For George was in a desperate scrape. The bruised lawyer threatened merciless proceedings, and to cudgel an under-sheriff was an outrage of which the law was likely to take a very serious view. It was clear that the boy must be concealed till the storm blew over. There was only one way of doing it. The fleet was lying in Plymouth nearly ready to sail. Once there he would be safe. So George, to his intense delight we may be sure, was smuggled off and hurriedly engaged as a volunteer under his kinsman Sir Richard Grenville. Early in October the expedition sailed. The baffled attorney had to hang up his unserved writ on the office-files, and George Monk, by the force of the straitened circumstances of the family, found himself prematurely a soldier with the burden of an imperfect education to carry through life. It is unnecessary to follow closely the disastrous expedition to Cadiz in 1625. Ill-planned, ill-disciplined, ill-officered, and ill-supplied, it was doomed from the first to failure. For young George Monk it was a bitter awakening from the dreams a boy will have of the glories of a soldier's life. The ship in which he sailed and the company in which he served, bad as it was, can hardly have been so bad as the rest. Grenville was at least a soldier by profession and a good officer. Borough's regiment must at least have tasted discipline. The veteran general was one of the most distinguished and scholarly soldiers of his time; a man who had seen grow up under the Veres that immortal English brigade which by patient effort and undaunted perseverance had wrested from the Spaniards their till then unchallenged claim to be the finest infantry in the world. He had seen more service than any man in the army, and in all questions of military science his word was law. Thus George began his career under good masters, and two years later he was fortunate enough to bring himself again under their command. At the head of another expedition, as ill-found as the first, Buckingham early in June, 1627, effected a landing on the Isle of Rhé, and laid siege to St. Martin, the citadel of the island. Its capture proved a more difficult matter than he had expected. Already nearly a fortnight had been expended in fruitless attempts when Buckingham's anxieties were further increased by unwelcome news. A young gentleman was announced with an important verbal message from the lips of the King. It was George Monk, who at the risk of his life had made his way through France; though ignorant of the language he had penetrated the army which lay before Rochelle, and so reached Rhé with the intelligence that a large combined naval and military force was being prepared in France to relieve the island.