And now for Montrose the end had come, the end to all the high ambitions, the wild dreams, the long struggle. The time of delusion was for ever past; nothing was left but the bare and terrible reality. Still Leslie was a brave soldier, and his fallen enemy might at least have hoped to be spared in his hands from insult. He was spared from no insult that the savage exultation of his foes could desire. For six years they had fled before his face and trembled at his name; that long debt of terror and humiliation was now to be amply repaid. Leslie was the soldier of the Covenant, and the orders of the Covenant were strict to leave nothing undone that might add a sting to the bitterness of death. In a fever from his still undressed wounds, clad in the mean peasant's garb in which he had been taken, with a pad of straw for saddle and a bridle of rope, Montrose was set on the back of a ragged Highland pony, with his feet tied beneath its belly, and led as in a triumphal procession through all the chief towns of the North. Wherever he passed the people were incited by the ministers of the Kirk to rail and hoot at their once terrible enemy. At Inverness, where the gloomy pageant was increased by the prisoners from Invercarron, the women came out to curse him for the ruin he had wrought. At Keith he was compelled to listen to a long and violent sermon on the text, "And Samuel said, As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women." Yet there were some, even among the clergymen, whom this spectacle of fallen greatness moved to gentler feelings; and it should at least be remembered to Leslie's credit that those who were not ashamed or afraid to own their friendship for his prisoner were allowed free access to him. It is remarkable that at Dundee, which had suffered so much from his soldiers, he was received with general expressions of pity; and here Leslie was persuaded to allow him to exchange the filthy rags in which he had hitherto been paraded for clothes more becoming his quality.[25] But the compassion of friends and the triumph of foes, pain and pity and scorn, were endured with the same equanimity. "All the way," wrote an eye-witness of the sorry march, "the Marquis never altered his countenance; but, with a majesty and state becoming him, kept a countenance high." Even the sight of his two youngest children, who were brought to take leave of him at Kinnaird Castle, could not shake his composure.