The Wars of the Three Kingdoms were the great rupture of seventeenth-century Britain - a tangle of religion, monarchy, and national identity that pulled Scotland, England and Ireland in different directions and frequently against themselves. In Scotland the central fight was between Covenanters, who had bound themselves in 1638 to defend the Presbyterian Kirk against royal interference, and Royalists who held to King Charles I. Aberdeenshire was Royalist country at heart. The Gordons of Huntly had been the dominant family of the north-east for centuries, Catholic by tradition, and quick to raise the banner for the king. Aberdeen itself, more Protestant and trade-minded, leaned the other way. The result was that the city had been sacked and re-sacked since the war began - by Montrose in 1644, by Argyll's men afterwards, and now once again.

Montgomerie was not in Aberdeen by choice. He had been sent north under John Middleton in 1646 to consolidate the Covenanter hold on what remained of the Royalist heartland. His 240 horse rode in four troops; his 700 foot formed two regiments. It was a respectable force, but a thin one for holding a Royalist city. Huntly, meanwhile, had spent 1645 in retreat at Strathnaver, far up the northern coast. By the spring of 1646 he had returned to his lands around Strathbogie - the country around modern Huntly - and raised 1,600 foot and 600 horse from the loyalty that the Gordon name still commanded in the surrounding glens. He moved on Aberdeen at the head of an army that knew the country intimately.

Huntly attacked on 14 May with the bulk of his force - around 1,500 foot and 500 horse. He set fire to the city as part of the assault. Montgomerie's defenders held out twice, throwing back the first two attacks from the streets and gates. On the third attempt they were overcome. The Covenanter army suffered heavy casualties, and more than 300 were taken prisoner. According to the Wikipedia source, no civilians were killed in the fighting itself - a notable claim given that the city had been deliberately set ablaze. Whether that statement reflects the careful reporting of survivors or the silence of the unrecorded is now impossible to know. Aberdeen burned, lives changed forever, and the war moved on.

The Battle of Aberdeen was one of the last significant Royalist victories of the war in Scotland. Within months, Charles I would surrender to the Scottish army at Newark. The political fight he and his northern supporters had been waging was already lost; the rest was bookkeeping. Huntly himself would be executed in Edinburgh in 1649, the same year as his king. The Gordons would lose their pre-eminence, then partly regain it, then lose it again. Aberdeen would rebuild - as it always has - on the same granite bedrock that had funnelled armies through its streets since the Middle Ages. Today nothing on the ground marks the battle. The hinge point of the granite city's worst seventeenth-century day is now ordinary streets and storefronts.

Civil wars are unkind to memory. The dead were soldiers on both sides; the prisoners came back, or didn't; the houses were rebuilt in stone that survives still. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms killed proportionally more people than the First World War would three centuries later, and yet today they are largely the property of historians and re-enactors. The Battle of Aberdeen survives as a brief Wikipedia entry, a dispute over whether the second Royalist commander was Huntly himself or Colonel Harie Barclay. The granite walls that witnessed the burning still stand. The names of the 300 prisoners do not. They marched south into a defeated Royalist cause - parolees and exchanges, ransoms and silences - and disappeared into the records that civil wars never quite finish writing.