French servants and English favourites. But though Montrose won no honour among his own countrymen, his pride might have been soothed by the admiration he excited elsewhere. He was the first person whom visitors to Paris desired to see. De Retz begged for the honour of an interview, praised him everywhere, and introduced him to Mazarin. The Cardinal at once offered him high employment and liberal pay, and promised more. But Montrose had no taste for the French service, nor belief in the Cardinal's promises. He thought that he might serve both his King and himself better at the Austrian Court. In the spring of 1648, after one more attempt to gain the Queen to his side, and finding her now pledged to the Presbyterian alliance, he left Paris and, travelling through Switzerland and the Tyrol, came to the Emperor at Prague. Ferdinand received him graciously, conferred on him the baton of a field-marshal, and lent a ready ear to his plans. Montrose was commissioned to levy regiments for his King in Flanders, and furnished with letters of recommendation to the Emperor's brother Leopold, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. His reception by the Archduke, whom he found at Tournay, was no less gracious; but the crushing defeat inflicted by Condé on the Imperial forces at Lens made any active aid from this quarter impossible, and Montrose went on to join his friends at Brussels. The Prince of Wales had now broken from the irksome bondage of his mother and Jermyn, and was settled at the Hague with Sir Edward Hyde for his Chancellor. There, too, were his brother the Duke of York, and his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia, the gifted and unfortunate Queen of Hearts, with her son Prince Rupert. With the latter Montrose at once opened a correspondence. Rupert answered cordially, but his new duties as Admiral of the Fleet left him, he said, no present leisure for an interview. At the Hague, as at Paris, Montrose had his enemies. One friend, indeed, supported him with all the ardour of a brave and generous woman. Between the nature of Elizabeth of Bohemia and the nature of Montrose there was much in common, and the warm sympathy that sprang up between these two noble spirits forms the one pleasant incident of this dark and miserable time.[22] But the rest, though more gracious than their countrymen in Paris, still held aloof. The complete and ignominious failure of Hamilton's Engagement had poured a fresh body of exiles into Holland, who persisted in assuring the Prince that only through Presbyterian Scotland could salvation come, and in warning him against the employment of a man so universally detested as Montrose. Charles was, on one side at least, the true son of his father. He was determined to keep friends with both parties, and to commit himself to neither. But for the present it was clearly not his interest to offend the Presbyterians, who had the advantage of numbers and were moreover on the spot. Hyde was therefore commissioned