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To one who studies such portraits as exist of the chief figures in the Scotland of that epoch, there must come a sense of disappointment. Few convey the impression of power which is found among the Puritans and Cavaliers of England. There is Hamilton, self-conscious, arrogant, and puzzled; Lanark, his brother, dark, sullen, and stupid; Huntly, a peacock head surmounting a splendid body; Rothes, heavy-chinned, goggle-eyed, Pickwickian; Glencairn, weak and rustical; old Leven, the eternal bourgeois; the Border earls, but one remove from the Border prickers; Wariston, obstinate and crack-brained; James Guthrie, lean and fanatical. But there are three exceptions. One is the haunting face of Montrose, whose calm eyes do not change from the Jameson portrait of his boyhood to the great Honthorst of his prime. The second is the face of Alexander Henderson, yellow from the fevers of the Leuchars marshes, lined with thought, and burning with a steady fire. The third is that of Archibald, eighth Earl of Argyll. We see him at nineteen, in his marriage clothes, his reddish hair falling over his collar, his grey-blue eyes with ever so slight a cast in them; we see him in his twenty-fourth year, with the air and accoutrements of a soldier; in the Castle Campbell portrait, unfortunately burned in the Inveraray castle fire of 1877, he is in armour, but the face has a scholar's pallor and a curious melancholy; in the familiar Newbattle picture, painted in his late forties, he is in sober black with the skull-cap of a divine on his head, the features are drawn with ill-health and care, the mouth is compressed and secret, the nose is pendulous, and the cast in the eyes has become almost a deformity. But at whatever period we take it, it is a face of power, with intellect in the broad brow, and resolution in the tight lips and heavy chin.[106]

In every national crisis there is some personal antagonism, where the warring creeds seem to be summed up in the persons of two protagonists—Cæsar and Pompey, Pym and Strafford, Fox and Pitt. So were to stand those present allies, Montrose and Argyll, secular types of conflicting temperaments and irreconcilable views. The head of the great house of Campbell was now some thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, eight years the senior of Montrose. He had the widest possessions of any Highland chief except Huntly, and at his back by far the most powerful clan, for he lived close to the Lowlands, and could put 5,000 men into the field. His father, to whom the sobriquet of Gilleasbuig Gruamach—"Gillespie the Sullen"—properly belonged,[107] was an odd character and led an odd life. He was defeated at Glenrinnes in 1594 by the Gordons, but later added to his possessions by subduing the Macdonalds of Islay and Kintyre. But his fortune was not commensurate with his lands, he fell deeply into debt, married a Catholic second wife, joined the Church of Rome, and had to flee the country. He was permitted to return, and lived some ten years in England before his death. His first wife was a daughter of the house of Morton, so his son had in his veins the unaccountable Douglas blood. Like the father, the son had an unhappy childhood, for he lost his mother in his infancy, and during his youth was perpetually at variance with his wandering sire. He had to fight hard during his minority for his rights, and the experience must have made him wary and distrustful, and taught him diplomacy and dissimulation. Charles is said to have assisted him against his vindictive parent, and Clarendon reports some dubious gossip about the old man warning the king against his son, "for he is a man of craft, subtlety, and falsehood, and can love no man, and if ever he finds it in his power to do you a mischief, he will be sure to do it."[108]

What is clear is that in his youth he was deeply in debt, and found his great estates less of a boon than an incumbrance. He determined to husband and increase his fortune, and there is record of a curious venture to annex an imaginary island beyond the Hebrides.[109] He took his part in policing the Highlands, and in 1636 brought to justice the outlaw Patrick Macgregor, who is famous in balladry as Gilderoy. With high politics he did not meddle. He defended the laird of Earlston against the Bishop of Galloway, and befriended Samuel Rutherford when brought before the Court of High Commission, but his motive may well have been only friendship to his kinsfolk, the Kenmures. These incidents did not predispose him to love the bishops, and in 1637 he convened a meeting of Rothes, Traquair, and other noblemen, to protest against the "pride and avarice of the prelates seeking to overrule the haill kingdom."[110] But up to 1638 we may regard him as principally occupied with family troubles and the care of his estates, a little suspect by Presbytery as the son of a Catholic and the brother-in-law of Huntly, well regarded by the king in spite of his father's warnings, and with no special predilection towards the Kirk. He was one of the few nobles who, in the summer of 1638, took the king's alternative covenant at the request of Hamilton.

In this mood he attended the Glasgow Assembly. There it would appear that he underwent a profound spiritual experience, and in the theological sense was "converted." It was the habit of Alexander Henderson during the sittings to hold meetings at night for prayer and counsel. "I find," says Wodrow, who must have been repeating a tradition handed down in the ministry, "that their meetings were remarkably countenanced of God, and that the Marquis of Argyll, and several others who sometimes joined in them, dated their conversion, or a knowledge of it, from those times."[111] It was this change of heart, and not the discovery that the Covenant was the side of the majority, that determined Argyll's course. He was an acute judge of popular opinion, but it was something more than policy that took him over to the Covenant side. For from that day this man, who in the past had been wholly concerned with his worldly possessions, and had held himself conspicuously aloof from the Kirk, became a religious enthusiast, a fanatic; and no mortal, however consummate an actor, could simulate such enthusiasm as Argyll revealed during the remainder of his troubled life.[112]

In assessing his character we have therefore to start from the fact that in religious matters he was most deeply in earnest, that he had the same proselytizing zeal, and the same complete assurance that the armies of Heaven were on his side, as Wariston and James Guthrie. To this add his Campbell and Douglas ancestry. He had the chief's love of power, and it is possible that, as in Hamilton's case, visions of a crown may have haunted one who boasted that he was the "eighth man from Robert Bruce." Such dreams were common among the higher Scots nobility. His bitter youth had left him suspicious and aloof, without warmth, with few friends and fewer intimates. He could not charm easily; he must win his way by patience, assiduity, and talent; but he learned in time a grace of manner to which even the hostile Clarendon bears witness. He was, so far as can be judged, without any interest in humane letters; his mind was mediæval in its cast, holding firm by law and scholastic divinity. Hence it is vain to look to him for any profound ideal of statecraft. He was essentially a politician, a shrewd judge of character and opinion, able to use both the raw material of fanaticism in the ministers and of gross self-interest in the nobles to further his ends, because he shared the one and wholly understood the other. There was no quicker brain in Britain to probe the possibilities of a situation. Mr. Gardiner thinks him as much superior to Montrose as a statesman as he was inferior in the art of war;[113] and Clarendon, after remarking that Montrose despised him, "as he was too apt to contemn those he did not love," adds that Argyll "wanted nothing but honesty and courage to be a very extraordinary man, having all other good talents in a great degree."[114]

Honesty and courage are difficult matters upon which to dogmatize. Argyll was a poor soldier, because he lacked the power of grasping a tactical or strategical problem—a gift as specialized as that for poetry or the higher mathematics—and because he had not the kind of personality which can impress itself upon large bodies of men under arms. But it is idle to deny courage, even of the rude physical kind, to a man who time and again risked his neck, who was prepared to meet an enemy in a duel, and who went without a tremor to the scaffold. As for honesty, there is little enough of the high and delicate kind at any time in the political game, and, if we define it as scrupulous loyalty to cause and colleague, it was a fruit which scarcely grew in seventeenth-century Scotland. In that mad kaleidoscope Argyll had as much of the rare commodity as most of his contemporaries. His troubles came primarily from a divided soul—a clear, practical intellect pulling against an obscurantist creed, the Highland chief at variance with the Presbyterian statesman, a brain, mediæval for all its powers, fumbling with the half-understood problems of a new world. With such a one subtlety will appear as irresolution, perplexity as cowardice, and a too quick mind will seem to argue a dishonest heart.

Such a man will be a power among fanatics and self-seekers, for he can read the souls of both. But there will be one chink in his armour. He will not comprehend so readily other motives, and, in failing to understand, he will miscalculate and undervalue. Single-heartedness will not come within the scope of his capacious understanding. Sooner or later Argyll was bound to find in Montrose his stark opposite, by whom he was both puzzled and repelled—one who, in the common sense of the word, had no personal ambition, who was a civic enthusiast as Wariston and Guthrie were religious enthusiasts, and who would force the appeal to that which Argyll hated and feared—the sword.