Book Reviews
‘Highland Warrior’ by David Stevenson
Some years ago now I read a book entitled ‘The Covenanters’ by the above author. Upon finishing the book I was left in no doubt that the author was plainly pro-Covenanter and anti-Royalist.
A year or so ago it was with some trepidation therefore that I bought ‘Highland Warrior’ by the same author, this being the story of Alasdair MacColla and the civil wars.
During my original reading of the book I quickly learned that the author was certainly not a fan of Montrose, as he seldom missed a chance to ridicule him. Having now re-read the book I felt inspired to bring it to the attention of the society, and to offer one or two observations of my own on its content.
As a study of the life of MacColla this is an enjoyable and well researched account but, to the Montrose admirer, the veiled criticisms of Montrose which punctuate the text do tend to become rather tedious.
When in 1639 Montrose led the Covenanting delegation north to Aberdeen to try to win the city over to the Covenant, he invited Huntly to come to meet the delegation and to discuss their differences. Huntly accepted this invitation and was issued with a safe conduct by Montrose. Every account of this meeting I have read has informed me that Montrose’s safe conduct was over-ruled by the Covenanting committee and Huntly was seized and sent south to imprisonment in Edinburgh.
Stevenson on the other hand writes that Huntly was “treacherously betrayed” by Montrose. Quite where the evidence came from to support this accusation is not made clear.
His praise for MacColla as the victor of Aberdeen contrasts dramatically with his criticism of Montrose for permitting the sack of the city after the battle (as if, following the murder of the drummer boy, Montrose could have done anything to prevent it).
Of Montrose’s retreat from Dundee, which military observers have claimed was one of Montrose’s greatest feats, there is virtually no mention.
Stevenson’s description of Philiphaugh naturally leaves Montrose with little credibility and the author states that it was Montrose’s “overweening pride” which drove him south to the borders with his small band of supporters, despite knowing that Leslie was in the area with a strong Covenanting force.
Stevenson accuses Montrose of billeting himself on the eve of the battle in Selkirk town “four miles away from his troops”. The building in the West Port where Montrose spent the night before the battle still stands, and it is barely ¾ of a mile from the battlefield. This at best displays extremely poor research by the author or at worst a blatant and shoddy attempt to show Montrose in a bad light.
Paradoxically however the author is not always critical of Montrose and he is quick to point out that, contrary to Gaelic folklore which hails MacColla as the sole victor of Inverlochy, Montrose deserves credit for not only the victory but for taking the decision to march his army over the high snow topped mountains above Glen Roy to confront Argyll.
Other veiled compliments are to be found within the text but, just as the reader is being lulled into the thought that Stevenson may be mellowing in his opinion of Montrose, he unleashes another broadside to reaffirm his prejudice.
Stevenson’s theories of the royalist victory at Auldearn are controversial to say the least and they are explored in greater detail in an article about the battle on this website.
All things considered, this is a well researched and readable account of the life of Alasdair MacColla. The author also describes in interesting detail the struggle of Clan MacDonald during the first half of the 17th century to reclaim their lost territories from the expansionist Campbells.
I was disappointed however at the bias which the author regularly displays against Montrose, and in his occasional presentation of debateable ‘evidence’ (particularly against Montrose) as fact.
In trying to justify his theories that MacColla deserves more credit for the civil war victories than Montrose he fabricates a conspiracy between modern writers to blindly enhance the reputation of Montrose at the expense of MacColla. In expounding this theory Stevenson implies, with no supporting evidence, that there was a friction between MacColla and Montrose and that MacColla’s reputation was sacrificed to account for, and to help cover up, Montrose’s many failures.
Stevenson’s description of Wishart as “a hypnotised hero worshipper” is unjustified as it is inaccurate.
My overall view of this book however is, despite the attitude of the author towards Montrose, that there is enough in it to make it of interest to all those who enjoy exploring the civil war troubles in 17th century Scotland.
BRIAN ROBERTSON.
Book Title: “HIGHLAND WARRIOR” by David Stevenson.
ISBN number 0859765636
‘Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts’ by Nadine Akkerman
When Montrose was in the Hague in 1649, like other distinguished visitors he paid his respects to another exile, Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen and sister of Charles I. They struck up an immediate friendship; both were against compromises and temporising and Montrose’s heroic generalship and intense loyalty to Charles I would have gained Elizabeth’s respect. Elizabeth steadfastly championed Montrose in the shifting intrigues as the young Charles II explored his options for securing the throne of Scotland. The handsome, witty and much-celebrated Queen, dressed in black in perpetual mourning following the death of her husband Frederick more than fifteen years earlier, presided over a shabby court and a brood of talented children including Prince Rupert of Civil War fame and the astute Princess Sophia, to be the direct ancestress of our current monarch.
Elizabeth is very well-served by the recently published biography by Nadine Akkerman, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Leiden University (Oxford University Press 2021, RRP £20). Working from primary sources and with an unparalleled knowledge of Elizabeth’s papers gained from editing her letters, and with the advantage as a Dutch academic of access to material on Elizabeth’s long exile in The Hague, Professor Akkerman has produced a first-rate account of Elizabeth’s life and achievements, the result of nearly two decades of assiduous research. In her painstaking and sympathetic account we see Elizabeth develop into a spirited princess with a passion for riding, hunting and Shakespeare’s plays, the only shadow cast on her early years being the death of her beloved brother Henry, Prince of Wales. She married the melancholic Frederick, Elector Palatine, battling for precedence with her stern Calvinist mother-in-law in a fairytale Renaissance castle the ruins of which still tower over Heidelberg. We witness her scholarly but weak-willed husband’s ill-fated acceptance of the Bohemian crown, strongly supported by Elizabeth (who was always up for a challenge). This was followed within a year by disaster when the Hapsburg forces defeated the Bohemian Protestant army at the Battle of the White Mountain in November 1620 (not really a mountain, more a chalky ridge). Elizabeth and Frederick fled to Imperial mockery as the Winter King and Queen whose rule had only lasted one winter. Invited to the Dutch Republic by Maurice, Prince of Orange-Nassau and Frederick’s uncle, we see them establish themselves with their court of nobles, bureaucrats and servants in the Hague in a house lent by the ruling States General while Bohemia and the Palatinate were ravaged in the conflict which became the Thirty Years War.
Professor Akkerman is adept in depicting Elizabeth’s uncompromising efforts to exercise all diplomatic and military levers to regain the Palatinate, particularly after the death of Frederick in 1632 of plague in a miserable inn in the Rhineland left her as the guardian of her ten surviving children and forced her in her own words to “turn stateswoman” by engaging with European power-brokers to advance her family’s interests. This was not wholly welcomed by Charles I, who would have preferred his sister back in London under his control rather than conducting her own policy abroad. But the two maintained generally cordial relations and the adolescent Princes Charles Louis and Rupert were packed off to England for a while to broaden their horizons and deepen their Stuart connections.
The Civil War in Britain was another turning point for Elizabeth and Professor Akkerman demonstrates how as the recipient of a pension from the English Parliament she trod a careful course notwithstanding that her sons Rupert and Maurice became senior Royalist commanders (unlike the unheroic Charles Louis, who courted Parliament assiduously). The execution of Charles I shocked Elizabeth profoundly and her support for the new King, her nephew, was unqualified. At this point Montrose enters the scene; he only features in five pages of the book and Professor Akkerman recounts the King’s wavering between Montrose’s clarity of vision and the politicking and extremism of the Commissioners dispatched by the authorities in Edinburgh. Elizabeth tried desperately to keep Charles from succumbing to the Covenanters’ blandishments. Professor Akkerman quotes tellingly from a Dutch nobleman’s diary: “I saw the queen, who does not trust the Scots, is completely against Argyll and the Presbyterians and is herself in cahoots with Montrose.”
Elizabeth’s last extant letter to Montrose was written in January 1650 and wished him safety in Scotland. None of his letters to her have survived as far as we know; he had asked for their return and presumably destroyed them. Elizabeth’s reaction to his execution can only be imagined; she presumably kept his portrait by Honthorst in her chamber where she had placed it. Montrose is mentioned once in passing in a letter sent some years later.
The last decade of Elizabeth’s life was coloured by disappointment. Charles Louis, restored to a reduced Palatinate by the Treaty of Westphalia, thwarted her attempts to recover her dower lands and squabbled with her over ownership of her property in The Hague. Her daughters left home (including Princess Louise Hollandine, possibly engaged to Montrose but later an ostentatious runaway convert to Catholicism) and debts mounted up; at one stage Elizabeth couldn’t afford candles for lighting. Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 Elizabeth decided to close down her court in the Hague and return to England. She was grudgingly welcomed back by the King. But her health was failing and she died in London of pneumonia on 12 February 1662 aged 65, sitting in an armchair as her life ebbed away. She is buried in Westminster Abbey near her brother Henry.
Professor Akkerman provides a rounded and in-depth picture of Elizabeth’s life, far surpassing other modern accounts. She dispels the myth of Elizabeth as a thoughtless spendthrift, showing how she needed to spend money to keep up regal appearances (including via the purchase of gilded leather wallpaper) and directed that her debts to local tradesmen be paid under her will. While it is anachronistic to consider her a feminist, Elizabeth more than held her own with male rulers, generals and diplomats while also maintaining generally cordial relations with female counterparts such as Queen Henrietta Maria. My only very minor criticism of Professor Akkerman’s comprehensive and vividly written account is that it contains such a wealth of detail about Elizabeth’s life and the political and personal networks to which she belonged as to be rather daunting to the general reader. But this scholarly and rigorously referenced work is invaluable for anyone with even a passing interest in the Queen of Hearts, so called because of the affection she continued to inspire despite having lost a kingdom. The Society hopes to welcome Professor Akkerman as the speaker at our AGM in 2023. I attended a talk she gave in London earlier in the year on seventeenth century Dutch courts headed by women. I can assure readers that her erudition and command of the themes emerging from the fascinating era when Elizabeth and Montrose were both names to conjure with are such that we can look forward to an exceptionally interesting event, whatever the specific topic chosen.
Phinella Henderson
Book Title: “Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts” by Nadine Akkerman.
ISBN number 978-0199668304
‘The King’s Only Champion‘, by Dominic Pearce
This year saw the publication of the first biography of Montrose for nearly fifty years. Dominic Pearce, who has come to biography following a career in finance, has produced a creditable account which can be recommended to readers of Venture Faire. The book is well-researched and written in a lively style. And the Society is name-checked in the Acknowledgements, which is always welcome.
Mr Pearce’s account is particularly good on the wider background to and intellectual climate of the Civil War period. He takes the reader through the Scottish Reformation, the tensions created by James VI’s departure for the riches of London and the English Crown in 1603 and the attempts by Charles I to first force the Scottish nobility to disgorge lands seized at the Reformation and then, aided by his zealous and blinkered Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, to impose a High Anglican-style prayer book and formality of worship on the Scottish Kirk. Mr Pearce also pays attention to Montrose’s upbringing as an extremely privileged youth to whom everything came easily. His thesis is that Montrose’s Ruthven heritage has been neglected (two of his maternal uncles died violently in the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600, a third was banged up in the Tower and the Ruthven name proscribed). But as Montrose’s mother died while he was still very young it is unlikely that he would have heard much about these events, although the reputation of the family as dabblers in witchcraft would have lingered. Mr Pearce is also good on the strengths and weaknesses of Montrose’s character as demonstrated in the 1630s; the charm, generosity and idealism combined with inability to brook opposition, impatience and political naivety in his initial wholehearted support of the National Covenant. His interest in matters military was clear from his time at the academy in Angers in France but no one could have predicted his genius.
It’s halfway through the book before we reach Montrose’s decision in 1643 to break totally with the Covenanters on learning of their plan to invade England in support of the Parliamentary cause and to join the Royal court in Oxford. Mr Pearce takes us competently through the vicissitudes of Montrose’s first abortive attempt to win Scotland for the King and the second almost incredible campaign beginning with the crossing of the Border in disguise with two companions to link up by luck with Alasdair MacColla’s forces and the men of Atholl at Blair Atholl. I didn’t find the account of the pivotal year of Montrose’s career which marked him out as one of the Civil War’s foremost generals and established his continuing fame added much to what others have written. The account didn’t quite bring to life the extraordinary victories, arduous marches and the constant struggle to patch together functioning armies as does Ronald Williams’ Cavalier in Mourning.
The remainder of Montrose’s story after the defeat at Philiphaugh and departure for exile in 1646 at the behest of the King is again competently related. The years of exile and the short final campaign undermined by Charles II’s duplicity and ending with disaster at Carbisdale, capture and ultimate horrific execution are likewise covered well. Someone new to reading about these events would no doubt be completely engrossed. The book ends neatly with an account of Montrose’s “True Funeralls” in 1661, a note of the fate of the other dramatis personae and an even-handed evaluation of Montrose’s career. The story of the heart of Montrose until its disappearance in the French Revolution is related (I don’t think the so-called heart which has been exhibited in recent years is genuine, but views differ).
Mr Pearce has produced a worthwhile introduction to Montrose for the general reader. But it adds relatively little to the four other biographies produced in English in the last century. It doesn’t knock “Cavalier in Mourning” off its perch as the best-researched and most insightful study of Montrose as a soldier, politician and individual. However, Montrose has been very fortunate in his biographers and Mr Pearce is to be commended for a creditable account which deserves to be widely read.
Phinella Henderson
Book Title: “The King’s Only Champion” by Dominic Pearce.
ISBN number 978-1445695198