Montrose, 1612-50
A general, a poet, a Calvinist, for almost a year Montrose, in King Charles’s name, was master of Scotland. Five years later, writes Aram Bakshian, Jr., he was hanged in Edinburgh.
If successful generals seldom demonstrate a bent for verse or political science, the list of accomplished poets and political theorists who have excelled as conquering heroes is even shorter.
A seventeenth-century Scotsman, James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, is perhaps the only example of the latter in British annals.
In his Lectures On Heroes, Thomas Carlyle singled out Montrose as ‘the noblest of all the Cavaliers; an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; what one may call the Hero-Cavalier’, and marvelled at how,
‘This Montrose, with a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of them so much as guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled Puritan armies like a wild whirlwind; sweeps them, time after time, some five times over, from the field before him. He was at one period, for a short while, master of all Scotland. One man; but he was a man: a million zealous men, but without the one; they against him were powerless.’
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