by various writers of that career and that fate afford a not less instructive illustration of the effects of faction in perverting truth, and in turning into poison what should be wholesome food. Some men have sought power and what is called glory by deeds of the most detestable cruelty, not merely shedding blood in battle, but shedding the blood of unarmed men, nay of women and children. And other men have sought to make the evil spirit that prompted such men to seek glory through such deeds assume the semblance of an angel of light. If a time shall ever come when men shall be seen as they are or were, and not darkly through the coloured clouds which poets and historians have thrown around them, and their deeds; and if those men in whose deeds the evil greatly preponderated over the good shall be judged according to their deeds; a corresponding judgment will be pronounced on those who have held up such men as fit objects for the unqualified approval of mankind.

It is undoubtedly the part of a mean spirit to celebrate its victory over an honourable enemy by dragging him in triumph from town to town in a mean garb. But they who thus treated Montrose would no doubt deny that a man who carried on war as Montrose carried it on was an

"1

honourable enemy. Sir Walter Scott says that his "unworthy victors now triumphed over a heroic enemy in the same manner as they would have done over a detected felon." Yet what account does Sir Walter Scott himself give of Montrose's treatment of the town of Aberdeen? "Many were killed in the street; and the cruelty of the Irish in particular was so great, that they compelled the wretched citizens to strip themselves of their clothes before they

1 History of Scotland contained in chap. 46, p. 479.

"Tales of a Grandfather," vol. i.,

killed them, to prevent their being soiled with blood. The women durst not lament their husbands or their fathers slaughtered in their presence, nor inter the dead which remained unburied in the streets until the Irish

1

2

departed." There were other frightful outrages committed by those barbarians on the women and children which Sir Walter Scott does not mention. The defence made by Sir Walter Scott for Montrose is that he “ necessarily gave way to acts of pillage and cruelty, which he could not prevent, because he was unprovided with money to pay his half-barbarous soldiery.' But if Montrose wanted the citizens' money, might he not have taken it without permitting his soldiers to murder them and their children? Such cruelties were not only a crime but a blunder and proved that Montrose, while he undoubtedly possessed military genius of no common order, altogether wanted political genius. Cromwell's severity in Ireland was partly dictated by policy, partly meant as punishment not merely to ordinary rebels, but to mutineers and murderers who had committed crimes with circumstances of almost unexampled cruelty. Montrose's cruelty at Aberdeen (for it cannot be called mere severity), as regarded policy, only served to make about three-fourths of the population of Scotland the mortal enemies of him and his cause, and, as regarded punishment, so far was the town of Aberdeen from deserving punishment for rebellion against Charles, that Montrose himself had actually on a former occasion punished it for its loyalty. Altogether then Montrose's treatment of Aberdeen seems the conduct of a man in whom the logical errors of the head were not corrected by the instincts of the heart, which saves many men from the errors of the head.

1 History of Scotland, contained in "Tales of a Grandfather," vol. i. chap.

42, p. 437.
2 Ibid.

1

It is not easy to analyse the heart of that man who in his dying hour could look without remorse or even regret on those four days of September, 1644, including that Sunday, the 15th of September, when there was neither preaching nor praying in Aberdeen and nothing but the deathgroans of men and the shrieks and wail of women through all the streets, and when the king's lieutenant, who had in the name of "King Charles the Good" caused all these things, could not enter or leave his quarters in Skipper Anderson's house without walking upon or over the bloody corpses of those not slain in battle and over streets slippery with innocent blood. Montrose's chaplain and panegyrical biographer Bishop Wishart has prudently thought fit to pass over the proceedings of his hero in Aberdeen altogether in silence. Montrose himself declared that he had never shed blood except in battle. But the facts are proved by Spalding, a townsman of Aberdeen, present on the occasion, who was firmly attached to episcopacy and the king's cause, and a well-wisher to the general success of Montrose, who must consequently in this case have been an unwilling witness, and whose testimony may therefore be considered as conclusive. We therefore have before us the strange phenomenon of a man, who cannot be considered as a pure barbarian by blood, birth, and education, performing deeds that place him on a moral level with Nana Sahib, and for what? to enable King Charles the First to do with impunity whatever had been done by King James, who had murdered by divine right two of Montrose's uncles.

The explanation may be found partly perhaps in two qualities which entered largely into the character of Mon

1 Spalding, vol. ii. p. 266.

1

trose, unbounded pride 1 and strong fanaticism.

The pride

of a Scottish oligarch was then, as it is now, boundless. To such a man the body of the people of Scotland were, if they are not still, a mere mass of base gutterbloods; whose ignoble blood was, to borrow the words which Sir Walter Scott has put into the mouth of Montrose's antitype Graham of Claverhouse, but "the red puddle that stagnated in the veins of psalm-singing mechanics, crack-brained demagogues, and silly boors." To murder such human beings in the most cruel and cowardly manner in cold blood was, it seems, to judge from what we know of Montrose and Dundee, an act of which there was no need to be ashamed. Their fanaticism, for those men were fanatics too and worshipped an idol as loathsome and as cruel as the superstition which they imputed to their enemies, altogether silenced within them the voice of conscience. There is no mild remedy to cure such fanaticism as this. In those days the charge of Cromwell's cuirassiers and the shock of his pikemen did something; in later times the crash of the guillotine and the thunder of Bonaparte's cannon have done something more towards giving to the class of Montrose and Dundee in Scotland and elsewhere a rather dim perception that they had made some slight errors in their reckoning concerning the canaille or gutter-bloods.

Is it surprising that Montrose as he was led a prisoner through the country and the towns where his troops had committed so many deeds of rapine and cruelty should have been assailed with curses? Is it not rather surprising

1 Montrose's inordinate pride is particularly recorded by his contemporaries; and it was united with great power of dissimulation, by no means so unusual a combination as Baillie seems

to imagine. "The man" says Baillie, "is said to be very double, which in

so proud a spirit is strange.

He, Antrim, Huntly, Airlie, Nithsdale, and more are ruined in their estates; public commotions are their private subsistence."-Baillie's Letters and Journals, vol. ii. p. 74. Edinburgh, 1841.

that he should not have been torn in pieces? Let any one place himself in the situation, not of a man who had lost his male relatives in battle against Montrose-that would have been a thing in the ordinary course of events—but of a man whose fields had been laid waste, whose houses had been burned, whose father, mother, wife, daughters, sisters had been butchered by this hero after the model of one of the heroes of Plutarch, (many of whose heroes were in truth but sorry scoundrels), and then let such a one say whether he would have considered Montrose entitled to the treatment of an honourable and generous enemy? Nay more—if there was a man wearing the "semblance of a kingly crown," who commissioned this Montrose and who avowed and sought to profit by his atrocities, will any man say there was no good done by "garring such a king ken that he too had a lithe in his neck?"

The route by which Montrose was conducted to Edinburgh crossed the river South Esk not far from his own house of Old Montrose. The beautiful valley through which the South Esk flows from the Grampians to the sea is rich in historical associations. Towards the upper part of it stand Glammis, the ancient castle of Macbeth, and the ruins of Finhaven, the castle of that Earl of Crawford, known as "the Tiger Earl." Farther down on a rock overhanging the river is the castle of Brechin, which Sir Thomas Maule bravely defended against Edward I. and his army, till he was killed upon the ramparts, with his last breath commanding his men not to surrender. But the greatest name associated with that valley and that river is that of the Marquis of Montrose, who was born in the town of Montrose where the South Esk joins the sea, and passed much of his boyhood and youth at his house of Old Montrose about four miles up the river. The aspect