Mowbray Morris

“ In that Castle, a prisoner under sentence of death, execrated by all Scotland, lay Archibald, Marquis of Argyll.
It was left for our own generation to pay the last honours due to the memory of the illustrious dead. In the little aisle that now bears his name a lofty window, blazoned with the royal arms of Scotland and the shields of the families and clans that shared his triumphs and his fall, looks down upon the plain stone slab that for more than two hundred years alone marked the grave of Montrose. Over against the grave rises a stately shrine. ”

“ When they had been heard, Hamilton, excusing himself to his colleagues, withdrew with them into another room where he addressed them in these remarkable words: "My Lords and Gentlemen, I spoke to you before those Lords of the Council as the King's Commissioner; now there being none present but yourselves, I speak to you as a kindly Scotsman. If you go on with courage and resolution you will carry what you please, but if you faint and give ground in the least you are undone—a word is enough to wise men." ”

“ Nor, conscious of his own powers and confident in the royal favour, is it probable that he was always at much pains to avoid offence, for, though neither a quarrelsome nor a wilful man, he had his own opinions, and was not shy of expressing them when he saw fit to do so. With all his constitutional regard for authority and his soldier's respect for discipline, Claverhouse would suffer himself to be browbeaten by no one. In those jealous intriguing days a man who could not fight for his own hand was bound to go down in the struggle. ”

“ The European troops indeed, set a glorious example. The officers did all that mortals could do to preserve discipline, and the men, obeying so far as it was possible to obey, nobly redeemed their former errors; but hampered by a helpless crowd whose one thought of safety was not to fight but to fly, it was but little that they could [90] do. Here and there a stand was made by gallant handfuls of our men, and where the English stood, there the Afghans fled, but these momentary triumphs served rather to increase than to check the fury of our foes. ”

“ In a Highland dress, on foot, with no companion but Inchbrakie, he set off over the hills for the rendezvous with the King's commission in his pocket and the King's standard on his shoulder. He arrived at a critical moment. The men of Athole did not care to see these Irishmen in their country. They looked on Macdonald, though partly of their own race, as an upstart unfit to lead Highland gentlemen to battle. For the Highland chieftains were as jealous as the Lowland peers. No chief would serve under another chief; no clan would follow any but its hereditary lord. ”

“ Keppoch, who would infallibly have struck his dirk into any other man who had used such language to him, attempted some lame excuses, muttered an apology, and ended by promising for the future neither he nor any of his men would stir a foot save at the General's command. There is no stronger proof of Dundee's genius and capacity for affairs than the singular influence he was able in a few short weeks to gain over men who could not speak his language and who hated his race. ”

“ There might have been more dangerous listeners than Leslie, who was an honest man not given to making mischief, and, so long as his pay was safe and he did his duty by his soldiers, caring as little for one faction as the other. But it had been all one with Montrose who was by to hear him. Everything was going wrong. He could no longer trust the Covenant; he could not yet trust the King. His associates in the Bond, with one or two exceptions, had made their peace with the enemy. The Bond itself had been promptly burned, and the wildest stories circulated of its language and purpose. ”

“ With the King and the Duke of York at his back, and, in Edinburgh, Sharp, Burnet, and the majority of the Episcopalian clergy, together with all the needy nobles who loved best to fish in troubled waters, Lauderdale could afford, as he thought then, to laugh at all opposition. To assume that his design had been from the first to goad the West into open rebellion affords, indeed, a simple explanation of a policy that in its persistent unwisdom and brutality seems strangely irrational and monstrous, even for such times and men. ”

“ Of the two Drummond was readiest to push his doctrine to its last conclusion, as the man of theory always will be. Resolved on no consideration and in no extremity to suffer himself to be dragged into the vortex of politics, in the solitude of his beautiful home on the wooded banks of the Esk he could weave his fairy fabric without any disturbing sense of its impracticability. Montrose, with his active experience of men and things, could not quite blind himself to the possibility of a king under whom passive obedience might be only another name for tyranny. ”

“ Dundee reminded his captains that they were assembled that day to fight in the best of causes, in the cause of their King, their religion and their country, against rebels and usurpers. He urged them to behave like true Scotchmen, and to redeem their country from the disgrace cast on it by the treachery and cowardice of others. He asked nothing of them but what they should see him do before them all. Those who fell would fall honourably like true and brave soldiers: those who lived and conquered would have the reward of a gracious King and the praise of all good men. ”

“ A few days after the affair at Turriff, Montrose joined hands with Leslie and entered Aberdeen in triumph at the head of six thousand men, each of whom wore a blue scarf, or carried a knot of blue ribbons in his cap, in opposition to the royal scarlet which Huntly had taken for his colours. To condescend to the devices of these godless cavaliers shocked some of Montrose's solemn captains, but the young general was right. He knew the value of a distinctive symbol to warm men's hearts, especially the hearts of soldiers, and that it was none the worse for pleasing their eyes as well. ”

“ Having already sketched out this plan in a letter to Hamilton, Mackay was in hopes to find on his arrival in Edinburgh that measures had been begun to put it into operation. He was grievously disappointed. He found nothing but quarrels and intrigues in the Parliament House and out of it. Each man was too intent on out-manœuvring his neighbour in the great struggle for place, to spare a thought for a foe who was happily separated from them by a vast barrier of mountains and many hundreds of miles of barren moorland, deep waters, and dense forests. ”

“ Yet the one man then in Scotland whom it most concerned to know these things for his master's sake, who alone in Scotland had the means and the warrant to profit by the knowledge, who was at liberty to come and go, to receive messengers and to despatch them, who knew that the young Gordon was in communication with the King, who had some experience of military affairs, and who, with all his faults, has never been called a coward, sat idly through all that precious time apparently in complete ignorance of events with which all the country round him was ringing. ”