1

It is not easy to analyse the heart of that man who in his dying hour could look without remorse or even regret on those four days of September, 1644, including that Sunday, the 15th of September, when there was neither preaching nor praying in Aberdeen and nothing but the deathgroans of men and the shrieks and wail of women through all the streets, and when the king's lieutenant, who had in the name of "King Charles the Good" caused all these things, could not enter or leave his quarters in Skipper Anderson's house without walking upon or over the bloody corpses of those not slain in battle and over streets slippery with innocent blood. Montrose's chaplain and panegyrical biographer Bishop Wishart has prudently thought fit to pass over the proceedings of his hero in Aberdeen altogether in silence. Montrose himself declared that he had never shed blood except in battle. But the facts are proved by Spalding, a townsman of Aberdeen, present on the occasion, who was firmly attached to episcopacy and the king's cause, and a well-wisher to the general success of Montrose, who must consequently in this case have been an unwilling witness, and whose testimony may therefore be considered as conclusive. We therefore have before us the strange phenomenon of a man, who cannot be considered as a pure barbarian by blood, birth, and education, performing deeds that place him on a moral level with Nana Sahib, and for what? to enable King Charles the First to do with impunity whatever had been done by King James, who had murdered by divine right two of Montrose's uncles.

The explanation may be found partly perhaps in two qualities which entered largely into the character of Mon

1 Spalding, vol. ii. p. 266.

The pride

trose, unbounded pride1 and strong fanaticism. of a Scottish oligarch was then, as it is now, boundless. To such a man the body of the people of Scotland were, if they are not still, a mere mass of base gutterbloods; whose ignoble blood was, to borrow the words which Sir Walter Scott has put into the mouth of Montrose's antitype Graham of Claverhouse, but "the red puddle that stagnated in the veins of psalm-singing mechanics, crack-brained demagogues, and silly boors." Το murder such human beings in the most cruel and cowardly manner in cold blood was, it seems, to judge from what we know of Montrose and Dundee, an act of which there was no need to be ashamed. Their fanaticism, for those men were fanatics too and worshipped an idol as loathsome and as cruel as the superstition which they imputed to their enemies, altogether silenced within them the voice of conscience. There is no mild remedy to cure such fanaticism as this. In those days the charge of Cromwell's cuirassiers and the shock of his pikemen did something; in later times the crash of the guillotine and the thunder of Bonaparte's cannon have done something more towards giving to the class of Montrose and Dundee in Scotland and elsewhere a rather dim perception that they had made some slight errors in their reckoning concerning the canaille or gutter-bloods.

Is it surprising that Montrose as he was led a prisoner through the country and the towns where his troops had committed so many deeds of rapine and cruelty should have been assailed with curses? Is it not rather surprising

that he should not have been torn in pieces? Let any one place himself in the situation, not of a man who had lost his male relatives in battle against Montrose-that would have been a thing in the ordinary course of events-but of a man whose fields had been laid waste, whose houses had been burned, whose father, mother, wife, daughters, sisters had been butchered by this hero after the model of one of the heroes of Plutarch, (many of whose heroes were in truth but sorry scoundrels), and then let such a one say whether he would have considered Montrose entitled to the treatment of an honourable and generous enemy? Nay more—if there was a man wearing the "semblance of a kingly crown," who commissioned this Montrose and who avowed and sought to profit by his atrocities, will any man say there was no good done by "garring such a king ken that he too had a lithe in his neck?"

The route by which Montrose was conducted to Edinburgh crossed the river South Esk not far from his own house of Old Montrose. The beautiful valley through which the South Esk flows from the Grampians to the sea is rich in historical associations. Towards the upper part of it stand Glammis, the ancient castle of Macbeth, and the ruins of Finhaven, the castle of that Earl of Crawford, known as "the Tiger Earl." Farther down on a rock overhanging the river is the castle of Brechin, which Sir Thomas Maule bravely defended against Edward I. and his army, till he was killed upon the ramparts, with his last breath commanding his men not to surrender. But the greatest name associated with that valley and that river is that of the Marquis of Montrose, who was born in the town of Montrose where the South Esk joins the sea, and passed much of his boyhood and youth at his house of Old Montrose about four miles up the river. The aspect

of that quiet valley more rich and wooded than is usual in Scotland, the gentle sloping green hills near, the huge chain of the blue Grampians in the distance, the clear and rapid stream rushing over its pebbled bed—all, while they reminded Montrose of those other days before ambition and revenge had done their work upon a character by nature brave and chivalrous, formed a strange contrast with that stormy and adventurous life which was soon to have a violent and terrible end.

Montrose's guards stopped with him for a short time at Kinnaird, the house of his father-in-law, the Earl of Southesk. Kinnaird is only about two miles distant from Montrose's own house at Old Montrose, situated like Kinnaird on the banks of the river South Esk. Between Montrose's mansion-house of Old Montrose and the town of Montrose is a basin or sort of estuary about four miles in length and two in breadth, dry at low water and filled by every returning tide, through which the South Esk rushes to meet the German Ocean. At Kinnaird Montrose procured liberty from his guards to see two of his children. But neither the sight of them nor of the scenes of his early and tranquil days appears to have occasioned in him the display of any outward sign of emotion. "Neither at meeting nor parting," says Wishart, "could any change of his former countenance be discovered, or the least expression heard which was not suitable to the greatness of his spirit. During the whole journey his countenance was serene and cheerful as of one who was superior to all reproach.

"1

But the captive conqueror, though his pride and force of character enabled him to bear with no outward sign of emotion that terrible reverse of fortune, and to smile at

1 Wishart, p. 380.

the insults of his enemies with a sedate and unshrinking eye, was a poet as well as a great soldier, and those scenes of his youth beheld under such circumstances must have awakened a host of recollections. The electric power of

thought would bring back, though but for a moment, the memory of early friends-some of them dead-others friends no longer the memory too of those dreams of early youth when the bound of his ambition was but to make one loved name "famous by his pen and glorious by his sword," and accomplish for it more than Brian de Bois Guilbert did for the name of Adelaide de Montemare. And though Montrose's early life may have been as unprosperous as that of the haughty Templar, it may have left, in a soul still haughtier and more daring than Bois Guilbert's, the traces of a life-long sorrow. But it is but for a fleeting hour he can look on those scenes now with all their sweet and bitter memories. Though there had passed his childhood; though there his youth had felt the spell of beauty and dreamt the dream of love; though there the clear and rapid stream, the dark pine wood, the broomy haugh, the furze and the very ragwort had for him a charm denied to the luxuriance of a more southern clime; his age shall not repose there and strangers shall dwell in the ancient abode of his fathers. Some of the walls of his house and some of the trees he planted may still stand. So fleeting is man! The feeblest work of his hands is more enduring. The houses he builds, the trees he plants, outlast him by centuries.

The trees which Bacon planted

in Gray's Inn Gardens, the trees under which Cromwell,

1 In his "Legend of Montrose," Sir Walter Scott, who was deeply versed in Scottish family history, makes Montrose say to Lord Menteith in reference to the latter's love for

Annot Lyle-"I am sorry for you—I too have known-but what avails it to awake sorrows which have long slumbered!"