Then it was that Montrose showed the world what is believed to have been his most daring feat of generalship. On the 29th and 30th of January he was at Kilchuilem on Loch Ness near what is now Fort Augustus. Thence it was his purpose to advance north to meet Seaforth, when he received news that Argyle was thirty miles behind him in Lochaber, at the old cattle of Inverlochy, at the foot of Ben Nevis, near what is now Fort William. He saw at once the device. Argyle did not mean to fight him directly, but to keep dogging him at a distance and then to come up when he should be engaged with Seaforth! Instantly, therefore, he resolved not to go on against Seaforth, but to turn back, and fall upon Argyle first by himself. Setting a guard on the beaten road along the lakes, to prevent communication with Argyle, he ventured a march, where no march had ever been before, or could have been supposed possible, up the rugged bed of the Tarf, and so, by the spurs of big Carryarick and the secrets of the infant Spey, now in bog and wet, now knee-deep in snow, over the mountains of Lochaber. It was on Friday the 31st of January that he began the march, and early in the evening of Saturday the 1st of February they were down at the foot of Ben Nevis and close on Inverlochy. It was a frosty moonlight night; skirmishing went on all through the night; and Argyle, with the gentlemen of the Committee of Estates who were with him, went on board his barge on Loch Eil. Thence, at a little distance from the shore, he beheld the battle of the next day, Sunday, Feb. 2. It was the greatest disaster that had ever befallen the House of Argyle. There were slain in all about 1,500 of Argyle's men, including brave Auchinbreck and many other important Campbells, while on Montrose's side the loss was but of a few killed, and only Sir Thomas Ogilvy, among his important followers, wounded mortally. And so, with a heavy heart, Argyle sailed away in his barge, wondering why God had not made him a warrior as well as a statesman; and Montrose sat down to write a letter to the King. "Give me leave," he said, "after I have reduced this country to your Majesty's obedience and conquered from Dan to Beersheba, to say to your Majesty then, as David's general did to his master, 'Come thou thyself, lest this country be called by my name.'" [Footnote: Rushworth, V. 931-2; Wishart, 110-114; Napier, 477-484. Mr. Napier winds up his account of the Battle of Inverlochy by quoting entire (484-488) Montrose's supposed letter to the King on the occasion. The letter, he says, was first "obscurely printed by Dr. Welwood in the Appendix to his Memoirs, 1699;" but he adds an extract from the Analecta of the Scottish antiquary Wodrow, to the effect that Wodrow had been told, by a person who had seen the original letter, that Welwood's copy was a "vitiated" one. No other copy having been found among the Montrose Papers, Mr. Napier has had to reprint Welwood's; which he does with great ceremony, thinking it a splendid Montrose document. It certainly is a striking document; but I cannot help suspecting the genuineness of it as it now stands. There are anachronisms and other slips in it, suggesting posthumous alteration and concoction.]——The Battle of Inverlochy was much heard of throughout England, where Montrose and his exploits had been for some time the theme of public talk. The King was greatly elated; and it was supposed that the new hopes from Scotland excited in his mind by the success of Montrose had some effect in inducing him to break off the Treaty of Uxbridge then in progress. The Treaty was certainly broken off just at this time (Feb. 24, 1644-5).
On Wednesday the 12th of February, ten days after Inverlochy, the Marquis of Argyle was in Edinburgh, and presented himself in the Parliament, "having his left arm tied up in a scarf." The day before, the Parliament had unanimously found "James, Earl of Montrose" (his title of Marquis not recognised) and nineteen of his chief adherents, including the Earl of Airlie, Viscount Aboyne, Alexander Macdonald MacColkittoch, and Patrick Graham younger of Inchbrakie, "guilty of high treason," and had forfaulted "their lives, honours, titles, lands and goods;" also ordering the Lyon King of Arms, Sir James Balfour, to "delete the arms of the traitors out of his registers and books of honour." The General Assembly of the Kirk was then also in session, rather out of its usual season (Jan. 22-Feb. 13), on account of important ecclesiastical business arising out of the proceedings of the Westminster Assembly; and Baillie and Gillespie had come from London to be present. Of course, the rebellion of Montrose was much discussed by that reverend body; and, in a document penned by Mr. Gillespie, and put forth by the Assembly (Feb. 12), there was this passage:—"In the meantime, the hellish crew, under the conduct of the excommunicate and forfaulted Earl of Montrose, and of Alaster Macdonald, a Papist and an outlaw, doth exercise such barbarous, unnatural, horrid, and unheard-of cruelty as is beyond expression." But, though Parliament might condemn and proscribe Montrose, and the General Assembly might denounce him, the real business of bringing him to account rested now with General Baillie. To assist Baillie, however, there was coming from England another military Scot, to act as Major-general of horse. He was no other than the renegade Urry, or Hurry, who had deserted from the English Parliament to the King, and been the occasion of Hampden's death in June 1643 (Vol. II. 470-1). Though the King had made him a knight, he had again changed sides. [Footnote: Sir James Balfour's Annals, III. 270-273; Baillie's Letters II. 258-263; Acts of General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (edition of 1843), p. 126.]
After Inverlochy, Montrose had resumed his northward march along the chain of lakes to meet Seaforth. That nobleman, however, had been cured of any desire to encounter him. Feb. 19, Elgin surrendered to Montrose; and here, or at Gordon Castle, not far off, he remained some little time, issuing Royalist proclamations, and receiving new adherents, among whom were Lord Gordon and his younger brother Lord Lewis Gordon, nay Seaforth himself! Lord Gordon remained faithful; Lord Lewis Gordon was more slippery; Seaforth had yielded on compulsion, and was to break away as soon as he could. At Gordon Castle Montrose's eldest son and heir, who had been with him through so many hardships, died after a short illness. Hardly had the poor boy been buried in Bellie church near, when his father, now reinforced by the Gordons, so that he could count 2,000 foot and 200 horse, was on his "fiery progress" south through Aberdeenshire, "as if to challenge Generals Baillie and Urry." March 9, he was at Aberdeen; March 21, he was at Stonehaven and Dunnottar in Kincardineshire, burning the burgh and its shipping, and the barns of Earl Marischal's tenants under the Earl's own eyes. Baillie and Urry kept zig-zagging in watch of him; but, though he skirmished with Urry's horse and tried again and again to tempt on battle, they waited their own time. Once they nearly had him. He had pushed on farther south through Forfarshire, and then west into Perthshire, meaning to cross the Tay at Dunkeld on his way to the Forth and the Lowlands. The desertion of Lord Lewis Gordon at this point with most of the Gordon horse obliged him to desist from this southward march; but, having been informed that Baillie and Urry had crossed the Tay in advance of him to guard the Forth country, he conceived that he would have time for the capture of Dundee, and that the sack of so Covenanting a town would be a consolation to him for his forced return northwards. Starting from Dunkeld at midnight, April 3, he was at Dundee next morning, took the town by storm, and set fire to it in several places. But lo! while his Highlanders and Irish were ranging through the town, still burning and plundering, and most of them madly drunk with the liquors they had found, Baillie and Urry, who had not crossed the Tay after all, were not a mile off. How Montrose got his drunken Highlanders and Irish together out of the burning town is an inexplicable mystery; but he did accomplish it somehow, and whirled them, by one of his tremendous marches, of three days and two nights, himself in the rear and the enemy's horse close in pursuit all the while, past Arbroath, and so, by dexterous choice of roads and passes, in among the protecting Grampians. "Truly," says his biographer Wishart, "I have often heard those who were esteemed the most experienced officers, not in Britain only, but in France and Germany, prefer this march of Montrose to his most celebrated victories." [Footnote: Wishart, 115-127; Rushworth, VI. 2.8; Napier, 490-497.]
Except Inverlochy, his most celebrated victories were yet to come. There were to be three of them. The first was the Battle of Auldearn in Nairnshire (May 9, 1645), in which Montrose's tactics and MacColl's mad bravery beat to pieces the regular soldier-craft of Urry, assisted by the Earls of Seaforth, Sutherland, and Findlater. [Footnote: Rushworth, VI. 229; Wishart, 128-138; Napier, 500-506.] The second was the Battle of Alford in Aberdeenshire (July 2, 1645), where Montrose defeated Baillie himself. MacColkittoch was not present in this battle, the commanders in which, under Montrose, were Lord Gordon, Nathaniel Gordon, Lord Aboyne, Sir William Rollo, Glengarry, and Drummond of Balloch, while Baillie was assisted in chief by the Earl of Balcarres. Montrose's loss was trifling in comparison with Baillie's, but it included the death of Lord Gordon [Footnote: Wishart, 133-152; Napier, 526-536]. To the Covenanting Government the defeat of Alford was most serious. The Parliament, which had adjourned at Edinburgh on the 8th of March, was convoked afresh for two short sessions, at Stirling (July 8-July 11), and at Perth (July 24- Aug. 5); and the chief business of these sessions was the consideration of ways for retrieving Baillie's defeat and prosecuting the war [Footnote: Balfour's Annals, III. 292 307.]. Baillie, chagrined at the loss of his military reputation, wanted to resign, throwing the blame of his disaster partly on Urry for his selfish carelessness, and partly on the great Covenanting noblemen, who had disposed of troops hither and thither, exchanged prisoners, and granted passes, without regard to his interests or orders. The Parliament, having exonerated and thanked him, persuaded him at first to retain his commission, appointing a new Committee of Estates, with Argyle at their head, to accompany and advise him (July 10). Not even so was Baillie comfortable; and on the 4th of August he definitively gave in his resignation. It was then accepted, with new exoneration and thanks, but with a request that, to allow time for the arrival of his intended successor (Major-general Monro) from Ireland, he would continue in the command a little longer. Goodnaturedly he did so, but unfortunately for himself. He was in the eleventh day of his anomalous position of command and no-command, when he received from Montrose another thrashing, more fatal than the last, in the Battle of Kilsyth in Stirlingshire (Aug. 15, 1645). On both sides there had been great exertion in recruiting, so that the numbers in this battle were, according to the estimate of Montrose's biographers, 6,000 foot and 1,000 horse under Baillie against 4,400 foot and 500 horse under Montrose. Baillie would not have allowed this estimate, for he complains that the recruiting for him had been bad. Anyhow, his defeat was crushing. In various posts of command under Montrose were the aged Earl of Airlie, Viscount Aboyne, Colonel Nathaniel Gordon, Maclean of Duart, the chief of Clanranald, and MacColkittoch with his Irish. Acting under Baillie, or, as he would have us infer, above him and in spite of him, were Argyle, the Earls of Crawfurd and Tullibardine, Lords Elcho, Burleigh, and Balcarres, Major-general Holborn, and others. Before the battle, Montrose, in freak or for some deeper reason, made all his army, both foot and horse, strip themselves, above the waist, to their shirts (which, with the majority, may have implied something ghastlier); and in this style they fought. The battle was not long, the Macleans and Clanranald Highlanders being conspicuous in beginning it, and the old Earl of Airlie and his Ogilvies in deciding it. But, after the battle, there was a pursuit of the foe for fourteen miles, and the slaughter was such as to give rise to the tradition of thousands slain on Baillie's side against six men on Montrose's. Many prisoners were taken, but the chief nobles escaped by the swiftness of their horses. Argyle was one of these. Carried by his horse to Queens-ferry, he got on board a ship in the Firth of Forth (the third time, it was noted, of his saving himself in this fashion), sailed down the Firth into the open sea, and did not come ashore till he was at Newcastle. [Footnote: Wishart, 162-171; Napier, 542-541. But see General Baillie's touching and instructive vindication of himself in three documents, printed in his cousin Baillie's Letters and Correspondence (II. 4l7-424). Baillie goes over the whole of his unfortunate commandership against Montrose, from his meeting with Argyle at Roseneath after Inverlochy (Jan. 1644-5) to the Battle of Kilsyth (Aug. 15. 1645); and the pervading complaint is that he had never been allowed to be real commander-in-chief, but had been thwarted and overridden by Argyle, Committees of Estates, and conceited individual nobles.]
The Battle of Kilsyth placed all Scotland at Montrose's feet. He entered Clydesdale, took the city of Glasgow under his protection, set up his head-quarters at Bothwell, and thence issued his commands far and wide. Edinburgh sent in its submission on summons; other towns sent in their submissions; nobles and lairds that had hitherto stood aloof gathered obsequiously round the victor; and friends and supporters, who had been arrested and imprisoned on charges of complicity with him during his enterprise, found themselves released. Dearest among these to Montrose were his relatives of the Merchiston and Keir connexion—the veteran Lord Napier, Montrose's brother-in-law and his Mentor from his youth; Sir George Stirling of Keir, and his wife, Lord Napier's daughter; and several other nieces of Montrose, young ladies of the Napier house. In fact, so many persons of note from all quarters gathered round Montrose at Bothwell that his Leaguer there became a kind of Court. The great day at this Court was the 3rd of September, eighteen days after the victory of Kilsyth. On that day there was a grand review of the victorious army; a new commission from the King, brought from Hereford by Sir Robert Spotswood, was produced and read, appointing Montrose Lord Lieutenant and Captain-general of Scotland with those Viceregal powers which had till then been nominally reserved for Prince Maurice; and, after a glowing speech, in which Montrose praised his whole army, but especially his Major-general, Alaster Macdonald MacColkittoch, he made it his first act of Viceroyalty to confer on that warrior the honour of knighthood. On the following day proclamations were issued for the meeting of a Parliament at Glasgow on the 20th of October. Montrose then broke up his Leaguer, to obey certain instructions which had come from the King. These were that he should plant himself in the Border shires, co-operating there with the Earls of Traquair, Hume, and Roxburgh, and other Royalists of those parts, so as to be ready to receive his Majesty himself emerging from England, or at least such an auxiliary force of English as Lord Digby should be able to despatch. For Montrose's triumph in Scotland had been reported all through England and had altered the state and prospects of the war there. Kilsyth (Aug. 15) had come as a considerable compensation even for Naseby (June 14) and the subsequent successes of the New Model. The King's thoughts had turned to the North, and it had become his idea, and Digby's, that, if the successes of the New Model still continued, it would be best for his Majesty to transfer his own presence out of England for the time, joining himself to Montrose in Scotland. [Footnote: Baillie, II. 313-314; Rushworth, VI. 231; Wishart, 190; Napier, 552-569.]
In obedience to his Majesty's instructions Montrose did advance to the Border. For about a week he prowled about, on the outlook for the expected aid from England, negotiating at the same time with some of the Border lords, and in quest of others with whom to negotiate. On the 10th of September he was encamped at Kelso; thence he went to Jedburgh; and thence to Selkirk. [Footnote: Napier, 570-575.] While he is at this last place, let us pause a little to ask an important question.
What was Montrose's meaning? What real political intention lay under the meteor-like track of his marches and battles? What did he want to make of Scotland? This is not a needless question. For, as we know, Montrose was not, after all, a mere military madman. He was an idealist in his way, a political theorist (Vol. II. 296-298). Fortunately, to assist our guesses, there is extant a manifesto drawn up under Montrose's dictation at that very moment of his triumph at which we have now arrived. The document is in the handwriting of Lord Napier, his brother-in-law and closest adviser, and consists of some very small sheets of paper, in Napier's minutest autograph, as if it had been drawn up where writing materials were scarce. It was certainly written after Kilsyth, and in all probability at one of Montrose's halts on the Border. In short, it was that vindication of himself and declaration of his policy which Montrose meant to publish in anticipation of the meeting of a Scottish Parliament at Glasgow which he had summoned for the 20th of October.
The document is vague, and much of it is evidently a special pleading addressed to those who remembered that Montrose had formerly been an enthusiastic Covenanter Still there are interesting points in it. His defence is that it was not he that had swerved from the original Scottish Covenant of 1638. He had thoroughly approved of that Covenant, and had gone on with Argyle and the rest of the Covenanters, perhaps "giving way to more than was warrantable," till their deviation from the true purposes of the Covenant had passed all legal hounds. He had seen this to be the ease at the time of the Treaty of Ripon at the conclusion of the Second Bishops' War; and at that point he had left them, or rather they had finally parted from him (Oct. 1640). He had since then gone on in perfect consistency with his former self; and they had gone on, in their pretended Parliaments and pretended General Assemblies, from bad to worse. The State was in the grasp of a few usurpers at the centre and their committees through the shires; finings and imprisonings of the loyal were universal; and all true liberty for the subject was gone. The Church too had passed into confusion, "the Brownistical faction" overruling it, joined "in league with the Brownists and Independents in England, to the prejudice of Religion." [Footnote: Several times in the course of the document this accusation of Brownism or Independency comes in—an absurdly selected accusation at the very time when the most patent fact about the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland was its deadly antagonism to Independency and all forms of Brownism. Montrose and Napier were probably a little behind-hand in their knowledge of English Ecclesiastical History, and merely clutched "Brownism" as a convenient phrase of reproach, much sanctioned by the King in his English proclamations against Parliament.] So much for a review of his past acts; but what were his present grounds? Here one listens with curiosity. One of his "grounds" he lays down definitely enough, and indeed with extraordinary and repeated emphasis. Let his countrymen be assured that he retained his hatred of Episcopacy and would never sanction its restoration in Scotland! He would not, indeed, be for uprooting Episcopacy in England, inasmuch as the King and his loyal subjects of that country did not desire it; nor was he pledged to that by any right construction of the Scottish Covenant of 1638. That Covenant referred to Scotland only, and it was that Covenant, and not the later League and Covenant of 1643, that he had signed. But he had not forgotten that the very cause of that original Scottish Covenant was the woe wrought by Prelacy in Scotland. "It cannot be denied," says the document, "neither ever shall be by us, that this our nation was reduced to almost irreparable evil by the perverse practices of the sometime pretended Prelates; who, having abused lawful authority, did not only usurp to be lords over God's inheritance, but also intruded themselves in the prime places of civil government, and, by their Court of High Commission, did so abandon themselves, to the prejudice of the Gospel, that the very quintessence of Popery was publicly preached by Arminians, and the life of the Gospel stolen away by enforcing on the Kirk a dead Service-book, the brood of the bowels of the Whore of Babel." For the defence, therefore, of genuine old Scottish Presbyterianism, he protests "in God's sight" he would be "the first should draw a sword." But a spurious Presbyterianism had been invented, and "the outcasting of the locust" had been the "inbringing of the caterpillar." As he abjured Episcopacy, so he thought the system that had been set up instead "no less hurtful;" wherefore, he concludes, "resolving to eschew the extremities, and keep the middle way of our Reformed Religion, we, by God's grace and assistance, shall endeavour to maintain it with the hazard of our lives and fortunes, and it shall be no less dear to us than our own souls."—Allowing for the fact that Montrose, or Napier for him, must have considered it politic to conciliate the anti-Prelatic sentiment, we cannot but construe these passages into a positive statement that Montrose really was, and believed himself to be, a moderate Presbyterian. His programme for Scotland, in fact, was Moderate Presbyterianism together with a restoration of the King's prerogative. In this, of course, was implied the annihilation of every relic of the Argyle-Hamilton machinery of government and the substitution of another machinery under the permanent Viceroyalty of the Marquis of Montrose. [Footnote: The document described and extracted from in the text is printed entire by Mr. Napier, who seems first to have deciphered it (Appendix to Vol. I. of his Life of Montrose, pp. xliv.- liii.), and whose historical honesty in publishing it is the more to be commended because it must have jarred on his own predilections about his hero. Many of Montrose's admirers still accept him in ignorance as a champion and hero of high Episcopacy; and for these Mr. Napier's document must be unwelcome news.]
Ah! how Fortune turns her wheel! This manifesto of Montrose was to remain in Lord Napier's pocket, not to be deciphered till our own time, and the Parliament for which it was a preparation was never actually to meet.
In England there had been amazement and grief over the news of Montrose's triumph. The Parliament had appointed Sept. 5 to be a day of public fast and prayer in all the churches on account of the calamity that had befallen Scotland; and on that day the good Baillie, walking in London to and from church, was in the deepest despondency. Never, "since William Wallace's days," he wrote, had Scotland been in such a plight; and "What means the Lord, so far against the expectation of the most clear-sighted, to humble us so low?" But he adds a piece of news, "On Tuesday was eight days" (i.e. Aug. 27), in consequence of letters from Scotland, David Leslie, the Major-general of Leven's Scottish army in England, had gone in haste from Nottingham towards Carlisle and Scotland, taking with him 4,000 horse. This was the wisest thing that could have been done. David Leslie was the very best soldier the Scots had, better by far than Lieutenant-general Baillie, whom Montrose had just extinguished, and better even than Monro, whom the Scottish Estates had resolved to bring from Ireland as Baillie's successor. [Footnote: Baillie, II. 313-315.]