Having been unsuccessful in so many attempts to serve the king, and his services being now absolutely rejected, it might have been supposed that Montrose would either have returned to his old friends, or that he would have withdrawn
himself as far as it was possible from public life. But he was animated by a spirit of deadly hatred against the party with whom he had acted, and he had
within him a restless spirit of ambition which nothing could satisfy but the supreme direction in all public managements : an ambition, the unprincipled exercise of which rendered him, from the very outset of his career, the "evil
genius," first of the covenanters, and latterly of the miserably misled monarch
whom he laboured apparently to serve, and whom he affected to adore. By suggesting the plot against Argyle and Hamilton, known in history by the name of
the Incident, during the sitting of the parliament, with Charles at its head in
Edinburgh, he checked at once the tide of confidence between him and his parliament, which was rapidly returning to even more than a reasonable height, and
created numberless suspicions and surmisings through all the three kingdoms,
that could never again be laid while he was in life; and by betraying the secrets
of the covenanters, he led the unwary monarch into such an extravagant notion
of the proofs of treason which might be established against some members of
the lower house, that, forgetting the dignity of his place, he came to the
parliament house in person, to demand five of its members, who, he said, had
been guilty of treason ; an unhappy failure, which laid the broad foundation of
his total ruin. With ceaseless activity Montrose, at the same time, tampered with the leaders of the covenant, who, anxious to bring him back to their cause, held out the prospect of not only a pardon, but of their giving him the post of lieutenant-general. Under the pretence of smoothing some difficulties of conscience, he sought a conference with the celebrated preacher, Mr Henderson, that he might pry into the secrets of his former friends ; which he had no sooner obtained, than he hastened to lay the whole before his majesty in a new accusation, and as offering additional motives for his majesty issuing out against them commissions of fire and sword.
The king, having now disengaged himself from the controlling influence of the marquis of Hamilton, entered into an arrangement, in terms of which the earl of Antrim, who was at the time waiting upon his majesty, undertook to transport into Scotland a few thousands of his Irish retainers, at whose head, and with the assistance of a band of Highland royalists, Montrose was to attempt the subversion of the existing Scottish government. The time appointed for the execution of this scheme was the beginning of April, 1644. Arms and ammunition were in the meantime to be imported from the continent, and a small auxiliary force procured from the king of Denmark.
As the time approached, Montrose, raised to the rank of marquis, left Oxford with the royal commission, to be lieutenant-general for Scotland, under prince Rupert, and accompanied by about one hundred cavaliers, mostly his personal friends. To these he added a small body of militia in passing through the northern counties of England, and on the 13th of April entered Scotland on the western border; and pushing into Dumfries, he there erected his standard, and proposed to wait till he should hear of the arrival of his Irish auxiliaries. In two days, however, he was under the necessity of making a precipitate retreat to Carlisle. This so speedy catastrophe did not tend to exalt the character of Montrose among the English cavaliers, who had pretty generally been of opinion that a diversion in Scotland in the then state of the country was utterly impracticable. Montrose, however, had lost nothing of his self-confidence, and he applied to prince Rupert for one thousand horse, with which he promised to cut his way through all that Scotland could oppose to him. This the prince promised he
