On December 20 the Assembly, which sat on after Hamilton dissolved it, broke up. Among the Covenanters were to be reckoned the Earl of Argyll (later the only Marquis of his House), and the Earl, later Marquis, of Montrose. They did not stand long together. The Scottish Revolution produced no man at once great and successful, but, in Montrose, it had one man of genius who gave his life for honour’s sake; in Argyll, an astute man, not physically courageous, whose “timidity in the field was equalled by his timidity in the Council,” says Mr Gardiner.
In spring (1639) war began. Charles was to move in force on the Border; the fleet was to watch the coasts; Hamilton, with some 5000 men, was to join hands with Huntly (both men were wavering and incompetent); Antrim, from north Ireland, was to attack and contain Argyll; Ruthven was to hold Edinburgh Castle. But Alexander Leslie took that castle for the Covenanters; they took Dumbarton; they fortified Leith; Argyll ravaged Huntly’s lands; Montrose and Leslie occupied Aberdeen; and their party, in circumstances supposed to be discreditable to Montrose, carried Huntly to Edinburgh. (The evidence is confused. Was Huntly unwilling to go? Charles (York, April 23, 1639) calls him “feeble and false.” Mr Gardiner says that, in this case, and in this alone, Montrose stooped to a mean action.) Hamilton merely dawdled and did nothing: Montrose had entered Aberdeen (June 19), and then came news of negotiations between the king and the Covenanters.
As Charles approached from the south, Alexander Leslie, a Continental veteran (very many of the Covenant’s officers were Dugald Dalgettys from the foreign wars), occupied Dunse Law, with a numerous army in great difficulties as to supplies. “A natural mind might despair,” wrote Waristoun, who “was brought low before God indeed.” Leslie was in a strait; but, on the other side, so was Charles, for a reconnaissance of Leslie’s position was repulsed; the king lacked money and supplies; neither side was of a high fighting heart; and offers to negotiate came from the king, informally. The Scots sent in “a supplication,” and on June 18 signed a treaty which was a mere futile truce. There were to be a new Assembly, and a new Parliament in August and September.
Charles should have fought: if he fell he would fall with honour; and if he survived defeat “all England behoved to have risen in revenge,” says the Covenanting letter-writer, Baillie, later Principal of Glasgow University. The Covenanters at this time could not have invaded England, could not have supported themselves if they did, and were far from being harmonious among themselves. The defeat of Charles at this moment would have aroused English pride and united the country. Charles set out from Berwick for London on July 29, leaving many fresh causes of quarrel behind him.
Charles supposed that he was merely “giving way for the present” when he accepted the ratification by the new Assembly of all the Acts of that of 1638. He never had a later chance to recover his ground. The new Assembly made the Privy Council pass an Act rendering signature of the Covenant compulsory on all men: “the new freedom is worse than the old slavery,” a looker-on remarked. The Parliament discussed the method of electing the Lords of the Articles—a method which, in fact, though of prime importance, had varied and continued to vary in practice. Argyll protested that the constitutional course was for each Estate to elect its own members. Montrose was already suspected of being influenced by Charles. Charles refused to call Episcopacy unlawful, or to rescind the old Acts establishing it. Traquair, as Commissioner, dissolved the Parliament; later Charles refused to meet envoys sent from Scotland, who were actually trying, as their party also tried, to gain French mediation or assistance,—help from “idolaters”!
In spring 1640 the Scots, by an instrument called “The Blind Band,” imposed taxation for military purposes; while Charles in England called The Short Parliament to provide Supply. The Parliament refused and was prorogued; words used by Strafford about the use of the army in Ireland to suppress Scotland were hoarded up against him. The Scots Parliament, though the king had prorogued it, met in June, despite the opposition of Montrose. The Parliament, when it ceased to meet, appointed a Standing Committee of some forty members of all ranks, including Montrose and his friends Lord Napier and Stirling of Keir. Argyll refused to be a member, but acted on a commission of fire and sword “to root out of the country” the northern recusants against the Covenant. It was now that Argyll burned Lord Ogilvy’s Bonny House of Airlie and Forthes; the cattle were driven into his own country; all this against, and perhaps in consequence of, the intercession of Ogilvy’s friend and neighbour, Montrose.
Meanwhile the Scots were intriguing with discontented English peers, who could only give sympathy; Saville, however, forged a letter from six of them inviting a Scottish invasion. There was a movement for making Argyll practically Dictator in the North; Montrose thwarted it, and in August, while Charles with a reluctant and disorderly force was marching on York Montrose at Cumbernauld, the house of the Earl of Wigtoun made a secret band with the Earls Marischal, Wigtoun, Home, Atholl, Mar, Perth, Boyd, Galloway, and others, for their mutual defence against the scheme of dictatorship for Argyll. On August 20 Montrose, the foremost, forded Tweed, and led his regiment into England. On August 30, almost unopposed, the Scots entered Newcastle, having routed a force which met them at Newburn-on-Tyne.
They again pressed their demands on the king; simultaneously twelve English peers petitioned for a parliament and the trial of the king’s Ministers. Charles gave way. At Ripon Scottish and English commissioners met; the Scots received “brotherly assistance” in money and supplies (a daily £850), and stayed where they were; while the Long Parliament met in November, and in April 1641 condemned the great Strafford: Laud soon shared his doom. On August 10 the demands of the Scots were granted: as a sympathetic historian writes, they had lived for a year at free quarters, “and recrossed the Border with the handsome sum of £200,000 to their credit.”
During the absence of the army the Kirk exhibited symptoms not favourable to its own peace. Amateur theologians held private religious gatherings, which, it was feared, tended towards the heresy of the English Independents and to the “break up of the whole Kirk,” some of whose representatives forbade these conventicles, while “the rigid sort” asserted that the conventiclers “were esteemed the godly of the land.” An Act of the General Assembly was passed against the meetings; we observe that here are the beginnings of strife between the most godly and the rather moderately pious.
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.