The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

The preceding ballad was a song of triumph over the defeat of Montrose at Philiphaugh; the verses, which follow are a lamentation for his final discomfiture and cruel death.  The present edition of “The Gallant Grahams” is given from tradition, enlarged and corrected by an ancient printed edition, entitled, “The Gallant Grahams of Scotland” to the tune of “I will away, and I will not tarry,” of which Mr Ritson favoured the editor with an accurate copy.

The conclusion of Montrose’s melancholy history is too well known.  The Scottish army, which sold king Charles I. to his parliament, had, we may charitably hope, no idea that they were bartering his blood; although they must have been aware, that they were consigning him to perpetual bondage.[A] At least the sentiments of the kingdom at large differed widely from those of the military merchants, and the danger of king Charles drew into England a well appointed Scottish army, under the command of the duke of Hamilton.  But he met with Cromwell, and to meet with Cromwell was inevitable defeat.  The death of Charles, and the triumph of the independents, excited still more highly the hatred and the fears of the Scottish nation.  The outwitted presbyterians, who saw, too late, that their own hands had been employed in the hateful task of erecting the power of a sect, yet more fierce and fanatical than themselves, deputed a commission to the Hague, to treat with Charles II., whom, upon certain conditions they now wished to restore to the throne of his fathers.  At the court of the exiled monarch, Montrose also offered to his acceptance a splendid plan of victory and conquest, and pressed for his permission to enter Scotland; and there, collecting the remains of the royalists to claim the crown for his master, with the sword in his hand.  An able statesman might perhaps have reconciled these jarring projects; a good man would certainly have made a decided choice betwixt them.  Charles was neither the one not the other; and, while he treated with the presbyterians, with a view of accepting the crown from their hands, he scrupled not to authorise Montrose, the mortal enemy of the sect, to pursue his separate and inconsistent plan of conquest.

[Footnote A:  As Salmasius quaintly, but truly, expresses it, Presbyterian iligaverunt independantes trucidaverunt.]

Montrose arrived in the Orkneys with six hundred Germans, was furnished with some recruits from those islands, and was joined by several royalists, as he traversed the wilds of Caithness and Sutherland:  but, advancing into Ross-shire, he was surprised, and totally defeated, by colonel Strachan, an officer of the Scottish parliament, who had distinguished himself in the civil wars, and who afterwards became a decided Cromwellian.  Montrose, after a fruitless resistance, at length fled from the field of defeat, and concealed himself in the grounds of Macleod of Assint to whose fidelity he entrusted his life, and by whom he was delivered up to Lesly, his most bitter enemy.

He was tried for what was termed treason against the estates of the kingdom; and, despite the commission of Charles for his proceedings, he was condemned to die by a parliament, who acknowledged Charles to be their king, and whom, on that account only, Montrose acknowledged to be a parliament.

“The clergy,” says a late animated historian, “whose vocation it was to persecute the repose of his last moments, sought, by the terrors of his sentence, to extort repentance; but his behaviour, firm and dignified to the end, repelled their insulting advances with scorn and disdain.  He was prouder, he replied, to have his head affixed to the prison-walls, than to have his picture placed in the king’s bed-chamber:  ’and, far from being troubled that my limbs are to be sent to your principal cities, I wish I had flesh enough to be dispersed through Christendom, to attest my dying attachment to my king.’  It was the calm employment of his mind, that night, to reduce this extravagant sentiment to verse.  He appeared next day, on the scaffold, in a rich habit, with the same serene and undaunted countenance, and addressed the people, to vindicate his dying unabsolved by the church, rather than to justify an invasion of the kingdom, during a treaty with the estates.  The insults of his enemies were not yet exhausted.  The history of his exploits was attached to his neck by the public executioner:  but he smiled at their inventive malice; declared, that he wore it with more pride than he had done the garter; and, when his devotions were finished, demanding if any more indignities remained to be practised, submitted calmly to an unmerited fate.”—­Laing’s History of Scotland, Vol.  I. p. 404.

Such was the death of James Graham, the great marquis of Montrose, over whom some lowly bard has poured forth the following elegiac verses.  To say, that they are far unworthy of the subject, is no great reproach; for a nobler poet might have failed in the attempt.  Indifferent as the ballad is, we may regret its being still more degraded by many apparent corruptions.  There seems an attempt to trace Montrose’s career, from his first raising the royal standard, to his second expedition and death; but it is interrupted and imperfect.  From the concluding stanza, I presume the song was composed upon the arrival of Charles in Scotland, which so speedily followed the execution of Montrose, that the king entered the city while the head of his most faithful and most successful adherent was still blackening in the sun.