This meant Montrose was not alone in his dread of the pope’s divisions. He believed firmly in monarchic power, too, but also thought that it must be restrained by law. He was elected to one of the ‘tables’, committees which also contained representatives of lairds, burghers and ministers, to monitor information which passed between the king and his council.
Opposite the Edinburgh Mercat Cross, a scaffold was erected. ‘James,’ said John Leslie to Montrose, ‘you will not be at rest till you be lifted up there above the rest in three fathoms of rope.’
From England, it all looked very different; so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading about different events. From London, the conflict did not appear to be a war about who the Scots were, but a war about the Laudian Church. To Charles, the Scots’ opposition seemed like a threat, a deliberate and mean attempt to undermine him. It was victory or death. His feelings blinded him to politics. For Charles, the Scots were out to destroy monarchy and impose a republic. ‘So long as the covenant is in force,’ he declared, ‘I am no more in Scotland than a Duke in Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.’ He spoke of ‘those traitors, the Covenanters’. He murmured defensively that ‘the blame for the consequences is theirs’. In August he ordered one of their propaganda sheets burned by the public hangman, and a few weeks later proclaimed all Scots invaders traitors whose lives were forfeit.
Charles saw the Covenanters as incomprehensible aliens, not as his familiar subjects even though he had spent his early childhood in Scotland, and may even have retained a very slight Scottish accent. Charles’s warm embrace of Europe in the person of his wife, his liking for European fashion and formality in matters of court life and religion, meant that Scottish plainness struck him as boorish and threatening.
Whitehall tried to organize an army under the Earl of Essex to go to Scotland. The godly Essex’s appointment was designed to reassure those who feared that the war was a campaign against the godly, since he had fought for the Dutch; however, Henrietta insisted that her ally the Earl of Holland be general of the horse. Holland was never an especially credible military leader, and his appointment convinced some that sinister forces were at work (meaning the queen). In fact Holland was part of a warmly Presbyterian faction at her court, which included Lucy Hay, but the anxiety about popery in high places refused to abate.
A slow-paced mobilization continued. Finally, at the end of March 1639, the king left, at the head of some 20,000 men, many of them notably unwilling. ‘We must needs go against the Scots for not being idolatrous and will have no mass amongst them’, declared an anonymous news-sheet. There was a shortage of incentives. Scotland was cold and plunder-free. The loyal, brave Sir Edmund Verney wrote to his son Ralph that ‘our army is but weak. Our purse is weaker, and if we fight with these forces and early in the year we shall have our throats cut, and to delay fighting long we cannot for want of money to keep our army together.’ He also commented that ‘I dare say there was never so raw, so unskilful and so unwilling an army brought to fight … Truly here are many brave gentlemen that for point of honour must run such a hazard as truly would grieve any heart but his that does it purposely to ruin them. For mine own part I have lived till pain and trouble has made me weary of to do so, and the worst that can come shall not be unwelcome to me, but it is a pity to see what men are like to be slaughtered here, unless it shall please God to put it in the king’s heart to increase his army, or stay till these know what they do, for as yet they are as like to kill their fellows as the enemy.’
Verney thought he knew who the mysterious agents behind the war were: ‘The Catholics make a large contribution, as they pretend, and indeed use all the ways and means they can to set us by the ears, and I think they will not fail of their plot.’ He thought that in part because Henrietta Maria was diligently trying to persuade the English Catholics to prove their loyalty to Charles with lavish donations to the war chest. She wrote individually to Catholic gentry families and especially to women. Some ladies did give up their jewellery, and peers like the Marquess of Winchester contributed four-figure sums. But a mysterious letter purporting to be from the pope urged them not to give. This may have been good advice, whoever it came from, because the main result was to make good, not especially godly men like Verney suspect that a papist plot lay behind the Scottish war. Madame de Motteville, Henrietta’s friend and confidante after the war, said Henrietta had told her that Charles was indeed trying to transform Scottish religion in order eventually to restore popery. It wasn’t likely, but she may have hoped it was true.
For the raggle-taggle army, it was hot and miserable on the way from Newcastle to Alnwick, thirsty and slow, and Alnwick was in a state of ruin, having been all but abandoned by the Percys for the urbanities of Syon House. The king tried to behave like a good commander. He lived under canvas with his men, he rode up and down to cheer his army, wearing out two mounts. At Berwick the rain set in.
People were, to say the least, sceptical – about the war itself, its causes, the army’s chances of success. George Puryer was hauled before the Yorkshire Justices for opining ‘that the soldiers were all rogues that came against the Scots, and if it had not been for the Scots thirty thousand Irish had risen all in arms, and cut all our throats, and that the king and queen was at mass together, and that he would prove it upon record, and that he is fitter to be hanged than to be a king, and that he hoped ere long that Lashlaye [David Leslie] would be a king, for he was a better man than any was in England’. This outburst aptly summarized the grievances of those unenthusiastic about the entire campaign, but there was another factor too; in fighting for the wrong side in matters of religion, the people of Stuart England feared not only that they were unjust, but that it might be a sign that they were damned, even a sign that God was deserting the nation.
The First Bishops’ War amply fulfilled the worst apprehension of Verney and the nation. The king’s army camped outside Berwick in May 1639, and on 3 June the Earl of Holland, too, managed to find in himself an even worse performance than the country had expected. He and his cavalry sprinted ahead of the disordered infantry. Late in a long afternoon, Holland suddenly saw his folly in leaving them behind. Eight thousand Scottish footsoldiers were closing in on him, in a wide sickle, as if his men were grass ripe for cutting. Holland halted, sensing disaster. He and the Scots gazed at each other in a deadly game of chicken. Blustering, Holland sent a trumpeter to ask for the Scots to withdraw. Leslie, the Scottish commander, sent the messenger back, with a cool request that Holland withdraw instead. Holland had his only flash of good sense for the day. He obeyed, and fled, pursued by the Scots’ cries of derision. They were in fine fettle after weeks of sleeping rough and singing psalms. The English were miserable; when it wasn’t raining, it was hot, and when it was hot there were midges, and what on earth were they doing here anyway?
The commanders were busy. They were not, however, busy safeguarding the army or doing the king’s bidding. Holland and Newcastle were expending their energies fighting a duel over an incident connected with the colours; colourful indeed, and full of musty rites of honour, but quite beside the point.
The king and the Scots managed a kind of peace in June 1639, signing a truce. But even while they were doing so, amicably enough, the first battle of the Civil Wars had begun, between Scot and Scot, between the Gordons, ardent supporters of the king, and the Covenanters under Montrose, at the Bridge of Dee.
The man in charge of the defence of Aberdeen had every reason to dislike Montrose, since Montrose had earlier been responsible for his captivity. Montrose had occupied the town before, on 25 May, but by then the Royalists had melted away. Montrose had marched north to besiege some local lairds, and in his absence the king’s ships, captained by Aboyne, had reoccupied Aberdeen on 6 June. By then Montrose had gone south to make sure his