Monk. Julian Stafford Corbett
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much misconception of their character. Then it was well understood to mean a soldier by profession, no more nor less than what every officer in our army is to-day. The ideal soldier of fortune was marked not so much by his readiness to change his colours as by his blind devotion to those with which for the time being he was engaged. Until the period of his commission, or of the war or campaign for which he had engaged was ended, his loyalty to his paymasters was as ungrudging as it was unassailable. Nothing would have induced him to enter a service which he considered dishonourable, but having once engaged he fought and toiled and bled in contemptuous indifference to the political manœuvres of the men whose commission he held. To look upon such men as cruel, unprincipled adventurers is the very reverse of the truth where worthy pupils of the heroic Veres are concerned. We must remember that it was in their school that Monk learnt his trade, and not in that which produced men like the Turners and Dalziells and brought disgrace upon the name of the soldier of fortune. They were men who could only teach virtues, though perhaps the only virtues they could teach were honesty and obedience. At any rate that was the lesson which Monk learnt. To be true to his paymaster, that was his rule in life; to obey the civil authority which employed him, that was his political creed. Such was the code which Monk brought home with him from the Low Countries. Simple and rude as it was, it was all he had to guide him through the labyrinth he was about to tread.
As yet the Revolution stirred but in restless slumber, and it is probable that it was not the prospect of civil strife which brought Monk to England in search of employment. Prince Rupert and his brother were at Court in hopes of getting their uncle's aid for the recovery of the Palatinate; and the King, sobered by failure, was turning and doubling every way to shirk the responsibility and enjoy the credit of assisting his beautiful and unfortunate sister. Of all the schemes which were suggested to this end the most extraordinary was the project for the colonisation of Madagascar. The idea was that a thousand gentlemen should join, each with a thousand pounds and a number of servants. The King was to provide twelve ships from the navy, and thirty merchantmen were to complete the fleet. Every adventurer was to sail in person, and the whole was to be commanded by Prince Rupert himself, with the title of Governor-General of Madagascar or St. Lawrence. But Elizabeth grew anxious about her son, and opposed the wild scheme in which she could see no reason. "As for Rupert's romance," she wrote to Roe, "about Madagascar, it sounds more like one of Don Quixote's conquests when he promised his trusty squire to make him king of an island." In the end practical merchants and seamen threw so much cold water on the scheme that it began to lose favour, and Rupert did not go.
Meanwhile all the world was run mad on the romantic adventure. Davenant wrote a little epic about it, which made Endymion Porter exclaim, himself as mad as the rest:
"What lofty fancy was't possest your braine,
And caus'd you soare into so high a straine?"
Suckling so far forgot himself in the craze of the hour as to write a copy of verses that may still be read without a blush. Even the phlegmatic Captain Monk was carried away. Man of the new time as he was, in the bottom of his heart he was Elizabethan. The project was more than enough to revive the dreams of his Devonshire boyhood, of Raleigh, of Guiana, and the early days of Virginia, and he promised to go. But it was not to be. Ere long he withdrew, either because his native shrewdness showed him it was all a bubble or else because the curtain was up at last, and he turned to the thrilling play beside which the Madagascar adventure was only a childish fairy tale.
Scotland was to be coerced into conformity, and in the bustle of preparation Monk saw his chance. To every soldier in England his name must have been perfectly familiar. Every young gentleman who had seen any service was hurrying to the King's standard on the chance of a commission, and the majority of them would be only too glad to claim George Monk as their father-in-arms, and boast of their service in the colonel's company of the crack regiment in the Low Country Brigade.
Nor did Monk lack powerful friends. He was a wide-kinned man, so wide that it is impossible to trace the multitudinous ramifications of his family. He had connections in high places, and they began to take him up. Above all Lord Leicester seems to have found a pleasure in pushing his distinguished young kinsman's fortunes, and at this moment there was no better friend a young man could have than Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester. His family was just now rising into high favour. His brother-in-law, the Earl of Northumberland, was Lord Admiral, while for sister-in-law he could claim the lovely Countess of Carlisle herself.
This "Erinnys of the North," as Warburton called her, for whom Waller could forget awhile his Sacharissa, who made Davenant sing his sweetest, and wrung from Suckling his most lascivious note, was still the reigning beauty of the Court. As she entered middle age her charms seemed only to ripen. Her eyes were as bright, her wit as keen, her vivacity as sparkling as ever. The only change was in the field of her conquests. Weary of breaking the hearts of fops and poets, she was seeking new excitement in political intrigue and new pleasures in charming tried leaders of men such as Pym and Strafford. At this moment a blunt manly soldier like Captain Monk was just the man to find favour in her capricious eyes. Monk was always soft-hearted with a woman, and his admiration of such a beauty must have been frank and undisguised. Whatever was the cause, he found her willing to support Lord Leicester's request for his advancement. The task was not difficult. Officers of tried worth who could be trusted in the quarrel were in high demand for lieutenant-colonels of the newly-raised regiments. Half the colonels were noblemen of little experience, and the rest were occupied with their duties on the staff. Monk, as a man who despised politics and was without convictions, was in every way fitted for a command, and his fair friend was soon able to hand him his commission as lieutenant-colonel of Lord Newport's regiment of foot.
Monk soon found plenty of work to do; but all his efforts to turn his men into soldiers were thrown away. In June, 1639, to his intense disgust a pacification was patched up with the Scots, and the First Bishops' War came to an ignominious end before a blow had been struck. To Monk, whose narrow but enthusiastic patriotism had been only increased by his service abroad, such a fiasco was deeply mortifying. With a stupid constancy, for which it is impossible not to love him, he clung through life to the fixed idea that one Englishman was any day worth two or three of any other nation. To face an army of Scots for months and then come to terms without fighting was a piece of pusillanimity he could not understand, and never forgot.
Nor did the conduct of the Second Bishops' War mend his opinion of the King. His regiment was amongst the first that were ready to take the field. It was present at the rout at Newburn Ford, where its lieutenant-colonel distinguished himself by saving the English guns. But with that disgraceful action the campaign ended. Monk and a few other officers at the Council of War urged every argument which the pedantic strategy of the day could suggest in order to induce the King to attack the Scots with the concentrated army which was now strengthened with the Yorkshire and Durham trained-bands. But all was in vain, and an armistice preliminary to peace was concluded at Ripon, by which the two northern counties were left in possession of the Scots as security for a war-indemnity.
For these two miserable failures Monk never forgave the King. To the end of his life he used to harp on the fatal mistake Charles made in not following the advice he gave, and to the last maintained, with characteristic ignorance of the real questions at issue, that all the blood which flowed in the following years was to be imputed to the folly of sparing it then.
While the Scots were eating up the fat of the land and Monk was fretting at the part he had to play, the plot was thickening fast. The Long Parliament had met and Strafford was brought to bay. The breach between King and Parliament was widening daily, and Charles was foolish enough to listen to schemes which the most hairbrained of his courtiers devised for dragging the army into the quarrel. Men ready to coerce the Houses were to be placed in command, and the army was to be brought up to London and the Tower snatched from the hands of Lord Newport, who was now constable. But there was a difficulty in the way. The Low Country officers, true to their principles, refused to have anything to do with the plot, and the conspirators fell out before the question of command could be settled. Goring, who had been promised the post of Lieutenant-General, in a fit of spite betrayed the plot to Lord Newport. Newport told Pym, and at the critical moment when Strafford's fate hung in the balance Pym played the information as a trump-card. The effect was electrical, and its sequel of no little