to suppress the practical dictatorship of his rival and enemy, Argyll, who, he understood, was to be one of a triumvirate, and absolute north of Forth. Argyll allowed the committee of Estates to rule, as before, and bided his time. On the 20th of August Montrose was the first of the Covenanting army to cross the Tweed; Newcastle was seized, and Charles, unsupported by England, entered on the course of the Long Parliament and the slaying of Stratford. In Scotland the secret of the Cumbernauld band came out; Montrose, Napier and other friends were imprisoned on the strength of certain ambiguous messages to Charles, and on the 27th of July, being called before parliament, Montrose said—“My resolution is to carry with me honour and fidelity to the grave.” Montrose kept his word, while Hamilton stooped to sign the Covenant. Montrose lay in prison while Charles I. visited Scotland and met the parliament, The “Incident” perturbed by the dim and unintelligible plot called “The Incident” (October 1641), which seems to have aimed at seizing the persons of Argyll, Hamilton and his brother Lanark. All that is known of Montrose, in this matter, is that from prison he had written thrice to Charles, and that Charles had intended to show his third letter to Argyll, Hamilton and Lanark, on the very day when they, suspecting a plot, retired into the country (12th of October). An agitated inquiry which only found contradictory evidence was disturbed by the news of the Irish rebellion (28th of October). Charles heaped honours on his opponents (Argyll was the one marquis of his name), and hastened to England. The country was governed by fifty-six members of the Estate and by the dreaded commission of the General Assembly, for now the kirk dominated Scotland, denying even the right of petition to the lieges.
The English parliament, at war with the king, demanded aid from Scotland; it was granted under the conditions of the The Great Rebellion. Solemn League and Covenant (1643), by which the Covenanters expected to secure the establishment of Presbyterianism in England, though the terms of agreement are dubious. Scotland, however, regarded herself as bound to war against “Sectaries,” and so came into collision with Cromwell, to her undoing. In January 1644, a Scottish army crossed Tweed, to aid the parliament, with preachers to attend the synod of Westminster. Already some 2000 men from Ireland, mainly of Macdonalds and other clans driven into Ireland by the Argylls, were being dispatched to the west Highland coast. Lanark, from Oxford, fled to join the Covenanters; Charles imprisoned Hamilton in Cornwall; Montrose was made a marquis; Leslie, with a large Scottish force and 4000 horse, besieged Newcastle. Montrose arrived a day too late for Marston Moor (and of July 1644); Rupert took his contingent; he entered Scotland in disguise, met the ill-armed Irish levies under Colkitto, raised the Gordons and Ogilvies, who supplied his cavalry, raised the fighting Macdonalds, Camerons and Macleans; in six pitched battles he routed Argyll and all the Covenanting warriors of Scotland, and then, deserted by Colkitto and the Gordons, and surprised by Leslie's cavalry withdrawn from England, was defeated at Philiphaugh near Selkirk, while men and women of his Irish contingent were shot or hanged months after the battle.
The clamour of the preachers was now for blood, and gentlemen taken under promise of quarter were executed by command of the Estates at St Andrews, for to give quarter was “to violate the oath of the Covenant”—as interpreted by the clergy. It would have been wiser to put the revenges as reprisals for the undeniable horrors committed by Montrose's Irish levies. The surrender of Charles to the Scots, the surrender by the Scots of Charles to the English, for £200,000 of arrears of pay, with hopes of another £200,000 (February 1647), were among the consequences of Montrose's defeat. But the surrender of the king festered in Scottish consciences; for the country was far from acquiescing in the transaction.
Leslie, by the advice of one Nevoy, a preacher, massacred, on his return to Scotland, the Macdonalds in Dunaverty castle. A strife arose between Hamilton, who wished to disband the Covenanting army, and Argyll, and gradually the struggle was between Hamilton and the sympathizers with the imprisoned king and Argyll at the head of (or under the heels of) the more fanatical preachers and Presbyterians. The Scottish commissioners in England, with Lauderdale, and with the approval of Hamilton's faction, signed, at the end of 1647, “The Engagement” with Charles, and broke away from the tyranny of the preachers. The Engagers had the majority in parliament, but were frantically cursed from the pulpits; they and their army mustered for the deliverance of their king. In August 1648, they crossed the border, leaving the fanatics to arm in their rear, but Cromwell, by a rapid march across the fells, caught and utterly routed them at Preston and on the line of the Ribble, taking captive the infantry and Hamilton, who was sent to the block.
This was the kirk's proudest triumph; the countrymen of the preachers had been ruined on “St Covenant's Day.” The Execution of Charles I. preachers, with Lords Loudoun and Eglintoun, Argyll and Cassilis, armed and raised the godly, and occupied Edinburgh. The parliamentary committee capitulated with the extremists, who sent friendly messages to Cromwell, and Argyll met him on the Tweed. Thence Cromwell sent Lambert with seven regiments to Edinburgh, where he himself stayed for some time. A parliament in Argy1l's and the preachers' interest met there in January 1649; only sixteen nobles were present, as against fifty-six in the previous year. The execution of Charles I. (30th of January 1649) left the extreme party in a quandary. How could they keep terms with “bloody Sectaries” that had slain their king, in face of the protests of their envoys? They did pass the Act of the Classes, disabling all “Engagers” from all manner of offices, military and civil, and dividing the distracted country into two hostile camps. On the 5th of February Charles II. was proclaimed king in Edinburgh, if he took the two Covenants. This meant war against England, and war in which the Engagers and Royalists could not take part. The situation developed into ruin under the strife of the wilder and the gentler preachers.
Communications with Charles II. at the Hague were opened, and the Scots accused the English of breach of the Solemn League Death of Montrose. and Covenant. Huntly, as a Royalist, was decapitated at Edinburgh; and the envoys of Charles, thanks to the advice of Montrose, failed to induce him to stamp himself a recreant and a hypocrite by signing any covenants. But Montrose (January 1650) was sent by Charles to “search his death,” as he said, in an expedition to the north of Scotland, while, in the absence of his stainless servant, Charles actually signed the treaty of Breda (1st of May). In April Montrose was abandoned by his royal master, and was defeated at Carbiesdale, on the south side of the kyle, or estuary, of Shin and Oykel; he was betrayed, insulted, bullied by the preachers, and, going to his death like a bridegroom to the altar, was hanged at Edinburgh, on the 20th of May. “Great in life, Montrose was yet greater in his death.” He had kept his word, he had “carried fidelity and honour to the grave” (Gardiner). His head was set on a spike and his quartered limbs were exposed in various places.
Charles came to Scotland; he signed the Covenants, while his tormentors well and duly knew that the action was a base Royalist cause in Scotland. hypocrisy, that they had tempted him to perjury. Cromwell, who now crossed the border, impressed this truth, as far as he might, on the preachers, who made Charles sign declarations yet more degrading, to the discredit of his father and mother. Meanwhile David Leslie, with singularly excellent strategy, foiled and evaded Cromwell in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, till the great cavalry leader was forced to retreat towards England. At Dunbar Leslie held Cromwell in the hollow of his hand, but his army had been repeatedly “purged” of all Royalist men of the sword by the preachers; they are said, and Cromwell believed it, to have constrained Leslie to leave his impregnable position and attack on the lower levels. Leslie appears to have intended a surprise, as at Philiphaugh, but “through our own laziness,” he confesses, the surprise came from Cromwell's side, and few of the Scots except the mounted gentry escaped from the crushing defeat at
