Crown, Covenant and Cromwell, page 17
Little wonder then that Aboyne should heed his father and lead his men home, while Montrose carried on only as far as Dalkeith. Edinburgh was still gripped by plague, and this was sufficient excuse to halt his advance and avoid the embarrassment of knocking on the gates with just a single regiment of foot at his back. Instead he turned south, hoping to raise large numbers of cavalry in the borders for at Bothwell many of the local magnates had submitted to the king’s general and promised to raise their men. At first the signs were good. The Marquis of Douglas joined him at Galashiels on 7 September with around 1,000 Moss-troopers, but neither the Earl of Home nor the Earl of Roxburgh appeared. By 10 September Montrose was at Jedburgh, and perhaps contemplating a raid into England, when disturbing news reached him. Lieutenant-General David Leslie had passed through Berwick four days earlier with at least four regiments of infantry and six regiments of cavalry hurriedly recalled from England.
Having already parted with Baillie and as many regiments as he could spare to secure Scotland against the Royalist insurgency Leven and his army had then spent much of the year in the north. The English Parliament wanted the army to join in an offensive against the strategically important Royalist stronghold of Chester, but with the situation in Scotland growing ever more critical, especially after Auldearn, Leven was reluctant to move far from the border. Nevertheless it was politically imperative that the English alliance be maintained and so he compromised by crossing the Pennines into Westmorland, a move that simultaneously allowed him to cover David Leslie’s wearisome blockade of Carlisle and interpose between a possible attempt by the king to cut his way through to Scotland, but which at the same time left him conveniently positioned to march on Chester if circumstances allowed. In the event a Royalist thrust into Yorkshire appeared for a time to be a more realistic possibility and so Leven recrossed the Pennines to a rendezvous with Lord Fairfax at Doncaster. There he learned the end of the war was in sight.
The destruction of the king’s army in the north at Marston Moor had freed that of the Eastern Association to turn south and quite literally ride to the rescue of London, shorn of its defenders in twin disasters at Cropredy bridge and Lostwithiel during the summer. Another battle at Newbury was indecisive, but what followed was not. Dismayed by the failure of no fewer than three combined armies to gain a victory there, Parliament reorganised or ‘new modelled’ them into just one army and gave the command to the most successful of its generals – Sir Thomas Fairfax – with Oliver Cromwell as his second-in-command. At Naseby, in Northamptonshire, on 14 June 1645 this new army utterly destroyed the king’s principal army. Eager to follow up this triumph Fairfax next moved against the king’s army in the west and to cover his rear Leven was ordered down into the Severn Valley.
As ever Leven remained reluctant to be drawn even farther south, but on 2 July he marched from Nottingham, crossed the Severn at Bewdley and pushed south to besiege Hereford by the end of the month. With his last armies disintegrating around him the king skirted Leven’s outposts and lunged northwards for Yorkshire after all, hoping to raise again the army lost on Marston Moor the year before. He got as far as Doncaster, but by then David Leslie was in pursuit with eight regiments of horse, one of dragoons and 500 mounted infantry, so the king turned south again, stormed Huntingdon out of sheer frustration and then returned to Oxford. By now Hereford was on the point of falling.
On the night of 28 August two sergeants, Thomas Innes and William Brown, were paid thirty shillings apiece for plumbing the ditch around Hereford. Based on what they discovered it was drained and two mines blown under the walls. All was ready to storm the place, but as the king cautiously approached with his last remaining soldiers on 3 September he found the Scots were gone. Leven had learned of the disaster at Kilsyth and was heading for home. Exactly what he intended to do when he got there, especially if he were to find a Royalist parliament sitting in Glasgow, might be an interesting question, but David Leslie’s cavalry brigade was ahead of him and in Berwick by 6 September.
There Leslie conferred with Argyle before marching rather cautiously along the coast road towards Edinburgh, with scouts out across the border hills sniffing for news of the Royalists. By the night of 11 September he had gotten the length of Gladsmuir, halfway between Haddington and Tranent where he was joined by at least two other cavalry regiments, Kirkcudbright’s and Barclay’s,11 and next day turned due south to Soutra and so over the hills to Galashiels.
In the meantime Montrose had pulled out of Jedburgh and was heading westwards to avoid him, presumably with a view to passing into Upper Clydesdale from where he could either cover Glasgow or get back above the Forth. By the afternoon of 12 September he and his men were at Selkirk. Unaware that Leslie was closing in, many of the officers found comfortable quarters in the burgh, while the rest of the army scattered itself along the north bank of Ettrick Water for nearly three kilometres along a narrow bottom called Philiphaugh. Security was seemingly limited to a single troop of cavalry left as a rearguard three kilometres away at Sunderland Hall, and at some point during the night this was snapped up by Leslie’s advance guard as it forded the Tweed. Only the commander, Alexander Charteris of Amisfield, and two or three others got away. When they reached Selkirk, Amisfield’s report that they had been attacked by Leslie’s men was dismissed as a drunken brawl, and no attempt was made to rouse the army.
Undisturbed, Leslie and his men appear to have spent the rest of night ‘invironed with woodes in a deep walley’,12 presumably the valley of the Tweed between Linglie Hill and Meigle Hill, just a little upstream from Sunderland. Some of his men must have been left behind in England to rejoin Leven for he had marched from Berwick with just six cavalry regiments: his own, the Earl of Leven’s, John Middleton’s, Lord Kirkcudbright’s, Lord Montgomery’s, and Hugh Fraser’s Dragoons. Muster reports from the following January and the records of a bounty paid to the Philiphaugh regiments suggest that the first two may have had something in the region of 550 officers and men apiece, while Middleton’s had about 400, Lord Kirkcudbright’s 600 and Lord Montgomery’s 470. By this time Fraser’s 400 dragooners were also riding as cavalry in all but name, so in total Leslie ought to have had just under 3,000 cavalry of his own. In addition however he had been joined at Gladsmuir by at least two other units – the Earl of Dalhousie’s and Colonel Harie Barclay’s Horse – and perhaps also some of Balcarres’ men. These may have added another 350 or so, but they were evidently in pretty poor shape and may have been left in reserve. On the other hand Leslie also had 500 mounted infantry of Lord Coupar’s Regiment under a Captain Grierson.13
Ironically the following morning dawned grey and misty, and had any notice been taken of Amisfield’s warning the Royalists might have still been able to escape under cover of the fog. Montrose, according to Ruthven, did intend to pull his men together at first light, but having sat up all night preparing despatches for the king he overslept. Instead just a single patrol was sent out at daybreak under Thomas Ogilvy of Powrie. When he returned with the happy news there was not an enemy within sixteen kilometres, they all remained where they were, displaying no urgency to go anywhere.
All the time Leslie was closing in. With a very comfortable superiority in numbers he divided his army in two at the Linglie Burn, about a kilometre north of Selkirk. One wing led by Lieutenant-Colonel James Agnew of Lord Kirkcudbright’s Regiment crossed the river Ettrick and made for Selkirk itself, while the rest, according to a reliable local ballad tradition, swung around the base of Linglie Hill and went straight for the rebel camp.
The fight, according to his official report, began at 10 a.m. and just minutes before that Montrose’s scoutmaster, Captain Blackadder, had burst in on his lordship at breakfast ‘in a great fright, assureing him that a great armie of his enemies ware aduancing, and allreadie within a myll of the toune’.14
Montrose thereupon flung himself on to the first horse he could catch and galloped across to Philiphaugh, where as so often before he found ‘all in uproar and confusion’. The large body of cavalry encamped on the haugh was not only untrained and inexperienced, but also most of their officers, like Montrose, had taken themselves off to find beds in Selkirk the night before. Presumably they were then trapped there by Agnew’s men, for Wishart says that many were absent and never reached the field. Consequently the troopers were now scattered all over the haugh in loose bodies of fifty, sixty, a hundred or even 200 men and making no attempt to form a battle line. Even the veteran Irish, recognising perhaps that the battle was already lost, were in some disorder with a great many of them intent only on securing their own baggage.
The result was that Laghtnan and O’Cahan could bring up only about 200 infantry, less than half their number. Of the 1,200 horse: ‘He fand only his old souldioures, Airly his troupe, and Collonell Gordoune, both which amounted not to a hundredth and fyftie; with those of Crawford, Ogilvie and some other noble cavelyres, being nyne or ten in number, did raige themselves vpon the generalles right hand, the foot on the left, and a ditch before them.’15
This was largely confirmed by the anonymous W. H. of the so-called Haddington despatch, who wrote that: ‘. . . according to their usuall manner thay had made choice of a most advantageous ground wherein they had intrenched themselves, having upon the one hand an unpasible Ditch, and on the other Dikes and Hedges, and where these were not strong enough, they further fortified them by casting up Ditches, and lined their hedges with Musketeers’.16 Just how much fortifying was actually done in the circumstances is open to question. The remains of ‘trenches’ can still be seen, but as at Fyvie these were most likely agricultural ditches and banks. The ‘unpasible’ ditch may possibly have been the Linglie Burn, joining the Ettrick just north of Selkirk itself, but was more likely to be the prominent re-entrant of the Philhope Burn, for it appears the Royalists also had two cannon planted where it joins the Ettrick.
At any rate W. H. states that the main fight began when three cavalrymen from each side came forward to skirmish and after banging away at each other for a quarter of an hour the Royalists fell back and instead 200 musketeers came out ‘but were forced by ours to retreat in great disorder’. This rather suggests that with Leslie’s opening attack having been made on the Selkirk side of the river the Irish came hurrying up to counter-attack only to run into the 500 musketeers of Lord Coupar’s Regiment, who sent them tumbling back to the ditch.
After these preliminaries there then seems to have been a pause before the battle began in earnest, perhaps because Leslie was still trying to develop the rebel position in the fog. The front between the enclosures occupied by the Royalist infantry and the river Ettrick was relatively narrow, and so when Leslie moved forward again he could deploy only one cavalry regiment at a time. For an hour or so ‘it was hotly disputed’. His first attack was repulsed, as was the second, but in the process many of the Royalist cavalry, led by Gordon and Ogilvy, found themselves trapped on the wrong side of the ditch and at around noon, with nowhere else to go, they broke out to the north.
This left Montrose with just forty or fifty horse besides the border levies still hanging about uncertainly in the rear. With Agnew now having finished mopping up in Selkirk and moving upstream, Leslie was confident enough to ignore him and instead he wheeled to his right and ‘charging very desperately upon the head of his own regiment, broke the body of the enemy’s Foot, after which they all went in confusion and disorder’.17
With more and more cavalry coming up all the time, Montrose and his immediate party decided it was all over and so retired at a ‘soft gallop’, splitting up into three groups to confuse their pursuers. The border levies may have been a little slower off the mark, for the Haddington despatch tells how the Royalist horse rallied again, ‘which occasioned their total overthrow’. Amidst the confusion, Montrose’s adjutant, Stewart, also managed to rally about a hundred of the Irish at Philiphaugh farm, but then surrendered on promise of quarter. With that, the battle ended, but not the killing. Coldly equivocating that quarter had been promised only to the three senior officers – Stewart, O’Cahan and Laghtnan – Leslie proceeded to have all his Irish prisoners shot. There were about a hundred in all, and that seemingly did not include a large numbers of camp-followers, who were also murdered, either on the spot or over the next few days.
The senior officers among the prisoners, who eventually included Nathaniel Gordon, were also executed in the end, except for Stewart who somehow escaped. As for the rest, a surprising number got away. In fact Wishart contends that: ‘Almost none of the horse, and very few of the foot, excepting those who had surrendered on terms, fell in fight. As they were not more than 500 in all, and of those 250 rejoined Montrose before the next day, all armed with their swords, we may conjecture that those who were missing did not exceed that number.’18 This boast might be as optimistic in its own way as the Haddington despatch, which claims there were ‘between two and three thousand killed’, but the fact remains that, while crippled, Montrose refused to accept defeat and still had enough men to prolong the agony. By 19 September he was safely back in Atholl.
At Dunkeld Montrose was rejoined by Inchbrackie, but appeals to MacColla went unanswered, and so Montrose marched northwards with some 800 infantry and 200 cavalry to try and link up with the Gordons again. Instead he found himself in the middle of a local civil war, which had little to do with national politics and everything to do with deep-seated family rivalries.
The End
Returning home after Kilsyth, Aboyne had quite fortuitously surprised and captured the entire Committee of War for the northeastern sheriffdoms near Fettereso on 14 September, and then followed up this unexpected coup by installing William Gordon of Arradoul as governor of Aberdeen.19 The burgh militia were also ordered to be called out as a garrison, but the arrival of Major-General John Middleton with 800 men of his own and Lord Montgomery’s regiments at the end of the month was greeted with relief rather than musket balls. At first Middleton was understandably wary of venturing farther with his little brigade, but his presence provided sufficient impetus for a revival of pro-government activity in Aberdeenshire led by the Master of Forbes.20
It was against this unpromising background that Montrose reappeared and persuaded Aboyne to meet him at Drumminor Castle with some 1,500 infantry, and as many as 500 cavalry under his younger brother, Lord Lewis Gordon. So far so good, but the marquis ‘fynding himselfe now stronge eneugh to giue his enemies a day’ announced that he intended to march south again, rather than confront Middleton, who by then was lying at Turriff. Aboyne reluctantly agreed, but then Montrose repeated his earlier mistake by insisting that the Earl of Crawford be acknowledged as commander of the cavalry, whereupon Lord Lewis Gordon proceeded to assert his independence by undertaking an unauthorised raid on one of Middleton’s outposts at Kintore.
The raid was spectacularly successful. Middleton’s men, considerably outnumbered, fell back to Turriff in such a panic that he in turn fled northwards to Banff. There he was uncomfortably close to Strathbogie, and this was sufficient excuse for Lord Lewis Gordon to return there. This in turn left Montrose with insufficient cavalry support for his proposed march southwards, so he reluctantly turned back to Alford from where Aboyne also returned to Strathbogie. Left with just Inchbrackie’s men and the last remaining Irish mercenaries Montrose then moved over the mountains to Dunkeld. Then with the aid of a few recruits levied by Robertson of Inver Montrose tried to threaten Glasgow – a move aimed at least in part in a vain attempt to save the lives of the Royalist officers captured at Philiphaugh. David Leslie however had done his work only too well. Glasgow was heavily garrisoned and fortified, and a strong line of outposts established along the Forth crossings. Dalhousie’s Regiment was based on Stirling, while Lord Montgomery’s and Colonel Hugh Fraser’s regiments lay in Clackmannan and Lord Kirkcudbright’s was pushed forward to reoccupy Baillie’s old fortified camp at Bridge of Earn. From there contact could also be maintained with both the Dundee garrison and with the Earl of Moray’s Foot, who were watching the Highland passes out of Atholl.
Gradually the noose was tightening, and at the beginning of January 1646 Colonel Harie Barclay arrived in Aberdeen with his own regiments of horse and dragoons, Colonel Robert Montgomery’s Horse and also two regular infantry regiments which had come north with Leslie – Colonel William Stewart’s and Viscount Kenmure’s. There they halted until the spring, while the battered but indefatigable Aberdeenshire levies were reorganised into a regiment of horse under the Master of Forbes and a regiment of foot under Colonel George Forbes of Millbuie.21
On the far side of the river Spey Montrose was vainly trying to raise a new army, while the Gordons engaged in a petty round of raid and counter-raid against their neighbours. The war was clearly lost, but they were still fighting on because they were afraid to stop. Only the Earl of Crawford, based at Banff, presented any threat to the growing concentration at Aberdeen. At first he made life distinctly uncomfortable for Barclay, with a series of raids pushed down Deeside by Farquharson of Inverey and from Fyvie Castle by Captain Blackadder, but eventually Barclay decided enough was enough and riposted with an even heavier raid on Banff, which sent the rebels tumbling back across the Spey.
By the end of April relations between the Royalist commanders had deteriorated to the extent that Huntly and Montrose were operating independently of each other when the latter embarked on a futile and quite pointless siege of Inverness. It was also reckless for Major-General John Middleton had come north to supersede Barclay and was then lying at Banff with a cavalry brigade and Millbuie’s Foot. Huntly on the other hand, having allowed his infantry to winter at home, had not yet concentrated his forces and was unable to cover the siege when Middleton suddenly lunged forward with his cavalry. Crossing the Spey late on 7 May and pausing only long enough at Elgin to feed and water his horses, Middleton pushed straight on through the night to Inverness, taking the Royalists completely by surprise. Alerted only by Middleton’s trumpets, Montrose’s men abandoned their guns and fled westwards without attempting to fight.22
