‘You are worth more to Scotland than any army.’ It was his nephew, young Napier, speaking now, in a sobbing gasp of fatigue and excitement – and then came old Lord Airlie, on the deep note of authority – ‘Get out of this, my Lord, and raise another army for the King. He is lost if you do not.’
He hated their urging. Why should he go on raising armies for the King, who would not send a man to help him? This was the best way to end it all. His men had died round him in hundreds; and now that death had come to himself, swift and inevitable, let him not reject it, to meet it in other and worse ways.
His men said he bore a charmed life, that neither bullet nor sword was forged that could kill him; years ago, when he had crossed Tweed in flood three times over and was not drowned, they said he must be born to be hanged. These things he had neither noticed nor remembered, yet now they gave zest to his determination to share the fate of his men.
‘Do you cut a way through, my Lord,’ he cried to Douglas, ‘and carry on the work. I have shot my bolt – it is your turn now.’
Douglas seized his General’s bridle rein, turning his horse’s head.
‘Will you give up?’ he flung at him, ‘and us with you?’
They were close round him now, about thirty of his friends, and all determined either to die or live with him.
He threw up his head, looking round on them, and his face set. He had answered their purpose.
They charged again in a desperate onrush, drove and hacked their way through, found presently that they were no longer surrounded, and that the road to the west was free. They rode up the vale of Yarrow, and here and there before them, as the mist drifted and swirled upwards, there came the cloudy shapes of the hills, into whose safety he had meant to lead his army this day.
At thought of that, his despair, no longer gay, since he was no longer greeting the death that would so quickly end it, overwhelmed him, and he slackened his horse’s gallop, and looked back.
His nephew, young Archie Napier, guessed his thought; in an agony he pressed nearer to his side and stammered out—
‘Sir – if you cannot think of us – remember – there is your wife.’
The boy’s passionate care for him shamed him; through it, he had an odd glimpse of Magdalen, as though he had looked in through a window, and seen her lay down her sewing and bend her head, listening for the sound of his horse’s hoofs – as perhaps she was doing at this moment. That quiet scene took from him the false courage that accepts death and defeat. She, who was never brave, so she said, gave him the courage for life. He knew he could not give up, not yet, nor ever.
He smiled at his nephew, denying his impulse, for now he could give good reason for his movement – ‘There are some of Leslie’s horse coming after us,’ he said.
They turned and charged their pursuers, routing them completely, and taking prisoner the captain and two cornets, each bearing a standard, who were in charge of the troop.
Then they rode on, until they reached the house of Traquair. There they demanded admittance, and speech with Lord Traquair or Lord Linton. But the gates were closed and guarded against them, and the men-at-arms on guard said that their lords had refused either to admit them or to speak with them.
Wet cobwebs were spun all over the gate-posts, covering them with a mesh of shining threads. The old grey stone building stood stark behind them; its blank walls, its narrow slits of windows, its three watchful turrets, stared grimly back at the little group of tired horsemen. It was like a dead face, seen through the now faintly sunny mist, the face of a house doomed to be haunted. Built for security a long time ago, it would stand for a very long time yet; but few would care to live in that ‘desolate house,’ as Catherine Traquair herself was to call it a few years later.
The sharp conical hills rose behind it; the clouds were rolling up over the silver stretches of bent. The horsemen rode on into the hills.
Hours later, another and much larger body of horse rode up to the house. This time the gates were flung open, and Lord Traquair himself hurried out between his servants, bowing and rubbing his hands; stood there a moment with the sunlight sparkling on his grey locks while he congratulated the conquerors, then led General Leslie and Lord Argyll in to dinner.
Chapter Thirty-One
‘Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the Word of God, all that you say?’
So Cromwell asked once of the ruling ministers and elders of the Kirk of Scotland, and then told them – ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. There may be a Covenant made with Death and Hell.’
That Covenant they now proceeded to keep.
Judaism rather than Christianity, and the Judaism of the captive tribes in ancient Egypt, had become the national religion.
But a yet older and more horrible religion had been stirred up in the turmoil caused by the destruction of old authority, and this was the belief in devil worship, with its attendant rites of human sacrifice. Fear of God, fear of the devil, the two were merged, and all the haunted land suffered from it. The Mother of God had been the mother of all men, but God the Father, on whom all eyes now turned, to the exclusion of His Son, was no father, but an enemy exulting in destruction. Placate Him with burnt and blood sacrifices, show yourself on His side, or you were utterly destroyed.
Just a month after its downfall at Kilsyth, the leaders of the Kirk suddenly found themselves all powerful again. Now was their chance to show the real nature of the God they worshipped. General Leslie was guilty of admiring his foe; he had openly said, ‘I never fought with better horsemen, and against more resolute foot.’ And his soldiers had promised quarter to the hundred Irish who had surrendered at Philiphaugh. But when the ‘gracious ministers’ who, as Mr Robert Baillie had requested, accompanied the Covenanting army, heard of this, they declared that it was ‘an act of most sinful impiety to spare them’. These Irish, they truly said, had given no quarter themselves; when they had won a battle, they had hewn down the flying foe, and taken no prisoners.
Said the Covenanting generals in answer, ‘Yes, but these men were selling their lives too dearly by killing our men as they died, and so we thought it cheaper to buy them with a promise of quarter, which cannot now be broken without dishonour.’
The ministers could not see the point. Blood for blood was the necessity, and it was only a soldier’s quibble to make a distinction between the blood of fighters shed in battle, and that of prisoners butchered in cold blood. But since the lay mind must have its legal-sounding quibbles instead of leaving all to God’s good pleasure, the ministers did their best to satisfy it by explaining that the quarter had only been given to the leaders, and not to their men.
O’Cahan and his adjutant, Stewart, and Lachlan of Duart, who had headed his men in that uphill race of the clans at Kilsyth, were therefore taken to Edinburgh, to be hanged over the Castle wall, without trial, as their share of the quarter promised them; and the army was let loose on the prisoners, to cut them in pieces, drive them into the river and guard the banks with their pikes, or make what other sport they chose of them. Two hundred cook boys and horse boys were also butchered, and the three hundred women and all their children. Some had escaped through the countryside, but the hunt for them continued for many days after the battle, and all were killed in time. The countryside bore record to them ever after. The Dead Wife and Slain-Man’s-Lee were now local names for hill and valley.
To the women, many of whom were great with child, the soldiers showed a perversion of instinct such as had made the ancient world account Nero a monster; but in this year of grace, 1645, their mode of slaughter was sanctified as a religious rite. Everywhere the ministers were preaching on such texts as – ‘They shall fall by the sword; their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ript up.’
The soldiers themselves could not stand as much of the horrors as did the clergy who urged them on. A nephew of the Reverend Mr Cant, also in the ministry, was asked later, ‘Mr John, hav
e you not once got your fill of blood?’
There was one who could not get his fill of it. Archibald Johnston, now Lord Warriston, though drunk with vicarious delight in the butchery, was still more agonized lest there should not be enough of it. All the nobles taken prisoner on promise of quarter after Philiphaugh were brought to Saint Andrews to stand a trial. The lay members of Parliament, meeting at Saint Andrews, were not eager to put them to death. The formal execution of prisoners of war, especially when they had been promised their lives, was without due precedent.
But such worldly reasoning was swept away by Warriston. What were ‘honour’ and ‘precedent’ in the sight of God? God was angry. He had shown it by sending ‘His two great servants against us, the sword and pestilence.’ He was angry because His people had been too merciful to delinquents and malignants; let them show no delay now therefore in revenge, or God would again visit them with His displeasure. He entreated Parliament to ‘unity amongst themselves’, but did not encourage that unity by comparing the House to ‘Noah’s ark, which had in it both foul and clean creatures’.
He was backed by petitions from the Kirk in one parish after another – the ministers of Jedburgh besought the Parliament to ‘cut off the horns of the wicked’; the assembly of the Kirk in Fife entreated that the ‘zealous purpose of executing justice upon the bloody men’ should ‘speedily be put in execution’; while in Galloway ‘the watchmen of the Kirk’ took Warriston’s view that the chief cause of the suffering of Scotland from plague and sword was the former ‘sparing of malignants’.
So the old gods conquered, Christianity died, and in its name devil worship, born of fear and encouraged by the lust of cruelty, ran rife through Scotland.
Colonel Nathaniel Gordon, Sir William Rollock, Alexander Ogilvy of Inverquharity, not yet eighteen, ‘a lovely young youth’, as his prison bailie called him, and another boy in his teens, were among those who surrendered after Philiphaugh and were executed.
‘The work goes on bonnily,’ said one of the ministers, and the homely words of satisfaction passed into a proverb.
The case most bewildering to the ordinary lay mind was that of Sir Robert Spottiswoode, an old man and a non-combatant, lawyer and scholar, who had been Lord President of the Court of Session in Scotland for many years. He had succeeded Lanark as the King’s Secretary for State in Scotland, and this was the only crime that could be urged against him by a Government that still declared its loyalty to the King’s person. Moreover he had surrendered to Lanark and been promised quarter. It was feared for a moment that this particular victim would have to be let off; but the letter he had written to Lord Digby and had never had an opportunity to send, was found in his pocket, and that proved his death warrant.
He was not allowed to speak to the people on the scaffold, for he had shown that he knew the Bible as well as his judges, and had quoted the answer of the Prophet Elisha to the King of Israel, concerning the treatment of his captives – ‘Thou shalt not smite them: wouldest thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive with thy sword and with thy bow?’
So Mr Robert Blair spoke instead on the scaffold; and Sir Robert told him quietly that he spoke blasphemies, abominable to God. He then prayed to the God he himself worshipped; ‘Merciful Jesus, gather my soul unto Thy saints and martyrs, who have run before me in this race.’
The night before his death he wrote to Montrose, begging him that ‘as you have always done hitherto, so you will continue by fair and gentle carriage to win the people’s affection for their prince, rather than to imitate the barbarous inhumanity of your adversaries.’
The request was granted. There were Covenant prisoners in the Castle of Blair; there were many who cried and clamoured to Montrose for reprisals. But he refused to try and rival his enemies in deeds of cruelty, and told his troops that if quarter had been offered by any one of them, even if it were by the meanest corporal in his army, that promise should be kept.
He had already got troops to himself again. He was in Atholl, and there four hundred men left their harvest (no mean test) to follow him, and were presently joined by the Farquharsons and some horse.
With these he threatened the towns, in desperate attempts to stop the execution of his friends, and in some cases succeeded in suspending them for a time.
At last the King kept his promise to him, and sent Digby with fifteen hundred horse across the Border, a month too late. Leslie’s armies were now between him and Montrose; Digby had to retreat to England, his men fled into the hills in Cumberland, himself to the Isle of Man. Montrose heard of this at the same time as of the first executions by the Covenant.
He heard how his best cavalry leader, Nat Gordon, was beheaded; and Manus O’Cahan hung without a trial, ‘to show how much they despised his nation’. Bebinn lay hacked to death; her golden collar, of workmanship so fine that in this degenerate age it had seemed the work of magicians, was melted down into a shapeless lump of metal.
The Golden Age of William Drummond’s congratulations had lasted less than three weeks. The age of blood and iron had returned.
It broke the heart of old Lord Napier, who died that autumn; and of the Kirk’s finest servant, who had worked and prayed all his life for it, and could not bear the manner of its triumph. Alexander Henderson, who now fell ill and died within a year, wrote his prayers ‘to remove God’s heavy judgements from this miserable land’, from which he so longed to depart that ‘never was a schoolboy more desirous to have the play than he was to have leave of this world’.
Yet still Montrose did not lose hope. Disaster and tragedy stung his spirit with the determination to surmount them. There was still an English royalist army south of Tweed; still Huntly to be won to his side; still a chance that Alasdair and his Macdonalds might return. Black Pate, whom he had feared dead at Philiphaugh, had also escaped, and won through to his side again; and once again the two comrades in arms were raising horse and claymores.
All news was fugitive, casual and uncertain. Among the reports of deaths of one friend after another, there came news of one utterly unexpected, shattering the belief that he would not despair. The Lady of Montrose, it was said, had died – or if not yet, was dying.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Middleton’s dragoons were all over the country near Kinnaird. But with a few horsemen (the fewer for speed if not for safety) Montrose made a dash across country. He must see Magdalen, alive or dead.
So once again he rode eastward towards the sea, down through the hills. The wind raced over their slopes, through the running silver of the bent. All round him was the scrubby brownish purple surface of the heather, and breaking through it the gaunt bones of the ineradicable rock. The speed of his riding made the wind sting in his nostrils; his heart was a hammer, urging his horse along. The flying scene swung past him, yet every fleck and shift of light and shade upon it stamped itself upon his desperate mind. Now and again he caught glimpses of the plains below, of sheep dotted here and there in them as still as haycocks, of seagulls flying low and white against the curve of the further hills, and beyond them the carved white clouds, stationary in the blue distance, that had always made him think of Magdalen.
As so often before, he was riding back to her through the hills; it had been a ritual repeated through the course of his life; now he was doing it for the last time. Those other rides, unnumbered, unremembered, linked together, made a chain that reached back into his schooldays at Glasgow, when he came riding eastward on his holidays to Kincardine and Old Montrose. When it was broken, the side of his life would be withdrawn that linked him to his home and his childhood.
But he did not think of this as he stared before him at the rain that now came dipping and trailing its long grey skirts over the plain until it fell plump on his face. Sunshine, rain, the stump of a rainbow that sailors call a wind-dog – he stared at the scene that had been the background of his life.
His thoughts of Magdalen were dull and confused. Behind them, there slowly swam into his memory, p
iece by piece, a little scene that had happened long ago in Italy, and that he had quite forgotten until now. His meeting with Douglas may have brought it back to him, for Douglas, then Lord Angus, had been there, and one or two English youths from the English College at Rome, when they had gone for a joke to consult a sturdy peasant woman who could tell fortunes.
Suddenly she stood as clear again in his mind as when she had stood before him, all those years ago, turning her heavy body from one to other of those laughing, fair, foreign lads, as a bear at bay will turn to the dogs that are baiting it – and flung answers to their questions casually, contemptuously, then fell silent, and stared at Montrose, who had asked none. When she spoke next, it was in a hurry, mumbled so fast and low he could hardly catch the words, which had been remembered and wondered over for a little, then lain buried until now.
‘Your life is a bright morning in a northern country,’ she had said, ‘you ride out, the sun shines, the streams shine on the hills. You ride alone, but men come down from the mountains and across the seas to follow you. They follow you to glory. They follow you to the death. There is the sound of trumpets high up in a lonely place. Good luck will ride with your honour. You will conquer your enemies. But those who love you will betray you. The sky goes black, the sound of trumpets in the mountains has turned to thunder. Rain falls, rain and tears, tears and blood. The blood of women runs in the rivers, the rivers are red with blood. All you have done is overthrown.
—‘Again you ride alone, but in the midst of a multitude, and they are silent; they stare at you, who are their conqueror.’
Her gabbling had ceased on that, her massive head sank forward on her chest; she would not speak again.
‘It all ends well, then,’ Douglas had said as they came out together into the hard sunlight, that never gave the look of fleeting splendour, too brilliant to endure, that Montrose now saw before him.
‘It ends well,’ Douglas had said, but he had said it only to cheer them, Montrose had known that, for no multitude will greet worldly triumph in silence.
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