The well-ordered army passed through, levying a fine on the Malignants, and all seemed well; but because the citizens had not resisted Montrose, the loyal barons in the neighbourhood fell on them and plundered them; and because they had submitted to be so plundered, the Covenanting army came back and plundered them also. "Many of this company went and brack up the Bishop's yetts, set on good fires of his peats standing within the close: they masterfully broke up the haill doors and windows of this stately house; they brake down beds, boards, aumries, glassen windows, took out the iron stauncheons, brake in the locks, and such as they could carry had with them, and sold for little or nothing; but they got none of the Bishop's plenishing to speak of, because it was all conveyed away before their coming." On Sunday, Montrose and the other leaders duly attended the devotional services of the eminent Covenanting divines they had brought with them. "But," says Spalding, "the renegate soldiers, in time of both preachings, is abusing and plundering New Aberdeen pitifully, without regard to God or man;" and he goes on in his specific way, describing the plundering until he reaches this climax: "No foul—cock or hen—left unkilled. The haill house-dogs, messens, and whelps within Aberdeen felled and slain upon the gate, so that neither hound nor messen or other dog was left that they could see." But there was a special reason for this. The ladies of Aberdeen, on the retiring of Montrose's army, had decorated all the vagabond street-dogs with the blue ribbon of the Covenant.
This was in 1639. Five years afterwards Montrose came back on them in more terrible guise still, to punish the town for having yielded to the Covenant. In Aberdeen, Cavalier principles generally predominated; but after being overrun and plundered successively by either party, the Covenanters, having the acting government of the country at their back, succeeded in establishing a predominance in the councils of the exhausted community. Spalding had no respect for the civic and rural forces they attempted to embody, and speaks of a petty bailie "who brought in ane drill-master to learn our poor bodies to handle their arms, who had more need to handle the plough and win their livings." Montrose had now with him his celebrated army of Highlanders—or Irish, as Spalding calls them—who broke at a rush through the feeble force sent out of the town to meet them. Montrose "follows the chase to Aberdeen, his men hewing and cutting down all manner of men they could overtake within the town, upon the streets, or in their houses, and round about the town, as our men were fleeing, with broadswords, but mercy or remeid. These cruel Irish, seeing a man well clad, would first tyr [i.e., strip] him and save the clothes unspoiled, then kill the man; ... nothing heard but pitiful howling, crying, weeping, mourning, through all the streets.... It is lamentable to hear how thir Irishes, who had gotten the spoil of the town, did abuse the samin. The men that they killed they would not suffer to be buried, but tirled them of their clothes, syne left their naked bodies lying above the ground. The wife durst not cry nor weep at her husband's slaughter before her eyes, nor the mother for her son—which if they were heard, then they were presently slain also; ... and none durst bury the dead. Yea, and I saw two corpses carried to the burial through the old town with women only, and not are man amongst them, so that the naked corpses lay unburied so long as these limmers were ungone to the camp."
The Commissary-Clerk was on Montrose's side, but he had the hatred of a Lowlander of that day for the Highlanders. He has a great many amusing episodes describing the light-fingered lads from the hills coming down, and in the general confusion of the times plundering Cavalier and Covenanter alike; and on these occasions he drops his usual placidity and becomes rabid and abusive, as the best-tempered Americans are said to become when they speak of niggers, and deals out to them the terms limmers, thieves, robbers, cut-throats, masterful vagrants, and so forth, with great volubility. Of some of their chiefs, renowned in history, he speaks as mere robber-leaders, and when they are known by one name in their own country and another in the Lowlands, he puts an alias between the two. The very initial words of his chronicle are, "Efter the death and burial of Angus Macintosh of Auldterlie, alias Angus Williamson."
Montrose having departed, Argyle's troops commenced to plunder the district for having submitted to his enemy, and these, being doubly offensive as Covenanters and Highlanders, are treated accordingly. But it is necessary to be impartial; and having bestowed so much on the Cavalier annalist, let us take a glimpse at the other side.
Robert Wodrow.
rom the collections of the Reverend Robert Wodrow, the historian of The Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, a rich harvest has been reaped by the northern clubs, one of which appropriately adopted his name. He was a voluminous writer and an inexhaustible collector. It is generally classed among the failings of the book-hunter that he looks only to the far past, and disregards the contemporary and the recent. Wodrow was a valuable exception to this propensity. Reversing the spirit of the selfish bull which asks what posterity has done for us, he stored up contemporary literature for subsequent generations; and he thus left, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, such a library as a collector of the nineteenth, could he have sent a caterer before him, would have prepared to await his arrival in the world. The inestimable value of the great collection of the civil-war pamphlets made by George Thomason, and fortunately preserved in the British Museum, is very well known. Just such another of its kind is Wodrow's, made up of the pamphlets, broadsides, pasquinades, and other fugitive pieces of his own day, and of the generation immediately preceding. These are things easily obtained in their freshness, but the term fugitive is too expressive of their nature, and after a generation or two they have all flown away, save those which the book-hunter has exorcised into the vaults of some public collection. There is perhaps too little done in our own day in preserving for posterity these mute witnesses of our sayings and doings. They are too light and volatile to be caught by the Copyright Act, which so carefully deposits our quartos and octavos in the privileged libraries. It is pleasant, by the way, at this moment, to observe that the eminent scholar who has charge of the chief portion of Wodrow's gatherings, as keeper of the Advocates' Library, is following his example, by preserving a collection of the pamphlets of the present century which will keep our posterity in employment, if they desire to unwind the intricacies of all our civil and ecclesiastical sayings and doings.
Wodrow carried on an active correspondence about matters of contemporary policy, and the special inquiries connected with his History: selections from this mass have furnished three sturdy volumes. Besides pamphlets, he scraped together quantities of other people's manuscripts—some of them rising high enough in importance to be counted State papers. How the minister of the quiet rural parish of Eastwood could have got his hands on them is a marvel, but it is fortunate that they were saved from destruction; and it is nearly equally fortunate that they have been well ransacked by zealous club-book makers, who have by this time probably exhausted the better part of their material. In the next place, Wodrow left behind several biographies of eminent members of his own Church, its saints and martyrs; and goodly masses out of this storehouse have also been printed.
But by far the most luxurious morsel in the worthy man's intellectual larder was not intended to reach the profane vulgar, but destined for his own special rumination. It consists in the veritable contents of his private note-books, containing his communings with his own heart and his imagination. They were written on small slips of paper, in a hand direly cramped and minute; and lest this should not be a sufficient protection to their privacy, a portion was committed to certain ciphers, which their ingenious inventor deemed, no doubt, to be utterly impregnable. In stenography, however, the art of lock-picking always keeps ahead of the art of locking, as that of inventing destructive missiles seems to outstrip that of forging impenetrable plates. Wodrow's trick was the same as that of Samuel Pepys, and productive of the same consequences—the excitement of a rabid curiosity, which at last found its way into the recesses of his secret communings. They are now printed, in the fine type of the Maitland Club, in four portly quartos, under the title, Wodrow's Analecta. Few books would hold out so much temptation to a commentator, but their editor is dumb, faithfully reprinting the whole, page by page, and abstaining both from introduction and explanatory foot-note.