sold his estate and raised a troop of horse for the Parliament. John Bunyan served as a private soldier in the Parliamentary army. But of all these, if some have sur passed Montrose in literary, none have come near him in military achievements; and I am not aware that there is any other man on record who has united in an equal degree poetical and military genius. Montrose was certainly a most accomplished man; and I regret, for the honour of human nature, that he should have tarnished his name by cruelty. There are indeed well-authenticated facts in his history that seem to show that he was not by nature cruel or ungenerous, and that he was not an exception to the rule that brave men are not cruel. Nevertheless the plea put forward for him that he necessarily gave way to acts of pillage and cruelty from inability to pay his half-barbarous soldiery will not avail him much; and history, painting him as he was, will paint him as a great man with dark spots on his fame. The royalist writers represent the people, and many even of Montrose's bitterest enemies as weeping on the occasion of his execution. That age was much addicted to tears, as is manifested when we find such a man as Cromwell, and even the whole House of Commons, occasionally dissolving into floods of tears. It may therefore, though it certainly seems strange, be true that the people of Scotland should weep even for a man who had treated them as Montrose had done, as people naturally weep at any great reverse of fortune. In regard to the mean spite imputed to the ruling party in Scotland at the time, as exhibited in the various studied insults offered to Montrose, the whole matter may be summed up in a very few words. If Montrose in his wars adhered to the recognized course of warfare of civilised men as the term was then understood, all taken down by Cromwell's orders; and it may be hoped that the Earl of Gowrie's was taken down at the same time and decently buried. Although Montrose's military genius rose far above that of the other men of that time who united qualities that are not now found together, he was only one of many who in Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as in Spain during the sixteenth century, were eminent at once as soldiers and as men of letters. Cervantes greatly distinguished himself at the battle of Lepanto, where he received three arquebuse wounds, two in the breast, and one in the left hand, which maimed him for life. Lope de Vega sailed in the Armada. Boscan served with distinction as a soldier. His friend Garcilaso de la Vega fell at the head of a storming party, being the first to mount the breach of a tower, which he was ordered to carry by assault. The Earl of Surrey, to whom as a poet both Spenser and Milton are indebted, and whose works went through four editions in two months, and through seven more in the thirty years after their first appearance in 1557, besides their circulation in garlands, broadsheets, and miscellanies, served two campaigns in France. Sir Philip Sidney was a poet as well as a soldier. Sir Walter Raleigh was at once a soldier, sailor, poet, and historian. Richard Lovelace fought for the king all through the civil war; and afterwards raised a regiment in the French service, commanded it, and was wounded at Dunkirk. George Withers served as a captain of horse in the expedition of Charles I. against the Scotch Covenanters in 1639, (which was also the first campaign of Lovelace); and three years after he in "Pitcairn's Criminal Trials," vol. ii. pp. 45-247, from Original MS. Adv. Lib. Edinburgh. thair twa headis set upoun the haid of the prisone-hous, thair to stand quhill the wind blaw thame away."— Robert Birrell's Diary, Nov. 19, 1600, cited sold his estate and raised a troop of horse for the Parliament. John Bunyan served as a private soldier in the Parliamentary army. But of all these, if some have sur passed Montrose in literary, none have come near him in military achievements; and I am not aware that there is any other man on record who has united in an equal degree poetical and military genius. Montrose was certainly a most accomplished man; and I regret, for the honour of human nature, that he should have tarnished his name by cruelty. There are indeed well-authenticated facts in his history that seem to show that he was not by nature cruel or ungenerous, and that he was not an exception to the rule that brave men are not cruel. Nevertheless the plea put forward for him that he necessarily gave way to acts of pillage and cruelty from inability to pay his half-barbarous soldiery will not avail him much; and history, painting him as he was, will paint him as a great man with dark spots on his fame. The royalist writers represent the people, and many even of Montrose's bitterest enemies as weeping on the occasion of his execution. That age was much addicted to tears, as is manifested when we find such a man as Cromwell, and even the whole House of Commons, occasionally dissolving into floods of tears. It may therefore, though it certainly seems strange, be true that the people of Scotland should weep even for a man who had treated them as Montrose had done, as people naturally weep at any great reverse of fortune. In regard to the mean spite imputed to the ruling party in Scotland at the time, as exhibited in the various studied insults offered to Montrose, the whole matter may be summed up in a very few words. If Montrose in his wars adhered to the recognized course of warfare of civilised men as the term was then understood, all insult offered to him as a prisoner was undoubtedly a mean revenge, and an ignominy recoiling upon those who offered it. But if, on the other hand, it be true that Montrose carried on war like a cruel and reckless savage, it would be drawing rather too largely on human forbearance in Scotland two hundred years ago to expect that he should receive the treatment which men of honour and humanity are anxious to give to a conquered enemy who has done nothing to forfeit his right to honourable treatment. Some writers have asserted, but without producing authority for the assertion, that Montrose at the beginning of his career joined the Covenanters from disgust at neglect from the Court. But when we call to mind that Montrose's mother was the sister of the Earl of Gowrie and of Alexander Ruthven, so basely murdered by James the First, and that his aunt Beatrix Ruthven had received through the Queen and Sir Thomas Erskine a very different version of that dark transaction called by King James the Gowrie Conspiracy, from that which King James put forth, we do not need to have recourse to any supposition of neglect from the Court to account for the fact of a young man, so intelligent and so well-educated as the Earl of Montrose, thinking it necessary to devise means to diminish rather than to increase the power to do evil, both to the nobility and people, of the royal family of Stuart. Wishart's work is so much a mere panegyric that it is no authority on disputed points. But the testimony of Principal Baillie, the best authority and beyond all suspicion, is, before Montrose's desertion of the Covenanters, very favourable to his general character, and throws no doubt on his sincerity. It is remarkable too that, so far from affording the least hint of cruelty in Montrose's character, Baillie objects to his too great lenity. "The discretion," he says, "of that generous and noble youth was but too great. A great sum was named as a fine to that unnatural city [Aberdeen] but all was forgiven.' And again: "Our forces likewise disbanded, it was thought, on some malcontentment either at Montrose's too great lenitie in sparing the enemies' houses, or somewhat else."2 This was in March 1639 when Montrose then only twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age went against Aberdeen as Lord General, with the Earl Marischall, the Lord Erskine, the Lord Carnegie, the Lord Elcho, "his Excellencie Felt Marshal Leslie," and an army of 9000 men. Now, as one of the charges brought against Montrose by the Parliament of Scotland in their declaration of the 24th January 1650 was, that " 'being a man of a mean and desperate fortune, and not meeting with that esteem and reward which he in his vanity proposed to himself, at the first pacification he began to hearken to the promises of the Court," how came it that, "being a man of a mean and desperate fortune," and so young, he was appointed to this important command? The inference is that the oligarchy which then governed Scotland must, notwithstanding their habitual blindness to such qualities, have perceived in Montrose, young as he was, the qualities fit for command; and that Argyle possessing great craft, (though no talent for war), and the power arising from a much greater estate or at least a much greater "following," than Montrose, which in an oligarchy confers the highest offices without regard to fitness, had influence in the Council to have Montrose superseded and Alexander 1 Baillie's Letters and Journals, vol. i. p. 197. Edinburgh 1841. Bannatyne Club. edition. Baillie calls Aberdeen "that unnatural city" on account of its leaning to prelacy. Baillie's Letters and Journals, vol. i. p. 205. 3 Spalding, vol. i. p. 107. Edinburgh, 1829. 2 vols. 4to. Bannatyne Club edition. |