Montrose - Mowbray Morris

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      Montrose was the only son of six children. Their mother was Lady Margaret Ruthven, daughter of the first Earl of Gowrie. It was whispered that, like her brother, she dabbled in magic, and had learned from a witch that her son was destined to be a firebrand to his country. If the report be true—and the Black Art found credence in Scotland long after Lady Margaret's day—she may well have sighed to think that the wild fate which had befallen so many of her family was to be the portion of her son. For the Ruthvens had both done and suffered much evil in their time. Her grandfather, who had died in exile, a fugitive from justice, was that grim lord who had risen from a sick-bed to lead the murderers of Rizzio into their queen's presence. Her father, who had perished on the scaffold, one of the many victims of Arran's intrigues, had been concerned in the violent attempt on the young king's liberty popularly known as the Raid of Ruthven. Her two brothers had perished by the sword before their sovereign's face, a fate which there is too good reason to believe that they had destined for him. Of her own life nothing more is known than that she bore her husband six children and died in 1618 when the youngest was but three years old. Her two eldest daughters, Lilias and Margaret, were married soon after her death: Lilias to Sir John Colquhoun of Luss, a union destined to an abrupt and shameful end by his flight with her sister Katherine, who had been received into the family after her father's death and was then little more than a child; but Margaret, though she did not live long to enjoy it, was more fortunate in her marriage with Archibald, first Lord Napier of Merchiston, a wise and good man who had been particularly recommended by King James to his son as the most judicious and disinterested of all Scottish statesmen. Of the others, Dorothea became the wife of Sir James, afterwards Lord Rollo, and Beatrix, the youngest and apparently her brother's favourite, the wife of the Master of Maderty, one of the first to join Montrose under the standard of their king. Both Margaret and Dorothea died young, the first probably about 1630, the latter in 1638; the deaths of Lilias and Beatrix are unrecorded; of Katherine all traces seem to have been lost after her disappearance from her sister's house in 1631.

      In his twelfth year Lord Graham was sent to study at Glasgow under the charge of a tutor, William Forrett. Master Forrett was most scrupulous in keeping account of his pupil's expenses, and to these we owe all our knowledge of this time. It is not much, and, as may be supposed, is rather sumptuary than intellectual. There is mention of certain books bought for the young student, and there is evidence that the tutor borrowed them for his own reading. A Latin version of Xenophon's Hellenics, the works of Seneca with Lipsius' commentary, and Fairfax's translation of the Gerusalemme Liberata are among them; but the lad's favourite book at this time would seem to have been Raleigh's History of the World. Our information as to the domestic establishment is more precise. It was abundant and costly, as was then considered becoming the heir of an ancient and wealthy house. He had a valet and two pages, plate, furniture, and linen of the best quality, nor was the favourite white pony forgotten. His wardrobe was handsomely stocked with suits of English cloth and embroidered cloaks, and his pages wore scarlet liveries. He was lodged in a large house belonging to Sir George Elphinstone of Blythswood, who had succeeded Napier as Lord Justice-Clerk, and for part of the time little Lady Katherine seems to have lived here with her brother. One pleasant fact at least stands out clear from these dim memories; there was a warm affection and regard between tutor and pupil. Years afterwards, when Montrose had burned his boats by the victory of Tippermuir, one of his first acts was to send for Master Forrett, to resume his part of purse-bearer to his old pupil and to be tutor to his sons.

      The sudden death of the father in November, 1626, broke up the establishment at Glasgow, and in the following January Montrose, then only in his fifteenth year, was entered at the University of St. Andrews, as was then the general custom of the young Scottish aristocracy. The funeral ceremonies of the dead Earl give a curious picture of the age. They lasted for one month and nineteen days, during which time all the kinsmen and friends of the family were entertained in the castle of Kincardine. There were Sir William Graham of Braco, the only brother, and the Earl of Wigton, the nephew of the deceased, with the sons-in-law Lord Napier and Sir John Colquhoun. All the branches of the clan were represented; Grahams of Claverhouse and Fintrie, of Inchbrakie, Morphie, Orchill, and Balgowan, with many neighbouring nobles and lairds, some of them destined in no long time to be the bitter foes of the House they were now assembled to honour. Many of the guests brought with them contributions to the funeral feast as though to a solemn picnic; and other provisions of all kinds were purchased in quantities sufficient to have stocked the Black Douglas's terrible larder many times over, while the wine and ale were reckoned by puncheons and buckets.

      Montrose's life at college seems to have been much the same as that of any young man of rank and fortune to-day at Christ Church or Trinity. He mixed freely in all the diversions of the place and time, hunted, hawked, and shot, played golf on the links of St. Andrews and tennis in the court at Leith. At archery he was especially skilful. In the second year of his residence he won the prize annually shot for by the students, a silver arrow with a medal bearing the name of the winner, and this he held against all competitors while he remained at the University. His walls were hung with his bows, just as to-day the successful cricketers and oarsmen of Oxford and Cambridge arrange round their rooms the instruments of their triumphs. Eminent in those accomplishments which always secure the admiration of the young, profuse in hospitality to his friends, liberal to the poor, and especially to those needy professors of the fine arts who were never slow in those days to scent out a generous patron, he evidently began even in these early years to engage the attention of his contemporaries. His own estates and tenants were not neglected; but his vacations were mostly passed in visits to the houses of his brothers-in-law and of the heads of the various branches of his clan, each of whom, according to the custom of the time, was considered as in some sort the guardian of his young chief, though Lord Napier, Sir William Graham of Claverhouse, and Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie seem to have had the largest share in an office which with a young gentleman of such cheerful tastes and dispositions can have been no sinecure.

      This merry life was not, however, without a check. In April, 1628, his sister Dorothea was married from Napier's house in Edinburgh to young James Rollo, and both then and afterwards at Carnock in Fife, where the honeymoon was spent, there had been high festival. The result of all this gaiety, alternated with days of hard exercise in the saddle and on the links, was that the lad fell sick on his return to college. For some days he was seriously ill. Two doctors were called in, and to judge by their fees must have been assiduous in their visits. They ordered their patient's long curls to be ruthlessly shorn, and they ordered also a diet which strikes our modern notions as curiously generous for a young fellow who, to speak plainly, had probably been only over-eating himself. However, nature and the doctors together triumphed—or, it may be, nature in spite of the doctors; and after a few weeks' confinement, cheered by chess and cards and the gift of a valuable hawk from his kinsman of Fintrie, Montrose was once more about at his old occupations—one of the first recorded acts of his convalescence being a breakfast-party given to some of his young friends who had been most attentive to him in his sickness.

      Of his studies we know much less than of his amusements. Sums for the purchase and binding of books appear in his accounts, which were kept as scrupulously by his new tutor, Master John Lambye, as by Master Forrett at Glasgow, and from the same source we learn that he had begun the study of Greek. Plutarch's Lives, Cæsar's Commentaries, Lucan, and Quintus Curtius were now added to his library, though the verses found written in some of them must belong to a later date. Undergraduates, more happy than their descendants, were not in those days pestered with examinations; but that Montrose at least attended lectures after a fashion is clear from an entry in his tutor's accounts of the sum of twenty-nine shillings paid to "a scholar who writes my lord's notes in the school." But we may suppose that his studies were directed more by his own tastes and dispositions than by the curriculum of the place, which, as was the case not so long ago in our English Universities, was not likely to be very sternly enforced on the young aristocrats who then frequented St. Andrews. It is, however, certain that he cannot have passed his time only in play. More fortunate in some respects than another famous member of his House, Montrose has never been called a block-head because he spelled no better than the rest of his world. Among his contemporaries his reputation stood high. "He was of very good parts," says Clarendon, "which were improved by a good education;" and posterity has accepted the verdict.

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