To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape. Charles Spencer

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       The Crown, Without Glory

      He that sits on a dunghill today, may tomorrow sit on a throne.

      The Man in the Moon, April 1650

      The Marquess of Montrose, the leading Scottish Royalist, was still in exile when the news of Charles I’s beheading reached him. He, like the queen, was dumbstruck with bewilderment. When he could at last bring himself to speak, it was to swear an oath of vengeance. He vowed to see that the king’s heir was placed on his rightful throne, or to perish in the attempt: ‘As I never had passion upon Earth so strong as that to do your King father service, so it shall be my study,’ he promised the newly declared king of Scotland, ‘to show it redoubled for the recovery of you.’1 Montrose’s unquestioning loyalty would not be reciprocated by his new master.

      Charles agreed to look again at the Scottish offering rejected in the Netherlands the previous year. Those speaking for the king justified an agreement with the Scots as ‘an effectual means to save Ireland, recover the King’s Right in England, and to bring the Murderers of His Majesty’s Father to condign punishment’.2

      Charles encouraged Montrose to return to fight for him in the Highlands. This was in order to put pressure on the Scottish Covenanters there, while Charles negotiated with their representatives in the Netherlands, but Montrose took the royal instruction at face value. He arrived in the northern tip of Scotland with 500 German, Danish and Dutch mercenaries, and some hardy but untrained men from the Orkneys. But the clans failed to rise in his support, fearing the strength of the Covenanters while sensing the weakness of the Crown.

      Before he set off for the Netherlands, Charles went to see his mother in a bid to smooth over the differences in the Royalist camp. Lord Byron, one of Charles I’s close supporters, wrote to the Marquess of Ormonde on 11 March 1650 that Henrietta Maria and Charles had just spent ten days together in Beauvais. The king was now heading for Breda, while his mother headed for Paris. ‘They met with great kindness on both sides and I hope will part so,’ wrote Byron, ‘and with a full reconcilement of those differences that formerly were betwixt them.’ Byron pointed to various figures in Charles’s court, including Sir Edward Hyde, who remained set against the treaty with the Scots: ‘[They] have by all possible means endeavoured to render the treaty we hope for, altogether fruitless to the king.’3

      A few days later another Royalist in exile, Henry Seymour, reported to Ormonde that Charles was determined on action, even if the Scots proved impossible to negotiate with: ‘If the treaty [with the Scots] succeed not his Majesty is resolved to lose no more time in idleness, and therefore must either go to you, or to my lord Montrose into Scotland. His own inclinations lean to the first. But a powerful interest [Henrietta Maria] … prefers the other, whose game lies another way.’4

      The negotiations with the Scots lasted from 26 March till the end of April 1650. Charles then capitulated to all demands relating directly to Scotland, but not those that the Scots had pushed for which were connected to England or Ireland. As king of Scotland, he agreed to swear the Oath of the Covenant, and said he would commit to the supreme rule of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland.

      One of the Scottish delegation, Alexander Jaffray, recorded in his diary the joylessness of the resulting union: ‘Being sent there by the [Scottish] Parliament, in the year 1650, for that same business, we did sinfully both entangle and engage the nation and our selves, and that poor young prince to whom we were sent; making him sign and swear a covenant, which we knew, from clear and demonstrable reasons, that he hated in his heart. Yet, finding that upon these terms only, he could be admitted to rule over us (all other means having failed him), he sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him – where, I must confess, to my apprehension, our sin was more than his.’5

      At the same time, news of the alliance gave some English Royalists hope, John Crouch printing in the periodical The Man in the Moon:

      Then cheer up Cavaliers; I hear

      The Drums for Charles do beat,

      And frozen Hearts half-dead with fear,

      Revive with Loyal heat.6

      But the sudden submission to the Covenanters’ Scottish demands had an immediate, terrible and shameful cost. Charles had agreed, as one of the conditions of Scottish support, to disown his family’s great Scottish champion. Deprived of royal patronage, the Marquess of Montrose was now at the mercy of Argyll and the Covenanters.

      Charles sent Montrose a letter with confirmation that he had decided to form a pact with his deadliest enemies. It was the ultimate royal betrayal. In the same communication he let Montrose know that he had decided to honour him by making him a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in Britain. It was a meaningless gesture. Both men knew that Montrose’s life was now hanging by a thread.

      Montrose’s small force was surprised and routed by his enemies at Carbisdale, forty miles north of Inverness, on 27 April 1650. Despite being wounded in the battle, Montrose managed to escape its ensuing carnage. After wandering the hills without food, being reduced to eating his gloves, he sought refuge in Ardvreck Castle, whose owner, Neil MacLeod of Assynt, had fought alongside him five years earlier. But his host sold his name to infamy by betraying Montrose, and accepting the reward on his head.

      On 18 May Montrose was paraded through the packed streets of Edinburgh. He was made to stand in a cart, before being transferred to the hangman’s wagon, in which he was forced to sit down, and was bound to his seat for the final leg of his journey to Tolbooth prison, where conditions were famously grim. At this point his eyes are said to have met the squinty glare of his old enemy the Marquess of Argyll, watching from a window on high.

      Two days later Montrose was taken to a brief hearing, where he was sentenced to death. Unusually for a nobleman, he was to be denied the merciful swiftness of the axe, and was condemned to being hanged. Such heartlessness was the payback for the turmoil and embarrassment he had caused his enemies during his years of triumph.

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