Montrose

English Men of Action
First Edition 1892 Reprinted 1901, 1909
THE MARQUIS OF MONTROSE, K.G. From a picture by Gerard Honthorst, painted at the Hague in 1649, and presented by Montrose to the Queen of Bohemia; it is now in the possession of the Earl of Dalhousie.
MONTROSE
MOWBRAY MORRIS
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1909


Tradition still points to a building in the town of Montrose as the birthplace of James Graham, fifth Earl and first Marquis of the line,—a building also fondly cherished by the antiquary as the last to shelter the Old Chevalier on Scottish soil. Both traditions are of course disputed, and both are easy to dispute. The title of Montrose was taken, not from the town of that name but, from the estate of Old Montrose on the opposite side of the bay, which a Graham had acquired from Robert Bruce in exchange for the lands of Cardross in Dumbartonshire. The name is said to be of Gaelic origin, Alt or Ald Moineros , the Burn of the Mossy Point; but the prefix must have been understood in its Saxon significance at least as early as the twelfth century, for in a charter of that time the place is styled Vetus Monros . The old castle has long since disappeared. The Covenanters naturally let slip no chance of despoiling the man they most feared and hated in Scotland; and of the three stately homes owned by the chief of the Grahams at the beginning of the seventeenth century—Kincardine in Perthshire, Mugdock in Stirlingshire, and Old Montrose in Forfarshire—all went down in the storm of civil war. Montrose's parents seem to have resided at all three impartially, and at the last their son may have been born. If this were so, it is easy to understand how tradition, anxious for some visible memorial of a famous man in the town bearing his name, should have transferred the honour of his birth there across the few miles of water that separated it from the old home of his family. But in fact nothing is certainly known of the place or time of Montrose's birth, except that he was fourteen years old when his father died in 1626, and must consequently have been born some time in the year 1612.