jarring projects; a good man would certainly have made a decided choice
betwixt them. Charles was neither the one not the other; and, while he
treated with the presbyterians, with a view of accepting the crown from
their hands, he scrupled not to authorise Montrose, the mortal enemy of
the sect, to pursue his separate and inconsistent plan of conquest.

[Footnote A: As Salmasius quaintly, but truly, expresses it,
_Presbyterian iligaverunt independantes trucidaverunt_.]

Montrose arrived in the Orkneys with six hundred Germans, was furnished
with some recruits from those islands, and was joined by several
royalists, as he traversed the wilds of Caithness and Sutherland: but,
advancing into Ross-shire, he was surprised, and totally defeated,
by colonel Strachan, an officer of the Scottish parliament, who had
distinguished himself in the civil wars, and who afterwards became a
decided Cromwellian. Montrose, after a fruitless resistance, at length
fled from the field of defeat, and concealed himself in the grounds of
Macleod of Assint to whose fidelity he entrusted his life, and by whom
he was delivered up to Lesly, his most bitter enemy.

He was tried for what was termed treason against the estates of the
kingdom; and, despite the commission of Charles for his proceedings, he
was condemned to die by a parliament, who acknowledged Charles to be
their king, and whom, on that account only, Montrose acknowledged to be
a parliament.

"The clergy," says a late animated historian, "whose vocation it was to
persecute the repose of his last moments, sought, by the terrors of his
sentence, to extort repentance; but his behaviour, firm and dignified to
the end, repelled their insulting advances with scorn and disdain. He