Montrose at the Mercat Cross

There are deaths that close a cause and deaths that open one. The scaffold meant to silence a man can, by the carriage of the man upon it, become the pulpit from which his cause speaks for the next two hundred years. The Estates of Scotland understood this in theory on the morning of the twenty-first of May 1650, which is why they raised the gibbet at the Mercat Cross to thirty feet, the highest ever set in Edinburgh, so that no citizen of the burgh should be permitted to look down upon the Marquess of Montrose at the moment of his death. They had not understood that height carries a man further than it lowers him.

THE NAME AND THE LONG QUARREL

James Graham, fifth Earl and first Marquess of Montrose, was thirty-seven years old. He had signed the National Covenant in 1638 in the kirkyard of the Greyfriars, as a young man of twenty-six who believed that the King's bishops were an offence to the kirk of Scotland and that the kirk of Scotland was the business of Scotsmen. He had ridden north for the Covenant against Huntly. He had taken Aberdeen. Then he had watched Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, take the Covenant for an instrument of one house, and he had drawn the other way. From 1644 to 1645, with a force never above three thousand, mostly Irish under Alasdair MacColla and Highlanders of the western clans, he had won six battles in a year against the Covenanting armies: Tippermuir, Aberdeen, Inverlochy in the snow against Argyll himself, Auldearn, Alford, Kilsyth. Scotland had been his in August 1645. By September, at Philiphaugh, it was not. He had gone abroad, to Hamburg and to Paris and to The Hague, an exile with a Garter and no kingdom. In March 1650 he had landed at Kirkwall with four hundred Danes and a commission from Charles II, crossed to Caithness, been broken at Carbisdale on the twenty-seventh of April, and taken three days later at Ardvreck above Loch Assynt by Neil MacLeod, who had the price upon his head from the Estates. He had been led south through Inverness and Dundee and into Edinburgh on the cart, bareheaded, on the eighteenth.

THE LODGING ON THE SOUTH SIDE

It is a quarter past two on the afternoon of the twenty-first of May, in the lower room of a tall lodging on the south side of the Royal Mile, three doors up from the Mercat Cross. The shutters are closed against the noise of the crowd assembling at the cross. On the table he has set three things: a small calf-bound copy of George Wishart's De Rebus Auspiciis Serenissimi et Potentissimi Caroli, the Latin record of his own campaigns of 1644 and 1645 that Wishart wrote in exile at The Hague; a black coat without ornament; and a paper from John Cant of the Tolbooth Kirk, the minister assigned to attend him, on which is set out the order of the procession. The scarlet of the Garter he had asked for has been refused by Argyll's order. The black coat is what he has. He has refused breakfast. With his servant Hay he has dressed in the black, and Hay has cut a length of black ribbon from the lining of the coat. Across the wynd, three windows up, the lodging of Argyll stands open, and the candles, even in the afternoon, are lit. Argyll is at the window with his counsellors. By six o'clock this morning the Town Council has had the proclamation read in the wynds: the people of the burgh are to spit upon the prisoner as the cart goes up. The Town Watch has, by Cant's report, forbidden the women of the Cowgate from coming up to the Lawnmarket. The proclamation has not been received well.

A SECOND ON THE RIBBON

He takes up the Wishart. He weighs it in his hand. He weighs, with it, the question of how a man is to be killed in public. The hangman's knot in Edinburgh is set under the angle of the jaw; the rope drops from above and is laid over the throat from behind. A book at the throat would be on the rope, or under it; not beside. The rope will pass over the parchment volume and over the linen at his throat. The book will be the last thing between his skin and the rope of the burgh. He turns the volume in his hand and notes the bindings: calf, hand-stitched, the gilt of the title rubbed where his thumb had been. Wishart had written the book in Latin so that the courts of Europe would know what had happened at Inverlochy. Wishart had written it to be read, not to be hanged. He thinks of Charles at Breda, twenty years old, who on the first of May, three weeks ago, had signed the Solemn League and Covenant at the urging of the commissioners of the Estates, and by that signature had set his hand to this afternoon. I will not blame Charles, he says, half aloud, to Hay, who is at the door, Charles has the hand of Argyll on his throat as I have had it on mine for ten years. He thinks of the window across the wynd. Argyll has not seen him since 1641 in the King's chamber at Holyrood. Argyll will want to see him on the cart. The cart will pass under that window in a quarter of an hour. He will look up. He will not speak. The crowd will see him look up. He puts the ribbon through the binding of the book, ties the knot at the back of his neck, and the book hangs at his throat. He puts the black coat on over the linen. He goes down the stair.

THE CART

The drum of the Town Guard is at the door at five minutes to three. The cart is in the street. He gets up onto it by his own foot, without help. The Provost of Edinburgh reads the warrant of the Estates at five past three. The cart begins to roll up the Royal Mile towards the cross. The crowd, ordered to spit, does not spit. The crowd, by every contemporary report, by John Nicoll's Diary and by John Lamont of Newton in his journal for that week, is silent. Lamont, writing within seven days, records a great weeping, both of women and men. At twenty past three the cart passes under the window of Argyll. He looks up. The window is open. Argyll is, by Lamont, partly behind a curtain; he can be seen but not entirely. He looks at Argyll for the space of two seconds and looks back at the road. He says nothing. The cart goes on. At half past three it reaches the Mercat Cross and the foot of the gibbet, which stands thirty feet above the cobbles, the highest the burgh has ever raised.

THE WINDOW

Three windows up, Argyll stands behind the half-drawn curtain. He has, by the testimony of those who were in the room with him, said nothing for the whole of the morning. He is forty-two years old. He had been at Inverlochy on the second of February 1645, in the galley off the shore, when this man on the cart below had come over the Ben Nevis passes through the snow with fifteen hundred men and broken his Campbells in an hour and a half. Fifteen hundred of his name had died on the loch shore that day. He has held to the Covenant since, has held Scotland since, has held the boy King since, by the cold patient husbandry of a man who counts his account in years and not in afternoons. He looks down at the cart and sees that the crowd is not spitting. He sees that the prisoner has looked up. He sees the small dark object at the prisoner's throat which is the book. He draws the curtain a finger's breadth further across. The room behind him does not speak.

THE LADDER

He goes up the wooden ladder of the gibbet by his own steps. The hangman of the burgh, by name William Lockhart, is on the platform. John Cant the minister is on the platform. The hangman places the rope of hemp over the parchment volume of Wishart at his throat and behind the knot of the ribbon. He says, by Cant's deposition lodged the following week, I leave my soul to God, my service to my Prince, my goodwill to my friends, my love and charity to all. The hangman ties the knot. The cart is drawn out from under him at twenty minutes to four. The body hangs three hours upon the gibbet by the order of the Estates and is taken down at six. The head is struck off with a hatchet upon a block at the foot of the cross and is carried across the High Street to the Tolbooth and spiked upon the north gable. The four limbs are taken away to be salted. The trunk is carried south to the Burghmuir, the gallows-ground beyond the city wall, and laid in unconsecrated earth.

THE FOUR BURGHS

The right arm is sent to Glasgow. The left to Stirling. The right leg to Perth. The left to Aberdeen, the town he had taken for the Covenant in 1639 and again for the King in 1644. They are nailed to the tolbooth gables of the four burghs and are seen by the people who pass beneath them through the years of the Commonwealth. They weather. They are taken in, quietly, at no recorded date, by hands that are not recorded. The head stands on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, opposite the west door of St Giles, for eleven years. Below it, in the close, his servant Hay has retrieved the Wishart volume, cut from the rope where it fell on the platform, and carried it away. The trunk lies in the Burghmuir under no stone.

THE RETURN

On the eleventh of January 1661, eight months after the King has come back to Whitehall, the Estates of the new Parliament reverse the attainder of treason. On the eleventh of May the head is taken down from the Tolbooth gable by his nephew Lord Napier. The four limbs are sent for, from Glasgow and Stirling and Perth and Aberdeen, and what is left of them is brought home. The trunk is lifted from the Burghmuir. On the seventh of May 1661, sixteen years after the year of victories and eleven after the gibbet at the cross, the reassembled body of James Graham is given a state funeral in St Giles, with the King's commissioner at the head of the procession and the Estates following. He is laid in the south transept, ten paces from where his head had stood for eleven years. His great-great-grandson, the third Duke of Montrose, raised over him in 1888 a marble tomb with a recumbent effigy, and cut on the side of it, in Latin and in his own hand, the lines he had written in his cell at the Tolbooth on the morning of the twenty-first of May 1650: Let them bestow on every airth a limb, / open all my veins, that every one may see / the sad effects of crossing kings. The end of a man is rarely settled by those who hang him. More often it is settled, slowly and without ceremony, by what was at his throat when the rope went over. The calf-bound Wishart, returned by Hay from the foot of the gibbet, is in the National Library of Scotland, shelfmark Adv. MS, the gilt still rubbed where his thumb had been.