Duke of Montrose

“ When the queen came to York, Montrose waited on her, and did all in his power to awaken a sense of peril in Scotland, and offered to raise ten thousand men there, and paralyse the designs of the Covenanters. But when these representations were made to Charles, the Marquis of Hamilton, now made duke, strongly opposed the advice of Montrose, declared that it was monstrous to set Scots against Scots, and that he would undertake to keep them quiet. ”

“ Thus, after Sir Andrew Wood had related that his embassy to Flanders had proved futile in clearing up our quarrel with the sturdy citizens of the Swyn, the Sluice, and the Dam, and that all trade with them would still be interdicted, the loyal and venerable Duke of Montrose said, in a most impressive manner,
"I grieve to say that complaints against the nobles have been pouring in to your majesty, and everywhere the people murmur against their oppression and misgovernment. ”

“ This was nothing short of the maintenance of a predatory war against the Duke of Montrose, whom he considered as the author of his exclusion from civil society, and of the outlawry to which he had been sentenced by letters of horning and caption (legal writs so called) , as well as the seizure of his goods, and adjudication of his landed property. Against his Grace, therefore, his tenants, friends, allies, and relatives, he disposed himself to employ every means of annoyance in his power ”

“ Determined that his Grace should not enjoy his lands with impunity, he collected a band of about twenty followers, declared open war against him, and gave up his old course of regular droving—declaring that the estate of Montrose should in future supply him with cattle, and he would make the Duke rue the day in which he quarrelled with him. ”

“ Of all the fortresses in Scotland, Lord Nithsdale's Castle of Caerlaverock in Dumfriesshire was alone held for the King. From the Border to the North Sea the Covenant was supreme, save only in that dangerous district which called Huntly lord, and against the power of Huntly the arms of the Covenant were now turned.
The command was given to Montrose. His restless and enterprising spirit marked him for the work among men whose talents appeared to lie rather in debate than in the field. ”

“ But Digby, who dearly loved a hazard and could persuade the King to anything, favoured the scheme. Antrim was despatched to Ireland, and Montrose made ready for his more perilous journey to the Border. He knew his jealous countrymen too well to come before them in the character Charles wished him to assume, of Viceroy and Captain-General [Pg 131] of the Royal Forces in Scotland. On his own advice these sounding titles were conferred on the King's nephew, Prince Maurice, as whose Lieutenant-General Montrose left Oxford for the North early in March, 1644. ”

“ Between the champion of the Throne who sealed his loyalty with his life and the leader of men in arms against their sovereign, there must surely be a gulf which no explanation or apology can bridge.
Both in joining and leaving the party of the Covenant Montrose has been represented as influenced solely by wounded vanity. Disappointed by the coldness of his first reception at court, he flung himself into the arms of the Covenanters; disappointed by the ascendency of Argyll in their councils, he flung himself into the arms of the Cavaliers. ”

“ At the same time he warned the King that Montrose was a dangerous young man, very ambitious, [Pg 28] very powerful and popular in Scotland, and not unlikely in the event of any national rising to be set up as king by virtue of an old strain of royal blood in his family. This last insinuation would not fall on deaf ears. Hamilton, indeed, had himself been accused of a similar design, for which his descent from a daughter of James the Second, who had married the first Lord Hamilton, gave at least as much colour as any that Montrose's pedigree could supply ”

“ In spite of all that had passed Charles still believed that in the Scots he would find a counterpoise to the rebellious English, and Hamilton, for purposes known only to himself, encouraged him in the belief. Montrose knew better. He knew, from his own past experience, how good was the secret understanding between the two Parliaments. He knew that the army, now again mustering under the new Earl of Leven, was never destined to waste its strength on Irish rebels. He knew that the Covenant was only biding its time to join hands with the English Parliament ”

“ Their natural love of war, their zeal for the royal cause,—for they viewed the King in the light of a chief whom his clansmen had deserted,—as well as their implicit obedience to their own patriarchs, drew in to Montrose's army not only all in the neighbourhood who were able to bear arms, but some who, in age at least, might have been esteemed past the use of them. ”

“ The brave Airlie, for all his sixty years, and his sons alone stood by him, and Nathaniel Gordon, who, though he left his leader, left him on the King's service. Montrose let the recreants go without a word, and turned to the Highlanders. They too deprecated a descent on the Lowlands, but for a different reason. These Macdonalds and Camerons were ready enough to fight under the royal banner, but they must fight against their own foe. They hated King Campbell more than they loved King Charles. ”

“ While affairs in Scotland were wholly managed by a Committee of the Estates and the Commission of the kirk, several of the nobles and the inhabitants of certain districts, chiefly in the Highlands, formed a tacitly royalist party. The young Earl of Montrose, raised to the rank of marquis, and invested by the king with a commission, set up the royal standard in Perthshire (August 1644) , and was soon surrounded, by three thousand men, part of whom were Irish papists. Montrose was a man of extraordinary genius, with conceptions far beyond his narrow sphere. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It will be recollected that the earls of Antrim and Montrose had been engaged by Charles to exert themselves in Ireland and Scotland on his behalf. Their first attempt was to take vengeance on the covenanting earl of Argyll, who had so much contributed to defeat the king's attempts on the Scottish church and government. Montrose, therefore, unfurled the royal standard as the king's lieutenant-general at Dumfries; but, having before been a strong covenanter, he did not all at once win the confidence of the royalists. His success was so poor that he returned to England. ”

“ On 19 Sept. 1489 he received a new charter of the dukedom of Montrose for life, and in February 1489–90 was chosen a member of the privy council. He died at Finhaven about Christmas 1495, and was buried in the Greyfriars Church, Dundee. A petition was presented in 1848 to the queen by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, claiming the dukedom of Montrose on the ground that the first patent still held good, inasmuch as it was not specially mentioned as abolished ”

“ He swore passionately that, greatly as he desired the King's restoration, he would rather that it should never be effected, than effected with the help of this cruel and inhuman James Graham. How much of this indignation was sincere, and how much assumed as a cloak for the intrigues of faction, it would be hard to say. That there was a deep and widespread feeling in Scotland against Montrose is certain; but it is difficult to believe that pity for human suffering can at any time have strongly moved such a man as Lauderdale. ”

“ It is possible, indeed, that the enthusiasm of these new Royalists was in some degree due to the feeling that it would not be forced to submit to the dictation of a man whose ways were not theirs. Only among the Highlanders could Montrose have found allies, and among their mountains was his only battle-ground. They knew nothing of Kirk or Covenant, of Presbyterian or Independent. The men of Macdonald bore no grudge against the destroyer of the Campbells; the men of Athole would have heard without a murmur that every Mackenzie had been put to the sword from Kintail to Loch Broom. ”

“ They had subscribed the Covenant not to destroy their king, but to save their religion. They had subscribed it, in short, without sufficiently considering whether it must inevitably lead them among such a people and at such a time, unless Charles were to undergo some marvellous change in his nature and ideas which only dreamers could hope for, and which, it is not too much to say, no man then wearing a crown was likely to undergo. To dethrone Charles merely to set up Argyll in his place was to their taste neither as Scotsmen nor Covenanters. To this party Montrose determined to appeal. ”

“ When he had sufficiently recovered to give full vent to his feelings, he expressed a desire to die with his sovereign, as he could no longer enjoy, as he said, a life which had now become a grievous and heavy burden. But on Wishart remonstrating with him upon the impropriety of entertaining such a sentiment, and informing him that he should be rather more desirous of life that he might avenge the death of his royal master, and place his son and lawful successor upon the throne of his ancestors, Montrose replied with composure, that in that view he should be satisfied to live ”

“ Sir Duncan Campbell left the hall, accompanied by Allan M’Aulay and Lord Menteith. “There goes a true-bred Campbell,” said Montrose, as the envoy departed, “for they are ever fair and false.”
“Pardon me, my lord,” said Evan Dhu; “hereditary enemy as I am to their name, I have ever found the Knight of Ardenvohr brave in war, honest in peace, and true in council.”
“Of his own disposition,” said Montrose, “such he is undoubtedly; but he now acts as the organ or mouth-piece of his Chief, the Marquis, the falsest man that ever drew breath. ”

“ When Dalgetty reluctantly obeyed, Montrose struck him lightly on the neck with the flat of his sword, saying,—“In reward of the gallant service of this day, and in the name and authority of our Sovereign, King Charles, I dub thee knight; be brave, loyal, and fortunate. And now, Sir Dugald Dalgetty, to your duty. Collect what horsemen you can, and pursue such of the enemy as are flying down the side of the lake. Do not disperse your force, nor venture too far; but take heed to prevent their rallying, which very little exertion may do. ”

“ Montrose sent a triumphant message to the King saying that he would soon cross the border with twenty thousand men. But his Highlanders went home with their plunder, the Lowland Scots declined to enlist under his banner, and he had less than two thousand men with him when David Leslie, with four thousand horse from the Scottish army in England, surprised his little force at Philiphaugh, and cut it in pieces (September 13th) . Ignorant of this disaster, Charles set out from Raglan Castle with three thousand horse to join Montrose. ”

“ And all the while Charles knew well that the one inevitable condition, whatever else might be taken or left, without which no basis of an understanding with the Covenant was possible, must be the dismissal of James Graham from his service. Elizabeth of Bohemia, who knew her nephew's disposition too well, had always foreseen this risk. "I pray God keep the King in his constancy to you and his other true friends and servants," she had written to Montrose ”

“ For a time Montrose retired, perforce, from public life. After the Civil War began in England (see Great Rebellion) he constantly pressed Charles to allow him to make a diversion in Scotland. Hamilton’s impracticable policy of keeping Scotland neutral for long stood in the way of Charles’s consent. But in 1644, when a Scottish army entered England to take part against the king, Montrose, now created a marquess, was at last allowed to try what he could do. He set out to invade Scotland with about 1000 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. ”

“ Annot Lyle could always charm Allan out of the sullens, and who knows whether matrimony might not make him more a man of this world?” Montrose hastened to interrupt the progress of his castle-building, by informing him that the lady was already wooed and won, and, with her father’s approbation, was almost immediately to be wedded to his kinsman, the Earl of Menteith ”

“ She did learn one thing about Montrose. He used different words with different kinds of people—just as she herself did, in a way. She was eavesdropping one evening as he sat by his campfire with Antrim and Patrick Graham [167] of Inchbrakie, and his words to them were less simple and certain than those to the untaught clansmen.
“No,” he said, “I do not fight for what people call the Divine Right of Kings. I don’t believe there is such a thing, Alistair. A king must be subject to the laws of God, nature, and the country that he rules. ”