This final rupture with the Covenant did not at once throw Montrose into the arms of the King. The malignant star of Hamilton was still in the ascendant. In spite of all that had passed Charles still believed that in the Scots he would find a counterpoise to the rebellious English, and Hamilton, for purposes known only to himself, encouraged him in the belief. Montrose knew better. He knew, from his own past experience, how good was the secret understanding between the two Parliaments. He knew that the army, now again mustering under the new Earl of Leven, was never destined to waste its strength on Irish rebels. He knew that the Covenant was only biding its time to join hands with the English Parliament; and he saw clearly that the only chance of preventing this fatal union was to strike such a blow at the former before it was ready for action as would leave it no leisure to meddle with matters outside its own borders. He would have warned the King of this before the war began, but Charles, mindful of his promise to the Estates, and careful always to keep promises it was not in his interests to break, refused to see him. He warned Henrietta Maria of it at Bridlington Quay amid the thunder of English guns firing on an English Queen, and he renewed his warnings again when Newcastle had escorted her to York, and the harassed lady could breathe and listen in safety. But Hamilton was also at her side persuading her, as he had persuaded the King, that no danger was to be feared from Scotland so long as no violence was attempted, and that he might be relied upon to keep the country quiet and loyal to its engagements. It was known that after Edgehill, when Charles was marching on London, the Houses at Westminster had directly invited the Scots into England to keep Newcastle's northern army in check, while the King's own appeals to his "contented people" had been invariably rejected. Yet the general feeling seems to have been in favour of a temporising policy. The truth was that, though many Royalists looked coldly on Hamilton, few were as yet inclined to trust Montrose. Among the old thorough-going cavaliers the taint of the Covenant still hung about him; his repentance, they thought, savoured too much of personal pique to be altogether genuine. But with the majority it was not so much his good faith as his capacity that was distrusted. They considered him a brilliant adventurer, brave and daring, but too young and inexperienced for these high matters, too rash and headstrong. "Montrose," they said, "is a generous spirit, but Hamilton hath the better head-piece." The King showed his opinion of the two men in characteristic fashion; he wrote courteously to Montrose, and advanced Hamilton to a dukedom.

So, during the first year of the war, Montrose was forced to eat his heart out in idleness, at home among his books, in strenuous efforts to keep alive the fainting loyalty of his party, or in despairing consultations with his friends on the approach of the inevitable hour that they were powerless to prevent. The Covenanters, aware of his situation, and conceiving that his proud and restless spirit, chafing under the sickness of hopes deferred and services rejected, would render him amenable to their designs, sought to win him again to their side. They offered him the command of their new army under Leven; they even offered, as they had once offered Huntly, to pay his debts. The Moderator Henderson (at Argyll's suggestion, it would seem, and certainly with his knowledge) was sent to solve some doubts he affected to entertain on the propriety of accepting these offers, and from him Montrose learned all that he expected and feared to know.

This curious interview took place on the banks of the Forth near the Bridge of Stirling. Henderson was accompanied by Sir James Rollo, who filled the embarrassing situation of brother-in-law to both Montrose and Argyll.[11] Montrose, who knew from the Queen that these Covenanting overtures had been reported to his disadvantage in England, had taken care to be accompanied by good guarantees for his integrity. He came with Napier and Napier's son the young Master, with Keir and Lord Ogilvy. For two hours the interview lasted by the water-side. Montrose, professing to have lived lately too much in retirement to be aware how matters were going in the great public world, asked the Moderator what these offers meant, and what he was expected to do for them. Henderson, in the belief that he was talking to an apostate only anxious to find a plausible excuse for his apostasy, frankly admitted that it was intended to send an army into England to co-operate with the Parliamentary forces, and that in both countries it was resolved to push matters to the extreme against the King; and he urged Montrose to hesitate no longer, but to throw himself heartily into the good work, assuring him that he had only to state his terms, and that whatever they might be they would be accepted. Montrose then turned to his brother-in-law and asked if they came as the mouthpiece of the Estates, or only out of goodwill to him. Sir James answered that he understood the Moderator to have spoken by authority. But to this Henderson demurred. He was not exactly commissioned, he said, by the Estates, but he was sure that they would make all his promises good. "That will not do for me," replied Montrose. "I cannot commit myself in such important matters without the assurance of the public faith, especially when the messengers cannot agree among themselves as to the terms of their message."

The substance of this interview was at once reported by Montrose, first to the Queen at Oxford, and then to the King in his camp before Gloucester. Still they both hesitated, nor was it till Hamilton himself confessed his failure that their eyes were opened. A Convention of the Estates had been summoned to meet in Edinburgh at the very time of the conference on the banks of the Forth. It was soon made clear that Henderson had spoken no more than truth when he told Montrose that the King need hope for nothing from Scotland. Though the Convention had been summoned without royal warrant, Hamilton attended as the Royal Commissioner, and was urgent with all loyal subjects to be in their places to secure him that diplomatic triumph which he had promised his confiding master. With Montrose he had been especially urgent, but Montrose had refused to attend unless the Commissioner would promise, should fair words prove useless, to sanction an appeal to force. Hamilton would not give the promise. "I will protest," he said, "but I will not fight." He did not even protest. Argyll asked him scornfully if he had nothing to say on the King's behalf. Lanark answered for him that he would not wrong himself and them by protesting against the wisdom of a whole kingdom. Hamilton muttered some confused words to the same purpose, and the loyal peers, who had obeyed his summons, left the hall in disgust.

All went forward as Henderson had predicted. Whatever reluctance might have been felt by the moderate Covenanters to declare open war against the King had been removed by the recent capture of Antrim in Ireland, with letters in his pocket from Nithsdale and Aboyne concerning a rising in Scotland to be backed by a force of Irish Catholics. There was no proof that this plan had been proposed to the King, still less that he had accepted it; but the mere whisper of the hated word Papist was enough to set Presbyterian Scotland in a blaze. The elections for the new Convention resulted in a large majority in favour of a military alliance with England. At the same time Waller's defeat at Roundway Down removed the last scruple entertained at Westminster on employing a Scottish army against Englishmen. The Commissioners from London, among whom was the younger Vane, were authorised to demand a force of eleven thousand men. Terms were soon arranged, and Lanark, as Secretary of State, set the seal on his treachery by affixing the King's signature to a warrant authorising the levy of an army to be employed against the King's authority. Then, to draw the bond still closer between the English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians, a new Covenant was formed by Vane and Henderson for mutual adoption under the title of the Solemn League and Covenant, which, after ratification by the Estates, was accepted by both Houses at Westminster, and solemnly subscribed in Saint Margaret's Church on September 25th, 1643.

The King could no longer blind himself to the truth. Hamilton had failed, and it was now clear that his failure had been inevitable from the first. He came with his brother to Oxford to justify himself before his indignant master. But Montrose was there also, with many a loyal Scotsman, Crawford and Nithsdale, Ogilvy and Aboyne, who had been cajoled into attending the Convention, and in the face of their evidence no justification was possible. Whether he had been traitor or fool mattered little now; but even the long-suffering King was forced to own that, if an honest man, the favourite had at least shown his honesty after a strange and disastrous fashion. The brothers were arrested. Lanark made his escape to the Covenanters; but Hamilton was sent a prisoner under a strong guard to Pendennis Castle in Cornwall.

Then, at last, the King turned for help to Montrose. Was the plan he had been urging for the last twelve months on unheeding ears still practicable? The Scots had crossed the Tweed; all the garrisons and passes of the Border were in their hands; any day might bring Leven and Newcastle face to face. Even Montrose could not but confess the venture to be a desperate one. But desperate ventures only raised that dauntless spirit. The plan that had seemed so easy a few short months since could not be impossible now, with all his friends round him, with his sovereign at his back, and no Hamilton in his path. If Newcastle could spare a few troopers he could make his way through the Lowlands to his own lands beyond the Tay. There, among his own people, with the royal commission in his hand, with Aboyne and Ogilvy for his lieutenants, he would rally the loyal North to the King's standard, and, sweeping down on the rear of the invading Scots, would soon send them back over their borders faster than they had come. Meanwhile Antrim, who was at large again, must effect a diversion from Ireland on the west, and beard the Dictator in his own country. The plan was thought sheer madness at Oxford, where little confidence was felt in Montrose, and none at all in Antrim, a vain and foolish man, notorious for nothing, in Clarendon's contemptuous phrase, but for his marriage with the great Duke of Buckingham's widow. But Digby, who dearly loved a hazard and could persuade the King to anything, favoured the scheme. Antrim was despatched to Ireland, and Montrose made ready for his more perilous journey to the Border. He knew his jealous countrymen too well to come before them in the character Charles wished him to assume, of Viceroy and Captain-General of the Royal Forces in Scotland. On his own advice these sounding titles were conferred on the King's nephew, Prince Maurice, as whose Lieutenant-General Montrose left Oxford for the North early in March, 1644. Crawford, Nithsdale, Reay, Ogilvy, and Aboyne rode with him, and a miscellaneous following of gentlemen-adventurers and their servants, some hundred in all.

Their first point was Newcastle's camp at Durham, where Montrose hoped to make some additions to his scanty army. He was received with all the circumstance and courtesy befitting his new honours, but with small assurance of help. Indeed Newcastle seemed in no good condition to help himself. Montrose was a spectator of the inglorious affair at Kowdenhill, which, but for the bravery of Sir Charles Lucas who led the English cavalry, might have ended in disaster. Here he saw that valiant Amazon, Mrs. Peirsons, riding, armed to the teeth, at the head of a troop of horse conspicuous for a black flag showing the ghastly device of a naked man hanging from a gibbet, with the motto I dare, the legendary banner of the House of Dalzell. The troop had been raised and armed at the charges of Carnwath, the head of that House; but the commission ran in the name of Captain Frances Dalzell, under which style the woman whom he called his daughter took the field. Carnwath's loyalty was of the sort too common at that time, and common especially among Scotsmen. The incompetence of an English general, though it might grieve him for his master's sake, could not, for the present at least, affect Montrose's plans. The jealousy of a Scottish peer might affect them seriously. It was this he feared more than all the swords of the Covenant or the subtleties of Argyll. For his enemies he could account. But who would undertake to account for those who should be his friends? The King had issued a commission for Carnwath as Lieutenant of Clydesdale where his lands lay, which was delivered to him by Aboyne as aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant-General of the Northern Expedition. The petulant old nobleman, who had been secretly chafing at Montrose's authority and the respect paid to it in the English camp, conceived himself entitled to some better reward for the expense of equipping Captain Frances Dalzell and her men for the field than an appointment which placed him at the orders of a man young enough to be his son, and who at the best was but a renegade Covenanter. Refusing even to read his commission, he flung it from him with one of those full-mouthed Scottish oaths that were always at his command.

But it was no time to stand upon punctilios. All the aid Newcastle could give was a hundred badly-mounted troopers and two small brass field-pieces. With these, and his own personal following, Montrose struck westward for Carlisle. On the road he was joined by eight hundred foot of the Northumberland and Cumberland Militia and three troops of horse. Such was the army with which this dauntless leader of a forlorn hope went forth to conquer Scotland for King Charles.

The beginning was disastrous. He crossed the Border on April 13th, and on the first day's march up the Annan the English troops quarrelled with their Scotch allies and deserted in a body. Still he pressed on with his own men and occupied Dumfries. There, at the head of his little band, he read his commission to the few townsmen who had not cared to run away, and raised the royal standard. There too he published the first of those declarations with which he was henceforth careful to mark his actions as the deliberate result of convictions forced on him by the conduct of his former allies. Not he, but they had changed the point of view. He was King's man now, as he had been Covenanter, "for the defence and maintenance of the true Protestant religion, his Majesty's just and sacred authority, the fundamental laws and privileges of Parliaments, the peace and freedom of oppressed and thralled subjects." For this he had taken the oath of the Covenant; for this he had borne arms in its service; for this he was now in arms for the King against traitors who had broken their faith to their country and to him. "I do again," he concludes, "most solemnly declare that, knew I not perfectly his Majesty's intention to be such, and so real as is already expressed, I should never at all have embarked myself in this service. Nor did I but see the least appearance of his Majesty's change from these resolutions or any of them, I should never continue longer my faithful endeavour in it."[12] These brave words fell on dull or unbelieving ears. Without allies it was madness to advance; to linger idle in Dumfries was useless, even if he could hope to hold the town. For two days he waited for Antrim and his Irishmen and the loyal gentlemen of the Western Lowlands. He waited in vain. Not a Scotsman joined him; nothing could be heard of Antrim; from every side came news of mustering foes. A solitary welcome was sent to him from the faithful hearts at Keir, urging him to make at once for Stirling, where Lord Sinclair, who held the bulwark of the North for the Covenant, was reported to be only waiting his chance to declare for the King. But he could not trust Sinclair; and learning that a strong force under the fickle Callendar was marching against him, he had no alternative but to fall back on Carlisle.

Yet, though foiled for the time, Montrose could not be idle. He contrived to draw a few troops together from the garrison at Newcastle and elsewhere, and with these he patrolled the Border, keeping Callendar in check on the Western Marches and gathering up forage and provisions everywhere for the English army. After some brisk fighting, and in the teeth of Leslie's cavalry, he took Morpeth Castle, a strong and important post, and a smaller fort at the mouth of the Tyne. From this most useful and not inglorious work he was summoned by an urgent message from Rupert, who was then marching to the relief of York, to join him at once with all the men he could muster. With all his haste he could not reach the prince till the evening after the fatal Second of July; and when the two men met in the little inn at Richmond the King had no longer an army in the north of England.

Still Montrose did not despair. If Rupert would give him a thousand horse he would cut his way into the heart of Scotland. But Rupert had neither horse, nor men, nor muskets to give. "When we came to the prince his occasions forced him to make use of the forces we brought along with us and would not suffer him to supply us with others; so that we were left altogether abandoned, and could not so much as find quartering for our own person in these counties." In such words was Montrose compelled to declare his forlorn situation to the King whom he had left but four short months earlier with every assurance of victory. But he added to them a characteristic postscript: "Forget not to show how feasible the business is yet, and the reason thereof if right courses be taken." And yet the outlook was dark enough to make even that stout spirit sink. His own reverses were but a small thing, the fortune of war which the next turn of the wheel might repair. It was the selfishness, the jealousy, the treachery, that made his heart sore. All he feared had come true. The commissions he had carried with him had shared the fate of Carnwath's lieutenancy, and these proud King's men would brook no master in the King's Lieutenant-General. The superior rank that his new patent of Marquis gave him over them, instead of confirming his authority, only aggravated his offence.[13] And still there was no sign of the Irishmen. All the Lowlands from the Forth to the Solway were in the hands of the Covenanters. Traquair, once the most trusted of the King's Scottish counsellors after Hamilton, had now openly declared for them, and was busy promising in their name pardon and preferment to all Royalists who should follow him. Huntly had indeed called his men out in the north, but had been easily routed by Argyll, and some gallant Gordons had paid the penalty for their chief's miscarriage with their heads.

Such was the substance of the report entrusted to Ogilvy for the King's hand. It was drawn up at Carlisle, whither the baffled adventurers had retired after the disaster at Marston. Nothing more could be done now but to make the best of their way back to headquarters at Oxford and there wait with their sovereign for a happier time. In this decision Montrose had seemed to acquiesce while secretly resolved on a very different enterprise. Early in August the melancholy cavalcade left Carlisle for the South. After nightfall on the second day, Montrose, having confided his plans to Ogilvy alone, privately left his companions, who, seeing his aide-de-camp, his horses, servants, and baggage still with them, continued their march for Oxford, never doubting that their chief was following. But they were not destined to reach their journey's end in safety. On their way through Lancashire they were attacked by a strong body of rebel horse, and after a stout resistance carried prisoners into Leven's camp before Newcastle. Their leader returned to Carlisle.

No wilder project was ever hatched in mortal brain than that on which Montrose was now bent. It was clear even to him that the game for the present was up in the Lowlands; but the Highlands were still open. There, among his own people, he might at least wait in safety for Antrim's promised succours, which must surely now be on their road, and there he might hope to find the loyal hearts which had ceased to beat south of the Forth. But to reach the Highlands he must first cross the Border where every pass and road was jealously watched by Covenanting patrols, and make his way through a country where every town and castle flew the blue flag. He knew that his enemies would give more to have him in their hands than for the King and all his armies, and he knew well that from those hands he need never hope to escape with life. In truth the design seems to match better with the brilliant romance of the great novelist than the sober record of history. He chose for his companions Sir William Rollo, a younger brother of the Laird of Duncruib, and Colonel Sibbald who had served under him in the Covenanting armies. They wore the dress of Leven's troopers, while the Marquis in the guise of a groom rode after them on a sorry nag and leading another by the bridle.

At the Border they were met by the startling intelligence that Montrose was known to be in the neighbourhood, and that the strictest watch was kept for him at all the passes. But a more serious danger soon threatened them. A Scots soldier, who had served under Newcastle and seen Montrose in the camp at Durham, at once detected him under his mean disguise and saluted him by name. The seeming groom would have maintained his character, but the soldier would take no denial. "What!" he said. "Do I not know my Lord Marquis of Montrose? But go your way and God be with you!" They gave him a few crowns, and the faithful fellow kept their secret well.

Thus, after four days of hard riding and continuous peril, Montrose reached the Highlands. He passed through his own lands without halting till he came to Tullibelton, on the Tay between Perth and Dunkeld, the seat of Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie the best loved and trusted of all his kinsmen. Here he could draw breath in safety, though the strictest concealment was still necessary till he could learn the state of the country. He passed his nights in a little hut among the woods, and his days in lonely rambles on the hills, while his two companions went on to Keir to report the wanderer's arrival, and to learn how things went in those parts for the King.