James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650)

Early Life and an Unlikely Covenanter

Montrose was born in 1612, the only son of the 4th Earl of Montrose, and educated first at Glasgow College and then at St Andrews. He married Magdalene Carnegie at seventeen and, in the early 1630s, undertook a Continental tour through France, Italy and the German states — a formative period during which he was exposed to wider European political and military thought.

He returned to Scotland to become, initially, one of the National Covenant's most committed and energetic early supporters in 1638, playing an active military role for the Covenanter cause in the First Bishops' War of 1639, including operations against Royalist sympathisers around Aberdeen.

established Montrose was not, however, the commander of the Aberdeen expedition of March 1639, as older accounts and some modern ones still say. The historians Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean, in Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years' War (2014), show that it was led by Alexander Leslie, a field marshal recently returned from Swedish service, with about 6,000 men; even the Royalist chronicler James Gordon conceded that everything was done by Leslie's direction, and Montrose's biographer Edward Cowan agrees. When Leslie left Aberdeen on 12 April, Montrose and the Earl Marischal stayed to negotiate with the Marquis of Huntly. Montrose's own command came at the Brig o' Dee in June 1639. He was also one of the signatories, with Leslie, Rothes, Mar, Eglinton, Loudoun and Forrester, of the Covenanters' letter "Au Roy" to Louis XIII in 1639, which Charles I later read to the English Parliament as proof of treason, and he signed several of the letters the Covenanters sent to foreign rulers in April 1640.

shared The minister Robert Baillie believed that Montrose resented having to defer to Leslie in military matters, despite having no military experience himself, and that this was when he began secret dealings with the king. Murdoch and Grosjean accept Baillie's account. Most historians put more weight on Montrose's growing opposition to Argyll, discussed below; the two explanations are not exclusive.

Why Montrose Broke With the Covenanters — It Wasn't About the Kirk

The popular shorthand — Montrose as simply "anti-Covenanter" — misrepresents his actual position, and this is worth stating precisely. Montrose had no quarrel with reforming the church or removing bishops' political power; his objection was to what he saw as Argyll's use of the Covenanting movement to accumulate personal and factional political control at the expense of royal authority and settled law. His view, in essence, was that the clergy should confine themselves to spiritual matters while the king upheld civil order — a position compatible with Presbyterian church reform but opposed to a Covenanter-led political revolution. This distinction crystallised in August 1640 with the Cumbernauld Bond, a protest signed by Montrose and other nobles specifically directed against what they called "the particular and direct practising of a few" — understood as a pointed reference to Argyll's growing dominance. The following year, Montrose was summoned before the Committee of Estates on suspicion of intriguing against Argyll and briefly imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, before receiving amnesty.

The Year of Miracles: Six Victories, One Small Army

In 1644, Charles I commissioned Montrose Lord Lieutenant of Scotland, and over the following year Montrose led one of the most militarily remarkable campaigns of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. His army was a genuinely unusual coalition: Royalist Scots, around 2,000 disciplined Irish Confederate troops sent by the Irish Confederacy under the command of Alasdair MacColla, and Highland clan levies drawn substantially from clans — particularly MacDonalds — with long-standing grievances against Argyll and the Campbells. Contemporary assessment rated the Irish infantry among the best in Britain at the time.

Across roughly a year, Montrose's forces won a remarkable run of victories, frequently while outnumbered: Tippermuir (September 1644); the Battle of Aberdeen (September 1644, followed by the sack — see below); Inverlochy (February 1645), a crushing defeat of Argyll's own Campbell forces; Auldearn (May 1645); Alford (July 1645); and Kilsyth (August 1645), his largest and most complete victory, which briefly gave him effective control of Scotland. He hoped to use this position to convene a parliament reconciling loyalty to the crown with a non-political Presbyterian settlement — a parliament that, in the event, never met.

Montrose Against the Veteran Generals

established Montrose's campaign has to be set against the Covenanters' war in England. The main Covenanting army, about 22,000 strong, had crossed into England in January 1644 under Alexander Leslie, now Earl of Leven, and most of its best officers were with it. Montrose's first Royalist venture was in the north of England, where in May 1644 he took Morpeth after a siege of about twenty days; Murdoch and Grosjean judge the gain costly to his own forces and irrelevant to the wider war. His Scottish campaign was fought mainly with Gaels from Clan Donald lands on both sides of the Irish Sea and Atholl men, joined after Inverlochy by Gordon cavalry from the north-east. When he took Perth after Tippermuir, Leven had to release three regiments from the siege of Newcastle to pursue him, and he sent home Lieutenant General William Baillie to raise an army against him.

established The Covenanters' home command was divided. Argyll preferred to fight without Baillie's help and was routed at Inverlochy. Major General John Urry, a veteran of Swedish service and the most frequent side-changer of the civil wars, lost to Montrose at Auldearn; Baillie lost at Alford and Kilsyth. Urry later served under Montrose and was executed in 1650 for doing so. Montrose's victories ended when Leven, by then campaigning near Hereford, sent David Leslie north with about 4,000 horse.

shared Murdoch and Grosjean describe the Montrosians as terrorising much of the population, Highland and Lowland, citing the sacks of Aberdeen in 1644 and Dundee in 1645, and argue that David Leslie's victory at Philiphaugh "shattered the myth" of Montrose's invincibility. Following the historian Barry Robertson, they also question Montrose's reputation as the strategist behind the whole campaign, giving more weight to his allies and to the Covenanters' divisions. Admirers of Montrose read the same victories as proof of real tactical skill against larger forces. Both views are held by serious historians.

The Sack of Aberdeen: A Documented Atrocity, Not Romantic Colour

This episode deserves direct, unflinching treatment rather than the glossing-over it sometimes receives in more heroic retellings. After the Battle of Aberdeen in September 1644, Montrose's forces — by contemporary accounts, after a Fife regiment trooper killed Montrose's drummer boy during surrender negotiations — were given licence to sack the town. What followed was days of killing, looting and sexual violence against the civilian population. Contemporary eyewitness accounts (notably the chronicler John Spalding and the observer Alexander Jaffray) recorded between roughly 118 and 160 civilian deaths, including several town councillors and numerous ordinary tradesmen and residents — with some townspeople reportedly wearing protective oat-straw badges in a desperate, largely futile attempt to signal non-combatant status. Historians assess this not as an incidental wartime excess but as a serious atrocity, and note it was also strategically self-defeating: Aberdeen had been a broadly Royalist-sympathetic area, and the sack devastated recruitment prospects there for the remainder of the campaign. established

Responsibility for the violence at Aberdeen and elsewhere in the campaign should not be treated as resting solely, or even primarily, with Montrose's direct personal command in every instance — contemporary and modern accounts both note that Highland clan levies and MacColla's semi-independent Irish forces frequently acted with a degree of operational autonomy, and that "the fiery enthusiasm of the Gordons and other clans often carried the day." This does not excuse Montrose, who held overall command and gave the order to sack Aberdeen specifically, but it is a meaningful distinction between his direct culpability and that of allied forces operating under his broader authority. established, treated with appropriate nuance rather than either full exoneration or blanket attribution of every act of violence in the campaign to Montrose personally.

Collapse at Philiphaugh — and an Atrocity Against His Own Side

Montrose's dramatic run of victories ended on 13 September 1645 at the Battle of Philiphaugh, where he was surprised and decisively defeated by David Leslie's well-led Covenanter cavalry, having been deserted by much of his Highland force beforehand. What happened immediately after the battle constitutes a significant and well-documented atrocity in its own right, this time against Montrose's side: approximately 100 Irish soldiers from Manus O'Cahan's regiment surrendered under a promise of safe passage. Presbyterian ministers accompanying Leslie's army persuaded him that this clemency was misguided, and the surrendered prisoners, along with roughly 300 camp followers — explicitly including women and children — were killed. Historians treat this as a clear breach of surrender terms and a war crime by the standards of the period as well as in retrospect. established

Montrose himself escaped the battlefield, in one contemporary phrase at "a soft gallope" with a handful of companions, and attempted a guerrilla campaign in the Highlands, but failed to rebuild an effective army. In 1646, following Charles I's own surrender to the Scots, the king ordered Montrose to disband his forces and leave Scotland; he went into Continental exile.

Exile and European Reputation

Between 1646 and 1650, Montrose's reputation as a commander travelled ahead of him on the Continent, aided by George Wishart's Latin account of his campaigns. He received offers of senior military appointment, including from the French crown and from Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, who awarded him the rank of field marshal — but Montrose remained committed to Stuart service, first for Charles I and, after Charles I's execution in 1649, for Charles II, who appointed him Lieutenant-Governor and Captain-General of Scotland.

1650: A Fatal Invasion, and a King's Double Game

Montrose's final campaign is also the episode that most directly implicates Charles II in a serious moral failure toward a loyal supporter, and this should be stated plainly rather than softened. In March 1650, acting on Charles II's authority, Montrose landed first in Orkney and then in Caithness and Sutherland, attempting to raise a fresh Royalist force in the Highlands. Crucially, at the very time Montrose was risking his life on Charles II's behalf, the king was simultaneously engaged in separate negotiations with the Covenanters (the Treaty of Breda) that would see him accept the Covenanter political settlement Montrose had spent his career opposing. Montrose's invasion was, in effect, already politically obsolete and unsupported before it properly began, doomed by contradictory instructions from the very monarch who had commissioned it.

Montrose was decisively defeated at the Battle of Carbisdale on 27 April 1650 by a force including the Munros, Rosses, Sutherlands, and troops under Colonel Archibald Strachan. He escaped the battlefield but, seeking refuge, entrusted himself to Neil MacLeod of Assynt at Ardvreck Castle — apparently unaware of MacLeod's political hostility toward him. MacLeod surrendered Montrose to the Covenanter authorities, traditionally understood as a betrayal for reward, though the precise financial and political calculations behind MacLeod's decision are not fully documented beyond the broad outline of the betrayal itself. Shared/Traditional as to MacLeod's exact motives; established that Montrose was surrendered into Covenanter custody by him.

Trial and a Deliberately Degrading Execution

Brought to Edinburgh as a prisoner, Montrose was sentenced to death by the Scottish Parliament on 20 May 1650 and executed the following day, 21 May, at the Mercat Cross, Edinburgh. The manner of his execution — hanging, rather than the beheading that would have been the more customary and less degrading method for a nobleman of his rank — was a deliberate choice, intended as a mark of humiliation rather than mere capital punishment. Accounts describe him hanged with a copy of George Wishart's admiring biography of him hung around his neck, and record him protesting to the last that he remained, in his own understanding, a genuine Covenanter and loyal subject rather than a traitor to either cause. Following the execution, his head was displayed on a spike atop Edinburgh's Old Tolbooth, where it remained for over a decade, while his limbs were sent for display to Glasgow, Perth, Stirling and Aberdeen. established

From Executed Traitor to State-Honoured Martyr — In Eleven Years

The reversal in Montrose's official standing after the 1660 Restoration is one of the starkest ironies in his story, and worth stating alongside Charles II's earlier abandonment of him, not in place of it. In January 1661, Montrose's remains — head and scattered limbs reassembled — were given a lavish state funeral, paid for by Charles II at a cost of some £802 sterling, with a major public procession through Edinburgh witnessed and recorded in detail by the contemporary diarist John Nicoll, culminating in formal reburial in St Giles' Cathedral in May 1661. The same king who had left Montrose to fight and die largely without political support in 1650 presided, a decade later, over his transformation into an officially honoured martyr of the Royalist cause — a sequence that says at least as much about Restoration political theatre as it does about genuine royal remorse.

A further, more intimate detail: Montrose's niece, Lady Napier, reportedly had his heart secretly removed before burial in 1650, preserving it in a steel case fashioned from his own sword, itself placed inside a gold filigree box. The heart relic was kept by the Napier family for generations before being lost amid the upheaval of the French Revolution. Shared/Traditional — a well-attested family tradition rather than an independently verifiable relic history.

Montrose the Poet

Montrose is also remembered for his surviving poetry, most famously the lyric "My Dear and Only Love," and for verses reportedly composed shortly before his execution reflecting on loyalty and mortality. His poetic output, while modest in volume, is treated by scholars as a genuine and personally revealing body of work rather than later invention, documented in family and biographical sources including Mark Napier's 19th-century memorials.

Montrose and Argyll: Two Complicated Men, Not Hero and Villain

It is worth resisting the temptation — common in older, more romantic accounts — to cast Montrose simply as noble Royalist hero and Argyll simply as scheming villain, or vice versa in more Presbyterian-sympathetic retellings. Both men were serious, capable political and military figures operating within the genuine complexity of mid-17th-century Scottish religious and constitutional conflict, and both have been alternately romanticised and vilified depending on the sympathies of the era doing the retelling. In a further historical symmetry sometimes noted by historians, Argyll himself was executed in 1661 — in the same city, by a broadly comparable state process, following the change in political fortunes the Restoration brought. Neither man's reputation should be read as a simple morality tale.

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1. Montrose began his military career fighting for the Covenanters, not against them — his later Royalism grew out of opposition to one man's political dominance, not to Presbyterian church reform itself.
2. His 1644–45 campaign is sometimes called the "Year of Miracles" for winning six battles in under a year, often while badly outnumbered — a run of victories still studied for its tactical innovation.
3. The sack of Aberdeen killed well over a hundred civilians and was, by most historical assessments, strategically self-defeating as well as morally indefensible — it alienated a region that had previously been sympathetic to his cause.
4. After his defeat at Philiphaugh, roughly 300 of his surrendered Irish soldiers and camp followers — including women and children — were killed by the victorious Covenanter side, in direct breach of surrender terms.
5. Montrose was hanged rather than beheaded specifically as a deliberate mark of degradation for a nobleman of his rank.
6. His head was displayed on Edinburgh's Old Tolbooth for over a decade before his 1661 state reburial.
7. Charles II — the king Montrose died for — was simultaneously negotiating a separate political settlement with the Covenanters at the very moment Montrose was fighting and dying on his behalf in 1650.
8. Eleven years after his execution as a traitor, Montrose received a full state funeral paid for by the crown, in a striking political reversal.

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1. "Montrose was simply anti-Covenanter." Inaccurate — he supported Presbyterian church reform and broke specifically with Argyll's political dominance, not with the Covenant's religious aims as such. established as a needed correction.
2. The sack of Aberdeen is sometimes minimised or omitted in romantic retellings. It should be treated as a serious, well-documented atrocity with a specific, sourced civilian death toll. established
3. Attribution of campaign-wide violence solely to Montrose personally, versus his semi-independent Highland and Irish allies, is oversimplified in both directions — some accounts wrongly exonerate him entirely, others wrongly treat every act of violence in the campaign as his direct personal order. This article treats it as genuinely mixed and nuanced.
4. The Philiphaugh massacre of Irish prisoners and camp followers is often underplayed relative to Montrose's own side's actions — this was a serious atrocity committed against Montrose's forces and deserves equal documentary weight.
5. Neil MacLeod of Assynt's exact motives for betraying Montrose rest on tradition rather than fully documented financial/political record. Shared/Traditional.
6. Charles II's culpability in effectively abandoning Montrose during the 1650 campaign is sometimes softened in accounts favourable to the Stuart monarchy; the documented timeline of concurrent Breda negotiations supports treating this as a serious, established moral failure on the king's part.
7. Montrose's popular romantic-hero reputation owes significantly to 19th- and 20th-century literary and biographical treatment (Walter Scott, John Buchan) rather than purely to the contemporary historical record, and should be read with that context in mind.
8. "Montrose commanded the Covenanters at Aberdeen in 1639." Do not repeat this. Leslie led the expedition; the error comes from retrospective sources such as Patrick Gordon's Britane's Distemper. established as a correction.
9. Montrose's military genius is debated. Murdoch and Grosjean, following Barry Robertson, give more credit to his allies and his opponents' divisions; others stress his own tactical skill. shared
10. The heart-relic tradition (removal by Lady Napier, preservation, later loss) is a well-attested family tradition but not independently verifiable as a relic history in every detail. Shared/Traditional.

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