there could not be the least suspicion of his averseness from our service at any time hereafter, but of whom they might safely promise all forwardness and alacrity in all our just courses, whensoever it should please us to use him. And now this same pardoned Lord Balmerino, being one of the chief contrivers and most malicious prosecutors of this wicked Covenant made against us and our authority, how he can be able to answer it to God, us, and our crown, his own conscience, or to the world, even in the point of honour and reputation, it must be left to the world to judge.”

The history of "this wicked Covenant,”—and if lawless designs, and cruel deeds, perpetrated under a false though specious exterior of religion and patriotism, be sins, the Covenant was indeed very wicked,-we shall have to trace in recording the life and death of MONTROSE.

CHAPTER I.

MONTROSE-HUNTLY-HAMILTON-ARGYLE.

MONTROSE was not more than fourteen years of age, when his father, John third Earl of Montrose, died unexpectedly upon the 24th of November 1626.* It must have been from this date to the time of his first going abroad, about the commencement of the year 1633, that the young Earl found in Lord Napier "a most tender father;" and, if we may judge from the intellectual accomplishments which not even his stormy destiny could altogether suppress or conceal, and of which we shall be able to afford proofs hitherto unnoticed, there can be no doubt that the greatest pains had been bestowed upon his education. It is said that, being an only son, he was advised to marry at a very early period of his life, and that he did so is apparent from the fact of his eldest son being sixteen years old, when, to the great grief of Montrose, he died at Gordon Castle early in 1645. ‡ The lady whom Montrose married was Magdalene, a daughter of

* We are told by Dr Wishart that Montrose was in his thirty-fourth year when he quitted Scotland for Norway, in the month of September 1646; and from other expressions in the same work it would appear that he was born about the close of 1612, or the commencement of the following year.

+ Wishart.

"4th March 1645. Yeheir how Montrois cumis to the Bog (of Geicht, now Gordon Castle.) His eldest son, the Lord Graham, wes in his company, a proper youth, about 16 yeiris old, and of singular expectation. He takis seikness, deis in the Bog in a few dayis, and is bureit in the kirk of Bellie, to his fatheris gryt greif."-Spalding.

Lord Carnegy of Kinnaird, afterwards first Earl of Southesk. Crawford, the peerage writer, (who obtained materials, for his account of the title, from the Montrose family, before the year 1714,) tells us that this early marriage interrupted Montrose's studies, but that afterwards he had good masters at home, and applied himself with such success," that in a very little time he became not merely a great master, but a critic in the Greek and Latin." Certainly he had been a diligent student at some period of his life, and when we consider how soon he entered those stormy scenes that left him but little opportunity for such attainments, we must be satisfied that his boyhood was not spent in idleness.

To finish the education so well commenced, Montrose proceeded to the continent, where he remained only for a few years. A contemporary writer,-whose name has not come down, but who says of himself, that he followed Montrose in several of his expeditions,*-gives this account of his travels. "In his younger days he travelled France and Italy, where he made it his work to pick up the best of their qualities necessary for a person of honour. Having rendered himself perfect in the academies, his next delight was to improve his intellectuals, which he did by allotting a proportionable time to reading and conversing with learned men, yet still so that he used his exercise as he might not forget it. He studied as much of the mathematics as is required for a soldier, but his great study was to read men, and the actions of great men. Thus he spent three years in France and Italy, and had surveyed the rarities of the east, if his domestic affairs had not obliged

* "A Relation of the True Funerals of the great Lord Marquis of Montrose in the year 1661," printed, from the original manuscript, in the appendix to the translation of Dr Wishart's Latin History, edition 1720.

his return home, which chanced at that time the late Rebellion began to peep out." This is a more pleasing picture, of the manner in which Montrose was occupied when abroad, than we obtain from Bishop Burnet, who corroborates, however, the account both of our he ro's learning and his travels. He says that the Earl of Montrose was " a young man well learned, who had travelled, but had taken upon him the part of a hero too much, and lived as in a romance, for his whole manner was stately to affectation."* As this portrait, however, might convey a more favourable opinion than the malicious Bishop intended, he qualifies it by the information, that, “when Montrose was beyond sea he travelled with the Earl of Denbigh, and they consulted all the astrologers they could hear of; I plainly saw the Earl of Denbigh relied on what had been told him to his dying day, and the rather because the Earl of Montrose was promised a glorious fortune for some time, but all was to be overthrown in conclusion." The alleged accuracy of this prediction is not bad evidence that it never occurred, and there is probably more of malicious detraction in the spirit with which Burnet retails it, than superstitious reliance on the truth of his anecdote. The difficulty of discovering any prominent vices in the character of Montrose has rendered his political enemies, of all eras, vaguely extravagant in their terms of abuse, and somewhat puerile in their anecdotes of detraction. Conscious that the unprejudiced would still be apt to admire him as a generous hero, though designed a "bloody murderer and excommunicated traitor," such writers have laboured to trace his best qualities from impure sources, and to annihilate the ab

* Burnet's History of his own Times, p. 51, Oxford edition, 1823, with the suppressed passages.

horred idea of his heroism, by imputing his most brilliant actions to impulses derived entirely from selfishness or superstition. But we shall not pretend to doubt the assertion of another historical gossip, that Montrose's "mother consulted with witches at his birth,"* when we remember that that mother was sister to the necromantic Earl of Gowrie ;t though we may be permitted to slight what is added by the same chronicler, that Montrose's "father said to a gentleman who was sent to visit him from a neighbour Earl, that this child would trouble all Scotland; he is said also to have eaten a toad while he was a sucking child.”‡

* Scot of Scotstarvet, MS. see before, p. 52.

+ Lady Margaret Ruthven, eldest daughter of William first Earl of Gowrie, and sister of John third Earl, the hero of the Gowrie conspiracy.

Scotstarvet must have thrown this mud at random; for in an old contemporary MS. of the times of Mary, (in the hands of Mr Macdonald of the Register-House) being a historical defence of that unfortunate queen, the same anecdote is thus told of the Regent Morton: "Morton had credite at the Courte, being left there by the traitoures to give intelligence how all maters past there, and how to betray his Mistres; for they could not chuse a more fitte man than him to do such an act, who from his very youth had been renouned for his treacherie, and of whome his own father had no good opinion in his very infance; for at a certane time his nurse coming foorth with him in a garden where his father was, with some that had come to visite him, busie in talk, the nurse setting down the childe on the greene grasse, and not much mindinge him, the boy seeth a toade which he snatched up, and had eaten it all till a little of the legges; which when shee saw, shee cried out, thinking he shoulde have been poisoned; and shee taking the legges of the toade that he had left as yet on-eaten, he cried out so loude and shrill, that his father and the other gentlemen, who were not far, heard the outcries, who sent to see what should be the cause; and when the messinger returned and told the mater as it happned, in all haiste he come where his son was, and, understanding as it was, he caused give the legges also, which he greedilie ate up also; which the father seeing said, the Dewill chewe thee, or burste thee, there will never come goode of thee. As he prognosticated so it happned, for after, he was beheaded at Edinburgh, attainted, and found guiltie of heigh treason for the murder of the King his maister." Whether, this be a fable in regard to Morton also, we leave to those who may write his life.