Short History of Scotland — 34 - Ch. 24: Charles I, pt 4

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 {181} 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 {182} (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 outmanoeuvred 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 pounds 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.