looked him in the face for the first time since he had lain in prison at Edinburgh Castle. Death seemed infinitely kindly. Many more people spoke well now of Queen Mary than they had done in her lifetime, for all that she had stood for the old faith. Still better did they speak of the poet king who had tried to bring justice to this land, and had been murdered for it, more than a century before her time.
Scotland was a country that did not value its heroes and heroines until they had been dead a long while.
In the morning the sun shone bright over the old Abbey that Henry VIII had done his best to destroy, but that still bore witness to the dead Queen Mary’s faith; and as they rode, there in the distance, in the midst of a sea-blue plain, up sprang the Eildon Hills, where King Arthur and his knights lie sleeping till Scotland shall again have need of them.
Montrose forgot that he had ever, even for an hour in the haunted night, lost hope and confidence. Yet the chief of this country, the ‘bold Buccleuch’, whose name had rung along the Border, was with Leslie; and scarcely any of the people round would come to the Royal Standard.
The Proud Servant Page 48