Scarcely had Montrose entered the prison when a deputation from the Parliament arrived to interrogate him. At first he refused to speak with them until he was assured that they had made their peace with the King and had warrant to examine him. Being satisfied on this point, he asked that he might be left to rest for the present. He was tired, he said, with a long journey; and "the compliment they had put upon him that day was something tedious."
But there was to be little rest for him. All through Sunday and the early hours of Monday, the ministers persecuted him, by order of the General Assembly, with a relation of his manifold misdemeanours and assurances of his certain damnation unless he would confess and receive the absolution of the Kirk. His capital offence in their eyes was his breach of the Covenant. That he stoutly denied. "The Covenant which I took," he said, "I own it and adhere to it. Bishops, I care not for them. I never intended to advance their interest. But when the King had granted you all your desires, and you were every one sitting under his vine and under his fig-tree,—that then you should have taken a party in England by the hand, and entered into a League and Covenant with them against the King, was the thing I judged my duty to oppose to the yondmost." They told him then that, as he still persisted in his stubbornness, they had no power to remit his sentence of excommunication, and must leave him to the judgment of the Almighty, "with the fearful apprehension that what is bound on earth God will bind in Heaven." "I am very sorry," he answered, "that any actions of mine have been offensive to the Church of Scotland, and I would, with all my heart, be reconciled to the same. But since I cannot obtain it on any other terms—unless I call that my sin which I account to have been my duty—I cannot for all the reason and conscience in the world."
Shortly before noon on Monday he was summoned to hear his sentence at the bar of Parliament. He had asked for a barber to shave him, and had been refused; "I would not think but they would have allowed that to a dog," was his comment. His friends had, however, been permitted to supply him with a dress suited, as one of the spectators thought, rather to a festival than a tragedy. He entered the House in a suit of black cloth, trimmed with silver, and covered with a scarlet cloak, lined with crimson and trimmed also with silver. His stockings were of carnation silk, his garters and the rosettes of his shoes of the same colour. On his head was a beaver hat with a broad band of silver lace. When the Chancellor, Loudon, had repeated the full tale of his crimes, he asked leave to speak. Leave was granted. Montrose stood up "in the place of delinquents," uncovered, and spoke.
"Since you have declared to me that you have agreed with the King, I look upon you as if his Majesty were sitting amongst you; and in that relation I appear with this reverence,—bareheaded. My care has been always to walk as became a good Christian and loyal subject: I did engage in the first Covenant, and was faithful to it. When I perceived some private persons, under colour of religion, intend to wring the authority from the King, and to seize on it for themselves, it was thought fit, for the clearing of honest men, that a bond should be subscribed, wherein the security of religion was sufficiently provided for. For the League, I thank God I was never in it; and so could not break it. How far religion has been advanced by it, and what sad consequences followed on it, these poor distressed kingdoms can witness. When his late Majesty had, by the blessing of God, almost subdued those rebels that rose against him in England, and that a faction of this kingdom went in to the assistance of the rebels, his Majesty gave commission to me to come into this kingdom, to make a diversion of those forces which were going from this against him. I acknowledged the command was most just, and I conceived myself bound in conscience and duty to obey it. What my carriage was in this country many of you may bear witness. Disorders in arms cannot be prevented; but they were no sooner known than punished. Never was any man's blood spilt but in battle; and even then, many thousand lives have I preserved. And I dare here avow, in the presence of God, that never a hair of Scotsman's head, that I could save, fell to the ground. And as I came in upon his Majesty's warrant, so upon his letters did I lay aside all interests and retire. And as for my coming at this time, it was by his Majesty's just commands, in order to the accelerating the treaty betwixt him and you; his Majesty knowing that, whenever he had ended with you, I was ready to retire upon his call. I may say, that never subject acted upon more honourable grounds, nor by so lawful a power, as I did in these services. And therefore I desire you to lay aside prejudice, and consider me as a Christian, in relation to the justice of the quarrel; as a subject, in relation to my royal master's command; and as your neighbour, in relation to the many of your lives I have preserved in battle: and be not too rash; but let me be judged by the laws of God, the laws of nature and nations, and the laws of this land. If otherwise, I do here appeal from you to the righteous Judge of the world, who one day must be your judge and mine, and who always gives out righteous judgments."
The Chancellor's reply was less dignified. Among the epithets hurled at the prisoner were infamous, perjured, treacherous; he was the most cruel and inhuman butcher that the world had ever seen; he had destroyed the father by his boundless pride and ambition, and would, had he been suffered, have destroyed the son. Montrose was then commanded to kneel, while his sentence was read by Warriston. He was to be hanged on a gibbet at the cross of Edinburgh, with a copy of his Memoirs by Wishart and a copy of his last declaration tied by a rope about his neck; after hanging for the space of three hours, his head, hands, and legs were to be cut off, and distributed as follows: his head was to be fixed on an iron spike on a pinnacle of the Tolbooth; one hand was to be set over the gate of Stirling, the other over the gate of Perth; one leg over the gate of Aberdeen, the other over the gate of Glasgow. If, at his death, he was penitent and released from excommunication, then the trunk of his body was to be decently buried in the churchyard of the Grey Friars; if otherwise, it was to be laid by the hangman's men under the common gallows on the Borough Moor. While this brutal sentence was read Montrose showed no sign of discomposure. Only at the end he sighed twice, and raising his head looked round the ring of relentless faces; but he spoke no word. The Doomster then, according to law, repeated the sentence, and Montrose was removed to the Tolbooth.
Scarcely had he re-entered his prison, when the ministers again attacked him. But he would argue with them no more. "I pray you, gentlemen," he said, "let me die in peace." One of his gaolers, moved to some momentary pity, asked these impertinent busybodies if nothing would satisfy them but tormenting the last hours of an unfortunate man. It was the only way, they answered, to humble his proud spirit and bring him to God.
Early the next morning, Tuesday, May 21st, he was waked by a loud noise of drums and trumpets. He asked his guards what these unusual sounds might mean, and was told that the soldiers were being mustered to arms, lest the malignants should attempt a rescue. "What!" he said, "is it possible that I, who was such a terror to these good men when alive and prosperous, continue still so formidable to them now that I am bound for slaughter? Then I should be still more terrible to them when dead!" Even now his persecutors would not leave him in peace. As he was preparing for the last scene, Johnston of Warriston, the chief instigator, it is said, of all this barbarity, came into his cell. Montrose was dressing his hair, which he wore long, after the fashion of the Cavaliers. "Why," sneered this brutal fellow, "is James Graham so careful of his locks?" "My head is yet my own," was the answer; "I will arrange it to my taste. To-night, when it will be yours, treat it as you please."
At three in the afternoon Montrose was led out to die. The largest crowd ever assembled on the streets of Edinburgh was gathered round the place of execution; every house-top, window, and balcony was thronged with spectators. At one end of the scaffold stood the chief magistrates of the city, at the other a group of the inevitable ministers. Beside the hangman was a bench on which were arranged in ghastly order the implements of butchery. A space was kept clear round the scaffold by a strong force of soldiers. As Montrose walked down the High Street from the Tolbooth, surrounded by his guards, in the same rich dress that he had worn before the Parliament, all were struck with his calm and noble bearing. "He stepped along the street," wrote an eye-witness, "with so great state, and there appeared in his countenance so much beauty, majesty, and gravity, as amazed all the beholders. And many of his enemies did acknowledge him to be the bravest subject in the world; and in him a gallantry that graced all the crowd, more beseeming a monarch than a peer."