Leslie o auchintoul

LESLIE O AUCHINTOUL
A Scots Historical Ballad
with a Literary Analysis and a Historical Note on
General Alexander Leslie of Auchintoul
(Александр Ульянович Лесли, 1590?–1661/63)
Daniil Lazko
Tuapse · 16 September 2026

LESLIE O AUCHINTOUL

I
The wind comes doun frae Bennachie
Ower heather, moss an stane,
An Leslie's son o Auchintoul
Gaed doun the road his lane.

II
He took the ship at Aiberdeen
Wi haar upon the tide,
An rade the Polish marches lang
Whaur plains lie bare an wide.

III
He first saw Muscovy a thrall
Wi cord aboot his hauns;
They lowsed him syne, an he rade west
Tae serve in ither launs.

IV
Gustavus gied him blue an gowd
An a letter under seal,
An east he gaed tae the Muscov Tsar
That lowsed him ance frae steel.

V
He learnt the Tsar's new men the pike,
The match-cord an the drum,
An ower the sea, frae Forth an Thames,
He gart the hired men come.

VI
He saw Smolensk the first time then,
The reid brick o its wa',
An watched the Tsar's lang siege gang doun
As snaw gangs in the thaw.

VII
Syne hame he cam by the grey North Sea
An rade in Montrose's horse;
At Philiphaugh the mist lay laigh
Upon the Ettrick's course.

VIII
They took him. Whaur the ithers dee'd
A Leslie spak for ane,
An Scotland steekit her yett on him,
An east he gaed his lane.

IX
In Muscovy he bided syne,
An in their gowden kirk
He took the cross o the Greekish faith
By cannle-licht an mirk.

X
Whan the young Tsar rade intil the west
Wi banner, cross an blade,
Auld Leslie took the road again
That ance his horse had gaed.

XI
The simmer dust lay on the camps,
The Dnieper slaw an broun;
They howkit trench an piled the yird
An set the cannon roun'.

XII
Frae dawin till the gloamin fell
The cannon spak their say,
An reik lay ower the reid brick tooers
Like haar on Aiberdeen bay.

XIII
They set the ladders tae the brick;
The brick stood, an the men
Lay thick ablow. Auld Leslie coontit,
An didna coont again.

XIV
Whan birks gaed gowd by Dnieper side
The Poles cam through the yett;
Nae man cried oot; the kirk-bells rang
Whaur the reik was hingin yet.

XV
Syne he that rade frae Bennachie
His lane, lang years afore,
Was voivode o the siegit toun,
Its keys ahint his door.

XVI
An whiles at nicht a wind wad rise
An rattle brick an stane,
An the auld man by the cannle sat
An hearkened til't his lane.

XVII
He dee'd in Smolensk toun at last;
The year's no richtly kent;
The priests sang ower him in their tongue,
An the wind cam, an it went.

XVIII
The wind comes doun frae Bennachie
Ower heather, moss an stane,
An east it gangs tae Smolensk wa's,
An gangs nae mair its lane.

Daniil Lazko · Tuapse · 16 September 2026

LITERARY ANALYSIS
1. Genre and Title
Leslie o Auchintoul is an original literary ballad in Scots on a documented historical subject: the life of Alexander Leslie of Auchintoul, the Aberdeenshire soldier who became the first officer to hold the rank of general in Muscovite service and who commanded at the Siege of Smolensk in 1654. The poem is not a versified biography. History supplies the route of the narrative; the ballad form decides what is told and, more importantly, what is left untold.
The title follows the traditional pattern of a personal name bound to a place, most familiar from Edom o Gordon. It names a man and his ground and explains nothing. Only in the course of the poem does the title acquire its second meaning: Auchintoul becomes the point of departure measured against the red walls of Smolensk. Alternatives considered — The Scot at Smolensk and The Norlan Man at Smolensk — were rejected because they announce the poem's idea before the poem can enact it, and because a named ballad-title keeps this text distinct from the author's earlier Gordon ballad, The Norlan Grund Quits Nane.
2. Literary Matrix
Three traditions are fused without imitation of any single model. From William Drummond of Hawthornden the poem takes musical evenness, historical distance and an elegiac undertone without martial bombast. From Alexander Hume it takes a moderately archaic Scots grounded in landscape and a religious gravity that treats providence as weather rather than doctrine. From the traditional Scottish ballad it takes its engine: narrative leaps, understatement, incremental repetition and the refusal to explain motive. Walter Scott is present only as a distant filter; the diction is deliberately kept free of nineteenth-century antiquarian ornament.
3. Form and Metre
The poem consists of eighteen quatrains in ballad (common) metre: alternating lines of four and three stresses, rhymed ABCB. A syllable count made by script, using an explicit exception dictionary for Scots forms, gives 8–9 syllables in the odd lines and 6–7 in the even lines. The nine-syllable lines are ballad anacrusis (Whan the young Tsar rade intil the west; An the auld man by the cannle sat), not metrical faults: the traditional ballad tolerates, and indeed depends on, such unstressed openings. The rhyme is full throughout, with Scots pronunciation determining pairs such as wa' / thaw, men / again and drum / come.
4. Architecture
The eighteen stanzas fall into five movements. Departure and apprenticeship (I–V): the wind on Bennachie, the ship at Aberdeen, Polish service, captivity, Swedish service and the reform of the Tsar's new regiments. First Smolensk and exile (VI–VIII): the failed siege of 1632–34, the return to Scotland, Philiphaugh and banishment. The turning point (IX): reception into Orthodoxy. Second Smolensk (X–XIV): the Tsar's campaign of 1654, the summer siege, the costly assault and the town's surrender in autumn. Governorship, old age, death and return (XV–XVIII).
Stanza IX is the hinge of the whole design. Before it, Leslie can be read as a professional soldier passing from crown to crown; after it, his presence in Muscovy is a matter of belonging, not merely of contract. The change is conveyed by rite — the cross, the golden church, candle-light and darkness — and never by theological statement.
5. Recurring Motifs
The ballad is held together by a small number of repeated words and objects, each of which changes meaning on its return.
• his lane (alone) — I, VIII, XV, XVI, and transformed in XVIII as its lane. Leslie leaves Scotland alone, is banished alone, keeps vigil alone; in the last line the wind itself goes east nae mair its lane. The poem never says what now accompanies the wind.
• lowsed (released) — III and IV. The Muscovites who once freed the Polish captive become the power he enters of his own will: captivity and service are joined by a single verb.
• haar (east-coast sea mist) — II and XII. The mist on the Aberdeen tide returns as cannon smoke over the towers of Smolensk; Scotland is present at the siege without being named as memory.
• cannle (candle) — IX and XVI. The candle of the conversion becomes the candle beside which the old governor listens to the wind.
• cross — IX and X. The faith taken in stanza IX marches west with the Tsar's banners in stanza X.
• Bennachie — I, XV, XVIII. The hill of the Balquhain Leslies frames the poem and is recalled at the moment of greatest distance from it.
• brick — VI, XII, XIII, XVI. The red brick walls of Smolensk are first seen, then shelled, then climbed, and finally heard rattling in the night wind.
6. Language and Register
The Scots is literary and moderately archaic, avoiding both modern dialect colour and full Middle Scots reconstruction. Words are chosen for function rather than as markers of Scottishness: steekit her yett (shut her gate) turns banishment into a physical act; gart … come supplies the Scots causative for recruitment; howkit and yird make the siege works tangible.
The phrase the Greekish faith in IX deliberately uses the seventeenth-century designation of Orthodoxy (the "Greek" or "Greekish" church) instead of the modern Eastern. The form is well attested in English usage of the period; its currency in written Scots could not be independently confirmed, and it is therefore recorded here as a residual register risk rather than an established defect. The surrounding context — Muscovy, their gowden kirk — prevents a literal reading of "Greek".
7. Imagery and Restraint
The governing principle is concreteness: meaning is carried by objects, gestures and sensory detail rather than by statement. The military reform is a pike, a match-cord and a drum. The cost of the assault is a count the general does not repeat (XIII). The capture of the city is a silence broken only by church bells in the lingering smoke (XIV). Power itself is domestic: the keys of the besieged town hang behind the governor's door (XV). No stanza calls Leslie brave, great or tragic; the poem trusts its objects to carry the weight.
8. The Ending
The final stanza repeats the opening couplet and then alters its direction: the wind from Bennachie now goes east to the walls of Smolensk and gangs nae mair its lane. An aphoristic close (Nae wind gangs aye its lane) was rejected as a declaration. The chosen line leaves the symbol open: the reader supplies the companion of the wind — the man, his name, or his memory — and the geographical ring of the poem closes without comment.
9. History and Artistic Reconstruction
The narrative skeleton is documented: Polish service and Russian captivity; Swedish service and the mission to Moscow; recruitment in Scotland and England; the Smolensk War; service with Montrose, capture at Philiphaugh, the intervention of David Leslie and lifelong banishment; settlement in Muscovy in 1647; reception into Orthodoxy in 1652; command at Smolensk in 1654 and appointment as voivode; death at Smolensk with the year disputed. The following details, however, are artistic reconstructions and should not be read as documentary fact:
• departure by ship from Aberdeen (II) and the cord binding the captive's hands (III);
• service specifically in Montrose's cavalry (VII);
• the general counting the dead after the assault (XIII);
• the silence of the troops and the ringing of church bells at the surrender (XIV);
• the old governor listening to the night wind by candle-light (XVI);
• the Orthodox funeral chant (XVII), which is consistent with his conversion but not attested in the sources consulted.
The misty morning at Philiphaugh (VII) belongs to the traditional accounts of the battle. The summer-to-autumn chronology of the 1654 siege (XI, XIV) is deliberate: the siege was not a winter action, and snow and frost were excluded from the second Smolensk for that reason.
10. Revision History
After the first draft three local corrections were made; all other passages were retained after testing alternatives.
• V. Tae march the stranger's style (a calque of "foreign order") was replaced by The match-cord an the drum … frae Forth an Thames, / He gart the hired men come, restoring concreteness and reflecting recruitment in Scotland and England. The Tsar's new men evokes the regiments of the new order without explanation.
• IX. the Eastern faith was replaced by the Greekish faith, a period designation of Orthodoxy.
• X. His younger horse had made — a logical strain — was replaced by That ance his horse had gaed, which fulfils the image literally; rade was changed to took to avoid repetition. drum moved to V, and cross entered X, linking the campaign to the conversion. The variant That he in youth had gaed was rejected as a statement of fact without an object.
11. Assessment
On the author's absolute scale the ballad stands at 9.7/10, the practical ceiling for conscious stylization; the title was assessed by the editor at 9.8/10. The text is closed at this point: no remaining change would produce an unambiguous improvement, only an exchange between equally valid choices, and further polishing would risk cooling the ballad's deliberate reticence.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Alexander Leslie of Auchintoul
Александр Ульянович Лесли; after 1652 Авраам Ильич Лесли
Origins
Alexander Leslie was the son of William Leslie, third laird of Crichie, of a branch of the Leslies of Balquhain in Aberdeenshire. The usual birth year is 1590; the genealogical site Rodovid gives 1568, and the English court physician in Moscow, Samuel Collins, even claimed that Leslie had reached ninety-nine — an obvious exaggeration, but one that shows he was remembered as very old.
Polish and Swedish Service
As a young officer Leslie served the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and was taken prisoner by the Russians, later being released. The St Andrews SSNE database dates this to 1618; an earlier version of the Russian Wikipedia article places his capture near Smolensk in 1616. By 1629 he was a colonel in Swedish service, and Gustavus Adolphus sent him on a mission to Moscow. In January 1630 he petitioned Tsar Michael for service, and from March 1630 he held a colonel's commission in Russia.
The Smolensk War (1632–1634)
In 1631 Leslie returned to Sweden to report that war between Russia and Poland was imminent, and he recruited thousands of soldiers in the West, including Scotland and England. He supervised the first Russian regiments "of the new (foreign) order" (полки нового / иноземного строя). In 1632, as senior colonel, he commanded both a mercenary regiment and a Russian regiment of the new order, took part in the expedition to Dorogobuzh under the voivode Fyodor Sukhotin, and served at the siege of Smolensk. After the capitulation of Mikhail Shein, his regiment is reported to have been the only one to leave the field with its colours and arms. During the siege he accused the English colonel Sanderson of treason and killed him. Charles I styled him Major-General in a letter to the Tsar, though Russian records continued to call him senior colonel.
Scotland, Philiphaugh and Banishment
After the unhappy outcome of the war Leslie returned to Britain; in March 1637 Charles I informed the Tsar that he was coming home on private business. In the Civil War he fought for Montrose and was captured at Philiphaugh in September 1645. Most prisoners were executed, but Lieutenant-General David Leslie, the victor, who had served with him in Russia, intervened personally. Auchintoul was spared, together with Lord Gray, and banished from Scotland for life.
Settlement in Muscovy and Conversion
Leslie returned to Russia with a recommendation from Charles I and settled there in 1647. Swedish diplomatic reports show that by 1649 he already held the rank of general and was expected to command ten thousand horse. In September 1652 he and his family were received into Orthodoxy; he took the name Avraam Ilyich and was richly rewarded. English Wikipedia names Prince Ilya Miloslavsky as his godfather and gives a reward of 23,000 silver roubles, but marks this as lacking a citation.
Smolensk, 1654, and the Governorship
In the spring of 1654 General Leslie joined Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich's campaign against the Commonwealth. He accompanied the Tsar as chief military adviser and directed the siege of Smolensk, one of the first great events of the Russo-Polish War of 1654–1667. After the city was taken he was appointed voivode of Smolensk and granted the estate of Gerchikovo. In 1656 he took part in the siege of Riga during the Russo-Swedish War. In his last years he appears to have withdrawn gradually from active command.
Death and Descendants
Leslie died at Smolensk. The year is uncertain: SSNE records both 1661 and 1663; English Wikipedia and the Russian biographical tradition give 1663; the current summary of the Russian Wikipedia article gives 1662. His sons Yakov (John) and Fyodor (d. 1695) served as colonels in the soldiers' regiments; English Wikipedia also records a son John Leslie, a cavalry colonel killed in 1655; whether he is identical with Yakov-John is unclear. His grandson, Major-General Yury Fyodorovich Leslie, fought in the War of the Polish Succession and the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. Leslie is regarded as the founder of the Smolensk branch of the Leslie family in Russia.
Disputed or Variant Data
Point Variants in the sources consulted
Birth 1590 (SSNE; English Wikipedia); 1568 (Rodovid); Collins's claim of age 99 is an exaggeration
First captivity 1618, in Polish service (SSNE; English Wikipedia); 1616, near Smolensk (earlier Russian Wikipedia text)
Rank in the 1630s Major-General in Charles I's letter; "senior colonel" in Russian records
First generalship Before 1649 (Swedish reports); after 1652 (Fedosov, via SSNE); 1654 (Russian genealogical sources)
Godfather and reward, 1652 Ilya Miloslavsky; 23,000 roubles (English Wikipedia, unsourced)
Death 1661 or 1663 (SSNE); 1663 (English Wikipedia); 1662 (current Russian Wikipedia summary)
NOTES TO THE POEM
I. Bennachie — the hill in Aberdeenshire under which Balquhain, seat of the Leslies of Balquhain, lies. Auchintoul — Leslie's territorial designation.
II. haar — cold sea mist of the Scottish east coast. the Polish marches — Leslie's early service with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
III. Leslie's first contact with Russia was as a prisoner of war (1618 or 1616).
IV. blue an gowd — the Swedish colours; Gustavus Adolphus sent Leslie to Moscow in 1629.
V. the Tsar's new men — the regiments of the new (foreign) order; Forth an Thames — recruitment in Scotland and England in 1631–1632.
VI. The Smolensk War of 1632–1634, which ended with Shein's capitulation; the walls of Smolensk are of red brick.
VII–VIII. Philiphaugh, on the Ettrick Water near Selkirk, 13 September 1645. A Leslie spak for ane — Lieutenant-General David Leslie, the victor, pleaded for his namesake. steekit her yett — banishment for life.
IX. Reception into Orthodoxy in September 1652; the Greekish faith — the period designation of Orthodoxy.
X. the young Tsar — Alexei Mikhailovich (born 1629), who led the campaign of 1654 in person.
XI–XIV. The siege of Smolensk, summer to autumn 1654; the Polish-Lithuanian garrison marched out after capitulation.
XV. voivode — military governor; Leslie was appointed voivode of Smolensk after its capture.
XVII. The year's no richtly kent — the sources disagree between 1661, 1662 and 1663.
Glossary
an and
ablow below
ahint behind
ance once
auld old
birks birches
cannle candle
coontit counted
dawin dawn
dee'd died
gaed went
gang, gangs go, goes
gart made, caused
gied gave
gloamin dusk
gowd, gowden gold, golden
haar sea mist
hauns, launs hands, lands
hingin hanging
howkit dug
his lane alone
kent known
kirk church
laigh low
learnt taught
lowsed loosed, released
mirk darkness
reid red
reik smoke
richtly rightly
siegit besieged
simmer summer
spak spoke
steekit shut
syne then, afterwards
thrall captive
til't to it
tooers towers
wa', wa's wall, walls
whaur where
whiles at times
yett gate
yird earth
Sources
Grosjean, A., and Murdoch, S. The Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Biographical Database (SSNE), University of St Andrews, ID 2916: Leslie, Alexander.
"Alexander Leslie of Auchintoul." Wikipedia (English).
«Лесли, Александр Ульянович». Википедия (Russian); consulted through search-index text, as the page could not be retrieved directly.
«Лесли, Александр Ульянович». Русский биографический словарь, т. 10. СПб., 1914, с. 320 (cited in the Wikipedia articles).
Fedosov, D. The Caledonian Connection. Aberdeen, 1996.
Murdoch, S. Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603–1746. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Barnhill, W., and Dukes, P. "North-east Scots in Muscovy in the Seventeenth Century." Northern Scotland 1, no. 1 (1972): 49–63.

Daniil Lazko · Tuapse · 16 September 2026