Bonnie Dundee (18 page)

Pate Paterson was our chief source of news, partly because he had a friend who was a newsletter writer by profession; but also because he was one of those people who have a natural nose for tidings of all kinds – it was long enough, in all conscience – and seem able to sniff news out of the wind, not just rumour, either, before it reaches anybody else.

He had been on three days’ leave, too, and so he was greeted on all sides with demands for the latest word of the world outside. He took the ale jack from the potboy’s hand, and set it down beside him, and waited until we were quiet. Then he said, ‘It seems the Queen is to have a bairn around Martinmas.’

You would not think there was anything so earthshaking in that, and the Queen a young second wife and all; but the words dropped small and hard into our waiting silence like a pebble into a pool, and set the ripples widening. Somebody whistled, and somebody demanded with a startled and sober face, ‘Man, is it sure?’ though a few more, the young ones, myself amongst them, gave tongue joyfully.

‘Have ye no sense?’ Pate said to us. ‘This is no time to be yammering like hound pups wi’ their dinner set before them!’ And the bleakness of his face quieted us all.

But I got to my feet and pushed in closer among the rest, Caspar padding at my heels. ‘But surely that will be
a fine thing for the King?’ said I, puzzled, ‘especially if ’tis a son —’

‘’Tis in just that chance that the danger lies,’ somebody said.

And Pate shook his head. ‘Och, my innocent young Hugh! Has it never dawned on you that Orange William has sat quiet in Holland all this while because King James has no son, and he is wed to James’s eldest daughter, and he has but to wait for James’s kingdom to come to him through the Princess Mary? If James has a son, William will have to do more for his British kingdom than wait, and wink at a few smuggled muskets!’

I mind there was a kind of jolt inside me, cold but lilting; three years is a long time to spend kicking one’s heels on garrison duties and training for the sake of training. ‘Then do ye mean – will there be war wi’ Holland?’

‘No,’ said Pate, making a great show of flicking the dust off his boots. ‘I’m no’ thinking there’ll be war wi’ Holland.’

And Matt Ferguson, who was something of a student of history, took up the tale. ‘James is too much like his father in some ways – so was his brother Charles, but he knew how to get clear wi’ it; James has never known how to get clear wi’ anything.’

‘Aye, he’s done some awfu’ daft things has James,’ someone else said, swirling his ale jack and watching the swirl of it. ‘An’ he’s lost his people – an awfu’ lot of his people – just as his father did, more than forty years ago.’

‘Not civil war,’ Willie Kerr said quickly, ‘I’ll no’ believe it.’

‘God knows,’ said Pate, ‘but the folk – those on both
sides of the Border that are thirsty for a change in their royal house – have been waiting too. Though they’ve done it more quietly in England, they’ll know, like William, that they canna wait any longer.’

‘But just till the bairn’s born,’ I said, with the lilt gone from me and only the coldness left. ‘Just till the bairn’s born –’ as though the decision were Pate’s and I was urging him. ‘Mebbe ’twill be another daughter, after all—’

‘Aye, mebbe,’ Pate said, still rubbing at the dust on his left boot. ‘but if ’tis a son, then ’twill be too late for them to call William over. They darena wait.’

Everyone was silent at that, and again I had the feel of pebbles dropped into a pool; and the ripples spreading…

Then young Robin Findlay, who had been sitting in a corner silent all the while, lunged to his feet, with every red hair on his head standing out round his long white laughing face as though it had a life of its own, and said he, ‘There’s mebbe two words as to that, while Claver’se is for the King, and we are for Claver’se!’ He looked round him. ‘Och, away! Ye look as though Corporal Pate has brought news of a wake, not a bairn on the way! Let’s drink to the King and the King’s son and heir, and another bud on the bonnie white briar!’

And so in the end we all came crashing to our feet, ale jacks in hand, as the laughter took us, and drank to King James and his son, Pate with the rest of us, while the snotty-nosed potboy looked on with his mouth open wide enough to catch a cuckoo.

Pate was right. Only a few days later we heard that a group of Whig noblemen had sent to William and the Princess Mary, offering them the Crown.

Looking back, it seems as though all that summer and autumn went by to the beat of distant drums. James had already recalled the British regiments in Dutch service, and the States General had refused to let them go, though leaving each man free to return on his own account if he chose to. Not many of them did. The militia was called out, the castles ammunitioned; and on Dundee Law, aye, and on hilltops all up and down the East Coast, beacons stood watched and ready to pass on in fire the warning of William’s coming. The men who were not in the militia formed themselves into companies of volunteers; and that year women and old men from the chimney corner got in the harvest as best they could.

And then, with our late northern harvest scarcely in, the King sent for the Scottish regulars to strengthen his English troops, since by then it seemed sure that William’s landing would come in the South.

The Scottish Council were not happy, not happy at all, to be left with one cavalry regiment and the militia and a few companies of volunteers to hold Scotland and the English North. But the King’s orders were the King’s orders, and so in October, with the rooks on the stubble and the heather dun-dark on the hills, and the berries bright in the wayside tangles, we rode South, His Majesty’s Regiment of Horse, and Drummond’s Dragoons and Douglas’s Footguards, Buchan’s Regiment and one troop of Lifeguards, with Claverhouse in command of the cavalry, and Douglas, by right of his two days’ seniority, in command over all. Less than three thousand of us, but you would have been hard put to it, I am thinking, to find better troops anywhere in this world; and we with the hearts high within us, going to save James his kingdom.

It was late October when we reached London, and made our camp in the meadows about Chelsea. It was a raw grey evening, with the mist creeping all up across the fields from the river. The campfires made tawny smears on the grey of it, and the sounds of the camp seemed smeared and muffled by it, too. We seemed like a camp of ghosts, I thought, as I came up from the horse lines after seeing to Jock, and headed for the lowbrowed tavern that for tonight was Cavalry Headquarters. I had almost reached the open door, threading my way through the coming and going all about it, when I heard the jingle and hoof-beats of a horse being ridden hard; and a sentry’s challenge and a muffled reply; and the hoof-beats, which had checked, came on up the cart-track. Horse and rider loomed out of the mist into the light of the open door, and I saw that it was the Earl of Balcarres, who had been sent ahead to tell the King of our coming. A trooper stepped forward saluting, to take his horse as he dropped from the saddle; and I saw his face clear in the door-light. By nature he had a fresh-coloured face, smooth as a laddie’s’s that has not yet begun to shave; but now it had a greyish look, and his eyes stared out of it and his mouth was shaking. And at sight of him a little cold fear went through me.

A voice behind me said, ‘Colin, what’s amiss?’ and his blank gaze went past me to the doorway, and I knew that Claverhouse had come out.

‘The King has changed his mind,’ said Balcarres dully, ‘when William lands he intends to make no resistance but yield up the crown to his daughter and her husband —’

‘Not here, Colin,’ Claverhouse said quickly. ‘This is for the Commander.’ And took him by the arm, and
turned him round, and together they disappeared into the mist in the direction of General Douglas’s headquarters. And more than ever, it seemed to me as the mist swallowed them, that we were ghosts in a ghost camp.

Indeed it seemed like that even when the river mist was gone, through all the weeks that we spent there, waiting, and none of us sure what we waited for.

Now you will understand that there are parts of this story that I cannot tell of my own knowing, but only by piecing together afterwards, and setting down the general knowledge of the day, and the word of what was going forward that drifted around the camp as it does round all camps. I have wondered sometimes if the officers of a regiment would be surprised how much of their inmost affairs is known to the men round their campfires.

So – we knew that Claverhouse went to wait upon the King next morning. It was said afterwards that he tried to stiffen the man to meet William when he landed, friendliwise, but at the head of his army, and ask for an explanation; or to ride north with his Scottish troops if he was no longer sure of his English ones, and wait in Scotland to see what the next move might be. He went again and again; but whatever it was that he sought to bring about, we saw his face when he came back, and judged that he had had no success.

What had happened to James, there is no knowing to this day; for whatever else he lacked, he had not lacked courage until then. Some say that he had a seizure of some kind, some that it was his heart that was sick, with grief that his daughter Mary should have turned against him, and her sister the Princess Anne with her, so that his own world had crumbled about him and nothing
mattered any more. But even when the news came that William had landed in Devon – aye, and the first troops to land with him the Scots and English Brigades – he would do nothing but say it was God’s will he should become a king in exile, and he must submit to the will of God.

Almost at the time of William’s landing, the Queen’s bairn was born. And it was a son. But even that put no heart into him. Early in December he sent his queen and bairn over to France; and next day he made public announcement of his own departure. That day, also, he disbanded the army.

It is an odd feeling, being disbanded, listening to your officers reading out the words that make you cease to exist.

And that day Claverhouse had his last audience with King James, and came back with an odd look on his face, almost as though he had been weeping; and word went round that the King had made him Viscount Dundee.

Next day in soft early-winter rain, the King crossed the river to Vauxhall on his way to France. Aye, and three days later he was back again, brought in by a fisherman who had mistaken him for a smuggler!

‘Och, the man canna even manage his own flitting. How in the De’il’s name would he manage an army?’ said Pate Paterson, when that news reached us, and laughed; but the laughter was of a dreich and dreary kind.

Claverhouse and Balcarres went off to wait on him at once. No doubt they had one last desperate go at the man. But he was firm set for France, and would do no more than promise to return if the people regained their senses and called him back. He promised also to
send Balcarres a commission to manage his civil affairs in Scotland, and Claverhouse his commission to command his Scottish troops. Then he was off downriver again; and the very next day, Orange William was in St James’s Palace. None of it seemed quite real, I mind, and more and more we felt ourselves to be some kind of ghosts, drifting in limbo.

Orange William would fain have had Claverhouse and Balcarres to be his men. He was some kind of kin by marriage to Colin Lindsey, and as I told you before, Claverhouse (I must try to get into the way now of calling him Dundee, but he remains Claverhouse in my mind) had served under him in his youth. And there was that old story of how he saved William’s life one time, bringing him off from the battlefield on his own horse after William’s was shot under him. But as to that, I’d not be knowing, I never heard Dundee claim it.

But neither Dundee nor Balcarres would take service with him; Balcarres, so I have heard tell, saying with that kindly, somewhat troubled smile of his that he could have no part in turning out his own king, who had been a good lord to him, though imprudent in many things; and Dundee telling him, ‘I carried my sword in your army, but not that I might turn it against my rightful king. If I were to break faith with His Majesty King James, could you ever be sure that I would not break it with you?’

And yet I think they both liked the man. I saw him once, during those days – as Dundee’s galloper I went to unlikely places with him – a little dark uncomely man in a black suit, with a cough that seemed to be tearing his lungs to pieces; not the kind to win easy liking from all men, but I could have liked him fine, if the pattern
of things had been otherwise. Seemingly he made a good king, too…

But not for Dundee, nor for us that followed him.

IN FEBRUARY WE
rode north again, with all our high hopes left behind us. But not all of us had ridden south. In disbanding the army, James had set us free, and most of the regiments, some even of Claverhouse’s own, had gone over to William. We called them turncoats and traitors at the time, but truly, I do not think that they were; I think that like most of the kingdom, they had had enough of Stuart kings and their Popish ways, and were for a king of their own faith, with a reputation for sound military leadership; aye, and a Stuart-born wife to share the rule and keep the thing from straying too far from home.

Some of the leaders who would not take up arms for William just turned their backs on what was happening and went home. Claverhouse could have done that. He was not young any more, and had soldiered hard for all the years of his grown manhood. Nobody could have blamed him if he had thought he had earned some peace – aye, and him with his new Viscountcy, and maybe an heir to it on the way, for after all the long waiting, my lady Jean was carrying a bairn – but that was not Claverhouse’s way.

So here we were, Claverhouse and Balcarres and a few friends and his own troop – around forty of us all told – that chose to follow him by way of escort, riding back up the long road north and over the Border, and so at last into Edinburgh. And none of us sure of anything save that Claverhouse was still for King James, and we were for Claverhouse.