the French army, but the second civil war was approaching, and he distrusted the French policy as likely to lead to the king's ruin. He therefore left France to offer his services to the Emperor Ferdinand III. By him he was made field-marshal, a title of much less importance than at present, and he also received permission to levy troops in Flanders for service in the king's behalf. Yet though he went to Brussels he was unable to effect anything that year.
On 28 Jan. 1649 Montrose offered his services to the Prince of Wales, who was then at Brussels. At the news of the execution of Charles I he fainted, and when he came to himself swore to avenge him. In February he was with Charles II at the Hague, and advised against his acceptance of the Scottish invitation to go to Scotland as a covenanting king. On 4 March 1649 Montrose received a commission to be lieutenant-governor of Scotland on royalist principles. He betook himself first to Denmark, and then to Sweden, to collect money for, his enterprise. On 12 Jan. 1650 Charles assured him that though he was about to receive the commissioners of the Scottish covenanters, he would agree to nothing contrary to the authority of Montrose. Montrose was already on the way, having sailed for the Orkneys on or about 16 Dec. 1649. He had been furnished with arms, munitions, and vessels. He took twelve hundred men with him, but of these a thousand perished by shipwreck. He sailed up the Dornoch Firth, and his scanty force was easily overwhelmed at Invercarron on 27 April 1650. Montrose himself escaped, but was delivered up to the government by Macleod of Assynt. David Leslie carried him to Edinburgh, where he arrived on 18 May. The day before an act of parliament had been passed decreeing that he should be hanged with 'his book and declaration' tied about his neck — that is to say, Wishart's account of his campaigns and the declaration which he had issued before his last expedition—and that he should, after death, be dismembered.
In a conference with some ministers on 20 May, Montrose laid down his political profession of faith. 'The covenant which I took,' he said, 'I own it and adhere to it. Bishops, I care not for them. I never intended to advance their interest. But when the king had granted you all your desires, and you were every one sitting under his vine and under his fig-tree, that then you should have taken a party in England by the hand, and entered into a league and covenant with them against the king, was the thing I judged my duty to oppose to the yondmost.' On 21 May 1650 the sentence was carried out. Montrose, dressed 'in his red scarlet cassock,' was hanged in the Grassmarket.
The indignation of the Scots against Montrose was chiefly roused by the slaughter of their countrymen by his followers. He said in defence that no one was killed except in battle. This was not strictly true, as there was much slaughter after the capture of Aberdeen, which Montrose made no attempt to stop. His true defence is that it was impossible to restrain an unpaid army composed of such wild materials as his own. This defence, however, is in reality his condemnation. He made use of a force strong enough to slay and plunder, but entirely incapable of founding a political edifice.
Montrose was a poet as well as a warrior and statesman. His poems have a political purpose, but, unlike most political verses, they have a poetic vigour which would have given them life apart from the intention with which they were written.
His only surviving child is noticed below.
[The documentary evidence of Montrose's career is printed in Napier's Memorials of Montrose. His military proceedings are narrated in Res Gestæ, &c., by A.S., i.e. Wishart, the first edition of which was printed at Amsterdam in 1647; and in Patrick Gordon's Short Abridgement of Britane's Distemper, printed by the Spalding Club. Gordon is the more trustworthy from a military point of view, Wishart having no knowledge of the topography of the battle-fields. Wishart, however, preserves many anecdotes, and his general account of the campaign is probably to be relied on. Montrose's poems are printed by Mr. Napier in the appendix to Montrose and the Covenanters, a corrected edition of one of them being given in the appendix to the Memorials of Montrose. Mr. Napier's own biography of Montrose, of which successive editions bore different names, appeared in its final shape as Memoirs of Montrose. It is a work of marvellous research, but disfigured by strong partisan feeling, and often failing in a military sense from want of topographical knowledge. For an attempt at a critical examination into Montrose's mode of fighting, see also the chapters on Montrose in Gardiner's Great Civil War, vol. ii., where will be found plans of the principal battles.]
GRAHAM, JAMES, second Marquis of Montrose (1631?–1669), surnamed the 'Good' marquis, was the second son of James, first marquis [q. v.], by his wife, Lady Madeline Carnegie, daughter of the sixth Earl of Southesk. Shortly after the death of his elder brother at the Bog of Gight in 1645, he was seized by General Urrie at Montrose, where, 'a young bairne about 14 years,' he was attending school under the care of a tutor (Spalding, Memorials, ii. 455). Both he and
