1650.1 MONTROSE IN SCOTLAND. 129 have committed to you; and not to be startled with any reports you may hear, as if I were otherwise inclined to the Presbyterians than when I left you. I assure you I am upon the same principles I was, and depend as much as ever upon your undertaking and endeavours for my service.” Urged thus, and by his own passionate loyalty, the exile of Philiphaugh was indefatigable in gathering followers, though with no great success. In the autumn of 1649 he had collected about twelve hundred men at Hamburg and Gottenburg, and he dispatched a portion of them, who perished at sea. A second body arrived safely at Kirkwall. With five hundred more, Montrose himself landed in the Orkneys early in March, 1650. He then crossed to the northern extremity of the main land; and, says Clarendon, "quickly possessed himself of an old castle; which, in respect of the situation in a country so impossible for an army to march in, he thought strong enough for his purpose: thither he conveyed the arms, ammunition, and troops which he had brought with him." Caithness, in which district he landed, has numerous ruins of old castles-grim monuments of days of cruel feuds and lawless rapine. Here Montrose was come with his threatening banners-one of the two royal ones exhibiting the bleeding head of Charles I., with the motto, "Judge and revenge my cause, O Lord;" and his own banner painted with a naked arm and a sword dripping with gore. Onward he marched into Sutherland. Few adherents joined him. The natives fled from him as from a public enemy, of whose military excesses the Scots had received terrible lessons. Some cavalry, under the command of colonel Strachan, were proceeding against Montrose, in advance of a main body of troops under David Lesley; and they came suddenly upon him near a pass in the parish of Kincardine. The place is now called Craigchonichen, or the Rock of Lamentation. Here Montrose's last battle was soon ended. His Orkney recruits quickly ran; his Germans and his Scottish companions fought valiantly, but without effect. The ill-compacted force was wholly broken; and he himself fled from the field, throwing away his ribbon and George, and changing clothes with a peasant. Wandering amongst the Highlands for many days, he was at last taken on the 3rd of May. Clarendon's narrative of the last enterprise of Montrose and its fatal termination is regarded as one of the finest passages of his history. It should be read as a whole to do justice to its merits as a composition. The facts which it relates, compared with other relations, lie in a short compass. After his capture, Montrose and the other Scottish prisoners were delivered to David Lesley; the foreigners were set at liberty. There was a ferocious exultation over the fall of the capital enemy of the Covenanters, which showed itself in such acts of meanness as carrying him from town to town in the unseemly garb with which he was disguised, and thus exposing him to the jeers of the populace. An Act of Attainder had been passed by the Parliament against Montrose in 1644; and upon that Act he was now sentenced to death, before he reached Edinburgh. When he arrived at the Watergate of the city he was delivered to the magistrates, and was conveyed. to the Tolbooth, bound with cords, in an open cart, the common hangman riding before the cart, and wearing the livery of the fallen marquis. Thirty * "Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 408, to 422. VOL. IV. K 130 EXECUTION OF MONTROSE. [1650. The great four of his officers, tied together, formed part of the cavalcade. object of popular curiosity sat serene amidst his indignities; and his proud composure moved pity in the beholders, instead of the demonstrations of hate which were anticipated. Argyle looked upon his illustrious enemy from a window in the house of the earl of Moray.* From the first scene of this tragedy to the last, Montrose acted his heroic part to perfection. His demeanour was somewhat more theatrical than the mode in which the highest species of heroism would care to exhibit itself; but it was well calculated to dazzle those who are most taken with the showy virtues. When he alighted from the cart, he gave the hangman a reward "for driving his triumphal chariot so well." When he was brought, two days after, before the Parliament, he was splendidly dressed; and looked around him with an air of studied haughtiness and contempt. The Chancellor Loudon spoke bitterly to him-" he had committed many horrible murders, treasons, and impieties, for all which he was now brought to suffer condign punishment." When permitted to speak, Montrose said that "since the king had honoured them so far as to treat with them, he had appeared before them with reverence, and bareheaded, which otherwise he would not willingly have done. He had done nothing of which he was ashamed or had cause to repent." He had withdrawn himself from the first Covenant, when he saw that it was intended to take away the king's just power and lawful authority. He had never taken the second Covenant. He defended himself from the charge of cruelty; and maintaining that having again entered the kingdom by his majesty's command, he advised them to consider well of the consequence before they proceeded against him. His sentence was then pronounced:-that on the morrow, the 21st of May, he should be hanged on a gallows thirty feet high; that his head should then be cut off and set on Edinburgh Tolbooth; and that his legs and arms should be hung up in other towns of the kingdom. After he was conveyed back to prison he was beset by ministers and magistrates; who only stirred his spirit to its loftiest mood. He told them that he had rather his head were stuck upon the Tolbooth than that his picture should be hung in the king's bed-chamber; that it troubled him not that his limbs should be exposed in other towns; " and that he heartily wished that he had flesh enough to be sent to every city in Christendom, as a testimony of the cause for which he suffered." In the same spirit he went to the scaffold. When the hangman, by way of adding to his indignities, hung about his neck the narrative of his military exploits, "the marquis smiled at this new instance of their malice, and thanked them for it, and said he was prouder of wearing it than ever he had been of the Garter." Clarendon's character of the great chieftain is not an unmixed eulogium : "He was a gentleman of a very ancient extraction, many of whose ancestors had exercised the highest charges under the king in that kingdom, and had been allied to the crown itself. He was of very good parts, which were improved by a good education: he had always a great emulation, or rather a great contempt, of the marquis of Argyle (as he was too apt to contemn those he did not love), who wanted nothing but honesty and courage to be a very extraordinary man, having all other good talents in a very great degree. Montrose was in his nature fearless of Guizot upon the authority of a letter of the French Agent to Mazarin. 1850.] CHARLES GOES TO SCOTLAND. 131 danger, and never declined any enterprise for the difficulty of going through with it, but exceedingly affected those which seemed desperate to other men, and did believe somewhat to be in himself above other men, which made him live more easily towards those who were, or were willing to be, inferior to him (towards whom he exercised wonderful civility and generosity), than with his superiors or equals. He was naturally jealous, and suspected those who did not concur with him, in any way, not to mean so well as he. He was not without vanity, but his virtues were much superior, and he well deserved to have his memory preserved, and celebrated amongst the most illustrious persons of the age in which he lived." Charles came to a conclusion with the Scottish commissioners at Breda before the death of Montrose, although he was acquainted with the failure of his rash expedition. He consented to every proposition. He was to swear to be faithful to the Covenant; he was to submit himself to the advice of the Parliament and the Church; he was never to permit the exercise of the Catholic religion in any part of his dominions. He even denied that he had authorised the enterprise of Montrose. When he heard of his friend's execution, he manifested a disposition to draw back; but his courtiers "persuaded the king, who was enough afflicted with the news, and all the circumstances of it, that he might sooner take revenge upon that people by a temporary complying with them and going to them." Upon this righteous principle "his majesty pursued his former resolution of embarking for Scotland." This is Clarendon's account; who makes no remark in his History upon this miserable policy. But he says, in a private letter to secretary Nicolas, "If the king puts himself into the hands of the Scots, they cannot justly be accused of deceiving him; for, on my conscience, they will not use him worse than they promise, if he does all they require him to do in this last address. I wish, with all my heart, they who advise the king to comply, and join with them, would deal as clearly, and say that the king should now take the Covenant, and enjoin it to others, and all observe it; but to say he should put himself into their hauds, and hope to be excused taking it, and be able to defend others from submitting to it,- -or that he and we should take it and break it afterwards,—is such folly and atheism that we should be ashamed to avow or think it." Such was the political morality by which Charles was guided when he was twenty years old-a season of life in which deliberate untruth and purposed treachery are rarely the governing principles of actions. We have little sympathy for him in his humiliations and adversities among the Scots. We rejoice to know that, before he had landed in Scotland on the 16th of June, he was compelled to sign the Covenant; that few of his English friends were permitted to be about him; and that if he were still free to listen to the ribaldry of Buckingham and Wilmot, he had to do daily penance in being compelled to attend the long prayers and longer sermons of the clergy who were placed about him. Charles probably cared little for these restraints; for he had a good table, horses to ride, and the outward shows. that belong to a king; but it has been sensibly conjectured that the gloomy austerity of these preachers "strengthened that indifference to religion and that proneness to dissipation by which his whole life was unhappily distin. guished." Cook, "History of the Church of Scotland," quoted by Sir Walter Scott. 132 WAR WITH SCOTLAND-CROMWELL GENERAL. [1650. Cromwell had arrived in London on the 31st of May. He was received with every honour that Parliament and City could bestow; and by the enthusiastic acclamations of the people. He did not despise popular applause; but he knew something of its intrinsic value. To the remark, "What a crowd come to see your lordship's triumph," he replied, "If it were to see me hanged how many more would there be!" He was soon called to other serious work. The Parliament has been preparing forces for a war with Scotland, having no great hope of repose in the presence there of a covenanted king. The Scots are also making some preparation for a war with England, the ministers of the Commonwealth not having taken in good part their remonstrance as to the course of civil and religious policy, and their negotiations with Charles. It is a question which shall strike the first blow. Fairfax was unwilling to invade the Scots; although, says Ludlow, "we laboured to persuade him of the reasonableness and justice of our resolution to march into Scotland, they having already declared themselves our enemies, and by public protestation bound themselves to impose that government upon us which we had found necessary to abolish."* Cromwell pressed that Fairfax, notwithstanding his resolution, should be continued as General of the Army, "professing for himself that he would rather choose to serve under him in his post than to command the greatest army in Europe." A Committee, upon Cromwell's motion, was appointed to confer with the General; and Ludlow adds that the Lieutenant-General "acted his part so to the life that I really thought he was in earnest." Ultimately Fairfax resigned his commission, receiving a large pension, and Cromwell was called to the great office. "I really thought he was in earnest," says Ludlow. There is another version from one who took a part in these events: "To speak the truth of Cromwell, whereas many said he undermined Fairfax, it was false; for in Colonel Hutchinson's presence, he most effectually importuned him to keep his commission, lest it should discourage the army and the people in that juncture of time, but could by no means prevail, although he laboured it almost all the night with most earnest endeavours. But this great man was then as unmoveable by his friends as pertinacious in obeying his wife; whereby he then died to all his former glory, and became the monument of his own name, which every day wore out." And so Cromwell set forth to lead an army into Scotland; declaring in a private conversation with Ludlow, "that he looked upon the design of the Lord on this day to be the freeing of his people from every burden, and that he was now accomplishing what was prophesied in the 110th Psalm; from the consideration of which he was often encouraged to attend the effecting those ends." On the 26th of June, the Act was passed for constituting "Oliver Cromwell Captain General and Commander-in-Chief of all the forces raised and to be raised within the Commonwealth of England." On the 29th he left London. On the 22nd of July, with about sixteen thousand horse and foot, he marched through Berwick; and setting his foot on Scottish ground he addressed a "large discourse" to his troops, as a Christian and a soldier: ""I exhort you," he said, “to be wary and worthy, for sure enough we have work before us. But have we not had God's blessing hitherto. Let us go on faithfully, and hope for the like ፡፡ • "Memoirs," Hutchinson's "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 172. |