Crown, Covenant and Cromwell, page 4
Instead, like many of Charles’ complex intrigues, it fell apart at the first touch and very largely thanks to an ‘old little crooked souldier’ named Alexander Leslie. An illegitimate son of George Leslie of Drummuir1 born in Aberdeenshire in about 1582, he went for a soldier in Holland in 1605 and three years later was in the Swedish service. He remained there for the next thirty years, serving with some considerable distinction before retiring with the rank of field marshal and a fair fortune. In 1636 a daughter had married the Earl of Rothes, one of the more prominent Covenanting leaders, and thus, while personally indifferent to religion, Leslie was drawn into their service. At first he acted merely in an advisory capacity, and it was he who put the word out to those other veterans, inviting them to come home to train and lead the county levies, but that background role changed dramatically on 21 March 1639.
Edinburgh is dominated by its castle and still had the king’s garrison in it when a number of the more prominent Covenanters went up in a body that morning and politely invited the governor, Captain Archibald Haldane, to render it up to the Tables. There is some suggestion they thought him likely to do so, or at least open to fair persuasion, but if so they were disappointed when he peremptorily refused. Not so Leslie. While the great and the good were parlaying he had quietly brought up some companies of infantry and concealed them in the narrow wynds or passages at the head of the High Street. Then he and two other mercenaries, Alexander Hamilton and Robert Monro, having mingled with the party, quietly attached a petard or shaped charge to the outer gate,2 and as everyone else drifted off back down the hill Leslie casually lit the fuse. The gate blew in; an inner gate quickly succumbed to axes, hammers and battering rams, and within moments Leslie and his men were receiving the astonished surrender of the governor.
As a propaganda coup it took quite some beating, and the feat has never been repeated, but an equally bloodless and scarcely less significant capture took place five days later. As was his habit, on Sunday 26 March a pious gentleman named Steuart, who happened to be the governor of Dumbarton Castle, peaceably went out to attend divine service at a nearby church. His enemies, being rather more worldly than they are generally credited, were waiting, and as soon as Steuart was out of sight of the castle he was seized, stripped and forced to divulge the password. His clothes were then donned by another gentleman ‘of his schape and quantetie’. Once it was dark enough to hide his face this bold spark called out for admittance, and as soon as the gate was opened to receive him in rushed the Covenanters as successfully as at Edinburgh.3 To all intents and purposes the castle changed hands as smoothly as if it were changing its guard, and Wentworth’s Irish army was deprived of its bridgehead.
That just left the Marquis of Huntly in the north, but he too had also contrived to get himself arrested! In retrospect his lacklustre behaviour and seeming lack of decisiveness form a sorry contrast to that of his great rival, Montrose, but from the beginning he suffered from a number of crippling disadvantages. While Aberdeen and its university were held to be a stronghold of Episcopalianism, and he could count on a wide circle of relatives and dependants to obey any summons, these advantages were balanced on the one hand by an equally large number of families who were traditionally at odds with the house of Gordon, and on the other by the plain if unpalatable fact that, if there was no great enthusiasm for the Covenant in the countryside, there was even less popular support for the king.
Nevertheless at first Huntly tried his best. When the local Covenanters convened a meeting at Turriff on 14 February and packed the place with some 800 heavily armed men under the Earls of Montrose and Kinghorn, no one was particularly surprised when Huntly also turned up. The question was what was he going to do? According to that invaluable chronicler John Spalding, Huntly had been innocently attending a funeral in Aberdeen the previous day with his two eldest sons and a number of other Gordon lairds. Turriff lay on his direct route home and so he took the opportunity to summon their followers to put on a show of strength of his own. Packing a town with rival sets of supporters, each intent on staking out their territory and intimidating all and sundry, was a very traditional technique in Scottish politics, as dramatically witnessed by the infamous ‘Cleanse the Causway’ fight between the Hamiltons and the Douglases a century before. Ordinarily there was a great deal more snarling at each other and brawling in back wynds than actual bloodshed, and on this occasion Huntly’s followers were accordingly instructed to muster only with muskets and swords rather than more serious hardware. Unfortunately Turriff was neither Edinburgh nor Stirling, and nor was it Aberdeen for that matter. Getting themselves in there first gave the Covenanters a crucial advantage, for they had secured all of the available accommodation (and taken over all the ale houses) long before the Gordons turned up. Huntly was very politely offered the use of the young Earl of Erroll’s house to ‘refresh himself’, but there was no way he was going to be able to bring his supporters into the already packed town. Instead he had to content himself by leading them ‘hard under the dyckes of the churchyarde, westward within two picke lenth to Montrose company without salutatione or worde speaking on either side’.4
The first round, clearly, had gone to the Covenanters. Then on 9 March Sir Alexander Gordon of Cluny arrived at Aberdeen on board one of the king’s yachts, escorting a collier laden with 1,000 pikes and 2,000 muskets and other warlike supplies, which might have been sufficient to alter the local balance of power decisively in Huntly’s favour, if only some of the promised troops had accompanied it. Instead as Patrick Gordon of Ruthven observed: ‘He was constrained to make the best of an evill day; raising such forces as he could upon the sudden, and many of them but coldlie affected and all of them, through a long continued peace, ignorant of all militarye discipline.’5
There was also, still, at this stage a very natural reluctance to disturb that ‘long continued peace’. No one needed any reminding that a brutal war had been raging in Germany for the past twenty years, with hundreds of thousands killed, towns burned and whole states devastated to no good purpose. Perhaps not surprisingly, after debating the matter, they rather sensibly decided that they knew their duty, but it was no time for pointless gestures and so agreed to go home again. A number of the keener loyalists, including sixty volunteers from Aberdeen itself, ‘weill armed with suord, musket and bandolier’ took ship for the south.6 Otherwise Huntly’s forces had seemingly evaporated by the time the Earl of Montrose and Alexander Leslie arrived at the burgh on 30 March at the head of two or three thousand men, marching under five flags bearing the inscription For Christs Croun and Couenant and wearing blue ribbons hung about their necks and under their left arms as a pointed distinction from the ‘reid flesche cullour’ ribbons earlier worn by Huntly’s people. They then proceeded to busy themselves agreeably enough in living at free quarter, seizing arms and indulging in a little discreet plundering. All the while Huntly did his best to reach an accommodation, frequently conferring with the Covenanting leaders under safe conduct, and as he plainly no longer represented a threat Leslie took himself back off south with all the infantry and guns on 12 April, to rejoin the army assembling at Edinburgh. Montrose and the Earl of Kinghorn on the other hand were intended to be left behind with just a few hundred cavalry to keep an eye on the area, but Montrose had no intention of acting as a policeman when glory beckoned on the border and next day Huntly was arrested and packed off to Edinburgh Castle.
Notwithstanding his noisy protestations of outrage at this treatment, and the animus he subsequently displayed towards Montrose, the marquis probably regarded his genteel incarceration with a degree of equanimity for it safely extricated him from what was seemingly turning into an impossible position. On the other hand the move backfired spectacularly for the Covenanters, for no sooner was Huntly safely out of the way and Montrose down at Dundee busy recruiting men for the expedition to the border, than the wilder spirits among the Gordons decided to fight after all.
The insurrection however got off to an inauspicious start when a man named David Prat earned the dubious distinction of being the very first man to be killed in the wars during a failed attack on Towie Barclay Castle on 10 May. In response, the local Covenanters assembled some 1,200 men at nearby Turriff under Lord Fraser and a number of the Forbes lairds – all of them traditional rivals of the Gordons – whereupon the insurgents equally promptly resolved to attack them. At this stage with just 800 men they were badly outnumbered, but they had a trump card in the form of the Strathbogie Regiment. Although most of them were indeed ‘ignorant of all militarye discipline’, a professional soldier – Colonel William Johnston – had equipped six companies of infantry with the king’s muskets and pikes and was now whipping them into shape.
Rather optimistically the Gordons’ first impulse was to sally forth there and then from their base in the burgh of Strathbogie7 and attack the Covenanters under cover of darkness. However just as they were on the point of setting out it suddenly occurred to them that it might be a sensible idea to appoint a commander to take charge of the expedition. As the only one who really knew what he was doing, Colonel Johnston might have seemed the obvious choice, but he was seemingly regarded as no more than the hired help and instead one of the first candidates to be proposed was Huntly’s brother, Lord Adam Gordon. Unfortunately, while he may have had the breeding, his brains were ‘craicted’. Because Huntly’s only available son, Lord Lewis Gordon, was just a twelve-year-old schoolboy, Sir George Ogilvy of Banff was acclaimed instead. As the loudest advocate of fighting (and the architect of the Towie Barclay business) he won ready acceptance, but, since he was not actually a Gordon, Sir John of Haddo was also appointed to command with him jointly.
The Trot of Turriff
By the time the leadership question had been debated and settled and the even weightier question of their authority for taking up arms in the first place briskly dismissed, it was about ten o’clock at night. After a ‘troublesome’ march, they eventually got the length of Turriff by the ‘piep of day’ on 14 May 1639. At that point the carriage of one of their four small cannon broke and inevitably instead of leaving it by the roadside the two leaders called a halt while it was fixed again ‘as weall at the time wold permitte’. Fortunately most the Covenanters were still asleep, while others were drinking and smoking or even excitedly walking up and down, and no one noticed the army hanging about on their doorstep until a sudden peal of trumpets and the loud rattle of the Strathbogie drums greeted the dawn’s early light.
Naturally enough wild confusion erupted within the town, but unlike the Gordons they had not yet gotten around to appointing any leaders so that ‘as it befalls in such cases, all commanded, and no bodye obeyed’. In the meantime the insurgents realised to their dismay they were in the wrong place to launch an assault, for Turriff stood ‘upon highe and steepe ground upon the north side of the valleye. They could not enter it in aeqwalle termes upon any side but either on the north or upon the easte, but best upon the east side, though it wer the ende of the village farrest removed from them, who wer come from the west that night.’8
There was no alternative therefore but for a thoroughly exasperated Colonel Johnston to march his Strathbogie Regiment right around to the far (eastern) side of the town, which allowed the Covenanters to form a hasty battle line in the broad main street of the village and start throwing up a quick barricade. Two musket shots fired at the insurgents from the Earl of Erroll’s house were promptly answered by two cannon shots, and the battle was on. Johnston’s half-trained soldiers immediately charged forward, tore down the barricade and sent a volley crashing down the street accompanied by a third cannon shot. Two of the Covenanters’ leaders, Hay of Delgaty and Keith of Ludquharn, did their best to rally their men ‘first by faire persuasione, and then by threttings, but all in vaine’. Instead, a fourth and final cannon shot and the appearance of the two small troops of Gordon cavalry finished the business as the Covenanters incontinently fled in all directions.
Predictably enough there were very few casualties in the affair, which was soon dubbed the ‘Trot of Turriff’. Just two of the Covenanters were killed, while Spalding cattily added that Lord Fraser was reported to have filled his breeches as he fled.9 On the winning side only one casualty was reported, and he, poor fellow, was supposedly killed ‘by the unskillfullnesse of his owne comerades fyring ther musketts’. The speed of the victory seems to have taken everyone by surprise and finding themselves at something of a loose end after their swift victory the Gordons accorded the unfortunate a full military funeral, culminating in two volleys being fired in salute over his grave. However not only were those volleys fired inside the tiny church, but the soldiers had unthinkingly loaded with ball ammunition rather than blanks and the bullets ripped up through the ceiling to the understandable terror of the minister, Mr Thomas Michell, ‘who all the whyle with his sonne, disgwised in a woman’s habite had gott upp and was lurkinge above the syling’.10
After that there was nothing to do but thoroughly plunder the place, more or less as a matter of course, and then march on Aberdeen, where they were joined by Huntly’s rather delinquent youngest son, Lord Lewis Gordon, and several hundred Highland clansmen under Donald Farquharson of Monaltrie. Unfortunately that seemingly marked the limit of their ambition. They might have quite literally beaten the king’s enemies before breakfast, but beyond that they still had no clear idea of what they were actually supposed to achieve and so very soon afterwards they dispersed again.
No sooner had they gone when the Covenanters, led this time by another local magnate, William Keith, the Earl Marischal, reoccupied the burgh in the name of the government and were soon joined by Montrose and Kinghorn with an army optimistically estimated as 4,000 strong with thirteen guns. The good citizens of Aberdeen were thoroughly unimpressed and according to Spalding tied blue ribbons around their dogs’ necks ‘in despyte and derisioun’. Montrose, alas, thereupon suffered a major sense of humour failure, and, after his men had killed all the unfortunate animals they could find, he imposed a swingeing fine and allowed his dog catchers to plunder those known or suspected to be anti-Covenanters. 11 Once that was done, but no longer sporting blue ribbons, they marched north in search of the Gordons and their friends.
Hardly had Montrose set off than word came that another of Huntly’s sons, Lord Aboyne,12 had appeared off the coast in one of the king’s ships. Jumping to the entirely natural conclusion that this foretold the landing of Hamilton’s 5,000 English troops, Montrose immediately abandoned his punitive expedition and hurried back south to round up more men in the Mearns and his native Forfarshire.
Hamilton however was already out of the game. Mustering the three Trained Band regiments levied from Kent, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire which had been assigned to him took longer than anticipated, and reduced their professional commanders to near despair. Sir Simon Harcourt complained that his regiment’s arms were defective and old fashioned, the muskets too heavy and the pikes rotten. Edward Rossingham similarly reported that, when the Kent Trained Bands were inspected at Gravesend, their ranks were filled with substitutes hired at £8, £10 or £12 a head and equipped with totally unserviceable weapons: ‘many of their muskets having no touch-holes, and some others having them so large as one might turn ones thumb in them, and the pikes were so rotten as they were shaken many of them all in pieces’.13
This sorry crowd did not begin embarking until 18 April, which was already two weeks after Huntly was arrested. Learning of the fact, Hamilton instead dropped anchor off Leith on 1 May. Ostensibly his purpose was to issue a proclamation in Edinburgh calling on all to submit to the king’s authority or face the customary consequences. Far from being overawed, the Covenanters not only refused to allow Hamilton to land, but also numbered among their ranks his own mother, who was reported riding ‘with her pistollis and carbine’ and expressing a unmaternal willingness to blow her son’s brains out.14
Whether or not he was intimidated by his mother’s theatrical display, Hamilton was certainly alive to the political consequences of being seen to invade his country at the head of an English army. Accordingly he took the hint and stayed where he was, riding at anchor while two of his regiments were recalled to join the king, and Aboyne sailed north alone except for a few Scottish professional officers and the bold volunteers, who had fled Aberdeen back in March. It was hardly an army, but it was a start. The Gordon lairds dutifully mustered their men to join him, and by mid June Aberdeen was yet again under military occupation in the king’s name. This time they were serious.
Megray Hill
Whether he actually contemplated marching all the way to Edinburgh or as is more likely simply wanted to make his presence felt is unclear, but probably rather late on Friday 14 June 1639 Aboyne marched south out of Aberdeen at the head of some 2,500 horse and foot, including 500 Highlanders under Farquharson of Monaltrie. The Earl Marischal, barring their advance in the small fishing village of Stonehaven, for his part could muster only half that number, even after Montrose hurried up with a few reinforcements, and a brisk assault should have been sufficient to clear them out. Indeed the Marischal left word that the gates of his nearby castle at Dunottar were to be left open in anticipation of a hasty retreat. Instead next morning the king’s men came no closer than Megray Hill, a little to the north, drew up in order of battle and then waited while their leaders went off to find some breakfast!
