This habit of fight was in a great measure changed by the introduction of muskets into the Scottish Lowland service,which,not being as yet combined with the bayonet,was a formidable weapon at a distance,but gave no assurance against the enemy who rushed on to close quarters.The pike,indeed,was not wholly disused in the Scottish army;but it was no longer the favourite weapon,nor was it relied upon as formerly by those in whose hands it was placed;insomuch that Daniel Lupton,a tactician of the day,has written a book expressly upon the superiority of the musket.This change commenced as early as the wars of Gustavus Adolphus,whose marches were made with such rapidity,that the pike was very soon thrown aside in his army,and exchanged for fire-arms.A circumstance which necessarily accompanied this change,as well as the establishment of standing armies,whereby war became a trade,was the introduction of a laborious and complicated system of discipline,combining a variety of words of command with corresponding operations and manoeuvres,the neglect of any one of which was sure to throw the whole into confusion.
War therefore,as practised among most nations of Europe,had assumed much more than formerly the character of a profession or mystery,to which previous practice and experience were indispensable requisites.Such was the natural consequence of standing armies,which had almost everywhere,and particularly in the long German wars,superseded what may be called the natural discipline of the feudal militia.
The Scottish Lowland militia,therefore,laboured under a double disadvantage when opposed to Highlanders.They were divested of the spear,a weapon which,in the hands of their ancestors,had so often repelled the impetuous assaults of the mountaineer;and they were subjected to a new and complicated species of discipline,well adapted,perhaps,to the use of regular troops,who could be rendered completely masters of it,but tending only to confuse the ranks of citizen soldiers,by whom it was rarely practised,and imperfectly understood.So much has been done in our own time in bringing back tactics to their first principles,and in getting rid of the pedantry of war,that it is easy for us to estimate the disadvantages under which a half-trained militia laboured,who were taught to consider success as depending upon their exercising with precision a system of tactics,which they probably only so far comprehended as to find out when they were wrong,but without the power of getting right again.Neither can it be denied,that,in the material points of military habits and warlike spirit,the Lowlanders of the seventeenth century had sunk far beneath their Highland countrymen.
From the earliest period down to the union of the crowns,the whole kingdom of Scotland,Lowlands as well as Highlands,had been the constant scene of war,foreign and domestic;and there was probably scarce one of its hardy inhabitants,between the age of sixteen and sixty,who was not as willing in point of fact as he was literally bound in law,to assume arms at the first call of his liege lord,or of a royal proclamation.The law remained the same in sixteen hundred and forty-five as a hundred years before,but the race of those subjected to it had been bred up under very different feelings.They had sat in quiet under their vine and under their fig-tree,and a call to battle involved a change of life as new as it was disagreeable.Such of them,also,who lived near unto the Highlands,were in continual and disadvantageous contact with the restless inhabitants of those mountains,by whom their cattle were driven off,their dwellings plundered,and their persons insulted,and who had acquired over them that sort of superiority arising from a constant system of aggression.The Lowlanders,who lay more remote,and out of reach of these depredations,were influenced by the exaggerated reports circulated concerning the Highlanders,whom,as totally differing in laws,language,and dress,they were induced to regard as a nation of savages,equally void of fear and of humanity.These various prepossessions,joined to the less warlike habits of the Lowlanders,and their imperfect knowledge of the new and complicated system of discipline for which they had exchanged their natural mode of fighting,placed them at great disadvantage when opposed to the Highlander in the field of battle.The mountaineers,on the contrary,with the arms and courage of their fathers,possessed also their simple and natural system of tactics,and bore down with the fullest confidence upon an enemy,to whom anything they had been taught of discipline was,like Saul's armour upon David,a hinderance rather than a help,"because they had not proved it."
It was with such disadvantages on the one side,and such advantages on the other,to counterbalance the difference of superior numbers and the presence of artillery and cavalry,that Montrose encountered the army of Lord Elcho upon the field of Tippermuir.The Presbyterian clergy had not been wanting in their efforts to rouse the spirit of their followers,and one of them,who harangued the troops on the very day of battle,hesitated not to say,that if ever God spoke by his mouth,he promised them,in His name,that day,a great and assured victory.The cavalry and artillery were also reckoned sure warrants of success,as the novelty of their attack had upon former occasions been very discouraging to the Highlanders.The place of meeting was an open heath,and the ground afforded little advantage to either party,except that it allowed the horse of the Covenanters to act with effect.
