Now began for the three fugitives the period of bodily anguish that was to cease only with their lives. The country was strange to them, and was almost bare of inhabitants, so that for two days they sought in vain to find a road which might take them to Caithness, whence they could escape to France or Norway. During these two days they ate absolutely nothing, and passed the cold nights under the stars. At length Kinnoull, who had always been delicate, flung himself down on the heather, and in a few hours died of exhaustion. There his friends were forced to leave him, without even a grave, and wandered on, their steps and their hearts heavier than before, till a light suddenly beamed at them out of the dusk. It was a shepherd's cottage, where they were given some milk and oatmeal, the first food they had eaten since the battle; but the man dared not take them into his hut, lest he should bring on himself the wrath of the covenant for harbouring royalists, even though he knew not who they were.
The reward offered for Montrose sharpened men's eyes and ears, and in two days he was discovered lying on the mountain side almost too weak to move. It was Macleod of Assynt to whom the deadly shame of his betrayal is said to belong, and Montrose prayed earnestly that the mercy of a bullet in his heart might be vouchsafed him. But the man who for many years had defied all Scotland could not be dealt with like a common soldier, so he was put on a small Shetland pony, with his feet tied together underneath, and led through roaring, hissing crowds, which pressed to see him in every town through which they had to pass. The wounds that he had received in the battle were still untouched, and he was feverish from the pain. This was another cause of rejoicing to his foes; but they were careful to give him food lest he should escape them as Kinnoull had done. And at each halting-place there came a minister to heap insults and reproaches on his head, which he seldom deigned to answer. But though the ministers of peace and goodwill had no words bad enough for him, one is glad to think that Leslie the general did what he could, and allowed his friends to see him whenever they asked to do so, and also permitted him to accept and wear the clothes of a gentleman, which were given him by the people of Dundee. It was to Leslie also that he probably owed a last interview with his two little boys, when he stopped for the night at the castle of Kinnaird, from which he had been married.
From Dundee the prisoner was brought by ship to Leith, and taken to the palace of Holyrood, where he was received by the magistrates of the city in their robes of office, with the provost (or mayor) at their head. Here the order of the Parliament was read, and he listened 'with a majesty and state becoming him, and kept a countenance high.' Then his friends, who, like himself, were prisoners, were ordered to walk, chained two together, through the streets, and behind came Montrose, seated bareheaded on a chair in a cart driven by the hangman. The streets of the old town were crowded by people who came to mock and jeer, but remained dumb with shame and pity. The cart slowly went on its way, and at seven the Tolbooth prison was reached, with the gallows thirty feet high standing as it had stood twelve years before beside the city cross.
The last days of Montrose were disturbed by the constant visits of ministers, who tried to force from him a confession of treachery to the covenant, but in vain.
'The covenant which I took,' he said, 'I own it and adhere to it. Bishops I care not for. I never intended to advance their interest. But when the king had granted you all your desires, and you were everyone 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.'
These words are the explanation of Montrose's conduct in changing from one side to another; but little he guessed that the new king, by whose express orders he had undertaken his present hopeless mission, had only a few days before, at the conference of Breda, consented to bid his viceroy disband his army and to leave Scotland. This knowledge, which would have added bitterness to his fate, was spared him; as was the further revelation of the baseness of Charles II., who gave orders to his messenger not to deliver the document if he found Montrose likely to get the upper hand.
As an act of extraordinary generosity the Parliament, which had voted to colonel Strachan a diamond clasp for his share in the final defeat of Montrose, permitted the prisoner's friends to provide him with a proper dress, so that he might appear suitably before them. Their courtesy did not, however, extend to a barber to shave him—a favour which, as he said, 'might have been allowed to a dog.' But he must have looked very splendid as he stood at the bar of the House, in black cloth trimmed with silver, and a deep lace collar, with a scarlet cloak likewise trimmed with silver falling over his shoulders, a band of silver on his beaver hat, and scarlet shoes and stockings.