Dundee, should have found infinite comfort in believing that he was
under the direct protection of Satan. In those days of lively faith,
the charge was by no means an uncommon one, and the dark distinction
was shared by any number of his compatriots. On the death of Sir
Robert Grierson of Lag, the devil, who had waited long for his prey,
manifested his sense of satisfaction by providing an elaborate funeral
cortége, which came over the sea at midnight, with nodding plumes and
sable horses, to carry off in ostentatious splendor the soul of this
much-honored guest. Prince Rupert was believed by the Roundheads to
owe his immunity from danger to the same diabolic agency which made
Claverhouse proof against leaden bullets; and his white dog, Boy,
was regarded with as much awe as was Dundee’s famous black charger,
the gift of the evil one himself. As a fact, Boy was not altogether
unworthy of his reputation, for he could fight almost as well as his
master, though unluckily without sharing in his advantages; for the
poor brute was shot at Marston Moor, in the very act of pulling down
a rebel. Even the clergy, it would seem, were not wholly averse to
Satan’s valuable patronage; for Wodrow--to whose claims as an historian
Mr. Morris is strangely lenient--tells us gravely how the unfortunate
Archbishop of St. Andrew’s cowered trembling in the Privy Council, when
Janet Douglas, then on trial for witchcraft, made bold to remind him of
the “meikle black devil” who was closeted with him the last Saturday at
midnight.
But even our delighted appreciation of these very interesting and
characteristic legends cannot altogether blind us to the dubious
quality of history based upon such testimony, and it is a little
startling to see that, as years rolled by, the impression they created
remained practically undimmed. Colonel Fergusson, in the preface to
his delightful volume on The Laird of Lag, confesses that in his youth
it was still a favorite Halloween game to dress up some enterprising
member of the household as a hideous beast with a preternaturally long
nose,--made, in fact, of a saucepan handle; and that this creature,
who went prowling stealthily around the dim halls and firelit kitchen,
frightening the children into shrieks of terror, was supposed to
represent the stout old cavalier searching for his ancient foes the
Covenanters. Lag’s memory appears to have been given up by universal
consent to every species of opprobrium, and his misdeeds have so far
found no apologist, unless, indeed, Macaulay may count as one, when
he gracefully transfers part of them to Claverhouse’s shoulders. Mr.
Morris coldly mentions Sir Robert Grierson as “coarse, cruel, and
brutal beyond even the license of those days;” Colonel Fergusson is
far too clever to weaken the dramatic force of his book by hinting
that his hero was not a great deal worse than other men; and Scott, in
that inimitable romance, Wandering Willie’s Tale, has thrown a perfect
glamour of wickedness around the old laird’s name. But in truth, when
we come to search for sober proven facts; when we discard--reluctantly,
indeed, but under compulsion--the spiked barrel in which he was
pleased to roll the Covenanters, in Carthaginian fashion, down the
Scottish hills; and the iron hook in his cellar, from which it was his
playful fancy to depend them; and the wine which turned to clotted
blood ere it touched his lips; and the active copartnership of Satan in
his private affairs,--when we lay aside these picturesque traditions,
there is little left save a charge, not altogether uncommon, of
indecorum in his cups, the ever-vexed question of the Wigtown martyrs,
and a few rebels who were shot, like John Bell, after scant trial, but
who, Heaven knows, would have gained cold comfort by having their cases
laid before the council. On the other hand, it might be worth while to
mention that Lag was brave, honest, not rapacious, and, above all, true
to his colors when the tide had turned, and he was left alone in his
old age to suffer imprisonment and disgrace.
But if the memory of a minor actor in these dark scenes has come down
to us so artistically embellished, what may we not expect of one who
played a leading part through the whole stormy drama? “The chief of
this Tophet on earth,” is the temperate phrase applied to Claverhouse
by Macaulay, and it sufficiently illustrates the position popularly
assigned him by his foes. Rumor asserted in his behalf her triumphant
immortality, and crystallized into tradition every floating charge
urged by the Covenanters against his fame. So potent and far-reaching
was her voice that it became in time a virtuous necessity to echo it;
and we actually find Southey writing to Scott in 1807, and regretting
that Wordsworth should have thought fit to introduce the Viscount of
Dundee into the sonnet on Killiecrankie, without any apparent censure
of his conduct. Scott, who took a somewhat easier view of poetical
obligations, and who probably thought that Killiecrankie was hardly
the fitting spot on which to recall Dundee’s shortcomings, wrote back
very plainly that he thought there had been censure enough already;
and nine years later he startled the good people of Edinburgh, on his
own account, by the publication of that eminently heterodox novel, Old
Mortality. Lockwood tells us that the theme was suggested to Sir Walter
by his friend Mr. Joseph Train, who, when visiting at Abbotsford, was
much struck by the solitary picture in the poet’s library, a portrait
of Graham of Claverhouse.
“He expressed the surprise with which every one who had known Dundee
only in the pages of the Presbyterian annalists must see for the
first time that beautiful and melancholy visage, worthy of the most
pathetic dreams of romance. Scott replied that no character had been
so foully traduced as the Viscount of Dundee; that, thanks to Wodrow,
Cruikshanks, and such chroniclers, he who was every inch a soldier
and a gentleman still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian
desperado, who rode a goblin horse, was proof against shot, and in
league with the devil.
“‘Might he not,’ said Train, ‘be made, in good hands, the hero of a
national romance, as interesting as any about either Wallace or Prince
Charlie?’
“‘He might,’ said Scott, ‘but your western zealots would require to be
faithfully portrayed in order to bring him out with the right effect.’”
Train then described to Sir Walter the singular character of Old
Mortality, and the result was that incomparable tale which took the
English reading world by storm, and provoked in Scotland a curious
fever of excitement, indignation, and applause. The most vigorous
protest against its laxity came from Thomas MacCrie, one of the
numerous biographers of John Knox, “who considered the representation
of the Covenanters in the story of Old Mortality as so unfair as
to demand, at his hands, a very serious rebuke.” This rebuke was
administered at some length in a series of papers published in
the Edinburgh Christian Instructor. Scott, the “Black Hussar of
Literature,” replied with much zest and spirit in the Quarterly Review;
cudgels were taken up on both sides, and the war went briskly on, until
Jeffrey the Great in some measure silenced the controversy by giving
it as his ultimatum that the treatment of an historical character in
a work of pure fiction was a matter of very trifling significance. It
is not without interest that we see the same querulous virtue that
winced under Sir Walter’s frank enthusiasm for Claverhouse uttering
its protest to-day against the more chilly and scrupulous vindications
of Mr. Morris’s biography. “An apology for the crimes of a hired
butcher,” one critic angrily calls the sober little volume, forgetting
in his heat that the term “hired butcher,” though most scathing in
sound, is equally applicable to any soldier, from the highest to the
lowest, who is paid by his government to kill his fellow-men. War is
a rough trade, and if we choose to call names, it is as easy any time
to say “butcher” as “hero.” Stronger words have not been lacking to
vilify Dundee, and many of these choice anathemas belong, one fears,
to Luther’s catalogue of “downright, infamous, scandalous lies.”
Their freshness, however, is as amazing as their ubiquity, and they
confront us every now and then in the most forlorn nooks and crannies
of literature. Not very long ago I was shut up for half an hour in a
boarding-house parlor, in company with a solitary little book entitled
Scheyichbi and the Strand, or Early Days along the Delaware. Its name
proved to be the only really attractive thing about it, and I was
speculating drearily as to whether Charles Lamb himself could have
extracted any amusement from its pages, when suddenly my eye lighted
on a sentence that read like an old familiar friend: “The cruelty,
the brutality, the mad, exterminating barbarity of Claverhouse, and
Lauderdale, and Jeffreys, the minions of episcopacy and the king.”
There it stood, venerably correct in sentiment, with a strangely
new location and surroundings. It is hard enough, surely, to see
Claverhouse pilloried side by side with the brute Jeffreys; but to meet
him on the banks of the Delaware is like encountering Ezzèlin Romano on
Fifth Avenue, or Julian the Apostate upon Boston Common.
Much of this universal harmony of abuse may be fairly charged to
Macaulay, for it is he who in a few strongly written passages has
presented to the general reader that remarkable compendium of
wickedness commonly known as Dundee. “Rapacious and profane, of violent
temper and obdurate heart,” is the great historian’s description
of a man who sought but modest wealth, who never swore, and whose
imperturbable gentleness of manner was more appalling in its way than
the fiercest transports of rage. Under Macaulay’s hands Claverhouse
exhibits a degree of ubiquity and mutability that might well require
some supernatural basis to sustain it. He supports as many characters
as Saladin in the Talisman; appearing now as his brother David Graham,
in order to witness the trial of the Wigtown martyrs, and now as his
distant kinsman, Patrick Graham, when it becomes expedient to figure
as a dramatic feature of Argyle’s execution. He changes at will into
Sir Robert Grierson, and is thus made responsible for that highly
curious game which Wodrow and Howie impute to Lag’s troopers, and which
Macaulay describes with as much gravity as if it were the sacking
and pillage of some doomed Roman town. It is hard to understand the
precise degree of pleasure embodied in calling one’s self Apollyon and
one’s neighbor Beelzebub; it is harder still to be properly impressed
with the tremendous significance of the deed. I have known a bevy of
school-girls, who, after an exhaustive course of Paradise Lost, were
so deeply imbued with the sombre glories of the satanic court that
they assumed the names of its inhabitants; and, for the remainder of
that term, even the mysterious little notes that form so important an
element of boarding-school life began--heedless of grammar--with “Chère
Moloch,” and ended effusively with “Your ever-devoted Belial.” It is
quite possible that these children thought and hoped they were doing
something desperately wicked, only they lacked a historian to chronicle
their guilt. It is equally certain that Lag’s drunken troopers, if
they ever did divert themselves in the unbecoming manner ascribed
to them, might have been more profitably, and, it would seem, more
agreeably, employed. But, of one thing, at least, we may feel tolerably
confident. The pastime would have found scant favor in the eyes of
Claverhouse, who was a man of little imagination, of stern discipline,
and of fastidiously decorous habits. Why, even Wandering Willie does
him this much justice, when he describes him as alone amid the lost
souls, isolated in his contemptuous pride from their feasts and
dreadful merriment: “And there sat Claverhouse, as beautiful as when
he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks streaming down over his
laced buff-coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade, to
hide the wound that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from them
all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance.” If
history be, as Napoleon asserts, nothing but fiction agreed upon, let
us go straight to the fountain-head, and enjoy our draught of romance
unspoiled by any dubious taint of veracity.
Mr. Walter Bagehot, that most keen and tolerant of critics, has pointed
out to us with his customary acumen that Macaulay never appreciated in
the highest degree either of the two great parties--the Puritans and
the Cavaliers--who through so many stirring events embodied all the
life and color of English history. In regard to the former, it may be
safely said that whatever slights they have received at the hands of
other historians have been amply atoned for by Carlyle. He has thrown
the whole weight of his powerful personality into their scale, and has
fairly frightened us into that earnestness of mind which is requisite
for a due appreciation of their merits. His fine scorn for the pleasant
vices which ensnare humanity extended itself occasionally to things
which are pleasant without being vicious; and under his leadership
we hardly venture to hint at a certain sneaking preference for the
gayer side of life. When Hazlitt, with a shameless audacity rare among
Englishmen, disencumbers himself lightly of his conscience, and
apostrophizes the reign of Charles II. as that “happy, thoughtless age,
when king and nobles led purely ornamental lives,” we feel our flesh
chilled at such a candid avowal of volatility. Surely Hazlitt must
have understood that it is precisely the fatal picturesqueness of that
period to which we, as moralists, so strenuously object. The courts of
the first two Hanoverians were but little better or purer, but they
were at least uglier, and we can afford to look with some leniency upon
their short-comings. His sacred majesty George II. was hardly, save in
the charitable eyes of Bishop Porteus, a shining example of rectitude;
but let us rejoice that it never lay in the power of any human being to
hint that he was in the smallest degree ornamental.
The Puritan, then, has been wafted into universal esteem by the breath
of his great eulogist; but the Cavalier still waits for his historian.
Poets and painters and romancers have indeed loved to linger over
this warm, impetuous life, so rich in vigor and beauty, so full to
the brim of a hardy adventurous joy. Here, they seem to say, far more
than in ancient Greece, may be realized the throbbing intensity of
an unreflecting happiness. For the Greek drank deeply of the cup of
knowledge, and its bitterness turned his laughter into tears; the
Cavalier looked straight into the sunlight with clear, joyous eyes,
and troubled himself not at all with the disheartening problems of
humanity. How could a mind like Macaulay’s, logical, disciplined,
and gravely intolerant, sympathize for a moment with this utterly
irresponsible buoyancy! How was he, of all men, to understand this
careless zest for the old feast of life, this unreasoning loyalty to
an indifferent sovereign, this passionate devotion to a church and
easy disregard of her precepts, this magnificent wanton courage, this
gay prodigality of enjoyment! It was his loss, no less than ours,
that, in turning over the pages of the past, he should miss half of
their beauty and their pathos; for History, that calumniated muse,
whose sworn votaries do her little honor, has illuminated every inch
of her parchment with a strong, generous hand, and does not mean that
we should contemptuously ignore the smallest fragment of her work. The
superb charge of Rupert’s cavalry; that impetuous rush to battle,
before which no mortal ranks might stand unbroken; the little group
of heart-sick Cavaliers who turned at sunset from the lost field of
Marston Moor, and beheld their queen’s white standard floating over the
enemy’s ranks; the scaffolds of Montrose and King Charles; the more
glorious death of Claverhouse, pressing the blood-stained grass, and
listening for the last time to the far-off cries of victory; Sidney
Godolphin flinging away his life, with all its abundant promise and
whispered hopes of fame; beautiful Francis Villiers lying stabbed to
the heart in Surbiton lane, with his fair boyish face turned to the
reddening sky,--these and many other pictures History has painted
for us on her scroll, bidding us forget for a moment our formidable
theories and strenuous partisanship, and suffer our hearts to be simply
and wholesomely stirred by the brave lives and braver deaths of our
mistaken brother men.
“Every matter,” observes Epictetus, “has two handles by which it
may be grasped;” and the Cavalier is no exception to the rule. We
may, if we choose, regard him from a purely moral point of view,
as a lamentably dissolute and profligate courtier; or from a purely
picturesque point of view, as a gallant and loyal soldier; or we may,
if we are wise, take him as he stands, making room for him cheerfully
as a fellow-creature, and not vexing our souls too deeply over his
brilliant divergence from our present standard. It is like a breath of
fresh air blown from a roughening sea to feel, even at this distance
of time, that strong young life beating joyously and eagerly against
the barriers of the past; to see those curled and scented aristocrats
who, like the “dandies of the Crimea,” could fight as well as dance,
facing pleasure and death, the ball-room and the battle-field, with the
same smiling front, the same unflagging enthusiasm. No wonder that Mr.
Bagehot, analyzing with friendly sympathy the strength and weakness
of the Cavalier, should find himself somewhat out of temper with an
historian’s insensibility to virtues so primitive and recognizable in a
not too merry world.
“The greatness of this character is not in Macaulay’s way, and its
faults are. Its license affronts him, its riot alienates him. He is
forever contrasting the dissoluteness of Prince Rupert’s horse with
the restraint of Cromwell’s pikemen. A deep, enjoying nature finds in
him no sympathy. He has no tears for that warm life, no tenderness
for that extinct mirth. The ignorance of the Cavaliers, too, moves
his wrath: ‘They were ignorant of what every schoolgirl knows.’ Their
loyalty to their sovereign is the devotion of the Egyptians to the god
Apis: ‘They selected a calf to adore.’ Their non-resistance offends the
philosopher; their license is commented on in the tone of a precisian.
Their indecorum does not suit the dignity of the narrator. Their rich,
free nature is unappreciated; the tingling intensity of their joy is
unnoticed. In a word, there is something of the schoolboy about the
Cavalier; there is somewhat of a schoolmaster about the historian.”[14]
That the gay gentlemen who glittered in the courts of the Stuarts
were enviably ignorant of much that, for some inscrutable reason,
we feel ourselves obliged to know to-day may be safely granted, and
scored at once to the account of their good fortune. It is probable
that they had only the vaguest notions about Sesostris, and could
not have defined an hypothesis of homophones with any reasonable
degree of accuracy. But they were possessed, nevertheless, of a
certain information of their own, not garnered from books, and not
always attainable to their critics. They knew life in its varying
phases, from the delicious trifling of a polished and witty society
to the stern realities of the camp and battle-field. They knew the
world, women, and song, three things as pleasant and as profitable
in their way as Hebrew, Euclid, and political economy. They knew how
to live gracefully, to fight stoutly, and to die honorably; and how
to extract from the gray routine of existence a wonderfully distinct
flavor of novelty and enjoyment. There were among them, as among the
Puritans, true lovers, faithful husbands, and tender fathers; and
the indiscriminate charge of dissoluteness on the one side, like the
indiscriminate charge of hypocrisy on the other, is a cheap expression
of our individual intolerance.
The history of the Cavalier closes with Killiecrankie. The waning
prestige of a once powerful influence concentrated itself in
Claverhouse, the latest and strongest figure on its canvas, the
accepted type of its most brilliant and defiant qualities. Readers of
old-fashioned novels may remember a lachrymose story, in two closely
printed volumes, which enjoyed an amazing popularity some twenty years
ago, and which was called The Last of the Cavaliers. It had for its
hero a perfectly impossible combination of virtues, a cross between
the Chevalier Bayard and the Admirable Crichton, labeled Dundee,
and warranted proof against all the faults and foibles of humanity.
This automaton, who moved in a rarefied atmosphere through the whole
dreary tale, performing noble deeds and uttering virtuous sentiments
with monotonous persistency, embodied, we may presume, the author’s
conception of a character not generally credited with such superfluous
excellence. It was a fine specimen of imaginative treatment, and not
wholly unlike some very popular historic methods by which similar
results are reached to-day. Quite recently, a despairing English
critic, with an ungratified taste for realities, complained somewhat
savagely that “a more intolerable embodiment of unrelieved excellence
and monotonous success than the hero of the pious Gladstonian’s
worship was never moulded out of plaster of Paris.” He was willing
enough to yield his full share of admiration, but he wanted to see
the real, human, interesting Gladstone back of all this conventional
and disheartening mock-heroism; and, in the same spirit, we would
like sometimes to see the real Claverhouse back of all the dramatic
accessories in which he has been so liberally disguised.
But where, save perhaps in the ever-delightful pages of Old Mortality,
shall we derive any moderate gratification from our search? Friends
are apt to be as ill advised as foes, and Dundee’s eulogists, from
Napier to Aytoun, have been distinguished rather for the excellence
of their intentions than for any great felicity of execution. The
“lion-hearted warrior,” for whom Aytoun flings wide the gates of
Athol, might be Cœur-de-Lion himself, or Marshal Ney, or Stonewall
Jackson, or any other brave fighter. There is no distinctive flavor of
the Graeme in the somewhat long-winded hero, with his “falcon eye,”
and his “war-horse black as night,” and his trite commonplaces about
foreign gold and Highland honor. On the other hand, the verdict of the
disaffected may be summed up in the extraordinary lines with which
Macaulay closes his account of Killiecrankie, and of Dundee’s brief,
glorious struggle for his king: “During the last three months of his
life he had proved himself a great warrior and politician, and his name
is therefore mentioned with respect by that large class of persons
who think that there is no excess of wickedness for which courage
and ability do not atone.” No excess of wickedness! One wonders what
more could be said if we were discussing Tiberius or Caligula, or if
colder words were ever used to chill a soldier’s fame. Mr. Mowbray
Morris, the latest historian in the field, seems divided between a
natural desire to sift the evidence for all this wickedness and a
polite disinclination to say anything rude during the process, “a
common impertinence of the day,” in which he declares he has no wish
to join. This is exceedingly pleasant and courteous, though hardly of
primary importance; for a biographer’s sole duty is, after all, to the
subject of his biography, and not to Macaulay, who can hold his own
easily enough without any assistance whatever. When Sir James Stephens
published, some years ago, his very earnest and accurate vindication
of Sir Elijah Impey from the charges so lavishly brought against him
in that matchless essay on Warren Hastings, he expressed at the same
time his serene conviction that the great world would go on reading
the essay and believing the charges just the same,--a new rendering
of “Magna est veritas et prævalebit,” which brings it very near to
Hesiod’s primitive experience.