‘It is your confounded Irishes that are keeping them off,’ Douglas told Montrose – ‘they may have forgotten everything else, but they will never forget how stout King Harry sent Irish troops against them because the English Borderers had grown too soft. And for that matter, I have not heard that your Irish today take many prisoners.’
‘Nor did the English Parliament at Naseby,’ said Montrose curtly.
‘Tut, tut, man, where is your sense of proportion? That was Irishwomen they murdered, and quite another matter from anything belonging to a kindly Scot. As for the faces of their fellow-countrywomen, it was sheer charity to slash them open for the better preservation of their virtue.’
‘They did it,’ said O’Cahan, coming unexpectedly towards them on that silent, lounging stride of his, ‘because of the great fear and hatred they have of anything that may bring pleasure to the heart of man.’
Their talk made Montrose wish more strongly than he had ever done before that there were not three hundred Irishwomen with their children following his army. Bebinn was with them again, having come to see her husband honoured among the other captains at the Viceroy’s grand review at Bothwellhaugh. Since then she had refused to leave his side again, and was very merry about it, giving as her reasons, first that she was jealous of him with the other women, and then that she would not leave the army until they had marched to London, and pulled out the Stone of Scone that Edward I had put under his coronation chair, and taken it back, not to Scone, but to Ireland, where it used to be the throne of the High Kings of Tara until the thievish Scots stole it, eight hundred years before King Edward stole it from them.
‘And why not back to Jericho?’ asked O’Cahan, ‘for wasn’t it Jeremiah himself who brought it from there to Ireland?’
Their laughter lightened the heavy air of suspense – all the more because Bebinn was believed to have glimpses of second sight, so that she could hardly be so gay if any disaster were impending.
The summer was still preposterously fine. A misty September heat lay over the blood-red heather like the bloom on a plum. It could not last, everyone said. The summer was like a ripe fruit, heavy and ready to fall. The morning and evening fogs grew denser. There was no wind. A dreamlike hush and stillness was over all the land. The huge spaces of the Border country had rolled up into hills as they marched west.
Montrose must then seek his refuge in them once again, until they were reinforced – when and by whom? There was still no news from Digby of the fifteen hundred horse he had last promised; and Sir Robert Spottiswoode had had no chance as yet to send any messenger with the letter he had written him. Montrose decided to write himself with it to the King; it would be a long and difficult letter and one that he hated to write, but it would have to be done and as soon as possible. He would have to admit his project had failed; he could not now lead an army across the Border.
A confused sense of urgency beset him with regard to this letter; he kept thinking of the arguments that he must use in his demand for troops, and then forgetting them; he felt that until it was off his mind he would have no room nor freedom to think of anything else.
‘I will not go to sleep tonight till I have written it/ he said to Spottiswoode when they reached Selkirk on the evening of the 12th, ‘we will dispatch a messenger at daybreak with it and yours together.’
He also ordered a general muster of the army at daybreak, so that they should at once march on to the hills. The rendezvous was to be held in a meadow below the little town, where the streams of Yarrow and Ettrick meet. He left his men encamped there, in a good position, guarded by the hills on the north, and the two streams. The guns they took at Kilsyth were parked in the rear. On one of them was the name ‘Prince Robert’, chalked on it by the Covenanters who had taken it from Rupert at Marston Moor.
Montrose sent out a mounted patrol under one of the Ogilvys, and left the further appointing of his sentinels and scouts to his officers. It was the first time he had done this, but the advance guard and flankers that he had sent out during the march had reported that the whole countryside was quiet; they had learned from the country people that Leslie’s army was far away on the Forth. Montrose went across the stream to Selkirk, to a house in the West Port where he had decided to lodge for the night, so that he might discuss his plans with one or two of his cavalry leaders in peace and quiet, and get that letter off his chest.
He kept saying to himself, ‘I cannot keep my promise to your Majesty. It is now impossible to bring an army across the Border. Tomorrow I must lead a retreat into the hills.’ The words filled his mind with bitterness and agitation, but he did not show it.
They dined off a boiled sheep’s-head, and their commander told his company with much amusement how he had passed the open door of the kitchen while the woman of the house was cooking it, and heard her say over the pot that she wished it were Montrose’s head, for then she would be careful to hold down the lid. They demanded indignantly what he had said or done, but he had not troubled to reveal himself – ‘it might have embarrassed her,’ he added, smiling.
The countryside of Selkirk was strongly Covenant, and this was but another instance of it.
Dinner was cleared away; a smell of mutton and tallow remained in the misty air. A thick autumnal fog drowned all the night. In its dripping intensity, sounds were muffled, soaked in darkness. Inside the poky little room, where Montrose sat at a table with Douglas and Spottiswoode and Airlie and young Napier, the fog filled all the corners, and fought against the feeble light of the badly made candles.
As he watched the worn face of his commander, which tonight looked a deal older than his thirty-three years, Spottiswoode considered whether he could not make his letter to Digby any more urgent. He pulled it out of his pocket, where it had been for two days and had got a trifle rubbed at the edges and stained with tobacco shreds, and looked it through. Scattered sentences here and there caught his eye – ‘Traquair has been with him, and promised more than he has yet performed.’
If he told all that he felt about Traquair, he might indeed put that more strongly, but it would not be wise, with his son in their camp as their ally.
—‘Only a little encouragement from you (as much to let it be seen that they are not neglected as for anything else) would crown the work speedily.’ What premonition had made him write that, two days ago, when Montrose had still been full of confidence?
But now that confidence seemed to have turned into the false security of acceptance that comes from exhaustion and weariness of spirit – the wish to leave things to chance, and just wait for what happens. There was no doubt that he was deadly weary. His eyes, usually so clear, were heavy and inert; Spottiswoode wondered how much he had slept during the last couple of nights.
At about eleven o’clock, he urged his commander in a low voice to go and sleep, but ‘Not till I have written that letter,’ he said, though he admitted that it would take him twice as long tonight as at any other time.
‘I have heard that your Lordship wrote your long letter describing Inverlochy in less than half an hour,’ said Spottiswoode.
‘Ah, but that was a victory,’ Montrose answered. ‘We must get another one shortly if you are to see me as a quick correspondent.’ (‘I cannot keep my promise to your Majesty. Tomorrow I lead a retreat into the hills.’ Once he had written that, would it cease to mock his brain?)
The others withdrew to another room, leaving him alone. A bed had been made up in a corner of the room, and he would go to rest the moment he had finished. He gave orders that he was not to be disturbed except for any really serious reason – a necessary injunction if he wished to get some unbroken sleep, for the last few nights had been full of rumours and false alarms breaking in on his rest. This general nervousness was a natural result of so many disappointments and reversals of hopes. It was partly due also to the fact that they were in hostile country.
The captains in the West Port had cause to remind themselves of this again that night, for just b
efore midnight, as they were getting to sleep, one of the outposts, Charteris of Amisfield, staggered in, declaring that he and his men had been attacked in Sunderland village about three miles off, and that most of them must have been killed, for only he and two others had escaped. His account was so confused as to be almost incoherent, and though he had been sobered by the fright he had had, it was plain that he had been drinking heavily. Neither he nor his two companions had been able to distinguish anything of their assailants, but then, as they protested, the night was as dark as inside the belly of a black dog.
Airlie and Douglas agreed that this attack must mean a raid by some of the country people, who had seized the chance of a foggy and moonless night to surprise the little band of outposts. They debated whether to wake the General, but decided he could do no more than they would now, which was to send sergeants over to the army camped in the field, with orders to send out more mounted patrols, and report results to headquarters as soon as they came in.
Douglas did not go to bed, so as to be instantly ready in case of any further accidents; but the scouts, who returned at the first glimmer of daybreak, all heartily damned themselves if there were an enemy within ten miles of them. They had been led through the thick night by men who knew the country; it occurred to Douglas to wonder if these were Traquair’s tenants – but Traquair could not be laying a trap for his son and his troopers.
It might be well, though, to question Linton. Douglas sent a messenger to him to come at once and speak with him.
By this time it was after five o’clock and just daylight, though thick and grey; while a heavy blanket of fog hung over the valley between the streams. The people of the house in the West Port had been stirring some time; now the woman of the house, with the grimmest of tight-shut mouths between her sharp nose and chin, was bringing in bread and ale.
Montrose came out of his room, dressed and cheerful, stretching himself and demanding, ‘Breakfast, breakfast.’
He stood arranging his collar of fine Dutch linen over his steel cuirass, holding up a pewter plate as mirror.
‘Fop!’ whispered Douglas in his ear, as he passed him to fetch some ale. Montrose cut off a crust from the loaf, and the stale bread crumbled like sawdust.
‘That shows what they think of us here,’ he said as he dipped it in his ale and laughed in his old easy way, which had won so many and various men to follow him.
Standing there, silhouetted against the raw and feeble light, he looked his old self again. As always he was surprisingly well groomed, his curled hair smooth and shining, his cuirass bright, his high boots of soft leather brushed to a silvery light and shade. Except for the small moustache and pointed tuft of hair beneath his lip, he looked much the same in this light to Douglas as when he had met him in Rome – a youth then, shy, and rather stiff, and only a little slighter than now.
But now the whole man had eased out into a careless generosity of genius, among men who were utterly unlike him and each other, but whom he had made of his own kind, because he had filled them with his own purpose, never thinking how he did it, ‘like wealthy men who care not how they give’.
‘I always knew he had it in him,’ thought Douglas, flattering himself as men do who have known great men in their youth; and then, modifying his prevision – ‘But not that he would mix with all men like this.’
For there was Montrose talking to Spottiswoode with just that touch of courtly deference which gratifies an old man – as happily at his ease with him as he had been when carousing with Alasdair and O’Cahan – savages, Douglas considered, whom he could never have expected to find as the companions of that proud and reserved youth in Rome. But his pride had diminished, as his reason for it had increased.
To Spottiswoode’s anxious inquiries as to whether he had had any sleep, he answered, ‘An hour or two – but I have done that letter!’ then pulled it out to add the date, as he asked what it was. They told him, September 13th.
He did not write it immediately, he stood with his pen in his hand, his face oddly shut against the present scene. His companions remembered this later, and thought it must have been some foreboding of the future that then visited him. But it was the past he was seeing.
On September 13 th, exactly a year ago, he had stormed Aberdeen, and allowed the sack of the city. That was no good day to him.
He shook himself from his thought, put the date on his letter, and said to Douglas, ‘You seemed to be having some scuffle in the night while I was writing. Was it anything?’ Douglas’ jaw dropped. So their commander had been awake and sitting up writing when Charteris had tumbled in on them, and he might just as well have been told of it at once. Not that it would have made any real difference.
‘Nothing of any importance,’ he answered, and began to tell him about Charteris. He had only said a few words, when the messenger he had sent to Linton came into the room, and said, ‘My Lord Linton has left the army during the night, and all his troop with him.’
Chapter Thirty
Through the window came the clanking, champing sounds of the officers’ horses, brought up as commanded to the house, and snuffing and sneezing the misty air out of their nostrils.
The sounds were very clear in that little dark room, where the leaders stared upon each other at this news. They had watched as for a sign of foul weather when Traquair’s son should leave them; that he should steal away like this in the night with no word to anyone, must show that a heavy storm was imminent.
Before anyone could speak, it broke upon them.
Montrose’s scoutmaster, Captain Blackadder, burst into the room, his face so wild and staring that his frantic words were scarcely needed to tell his news.
‘They are on us!’ he gasped – ‘Cavalry! All cavalry! Thousands of them. Our scouts are all driven back – they are on the army by now.’
Montrose dashed past him, out of the house, on to his horse, and with Douglas, Airlie, and young Napier close behind him, galloped madly down to the meadow in the plain they called Philiphaugh.
Chaos was there. Not an officer was in his place. The men had been cooking their breakfast, slack and easy in the false security that their commander had given them, because for the first time he had not appointed his pickets himself, but had left the camp that he might write undisturbed to King Charles. There could be no possibility of danger, if their general could leave them to write letters.
So they cooked their breakfast at leisure, with the officers scattered and casual, when through the white mist there came the thunder of Leslie’s horse – black clouds of cavalry surging up out of the fog – vague, enormous, plunging down on to them, yelling with excitement, scattering the cooking pots and the men grouped round them.
O’Cahan and his five hundred Irish infantry rushed to the shallow trenches they had dug overnight, and at once put up a fight. But Douglas’ new levies ran from the field without waiting to fire a shot.
Douglas met some of them as he galloped up, and tried desperately to rally them, but their blank unseeing faces gaped at him like dying codfish, and they merely swerved from his sword and went straight on past him. Cursing, he rode on alone, and soon found that of all the southern forces and nobility he alone had stayed.
He joined Montrose, who had got together a hundred horse, and now charged the enemy with such frenzy that for a brief moment they actually checked the whole vast body of attacking cavalry.
But another attack was being made by Leslie’s musketry from beyond the Ettrick stream, firing at random in the mist, but the fire was thick enough to be fast picking off the men on the royalist right flank. And soon these musketeers had crossed the stream and were attacking from the rear. Leslie must have divided his army into two parts; and Montrose’s army, now only six hundred, was being surrounded.
His few horse cut roads deep into the enemy, but the on-surging waves of cavalry rose out of the fog, crashed against them, and came on again as interminably as the sea. Through the misty confusion and turmoil, Montrose
saw his men being cut down right and left – saw foot soldiers, or those who had never managed to get their mounts, flying from the pursuing cavalry – had a momentary vision of a terrified cur that scampered between his horse’s hoofs, yelping in a high scream.
As far as he could tell in the fog, he soon made out that he must have lost the half of his cavalry.
The Irish were beating back the horsemen again and again – but again they came, till the trenches were so full of dead they could no longer hold them, and they were driven out to take up another position round Philiphaugh farm. More than four hundred of them were killed by now; and the others had no thought except to sell their lives as dearly as they could. The Covenanting troopers, who had learned this to their cost, now held up the fight, and promised quarter to every man if they would surrender.
The game was up. There had been no battle, but a surprise and a massacre, and now that the Irish were down to a hundred men, surrounded on all sides by Leslie’s thousands, and offered quarter, there was nothing to make it worth while to go on being killed. They threw down their arms and surrendered themselves as prisoners.
Montrose had no thought of escape. He was showing the gay and frantic fight of a man who does not expect to live.
He had put his fate to the touch, and had first won and now lost it all. He was clear of fate, and fought with a careless freedom that felt like happiness.
It was Douglas who tore it from him, pushed his sweating and snorting horse up to him, and cried – ‘They have got wind of the baggage and are grabbing it as fast as they can. We might even now cut a way through them.’
Montrose laughed, wiping his face, which was bleeding from a cut.
‘To what end?’ he asked. ‘We have lost all that was left of the army.’
‘You have lost a few hundred men. Save yourself, and you can get another army.’
The Proud Servant Page 49