arrival of the fleet at Portsmouth, he was
obliged, on the 13th of February 1650, to return again to Breda. The
projected invasion of Ireland was delayed through want of funds till it
was too late; Hyde's mission to Spain, in the midst of Cromwell's'
successes, brought no assistance, and Charles now turned to Scotland for
aid. Employing the same unscrupulous and treacherous methods which had
proved so fatal to his father, he simultaneously supported and
encouraged the expedition of Montrose and the royalists, and negotiated
with the covenanters. On the 1st of May he signed the first draft of a
treaty at Breda with the latter, in which he accepted the Solemn League
and Covenant, conceded the control of public and church affairs to the
parliament and the kirk, and undertook to establish Presbyterianism in
the three kingdoms. He also signed privately a paper repudiating Ormonde
and the loyal Irish, and recalling the commissions granted to them. In
acting thus he did not scruple to desert his own royalist followers, and
to repudiate and abandon the great and noble Montrose, whose heroic
efforts he was apparently merely using in order to extort better terms
from the covenanters, and who, having been captured on the 4th of May,
was executed on the 21st in spite of some attempts by Charles to procure
for him an indemnity.

Thus perjured and disgraced the young king embarked for Scotland on the
2nd of June; on the 11th when off Heligoland he signed the treaty, and
on the 23rd, on his arrival at Speymouth, before landing, he swore to
both the covenants. He proceeded to Falkland near Perth and passed
through Aberdeen, where he saw the mutilated arm of Montrose suspended
over the city gate. He was compelled to dismiss all his followers except
Buckingham, and to submit to interminable sermons, which generally
contained violent invectives against his parents and himself. To Argyll
he promised the payment of L40,000 at his restoration, doubtless the sum
owing as arrears of the Scottish army unpaid when Charles I. was
surrendered to the English at Newcastle, and entered into negotiations
for marrying his daughter. In August he was forced to sign a further
declaration, confessing his own wickedness in dealing with the Irish,
his father's blood-guiltiness, his mother's idolatry, and his abhorrence
of prelacy, besides ratifying his allegiance to the covenants and to
Presbyterianism. At the same time he declared himself secretly to King,