The word pacification can hardly have deceived even the most sanguine advocates of peace. None who knew the character of Charles or of the Scottish nation can have believed in their hearts that any final solution to the quarrel between them had been found at Berwick. It was at most a truce; and it was soon made clear how short and hollow a truce it was destined to be. The Pacification was signed on June 10th, and before the year was out both sides were arming fast again for war.

It was the old story. Charles had refused to recognise the acts of the Glasgow Assembly, as indeed he could not but have refused while he called himself King of Scotland; but he had agreed that a lawful Assembly should be convened in August at which all the ecclesiastical points at issue should be settled, and that a Parliament should follow to make the settlement good. It had been his intention to preside in person at both meetings, but the temper of the Scottish capital made him hesitate. Almost immediately after the Pacification he had issued one of his foolish proclamations, summoning the bishops to take their places in the forthcoming Assembly. A protestation of course followed. Charles was indeed within his legal rights, for Episcopacy had as yet been abolished only by the Glasgow Assembly, which he had refused to acknowledge and which the Covenanters had agreed not to press. But though Episcopacy had not yet been legally abolished, Charles, by renewing the assurances made in his name by Hamilton at Glasgow, had given his word for its abolition. Within a fortnight of this solemn promise he had issued a proclamation which, if there were any meaning in words, could mean only one of two things; he was summoning the bishops to vote for their own extinction, or he was summoning them to quash the motion for their extinction by their own votes. It is no wonder that the Scottish people, with their previous experience of the royal diplomacy, chose the latter interpretation, and, finding that the King was breaking his share of the treaty, made no haste to keep theirs. The army was not disbanded; the Tables were not dissolved; the fortifications of Leith were not dismantled. The fortresses were indeed restored to the Crown, but Hamilton had to make his way through sullen and menacing crowds to install a new governor in Edinburgh Castle. A few days later Aboyne, who had imprudently shown himself on the High Street, was forced to fly for his life, while the unfortunate Treasurer was for the second time roughly handled by the mob. Charles, who was still at Berwick, sent in anger for the Covenanting leaders to explain these things. Only six obeyed the summons. The rest were stopped, or pretended to have been stopped, as they were leaving Edinburgh, by the citizens, who would not suffer their champions to place themselves in the King's power. But among the six was Montrose.

It is an infinite pity that no report exists of any interview between Montrose and the King during this visit. We know that Hamilton was instructed to confer with the Covenanting chiefs, and to use any device necessary to discover their intentions. We know that there was a stormy scene between Charles and Rothes, in which the latter was twice called a liar to his face. But how it fared between Montrose and his sovereign history is silent. How it was believed in Scotland to have fared between them is sufficiently shown by an incident which occurred soon after the meeting of Parliament. A paper was found one morning on the door of Montrose's lodgings bearing the inscription, Invictus armis verbis vincitur. It began now to be whispered abroad that the gallant young enthusiast who had led the soldiers of the Covenant to their first victory had in his turn been conquered by gracious looks and fair speeches.

The belief was natural in a society where no man could trust his neighbour. And there was possibly this much foundation for it, that Charles had succeeded in persuading Montrose that he was now really sincere in his intention to abolish Episcopacy and leave Scotland free to worship God after her own fashion. It is at least unlikely that Hamilton, whatever language he might speak, should have persuaded him to anything. And the change that is now perceptible in Montrose's attitude both towards King and Covenant is compatible with our belief in his intelligence and honesty only on the ground that he believed the work of the Covenant, as he interpreted it, to have been done, that he believed Charles to have learnt his lesson, and that thenceforth it was the part of every true Scotsman to stand by the King so long as the King stood by his word.

But in truth Montrose understood his countrymen as little as he understood the King. He had framed for himself an ideal constitution as unlike anything possible in such a country and at such a time as the ideal sovereign of his imagination was unlike the reality. His political views were in truth a dream like Dante's, but, like the great Italian's, a dream based on what had been in the past, and an anticipation in part at least of what was to be again in the future,—the dream of a real State, a government based on justice and law and supported by obedience. A parallel has been drawn between Montrose and that singularly interesting and attractive man, William Drummond of Hawthornden. Fanciful as the resemblance may at first seem between the fiery ambitious man of action and the shy meditative man of letters, the parallel is on one side good. Drummond, it is said, was a passive or theoretical Montrose, Montrose a rampant or practical Drummond. The latter's Irene indeed embodies, in more elaborate detail and more fanciful language, the peculiar form of Scottish Conservatism which Montrose was afterwards to express in a remarkable paper rescued by the industry of his biographer from two centuries of neglect. The plan of each discourse is very similar. Both draw a picture of the hopeless state of anarchy and confusion into which Scotland must fall if certain evil counsels prevail. Montrose, writing later in time and influenced by personal dislike as well as disappointment, aims clearly at Hamilton and Argyll; while Drummond includes in his censure all the noblemen who had joined the Covenant, and Montrose among them, openly accusing the majority of acting solely under the influence of private revenge and ambition. Both then proceed to appeal to each Estate particularly, to the nobles, the clergy, and the people. In both is the same recognition of the necessity for a paramount authority in the State, and the conviction that from the temper of the times that authority must be vested in the hands of a king. In both is the same dislike of all clerical interference, whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, in matters of State. Both show the same mistrust of any alliance between the aristocracy and the people. Both warn the latter in almost the same strain that they are not fit for power, and that the nobles who would persuade them otherwise can do so only for their own selfish ends. Both, in short, may be said to preach the doctrine of passive obedience; but both imagine a king under whose wise and beneficent rule passive obedience should mean no more than happy and prosperous quiescence in the secure enjoyment of their religion and liberties. Of the two Drummond was readiest to push his doctrine to its last conclusion, as the man of theory always will be. Resolved on no consideration and in no extremity to suffer himself to be dragged into the vortex of politics, in the solitude of his beautiful home on the wooded banks of the Esk he could weave his fairy fabric without any disturbing sense of its impracticability. Montrose, with his active experience of men and things, could not quite blind himself to the possibility of a king under whom passive obedience might be only another name for tyranny. Yet he was practical to this extent, that, while the other was content to dream, he was ready to put his dream into action. He would carry into the sphere of working politics the reform on which they were both agreed. He would be the active exponent of the ideal Constitution under Charles the ideal King. Yet both are at one in recommending the subject patience even under the worst sovereign. It is better, they argue, to bear the ills we have and trust to time to cure them, than to fly to others we know nothing of. And of all forms of tyranny, says Montrose, the tyranny of subjects over their king is "the most fierce, insatiable, and unsupportable in the world." Drummond, who could on occasion speak boldly enough for the liberty of the subject, and who disliked religious intolerance in any shape and from any quarter, foresaw that in this respect at least the Covenant was likely to chastise with scorpions where Charles had chastised with whips. Passive obedience to a king who had shown himself (as he, like Montrose, believed) ready to remove the old yoke and resolved to add no new one, was surely more tolerable than passive obedience to a league of self-seeking nobles and fanatical clergymen.[7]

In the summer of 1639 Montrose had not formally broken with the Covenant, nor was his scheme of political reform probably as yet fully matured. Nevertheless, he was soon to have an opportunity of making trial of his countrymen's temper, and of learning how utterly he had misconceived it.

The first act of the new Assembly was to sweep Episcopacy off the face of Scottish earth. The first act of the new Parliament was to ratify the decision of the Assembly. But before it could effect this ecclesiastical reform it had to consider a question of political reform which was infinitely more important to the King's authority. Hitherto the committee known as the Lords of the Articles had been so formed as to be practically no more than the mouthpiece of the Crown; and as no bills could be presented to Parliament till they had passed this committee, and, when so presented, could only be accepted or rejected in their entirety without amendment or alteration, it is clear that the power of the Scottish Parliament as a national assembly was little more than a cipher. This state of things was due to the influence possessed by the bishops in the formation of the committee. But now that the bishops had gone, by whom was this influence to be exercised? Charles would have been glad to see it exercised by a corresponding number of ministers, who might at some more tranquil time be translated into bishops. But this was obnoxious to all parties. The nobles would not consent to share their power with the clergy, and the clergy would not consent to see any of their order elevated above the rest. Business was made possible by a compromise; but as the compromise entailed a majority of Covenanters on the committee, the business was not palatable to the King. It was now that the two great rivals, Montrose and Argyll, were first brought into direct conflict. Montrose would not support Charles in filling the bishops' places with other clergymen, though they should wear the black gown of Geneva instead of the hated lawn-sleeves. But he had no mind to see the authority of the Crown a cipher, and the King without a voice among the new Lords of the Articles. He proposed, therefore, that the bishops' places should be taken by a corresponding number of noblemen to be chosen by the King. In his ideal State the Crown and the nobility should mutually support and counterpoise each other, both acting together against the dangerous encroachments of the people. Far different were Argyll's views. With clearer eyes than Montrose he read the signs of the times, and saw what the victory of the Covenant really meant. He saw that it meant the inevitable rise of the middle classes to a share in the control of public affairs. He saw that the old monarchical supremacy and the old aristocratic supremacy were alike doomed, and that henceforth his order, if it would retain any vestige of its ancient influence, could do so only by acquiescing in a partition it was powerless to prevent. Henceforth the Scottish Parliament, like the English Parliament, must represent the voice, not of the sovereign, but of the people. Nor was this recognition unpleasing to an ambition far other and more dangerous than the generous desire for fame which swelled the heart of Montrose. As a member of the old aristocracy he was but one among many, richer, indeed, and more powerful than most, but subject like the rest to the caprice of a king, and to the jealousy, the intrigues, and the violence of his peers. But with a national Parliament at his back, speaking and acting as the mouthpiece and agent of a people, he might rise in fact to that power his countrymen would no longer brook in name. Conscious of mental abilities and a genius for statecraft immeasurably superior to those around him, he felt confident of wielding to his own ends this new force that he saw rising on the ruins of the old. And Argyll carried the day, though not without a hard struggle. By a majority of only one it was determined that in future each Estate should choose its own Lords. Henceforth the nobles would be represented by eight votes, the lesser barons and burghers by sixteen; and thus at one stroke the voice of the sovereign was silenced in the Scottish Parliament. In the first direct struggle between Montrose and Argyll there could be no doubt with whom victory rested. Under their new constitution the Covenanting majority carried all before them. Episcopacy was abolished, not, as Charles would have had, as contrary to the usage of the Scottish Church, but as actually unlawful. A general tax was to be levied, to cover the expenses of the late war, on Royalists as well as on Covenanters. The castles of Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton were to be entrusted to the charge of none but Scottish subjects, who, though chosen by the King, were to be approved by Parliament. No more drastic Reform Bill has, in short, been passed even in our own century. Charles at once sent orders to Traquair to prorogue a Parliament under which the very existence of the Crown was at stake. The Treasurer was at once met with the answer that Parliament could not be prorogued without its own consent. A short adjournment was therefore arranged, and two Covenanting lords, Loudon and Dunfermline, were despatched to plead their case in London.

Charles had been informed of Montrose's action during this momentous time by that Earl of Airth whose disgrace and subsequent reinstatement has been already mentioned. The result was a summons to Court for the repentant Covenanter. But Montrose excused himself on the ground that the visit would breed suspicion both of himself and of the King, and so tend to prevent the accommodation of existing difficulties which they both desired. "I hope," he wrote, "that your Majesty will do me the honour to think that this is no shift,—for all of that kind is too much contrary to my humour, chiefly in what your Majesty or your service is concerned in—but that, as I have ever been bold to avow, there are no things your Majesty shall be pleased to command me in—persuading myself they will be still such as befits and do suit with all most incumbent duties—that I shall not think myself born to perform as your Majesty's most loyal and faithful subject and servant."

These things passed in the autumn of 1639. The winter wore itself out in barren diplomacies and preparations for war on both sides. The Scottish Commissioners could do nothing with the King, and Parliament was prorogued till the following June. Strafford was now supreme in the royal councils, and that imperious voice was never for submission. At this time, moreover, a discovery was made which gave fresh weight to Strafford's arguments and fresh heart to his perplexed master. A letter had fallen into Traquair's hands addressed by some of the leading Covenanters to the French King, praying him to come to their aid. This, it was thought, would surely establish the treasonable nature of the Scottish movement. But when the letter was read before the English Parliament, which met on April 13th, it made no impression on either House. Both were too intent on their own affairs—the pressing question of Ship-Money among others—to interfere in a matter which, so far as it concerned them at all, made for their own interests. The Scottish Covenanters were the very good neighbours of the English malcontents, and no obstacle was to be put in their way to work out their own salvation. Lewis, to whom a second letter had been addressed on the miscarriage of the first, was too cautious to enter into a quarrel which could be safely trusted to shape itself to his own gain. Loudon, who was then in London as one of the Commissioners, and whose name was subscribed to the letter, was indeed sent to the Tower on a charge of treasonable conspiracy; but nothing could be brought home to him, and he was soon released. Parliament did not choose to adopt Charles's interpretation of words that could be strained to bear a less criminal significance; and the affair passed quickly out of sight.[8]

Among the signatories to the French King was Montrose. Whether this was done to lull the growing suspicions of his colleagues, or done through fresh mistrust of Charles's clerical policy, it is hard to determine. Probably both motives were at work in a mind that could as yet see firm ground nowhere. At all events, when on reassembling in June the Scottish Parliament aimed a further blow at the royal authority by the appointment of a permanent Committee of Estates with supreme power both in military and civil matters, Montrose was named among the noblemen, with his kinsmen, Napier and Stirling, among the lesser barons. In obedience to the orders of this new power he at once proceeded to his own territories to levy men for the army a second time mustering under Leslie for the Border. While engaged in this business he was commissioned to effect the reduction of Airlie Castle, the main stronghold of the loyalists in the shire of Angus. The chief of the Ogilvies, lately raised to the earldom of Airlie, was then with the King, having left his house in charge of his eldest son. The work was accomplished without resort to arms or any violence. Lord Ogilvy, after conference with the commissioner, rendered his father's castle quietly, being in truth in no position to defend it, for the good of the public, as the convenient phrase ran; and Montrose, leaving a garrison of his own men in charge of it, marched south to join Leslie.

Unfortunately for the loyal North, and most unfortunately for the House of Airlie, others besides Montrose had been entrusted with the charge of "pacification." Commissions had been also issued for that purpose to Monro, one of the roughest and most brutal pupils of the German wars, and to Argyll. To Monro was assigned the district of Aberdeen, while Argyll was to take order with the more southern Highlands. Commissions of fire and sword the style ran, and seldom can it have been more literally vindicated. Monro harried Aberdeen and the surrounding country, destroying what he could not remove, putting some of the citizens to torture after a fashion practised in his school of war, and carrying back a crowd of prisoners to Edinburgh. Argyll did his work even more thoroughly. Montrose had advised him of the surrender of Airlie Castle, and that all was now quiet on the braes of Angus. But not thus was Argyll to be balked of his vengeance. Between the Campbells and the Ogilvies there had been feud for many generations, and so rare a chance of masking private vengeance under the cloak of duty was not to be lost. Montrose's garrison was dismissed, and the Bonny House of Airlie burned to the ground. Forthar, the seat of Lord Ogilvy, was next served in the same fashion, the young lord's wife, who was then daily expecting her confinement, being turned out of doors, her own family only venturing at their own risk, and after permission had been asked and refused, to shelter the unhappy outcast. Craig, an unfortified building, and therefore not rightly within this strange peacemaker's commission, but also the property of an Ogilvy, shared the same fate. Argyll next turned his attention to the lands of Breadalbane, but finding his way barred by Athole with a force almost amounting to one-fourth of his own, he preferred to effect by diplomacy what he dared not put to the trial of the sword. Athole, unmindful of the fate of Huntly, was caught in the same snare. Under promise of a safe-conduct he was persuaded with his captains to meet Argyll in conference. The conference was an ambuscade. The whole party were seized and sent as prisoners to Edinburgh. Then, after settling a longstanding account with the Macdonalds, against whom he held a twofold grudge as hereditary foes of his House and as friends and in some sort vassals of the House of Gordon, and laying Badenoch waste from Lochaber to Braemar, this great warrior returned in triumph to Edinburgh to impeach Montrose for treason against the Covenant in dealing too leniently with its enemies.

From this ridiculous charge Montrose found little difficulty in exonerating himself. Argyll would have had him tried by court-martial, but neither Leslie nor the Committee of Estates would entertain the proposal, and Montrose was unanimously pronounced to have done his duty as a true soldier of the Covenant. But he had now far more serious matter for thought than this paltry ebullition of temper. While in Leslie's camp at Dunse a proposal was submitted to him, which of all men in Scotland he was the last to hear calmly. Already there had been some secret debate among the extreme party of the right of subjects to depose a faithless king, and Argyll had already maintained in Parliament the right of the Estates to pass laws without the royal sanction. How far matters had gone Montrose did not yet know, but he had other grounds than mere pique for suspecting Argyll and his faction of some deep design against the King's authority. The plan now submitted to him confirmed his worst suspicions. It inflamed his jealousy of Argyll, while threatening to break for ever the dream he still cherished of placing Charles at the head of a constitutional government with a Presbyterian Church. The precise details of the scheme are rather obscure; for when it afterwards became matter of public inquiry, those most directly concerned repudiated all knowledge of it. There seem in fact to have been more than one scheme, that submitted to Montrose having been chosen as least likely to alarm his inconvenient loyalty, while at the same time offering a sop to his ambition by assigning him a share in the executive. According to this the government of Scotland was to be placed in the hands of a Triumvirate, consisting of Argyll, Mar, and Cassillis. Argyll was to rule all the lands beyond the Forth, while the southern counties were to be in charge of his colleagues. A committee or council was to work with the Triumvirate, and in this Montrose's name had been inserted. But though the particulars of the various schemes may have differed, they all practically tended to the same end. Whether he was to stand alone, an absolute dictator, or to be one of a nominal council, Argyll was the only man who could save Scotland in her present straits.

But Montrose had a party as well as Argyll. Besides the few who, like Napier and Stirling, looked to him as their head, there were many who, while not sharing his sanguine loyalty, and perhaps not altogether trusting him, were agreed with him that the time had come when the Covenant needed to be saved from itself. They were indeed in much the same predicament as Montrose himself, though his peculiar temperament and aspiring genius made impossible for him what was merely troublesome for men of commoner mould. They had subscribed the Covenant not to destroy their king, but to save their religion. They had subscribed it, in short, without sufficiently considering whether it must inevitably lead them among such a people and at such a time, unless Charles were to undergo some marvellous change in his nature and ideas which only dreamers could hope for, and which, it is not too much to say, no man then wearing a crown was likely to undergo. To dethrone Charles merely to set up Argyll in his place was to their taste neither as Scotsmen nor Covenanters. To this party Montrose determined to appeal. A conversation held with Lindsay during a hasty visit to Edinburgh convinced him that this idea of a dictatorship was no mere fancy of Argyll's ambitious brain, nor promoted only by his creatures.

Almost in these words, and using this very illustration from the practice of ancient Rome, did Lindsay in private approve a scheme of which he afterwards publicly disowned all knowledge. Montrose accordingly resolved to play these men at their own game, and to form a counter-plot in the interests of Scotland, her Covenant, and her King. This was the origin of the secret alliance known as the Cumbernauld Bond, from the place where it was signed, the house of Montrose's uncle Lord Wigton. "Montrose's damnable bond," Baillie calls it, "by which he thought to have sold us to the enemy;" but he is careful not to quote it, nor to give the names of the subscribers. Among them were Mar, the governor of Stirling Castle, Almond, Leslie's second in command on the Border, and Erskine, whose accession to the cause Baillie had welcomed but a short while since as a signal instance of God's mercy. The presence of such names sufficiently proves the genuine nature of the bond, and disposes of the assertion that it was merely designed by Montrose to further his own personal aggrandisement or in treachery to the Covenant. The purpose of its subscribers is plainly declared in the clause levelled against the "particular and indirect practising of a few," by which the Covenant that they had signed and pledged themselves anew to promote "to the hazard of their lives, fortunes, and estates," was now brought into danger, and with the Covenant the country. That Argyll and his scheme of dictatorship were the danger ahead was of course understood by all who signed; but this danger was as manifest to Mar, Almond, and Erskine as to Montrose.

Having thus, as he supposed, provided the means of checkmating Argyll and his faction, Montrose returned to the army. He found it on the point of entering England. The spot chosen was the ford over the Tweed at Coldstream. It was a strange irony of fate that twenty years later led another army southwards by the same ford to restore to his throne the exiled King for whom Montrose had given his life, and against whose father he was this day in arms! The river was in flood, and for three days the army halted on the plain of Hirselhaugh. On August 20th the passage was practicable. But whether at the last moment they shrank from incurring the charge of rebellion against which they had all so strenuously protested, but which, when the Rubicon was once passed, they would no longer be able to avoid, or from a preconcerted plan to test Montrose's good faith, there was a strange unwillingness among the leaders to be the first to make the passage. It was agreed to cast lots. The lot fell on Montrose. Instantly he sprang from his horse, and entering the stream waded through waist-high to the farther bank. Then returning he led his division across. The whole army followed, each captain wading on foot at the head of his men. The passage was begun at four in the afternoon, and by midnight five-and-twenty thousand armed Scotchmen were encamped on English ground.

His earliest biographer, the loyal and affectionate Wishart, maintains that it was Montrose's purpose, when once fairly across the Border, to carry his own men over to the English camp; and that, if his friends had kept their faith, so large a part of the Scottish army had gone with him that the rest could have effected nothing. It is possible that some such plan may have crossed his mind for the moment. His own regiments, men of Perthshire and Forfarshire, raised under his own supervision and many of them his own tenants, would have followed whithersoever he chose to lead them. Nor is it impossible that many of his colleagues who, like him, had put their hands prematurely to the plough, and were now, like him, looking back, might have welcomed any opportunity of extricating themselves from a false position. But Wishart vouchsafes no authority for his statement. No hint of such a design is to be found elsewhere. It was not made a charge against Montrose during his trial before the Estates in the following year, though it is impossible to suppose that a secret shared by so many would not have leaked out when the tide had turned against its author. We may therefore suppose that the generous biographer was only endeavouring to find for an action which he conceived to need some explanation, an excuse which his own uncompromising loyalty would prevent him from seeing in its true light. Against treason treachery itself would in his eyes be fair. To Wishart the Covenant had always been an unlawful and impious league, masking under dishonest professions of reverence to God and King designs subversive of the authority of both. He had himself stood stoutly out against it from the first, for which he had been deprived of his ministry, despoiled of his property, and flung a prisoner into the Tolbooth. Such a man may be pardoned for failing to understand his hero's conduct at this crisis; he may be pardoned for being unable to appreciate the peculiar nature of that loyalty to the Throne which could allow a man to bear arms against its occupant. Even passive adherence to the Covenant was incompatible in his plain mind with duty to his King; he would have preferred to believe his hero capable of treachery to the rebels whose commission he had accepted, rather than of disloyalty to the monarch whom he professed to serve. But we must hope that Wishart was mistaken; and that if such a course of action at any time crossed Montrose's mind, he put it away from him as unworthy of an honest man. Yet in truth it is not easy to reconcile Montrose's behaviour during the past few months with his presence in the army which was now at open war with its sovereign. The time was indeed critical enough to have perplexed an older and a cooler head. Even were he now convinced that to declare frankly for the King was the only course consistent with his duty to his country, to do so before he was strong enough to make his declaration good might for ever ruin his prospects of serving either country or King. By still siding with the Covenant he might yet be able to guide it to a sense of its true purpose. With what feelings Montrose saw the royal cavalry flying in disgraceful panic before his countrymen at Newburn, and Newcastle unbar its gates at the first sound of the Scottish drum, we cannot tell. That he bore his part like a brave and skilful captain we may be sure; but that figure wading sword in hand through the swollen waters of the Tweed is the sole glimpse of Montrose that history affords through the brief and inglorious campaign to which it has given the name of the Second Bishops' War. Once, indeed, he is mentioned in a way which suggests how keenly the Royalists kept their eyes on him both as a present foe and a possible friend. Writing to the King from Darlington on August 30th Strafford reports as the most significant item of news a rumour that Montrose had fallen in the affair at Newburn. His signature also appears, along with Leslie's, Almond's, and the rest of his principal colleagues, to one of those extraordinary documents in which the Covenanters still continued to profess their peaceful and loyal intentions. Of this there will be more to say hereafter. For the present we may leave to the historian the narrative of the events which led to the Treaty of Ripon and to the King's second and last visit to Scotland. Montrose had pressed him to come; and when he came Montrose was a prisoner in the hands of their common enemies.