sue. red with a very strong desire of doing battle with the terrible warriors they were called upon to purNor were the commanders themselves unanimous in counselling an attack. Hurry, who commanded the horse, with which that attack should have been made, expressed aversion to such a movement, and failed to take the necessary measures for accomplishing it. Thus it happened, that although a great tumultuary force went in pursuit of Montrose, there was no decisive order given for the movement of the men, and no concerted measures laid down for their various evolutions. They made several attacks upon the rear of Montrose's host, and endeavoured to assail it in other directions, but they were invariably received with so sharp and destructive a fire, were, moreover, so much fatigued with their march, and so much perplexed by the darkness of the night and the irresolution of their leaders, that instead of making any serious impression, they were soon obliged to retire, and leave Montrose to pursue his way undisturbed. Montrose reached Arbroath, a town seventeen miles east from Dundee, long before day-break. His men had then marched about fifty miles, and existed nearly two days, without rest or sleep. It might have been expected, that, utterly unable to resist the force of nature any longer, they would have now sunk exhausted in slumber, without regard to the fate which might overtake them before they should awake. To have yielded, however, in any such way to their sensations, was seen by Montrose to involve certain destruction, their position being now such that Baillie could easily separate them from their main body at Brechin, and either cut them down at leisure in the morning with the sabres of his troopers, or drive them into the equally unsparing sea. He saw it to be necessary for their salvation, that before morning they should make still another forced march. He pointed out the necessity to them, and called upon them to brace their nerves for the undertaking. They fortunately were possessed of sufficient firmness and enthusiasm to encounter the task, dreadful as it was. The march which he determined upon was certainly, when its direction is considered, one of the strangest and most adventurous ever projected or achieved by any general. Instead of stealing northward along the coast, in the direction most remote from the position of his enemies, as almost any other commander would have done under similar circumstances instead of flying in a line at all calculated to lead him away directly from what he had most to dread, he turned short about from the gates of Arbroath, made almost a right angle with his former course, led his men in a north-westerly direction, right athwart the county of Forfar, and, before morning, got across the South Esk at Cariston Castle, where he was within three or four miles of the Grampian hills. Baillie had meanwhile drawn his army round towards the north, and had taken up his quarters for the night at Forfar,-a point from which he conceived he should be able to command Montrose at Arbroath, so that he supposed he would have nothing else to do but fall down upon him at his leisure in the morning, in order to make root and branch work of himself and his miserable little band. But several hours before this calculated period of vengeance arrived, his devoted victims had passed close by his very side, got away half an ordinary day's march beyond him, and, setting their backs to the firm wall of the Grampians, were able to put both his pursuit and his attack at defiance. A glance at the map of Scotland will enable the reader more fully to comprehend how completely Montrose had thus eluded his enemy, and by what a prodigious exertion. When the royalists reached Cariston, they had traversed about seventy miles of rough and difficult country, chiefly in the dark, and without rest or sleep. It may be supposed that, when they at length were enabled to stop with safety, they would enjoy the refreshment so necessary to them with peculiar zest. It was, accordingly, with no small vexation, that they were roused during the course of the day from their hard but agreeable repose, by intelligence of the approach of the enemy. Baillie had no sooner learned the evasive trick Montrose had played him, than, thinking yet to overtake him, he got his troops in motion from Forfar; and such was the haste he made, that his horse were in sight of Montrose's bivouac before that general was aware. The men were immediately roused from their lairs, though not without such difficulty that many did not awake even when pricked with swords;10 and in a few minutes the whole were once more in motion towards the hills. By retiring three miles farther into the recesses of Glenesk, he at length reached a place where he could not possibly be approached; and Baillie then saw fit to abandon the pursuit altogether. It must be mentioned, that in the meantime the main body of the royalists, which had been placed at Brechin while Montrose made his attack upon Dundee, having received timely notice of the approach of Baillie's army, was also by this time safe from pursuit, along with all the baggage, in some other recesses of the Grampians, from which they were easily able next day to form a junction with their general. Montrose had thus accomplished a retreat, which for boldness of design, and masterliness of execution, not to speak of its innumerable difficulties and dangers, might vie, says one of his historians, with any such military transaction on record. The Covenanters looked upon the affair as a sort of victory, merely, it would appear, in consideration of the circumstance, that their generals had caused "the great rebel" to fly; and Baillie devoutly terms it in his Letters a pleasant "blink" of God upon benighted Scotland. But Montrose, by the extraordinary skill and exertion which enabled him to set at nought an enemy who ought properly to have devoured him, had in reality the only honour in the transaction. If the thing could be at all a question, Bishop Wishart has since set it at rest by recording, that among the most experienced officers on the Continent, he had frequently heard the retreat of Dundee preferred, as an exhibition of generalship, to Montrose's greatest and most hard-won victories. CHAPTER III. THE BATTLES OF AULDEARN AND ALFORD. One to ten! Lean raw-boned rascals; who would e'er suppose SHAKSPEARE. THE subsequent proceedings of the armies, however, and of the Parliamentary Committee, proved incontestably the advantage which Montrose had gained by the affair. The latter body, in whose hands lay at this period the whole management of the kingdom, having now apparently lost all hope of suppressing Montrose by their present superior army, sent over to Ireland an order for another thousand of the disciplined troops which they kept there. Till they should arrive, Baillie and Hurry were commanded to dispose themselves only in such a way as seemed most likely to protect the Lowlands, in the meantime, from the ravages of Montrose. Baillie was to remain with the greater portion of the army at Perth, to defend the to the capital and the southern shires; while Hurry was to go northward to Moray, at the head of a smaller portion, with which, being joined by the garrison of Inverness and all possible volunteer adherents of the Covenant, it was hoped he would be able to prevent the arch-enemy from making another descent upon that portion of Lowland terri passes |