portrait painted by Jameson, who was then practising his art in his native town of Aberdeen. This was Graham of Morphie's marriage-gift to the bride, and is still to be seen at Kinnaird Castle, where it is said to have remained since it was first hung there more than two centuries and a half ago. Those who have seen it pronounce it to be still in an unusually good state of preservation. Time has dealt tenderly with the long auburn hair, the fresh complexion, and gay clothes of the young bridegroom. The smooth upper lip and arch expression show a mind very different of course from that which had set its seal on the grave and resolute face seen later by Dobson and by Honthorst. But this smiling lad in his slashed doublet, lace collar, and gold chain is clearly father to the stately armoured man who had risked all for his king, and was to lose all.[3]

In the spring of 1633 Montrose left Scotland for the customary period of foreign travel. He was absent three years, but the barest outline of the time alone remains. We know that for some part of it his companion was Basil Fielding, son of the newly-made Earl of Denbigh, that he visited France and Italy, and that in the spring of 1635 he was in Rome with the young Lord Angus and four other Scottish gentlemen. He is said to have continued his studies diligently during this period, and to have particularly affected the society of learned men. "He studied," writes Saintserf, "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."

Montrose returned to Scotland some time in 1636. He was then in his twenty-fourth year, of the middle height, well and strongly made, of graceful carriage and singularly expert in all bodily exercises, especially in riding. His hair was of the light reddish tinge which darkens with time, and his complexion of that clear fresh colour which is often found with red hair; his nose was aquiline, his eyes gray, bright, and keen. Though not strictly a handsome man, his appearance in later life at least must have been striking, dignified, and noble. Those who knew him only in manhood describe him as being somewhat haughty to strangers, especially if they were his equals or superiors in rank; but to his friends, and always to his inferiors, his manners were singularly courteous and engaging. In his later years of exile he is said to have been somewhat too stately and formal, and inclined, as the saying goes, to take too much upon himself. Burnet, whose friendship for the Hamiltons would not dispose him to think favourably of Montrose—though he does him more justice in the biography of those brothers than in the history of his own time—says contemptuously that he had too much of the hero about him, and that his manner was stately to affectation, insinuating also that his courage was not so certain as his friends pretended. To call Montrose a coward should be enough to put any witness out of court at once; but indeed, as Burnet was only seven years old when the man against whom he vented this silly piece of spite died, and as the society he knew best was unlikely to foster any fervent admiration for the great champion of the Throne, his evidence cannot go for much. From the accounts, however, of men better able to judge than the Bishop of Salisbury, it is clear that there was something in Montrose's manner that did not please all tastes, and perhaps seemed fantastic to some. "He was of most resolute and undaunted spirit," writes one of his friends, "which began to appear in him to the wonder and expectation of all men, even in his childhood." And again: "He was exceeding constant and loving to those who did adhere to him, and very affable to such as he knew; though his carriage, which indeed was not ordinary, made him seem proud." These expressions fall in well with Clarendon's famous character of him, and also with the impression made by him on Cardinal De Retz, when they met in Paris in 1647, as the very ideal of one of Plutarch's heroes. These are witnesses of Montrose's prime; but the carriage that is admitted to be not ordinary in a grown man would probably be still more marked in a young one. The Covenanters, through their great mouthpiece Robert Baillie, declared him to be too proud, headstrong, and wilful for their tastes. Certainly he had little of the tone or temper of the Puritan about him, and of all the young aristocrats who joined them was the least likely to submit himself blindly to their dictation, or become the mere instrument of their factions; and as he also had evidently a strong partiality for his own opinion, which he was neither slow to form nor to declare, it is plain that there can never have been much personal sympathy between him and his early associates. We may think of Montrose, then, at this time as a young man full of high resolves and romantic fancies, ardent, aspiring, impulsive, impatient of delay, and always more eager to lead than willing to follow. But his own verses are after all the clearest reflection of his character, and though probably written in the last year of his life, they describe the Covenanter as truly as the Cavalier.

CHAPTER II
FOR KING OR COVENANT

Montrose had returned to Scotland at a critical time. Eleven years earlier, while he was still reading Seneca with his tutor at Glasgow, the heralds had proclaimed from the city-cross at Edinburgh a royal edict destined to set not Scotland only but the whole kingdom in a blaze. By the Act of Revocation, as it was called, Charles, before he had been a year upon his throne, succeeded in doing what his father through nearly forty years of meddling had been careful to leave undone. The blast of his heralds' trumpets had woke to life again that long feud between the Crown and the aristocracy which had marked the course of Scottish history during the two previous centuries, but which had been gradually declining since Murray scattered his sister's power to the winds at Langside.

It would be hard, at this distance of time and without his excuse, to say in our haste with Knox that there was not one righteous man among the Lords of the Congregation who had assisted him to establish the reformed religion in Scotland; but it is certain that the large majority looked only to the fat revenues of the old Church, and remembered only her insolence in the day of her power. For a century and a half she had been enriched and strengthened by successive sovereigns as a bulwark against the fiercest and most independent aristocracy in Europe. Under James the Fifth her haughty and dissolute prelates had filled the highest offices of State, while the nobles were despoiled, imprisoned, and banished at their will. The hour of reckoning had now come, and it was to be exacted to the uttermost farthing. But though the reformers were allowed to indulge their pious zeal unchecked in the work of destruction, they were soon made aware that