Montrose - Mowbray Morris

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intellect was indeed quick and eager rather than solid. His classical knowledge was that rather of a poet than a scholar, and his poetical fame must be content to rest upon a few stanzas which have taken their place among English lyrics; but it will be seen that he had read and thought much on those problems of government which the inhabitants of this kingdom were then seriously addressing themselves to solve. A book published after his death by Thomas Saintserf (son of the Bishop of Galloway), who had been his secretary during the stormiest years of his life, bears witness, in a dedication to his son, to the polished and scholarly tone of the conversation he loved to encourage among his associates. We are told, and may believe, that the few and enforced pauses in his short tumultuous career were relieved by study; but no man turns to that solace in his hours of disappointment who has not felt at least some touch of its enchantment in his youth. We may therefore conclude that he found some time amid the gaieties of St. Andrews to read the books that had been bought for him.

      Among the houses that Montrose visited was Kinnaird Castle, the seat of Lord Carnegie, his nearest neighbour in Forfarshire. The families were already connected by the marriage of Eupheme, Lord Carnegie's youngest sister, to Robert Graham of Morphie. The tie was now to be drawn closer.[2] There were six daughters at Kinnaird Castle, and to the youngest of these, Magdalene, Montrose began to pay his court. The wooing was not long. His guardians were well pleased to see their young chief in a fair way to carry on the line; and that chief, in youth as in manhood, was not wont to linger over anything he undertook. He was married in the private chapel of the castle on November 10th, 1629. The bride's age is not known, but as the bridegroom can only just have completed his seventeenth year, they may be fairly allowed the conventional title of the young couple. There is a tradition that she had been previously courted by the Master of Ogilvy, which, if true, might suggest that she had some advantage of Montrose in years. But nothing is certainly known of her—of her appearance, tastes, or temper, of the course of her married life or her relations with her husband. She bore him four sons, the second coming into the world just as his father attained his majority, and died in 1645.

      According to the terms of the marriage-contract the next three years were passed at Kinnaird Castle, but no record of them exists. All the bridegroom's books, papers, and furniture were removed from St. Andrews to the castle. We catch a glimpse of him very soon after the marriage on the links at Montrose, and we know that he was made a burgess of Aberdeen shortly before the ceremony. We are also told that after the novelty of his new life had worn off, he applied himself so assiduously to his studies as to become, in the pious old chronicler's words, "not merely a great master, but a critic in the Greek and Latin," of which we may believe so much as we choose. But the only visible memorial of this time is his portrait painted by Jameson, who was then practising his art in his native town of Aberdeen. This was Graham of Morphie's marriage-gift to the bride, and is still to be seen at Kinnaird Castle, where it is said to have remained since it was first hung there more than two centuries and a half ago. Those who have seen it pronounce it to be still in an unusually good state of preservation. Time has dealt tenderly with the long auburn hair, the fresh complexion, and gay clothes of the young bridegroom. The smooth upper lip and arch expression show a mind very different of course from that which had set its seal on the grave and resolute face seen later by Dobson and by Honthorst. But this smiling lad in his slashed doublet, lace collar, and gold chain is clearly father to the stately armoured man who had risked all for his king, and was to lose all.[3]

      In the spring of 1633 Montrose left Scotland for the customary period of foreign travel. He was absent three years, but the barest outline of the time alone remains. We know that for some part of it his companion was Basil Fielding, son of the newly-made Earl of Denbigh, that he visited France and Italy, and that in the spring of 1635 he was in Rome with the young Lord Angus and four other Scottish gentlemen. He is said to have continued his studies diligently during this period, and to have particularly affected the society of learned men. "He studied," writes Saintserf, "as much of the mathematics as is required for a soldier; but his great study was to read men and the actions of great men."

      Montrose returned to Scotland some time in 1636. He was then in his twenty-fourth year, of the middle height, well and strongly made, of graceful carriage and singularly expert in all bodily exercises, especially in riding. His hair was of the light reddish tinge which darkens with time, and his complexion of that clear fresh colour which is often found with red hair; his nose was aquiline, his eyes gray, bright, and keen. Though not strictly a handsome man, his appearance in later life at least must have been striking, dignified, and noble. Those who knew him only in manhood describe him as being somewhat haughty to strangers, especially if they were his equals or superiors in rank; but to his friends, and always to his inferiors, his manners were singularly courteous and engaging. In his later years of exile he is said to have been somewhat too stately and formal, and inclined, as the saying goes, to take too much upon himself. Burnet, whose friendship for the Hamiltons would not dispose him to think favourably of Montrose—though he does him more justice in the biography of those brothers than in the history of his own time—says contemptuously that he had too much of the hero about him, and that his manner was stately to affectation, insinuating also that his courage was not so certain as his friends pretended. To call Montrose a coward should be enough to put any witness out of court at once; but indeed, as Burnet was only seven years old when the man against whom he vented this silly piece of spite died, and as the society he knew best was unlikely to foster any fervent admiration for the great champion of the Throne, his evidence cannot go for much. From the accounts, however, of men better able to judge than the Bishop of Salisbury, it is clear that there was something in Montrose's manner that did not please all tastes, and perhaps seemed fantastic to some. "He was of most resolute and undaunted spirit," writes one of his friends, "which began to appear in him to the wonder and expectation of all men, even in his childhood." And again: "He was exceeding constant and loving to those who did adhere to him, and very affable to such as he knew; though his carriage, which indeed was not ordinary, made him seem proud." These expressions fall in well with Clarendon's famous character of him, and also with the impression made by him on Cardinal De Retz, when they met in Paris in 1647, as the very ideal of one of Plutarch's heroes. These are witnesses of Montrose's prime; but the carriage that is admitted to be not ordinary in a grown man would probably be still more marked in a young one. The Covenanters, through their great mouthpiece Robert Baillie, declared him to be too proud, headstrong, and wilful for their tastes. Certainly he had little of the tone or temper of the Puritan about him, and of all the young aristocrats who joined them was the least likely to submit himself blindly to their dictation, or become the mere instrument of their factions; and as he also had evidently a strong partiality for his own opinion, which he was neither slow to form nor to declare, it is plain that there can never have been much personal sympathy between him and his early associates. We may think of Montrose, then, at this time as a young man full of high resolves and romantic fancies, ardent, aspiring, impulsive, impatient of delay, and always more eager to lead than willing to follow. But his own verses are after all the clearest reflection of his character, and though probably written in the last year of his life, they describe the Covenanter as truly as the Cavalier.

      As Alexander I will reign,

       And I will reign alone;

       My thoughts did evermore disdain

       A rival on my throne:

       He either fears his fate too much,

       Or his deserts are small,

       That dares not put it to the touch,

       To gain or lose it all.

       FOR KING OR COVENANT

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      Montrose had returned to Scotland at a critical time. Eleven years earlier, while he was still reading Seneca with his tutor at Glasgow, the heralds had proclaimed from the city-cross at Edinburgh a royal edict destined to set not Scotland only but the whole kingdom in a blaze. By the Act of Revocation, as it was called, Charles, before he had been a year upon his throne, succeeded in doing what his father through nearly forty years of meddling had been careful to leave undone. The blast of his heralds'

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