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first to retreat, suffered particularly on this fatal day. It would indeed appear, that a mere wreck or shadow of this unfortunate body returned to the county from which it had been so cruelly and basely A remark made, seventy years after, by an aged Highlander who had been present and assisted in their slaughter, may perhaps give the reader a more vivid idea of the circumstances than

abstracted.

any rounded detail. "It was a braw day, Kilsyth!" this veteran would say, with a grim smile; "at every stroke I gave with my broadsword that day, I cut an ell o' breeks!" alluding to the dress of his Lowland antagonists.

It is recorded, moreover, by the writer of the Statistical Account of the parish of Anstruther, in Fife, that so great an antipathy did the people of that part of the country conceive and retain for the military life, in consequence of the loss of their friends at Kilsyth, that, during a space of twenty years preceding 1790, when nearly a century and a half had intervened since the dreadful day, only one man out of the whole parish had been known to become a soldier.

The reader, when he peruses this bloody relation, may perhaps be disposed to inquire, why Montrose did not rather spare the lives of his vanquished countrymen, and content himself with merely taking them prisoners.22 The only answer which can be returned to the question, is, that having no garrisons or fortified towns in his interest, where he could dispose of prisoners, and finding that the jesuitism of his enemies taught them to consider it no wrong to break a parole with him, and even enter once more into service against him, he was compelled to adopt a principle of uncompromising extermination, as the only one

which promised him the ultimate mastery over the Covenanting government, at which he aimed. The whole circumstances under which he fought-his slight tenure of command over his forces, his necessity of rapid movements, his uncertain and perpetually fluctuating strength, but, more than all, his liability, and that of his men, to be seized every day and put to death as traitors, demanded that he should act in the way he did. The historians who stigmatize his proceedings with such epithets as savage and monstrous, seem to have quite forgot that, at the very beginning of the campaign, his enemies had placed him beyond the pale of honourable warfare—had reduced him, in fact, to the condition of an outlaw or a pirate-by their acts of excommunication and forfeiture. Could it be unjust-was it not, rather, perfectly fairthat an army which, if beaten, was sure to be hanged, should, when victorious, put those who threatened it with that fate to the sword?

It is, abstractly, very difficult for men sitting in the peace and security of the present century, and whose minds have only been accustomed to judge of humanity in private life, to say what is humane or what is inhumane, in a peculiar sort of warfare which obtained in a remote and barbarous age. The probability is-and the present writer, for his own part, has not the slightest doubt that such was Montrose's own sentiment upon the subjectthat the unsparing plan was, under the circumstances, that which promised the speediest conclusion to the war, and which was therefore, in reality, the most humane. To show how differently, at least, many men may think upon such a question, it may be mentioned that, among the Highlanders, the descendants of the very men who

acted with what is considered such unrelenting truculence in this war, an idea very generally prevails, that Montrose was too hesitating and too humane a commander; that he even, by permitting his own generous feelings to interfere too often with matters of general policy, protracted the war to a length it would not have reached, had he been every thing which they could have wished him. "A bloody war, a short one," is a maxim which they invariably quote, when alluding to this question; and it is observable that, when they discuss the merits of the various commanders who have at different times led them to battle against the Saxon, they prefer, by many degrees, Alaster MacCol, or the Viscount Dundee, to him whom the Lowland cavaliers have agreed to designate" the great Marquis." But it is perhaps enough to settle this question in favour of Montrose, to remind the reader of what seems to be now a recognised principle in war of all descriptions, that no general who studies to spare the effusion of blood, either in his own army or that of his opponent, will ever be very brilliantly successful. 23

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CHAPTER V.

44

BATTLE OF PHILIPHAUGH.

Bast. Methinks, your looks are sad, your cheer appall'd.
Hath the late overthrow wrought this offence?
Be not dismay'd; for succour is at hand.

Henry VI. Part I.

THE victory of Kilsyth, the last and greatest Montrose ever gained, gave him for the time possession of the whole of Scotland. As it deprived the opposite party of every thing like an army, so it completely broke up their government. Glencairn and Cassilis now fled over to Ireland; Argyle, Crawford, Lanark, and others, took refuge within the fortified walls of Berwick. Their Parliament, their General Assembly, every organ of their recently monstrous power, at once vanished; and nothing was left behind but this red and triumphant soldier, who, as the deeds he had done were next thing to miraculous, appeared in the eyes of this superstitious people a destroying angel, commissioned by the Supreme Being to lay waste the land.

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"Since the days of William Wallace," says Baillie, or rather since Fergus the Second, [a period of fabulous Scottish history, when the whole government was for a time dissolved, our land was never in the present condition. I confess," he adds at another place, "I am ama

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zed, and cannot see to my mind's satisfaction, the reasons of the Lord's dealing with that land. The sins of all ranks there I know to be great, and the late mercies of God, spiritual and temporal, towards them to have been many; but what means the Lord," adds this daring priest of the Scottish tabernacle," so far from the expectation of the most clear-sighted, to humble us so low, and by his immediate hand, I confess I know not.2 This shame," he continues, "will not be put off us for an age. The English contemn us much the more: they have sent commissioners to crave Newcastle and Carlisle from us, all our places of garri. sons but Berwick."3

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It was the very worst result of Montrose's victory over their government, that the English, whose favour they had taken so much pains and used such unjustifiable measures to procure, and upon whom they were so anxious to impose their own favourite system of church-government, took occasion from it to hold them cheap, and even to menace them with a complete discharge from their service; which they were now the better fitted to do, that they had just gained a decided superiority over the king at the battle of Naseby, and were on that account enabled, as they thought, henceforth to cope with the cavaliers single-handed. The Indes pendents, at least, who were at this period the greatest enemies the Scots had to contend with in their endeavours to establish Presbytery in Eng land, entertained these views, and cherished these sentiments, without the least disguise.

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The local disasters of the country were not less grievous than the political. The slaughter of Kil syth had filled the country with lamentation. It was even judged so supereminently disastrous an

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