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

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.

      On 21 May, the day of Montrose’s execution, some of his enemies taunted him for bothering to comb his hair when death was so near. He replied: ‘My head is still my own. Tonight, when it will be yours, treat it as you please.’7

      Lord Wariston watched from a window in his home as Montrose walked to his death, defiant to the end. He had dressed himself in a scarlet cape, silk stockings and ribboned shoes. One observer said he looked more like a bridegroom than a condemned man. Montrose mounted the gallows, assembled on a thirty-foot-high platform that towered over Mercat Cross. He chose not to pray. In a short statement he said that Charles I ‘had lived a saint and died a martyr: I pray God I may end so: if ever I would wish my soul in another man’s stead it is in his’.8

      After the life had been throttled out of him, Montrose’s body was cut up. His head was stuck on a spike attached to Tolbooth’s upper reaches, and his arms and legs were dispatched to four of the other great cities of Scotland. There they were nailed up high, as deterrents to those who dared to oppose the Covenant. His trunk and bowels were buried in a casket on Burgh Moor, to the south of Edinburgh.

      Sir Edward Hyde was on a diplomatic mission to Spain when he learnt that Charles had agreed to the Scots’ demands, and that he had subsequently landed at Garmouth, forty-five miles east of Inverness, on 24 June 1650. By this stage Charles had made further concessions, including swearing to both Covenants, and disowning his loyal supporters in Ireland. ‘If there be judgement of Heaven upon him,’ Hyde wrote, ‘I can only pray it may fall as light on him as may be.’

      On his progress south to Edinburgh, Charles saw something curious hanging from the gates into Aberdeen. On asking what it was, he was informed that it was one of Montrose’s severed arms.

      From the outset, Charles found the contract he had agreed with the Scots hard to bear. His hosts insisted on most of his retinue being sent away, because of their ‘malignant’ nature. Meanwhile, to demonstrate his commitment to the Covenant, he was led through denunciations of his parents, addressing their supposed sins, while also being forced to confess his own many personal shortcomings.

      Having humbled himself before God, he was also obliged to debase himself before the Marquess of Argyll. The marquess extracted a promise from Charles that he would receive £40,000 from him if he succeeded in retrieving his English throne.

      Argyll was also keen to discuss the possibility of Charles marrying his daughter, Lady Anne Campbell. Charles’s father and grandfather had wed princesses from France and Denmark, respectively. For him to have to seriously contemplate marriage to the daughter of one of his subjects showed just how devalued Charles’s eligibility had become, by this stage of his exile from England.

      The austerity of his everyday life now, with its dour sermons and endless prayers, was far removed from the idle, easygoing court in exile that Charles had become used to. While to the world he exhibited acceptance and charm, inside he was furious at the repeated humiliations: ‘The Scots have dealt with me very ill!’ he told an Anglican dean.9

      Oliver Cromwell was recalled from Ireland in 1650, to replace Sir Thomas Fairfax as Lord General of Parliament’s army. Fairfax had retired rather than invade Scotland because, he said, ‘we are [still] joined in the National League and Covenant’. He refused to attack his old allies.

      In late July 1650, in response to the provocation of Charles’s presence on British soil and the Scots’ promise to place the English crown on his head, Cromwell invaded Scotland with 16,000 men.

      It was a testing country to fight in. The Scots held fast behind a defensive line that had Edinburgh at its core. The English, meanwhile, had to contend with a relentlessly hostile landscape. Symptomatic of this was the aggravating presence of ‘Mosstroopers’, small guerrilla bands of Lowlanders who lay in wait outside the invaders’ garrisons, picking off stragglers and disrupting supplies and communications.

      Cromwell was one of many in his army to become seriously ill, and it seemed that he and his soldiers would need to retreat unless the opportunity soon presented itself for battle. Even then, the Scots would heavily outnumber the invaders. Disease and desertion reduced the English to 11,000 fighting men, while the Scottish army was 22,000 strong.

      The two mismatched armies eventually lined up to fight in early September, near Dunbar, the port twenty-eight miles north of the border which was Cromwell’s main supply point. The Scottish generals, the Earl of Leven and his cousin David Leslie, had established an advantageous position for their troops on the formidable Doon Hill. Cromwell’s line of retreat on land had been cut off, and Leven and Leslie expected the English cavalry to make a break for it, leaving their infantry behind to surrender. But things now took a bizarre turn.

      The leading Covenanters had already reduced their army’s effectiveness. They had insisted that it be purged of eighty officers and 3,000 experienced men, because their religious beliefs were not considered sufficiently godly. The same fanatics now compromised their troops further, ordering an immediate abandonment of their advantageous position on Doon Hill.

      Despite the enemy’s needless surrender of the tactical advantage, Cromwell was extremely agitated before what would clearly be a pivotal battle: he chewed his lips so furiously that blood was seen dripping down his chin. Before dawn on 3 September he ordered an attack on the Scottish army, which was left disjointed by its new deployment. He started on the enemy’s right wing, which his forces overwhelmed before turning on their centre. When that force was also overcome, he set about its left wing. The Scots’ large numerical advantage was negated by this three-stage strike. That day the New Model Army – disciplined, professional, and sure that God was on its side – pulled off Cromwell’s most startling triumph.

      The English lost just twenty-eight men at Dunbar. Leven and Leslie had up to 3,000 killed, and a further 10,000 captured. It was a defeat of biblical proportions, in an age when God’s hand was seen in everything. Indeed, there was a suitably Old Testament ring to Cromwell’s report to Parliament on the Royalist