CROMWELL RETURNS TO LONDON. 605 forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English Liberty in a Nation where we have an undoubted right to do it ;-wherein the People of Ireland (if they listen not to such seducers as you are) may equally participate in all benefits; to use their liberty and fortune equally with Englishmen, if they keep out of arms.” * Cromwell did not seek any long repose from his military labours. On the 15th of February, 1650, he writes to the Speaker, "having refreshed our men for some short time in our winter-quarters, and health being pretty well recovered, we thought fit to take the field." The House send the Lord-Lieutenant their thanks for all he had done; and resolve that he "have the use of the Lodgings called the Cockpit, of the Spring Garden and St. James's House, and the command of St. James's Park." His return to London was desired; but he had work to do, and rather turned a deaf ear to the wishes of the Parliament. It is not necessary that we should follow his course of success during the spring of 1650. His boldest and most sagacious stroke of policy was that of proclaiming throughout the country that the men who had been in arms, and were now scattered and utterly destitute, had full liberty to serve abroad. The ministers in London of France and Spain availed themselves of this permission, and forty-five thousand men of Ireland were levied for the service of these powers. Clarendon speaks with bitterness of heart of this wise expedient for freeing the land from those who would have been the principal hindrance to its quiet settlement. The king's lieutenant, he says, could not, after all the promises and contracts of the confederate Roman Catholics, draw together a body of five thousand men; whilst "Cromwell himself found a way to send above forty thousand men out of that country for service of foreign princes; which might have been enough to have driven him from thence, and to have restored it to the king's entire obedience." Cromwell left Ireton as Deputy to complete the work which he had begun, and he arrived himself in London on the 31st of May, ready for other services to the Commonwealth. * This document, which Mr. Carlyle terms "one of the remarkablest State Papers ever published in Ireland since Strongbow, or even St. Patrick appeared there," occupies sixteen pages of the Cromwell Letters, p. 103 to 119, vol. ii. CHAPTER XXXII. Charles II. negotiates with the Scottish Parliament.-His commission to Montrose.Montrose in Scotland.-Execution of Montrose.-Charles goes to Scotland.-War with Scotland.-Cromwell General.-Cromwell's Advance.-His Danger.-Position of the two Armies at Dunbar.-Battle of Dunbar.-Charles crowned at Scone.Perth taken by Cromwell.-Charles and the Scotch Army in England.-The Battle of Worcester.-Escape and Adventures of Charles.-Charles returns to France.-— Note.-Whitelocke's Description of Cromwell's Army, in a Conversation with Christina, queen of Sweden. CHARLES II., essentially different in character from his father, had inherited that quality of his family which mainly led to the tragedies of Fotheringay and Whitehall. He was a double-dealer. When the affairs of Ireland became hopeless, he listened to the proposals of the Parliament of Scotland. He received an envoy from the Presbyterian authorities while at Jersey; and appointed them to meet him at Breda to conclude a treaty for his reception in Scotland. He was urged by his warmest friends to close with their offers, although there was no relaxation of the terms upon which the support of the great religious party, speaking the voice of the Scottish nation, was offered to him. Whilst he was thus negotiating with the Parliament, he gave Montrose a commission to levy troops in foreign countries, and wage war against the powers with whom he was bargaining. He wrote to the mortal enemy of the Covenanters, "I entreat you to go on vigorously, and with your wonted courage and care, in the prosecution of those trusts I have committed to you; and not to be startled with any reports you may hear, as if I were otherwise inclined to the Presbyterians than when I left you. I assure you I am upon the same principles I was, and depend as much as ever upon your undertaking and endeavours for my service." Urged thus, and by his own passionate loyalty, the exile of Philiphaugh was indefatigable in gathering followers, though with no great success. In the autumn of 1649 he had collected about twelve hundred men at Hamburg and Gottenburg, and he dispatched a portion of them, who perished at sea. A second body arrived safely at Kirkwall. With five MONTROSE IN SCOTLAND. 607 hundred more, Montrose himself landed in the Orkneys early in March, 1650. He then crossed to the northern extremity of the main land; and, says Clarendon, "quickly possessed himself of an old castle; which, in respect of the situation in a country so impossible for an army to march in, he thought strong enough for his purpose thither he conveyed the arms, ammunition, and troops which he had brought with him." Caithness, in which district he landed, has numerous ruins of old castles-grim monuments of days of cruel feuds and lawless rapine. Here Montrose was come with his threatening banners-one of the two royal ones exhibiting the bleeding head of Charles I., with the motto, "Judge and revenge my cause, O Lord; " and his own banner painted with a naked arm and a sword dripping with gore. Onward he marched into Sutherland. Few adherents joined him. The natives fled from him as from a public enemy, of whose military excesses the Scots had received terrible lessons. Some cavalry, under the command of colonel Strachan, were proceeding against Montrose, in advance of a main body of troops under David Lesley; and they came suddenly upon him near a pass in the parish of Kincardine. The place is now called Craigchonichen, or the Rock of Lamentation. Here Montrose's last battle was soon ended. His Orkney recruits quickly ran; his Germans and his Scottish companions fought valiantly, but without effect. The ill-compacted force was wholly broken; and he himself filed from the field, throwing away his ribbon and George, and changing clothes with a peasant. Wandering amongst the Highlands for many days, he was at last taken on the 3rd of May. Clarendon's narrative of the last enterprise of Montrose and its fatal termination is regarded as one of the finest passages of his history. It should be read as a whole* to do justice to its merits as a composition. The facts which it relates, compared with other relations, lie in a short compass. After his capture, Montrose and the other Scottish prisoners were delivered to David Lesley; the foreigners were set at liberty. There was a ferocious exultation over the fall of the capital enemy of the Covenanters, which showed itself in such acts of meanness as carrying him from town to town in the unseemly garb with which he was disguised, and thus exposing him to the jeers of the populace. An Act of Attainder had been passed by the Parliament against Montrose in 1644; and upon that Act he was now sentenced to death, before he reached "Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 408, to 422. Edinburgh. When he arrived at the Watergate of the city he was delivered to the magistrates, and was conveyed to the Tolbooth, bound with cords, in an open cart, the common hangman riding before the cart, and wearing the livery of the fallen marquis. Thirty-four of his officers, tied together, formed part of the cavalcade. The great object of popular curiosity sat serene amidst his indignities; and his proud composure moved pity in the beholders, instead of the demonstrations of hate which were anticipated. Argyle looked upon his illustrious enemy from a window in the house of the earl of Moray.* From the first scene of this tragedy to the last, Montrose acted his heroic part to perfection. His demeanour was somewhat more theatrical than the mode in which the highest species of heroism would care to exhibit itself; but it was well calculated to dazzle those who are most taken with the showy virtues. When he alighted from the cart, he gave the hangman a reward "for driving his triumphal chariot so well." When he was brought, two days after, before the Parliament, he was splendidly dressed; and looked around him with an air of studied haughtiness and contempt. The Chancellor Loudon spoke bitterly to him-"he had committed many horrible murders, treasons, and impieties, for all which he was now brought to suffer condign punishment." When permitted to speak, Montrose said that "since the king had honoured them so far as to treat with them, he had appeared before them with reverence and bareheaded, which otherwise he would not willingly have done. He had done nothing of which he was ashamed, or had cause to repent." He had withdrawn himself from the first Covenant, when he saw that it was intended to take away the king's just power and lawful authority. He had never taken the second Covenant. He defended himself from the charge of cruelty; and maintaining that having again entered the kingdom by his majesty's command, he advised them to consider well of the consequence before they proceeded against him. His sentence was then pronounced: that on the morrow, the 21st of May, he should be hanged on a gallows thirty feet high; that his head should then be cut off and set on Edinburgh Tolbooth; and that his legs and arms should be hung up in other towns of the kingdom. After he was conveyed back to prison he was beset by ministers and magistrates; who only stirred his spirit to its loftiest mood. He told them that he had rather his head were stuck upon the Tolbooth * Guizot: upon the authority of a letter of the French agent to Mazarin. EXECUTION OF MONTROSE. 609 than that his picture should be hung in the king's bedchamber; that it troubled him not that his limbs should be exposed in other towns; "and that he heartily wished that he had flesh enough to be sent to every city in Christendom, as a testimony of the cause for which he suffered." In the same spirit he went to the scaffold. When the hangman, by way of adding to his indignities, hung about his neck the narrative of his military exploits, "the marquis smiled at this new instance of their malice, and thanked them for it, and said he was prouder of wearing it than ever he had been of the Garter." Clarendon's character of the great chieftain is not an unmixed eulogium: "He was a gentleman of a very ancient extraction, many of whose ancestors had exercised the highest charges under the king in that kingdom, and had been allied to the crown itself. He was of very good parts, which were improved by a good education: he had always a great emulation, or rather a great contempt, of the Marquis of Argyle (as he was too apt to contemn those he did not love), who wanted nothing but honesty and courage to be a very extraordinary man, having all other good talents in a very great degree. Montrose was in his nature fearless of danger, and never declined any enterprise for the difficulty of going through with it, but exceedingly affected those which seemed desperate to other men, and did believe somewhat to be in himself above other men, which made him live more easily towards those who were, or were willing to be, inferior to him (towards whom he exercised wonderful civility and generosity), than with his superiors or equals. He was naturally jealous, and suspected. those who did not concur with him, in any way, not to mean so well as he. He was not without vanity, but his virtues were much superior, and he well deserved to have his memory preserved, and celebrated amongst the most illustrious persons of the age in which he lived." Charles came to a conclusion with the Scottish commissioners at Breda before the death of Montrose, although he was acquainted with the failure of his rash expedition. He consented to every proposition. He was to swear to be faithful to the Covenant; he was to submit himself to the advice of the Parliament and the Church; he was never to permit the exercise of the Catholic religion in any part of his dominions. He even denied that he had authorised the enterprise of Montrose. When he heard of his friend's execution, he manifested a disposition to draw back; his courtiers "persuaded the king, who was enough afflicted with VOL. III. 39 but |