History Of Scotland Vol. 2 - Part 6

( Originally Published 1909 )

Commencement of the Civil War—English Invasion—The Borderers chastised—The House of Hamilton almost ruined—Dumbarton Castle taken—Scotland divided between King's Men and Queen's Men—Cruel Character of the War—State of Parties—Raid of Stirling—Death of the Regent Lennox—Mar succeeds, and labors for Peace, but shortly after dies—Morton chosen Regent—His Character—Mary corresponds with Spain—Duke of Norfolk beheaded—Queen Elizabeth publicly owns the Right of James —The Civil Wars still rage; but the Party of the Queen declines everywhere save in the North, where it is supported by the Gordons—The Queen's Adherents capitulate, excepting Grainge, who holds out Edinburgh Castle—He is besieged by an English Force, and compelled to surrender—He is executed—Death of Maitland of Lethington

ON the death of the Earl of Murray, both parties in Scotland prepared for war. The faction adhering to the infant monarch chose for regent, instead of Murray, the Earl of Lennox, father of the murdered Darn-ley, and grandfather of James himself. His authority was strongly supported by Elizabeth, who despatched two flying armies into Scotland to avenge the mischief done upon the frontiers, and to co-operate with the forces of the regent. One of these, under the Earl of Sussex, severely chastised the border clans of Scott and Kerr by ravaging their lands and burning their houses. The other army was commanded by Lord Scroope of Bolton. A third body of English, led by Sir William Drury, assisted Lennox in laying waste the vale of Clyde, and desolating the mansions of Hamilton, rendered obnoxious to the king's party by the murder of the late regent, and to Lennox himself, whose father had been slain by one of that clan, by the bitterness of feudal hatred. Their vengeance was urged with such unrelenting fury that the great family, whom it affected, was in all its branches brought to the verge of ruin.

In 1571 another advantage was obtained by the king's party by an extraordinary feat of courage and dexterity. Crawford of Jordanhall, an enterprising officer, undertook the venturous exploit of storming the almost impregnable castle of Dumbarton, which had hitherto, during the variation of the civil war, remained in possession of the queen's partisan, the Lord Fleming. A handful of soldiers advanced to the foot of the rock on a misty evening. By means of ladders they ascended to a ledge of rock where they were able to keep their footing till they could draw up and replace the ladders so as to attain the bottom of the wall. In the second ascent, a soldier, when half way up the ladder, was seized with a fit of epilepsy. Crawford caused the man to be bound to the steps; then commanding the ladder to he turned, they mounted over the indisposed person's belly. Surmounting the wall, the assailants surprised the ill-watched garrison, who were too confident in the strength of the castle to keep a due guard, and carried the place by an attempt, the boldness of which was unequalled by the siege of the Numidian fortress mentioned by Sallust, or the more modern surprise of Fecamp, on the coast of Normandy, by Bois-Rosé during the wars of the League.

The archbishop of St. Andrew's, natural brother of the Duke of Chatelherault, was taken in the castle of Dumbarton, to which he had retreated for safety as to an impregnable place of refuge. This prelate was highly obnoxious to the king's party from his profession, his talents, and his family; and being already attainted by parliament, lay open to their severity, which was carried to the uttermost. They conveyed the archbishop to Stirling, where he was publicly_ hanged without trial or ceremony. That he deserved this fate is highly probable. He was proprietor of the fatal mansion called the Kirk of Field, in which Darnley was blown up, and of the no less fatal lodging at Linlithgow, from which the Regent Murray received his death-wound; and there was little doubt of his being on both occasions aware of the purpose which the lodgings were to be put to. But his execution, without even a semblance of trial, in the heat of a civil war, was calculated to add fuel to its fury, and be-came the example and justification of numerous atrocities practiced by way of retaliation.

The civil war was now widely kindled, and raged in every province; and the fatal distinction into king's men and queen's men divided even private families. The king's adherents held a parliament at Stirling. The queen's lords assumed the same title at Edinburgh; and these assemblies fulminated decrees of forfeiture against each other. Skirmishes were fought in every part of the kingdom; and as the parties threw on each other the imputation of rebellion, those taken in battle were only spared by the sword to perish by the gibbet; for each party in these desolating hostilities relentlessly executed their captives as traitors.

The historian, Hume of Godscroft, has left us a species of parallel, showing how the great peers and families in the different parts of Scotland were divided between the two factions. By this it appears that the preponderance of the feudal nobility was on the side of Queen Mary, though the strength which the king's men obtained from the support of the reformed party decided the civil war in favor of her son. First, there were of the queen's side the Duke of Chatelherault, the Earls of Argyle, Athole, Huntley, almost all petty princes in their several countries and shires; also the Earls of Crawford, Rothes, Eglinton, Cassilis, the Lord Herries, with all the Maxwells, Lochinvar, Johnstone, the Lords Seton, Boyd, Gray, Ogilvy, Livingston, Fleming, Oliphant, the sheriff of Ayr and Linlithgow, Buccleuch, Farniherst, and Tulliebardine. "The Lord Hume did also countenance them, though few of his friends or name were with him, save one mean man, Ferdinando of Broomhouse; Maitland, the secretary, a great politician, and Grainge, an approved soldier, who was captain of the castle, and provost of the town of Edinburgh, embraced Mary's party. They had the chief castles and places of strength in their hands Edinburgh, Dumbarton, and Lochmaben. France did assist them; Spain did favor them, and so did the pope, together with all the Roman Catholics everywhere. The same faction in England was great : all the Duke of Norfolk's party, papists and malcontents, had their eye upon Queen Mary. Neither was she, though in prison, altogether unuseful to her side; for besides her countenance, and color of her authority, which prevailed with some, she had her rents in France, and her jewels, wherewith she both supported the common cause and rewarded her private servants and followers. Especially these resources served her to furnish agents and ambassadors to plead her cause, and importune her friends at the courts of France and England, who were helped by the banished lords, Dacres and Westmoreland, to stir up foreign princes all they could. Thus was that party now grown great, so that it might seem both safe and most advantageous to follow it. The other was almost abandoned. There were but three earls that took part with Morton at first Lennox, Mar, and Glencairn; neither were these comparable to any of the foremost four. In Fife there was the Lord Lindsay, and Glammis in Angus no very powerful men, and no ways equal to Crawford and Rothes. The Lord Semple was but a simple one in respect of Cassilis, Maxwell, Lochinvar and others; Methven in Strathern, a very mean lord; Ochiltree among the meanest that bare the title of a lord; and yet Cathcart was meaner than he, both in men and means. Neither was Ruthven so great but that Tulliebardine and Oliphant were able to overmatch him. They had no castles but Stirling and Tantallon, which belonged to Morton. The commons, indeed, were very forwardly set that way; but how uncertain and unsure a prop is the vulgar? England did befriend them sometimes, but not so fully as they needed, and even so far as did concern their own safety."

In this view of parties, the historian, desirous to rate the strength of the king's faction as low as possible, in order the more to exalt the talents and worth of those who gained the superiority against such odds, considerably undervalues the assistance afforded to the king's lords by the burghs and commons. Nor does he give due weight to the countenance of England, which ministered to the assistance of the regent by effectual supplies of troops and money; whereas the courts of France and Spain and other Catholic powers supported Queen Mary by little more than splendid promises. Nevertheless, Godscroft justly says that the factions were so balanced as to make success dubious and the bloodshed and strife great and universal. The whole inland country was agitated through every province by the contests of king's men and queen's men; and, to use an expression of the period, in the wild borders and savage Highlands, the Clan Gregor and the Clan Chattan in the north, Buccleuch and Farniherst in the south, were bounded out to ravage the neighboring country with the full fury of predatory war.

Amid this scene of slaughter and confusion, a military movement, contrived by the talent of Grainge, had nearly brought the war to an unexpected termination. A body of five hundred men were privately assembled at Edinburgh, under the command of the Earl of Huntley, Lord Claud Hamilton, younger son of the Duke of Chatelherault, and Scott of Buccleuch. They made a night march to Stirling, occupied the town without opposition, and breaking into the lodgings of the principal lords of the king's faction, as well as the regent himself, made them prisoners, and were about to conduct them to Edinburgh. The obstinacy of Morton, who defended his house till it was set on fire, and the rapacity and want of discipline of the soldiers, who broke their ranks for the purpose of plunder, gave the king's party an opportunity of rallying. The garrison marched out of the castle, and fired upon the invaders from some half-built houses which still stand in the same unfinished state across the top of the main street : the inhabitants of Stirling immediately joined in the attack, and the assailants, taken by surprise in their turn, began to fly. In the scuffle, a man, by command it is said of Lord Claud Hamilton, shot the Regent Lennox with a carabine, in revenge of the death of the archbishop of St. Andrew's. The queen's party fled, nor could the others pursue them, the border men, followers of Buccleuch, having carried off all the horses they could find in Stirling. Morton, who had previously surrendered to Buccleuch, now took his captor, who was related to him, under his protection as his prisoner, and dismissed him uninjured. If Grainge himself had led the assailants on this occasion, the enterprise, so successful in the commencement, might probably have terminated in the entire ruin of the king's party.

As it was, the loss of the Regent Lennox was a disadvantage which the king's nobles hastened to repair, by placing in the vacant situation John, earl of Mar. Just, moderate, and patriotic, this estimable nobleman endeavored to establish peace between the contending parties in the State; and it is said the deep regret which he felt at being impeded by Morton, and others of his own party, in the work of reconciliation, brought on the disease of which he died, 29th October, 1572.

The Earl of Mar's successor in the regency was the old friend of the Regent Murray, James, earl of Morton; and no election could have been made more dangerous to those who followed the cause of Mary. Morton possessed all Murray's faults in an exaggerated degree, many of his talents, but few or none of his virtues. He was ambitious, but his ambition was of that sordid kind that is sullied by avarice; and he was willing to stoop yet lower to win the favor of Elizabeth than Murray himself would have bowed. As a judge, he was accessible to bribery; as a soldier, he was a stranger to mercy; and it was from his name that those skirmishes, in which prisoners were regularly executed on both sides, were called the Douglas wars. If we compare the two regents in other respects, the religion of Murray seems to have been sincere, while Morton's pretension to it was that of a hypocritical profligate. As a partisan, Morton was so deeply implicated in the dark secrets of Queen Mary's reign that he must have regarded her return to the throne as an era to be followed by his own total ruin. It was his interest to prevent this, by a complete and abject dependence on Queen Elizabeth. In his personal deportment he displayed many of the qualities of the great House of Douglas, from which he was descended, being brave, proud, politic, and haughty; generally feared, and little loved, through a long and despotic administration.

While Morton held the ostensible government of Scot-land, he steered his course almost entirely by the suggestions of the queen of England; and that princess was now more than ever desirous that the affairs of Scotland should either continue in an embroiled state, or remain under the management of a statesman who was sure to govern them in all respects according to her interests, and diametrically opposite to those of Queen Mary, to whom she was more hostile than ever.

The causes for Elizabeth's additional resentment against her Unfortunate prisoner arose out of circumstances which were the natural consequences of the injustice which had made her captive. Anxious to obtain the liberty of which she was unjustly deprived, Mary naturally turned her eyes to the princes of her own faith for support. France, divided by civil and religious quarrels, no longer listened to her complaints with interest; but Philip II. of Spain willingly agreed to send troops and money to invade England, assist the distressed English Catholics, and avow the quarrel of Queen Mary. His agent Ridolphi found a vigorous second in the bishop of Ross, the able defender of Queen Mary, and was listened to, at least, by the Duke of Norfolk.

This last nobleman had been just released from prison, upon pledging his solemn word never to renew his project of marriage with Queen Mary. But on obtaining his freedom he immediately resumed the perilous intrigues which his imprisonment had interrupted : letters and love tokens passed between him and the captive queen of Scotland. The intercourse between Norfolk and Mary, thus renewed on the duke's part, seems fatal to an argument in prof of Queen Mary's guilt, much relied upon by Dr. Robertson and others. The letters and proofs produced before the commission must, they said, have been genuine, since Norfolk expressed his belief in them. That he expressed something approaching to such an opinion is unquestionable. But, first, he had an obvious motive for deceiving Queen Elizabeth on the nature of his sentiments toward Mary; secondly, if we are to decide anything on Norfolk's opinion, it must be upon that opinion which he finally entertained at the period when he sought her hand; an overture which he would hardly have resumed, if he had credited or continued to believe in the authenticity of documents which accused her of adultery and murder.' This intercourse did not long escape the eager eyes of Elizabeth and Cecil. Norfolk was again arrested, tried, condemned, and executed for high treason. That Mary was the motive and mainspring of this conspiracy was undeniable; and Elizabeth was not generous enough to see that it resulted entirely from her own conduct, and the situation to which she had reduced her kinswoman. The queen of England now threw off all mask and disguise; and announcing to the world that Mary had held criminal correspondence with her subjects, she declared she would never consent to her release, and that she would lend avowed and direct aid to maintain King James on the throne.

Possessing the regency of Scotland, Morton speedily showed how much he was the devoted servant of England, by delivering up to Elizabeth the banished Earl of Northumberland, a nobleman to whom he had been personally obliged during his residence in England, and who was beheaded at York, in 1572, for his rebellion in 1569. What rendered the regent's treachery more infamous was his acceptance of a reward in money for this service, which was shared between him and his cousin, the Laird of Lochleven, in whose island fortress Northumberland had been imprisoned. The regent's base compliance in this respect was humiliating, as compared with his predecessor, Murray, who, although he consented to detain Northumberland a captive, had resisted all Queen Elizabeth's requests for having him delivered up to her revenge.

In the meantime Scotland bled at every vein. In the west, Lord Claud Hamilton with infinite courage and zeal continued to uphold the sinking cause of Queen Mary. In the south, Buccleuch and Farniherst maintained the same side. In the north, Sir Adam Gordon, a son of that earl of Huntley who was killed in the battle of Corrichie, made war in the queen's behalf with distinguished success. Grainge defended the castle of Edinburgh with his characteristic intrepidity. But notwithstanding the efforts of her adherents, the queen's cause declined in Scotland in every quarter, save Aberdeenshire. At length Huntley and the Duke of Chatelherault consented to a treaty of peace, concluded at Perth the 23d of February, 1573. By this treaty they agreed to acknowledge the authority of the king and the regent, and confessed the illegal 'character of all that they had done in the name of the queen. On the other hand, they and their followers were promised indemnity and remission of such dooms of forfeiture as had been launched against them. The adherents of the queen in other parts of Scot-land acceded to this capitulation; and thus the banner of Mary sunk on all sides, save where it continued to float over Edinburgh Castle.

The dauntless intrepidity of Kirkcaldy of Grainge might have held out that strong fortress against all the force which the regent could muster within Scotland, ill supplied as it was with the means and skill necessary to carry on sieges.

But, in conformity with her proclamation, Elizabeth sent Sir William Drury with a formidable train of artillery to assist in reducing the castle. Kirkcaldy held out with firmness worthy of his high military reputation, till his walls were breached and shattered, his provisions expended, the well choked with ruins and inaccessible, and the artillery silenced. At the last extremity he surrendered the place to Sir William Drury, on a general promise of favorable terms. In this the English general had undertaken for more than he could make good. By Elizabeth's orders Sir William Drury saw himself obliged to surrender his prisoners to the vindictive regent. Morton caused the gallant Kirkcaldy and his brother to be executed at the cross of Edinburgh; and Lethington, so long the sharer of his counsels, would have experienced as little mercy had not he taken poison and died, according to the expression of a contemporary, a Roman death.