Meanwhile, in face of the catastrophe they had so long apprehended, the parliamentary agents were not idle. They promised the troops full discharge of arrears and every other inducement to enter their service, and with such success that Ormonde considered it necessary to take the precaution of demanding the signature of a "protestation" from the officers who were to go to England. To his intense disgust Monk was called upon to formally pledge himself to be true to the flag under which he was about to serve. That he had any serious objection to the royal cause is hardly probable. His friends, Lord Lisle and Algernon Sidney, were not in Dublin to influence him. Monk, with the rest of the officers, must have long lost faith in parliamentary promises of pay; and, moreover, through the Commons' antipathy to martial law, there had been trouble in Ireland of the same nature as that which led to his leaving the Dutch service. Then the prospect of coming to blows with the Scots, before whom he had been disgraced, had irresistible attractions for him. Morally there was nothing to prevent him entering the royal service. Although paid by the Parliament it was the King's commission he held. But to be asked to pledge himself to the politics of those for whom he fought was in his eyes a monstrous proposal, while to be called on to swear fidelity to the man whose commission he held was an insult. Rigid even to pedantry in his notions of military honour, he did not know what it was to swerve a hair's-breadth from the duty of his place. Through jealousy and disappointment, through every danger and temptation, he had been true to Ormonde, and now his reward was to be suspected of being able to forget what was due to himself as a soldier. It was more than he could tamely endure. Ormonde presented the protestation, and Monk flatly refused either to sign or swear, nor did he scruple to say plainly what he thought of it. Only one man had the spirit or honesty to follow his example, and that was Colonel Lawrence Crawford, the sturdy Scot whose bigotry would not now permit him to draw sword against the Covenant, and was ere long to bring down upon him the merciless resentment of Cromwell.