A Short History of Scotland

The secret of Montrose’s Cumbernauld band had come to light after November 1640: nothing worse, at the moment, befell than the burning of the band by the Committee of Estates, to whom Argyll referred the matter. On May 21, 1641, the Committee was disturbed, for Montrose was collecting evidence as to the words and deeds of Argyll when he used his commission of fire and sword at the Bonny House of Airlie and in other places. Montrose had spoken of the matter to a preacher, he to another, and the news reached the Committee. Montrose had learned from a prisoner of Argyll, Stewart the younger of Ladywell, that Argyll had held counsels to discuss the deposition of the king. Ladywell produced to the Committee his written statement that Argyll had spoken before him of these consultations of lawyers and divines. He was placed in the castle, and was so worked on that he “cleared” Argyll and confessed that, advised by Montrose, he had reported Argyll’s remarks to the king. Papers with hints and names in cypher were found in possession of the messenger.

The whole affair is enigmatic; in any case Ladywell was hanged for “leasing-making” (spreading false reports), an offence not previously capital, and Montrose with his friends was imprisoned in the castle. Doubtless he had meant to accuse Argyll before Parliament of treason. On July 27, 1641, being arraigned before Parliament, he said, “My resolution is to carry with me fidelity and honour to the grave.” He lay in prison when the king, vainly hoping for support against the English Parliament, visited Edinburgh (August 14-November 17, 1641).

Charles was now servile to his Scottish Parliament, accepting an Act by which it must consent to his nominations of officers of State. Hamilton with his brother, Lanark, had courted the alliance and lived in the intimacy of Argyll. On October 12 Charles told the House “a very strange story.” On the previous day Hamilton had asked leave to retire from Court, in fear of his enemies. On the day of the king’s speaking, Hamilton, Argyll, and Lanark had actually retired. On October 22, from their retreat, the brothers said that they had heard of a conspiracy, by nobles and others in the king’s favour, to cut their throats. The evidence is very confused and contradictory: Hamilton and Argyll were said to have collected a force of 5000 men in the town, and, on October 5, such a gathering was denounced in a proclamation. Charles in vain asked for a public inquiry into the affair before the whole House. He now raised some of his opponents a step in the peerage: Argyll became a marquis, and Montrose was released from prison. On October 28 Charles announced the untoward news of an Irish rising and massacre. He was, of course, accused of having caused it, and the massacre was in turn the cause of, or pretext for, the shooting and hanging of Irish prisoners – men and women – in Scotland during the civil war. On November 18 he left Scotland for ever.

The events in England of the spring in 1642, the attempted arrest of the five members (January 4), the retreat of the queen to France, Charles’s retiral to York, indicated civil war, and the king set up his standard at Nottingham on August 22. The Covenanters had received from Charles all that they asked; they had no quarrel with him, but they argued that if he were victorious in England he would use his strength and withdraw his concessions to Scotland.

Sir Walter Scott “leaves it to casuists to decide whether one contracting party is justified in breaking a solemn treaty upon the suspicion that in future contingencies it might be infringed by the other.” He suggests that to the needy nobles and Dugald Dalgettys of the Covenant “the good pay and free quarters” and “handsome sums” of England were an irresistible temptation, while the preachers thought they would be allowed to set up “the golden candlestick” of presbytery in England (‘Legend of Montrose,’ chapter i.) Of the two the preachers were the more grievously disappointed.

A General Assembly of July-August 1642 was, as usual, concerned with politics, for politics and religion were inextricably intermixed. The Assembly appointed a Standing Commission to represent it, and the powers of the Commission were of so high a strain that “to some it is terrible already,” says the Covenanting letter-writer Baillie. A letter from the Kirk was carried to the English Parliament which acquiesced in the abolition of Episcopacy. In November 1642 the English Parliament, unsuccessful in war, appealed to Scotland for armed aid; in December Charles took the same course.

The Commission of the General Assembly, and the body of administrators called Conservators of the Peace, overpowered the Privy Council, put down a petition of Montrose’s party (who declared that they were bound by the Covenant to defend the king), and would obviously arm on the side of the English Parliament if England would adopt Presbyterian government. They held a Convention of the Estates (June 22, 1643); they discovered a Popish plot for an attack on Argyll’s country by the Macdonalds in Ireland, once driven from Kintyre by the Campbells, and now to be led by young Colkitto. While thus excited, they received in the General Assembly (August 7) a deputation from the English Parliament; and now was framed a new band between the English Parliament and Scotland. It was an alliance, “The Solemn League and Covenant,” by which Episcopacy was to be abolished and religion established “according to the Word of God.” To the Covenanters this phrase meant that England would establish Presbyterianism, but they were disappointed. The ideas of the Independents, such as Cromwell, were almost as much opposed to presbytery as to episcopacy, and though the Covenanters took the pay and fought the battles of the Parliament against their king, they never received what they had meant to stipulate for, – the establishment of presbytery in England. Far from that, Cromwell, like James VI., was to deprive them of their ecclesiastical palladium, the General Assembly.

Foreseeing nothing, the Scots were delighted when the English accepted the new band. Their army, under Alexander Leslie (Earl of Leven), now too old for his post, crossed Tweed in January 1644. They might never have crossed had Charles, in the autumn of 1643, listened to Montrose and allowed him to attack the Covenanters in Scotland. In December 1643, Hamilton and Lanark, who had opposed Montrose’s views and confirmed the king in his waverings, came to him at Oxford. Montrose refused to serve with them, rather he would go abroad; and Hamilton was imprisoned on charges of treason: in fact, he had been double-minded, inconstant, and incompetent. Montrose’s scheme implied clan warfare, the use of exiled Macdonalds, who were Catholics, against the Campbells. The obvious objections were very strong; but “needs must when the devil drives”: the Hanoverian kings employed foreign soldiers against their subjects in 1715 and 1745; but the Macdonalds were subjects of King Charles.

Hamilton’s brother, Lanark, escaped, and now frankly joined the Covenanters. Montrose was promoted to a Marquisate, and received the Royal Commission as Lieutenant-General (February 1644), which alienated old Huntly, chief of the Gordons, who now and again divided and paralysed that gallant clan. Montrose rode north, where, in February 1644, old Leslie, with twenty regiments of foot, three thousand horse, and many guns, was besieging Newcastle. With him was the prototype of Scott’s Dugald Dalgetty, Sir James Turner, who records examples of Leslie’s senile incompetency. Leslie, at least, forced the Marquis of Newcastle to a retreat, and a movement of Montrose on Dumfries was paralysed by the cowardice or imbecility of the Scottish magnates on the western Border. He returned, took Morpeth, was summoned by Prince Rupert, and reached him the day after the disaster of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644), from which Buccleuch’s Covenanting regiment ran without stroke of sword, while Alexander Leslie also fled, carrying news of his own defeat. It appears that the Scottish horse, under David Leslie, were at Marston Moor, as always, the pick of their army.

Rupert took over Montrose’s men, and the great Marquis, disguised as a groom, rode hard to the house of a kinsman, near Tay, between Perth and Dunkeld. Alone and comfortless, in a little wood, Montrose met a man who was carrying the Fiery Cross, and summoning the country to resist the Irish Scots of Alastair Macdonald (Colkitto), who had landed with a force of 1500 musketeers in Argyll, and was believed to be descending on Atholl, pursued by Seaforth and Argyll, and faced by the men of Badenoch. The two armies [26 - Colkitto’s men and the Badenoch contingent.] were confronting each other when Montrose, in plaid and kilt, approached Colkitto and showed him his commission. Instantly the two opposed forces combined into one, and with 2500 men, some armed with bows and arrows, and others having only one charge for each musket, Montrose began his year of victories.

The temptation to describe in detail his extraordinary series of successes and of unexampled marches over snow-clad and pathless mountains must be resisted. The mobility and daring of Montrose’s irregular and capricious levies, with his own versatile military genius and the heroic valour of Colkitto, enabled him to defeat a large Covenanting force at Tippermuir, near Perth: here he had but his 2500 men (September 1); to repeat his victory at Aberdeen [27 - Much has been made of cruelties at Aberdeen. Montrose sent in a drummer, asking the Provost to remove the old men, women, and children. The drummer was shot, as, at Perth, Montrose’s friend, Kilpont, had been murdered. The enemy were pursued through the town. Spalding names 115 townsmen slain in the whole battle and pursuit. Women were slain if they were heard to mourn their men – not a very probable story. Not one woman is named. The Burgh Records mention no women slain. Baillie says “the town was well plundered.” Jaffray, who fled from the fight as fast as his horse could carry him, says that women and children were slain. See my ‘History of Scotland,’ vol. iii. pp. 126-128.] (September 13), to evade and discourage Argyll, who retired to Inveraray; to winter in and ravage Argyll’s country, and to turn on his tracks from a northern retreat and destroy the Campbells at Inverlochy, where Argyll looked on from his galley (February 2, 1645).

General Baillie, a trained soldier, took the command of the Covenanting levies and regular troops (“Red coats”), and nearly surprised Montrose in Dundee. By a retreat showing even more genius than his victories, he escaped, appeared on the north-east coast, and scattered a Covenanting force under Hurry, at Auldearn, near Inverness (May 9, 1645).

Such victories as Montrose’s were more than counterbalanced by Cromwell’s defeat of Rupert and Charles at Naseby (June 14, 1645); while presbytery suffered a blow from Cromwell’s demand, that the English Parliament should grant “freedom of conscience,” not for Anglican or Catholic, of course, but for religions non-Presbyterian. The “bloody sectaries,” as the Presbyterians called Cromwell’s Independents, were now masters of the field: never would the blue banner of the Covenant be set up south of Tweed.

Meanwhile General Baillie marched against Montrose, who outmanœuvred him all over the eastern Highlands, and finally gave him battle at Alford on the Don. Montrose had not here Colkitto and the western clans, but his Gordon horse, his Irish, the Farquharsons, and the Badenoch men were triumphantly successful. Unfortunately, Lord Gordon was slain: he alone could bring out and lead the clan of Huntly. Only by joining hands with Charles could Montrose do anything decisive. The king, hoping for no more than a death in the field “with honour and a good conscience,” pushed as far north as Doncaster, where he was between Poyntz’s army and a great cavalry force, led by David Leslie, from Hereford, to launch against Montrose. The hero snatched a final victory. He had but a hundred horse, but he had Colkitto and the flower of the fighting clans, including the invincible Macleans. Baillie, in command of new levies of some 10,000 men, was thwarted by a committee of Argyll and other noble amateurs. He met the enemy south of Forth, at Kilsyth, between Stirling and Glasgow. The fiery Argyll made Baillie desert an admirable position – Montrose was on the plain, Baillie was on the heights – and expose his flank by a march across Montrose’s front. The Macleans and Macdonalds, on the lower slope of the hill, without orders, saw their chance, and racing up a difficult glen, plunged into the Covenanting flank. Meanwhile the more advanced part of the Covenanting force were driving back some Gordons from a hill on Montrose’s left, who were rescued by a desperate charge of Aboyne’s handful of horse among the red coats; Airlie charged with the Ogilvies; the advanced force of the Covenant was routed, and the Macleans and Macdonalds completed the work they had begun (August 15). Few of the unmounted Covenanters escaped from Kilsyth; and Argyll, taking boat in the Forth, hurried to Newcastle, where David Leslie, coming north, obtained infantry regiments to back his 4000 cavalry.

In a year Montrose, with forces so irregular and so apt to go home after every battle, had actually cleared militant Covenanters out of Scotland. But the end had come. He would not permit the sack of Glasgow. Three thousand clansmen left him; Colkitto went away to harry Kintyre. Aboyne and the Gordons rode home on some private pique; and Montrose relied on men whom he had already proved to be broken reeds, the Homes and Kers (Roxburgh) of the Border, and the futile and timid Traquair. When he came among them they forsook him and fled; on September 10, at Kelso, Sir Robert Spottiswoode recognised the desertion and the danger.

Meanwhile Leslie, with an overpowering force of seasoned soldiers, horse and foot, marched with Argyll, not to Edinburgh, but down Gala to Tweed; while Montrose had withdrawn from Kelso, up Ettrick to Philiphaugh, on the left of Ettrick, within a mile of Selkirk. He had but 500 Irish, who entrenched themselves, and an uncertain number of mounted Border lairds with their servants and tenants. Charteris of Hempsfield, who had been scouting, reported that Leslie was but two or three miles distant, at Sunderland Hall, where Tweed and Ettrick meet; but the news was not carried to Montrose, who lay at Selkirk. At breakfast, on September 13, Montrose learned that Leslie was attacking. What followed is uncertain in its details. A so-called “contemporary ballad” is incredibly impossible in its anachronisms, and is modern. In this egregious doggerel we are told that a veteran who had fought at Solway Moss a century earlier, and at “cursed Dunbar” a few years later (or under Edward I.?), advised Leslie to make a turning movement behind Linglie Hill. This is not evidence. Though Leslie may have made such a movement, he describes his victory as very easy: and so it should have been, as Montrose had only the remnant of his Antrim men and a rabble of reluctant Border recruits.

A news letter from Haddington, of September 16, represents the Cavaliers as making a good fight. The mounted Border lairds galloped away. Most of the Irish fell fighting: the rest were massacred, whether after promise of quarter or not is disputed. Their captured women were hanged in cold blood some months later. Montrose, the Napiers, and some forty horse either cut their way through or evaded Leslie’s overpowering cavalry, and galloped across the hills of Yarrow to the Tweed. He had lost only the remnant of his Scoto-Irish; but the Gordons, when Montrose was presently menacing Glasgow, were held back by Huntly, and Colkitto pursued his private adventures. Montrose had been deserted by the clans, and lured to ruin by the perfidious promises of the Border lords and lairds. The aim of his strategy had been to relieve the Royalists of England by a diversion that would deprive the Parliamentarians of their paid Scottish allies, and what man might do Montrose had done.

After his first victory Montrose, an excommunicated man, fought under an offer of £1500 for his murder, and the Covenanters welcomed the assassin of his friend, Lord Kilpont.

The result of Montrose’s victories was hostility between the Covenanting army in England and the English, who regarded them as expensive and inefficient. Indeed, they seldom, save for the command of David Leslie, displayed military qualities, and later, were invariably defeated when they encountered the English under Cromwell and Lambert.

Montrose never slew a prisoner, but the Convention at St Andrews, in November 1645, sentenced to death their Cavalier prisoners (Lord Ogilvy escaped disguised in his sister’s dress), and they ordered the hanging of captives and of the women who had accompanied the Irish. “It was certain of the clergy who pressed for the extremest measures.” [28 - Craig-Brown, ‘History of Selkirkshire,’ vol. i. pp. 190, 193. ‘Act. Parl. Scot.,’ vol. vi. pt. i. p. 492.] They had revived the barbarous belief, retained in the law of ancient Greece, that the land had been polluted by, and must be cleansed by, blood, under penalty of divine wrath. As even the Covenanting Baillie wrote, “to this day no man in England has been executed for bearing arms against the Parliament.” The preachers argued that to keep the promises of quarter which had been given to the prisoners was “to violate the oath of the Covenant.” [29 - ‘Act. Parl. Scot.,’ vol. vi. pt. i. p. 514.]

The prime object of the English opponents of the king was now “to hustle the Scots out of England.” [30 - Hume Brown, vol. ii. p. 339.] Meanwhile Charles, not captured but hopeless, was negotiating with all the parties, and ready to yield on every point except that of forcing presbytery on England – a matter which, said Montereuil, the French ambassador, “did not concern them but their neighbours.” Charles finally trusted the Scots with his person, and the question is, had he or had he not assurance that he would be well received? If he had any assurance it was merely verbal, “a shadow of a security,” wrote Montereuil. Charles was valuable to the Scots only as a pledge for the payment of their arrears of wages. There was much chicanery and shuffling on both sides, and probably there were misconceptions on both sides. A letter of Montereuil (April 26, 1646) convinced Charles that he might trust the Scots; they verbally promised “safety, honour, and conscience,” but refused to sign a copy of their words. Charles trusted them, rode out of Oxford, joined them at Southwell, and, says Sir James Turner, who was present, was commanded by Lothian to sign the Covenant, and “barbarously used.” They took Charles to Newcastle, denying their assurance to him. “With unblushing falsehood,” says Mr Gardiner, they in other respects lied to the English Parliament. On May 19 Charles bade Montrose leave the country, which he succeeded in doing, despite the treacherous endeavours of his enemies to detain him till his day of safety (August 31) was passed.

The Scots of the army were in a quandary. The preachers, their masters, would not permit them to bring to Scotland an uncovenanted king. They could not stay penniless in England. For £200,000 down and a promise, never kept, of a similar sum later, they left Charles in English hands, with some assurances for his safety, and early in February 1647 crossed Tweed with their thirty-six cartloads of money. The act was hateful to very many Scots, but the Estates, under the command of the preachers, had refused to let the king, while uncovenanted, cross into his native kingdom, and to bring him meant war with England. But that must ensue in any case. The hope of making England presbyterian, as under the Solemn League and Covenant, had already perished.

Leslie, with the part of the army still kept up, chased Colkitto, and, at Dunavertie, under the influence of Nevoy, a preacher, put 300 Irish prisoners to the sword.

The parties in Scotland were now: (1) the Kirk, Argyll, the two Leslies, and most of the Commons; (2) Hamilton, Lanark, and Lauderdale, who had no longer anything to fear, as regards their estates, from Charles or from bishops, and who were ashamed of his surrender to the English; (3) Royalists in general. With Charles (December 27, 1647) in his prison at Carisbrooke, Lauderdale, Loudoun, and Lanark made a secret treaty, The Engagement, which they buried in the garden, for if it were discovered the Independents of the army would have attacked Scotland.

An Assembly of the Scots Estates on March 3, 1648, had a large majority of nobles, gentry, and many burgesses in favour of aiding the captive king; on the other side Argyll was backed by the omnipotent Commission of the General Assembly, and by the full force of prayers and sermons. The letter-writer, Baillie, now deemed “that it were for the good of the world that churchmen did meddle with ecclesiastical affairs only.” The Engagers insisted on establishing presbytery in England, which neither satisfied the Kirk nor the Cavaliers and Independents. Nothing more futile could have been devised.

The Estates, in May, began to raise an army; the preachers denounced them: there was a battle between armed communicants of the preachers’ party and the soldiers of the State at Mauchline. Invading England on July 8, Hamilton had Lambert and Cromwell to face him, and left Argyll, the preachers, and their “slashing communicants” in his rear. Lanark had vainly urged that the west country fanatics should be crushed before the Border was crossed. By a march worthy of Montrose across the fells into Lanarkshire, Cromwell reached Preston; cut in between the northern parts of Hamilton’s army; defeated the English Royalists and Langdale, and cut to pieces or captured the Scots, disunited as their generals were, at Wigan and Warrington (August 17-19). Hamilton was taken and was decapitated later. The force that recrossed the Border consisted of such mounted men as escaped, with the detachment of Monro which had not joined Hamilton.

The godly in Scotland rejoiced at the defeat of their army: the levies of the western shires of Ayr, Renfrew, and Lanark occupied Edinburgh: Argyll and the Kirk party were masters, and when Cromwell arrived in Edinburgh early in October he was entertained at dinner by Argyll. The left wing of the Covenant was now allied with the Independents – the deadly foes of presbytery! To the ordinary mind this looks like a new breach of the Covenant, that impossible treaty with Omnipotence. Charles had written that the divisions of parties were probably “God’s way to punish them for their many rebellions and perfidies.” The punishment was now beginning in earnest, and the alliance of extreme Covenanters with “bloody sectaries” could not be maintained. Yet historians admire the statesmanship of Argyll!

If the edge which the sword of the Covenant turned against the English enemies of presbytery were blunted, the edge that smote Covenanters less extreme than Argyll and the preachers was whetted afresh. In the Estates of January 5, 1649, Argyll, whose party had a large majority, and the fanatical Johnston of Waristoun (who made private covenants with Jehovah) demanded disenabling Acts against all who had in any degree been tainted by the Engagement for the rescue of the king. The Engagers were divided into four “Classes,” who were rendered incapable by “The Act of Classes” of holding any office, civil or military. This Act deprived the country of the services of thousands of men, just at the moment when the English army, the Independents, Argyll’s allies, were holding the Trial of Charles I.; and, in defiance of timid remonstrances from the Scottish Commissioners in England, cut off “that comely head” (January 30, 1649), which meant war with Scotland.

SCOTLAND AND CHARLES II

This was certain, for, on February 5, on the news of the deed done at Whitehall, the Estates proclaimed Charles II. as Scottish King – if he took the Covenant. By an ingenious intrigue Argyll allowed Lauderdale and Lanark, whom the Estates had intended to arrest, to escape to Holland, where Charles was residing, and their business was to bring that uncovenanted prince to sign the Covenant, and to overcome the influence of Montrose, who, with Clarendon, of course resisted such a trebly dishonourable act of perjured hypocrisy. During the whole struggle, since Montrose took the king’s side, he had been thwarted by the Hamiltons. They invariably wavered: now they were for a futile policy of dishonour, in which they involved their young king, Argyll, and Scotland. Montrose stood for honour and no Covenant; Argyll, the Hamiltons, Lauderdale, and the majority of the preachers stood for the Covenant with dishonour and perjury; the left wing of the preachers stood for the Covenant, but not for its dishonourable and foresworn acceptance by Charles.

As a Covenanter, Charles II. would be the official foe of the English Independents and army; Scotland would need every sword in the kingdom, and the kingdom’s best general, Montrose, yet the Act of Classes, under the dictation of the preachers, rejected every man tainted with participation in or approval of the Engagement – or of neglecting family prayers!

Charles, in fact, began (February 22) by appointing Montrose his Lieutenant-Governor and Captain-General in Scotland, though Lauderdale and Lanark “abate not an ace of their damned Covenant in all their discourses,” wrote Hyde. The dispute between Montrose, on the side of honour, and that of Lanark, Lauderdale, and other Scottish envoys, ended as – given the character of Charles II. and his destitution – it must end. Charles (January 22, 1650) despatched Montrose to fight for him in Scotland, and sent him the Garter. Montrose knew his doom: he replied, “With the more alacrity shall I abandon still my life to search my death for the interests of your Majesty’s honour and service.” He searched his death, and soon he found it.

On May 1, Charles, by the Treaty of Breda, vowed to sign the Covenant; a week earlier Montrose, not joined by the Mackenzies, had been defeated by Strachan at Carbisdale, on the south of the Kyle, opposite Invershin, in Sutherlandshire. He was presently captured, and crowned a glorious life of honour by a more glorious death on the gibbet (May 21). He had kept his promise; he had searched his death; he had loyally defended, like Jeanne d’Arc, a disloyal king; he had “carried fidelity and honour with him to the grave.” His body was mutilated, his limbs were exposed, – they now lie in St Giles’ Church, Edinburgh, where is his beautiful monument.

Montrose’s last words to Charles (March 26, from Kirkwall) implored that Prince “to be just to himself,” – not to perjure himself by signing the Covenant. The voice of honour is not always that of worldly wisdom, but events proved that Charles and Scotland could have lost nothing and must have gained much had the king listened to Montrose. He submitted, we saw, to commissioners sent to him from Scotland. Says one of these gentlemen, “He.. sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him… our sin was more than his.”

While his subjects in Scotland were executing his loyal servants taken prisoners in Montrose’s last defeat, Charles crossed the sea, signing the Covenants on board ship, and landed at the mouth of Spey. What he gained by his dishonour was the guilt of perjury; and the consequent distrust of the wilder but more honest Covenanters, who knew that he had perjured himself, and deemed his reception a cause of divine wrath and disastrous judgments. Next he was separated from most of his false friends, who had urged him to his guilt, and from all Royalists; and he was not allowed to be with his army, which the preachers kept “purging” of all who did not come up to their standard of sanctity.

Their hopeful scheme was to propitiate the Deity and avert wrath by purging out officers of experience, while filling up their places with godly but incompetent novices in war, “ministers’ sons, clerks, and such other sanctified creatures.” This final and fatal absurdity was the result of playing at being the Israel described in the early historic books of the Old Testament, a policy initiated by Knox in spite of the humorous protests of Lethington.

For the surer purging of that Achan, Charles, and to conciliate the party who deemed him the greatest cause of wrath of all, the king had to sign a false and disgraceful declaration that he was “afflicted in spirit before God because of the impieties of his father and mother”! He was helpless in the hands of Argyll, David Leslie, and the rest: he knew they would desert him if he did not sign, and he yielded (August 16). Meanwhile Cromwell, with Lambert, Monk, 16,000 foot and horse, and a victualling fleet, had reached Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, by July 28.

David Leslie very artfully evaded every attempt to force a fight, but hung about him in all his movements. Cromwell was obliged to retreat for lack of supplies in a devastated country, and on September 1 reached Dunbar by the coast road. Leslie, marching parallel along the hill-ridges, occupied Doonhill and secured a long, deep, and steep ravine, “the Peaths,” near Cockburnspath, barring Cromwell’s line of march. On September 2 the controlling clerical Committee was still busily purging and depleting the Scottish army. The night of September 2-3 was very wet, the officers deserted their regiments to take shelter. Says Leslie himself, “We might as easily have beaten them as we did James Graham at Philiphaugh, if the officers had stayed by their own troops and regiments.” Several witnesses, and Cromwell himself, asserted that, owing to the insistence of the preachers, Leslie moved his men to the lower slopes on the afternoon of September 2. “The Lord hath delivered them into our hands,” Cromwell is reported to have said. They now occupied a position where the banks of the lower Broxburn were flat and assailable, not steep and forming a strong natural moat, as on the higher level. All night Cromwell rode along and among his regiments of horse, biting his lip till the blood ran down his chin. Leslie thought to surprise Cromwell; Cromwell surprised Leslie, crossed the Broxburn on the low level, before dawn, and drove into the Scots who were all unready, the matches of their muskets being wet and unlighted. The centre made a good stand, but a flank charge by English cavalry cut up the Scots foot, and Leslie fled with the nobles, gentry, and mounted men. In killed, wounded, and prisoners the Scots are said to have lost 14,000 men, a manifest exaggeration. It was an utter defeat.

“Surely,” wrote Cromwell, “it is probable the Kirk has done her do.” The Kirk thought not; purging must go on, “nobody must blame the Covenant.” Neglect of family prayers was selected as one cause of the defeat! Strachan and Ker, two extreme whigamores of the left wing of the godly, went to raise a western force that would neither acknowledge Charles nor join Cromwell, who now took Edinburgh Castle. Charles was reduced by Argyll to make to him the most slavish promises, including the payment of £40,000, the part of the price of Charles I. which Argyll had not yet touched.

On October 4 Charles made “the Start”; he fled to the Royalists of Angus, – Ogilvy and Airlie: he was caught, brought back, and preached at. Then came fighting between the Royalists and the Estates. Middleton, a good soldier, Atholl, and others, declared that they must and would fight for Scotland, though they were purged out by the preachers. The Estates (November 4) gave them an indemnity. On this point the Kirk split into twain: the wilder men, led by the Rev. James Guthrie, refused reconciliation (the Remonstrants); the less fanatical would consent to it, on terms (the Resolutioners). The Committee of Estates dared to resist the Remonstrants: even the Commissioners of the General Assembly “cannot be against the raising of all fencible persons,” – and at last adopted the attitude of all sensible persons. By May 21, 1651, the Estates rescinded the insane Act of Classes, but the strife between clerical Remonstrants and Resolutioners persisted till after the Restoration, the Remonstrants being later named Protesters.

Charles had been crowned at Scone on January 1, again signing the Covenants. Leslie now occupied Stirling, avoiding an engagement. In July, while a General Assembly saw the strife of the two sects, came news that Lambert had crossed the Forth at Queensferry, and defeated a Scots force at Inverkeithing, where the Macleans fell almost to a man; Monk captured a number of the General Assembly, and, as Cromwell, moving to Perth, could now assail Leslie and the main Scottish force at Stirling, they, by a desperate resolution, with 4000 horse and 9000 foot, invaded England by the west marches, “laughing,” says one of them, “at the ridiculousness of our own condition.” On September 1 Monk stormed and sacked Dundee as Montrose sacked Aberdeen, but if he made a massacre like that by Edward I. at Berwick, history is lenient to the crime.

On August 22 Charles, with his army, reached Worcester, whither Cromwell marched with a force twice as great as that of the king. Worcester was a Sedan: Charles could neither hold it nor, though he charged gallantly, could he break through Cromwell’s lines. Before nightfall on September 3 Charles was a fugitive: he had no army; Hamilton was slain, Middleton and David Leslie with thousands more were prisoners. Monk had already captured, at Alyth (August 28), the whole of the Government, the Committee of Estates, and had also caught some preachers, including James Sharp, later Archbishop of St Andrews. England had conquered Scotland at last, after twelve years of government by preachers acting as interpreters of the Covenant between Scotland and Jehovah.

CHAPTER XXV. CONQUERED SCOTLAND

During the nine years of the English military occupation of Scotland everything was merely provisional; nothing decisive could occur. In the first place (October 1651), eight English Commissioners, including three soldiers, Monk, Lambert, and Deane, undertook the administration of the conquered country. They announced tolerance in religion (except for Catholicism and Anglicanism, of course), and during their occupation the English never wavered on a point so odious to the Kirk. The English rulers also, as much as they could, protected the women and men whom the lairds and preachers smelled out and tortured and burned for witchcraft. By way of compensation for the expenses of war all the estates of men who had sided with Charles were confiscated. Taxation also was heavy. On four several occasions attempts were made to establish the Union of the two countries; Scotland, finally, was to return thirty members to sit in the English Parliament. But as that Parliament, under Cromwell, was subject to strange and sudden changes, and as the Scottish representatives were usually men sold to the English side, the experiment was not promising. In its first stage it collapsed with Cromwell’s dismissal of the Long Parliament on April 20, 1653. Argyll meanwhile had submitted, retaining his estates (August 1652); but of five garrisons in his country three were recaptured, not without his goodwill, by the Highlanders; and in these events began Monk’s aversion, finally fatal, to the Marquis as a man whom none could trust, and in whom finally nobody trusted.

An English Commission of Justice, established in May 1652, was confessedly more fair and impartial than any Scotland had known, which was explained by the fact that the English judges “were kinless loons.” Northern cavaliers were relieved by Monk’s forbidding civil magistrates to outlaw and plunder persons lying under Presbyterian excommunication, and sanitary measures did something to remove from Edinburgh the ancient reproach of filth, for the time. While the Protesters and Resolutioners kept up their quarrel, the Protesters claiming to be the only genuine representatives of Kirk and Covenant, the General Assembly of the Resolutioners was broken up (July 21, 1653) by Lilburne, with a few soldiers, and henceforth the Kirk, having no General Assembly, was less capable of promoting civil broils. Lilburne suspected that the Assembly was in touch with new stirrings towards a rising in the Highlands, to lead which Charles had, in 1652, promised to send Middleton, who had escaped from an English prison, as general. It was always hard to find any one under whom the great chiefs would serve, and Glencairn, with Kenmure, was unable to check their jealousies.

Charles heard that Argyll would appear in arms for the Crown, when he deemed the occasion good; meanwhile his heir, Lord Lorne, would join the rising. He did so in July 1653, under the curse of Argyll, who, by letters to Lilburne and Monk, and by giving useful information to the English, fatally committed himself as treasonable to the Royal cause. Examples of his conduct were known to Glencairn, who communicated them to Charles.

At the end of February 1654 Middleton arrived in Sutherland to head the insurrection: but Monk chased the small and disunited force from county to county, and in July Morgan defeated and scattered its remnants at Loch Garry, just south of Dalnaspidal. The Armstrongs and other Border clans, who had been moss-trooping in their ancient way, were also reduced, and new fortresses and garrisons bridled the fighting clans of the west. With Cromwell as protector in 1654, Free Trade with England was offered to the Scots with reduced taxation: an attempt to legislate for the Union failed. In 1655-1656 a Council of State and a Commission of Justice included two or three Scottish members, and burghs were allowed to elect magistrates who would swear loyalty to Cromwell. Cromwell died on the day of his fortunate star (September 3, 1658), and twenty-one members for Scotland sat in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. When that was dissolved, and when the Rump was reinstated, a new Bill of Union was introduced, and, by reason of the provisions for religious toleration (a thing absolutely impious in Presbyterian eyes), was delayed till (October 1659) the Rump was sent to its account. Conventions of Burghs and Shires were now held by Monk, who, leading his army of occupation south in January 1660, left the Resolutioners and Protesters standing at gaze, as hostile as ever, awaiting what thing should befall. Both parties still cherished the Covenants, and so long as these documents were held to be for ever binding on all generations, so long as the king’s authority was to be resisted in defence of these treaties with Omnipotence, it was plain that in Scotland there could neither be content nor peace. For twenty-eight years, during a generation of profligacy and turmoil, cruelty and corruption, the Kirk and country were to reap what they had sown in 1638.

CHAPTER XXVI. THE RESTORATION

There was “dancing and derray” in Scotland among the laity when the king came to his own again. The darkest page in the national history seemed to have been turned; the conquering English were gone with their abominable tolerance, their craze for soap and water, their aversion to witch-burnings. The nobles and gentry would recover their lands and compensation for their losses; there would be offices to win, and “the spoils of office.”

It seems that in Scotland none of the lessons of misfortune had been learned. Since January the chiefs of the milder party of preachers, the Resolutioners, – they who had been reconciled with the Engagers, – were employing the Rev. James Sharp, who had been a prisoner in England, as their agent with Monk, with Lauderdale, in April, with Charles in Holland, and, again, in London. Sharp was no fanatic. From the first he assured his brethren, Douglas of Edinburgh, Baillie, and the rest, that there was no chance for “rigid Presbyterianism.” They could conceive of no Presbyterianism which was not rigid, in the manner of Andrew Melville, to whom his king was “Christ’s silly vassal.” Sharp warned them early that in face of the irreconcilable Protesters, “moderate Episcopacy” would be preferred; and Douglas himself assured Sharp that the new generation in Scotland “bore a heart-hatred to the Covenant,” and are “wearied of the yoke of presbyterial government.”