THE KING'S COMMISSION
This final rupture with the Covenant did not at once throw Montrose
into the arms of the King. The malignant star of Hamilton was still in
the ascendant. 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; and he saw clearly that the only
chance of preventing this fatal union was to strike such a blow
at the former before it was ready for action as would leave it no
leisure to meddle with matters outside its own borders. He would have
warned the King of this before the war began, but Charles, mindful
of his promise to the Estates, and careful always to keep promises
it was not in his interests to break, refused to see him. He warned
Henrietta Maria of it at Bridlington Quay amid the thunder of English
guns firing on an English Queen, and he renewed his warnings again
when Newcastle had escorted her to York, and the harassed lady could
breathe and listen in safety. But Hamilton was also at her side
persuading her, as he had persuaded the King, that no danger was to
be feared from Scotland so long as no violence was attempted, and
that he might be relied upon to keep the country quiet and loyal to
its engagements. It was known that after Edgehill, when Charles was
marching on London, the Houses at Westminster had directly invited the
Scots into England to keep Newcastle's northern army in check, while
the King's own appeals to his "contented people" had been invariably
rejected. Yet the general feeling seems to have been in favour of a
temporising policy. The truth was that, though many Royalists looked
coldly on Hamilton, few were as yet inclined to trust Montrose. Among
the old thorough-going cavaliers the taint of the Covenant still
hung about him; his repentance, they thought, savoured too much of
personal pique to be altogether genuine. But with the majority it was
not so much his good faith as his capacity that was distrusted. They
considered him a brilliant adventurer, brave and daring, but too young
and inexperienced for these high matters, too rash and headstrong.
"Montrose," they said, "is a generous spirit, but Hamilton hath the
better head-piece." The King showed his opinion of the two men in
characteristic fashion; he wrote courteously to Montrose, and advanced
Hamilton to a dukedom.
So, during the first year of the war, Montrose was forced to eat his
heart out in idleness, at home among his books, in strenuous efforts
to keep alive the fainting loyalty of his party, or in despairing
consultations with his friends on the approach of the inevitable
hour that they were powerless to prevent. The Covenanters, aware of
his situation, and conceiving that his proud and restless spirit,
chafing under the sickness of hopes deferred and services rejected,
would render him amenable to their designs, sought to win him again
to their side. They offered him the command of their new army under
Leven; they even offered, as they had once offered Huntly, to pay his
debts. The Moderator Henderson (at Argyll's suggestion, it would seem,
and certainly with his knowledge) was sent to solve some doubts he
affected to entertain on the propriety of accepting these offers, and
from him Montrose learned all that he expected and feared to know.
This curious interview took place on the banks of the Forth near the
Bridge of Stirling. Henderson was accompanied by Sir James Rollo,
who filled the embarrassing situation of brother-in-law to both
Montrose and Argyll.[11] Montrose, who knew from the Queen that
these Covenanting overtures had been reported to his disadvantage in
England, had taken care to be accompanied by good guarantees for his
integrity. He came with Napier and Napier's son the young Master,
with Keir and Lord Ogilvy. For two hours the interview lasted by the
water-side. Montrose, professing to have lived lately too much in
retirement to be aware how matters were going in the great public
world, asked the Moderator what these offers meant, and what he
was expected to do for them. Henderson, in the belief that he was
talking to an apostate only anxious to find a plausible excuse for
his apostasy, frankly admitted that it was intended to send an army
into England to co-operate with the Parliamentary forces, and that in
both countries it was resolved to push matters to the extreme against
the King; and he urged Montrose to hesitate no longer, but to throw
himself heartily into the good work, assuring him that he had only
to state his terms, and that whatever they might be they would be
accepted. Montrose then turned to his brother-in-law and asked if they
came as the mouthpiece of the Estates, or only out of goodwill to him.
Sir James answered that he understood the Moderator to have spoken
by authority. But to this Henderson demurred. He was not exactly
commissioned, he said, by the Estates, but he was sure that they
would make all his promises good. "That will not do for me," replied
Montrose. "I cannot commit myself in such important matters without
the assurance of the public faith, especially when the messengers
cannot agree among themselves as to the terms of their message."
The substance of this interview was at once reported by Montrose,
first to the Queen at Oxford, and then to the King in his camp
before Gloucester. Still they both hesitated, nor was it till
Hamilton himself confessed his failure that their eyes were opened.
A Convention of the Estates had been summoned to meet in Edinburgh
at the very time of the conference on the banks of the Forth. It was
soon made clear that Henderson had spoken no more than truth when he
told Montrose that the King need hope for nothing from Scotland.
Though the Convention had been summoned without royal warrant,
Hamilton attended as the Royal Commissioner, and was urgent with all
loyal subjects to be in their places to secure him that diplomatic
triumph which he had promised his confiding master. With Montrose he
had been especially urgent, but Montrose had refused to attend unless
the Commissioner would promise, should fair words prove useless, to
sanction an appeal to force. Hamilton would not give the promise.
"I will protest," he said, "but I will not fight." He did not even
protest. Argyll asked him scornfully if he had nothing to say on the
King's behalf. Lanark answered for him that he would not wrong himself
and them by protesting against the wisdom of a whole kingdom. Hamilton
muttered some confused words to the same purpose, and the loyal peers,
who had obeyed his summons, left the hall in disgust.
All went forward as Henderson had predicted. Whatever reluctance
might have been felt by the moderate Covenanters to declare open war
against the King had been removed by the recent capture of Antrim
in Ireland, with letters in his pocket from Nithsdale and Aboyne
concerning a rising in Scotland to be backed by a force of Irish
Catholics. There was no proof that this plan had been proposed to
the King, still less that he had accepted it; but the mere whisper
of the hated word _Papist_ was enough to set Presbyterian Scotland
in a blaze. The elections for the new Convention resulted in a large
majority in favour of a military alliance with England. At the same
time Waller's defeat at Roundway Down removed the last scruple
entertained at Westminster on employing a Scottish army against
Englishmen. The Commissioners from London, among whom was the younger
Vane, were authorised to demand a force of eleven thousand men.
Terms were soon arranged, and Lanark, as Secretary of State, set the
seal on his treachery by affixing the King's signature to a warrant
authorising the levy of an army to be employed against the King's
authority. Then, to draw the bond still closer between the English
Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians, a new Covenant was formed by Vane
and Henderson for mutual adoption under the title of the Solemn League
and Covenant, which, after ratification by the Estates, was accepted
by both Houses at Westminster, and solemnly subscribed in Saint
Margaret's Church on September 25th, 1643.
The King could no longer blind himself to the truth. Hamilton had
failed, and it was now clear that his failure had been inevitable
from the first. He came with his brother to Oxford to justify himself
before his indignant master. But Montrose was there also, with many
a loyal Scotsman, Crawford and Nithsdale, Ogilvy and Aboyne, who had
been cajoled into attending the Convention, and in the face of their
evidence no justification was possible. Whether he had been traitor or
fool mattered little now; but even the long-suffering King was forced
to own that, if an honest man, the favourite had at least shown his
honesty after a strange and disastrous fashion. The brothers were
arrested. Lanark made his escape to the Covenanters; but Hamilton was
sent a prisoner under a strong guard to Pendennis Castle in Cornwall.
Then, at last, the King turned for help to Montrose. Was the plan he
had been urging for the last twelve months on unheeding ears still
practicable? The Scots had crossed the Tweed; all the garrisons and
passes of the Border were in their hands; any day might bring Leven
and Newcastle face to face. Even Montrose could not but confess the
venture to be a desperate one. But desperate ventures only raised
that dauntless spirit. The plan that had seemed so easy a few short
months since could not be impossible now, with all his friends round
him, with his sovereign at his back, and no Hamilton in his path. If
Newcastle could spare a few troopers he could make his way through the
Lowlands to his own lands beyond the Tay. There, among his own people,
with the royal commission in his hand, with Aboyne and Ogilvy for his
lieutenants, he would rally the loyal North to the King's standard,
and, sweeping down on the rear of the invading Scots, would soon send
them back over their borders faster than they had come. Meanwhile
Antrim, who was at large again, must effect a diversion from Ireland
on the west, and beard the Dictator in his own country. The plan was
thought sheer madness at Oxford, where little confidence was felt in
Montrose, and none at all in Antrim, a vain and foolish man, notorious
for nothing, in Clarendon's contemptuous phrase, but for his marriage
with the great Duke of Buckingham's widow. 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 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. Crawford,
Nithsdale, Reay, Ogilvy, and Aboyne rode with him, and a miscellaneous
following of gentlemen-adventurers and their servants, some hundred in
all.
Their first point was Newcastle's camp at Durham, where Montrose hoped
to make some additions to his scanty army. He was received with all
the circumstance and courtesy befitting his new honours, but with
small assurance of help. Indeed Newcastle seemed in no good condition
to help himself. Montrose was a spectator of the inglorious affair
at Kowdenhill, which, but for the bravery of Sir Charles Lucas who
led the English cavalry, might have ended in disaster. Here he saw
that valiant Amazon, Mrs. Peirsons, riding, armed to the teeth, at
the head of a troop of horse conspicuous for a black flag showing
the ghastly device of a naked man hanging from a gibbet, with the
motto _I dare_, the legendary banner of the House of Dalzell. The
troop had been raised and armed at the charges of Carnwath, the head
of that House; but the commission ran in the name of Captain Frances
Dalzell, under which style the woman whom he called his daughter took
the field. Carnwath's loyalty was of the sort too common at that
time, and common especially among Scotsmen. The incompetence of an
English general, though it might grieve him for his master's sake,
could not, for the present at least, affect Montrose's plans. The
jealousy of a Scottish peer might affect them seriously. It was this
he feared more than all the swords of the Covenant or the subtleties
of Argyll. For his enemies he could account. But who would undertake
to account for those who should be his friends? The King had issued a
commission for Carnwath as Lieutenant of Clydesdale where his lands
lay, which was delivered to him by Aboyne as aide-de-camp to the
Lord Lieutenant-General of the Northern Expedition. The petulant old
nobleman, who had been secretly chafing at Montrose's authority and
the respect paid to it in the English camp, conceived himself entitled
to some better reward for the expense of equipping Captain Frances
Dalzell and her men for the field than an appointment which placed him
at the orders of a man young enough to be his son, and who at the best
was but a renegade Covenanter. Refusing even to read his commission,
he flung it from him with one of those full-mouthed Scottish oaths
that were always at his command.
But it was no time to stand upon punctilios. All the aid Newcastle
could give was a hundred badly-mounted troopers and two small brass
field-pieces. With these, and his own personal following, Montrose
struck westward for Carlisle. On the road he was joined by eight
hundred foot of the Northumberland and Cumberland Militia and three
troops of horse. Such was the army with which this dauntless leader of
a forlorn hope went forth to conquer Scotland for King Charles.
The beginning was disastrous. He crossed the Border on April 13th, and
on the first day's march up the Annan the English troops quarrelled
with their Scotch allies and deserted in a body. Still he pressed
on with his own men and occupied Dumfries. There, at the head of
his little band, he read his commission to the few townsmen who
had not cared to run away, and raised the royal standard. There
too he published the first of those declarations with which he was
henceforth careful to mark his actions as the deliberate result of
convictions forced on him by the conduct of his former allies. Not
he, but they had changed the point of view. He was King's man now, as
he had been Covenanter, "for the defence and maintenance of the true
Protestant religion, his Majesty's just and sacred authority, the
fundamental laws and privileges of Parliaments, the peace and freedom
of oppressed and thralled subjects." For this he had taken the oath
of the Covenant; for this he had borne arms in its service; for this
he was now in arms for the King against traitors who had broken their
faith to their country and to him. "I do again," he concludes, "most
solemnly declare that, knew I not perfectly his Majesty's intention
to be such, and so real as is already expressed, I should never at
all have embarked myself in this service. Nor did I but see the least
appearance of his Majesty's change from these resolutions or any of
them, I should never continue longer my faithful endeavour in it."[12]
These brave words fell on dull or unbelieving ears. Without allies it
was madness to advance; to linger idle in Dumfries was useless, even
if he could hope to hold the town. For two days he waited for Antrim
and his Irishmen and the loyal gentlemen of the Western Lowlands. He
waited in vain. Not a Scotsman joined him; nothing could be heard
of Antrim; from every side came news of mustering foes. A solitary
welcome was sent to him from the faithful hearts at Keir, urging
him to make at once for Stirling, where Lord Sinclair, who held
the bulwark of the North for the Covenant, was reported to be only
waiting his chance to declare for the King. But he could not trust
Sinclair; and learning that a strong force under the fickle Callendar
was marching against him, he had no alternative but to fall back on
Carlisle.
Yet, though foiled for the time, Montrose could not be idle. He
contrived to draw a few troops together from the garrison at Newcastle
and elsewhere, and with these he patrolled the Border, keeping
Callendar in check on the Western Marches and gathering up forage and
provisions everywhere for the English army. After some brisk fighting,
and in the teeth of Leslie's cavalry, he took Morpeth Castle, a strong
and important post, and a smaller fort at the mouth of the Tyne. From
this most useful and not inglorious work he was summoned by an urgent
message from Rupert, who was then marching to the relief of York, to
join him at once with all the men he could muster. With all his haste
he could not reach the prince till the evening after the fatal Second
of July; and when the two men met in the little inn at Richmond the
King had no longer an army in the north of England.
Still Montrose did not despair. If Rupert would give him a thousand
horse he would cut his way into the heart of Scotland. But Rupert had
neither horse, nor men, nor muskets to give. "When we came to the
prince his occasions forced him to make use of the forces we brought
along with us and would not suffer him to supply us with others; so
that we were left altogether abandoned, and could not so much as find
quartering for our own person in these counties." In such words was
Montrose compelled to declare his forlorn situation to the King whom
he had left but four short months earlier with every assurance of
victory. But he added to them a characteristic postscript: "Forget not
to show how feasible the business is yet, and the reason thereof if
right courses be taken." And yet the outlook was dark enough to make
even that stout spirit sink. His own reverses were but a small thing,
the fortune of war which the next turn of the wheel might repair. It
was the selfishness, the jealousy, the treachery, that made his heart
sore. All he feared had come true. The commissions he had carried with
him had shared the fate of Carnwath's lieutenancy, and these proud
King's men would brook no master in the King's Lieutenant-General.
The superior rank that his new patent of Marquis gave him over them,
instead of confirming his authority, only aggravated his offence.[13]
And still there was no sign of the Irishmen. All the Lowlands from the
Forth to the Solway were in the hands of the Covenanters. Traquair,
once the most trusted of the King's Scottish counsellors after
Hamilton, had now openly declared for them, and was busy promising in
their name pardon and preferment to all Royalists who should follow
him. Huntly had indeed called his men out in the north, but had been
easily routed by Argyll, and some gallant Gordons had paid the penalty
for their chief's miscarriage with their heads.
Such was the substance of the report entrusted to Ogilvy for the
King's hand. It was drawn up at Carlisle, whither the baffled
adventurers had retired after the disaster at Marston. Nothing
more could be done now but to make the best of their way back to
headquarters at Oxford and there wait with their sovereign for a
happier time. In this decision Montrose had seemed to acquiesce while
secretly resolved on a very different enterprise. Early in August the
melancholy cavalcade left Carlisle for the South. After nightfall on
the second day, Montrose, having confided his plans to Ogilvy alone,
privately left his companions, who, seeing his aide-de-camp, his
horses, servants, and baggage still with them, continued their march
for Oxford, never doubting that their chief was following. But they
were not destined to reach their journey's end in safety. On their way
through Lancashire they were attacked by a strong body of rebel horse,
and after a stout resistance carried prisoners into Leven's camp
before Newcastle. Their leader returned to Carlisle.
No wilder project was ever hatched in mortal brain than that on which
Montrose was now bent. It was clear even to him that the game for the
present was up in the Lowlands; but the Highlands were still open.
There, among his own people, he might at least wait in safety for
Antrim's promised succours, which must surely now be on their road,
and there he might hope to find the loyal hearts which had ceased to
beat south of the Forth. But to reach the Highlands he must first
cross the Border where every pass and road was jealously watched by
Covenanting patrols, and make his way through a country where every
town and castle flew the blue flag. He knew that his enemies would
give more to have him in their hands than for the King and all his
armies, and he knew well that from those hands he need never hope
to escape with life. In truth the design seems to match better with
the brilliant romance of the great novelist than the sober record of
history. He chose for his companions Sir William Rollo, a younger
brother of the Laird of Duncruib, and Colonel Sibbald who had served
under him in the Covenanting armies. They wore the dress of Leven's
troopers, while the Marquis in the guise of a groom rode after them on
a sorry nag and leading another by the bridle.
At the Border they were met by the startling intelligence that
Montrose was known to be in the neighbourhood, and that the strictest
watch was kept for him at all the passes. But a more serious danger
soon threatened them. A Scots soldier, who had served under Newcastle
and seen Montrose in the camp at Durham, at once detected him under
his mean disguise and saluted him by name. The seeming groom would
have maintained his character, but the soldier would take no denial.
"What!" he said. "Do I not know my Lord Marquis of Montrose? But go
your way and God be with you!" They gave him a few crowns, and the
faithful fellow kept their secret well.
Thus, after four days of hard riding and continuous peril, Montrose
reached the Highlands. He passed through his own lands without halting
till he came to Tullibelton, on the Tay between Perth and Dunkeld, the
seat of Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie the best loved and trusted of all
his kinsmen. Here he could draw breath in safety, though the strictest
concealment was still necessary till he could learn the state of the
country. He passed his nights in a little hut among the woods, and his
days in lonely rambles on the hills, while his two companions went on
to Keir to report the wanderer's arrival, and to learn how things went
in those parts for the King.