As yet the Revolution stirred but in restless slumber, and it is probable that it was not the prospect of civil strife which brought Monk to England in search of employment. Prince Rupert and his brother were at Court in hopes of getting their uncle's aid for the recovery of the Palatinate; and the King, sobered by failure, was turning and doubling every way to shirk the responsibility and enjoy the credit of assisting his beautiful and unfortunate sister. Of all the schemes which were suggested to this end the most extraordinary was the project for the colonisation of Madagascar. The idea was that a thousand gentlemen should join, each with a thousand pounds and a number of servants. The King was to provide twelve ships from the navy, and thirty merchantmen were to complete the fleet. Every adventurer was to sail in person, and the whole was to be commanded by Prince Rupert himself, with the title of Governor-General of Madagascar or St. Lawrence. But Elizabeth grew anxious about her son, and opposed the wild scheme in which she could see no reason. "As for Rupert's romance," she wrote to Roe, "about Madagascar, it sounds more like one of Don Quixote's conquests when he promised his trusty squire to make him king of an island." In the end practical merchants and seamen threw so much cold water on the scheme that it began to lose favour, and Rupert did not go. Meanwhile all the world was run mad on the romantic adventure. Davenant wrote a little epic about it, which made Endymion Porter exclaim, himself as mad as the rest: "What lofty fancy was't possest your braine, And caus'd you soare into so high a straine?" Suckling so far forgot himself in the craze of the hour as to write a copy of verses that may still be read without a blush. Even the phlegmatic Captain Monk was carried away. Man of the new time as he was, in the bottom of his heart he was Elizabethan. The project was more than enough to revive the dreams of his Devonshire boyhood, of Raleigh, of Guiana, and the early days of Virginia, and he promised to go. But it was not to be. Ere long he withdrew, either because his native shrewdness showed him it was all a bubble or else because the curtain was up at last, and he turned to the thrilling play beside which the Madagascar adventure was only a childish fairy tale. Scotland was to be coerced into conformity, and in the bustle of preparation Monk saw his chance. To every soldier in England his name must have been perfectly familiar. Every young gentleman who had seen any service was hurrying to the King's standard on the chance of a commission, and the majority of them would be only too glad to claim George Monk as their father-in-arms, and boast of their service in the colonel's company of the crack regiment in the Low Country Brigade.