"The Proud Servant", Margaret Irwin

[igenlode]

What I admire about this book is first of all how — as in any good historical novel — the author has managed to put us into the viewpoint of the past with a sense of 'now', rather than with quaint customs and costumes as viewed through the lens of the present day. And not just any 'now', but the contrasting views of Scotland and England and Italy all in the seventeenth century, all seen as foreign to one another but never for one moment old-fashioned; it is *their* recent past, to us almost equally long ago, that is very clearly felt to be out of date to the point of nostalgia — the days of the old queen and the Border reivers, and the age-old conflict between England and Scotland so recently and unaccustomedly stifled. The writing vividly evokes the conviction, common to all ages, that we, here, now, are on the threshold of modernity, with all the latest technology that man can dream: with bows and arrows passing over within living memory from a weapon of war to a sport for idle hours, as gunpowder takes their place.

In this carefully lighted, pretty, modernly furnished room, with its new Flemish tapestries and its French chairs covered with rose-coloured velvet, and its one good religious picture from Italy, he was in an alien world from that wet wood[...] Other ages than his own surrounded him in these woods and stones. Unconscious of them and their history, he was yet reminded in this sad search back through his youth that the world was very old, and drawing to an end. The seventeenth-century mind, just like our own, pictures itself instinctively as living at the end of history :-)

The second impressive thing is how sure-footedly the book manages to plot a coherent narrative through what I suspect to be some extremely turgid details of military and political history; textbooks could and doubtless have been written about the various shifting political alliances in the lead-up to the Civil War, and the war itself is dealt with in the space of a dozen pages over two very cursory chapters (XXV: "The King set up his standard at Nottingham on a cold and gusty day in August"— XXVI: "He joined the King's Court at Oxford"). All the political manoevuring is in effect subsumed into character arcs; Argyll, Montrose, King Charles. The author has clearly done her research, but she is sure enough of herself not to drown the reader in all the resulting details in order to justify the effort! (And, I presume, she is in some haste to get to the 'Annus Mirabilis', without which no-one would now remember Montrose in the first place...) But, conversely, she shows very vividly and comprehensibly how Montrose himself could have travelled from being
an ardent leading light of the Covenanter movement to devoting himself body and soul to the cause of the King he had so successfully opposed, without any inconsistency; we can never know what people were truly thinking, but her account holds artistic conviction.

And the third thing is simply the quality of the prose, and in particular that of the description, in passages frequently verging on the poetic.

The fruit trees were splayed against the walls; outside them, leaning over them, trees were tossing and blowing, as big and dark as thunder-clouds; above them, huge clouds, white and black, were riding like galleons high up in the blue sky.

He himself was not a boy, not even primarily a romantic. That was the secret of his hold on the heroes and ruffians he led, whose pride it was to rush blindly into fight,—that he himself never lost the coolness of his judgment, that it was his reason that flamed white-hot in action, prompted his most daring commands, turned disaster into victory by a rapid calculation, a deliberate word flung at the critical moment into the fight, which acted like wine and fire.

There was his father's face, keen and high like a hawk's, with the clear eyes that could always pierce through the mist that now surrounded him; and his father's voice could always be heard, low and ringing, when the others could only move their mouths at him and say nothing. And his father's hand came down on his shoulder and made him know that all was well, when nothing else in that room remained, and the curtains of his bed had turned into the white and scarlet sky beyond the mountains, where he had stood beside his father and heard the trumpets salute the King's Standard at dawn.
That hand was still on his shoulder, though its touch grew lighter and lighter yet,—but now he did not need its touch to tell him that his wish had come true, that he and his father would go on like this for ever.

The book makes a fascinating contrast to Irwin's subsequent "The Stranger Prince", which covers what is essentially the same period from a completely different point of view, that of Rupert of the Rhine; in fact if you set the two volumes side by side, the dialogue quoted in the two scenes where Rupert and Montrose come face to face is so word for word identical that the author presumably had her own manuscript open for reference, or else is basing it on the same historical document! But Rupert's view of England as a refuge from the war-torn Continent of his youth is very different from Montrose's perspective on it as the old enemy of his homeland, and Montrose's view of Rupert himself and of the aftermath of Marston Moor is very different from Rupert's own heartbreak: in "the heavy-lidded lustrous eyes... eyes of a dog, eyes of a deer, eyes like his uncle, King Charles" there lay "the doom of his family— childishly personal, and too much concerned with family matters. ... Had Montrose had such a letter in Rupert's place, he would have ignored it and given his respectful reasons afterwards for doing so." It's an impressive feat of ventriloquy.

(And "The Bride", of course, is in effect an equal sequel to both books; Montrose seen again, but through the lens of "The Stranger Prince", and picking up/filling out the pre-existing endings of both novels.)

I haven't read either of the two nearly so often as I have reread "The Stranger Prince", for the same reason that I put off finishing "The Proud Servant" for so many days on this occasion: because I prefer happy endings, and while we know that Rupert recovers from his failures and eventually returns to his beloved England to live a long, fruitful and presumably contented life at the restored court of his cousin Charles II, Montrose is doomed by history to die as he had lived, caught up in a thankless fight for a cause riddled by shifting betrayals :-(
And, oddly enough, we never do find out what had become of his sister Kat, who figures so largely in the first part of the story and who then disappears abroad beyond his ability to find her, despite all his efforts. Presumably history simply does not record her fate, although a novel would normally round off that strand of the story.