MONTROSE RIDES NORTH
By ALAN PHILLIPS
JAMES GRAHAM, fifth earl and soon to be first marquis of Montrose, was thirty-one when on the twenty-first of March, 1644—three hundred years ago this week—he rode out from the
royal headquarters at Oxford to raise Scotland for the side of King Charles the First in the Civil War. The most astonishing eighteen months of his life, indeed one of the most astonishing periods of any life in history, had begun. In those months he was to win over and combine by the power of his personality some of the most contradictory forces in Highland and Lowland, clansmen and town- dwellers, chieftains, statesmen and adventurers alike ; to triumph in six battles and carry out some of the military feats of that counter- marching century ; and then starved of assistance, surprised and routed at Philiphaugh, to see the whole achievement collapse in the North just after the King's cause had been shattered in England at Naseby. Ideally an epic, practically the Annus Mirabilis was a failure. What then is the meaning of Montrose's exploits for the historian, the statesman, the zealot and the ordinary reader to con- template? The answer is fourfold. Montrose is the apostle of orderly and constitutional government ; his mental development shows the enthronement of reason above the passion and prejudice of his age ; he is humanity itself, enlarged to tragic proportions ; his character and career are wholly encircled by romance.
Montrose devoted himself to monarchy as his chosen form of government because he saw it as best equipped to bring peace and content in his time. He was scarcely interested in its historical origins or in metaphysical theories underlying Stuart Kingship. He desired Scotland to be at peace within itself and with England. Both would be impossible if the turbulent baronage of the smaller country sought to impose its will on the common people of the larger, especially in matters of conscience. By 1643 it was apparent that the Kirk would insist on the establishment of Presbyterianism, in England no less than Scotland, as the price for effective military support for the Parliamentarians at Westminster, and in the autumn there was signed the Solemn League and Covenant which bound both parties to labour towards that end. As Charles had already allowed the National Covenant to be valid for Scotland in return for that country's loyalty, treachery was now added to rebellion. Montrose divined one of the constants of British history which have been too often overlooked by its actors and authors alike ; that in quarrels between Crown and other leaders, the public interest has usually been more truly understood by the Crown. He saw that sovereign power, to afford protection to all classes, must be cen- tralised where it could be effectually wielded. If justice and public spirit could not be found in the monarchy, they were non-existent. Certainly chiefs like 'Argyll and preachers like Warriston, prepared to overthrow all liberty in their zeal to establish uniformity, could be counted on for neither, precarious as their own grip on power must be. .Montrose had reached his position not from bigotry or scholastic preconceptions, but from his own experience subjected to the search- light of reason. As a young man he hai ardently taken the Covenant and even a command in the Bishops' War to compel the King to grant Presbyterianism and the holding of General Assemblies in Scotland. To his enemies, the memory that he had once stood with them was an additional goad. It may be said that, as soon as the Kirk issued out from its defensive posts, he broke with it irrevocably. He valued spiritual liberty, the right to worship in his own way, as dearly as anyone at the Glasgow Assembly which protested against Laud's ritualistic reforms ; but he was beyond almost all contempor- aries in understanding that Englishmen might value it seriously also. Irony saw- to it that in fighting for the King he was on the same side as Laud's clergy, who had no more use than had the Kirk for toleration as a principle ; but at least Episcopacy was the religion accepted by a majority of Englishmen. Montrose was that moderate who rises early in most periods of revolution and civil strife, wins momentary acclamation and a hearing for reason, and then is swept away by the floods of vindictiveness. In politics his parallel is Mirabeau. And often, when the storms have subsided and the landscape can be seen again, its shape is strikingly as it was just at the moment when the moderate appealed for a halt. Is not the lesson, for us, that we should recognise and heed his voice at the time?
In that campaign of 1644-5 are all the elements of human drama and tragedy. Married at seventeen, Montrose is a devoted family man to whom cares of State allow all too little domestic happiness. His eldest son dies in the Highlands from the effect of the frightful winter march to Inverlochy. His associates quarrel with one another, desert him to look after their own lands, or remain faithful and meet their deaths under his command. He has agonising doubts as to their loyalty or their ability to bring reinforcements. He hears fitfully of the war in England, and often the news is disastrous— Marston! Moor, Naseby. Often he feels utterly alone. In return some radiance is thrown upon his loneliness by the constancy of rare souls like his cousin Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie and a few of the Gordon clan, and by the trust of that extraordinary half-wild Alasdair Macdonald and his Ulstermen. If the story of Montrose's spiritual. journey moves us to compassion, the physical prodigies thrill us. He leads an army by night through the icy passes along the Canal ; extricates it from Dundee after a skirmish and a sack, and leads it to safety miles into the hills, again by night ; before and during battle he is everywhere ; at every season he is in peril and hardship in a terrifying country. Whatever befalls, he preserves calm, affection, hope, forbearance, clemency. The massacre at Aberdeen, which he seems to have been slothful in stopping, is the one blot on his record.
That morning ride out of Oxford is the start of an adventure which, although it really happened to one man, symbolises for nearly every one of us that high romance in which, whatever form it may take, some part of out being craves to play as principal. Glory and hopelessness meet together in a saga whose end is doom. But men will choose doom and splendid episodes rather than success without them. As a romantic figure, Montrose starts with a hand full of trumps. He is still young, indeed he will not be thirty-eight when put to death ; he has lived on the grand level from boyhood, is as much in love with his wife as on their wedding-day, has troops of friends ; he is scholar and poet, traveller and courtier, dis- tinguished in council and action ; a natural lord of men, so that we shall not find his counterpart in that generation ; at last the hour strikes for him to be identified with history. He is eternally above the common run of men, but the kind of man we would choose to be. As we read his story we find the subjective vision creeping in, and try to share his emotions and spiritual discoveries within our own souls. If this convinces us that we too should find it a fine thing to live and die by eternal principles of justice, order and charity, and that endeavour in the highest cause can make apparent failure therein more to be desired than any lesser achieve- ment, Montrose's story will still be read. It gives glimpses into immortality.
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