THE SECOND

BISHOPS' WAR WITH THE SCOTS.

Meanwhile the two armies were being mustered and drilled in their respective countries. The English army arrangements were superintended by Lord Conway, who had for some time had his head-quarters at Newcastle; the Scots were coming together more quietly under their old commander, Fieldmarshal Leslie. "It is just that you know somewhat of the "estate I am in," we find the light-hearted Conway writing from Newcastle, on the 28th of May, to a lady with whom he was keeping up a lover-like correspondence: "I am teaching 'cart-horses to manage, and making men that are fit for Bed"lam and Bridewell to keep the Ten Commandments. So "that General Leslie and I keep two schools: he hath "scholars that profess to serve God, and he is instructing. "them how they may safely do injury and all impiety; mine, "to the uttermost of their power, never kept any law either "of God or the King, and they are come to be made fit to "make others keep them."1 From this description of the English army we should infer that it was composed of elements as ill-assorted and as disaffected for their work as the former army had been. Probably, as before, poverty of supplies had much to do with it. Disappointed of his subsidies from Parliament, the King was employing the most desperate measures to raise such means as, added to the loan from the nobles, the benevolence from the clergy, and the Irish subsidies which Strafford had procured, might maintain the army through a campaign. The City of London had been applied to for a loan of 200,000l. ; and, for the better raising of this loan, the Aldermen of the several wards had been required to send in lists of all the inhabitants of each ward able to subscribe, with a note of the sum that might be fairly expected from each person. For the contempt of this order four Aldermen had been sent to prison. There were also all sorts of Excise and Customs' devices, ship-money distraints,

1 Conway MSS. in S. P. O.

sales of patents and monopolies, &c. In particular, there was a rate for clothing and travelling expenses for the troops, under the name of "coat and conduct money," to the levying of which there was much opposition in the counties.1 It must have been owing to the difficulty of getting in moneys by all these means that there was so long a delay in bringing the English expedition to bear. All through the months of June and July, and during a part of August, Conway was still in the North, doing his best with his levies, the grievous billetting of whom among the inhabitants of Yorkshire and other northern counties led to petitions which Strafford denounced as "mutinous." Strafford, who had returned from Ireland in April, still in a wretched state of health, was giving his services mainly in London; and the Earl of Northumberland, though Commander-in-chief, had also the plea of ill-health for absence from military duty. I suspect that, with the Earl's sentiments, he was glad to have the plea. All rested on Conway.

The delay was to the advantage of the Scots. Punctually on the 2nd of June, to which day their Parliament stood prorogued, they reassembled in Parliament; and though, in consequence of the absence of Traquair, the King's Commissioner, they had to constitute themselves rather irregularly, they sat till the 12th. Leslie was formally reappointed Commander-in-chief, with Lord Almont for his Lieutenantgeneral; and the direction of the war, with the supreme government of Scotland until Parliament should reassemble in quieter times, was vested in a Committee of forty persons, called "The Committee of Estates." Not long after the Parliament, the Scots held also their third General Assembly. It met at Aberdeen on the 28th of July, with Mr. Andrew Ramsay for Moderator, and sat till the 5th of August, getting through business of detail (some of it of a perplexing nature) which had accumulated since the preceding Assembly.

The arrangements of the Scots at this season were not all

1 Henry Bulstrode of Horton was among the defaulters for a rate on his property, under this head, of between

21. and 31. (Return for Bucks in S. P. O. of date July 1640.)

deliberative. While Leslie was gathering his army to the South, there was the same necessity as in the former war for taking precautions against such Non-Covenanting elements as still smouldered within Scotland itself.

In the Castle of Edinburgh the King had placed General Ruthven as commander, and it was not so easy to take this castle from Ruthven as it had been to win it before the first war. Ruthven, when summoned to surrender, had even opened fire upon the town; and, as stray shooting went on between the citizens and the soldiers on the ramparts from day to day, eighty persons had been killed. On the whole, it was deemed best to let the castle alone till there should have been a settlement with the English army.-In the disaffected Aberdeenshire districts, on the other hand, Colonel (now General) Monro was taking precautions that were remorselessly effective. While the Assembly was in Aberdeen, Monro was ranging in its neighbourhood as far as the Strathbogie mansion and estates of the Marquis of Huntley, who was then in England with the King; and he did not cease till he had left that dangerous county "almost manless, moneyless, horseless, armless." -It was at this time also that Argyle made that precautionary raid, for the Committee of Estates, through the border-Highlands of Dumbartonshire, Perthshire, and Forfarshire, then the region of the NonCovenanting houses of Ogilvy, Murray, and Stuart, of which there is such pathetic commemoration in the old ballad—

"Gin my gude lord had been at hame,
As this nicht he is wi' Charlie,

There's no a Campbell in a' Argyle

Durst hae plundered the bonnie house o' Airly!"1

About the middle of August 1640, Leslie, without Argyle in his company this time, but with an army of 22,000 foot and 3,000 horse, besides artillery, was at his old quarters at Dunse, within a few miles of the border. But this time there was no waiting for the King to invade Scotland. There had been communications, the extent of which never can be

1 Acts of Scottish Parliament; Baillie, I. 247, &c. ; Stevenson, 432-3; Spalding, I. 172, &c.

known, but the existence of which to some extent can be proved, between individual Scottish leaders and representatives, authorized or self-authorized, of the English Puritans; and, whether influenced by such communications, or simply on calculation what policy would now be the best, both Leslie and the Committee of Estates had resolved that it was for the Scots this time to invade England. From Dunse, accordingly, the word was given-" March." They did march. On Thursday the 20th of August, the Scottish army crossed the Tweed at Coldstream, without opposition, and with the loss of but one man by drowning, the foot-soldiers wading to the middle, while the horse broke the force of the current above them. The first man to cross, and to stand as an invader on the English soil, was the young Earl of Montrose. They wore blue caps, with a prevailing uniform of hodden-grey, and each man had a haversack of oatmeal strapped to his back.1

The first resting-place of the Scots was at Cornhill in Northumberland, about a mile from the Tweed. Thence, on the following day, they advanced through the villages of Crooksham and Nethershaw as far as a place called Millfield. "The army began to march from Cornell," writes an English eye-witness, "yesterday about 12 of the clock-the General first, with some forty or fifty at his back; then, some quarter "of a mile after him, the horse-troops in ranks and very fine "order; and, after them, the foot, in five men deep, from the "first regiment to the last; and then two or three troops of "horse last; and, a little wide of their camp, all their car"riages of horse-waggons and carts in abundance, with their "provision of beds and victuals. Their number [i.e. of the carriage-waggons, &c.] was of itself like a huge army, being "four pair of butts wide of the way the army did march. "But, for their ordnance and field-pieces, they followed their "companies in order, together with an abundance of carriage'wheels; every pair thrust along before a man to every pair "of carriage-wheels, and the pieces provided in time of need "all carried in great close waggons, bigger than horse-litters, "and drawn by horses. There was in this march only eight

1 Baillie, I. 256.

cannons of brass, drawn with six oxen and two horses to "every cannon, but an abundance of smaller field-pieces, some "long and some short, drawn with one horse in fine light carriages." As to the total number he could but form a guess, but, at Crooksham where he was stationed, it was five hours, or from three o'clock to eight in the evening, before they had all passed. "One omission I have made," he continues, "which is now remembered-their strength of arms; which "is none at all of their bodies [i.e. no body armour], not so "much as a gorget or corslet, I know not whether you call it. "In one word, the horse have all pike-staves, swords, and "pistols; some have petronels, but few; and their horse few or none at all on great horses: most of them middling nags and geldings; all the whole, both horse and foot, in blue 'caps, saving the lords and some few in jacks. For the foot, "all naked of armour as before; only their muskets and "swords, with short staves, one yard and a half long, with a "pike off either end; and the rest with pikes and swords; and "the Highlanders with bows and arrows, and some have swords, " and some none. They are the nakedest fellows, the High"landers, that ever I saw." This same eye-witness testifies to the good behaviour of the army. They are so careful "for doing harm," he says, "by their strict proclamation "of pain of death not to stir man, woman, or child; not so "much as a word to fright any, nor not to steal the worth of "a chicken nor one pot of ale, but to pay for it; and, for corn, "if any man suffer his horse to bite of it, and any seeing him 'catch him by the bridle, he shall have him for his pains."1 This extreme carefulness not in any way to offend the English was in accordance with most special instructions issued by the Committee of Estates. Among several printed papers they had prepared, and which the army carried with them, justifying the invasion, was one addressed to the English people. "As we attest the God of Heaven," said this paper, "that these and no other are our intentions, so, upon "the same great attestation, do we declare . . . that we will

1 This graphic letter is in the S. P. O., in the bundle of papers for Aug. 1640, but bears no signature.