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MONTROSE, MARQUIS OF. 



MONTUCLA, JEAN-ETIENNE. 



S22 



viduals there was none more zealous than he. This course of conduct 

 springing from the natural ardour of his temper, continued for some 

 time : till at length, conceiving, as it would seem, his importance anc 

 military talents undervalued by the Covenanters when Argyle anc 

 Lesly were allowed to lead, the one in the senate, the other in the 

 field, Montrose determined on going over to the king. With that 

 view h>- entered into a secret correspondence with Charles ; but this 

 being detected, the Covenanters threw him into prison, where he was 

 when Charles made his second visit to Scotland, in 1641. As the prin 

 cipal object of the royal visit was to gain the Scots over to his interest, 

 Charles made various concessions, and Montrose was set at liberty with 

 his adherents, in the beginning of 1642. 



From that time he retired to his own house in the country, living 

 privately till the spring of 1643, when the queen returning from 

 Holland, he hastened to wait on her majesty at Burlington and accom- 

 panied her to York. He embraced this opportunity to urge on the 

 queen, as he had formerly done on the king, what he termed the 

 dangerous policy of the Covenanters, and with the impetuosity natural 

 to his character, solicited a commission to raise an army and suppress 

 them by force of arms. The marquis of Hamilton however thwarted 

 him for the present, and he returned home ; but neither his ceaseless 

 activity, nor Ms deadly hatred against the party with whom he had 

 formerly acted, and particularly against their leaders, whose recent 

 imprisonment of him had roused him to revenge, and who filled the 

 place which his ambition had long aimed at, could be laid asleep. 

 Accordingly he took another opportunity of waiting on the king with 

 his proposals on behalf of his majesty, by whom he was favourably 

 received; and at length, in the month of April 1644, he was created 

 Marquis of Montrose, and constituted captain-general and com- 

 mander-in-chief of all the forces to be raised in Scotland for the king's 

 service under prince Hupert The royal arms were for some time 

 unsuccessful however, and the prince seems to have regarded Montrose 

 in no other light than that of a fearless but somewhat wrong-headed 

 enthusiast. Montrose's counsels indeed were almost always of a 

 desperate character, and no failure ever destroyed hia confidence of 

 ultimate success. His army was reinforced from all quarters, its 

 attacks were desultory and violent, and its progress was marked by 

 depredation and waste. At Tipperinuir, a wide field about five miles 

 from Perth, whei e Montrose came in Bight of the enomy drawn up in 

 one long line, with horse at the flanks, the Covenanters' horee were 

 overpowered, according to Wishart, by a shower of stones. The flight 

 of the horse threw tlie ill-disciplined foot into irremediable confusion, 

 numbers were killed through fatigue and fear, and the whole of the 

 artillery and baggage of the vanquished fell into the hands of Mont- 

 ro-e and his men ; and the defeat of Tippermuir was but the begin- 

 ning of a series of conquests, which laid all Scotland open to the 

 victorious Montrose. The last of the series was the battle (or rather, 

 massacre) of Kilsytb, fought in the month of Auguit 1645. On this 

 occasion Montrose had the advantage of selecting his ground with 

 deliberation, whereas the Covenanters catne up after a toilsome 

 inarch, and were even ordered to remove from their first position in 

 the very presence of the enemy. While this change was taking place, 

 Moutrose cast his eye upon a company of cuirassiers, and, pointing 

 them out to his men as " cowardly rascals cased in iron," he threw off 

 his coat and waistcoat, tucked up the sleeves of his shirt, and drawing 

 his sword with ferocious resolution, cried out, " Let us fight the 

 fellows in our shirts." The example was instantly copied by the 

 eDthu.-ia-tic and sanguinary troop, and, falling upon the enemy before 

 they had taken up the places assigned them, the battle which ensued 

 became a mere massacre a race of 14 miles, in which 6000 of the 

 Covenanters, if we are to believe the royalists, were cut down and slain. 

 Montrose now carried such of his men as would accompany him to 

 the borders, presuming on the continued success of his arms. He was 

 however mistaken : at Philiphaugh, near Selkirk, he was surprised by 

 General Lesly on the 13th of September 1645 ; and upon the panic- 

 struck royalists was that day inflicted a fearful retaliation for their 

 previous enormities. Montroae regained the Highlands with a few 

 followers, but was perfectly unsuccessful in all his endeavours to 

 excite sympathy towards either his person or cause ; and on the 

 king's surrender to the Scots, Montrose capitulated, nnd was permitted 

 to embark in a small vessel for Norway, on the 3rd of September 1646. 

 On this occasion he put on the di*gui<e of a menial, and passed for the 

 servant of his chaplain. When on the continent at this time he had 

 the offer of the appointment of general of the Scots in France, lieu- 

 tenant-general in the French army, and captain of the gens-d'armes, 

 rith an annual pension besides his pay ; but he declined all appoint- 

 ments, saying he wished only to be of service to his own sovereign. 



He remained abroad till the death of Charles I., when he received a 

 commission from his son for a new invasion of Scotland. Accord- 

 ingly, selecting the remote iflands of Orkney for his rendezvous, 

 he despatched thither a part of his troops, consisting of foreign 

 auxiliaries, in the month of September 1649 ; and in the month of 

 March following, he himself arrived there. In their very first 

 encounter with the enemy however on the mainland, his forces were 

 utterly routed ; and after some time he himself was discovered on 

 foot in the disguise of a Highland rustic. In this condition he escaped 

 to the house of McLeod of Asaint, by whom he was delivered up to 

 leneral Lesly, and then conducted towards Edinburgh in the same 

 1:100. uiv. VOL. iv. 



mean garb in which he was taken ; but in Dundee a change of raiment 

 was allowed him. His reception in the capital was that of a condemned 

 traitor, sentences of excommunication and forfeiture having been 

 pronounced by the General Assembly and parliament so far back as 

 the year 1644 ; and many barbarous indignities were heaped upon 

 him. But throughout his dignity remained nndiminisheci, and he 

 now excited a sympathy which had never before been felt for him. 

 He received sentence of death with the same firmness; and on Tues- 

 day, the 21st of May 1650, the sentence was executed upon him : he 

 was hanged on a gibbet thirty feet high ; and his limbs, after being 

 severed from his body, were affixed to the gates of the principal towns 

 in the kingdom. He retained his heroism and self-possession to the last. 



Oil the Restoration, King Charles II. reversed the Bentence of for- 

 feiture which had been passed by the parliament ; and his scattered 

 remains were collected and buried with great solemnity in the cathe- 

 dral church of St. Giles, Edinburgh. 



MONTUCLA, JEAN-ETIENNE, was the son of a merchant at 

 Lyon, in which city he was born, 5th of September 1725. At the age 

 of sixteen he became an orphan, and his grandmother, who had been 

 left guardian of his education, died shortly afterwards. At the Jesuits' 

 College of Lyon his attention was chiefly directed to the study of the 

 ancient classics, although a decided taste for philological pursuits in 

 general, assisted by a peculiarly retentive memory, enabled him to 

 become acquainted with several of the modern languages, among which 

 the Italian, English, Dutch, and German are mentioned as those with 

 which he was more particularly conversant At this college also, under 

 Le Pere Beraud, the subsequent tutor of Lalaudc, he attained to con- 

 siderable proficiency in those sciences of which he was afterwards the 

 historian. From Lyon he went to Toulouse, in order to qualify him- 

 self for the legal profession, and having taken the usual degrees, he 

 thence proceeded to Paris. At the public libraries of that metropolis, 

 and at the scientific soire'es of M. Jombert, he made the acquaintance 

 of Diderot, D'Alembert, Cochin, Lalande, and others. To his inter- 

 course with D'Alembert, in particular, he probably owed much of his 

 mathematical knowledge ; aud Lalande, if he did not suggest a history 

 of the mathematical sciences, at least gave him considerable encourage- 

 ment to carry out the design when once it had been formed. In 17i4 

 he published in 12mo, anonymously, the ' History of the Researches 

 for determining the Quadrature of the Circle,' to which was appended 

 ' An Account of the Problems of the Duplication of the Cube, aud the 

 Triaectiou of an Angle.' A second edition of this work appeared in 

 1831, in 8vo, edited by Lacroix. The following year (1755) he was 

 admitted a member of the Academy of Berlin, and in 1758 he pub- 

 lished, in two vol?. 4to, the first part of the ' History of the Mathe- 

 matics.' After this he began to be employed by the government 

 first, as intendant-secretary at Grenoble, where he became acquainted 

 with the family of M. Lomand, whose daughter he married in 1763 ; 

 and then (1764) as secretary and astronomer-royal to the expedition 

 for colonising Cayenne. Upon his return to Franco the following year 

 he obtained, through the instrumentality of his frieud Cochiu, the 

 situation of ' premier commis des bailments,' the duties of which he 

 discharged most assiduously for twenty-five years. To the above 

 appointment was added the honorary one of censor-royal of mathe- 

 matical books. His leisure was devoted to the education of his family 

 and to scientific pursuits ; but the latter he is said to have conducted 

 with extreme secrecy, lest he should be suspected of neglecting his 

 official duties. In this way he edited iu 1778 a new and greatly 

 improved edition of Uzanam's ' Mathematical Recreations,' in 4 vols. 

 8vo; and so carefully had he concealed his connection with the work, 

 that a copy was forwarded to him, in his capacity of censor, for 

 examination and approval. The income he derived from his situation 

 under the government, though small, was sufficient for the immediate 

 wants of himself and family ; but by the events of the revolution he 

 lost his situation, and was left little short of destitute. 



In 1794 Montucla was employed iu forming an analysis of the 

 treaties deposited in the archives of the foreign department, and about 

 the same time he was nominated professor of mathematics to one of 

 the central schools of Paris ; but his health not permitting him to fill 

 the appointment, a situation in the ' Jures d'Instruction ' was assigned 

 to him. In 1798 he published a second edition of the first part of Ids 

 'History of the Mathematics,' in which he introduced many improve- 

 ments aud augmentations. With the exception however of the profits, 

 if any, which he may have derived from this work, his only resource 

 for two years, from which he could provide for his family, was an 

 insignificaut situation in the office of the National Lottery. Upon the 

 death of Saussure in 1799, the minister Neufchateau conferred upon 

 aim a pension of 24UO francs, which he lived but four months to enjoy, 

 tie died on the 18th of December 1799. His ino<lcsty and benevolence 

 were no less conspicuous than hia erudition and the stnallness of his 

 'ortune. When Lalande, deputed by the Academy, offered him some 

 situation in that society, he declined the honour on the ground of 

 in competency. 



Before his decease he had occupied himself with the second part of 

 lis ' History.' The completion of the work was confided to Lalande, 

 who, with the assistance of several scientific individuals, among whom 

 was Lacroix, published the remaining two volumes in 1802. The 

 whole work is divided into five parts, and these are subdivided into 

 looks aud chapters. Part I. contains the History of the Mathematics 



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