sold his estate and raised a troop of horse for the Parliament. John Bunyan served as a private soldier in the Parliamentary army. But of all these, if some have sur

passed Montrose in literary, none have come near him in military achievements; and I am not aware that there is any other man on record who has united in an equal degree poetical and military genius. Montrose was certainly a most accomplished man; and I regret, for the honour of human nature, that he should have tarnished his name by cruelty. There are indeed well-authenticated facts in his history that seem to show that he was not by nature cruel or ungenerous, and that he was not an exception to the rule that brave men are not cruel. Nevertheless the plea put forward for him that he necessarily gave way to acts of pillage and cruelty from inability to pay his half-barbarous soldiery will not avail him much; and history, painting him as he was, will paint him as a great man with dark spots on his fame.

The royalist writers represent the people, and many even of Montrose's bitterest enemies as weeping on the occasion of his execution. That age was much addicted to tears, as is manifested when we find such a man as Cromwell, and even the whole House of Commons, occasionally dissolving into floods of tears. It may therefore, though it certainly seems strange, be true that the people of Scotland should weep even for a man who had treated them as Montrose had done, as people naturally weep at any great reverse of fortune. In regard to the mean spite imputed to the ruling party in Scotland at the time, as exhibited in the various studied insults offered to Montrose, the whole matter may be summed up in a very few words. If Montrose in his wars adhered to the recognized course of warfare of civilised men as the term was then understood, all

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insult offered to him as a prisoner was undoubtedly a mean revenge, and an ignominy recoiling upon those who offered it. But if, on the other hand, it be true that Montrose carried on war like a cruel and reckless savage, it would be drawing rather too largely on human forbearance in Scotland two hundred years ago to expect that he should receive the treatment which men of honour and humanity are anxious to give to a conquered enemy who has done nothing to forfeit his right to honourable treatment.

Some writers have asserted, but without producing authority for the assertion, that Montrose at the beginning of his career joined the Covenanters from disgust at neglect from the Court. But when we call to mind that Montrose's mother was the sister of the Earl of Gowrie and of Alexander Ruthven, so basely murdered by James the First, and that his aunt Beatrix Ruthven had received through the Queen and Sir Thomas Erskine a very different version of that dark transaction called by King James the Gowrie Conspiracy, from that which King James put forth, we do not need to have recourse to any supposition of neglect from the Court to account for the fact of a young man, so intelligent and so well-educated as the Earl of Montrose, thinking it necessary to devise means to diminish rather than to increase the power to do evil, both to the nobility and people, of the royal family of Stuart. Wishart's work is so much a mere panegyric that it is no authority on disputed points. But the testimony of Principal Baillie, the best authority and beyond all suspicion, is, before Montrose's desertion of the Covenanters, very favourable to his general character, and throws no doubt on his sincerity. It is remarkable too that, so far from affording the least hint of cruelty in Montrose's character, Baillie objects to his too great lenity. "The discretion," he says,

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"of that generous and noble youth was but too great. A great sum was named as a fine to that unnatural city [Aberdeen] but all was forgiven." 1 And again: "Our forces likewise disbanded, it was thought, on some malcontentment either at Montrose's too great lenitie in sparing the enemies' houses, or somewhat else."2 This was in March 1639 when Montrose then only twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age went against Aberdeen as Lord General, with the Earl Marischall, the Lord Erskine, the Lord Carnegie, the Lord Elcho, "his Excellencie Felt Marshal Leslie," and an army of 9000 men. Now, as one of the charges brought against Montrose by the Parliament of Scotland in their declaration of the 24th January 1650 was, that "being a man of a mean and desperate fortune, and not meeting with that esteem and reward which he in his vanity proposed to himself, at the first pacification he began to hearken to the promises of the Court," how came it that, "being a man of a mean and desperate fortune," and so young, he was appointed to this important command? The inference is that the oligarchy which then governed Scotland must, notwithstanding their habitual blindness to such qualities, have perceived in Montrose, young as he was, the qualities fit for command; and that Argyle possessing great craft, (though no talent for war), and the power arising from a much greater estate or at least a much greater "following," than Montrose, which in an oligarchy confers the highest offices without regard to fitness, had influence in the Council to have Montrose superseded and Alexander

1 Baillie's Letters and Journals, vol. i. p. 197. Edinburgh 1841. Bannatyne Club edition. Baillie calls Aberdeen "that unnatural city" on account of its leaning to prelacy.

Baillie's Letters and Journals, vol. i. p. 205.

3 Spalding, vol. i. p. 107. Edinburgh, 1829. 2 vols. 4to. Bannatyne Club edition.

Leslie, an old soldier of fortune and military pedant, put in his place. Montrose's vindictive feelings on this occasion were also probably much exasperated by the fact of the existence of an old feud between his family and that of Argyle. Seeing therefore no hope for the exercise of those great military talents, which with the instinct of genius he felt that he possessed, in the service of the Covenanters, he determined to offer his services to the Royal cause. And however much reason he may have had to dislike the supremacy of the Stuarts, he would probably have very much preferred it to the supremacy of Argyle and Loudon, which would have been in other words the supremacy of the Campbells. If this was the alternative, it is idle to say that it was Montrose's duty as a man of principle to bow to the order which superseded him and placed another in his command. Moreover, where the Government is little else but a scramble for power among a few families, the modern standard of political morality cannot be applied. It is proper to add that some of Montrose's greatest enemies have allowed that, though he could not bear an equal, and was always ready to destroy an adversary, whether by heroism in the field or less honourable means, he was always generous to those who testified their sense of his superiority. There can be little doubt that, if Montrose with his military genius had held the command of the armies of the Scottish Covenanters, the struggle would have assumed an aspect different in many respects-but that the result would have been more favourable to the ultimate establishment of good government and of civil and religious liberty is very far from probable, for to look for such a result from that corrupt and tyrannical oligarchy which then and long after misgoverned Scotland, was quite out of the question. In such a case it

is absolutely necessary to destroy before there can be any hope to reform.

Montrose, when brought before the Scottish Parliament to hear his sentence, had said in reply to the Chancellor Loudon's violent harangue against him, that

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although it was impossible in the course of hostilities absolutely to prevent acts of military violence, he had always disowned and punished such irregularities. He had never," he said, "spilt the blood of a prisoner, even in retaliation of the cold-blooded murder of his officers and friends, nay he had spared the lives of thousands in the very shock of battle." He might also have told that Chancellor and the rest of his judges that all the crimes imputed to him, if proved on the clearest evidence, would not leave behind them a stain so indelible as the fingering of a certain sum of English gold, which was not unknown to that Chancellor and his accomplices or brother judges, and which was the price of blood. Though those men died in their beds and Montrose died by the hands of the hangman, had they all come before Dante's infernal tribunal, the prisoner would not have been condemned to so deep a part of the abyss as some of his judges. For if to Montrose would have been assigned a place with Ezzelino in the lake of boiling blood of Bulicame, the traitors who sold the king who trusted them would have had their portion with Judas Iscariot in the eternal ice of Giudecca.

Urry, who had changed sides several times during the civil war, and had been sometimes the enemy, sometimes the follower of Montrose, was executed with others of the marquis's followers, among whom was Whitford,1 one of the assassins of Dr. Dorislaus. Lord Frendraught, who when

1 Whitelock, p. 460.