Mowbray Morris

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Montrose, well mounted, clad in coat and trews, with a bunch of oats in his bonnet—a whimsy adopted by all his infantry—was everywhere his keen eye told him there was need of his services. The fighting was hot while it lasted, and at one moment the left flank of the Royalists was within an ace of being turned. But Montrose brought up the horse and a fresh supply of musketeers from the right wing in the nick of time, and the Covenanters having no one to take advantage of the crisis, the danger was averted. The fifty troopers performed wonders, and the Irish fought like trained soldiers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The want of honesty was too common a want in the politicians of those days to mark a man among his peers, but cowardice was indeed rare among all classes; and though he was destined to show that, like so many men whose nerves are uncertain, he could face inevitable death with calmness and dignity, in the presence of danger it is indisputable that Argyll's physical courage was, to say the least, not conspicuous. Cool, cunning, and sagacious, he had, though at once a Privy Councillor and a rigid Presbyterian, been hitherto careful to identify himself prominently with neither party. ”

“ As the last words were spoken—"that religion and righteousness may nourish in the land, to the glory of God, the honour of our King, and peace and comfort of us all"—all hands were raised to heaven in token of assent, while old men, in whose ears the fiery tones of Knox might have rung, wept tears of joy to see that the spirit of the great Reformer still lived among his countrymen. ”

“ The snare which lured his young hot-headed relative was spread in vain for the old and cautious Napier. A true Covenanter Montrose called him before the Assembly at Glasgow. He was so; he was too true to the spirit of the real Covenant to be caught by its specious copy; too true a Covenanter to trust himself or his conscience to such keepers as Rothes, Loudon, and Balmerino. A man of his experience in affairs, nor less experienced in the temper of his own countrymen and of the King, cannot but have had a shrewd suspicion whither such a movement under such guides must inevitably tend. ”

“ He bade his soldiers strip to their shirts, for the day was hot, and they would have to charge uphill. He could not suppose that even such generals as Argyll and Elcho would forego their advantage of ground, while rough or smooth was all one to his men. Yet even this monstrous folly was forced on the unfortunate Baillie. The hills surrounding the meadow in which the Royalists lay were for the most part steep and rugged, up which a Highlander would scamper like a deer, but the heavier-footed and heavier-armed Lowland troops would hardly descend in good order. ”

“ Eleven years passed, and again a vast crowd thronged the High Street of Edinburgh to witness a different scene. The King, for whom Montrose had died, was now restored to the throne of his fathers, and had decreed the empty tribute of a public funeral for the man whom he had not dared to lift a finger or speak a word to save. The scattered remains had been previously collected, and carried amid great pomp to Holyrood. ”

“ The cruelties practised in the name of the Covenant had excited no indignation; for they had been practised in remote parts of the kingdom either on men who were regarded as little better than wild beasts, or on men who were fighting against the sacred cause of religion and liberty. Even the butchery after Philiphaugh was but the just vengeance of God. But thousands of homes had been left desolate, and thousands of innocent lives lost, to gratify the vain and furious ambition of Montrose. Such in times of disorder will always be the reasoning of the stronger side. ”

“ There at all events they were, not only marshalled to fight against the King's troops, but marshalled side by side with their hereditary foes, the Crichtons, Frasers, and other families who welcomed the Covenant as a counterpoise to the overweening power of the Gordons. But though superior in numbers, and not inferior in arms and courage, the Covenanters were totally deficient in discipline, and their nominal leader, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, had neither knowledge nor authority to control them. ”

“ But though Episcopacy had not yet been legally abolished, Charles, by renewing the assurances made in his name by Hamilton at Glasgow, had given his word for its abolition. Within a fortnight of this solemn promise he had issued a proclamation which, if there were any meaning in words, could mean only one of two things; he was summoning the bishops to vote for their own extinction, or he was summoning them to quash the motion for their extinction by their own votes. ”

“ So powerful an ally was received of course with open arms by the Covenanters. Hitherto they had been doubtful whether they should regard him as friend or foe. His conduct, said Baillie, had been ambiguous. This was now explained by Argyll's assurance that he had always secretly been on their side and had only delayed declaring himself for them while he conceived that this ambiguity might best serve their interests; matters had now come, he said, to such a height that no honest man could hold back. ”