They prepared a different welcome now for the young Earl. The citizens were armed and drilled, guns mounted, trenches dug, and the town generally put into such a state of defence as was possible. Meanwhile Montrose was at his own place in Forfarshire, beating up for recruits. While there he heard that the few allies the Covenant could boast in that quarter were to meet at Turriff, a market-town on the borders of Banffshire, mostly gentry of the district, Frasers and Forbeses, who were jealous of the Gordons and ready to join any party against them. Huntly heard also of the meeting and resolved to disperse it. But Montrose was too quick for him. With one of those lightning dashes which were to be the secret of his successes against the Covenant, he now won the first point in the game for it. Taking with him barely two hundred of his own men, he hurried across the Grampians by the most unfrequented routes, and when Huntly at the head of two thousand men marched into Turriff he was greeted with a compact array of musket-barrels levelled at him across the wall of the little churchyard. His orders were explicit. He was not to proclaim his commission till the time came, and that mysterious moment was to be decided not by him but by Hamilton. Moreover he was to avoid all risk of bloodshed for the present. He knew Montrose would fight, and, though he was perhaps the better man for the moment, he knew also that Leslie was at hand with a force more than double his own. Had the positions of the two leaders been reversed there can be no doubt what Montrose would have done. But Huntly was not Montrose. He withdrew to Inverury, and disbanding the most part of his men left Aberdeen to its fate.
This was not so severe as probably the citizens had expected, and as certainly some of the Covenanters wished. A few days after the affair at Turriff, Montrose joined hands with Leslie and entered Aberdeen in triumph at the head of six thousand men, each of whom wore a blue scarf, or carried a knot of blue ribbons in his cap, in opposition to the royal scarlet which Huntly had taken for his colours. To condescend to the devices of these godless cavaliers shocked some of Montrose's solemn captains, but the young general was right. He knew the value of a distinctive symbol to warm men's hearts, especially the hearts of soldiers, and that it was none the worse for pleasing their eyes as well. The blue ribbons were at once popular, and Montrose's whimsies, as they were at first contemptuously called, soon became the recognised badge of the Covenanters.
There was no attempt at opposition. Disgusted at Huntly's defection, the most resolute spirits had left the city and sailed south to join the King. The rest could do nothing but accept the Covenant and trust to Montrose's mercy. He was not hard upon them. Having marched his men through the town he quartered them on the links outside, with strict injunctions to keep good order and to pay for all they consumed. The citizens were set to work at filling up the trenches they had dug and removing all traces of their improvised fortifications, and a fine of ten thousand marks was imposed on the town. Then, leaving behind him a garrison under the command of his college friend Lord Kinghorn, whom he named governor of the town, Montrose marched north after Huntly, who had retreated from Inverury to Gordon Castle in the Bog of Gicht.
Huntly was anxious to come to terms, and Montrose when left to himself had no wish to make them hard. The two men accordingly met by appointment near Inverury, each attended by eleven friends armed only with walking-swords. The two chiefs stepped aside to talk. What passed between them can only be conjectured, but after a long conference Huntly and his companions returned with Montrose to his camp at Inverury, where they were courteously received. Here Huntly signed a paper, known in the language of the time as a bond of maintenance, probably containing (for its exact terms were never made clear) those clauses of the Covenant which professed respect to the King's authority and a love for the national religion and liberties, pledging himself also not to interfere with any of his vassals who had a mind to mount the blue ribbon. Such of them as were Papists Montrose, on his part, promised to protect so long as they were willing to assist in maintaining the laws and liberties of their common fatherland. Huntly, however, who saw many of his personal enemies in the camp, Crichton of Frendraught in particular, the sworn foe of his House,[6] was doubtful how far this arrangement would be allowed to hold good. He employed one of his followers, therefore, to warn Montrose against evil counsellors who, he said, would be certain to work him all the mischief they could. Montrose answered that he was well aware that Huntly had many enemies among the Covenanters, but that he should not fail in any part of his word; "only," he added, "there is this difficulty, that business here is all transacted by a vote and a committee, nor can I get anything done of myself." He had already done so much, it was urged, that he might well go on with the rest. He was in command, and if he stood firm the others must give way. "I shall do my utmost for Huntly's satisfaction," was the answer, and with this assurance the Marquis and his friends were suffered to depart.
Their doubts were soon verified. Montrose returned to Aberdeen, where he was joined by Murray, Seaforth, the Master of Lovat, and other zealous Covenanters with a body of cavalry. Encouraged by these reinforcements, Huntly's enemies were soon at work. A council of war was held; it was agreed that the General had been too lenient with a dangerous man, and the Marquis was requested to repair to Aberdeen under a promise of safe conduct. How far Montrose was directly responsible for what followed it is hard to decide. That he had promised more than he was at the time confident of being able to perform is clear; but it is by no means so clear that he did not do his utmost to keep his promise, and it is unreasonable to brand him with treachery because he was not strong enough to carry the day single-handed against the vote and the committee. Yet though he may have meant to deal honestly with Huntly, when he found himself overborne in the council he certainly seems to have shown little hesitation in acting as the agent of those who had no such scruples. After a series of trifling and vexatious conditions had been offered and refused, it was intimated that the Marquis would do well to return with them to Edinburgh. Conscious that he was in a trap Huntly first asked that his bond should be restored to him. When this had been done, he asked if he was to go as a prisoner or as a free man. "Make your choice," said Montrose shortly. "Then," was the answer, "I will not go as a prisoner, but as a volunteer." Whatever share Montrose may have had in this double dealing he was destined to pay dear for it on a later day. The Marquis never really forgave him; and their subsequent alliance proved costlier to Montrose and to the King than their present enmity proved to Huntly.
Montrose marched south with his prize on April 13th, leaving Aberdeen in charge of a committee composed of the Gordons' bitterest foes. Immediately on his arrival at Edinburgh, Huntly was brought before the Tables and pressed to subscribe the Covenant. "You may take my head from my shoulders," was his answer, "but not my heart from my sovereign." He was at once sent as a prisoner to the Castle, with his heir Lord Gordon who had accompanied him from Aberdeen. His second son, Lord Aboyne, should also have been there, but he had been allowed by Montrose to return home on parole to procure money and other necessaries for the journey, and when safe within his own borders had easily been persuaded to break his word with men who had shown so little care of their own. The House of Gordon, said his kinsmen, could not be left without a head at such a crisis. Lord Lewis, the third son, was too young, and it devolved therefore on him to play his father's part, and to keep the King's flag flying in the midst of traitors and rebels.
Montrose reached Edinburgh on April 20th. On May 1st Hamilton anchored in the Firth of Forth with nineteen sail, five thousand men, and some munitions of war. He came too late. Leith had been fortified. Fife and the Lothians were in arms to a man. Among the crowds who thronged the shore to stare at the English fleet came the old Dowager Countess of Hamilton, riding on horseback, with pistols at her saddle, and vowing, in a spirit worthy of her ancestor, the grim old Reforming Earl of Glencairn, to shoot her son dead with her own hand should he dare to set a hostile foot on Scottish soil. A stouter heart than Hamilton's might well have shrunk from the prospect before him. His men were raw English peasants, without drill or discipline and careless of the cause for which they had been armed with weapons of whose use they were ignorant. Opposed to them was a people as well equipped and better officered, inflamed with the belief that their religion and liberties were at stake, and resolute to accept no compromise till both had been secured. Present action was plainly impossible; but useful time might be gained by diplomacy, which, if it could effect nothing else, might serve to remind the Covenanters that Hamilton, though circumstances had placed him at the head of an English army, was still at heart a Scotsman. He therefore landed his men on the little islands of Inchcolm and Inchkeith, where they could be taught at least how to handle their muskets, opened negotiations with the enemy, and commenced a lugubrious correspondence with the King.
Meanwhile Aboyne had gone south to find Charles, and had met him at Newcastle. The spirited young fellow undertook to raise his father's vassals, if some help in men and money were forthcoming. Money there was none, but some of the men now lying idle in the Forth might be available. Aboyne was therefore sent back to Scotland with instructions to Hamilton to furnish him with what troops he could spare; but before he could reach the fleet the position of affairs had again changed. The Gordons had risen without waiting for their young chief, had scattered the Covenanting garrison in a skirmish popularly known as the Trot of Turriff (which marks the virtual beginning of the Civil War), and had re-occupied Aberdeen. Montrose had marched north again with a force of four thousand men. And Hamilton, on whom the eyes of all Royalists and Covenanters in Scotland were now anxiously turned, had sent two out of his three regiments south to swell the army Charles was now laboriously mustering at York!
This inexplicable movement had been made by the King's order, but on Hamilton's advice. That advice had been given on May 21st, seven days after the Gordons had risen. The order had been sent on the 23rd, and on the next day Charles learned the news from Aberdeen. His position was undoubtedly serious. Leslie was advancing to the Border with an army which, though less than rumour made it at Newcastle, was far larger than the force Charles had as yet been able to collect, far readier and far more eager to fight. But it is clear that such reinforcements as Hamilton could furnish, while they could have availed little against the trained and resolute troops of Leslie, had been invaluable in the North, where the war was as yet rather feudal than national, where the forces on both sides were small and disorganised, and where five thousand men, however unskilful, would have been sufficient to turn the scale on either side. The Royalists held Aberdeen from the 15th to the 20th of May. Had Hamilton joined them before the latter day it would have been necessary to place a larger force at Montrose's disposal, and Leslie's march to the Border must have been checked for the time. But for three weeks the King's lieutenant seems to have remained in complete ignorance that the King's loyal subjects were in arms for him within less than a hundred miles. We have seen that the rising was known at Newcastle on the 24th. It was known in Edinburgh, it was known even to Huntly in his prison, before the regiments had left the Forth. Yet the one man then in Scotland whom it most concerned to know these things for his master's sake, who alone in Scotland had the means and the warrant to profit by the knowledge, who was at liberty to come and go, to receive messengers and to despatch them, who knew that the young Gordon was in communication with the King, who had some experience of military affairs, and who, with all his faults, has never been called a coward, sat idly through all that precious time apparently in complete ignorance of events with which all the country round him was ringing. He was still ignorant of them when Aboyne arrived in the Forth on the 29th. Hamilton was profuse in regrets and courtesies. Men he had none to spare; but he entertained his young friend sumptuously on board his own ship, with discharge of cannon at every health, after the fashion once in vogue at the Court of Denmark, presented him with a few small field-pieces, and an officer whom he warranted to be of the highest skill, courage, and experience, and who vindicated this praise by earning among the Royalists the name of Traitor Gun. Two days later news arrived from Aberdeen, and Aboyne at once sailed north with these valuable succours. Some vague promises were indeed held out to him of possible reinforcements, if they could be spared from England; and it seems that Hamilton, on Aboyne's arrival, had written for more troops, a request which, immediately following the arrival of those he had just parted with, must have considerably puzzled his unfortunate master. That he might possibly have done better to accompany the lad with his remaining regiment than to stay in a place where he had confessed himself unable to be of any service does not appear to have entered into Hamilton's head.