The document had been the king’s appeal. And what followed was Tullibardine’s response. He counselled that not only should the march on Inverness be abandoned, but that all the troops now ashore should re-embark.
More decanters were summoned for the table, and the debate resumed. The points made and the language had been easy to follow, but James could not fathom the thrust of it all, the end to be achieved.
Stalemate.
Then, Tullibardine slipped the second letter across the table to the Marischal. It was Tullibardine’s own king’s commission, and it pre-dated the Marischal’s by two years, having been issued at the time of some previous still-born tilt at restoring the Stuarts. More importantly, however, it conferred the rank of lieutenant general on Tullibardine, making him superior to the Marischal.
As George Keith read it, Tullibardine had embarked on a convoluted speech, emphasising that although undoubtedly the Earl Marischal had commanded the King of Spain’s expedition to Scotland, now that it had arrived, it must be King James’ will that those forces should fall under the command of his most senior general in the country. Namely, Tullibardine.
Young James Lindsay had hung on every cut and thrust of this fencing.
The facts could not be gainsaid, admitted the Marischal, but he counselled against the force re-embarking. British cruisers were known to prowl this coast hunting any Jacobite vessel (that label being a Hanoverian one, as in Jacobus, the Latin for James, their so-called king). Should a squadron appear, their naval force might be compromised where it lay, embayed and trapped, or worse still, brought to battle and destroyed with the army aboard, denying it any chance to strike a blow. And also, as the marquess had so pertinently pointed out, he, the Earl Marischal, was still in command of the Spanish expedition and its ships.
Young James remembered hearing Lord George Murray banging the table and saying he just wanted to fight, that was why they were all here, and could they all just get on with it? And then James’ eyes had started to droop again, and he’d retreated to bed once more. When he awoke the next day, the Spanish ships had sailed in the night, empty. James simply thought a mutual decision must have been arrived at on the issue of re-embarkation. Only later did he discover it was the Marischal’s alone.
If Tullibardine had been angry, he didn’t bother to show it publicly, because the following night, it emerged that there were other ‘issues’ to debate. Was it time to send out the king’s letter summoning the clans? Or did that too have to await news of Ormonde?
Poor young James, his head was left spinning at so much wisdom on display. Lying there against his saddles now, he recalled that it had taken his betters over a week to decide that the king’s appeal must indeed go forth to the clans.
It was then that young James’ revelry was disturbed by figures emerging from the smoke; a ragged cluster of them carrying a body slung in a cloak. The body was Murray, badly wounded. James went to stand up, but realised he couldn’t, without opening his own wounded leg.
Down below the musketry and the booms of the coehorn mortars had abated and the smoke was eddying and dissipating. He watched the men carry Murray past him to a cart, and then wheel him away back towards the drover road and the loch. He called to the men, and others who had gone to join the crowd around Murray. ‘My lord? How badly is he hurt?’ James yelled. ‘How goes the fight? Are the English repulsed?’
Nobody answered him. And when he turned back to look down the hill, he saw a sight that shut him up. The Highlanders were walking out the powder smoke, up the hill towards him, away from their defensive line of stones. And not in an orderly way either, but in rabble clumps, some assisting the few walking wounded. Little staggering knots of dun and plaid, that against the heather and tussock looked more like camouflage than proud colours. Dismaying enough, but nowhere near as crushing as the vista he beheld behind them, emerging from the thinning smoke – their abandoned stone palisades, and not a red coat near.
It was obvious. There could be no mistake. The Highlanders, on this flank at least, had simply decided they were going home.
Watching them go, that evening on the side of Glenshiel, James’ boyish dreams of glory and the nobility of their cause were stripped away. He lay there, impotent, as every castle he’d ever built in the air came tumbling down.
*
‘I see no reason you shouldn’t head home, Jaimie, lad,’ a weary Earl Marischal told him after the sun had set on that battle that never really was. With his leg tightly swaddled in bandage, and leaning his weight on Sophie, now shamefacedly returned to her master, James had hobbled down to where the Marischal and some of his retainers gathered, behind the lines of the Spanish infantry, still standing-to and facing their front.
James had found it hard to follow what was being said, so engulfed had he been in that soldier’s desolation when he first realises he is no longer on his army’s strength; that he doesn’t belong anymore, because he has crossed the line between the fit and the wounded. He was too dazed to argue, too drained to put up a fight. And that was how he departed the king across the water’s army at Glenshiel. His brother David went off with what was left, heading for the coast and boats to carry them to the continent and exile; and James went home.
And what was home?
Kirkspindie Mearns was a moss
