There remains then only to consider what share, if any, his alleged resentment at the King's behaviour may have had in determining his action. That he joined the Covenant to revenge himself on the King no one who has studied his character will believe, any more than they will believe that he joined the King to revenge himself on the Covenant. But is there anything unreasonable in believing that his resentment at behaviour for which he was conscious of having given no cause, and so much the reverse of what he had every right and reason to expect, may have rendered an ambitious and impulsive young man more amenable to the plausible arguments and misrepresentations of artful and interested counsellors? If the story of Hamilton's intrigue be true--and it is hard to believe there can have been no truth in it--Montrose had been instructed that the King was ill disposed to Scotland, and the Scots had received what he could not but consider a convincing proof of it. With his own eyes he had seen what the King's disposition was to the religion he had been bred in. Everything that had happened since his return to Scotland had unfortunately tended to confirm the original impression of his own reception and Hamilton's explanation of it. A young man of Montrose's disposition would in such a frame of mind be easy game for such cunning hunters as Rothes and his crew. There was nothing in the letter of the Covenant he signed incompatible with the peculiar nature of Scottish loyalty, which had never been of that patient, unquestioning, one might almost say unreasoning, nature which has sometimes marked the English loyalist. To save the country meant to save the King in spite of himself, in spite of those evil counsellors who stood ever at his ear to poison him against his Scottish subjects. It was an enchanting prospect for an ardent, aspiring young man who had fired his imagination with the romantic pages of Plutarch. "As Philip's noble son," he had written, As Philip's noble son did still disdain All but the dear applause of merited fame, And nothing harboured in that lofty brain But how to conquer an eternal name; So great attempts, heroic ventures, shall Advance my fortune, or renown my fall. What greater or more heroic venture could there be than to preserve the religion, laws, and liberties of his country! Hamilton and the unconscious King between them had provided the hour; Rothes found the man.