Part 1
If you support a revolution, you have to be willing to accept the utter uncertainty of its outcome. You don’t get to dictate how much, or exactly how things change. Your options are to defend the status quo, even if you believe in reform, or to destroy the established order and accept the free for all which follows. These were lessons that Scotland learned the hard way during the time of the British Civil Wars.
Introduction
Scotland certainly wanted things to change during the reign of Charles I. They were staunch Presbyterians living under kings who wanted to push them toward Episcopalianism. They weren’t getting as much attention as England, even though the Stuarts were Scottish kings who’d taken the English throne, taxes had increased, and these problems were getting worse.
By the time war broke out in England, it had already been going on in Scotland for years, off and on, and alliances were already shifting. Unlike England, Scotland was largely ideologically united, and there was little debate over which political or religious future to choose. Scots had a largely uniform vision, explicitly stated in a document called the Covenant, and the question facing the country was how to protect that vision while the King and the Kirk, or Scottish Presbyterian Church, played political tug-o-war with the country. Defending the Covenant became the Scottish majority’s focus during the Civil War.
This majority was known as the Covenanters, and it was led by Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll. Its opposition consisted of a handful of Catholics and Episcopalians, as well as a group of moderate Covenanters who had started to question Argyll’s motives. These people were led by James Graham, Marquess of Montrose. These were the people who would rally behind the Royal Standard. So far, though, they had been imprisoned, intimidated, and many driven to England, while the ones who remained were trying to keep their heads down.
Montrose himself had been imprisoned, but had been released the previous November when the King visited Edinburgh. Now, he begged Charles to allow him to raise an army to fight for him in Scotland. The Earl of Antrim, leader of the Irish Rebels in Ulster, was willing to send him an Irish army for the fight. The king was hesitant, though. As the Marquess of Hamilton pointed out, if Scotland entered the war, it would be on Parliament’s side, so it benefitted him to keep Scotland neutral as long as possible. The Covenanters were demanding that England commit to adopting Presbyterianism in exchange for a military alliance, and that wasn’t happening. The last thing Charles wanted was to prematurely push them into an alliance which could provide Parliament with tens of thousands more experienced troops. Hamilton may have been too weak, and he may even have sympathized with the covenanters, but that was definitely a fair argument. The problem, though, is that when that alliance was forged, Montrose was totally unprepared.
So, ten months after the war began, Argyll and Henry Vane, among others, met in Edinburgh and negotiated a treaty known as the Solemn League and Covenant. Now, you and I know Henry Vane at this point. In fact, I’d venture a guess that we know him better than just about anyone does, and we certainly know him well enough to know that he was never going to actually agree for England to adopt uniform Presbyterianism. But, he was nothing if not clever, and under his guidance, the Solemn League and Covenant was cleverly worded to avoid doing so. It forged a military alliance. It agreed to make religion in both countries uniform, and it even discussed the possibility of uniting the two kingdoms … but it left the wording about what the precise religious future of the two countries would be, and for one reason or another, Argyll didn’t call him on it. When a group of Royalists in Scotland tried to rebel against this, the Scottish Parliament had excommunicated them all and chosen one, convicted him of treason by attainder and beheaded him, so people were more than reluctant to follow in those footsteps.
And ten months after the Solemn League and Covenant, a Covenanter Army under David Leslie enabled Parliament’s victory at Marston Moor, the turning point of the war, saving a wounded Oliver Cromwell and helping hold the Royalist line. Leslie had fought brilliantly for Sweden in the Thirty Years War, and returned with the esteemed Alexander Leslie to turn the Covenanter Army into a professional fighting force during the Bishops’ Wars. Now, his army all-but-clinched Parliament’s victory, and Montrose was still stuck in London.
But, since neutrality was no longer an option, King Charles now let him do his thing. Antrim sent him that army, while he made his way north with a few hundred English soldiers. At this point, the hope was that he could distract Leslie’s army, pulling them back up to Scotland so that the English Parliament was forced to continue the fight on its own. It took one showdown with the Scots to scatter the English troops, and by the time that Antrim’s forces … came down to Montrose … they were shocked to find him alone in the woods, save for two companions, and dressed in humble mountaneering garb.
Now, the person leading Antrim’s troops was Alasdair MacColla, that young MacDonald we met last episode, who had been taking refuge in Ireland since Argyll had imprisoned his family. His military career had begun when he’d joined the army raised to try to suppress Irish rebels who were at this point slaughtering Ulster Scots, but after just a few months he had defected and joined the rebels who had now organized into the Irish Confederation. He had way more in common with them. They shared language, religion, and the common experience of having lost and suffered for that religion. The MacDonalds had been connected to Antrim for centuries, and MacColla had even been born there, as had his father. Even the Campbells could be seen as a common enemy. MacColla was soon such a distinguished leader of the Confederate Forces that Antrim chose him to lead the Irish forces who would fight in Scotland. And he was a spectacular choice.
Together, Montrose and MacColla achieved what neither could have separately. They took Scotland for the king. If this story were fiction, people would dismiss it as unrealistic. Two people, both in their early 30s, with a couple years’ military experience each. Montrose brought education, formal military training, experience plotting large scale campaigns, the legitimacy of being the King’s designated leader, and a dedication to Presbyterianism. MacColla brought Highland prestige, Highland connections, and the specific experience of fighting as part of an underdog rebel force, plus the beginnings of an army. Perhaps most importantly, though, they shared an almost unequalled willingness to risk and do what it took to win.
And that last part may be the most important of all. No one who fought alongside Montrose and MacColla was likely to survive a defeat, them included. Irish people were exempted from quarter, even when offered, and MacColla was essentially an Irish rebel, leading an army of Irish rebels. Their military experience had come from fighting Scots, killing Scots, kicking them off the land and revolutionizing the type of warfare used against them … and he was a Catholic. As for Montrose, he’d been excommunicated by the Kirk and the Scottish Parliament had passed a bill of attainder against him, so if he were ever captured he would be executed. They led an army of 3,000 Irish and Highlander soldiers with no cavalry, little training, and even less equipment. Meanwhile, the Covenanters could easily recruit tens of thousands of soldiers.
The Scots were trained to use claymores, the Irish were trained to use muskets, and that was about it. In Ireland, MacColla had helped develop the tactic which would become the foundation of their fighting style, and which would come to be known as the Highland Charge. It’s a fascinating tactic, and just so representative of the nature of their army, too. Instead of surrounding their musketeers with pikemen to protect them while they reloaded, MacColla’s soldiers would stand just out of accurate firing range to push the enemy to fire. Most of the bullets would miss, and while they were reloading, his troops would run up to the pikemen, shoot at point blank range, and then finish them off with swords before they could organize to fight back. It’d be 100 years before guns were fast enough to make this strategy obsolete.
And, much like the Highland Charge, their victory would be built on speed and sheer audacity, along with a hefty enough dose of violence to make the English Civil War seem tame by comparison. In part this was cultural, because massacres were a part of Highland life and clan feuds, and the bitterest feud in Scottish history was between Argyll’s Campbells and MacColla’s MacDonalds. Even one of the Campbells who was now leading the Covenanter army had orchestrated a massacre of 3000 MacDonalds just a few years before. And, the MacDonalds had burned Churches filled with people of all ages. In addition to this, there had already been an escalation of brutality during the Bishops Wars.
But this was also because Montrose’s was a tiny army fighting a massive, well-equipped force, and they were all going to be killed if they were ever defeated. Inflicting minimal damage wasn’t a priority. Nor was granting quarter in a conflict where none could be expected. This was a fight to the death, and they were the underdogs.
Argyll now had to stay behind in Scotland to fight Montrose’s army. First, they faced off in Perth, where Argyll had an army of 6,600. Montrose’s army won, though, and their victory started with them throwing rocks at Argyll’s army, after which they chased after them with claymores. They killed 300, and sustained only two minor injuries. After the battle, they stocked up on provisions, weapons, clothes, food, etc, and headed to Aberdeen. When they won there, too, Leslie’s army had to head back to Scotland.
After winning in Aberdeen, they went to Argyleshire and just devastated the Campbells. They killed 1000 people, did millions of pounds worth of damage, even in 17th Century money, and burned Inverary to the ground. Argyll, himself, only narrowly escaped, but he sailed to Inverlochy to regroup and gathered 8,000 troops to surround Montrose’s army. The roads leading out of the area went either to Inverlochy or Inverness, and everything else was rugged mountain terrain, and this was the middle of winter. But, Montrose and MacColla chose the mountains, and traveled 30 miles through them in 36 hours, so that Argyll’s Inverlochy army had no warning whatsoever of their approach. They could not leave Argyll without going through either Inverlochy or Inverness, unless of course they went through 30 miles of rugged mountain terrain in the middle of winter, so he put 3,000 in one, and 5,000 in the other. But, trek through the mountains is exactly what they did. And they did it in 36 hours so that Argyll’s Inverlochy army had no warning whatsoever. They simply looked up one morning to see 1,500 men marching down Ben Nevis. Half the army was killed in the battle, including most of the important Campbell leaders, while Montrose and MacColla lost only a handful of men.
And the victories continued until there was only one remaining Covenanter Army in Scotland, a force of 7,000 men at the town of Kilsyth led by William Bailie. This one could easily have defeated them, but it ended up being the most anticlimactic of all. Bailie planned to trap Montrose between his army and the reinforcements which were arriving under Hamilton’s brother, and there would have been little he could do … but in this case Kirk leadership overruled him. They could do that in the Covenanter army, and they were panicked about the idea of Montrose and MacColla getting back to the Highlands, so they demanded Bailie rearrange his army to focus on preventing this … as Montrose watched. After arguing, he obeyed. All Montrose had to do was attack while they did this, and he wiped out ¾ of their army, no quarter offered. The rest fled into bogs, where more died. The reinforcements scattered, leadership fled to England, and Glasgow and Edinburgh were simple victories after that. Against all odds, Montrose controlled Scotland. He released his friends and supporters from prison, conferred a knighthood on MacColla and recognized Catholics as being his most dependable and trustworthy soldiers, pushing for them to get freedom of worship.
I may have dwelled too long on this, but it really is an amazing story. There was one problem, though, and that was England. Montrose’s great victory had come just two months after Charles’s final defeat at Naseby. News of his exploits had been the only good news for English Royalists in over a year, and now the King had no real army with which to win a war. He was playing for time, delaying the inevitable and trying to find some way to salvage something.
So the question facing Montrose and MacColla was what to do next. They couldn’t hold Scotland indefinitely with nothing going on in England, and they weren’t going to do much good trying. Charles hoped to meet with them to rebuild his war effort, but fundamentally they were in charge of an army whose numbers hovered between 1,500 and 3,000. They had done the impossible, but there were a lot of people who simply would not fight alongside Irish Catholics who had only recently been killing Scottish Protestants. Montrose wanted to meet with the king and rebuild the Royalist war effort, but MacColla wanted to keep weakening the Campbells. They had different priorities, and with the newly changing war dynamics, there was no getting around that fact. As much as he disliked Argyll, Montrose was not going to abandon the king to fight him. And if MacColla’s time was limited, he was going to spend his time weakening his clan’s greatest rivals. 700 soldiers stayed with Montrose, and 2,000 went with MacColla, and the two parted ways.
But, neither was as strong apart as they’d been together. Leslie gathered the people who had fled from Kilsyth and tracked down Montrose. He killed every soldier under Montrose, as well as the wives who were nearby. Montrose escaped, but no one would join him after that. He tried to meet with Digby at Newark, but neither could reach it.
And after defeating Montrose, Leslie turned toward MacColla’s army. He forced them to retreat to Ireland and then killed the 300 people left behind in Dunaverty Castle. MacColla and his men continued their fight in Munster, but there, they too were overwhelmed, defeated, and executed, as was MacColla’s imprisoned father in Scotland.
Meanwhile, the King had surrendered to the Covenanters, calculating that they were the most likely to negotiate with him. They were clearly being pushed to the side, ignored more and more by England’s victorious Roundheads, and Scottish Presbyterians disliked the ascending Independents of the New Model Army every bit as much as they disliked Episcopalians. As a show of mutual good faith, he’d ordered his remaining armies, including MacColla’s, to stand down, and the Covenanters had allowed Montrose and his followers to escape into exile. That was all they really accomplished, though. Neither was prepared to bend enough to come to an agreement yet. Charles was obviously in the weaker position, but as would become increasingly clear in coming months and years, allying with him was also the best chance the Covenanters had to protect their own interests. Perhaps neither was willing to accept how dire their situations were, but the treaty fell through, and the Covenanters gave Charles to Parliament in exchange for their war debts, L200,000, being paid off.
This, though, prompted the next split of the Covenanter cause. Hamilton, who had left the king’s service, entered the inner circle of Covenanter leadership, been imprisoned and now been released from prison, now led a faction of Covenanters who were concerned by the direction things were taking in England. The worst sorts of radicals were taking over, Scotland was being left out of any decisionmaking, and the Solemn League and Covenant was being thoroughly ignored. England absolutely wasn’t turning Presbyterian, and Scottish speeches were being banned from being printed in England. So, a group of Covenanters started to negotiate with the king, and they were willing to bend more than their leadership had. After some negotiation, they were willing to ally with the king in exchange for three years of Presbyterianism and say in future religious changes. This was called the Engagement, its supporters were called the Engagers, and the King agreed to their terms.
The Engagers took the majority in the next Scottish Parliament, but Argyll and the Kirk still opposed any compromise. Rumors spread ever further that Argyll wanted to be the de facto leader of Scotland, but the fact that the Kirk opposed the Engagement turned the population against it. More than that, they also put up roadblocks to hinder Hamilton’s progress, saying, for instance, that anyone who refused the Covenant should be excluded from the army, and also that they shouldn’t fight until the king accepted the full Covenant and permanent Presbyterianism.
The result of all of this was that Leslie and other experienced Covenanter officers refused to serve in the Engager army, and recruitment of ordinary soldiers was painfully slow. And, English royalists who were waiting had enough desperation and little enough trust in Hamilton that they ultimately decided to stop waiting and rebel on their own. When they did that, Hamilton only had 14,000 untrained, ill-equipped and undisciplined soldiers, split into two completely independent groups. The bad decisions added up, and continued to fuel suspicion, communication never happened, and the war was pretty much over before it began. When Cromwell and Hamilton eventually did face off, a huge part of Hamilton’s army fled or surrendered, those who stayed to fight sustained massive losses and Hamilton, himself, was taken prisoner. This was called the Battle of Preston, and after it there was a significant number of Scottish and English prisoners sent to Barbados as well as being put to work on English projects in and around Europe. The problem is, we know almost nothing about these people. We don’t even know how many there were. Was it hundreds? Was it thousands? We know there were about 10,000 Scottish prisoners taken, and the transported ones went to Barbados, and that’s about it. The stated rule at this point was that only soldiers who had volunteered for service would be transported, but it’s fully conceivable that this rule didn’t apply to Scots and one Parliamentary officer said “I think they mean to transport the whole nation of the Scots.” It was in the same year that Cromwell, in his infamous conquest of Ireland, started to transport Irish prisoners en masse to the Caribbean, too. There, they were put to work on the emerging sugar plantations, as the commonest of indentured servants, regardless of their rank. Regardless of how many were sent, we can call this the start of Scottish and Irish presence in America.
At the same time, within Scotland, the Western counties had rebelled against the politically dominant Engagers, and soldiers were marching on Edinburgh to expel them from office. They surrendered, too, and anyone who had supported the Engagement was now forced to apologize and forbidden from serving in government. This was called the Whiggamore raid, it sealed the fate of the Engager movement, and it’s from this that the Whig party would later get its name. The new government now welcomed Cromwell into Edinburgh as deliverer of the Kirk, and he met with Argyll. Royalists would later believe that it was here that the two had agreed to the king’s execution.
But if Argyll had supported the regicide, he was in the distinct minority in Scotland.
Part 2
But if Argyll had supported the regicide, he was in the distinct minority in Scotland. When news of the event reached Scotland, it was seen as proof that the English Independents were heretics, and it was also proof of Scotland’s status in relation to Parliamentary England. Both the Covenant and Solemn League and Covenant had emphasized the importance of the king, and he was Scotland’s king independently of being England’s … yet, when Scottish Commissioners protested the execution, and refused to join with England as a federal republic, they were arrested and sent back to Scotland. At this point, Hamilton was also tried and executed by the English government.
We’ve covered the regicide from a lot of perspectives at this point, but I’d venture a guess that it was the worst of all for Scotland. Not only was it a heretical act among a deeply religious people, and not only was it the destruction of a part of their government without their consent, it was also a clear message that they had no real place in the coming order. The Solemn League and Covenant was supposed to be an alliance, but it looked a lot more like Scotland helping win the pivotal battle of the war, and then being swept aside when internal problems meant they were no longer useful.
Public outcry threatened to tear the Covenanter government apart. Royalists put the blame squarely on the Covenanters. They had given the King to Parliament, after all. People who had supported the Covenanters during the Bishops Wars, and then during Montrose’s Campaigns, and even during Hamilton’s invasion of England in the Second English Civil War, now adopted Montrose’s position en masse and demanded justice. Regardless of what Argyll and the Kirk Party wanted to do, they had no choice. Within days of the regicide, they proclaimed the exiled Prince Charles as King Charles II of Scotland, England and Ireland, and Parliament acknowledged him.
And this is how the event which has been called the Third English Civil War, and more accurately the English Invasion of Scotland, came about. It takes us firmly into the period known as the Interregnum, or the English Republic, and a step beyond anything we’ve previously discussed in this podcast. And, it’s this event which would most infamously see thousands of Scottish prisoners transported to the New World.
Argyll and the Kirk’s priorities hadn’t changed, and while they proclaimed the new king, they demanded he agree to the Covenant before he take power. This would mean accepting permanent Presbyterianism in all three kingdoms, and it would also mean that he couldn’t pass anything that Parliament disagreed with. They even demanded that Royalists and Engagers be excluded both from government and from court. Royalists and Engagers who were still in Scotland revolted in favor of an unconditional accession of the new king, but the Kirk party quashed that, hard. If Charles II wanted to take power in the only kingdom which would accept him, he would have to do it on their conditions, and that meant taking the Covenant.
In exile with the king, Montrose had a different idea. If the king returned to Scotland with a military force, he could restore his government with no caveats. Exiled Engagers disagreed, saying that Charles needed to accept Argyll’s offer as a resource at his disposal. He couldn’t actually afford to turn his back on a kingdom which was willing to invite him peacefully, and that might be a stepping stone to retaking England. They even went so far as to blame Montrose’s campaign for all the problems Scotland was now facing. The two factions would barely speak to each other, but the king adopted ideas from both. He hedged his bets and tried to negotiate with the Covenanters, while simultaneously asking Montrose to secretly start preparing for war.
Soon, Montrose headed to Orkney with 600 German soldiers, commanded by Scottish exiles and supplied by Denmark and Sweden. In Orkney, he recruited 800 more, but it wasn’t a great trip. The islanders were terrified by the stories they’d heard about Montrose. Remember, this was the first war to see widespread use of propaganda, and even when they agreed to fight, they were thoroughly inexperienced soldiers.
And when the Scottish government heard news of his arrival, they didn’t just prepare. They overprepared. They gathered an army of 4,300, complete with cavalry, to meet Montrose’s 1,200 foot soldiers. It didn’t take much more than the sight of Leslie’s army for the Germans to decide the fight wasn’t worth the effort, and the Islanders to scatter in terror. And perhaps poetically, Montrose now ended the war as he’d begun it. Alone, in peasant garb, hiding in the Scottish Highlands after being deserted by his army. He went to Ardvreck Castle to take refuge with an old friend, but either the man or his wife told Leslie where he was. He was captured, tied to a wooden cart and paraded across Scotland in his peasant’s clothes.
Some towns celebrated his humiliation. Some showed their Royalist sympathies, and others just showed sympathy. In Dundee in particular, the people replaced his humble garb with clothes befitting his status, and ensured he had accommodation which reflected his rank as well. Even in Edinburgh, though, reception was mixed. His captors encouraged people to shout, jeer and throw things at this most dangerous of traitors, and they did for a while. He was calm, though, and maintained his dignified composure, and the jeers started to be replaced by curiosity, and prayers for him. Having been excommunicated, he was taken to the common jail, and then to court only long enough for the years-old sentence of death under the Bill of Attainder to be read. He was sentenced to be hanged as a common criminal, and the parts of his body not mounted in Scotland’s major cities to be buried in the common criminals’ graveyard. Through all of this, the only thing that seemed to provoke an emotional response from Montrose was the accusation that he’d violated the Covenant in his actions.
With Montrose’s defeat, Charles would have to sign the Covenant, and in addition, they demanded he annul his commission to Montrose, allowing his execution. The new king agreed, and his fate was sealed.
Montrose refused the Kirk’s push for him to acknowledge his wrongs, and maintained the same position he’d held throughout the wars. He believed in the Covenant, but couldn’t support any more actions against the King’s authority. He was prouder, he said, to have his head affixed to the walls of the prison than his picture placed in the king’s bedchamber, “and far from being troubled that my limbs are to be sent to your principal towns, I wish that I had flesh enough to be dispersed throughout Christendom, to attest my dying attachment to my king.”
That night, he scrawled his final poem on the wall of his cell.
Let them bestow on every airth a limb,
Then open all my veins that I may swim
To thee, my Maker, in that crimson lake,
Then place my par boiled head upon a stake;
Scatter my ashes, strow them in the air.
Lord, since thou knowest where these atoms are,
I’m hopeful thou’lt recover once my dust,
And confident thou’lt raise me with the just.
The next day, he was taken to the scaffold, and his executioner hung an account of his exploits around his neck, to which he responded that he wore that with more pride than he had the garter. He wasn’t allowed any form of a last speech, because that would have been exceptionally dangerous. When he had fought, he’d fought in a country that largely disagreed with him, but now that same country was almost unanimously on his side, even if some didn’t know it. A last speech could have solidified all of those feelings while making him a martyr. He prayed, spoke with those around him, and then ascended the scaffold and gave his final words. “God have mercy on this afflicted land!”
At the same age as MacColla, Montrose was executed, and his officers followed, but the damage had been done to the Kirk party’s cause, as well as to Charles II’s. Charles now went to Scotland under the terms he’d agreed to, and the two joined forces and prepared for the inevitable war which would follow. The Kirk still didn’t want to fight for the King or against Cromwell, and this prompted the last split of the Covenanters, in which Argyll himself shifted his allegiance. There were still people who sided with the Kirk, mostly in the Western counties around Glasgow, but at the point where the Kirk had lost Argyll, they’d lost just about everyone.
And they started recruiting soldiers. At this point, though, we need to step back and realize who these people were. After countless years of wars, drafts, raids, attacks, and faction fighting, who do you think was left? Not Montrose’s soldiers. They’d been killed long ago. Not Argyll’s, they’d been killed, too, as had a huge percent of Leslie’s. Who was left? Inexperienced people, mostly kids. Terrified teens and pre-teens who had been living in a war torn country for as long as they could remember, and one which had been experiencing hunger and bouts of starvation since before they were born. An army, as one colonel described them, of “nothing but useless clerks and ministers’ sons, who have never seen a sword, much less used one.” And few of these people would ever see their homes again.
Cromwell arrived three weeks later. When he arrived, though, he found a wasteland. To slow his approach, the Scots had removed every person, every bit of food, every bit of equipment, every animal. Anything they couldn’t take was destroyed. And in Edinburgh, the wasteland ended in a series of trenches and fortifications, guarded by a massive army led by Leslie.
After weeks of being completely unable to do anything, Cromwell was running out of supplies, so he withdrew to a herring port called Dunbar, where he hoped he might intercept some Scottish supplies and simultaneously force Leslie to attack at its most vulnerable. Leslie prepared his attack, and took the high ground, and at this point the Kirk did to him exactly what they’d done to Baillie at the battle of Kilsyth against Montrose. They ordered him to rearrange his army, right there, in front of Cromwell, to give up the high ground and to attack immediately. And just like Montrose had, Cromwell watched, attacked, and obliterated Leslie’s army while it was totally incapacitated. Most soldiers dispersed, and the two regiments which held their ground were wiped out completely. Three thousand people died, thousands more left the field with soon-to-be fatal injuries, and five thousand were taken prisoner. The ones who were left to try to find their way home struggled to deal with the sheer number of horrifyingly injured people who had wounds similar to the oilfields injuries in Texas which was worst scenario ever imagined.
The prisoners were marched without food for days, and camped in a series of makeshift prisons. The most recognizable of these today is Alnwick Castle, home of the Percy family we’ve talked so much about, and the castle which acts as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies. So, if you see some of those outdoor scenes, they were filmed in places where these prisoners would have been housed. They were so starved that when they found cabbages one day, the ones who ate them died. Then, dysentery set in and Haselrig realized they might all die, so he started feeding them, but the sudden burst of food killed even more. Every Englishc olony needed labor desperately after the Civil Wars had depleted the supply of indentured servants on which they had so heavily relied, and for the loyal colonies, transported prisoners solved this problem.
Half died on the journey, and the ones who survived were sent to the colonies as indentured servants. New England was a preferred destination, because they’d been loyal to Cromwell and needed workers, but they could be shipped anywhere where royalist revolt wasn’t a major threat. This stipulation did mean that the group intended for Virginia was ultimately not sent there, but they were scattered around other colonies.
Back in Scotland, though, Cromwell was marching to Edinburgh. Leslie was desperately working to raise a new army, and no one was going to be excluded this time. Engagers, defectors, whatever, even Catholics. It didn’t matter. Scotland was desperate. The Western Counties, however, still wouldn’t participate, withholding soldiers and planning to capture Charles and give him to Cromwell. Charles escaped, and was finally crowned king, by Argyll of all people. His friends were re-admitted to parliament, and the people who opposed him were taken off of Scotland’s standing council, known as the Committee of Estates.
Cromwell went west, where he was welcomed and defended, and from there, he took Scotland castle by castle over the course of a winter. Scotland could only muster enough for one last stand. The new King Charles assumed command in person, and the new Marquess of Hamilton joined him, as did Leslie. They boosted their numbers with drafts in each county, the rawest of raw recruits.
The line of defense Leslie had organized was strong, and Cromwell searched for a weak point for six weeks. Finally, he took some places in Fife, and his success caused some Scottish desertions. Charles decided to go on the offense, though Argyll disagreed and went home. The English West Country was still devoted to the royal cause, so by going there, perhaps he could join forces with the English Royalists and topple Cromwell’s government for good. He took his army of 18,000 southwest, toward Worcester.
The Royalists and Presbyterians in England had been devastated beyond the point of fighting back, though, and even if they’d been given time to prepare, they couldn’t really. Cromwell left a Scottish an English General named Monck in charge of 7,000 troops to finish reducing Scotland, and followed Charles’s army to England. Monck made an example of Dundee, massacring its garrison after they resisted, and the rest of Scotland surrendered quickly.
By the time they met, Cromwell and Charles each had armies of about 18,000, but while Charles’s was full of the last people Scotland could offer, fighting their first battle ever, who were now far away from home and absolutely exhausted, Cromwell’s was full of veterans who had been fighting together for years at this point. The battle was five long, bloody hours. 5,000 were killed, Leslie and other commanders captured and sent to the Tower of London, new Hamilton mortally wounded, and Charles himself barely managed to escape. His journey to the coast and back into exile has become the stuff of legend, a 45 day journey in disguise, hiding in the woods and old priestholes, trying both to find a ship which would take him abroad and to keep from being captured with a massive price on his head. In one instance, he passed through a Parliamentary army line, and in perhaps the most famous story of all, he hid in an old oak tree, just feet above Parliamentary soldiers who were searching for him.
After dismissing the people who were too injured to keep fighting, or even survive for long, Cromwell ended up with 10,000 Scottish prisoners. And again, the half who survived the journey were sent to the colonies, never to return. 1,500 were shipped to gold mines in Africa, which we will absolutely be talking about soon, and the others were sent to New England and the West Indies. They were kept out of colonies where mutual dissatisfaction might cause problems, and New England was a priority destination as a reward for their loyalty to Cromwell’s cause. Because of the threat of Virginia’s Royalism, the group which was supposed to be sent to Virginia was redirected, but most other colonies ended up with some.
These people never saw Scotland again. Even today, connecting them to their families or even their regions of origin within Scotland is almost impossibly difficult. They were, suddenly and permanently, Americans. Even when they finished their terms of indenture, they had to pay their own voyage back, which few could afford.
Instead, they made their lives in the New World, and there were struggles. In New England, they were treated more dishonestly than the average indentured servant, with some being tricked into serving twice the time they were supposed to, and when they stayed in towns like Boston, they were treated distinctly like second class citizens, with their status equated to that of “Blacks and Indians.” They also clashed frequently with authorities there, with strong beliefs and opinions that contrasted with those of New England’s Congregational leadership. The ones in the West Indies were treated worse. Sugar was a notoriously taxing crop to work with, and conditions for indentured servants were declining fast. Limited land forced people to work multiple terms of indenture, and life was pretty bleak for decades.
But, plenty moved around and some did pretty well for themselves. Those in New England formed a settlement in Maine, and some went south, even to Virginia, which was a decently common practice among people who didn’t fit in with New England society at this point. Others went to Rhode Island. They had the skills, more than many English settlers, to survive in wilderness areas, and they did this. All over the New World, as their indentures ended, at least some emerged as successful landowners, farmers and businessmen.
It’s hard to fathom what these people went through. Transportation was a complete novelty at this point in time. The idea that you could walk out of your house one day and never be able to return home was a real possibility of you didn’t agree with the government that was in power. It’s true that in this particular case, we’re talking about a couple of battles, but for these people, the battle was just the beginning of their struggles. It wasn’t a matter of dying versus surviving and returning home, which was usually the case if you were a commoner. Suddenly, these kids had fought this battle, and were suddenly swept into a life which got more and more foreign and terrifying. A teenager who grew up on a farm in Scotland, drafted, and then after surviving a battle, being tracked down and marched through England, from prison to prison, put on a ship and sent to a different continent.
And as for Scotland, it was no longer a country. Monck was left the head of a military government, with an English administration that included Henry Vane, and it was taxed heavily to pay for its own military occupation. England boasted that Cromwell had achieved what not even the Romans had been able to. The Kirk was pushed aside, its General Assembly broken up by force in Edinburgh, and Scotland was forced to accept English-style Independents within its borders. Anyone who refused to accept the English government was disenfranchised and refused any government protection. Argyll tried to join forces with old Royalists for a new rebellion, but they refused and he submitted to Monck, too. Scotland would have no Parliament, but instead be given thirty seats on the English Parliament, which were in practice largely filled by English people. Just like in England, transportation loomed as an ever-present threat to those who opposed the government, and more Scots would join the POWs as time went on. Scotland now faced a more extreme version of every problem which had pushed it to revolt in the first place.
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