he set out for England, leaving Lambert with some regiments to aid Argyll in maintaining the new arrangement.
While Cromwell was lodged at Moray House, Argyll and some others had held long conferences with him in private, and Guthry states that it was afterwards ‘talked very loud that he did communicate to them his design in reference to the king and had their consent thereto’ (Memoirs, 298). ‘Nothing,’ however, Guthry admits, ‘came to be known infallibly.’ Argyll moved for delay in giving instructions to the Scottish commissioners to protest against the trial of the king until after a fast that had been ordered (Balfour, Annals, iii. 386), but if not influenced in this by religious scruples, he may have hesitated to countenance their interference as more likely to endanger the life of the king than to save it. His asseverations at his own trial and on the scaffold must also count for something. In any case such was the universal horror awakened throughout Scotland by the news of the king's execution, that Argyll, if he had ventured to stand against the tempest, would have involved himself in hopeless ruin. The alliance with Cromwell was therefore repudiated without a dissenting voice, and on 5 Feb. 1649–50 Charles II was proclaimed king, not merely of Scotland, but of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, at the cross of Edinburgh. The situation in which Argyll now found himself may perhaps be best understood from his own pathetic description in ‘Instructions to a Son.’ ‘By that confusion,’ he says, ‘my thoughts became distracted, and myself encountered so many difficulties that all remedies that were applied had the quite contrary operation; whatever therefore hath been said by me or others in this matter, you must repute and accept them as from a distracted man of a distracted subject in a distracted time wherein I lived.’ The policy now entered upon by him was a desperate one. He supported the movement for inviting the king to Scotland, as it was deemed of prime importance that he should land in Scotland under the auspices of the covenanters, rather than in Ireland unfettered by any oaths and promises. The king favoured the Irish proposal, and upon a temporary gleam of hope broke off negotiations with the Scotch commissioners, and despatched Montrose to Scotland to attempt the restoration of the monarchy without the aid of the covenanters. After the dispersion of his small band of followers Montrose was captured, and on 1 May 1650 brought into Edinburgh. Argyll, as he afterwards affirmed in his defence at his own trial, refused to interfere one way or another in regard to his fate; but when Montrose was paraded through the town bound on a cart on his way to the Tolbooth, ‘the procession,’ it was said, ‘was made to halt in front of the Earl of Moray's house, where among the spectators was the Marquis of Argyll, who contemplated his enemy from a window the blinds of which were partly closed’ (M. de Graymond's report to Cardinal Mazarin, quoted in Napier's Memoirs of Montrose, p. 781). Writing to his nephew Lord Lothian on the day of Montrose's execution announcing the birth of a daughter, Argyll notes that ‘her birthday is remarkable in the tragic end of James Graham at the cross,’ and adds: ‘He got some resolution after he came here how to go out of this world, but nothing at all how to enter another, not so much as once humbling himself to pray at all upon the scaffold’ (Ancrum Correspondence p. 262).
Anticipating the pledge given by him at Breda on 13 May, Charles signed the covenant while the ship in which he had embarked for Scotland was still riding at anchor in the Moray Firth, but the covenanters were determined not to be thrown off their guard, and the sole direction of affairs was still continued in the hands of the committee of estates with Argyll at their head. For his browbeating by the presbyterian clergy Charles obtained some consolation from the assurances of Argyll that ‘when he came into England he might be more free, but that for the present it was necessary to please these madmen’ (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1650, p. 310). Possibly Argyll chafed more under their domination than did Charles. Argyll took advantage of Charles's position to make overtures for a marriage between him and his daughter, but nothing came of it owing largely to the queen's opposition (see ‘Instructions to Captain Titus’ in Hillier's King Charles in the Isle of Wight, 324–34). After the victory of Cromwell at Dunbar Argyll's policy changed. Charles saw the prime necessity of preventing him entering into communications with Cromwell, and by a private letter under his sign-manual dated Perth 24 Sept. recorded his purpose to make him Duke of Argyll and knight of the Garter, and as soon as royalty was established in England to see him paid 40,000l. (Letter in app. to Eachard's Hist.) Argyll recognised that the cause of the king was hopeless so long as the presbyterian clergy had the sole direction of affairs. He had only to choose between a desertion of the king by coming to terms with Cromwell, and an endeavour to promote an alliance between the covenanters and the royalists in Scotland and England. Possibly
