Montrose reached Edinburgh on April 20th. On May 1st Hamilton anchored in the Firth of Forth with nineteen sail, five thousand men, and some munitions of war. He came too late. Leith had been fortified. Fife and the Lothians were in arms to a man. Among the crowds who thronged the shore to stare at the English fleet came the old Dowager Countess of Hamilton, riding on horseback, with pistols at her saddle, and vowing, in a spirit worthy of her ancestor, the grim old Reforming Earl of Glencairn, to shoot her son dead with her own hand should he dare to set a hostile foot on Scottish soil. A stouter heart than Hamilton's might well have shrunk from the prospect before him. His men were raw English peasants, without drill or discipline and careless of the cause for which they had been armed with weapons of whose use they were ignorant. Opposed to them was a people as well equipped and better officered, inflamed with the belief that their religion and liberties were at stake, and resolute to accept no compromise till both had been secured. Present action was plainly impossible; but useful time might be gained by diplomacy, which, if it could effect nothing else, might serve to remind the Covenanters that Hamilton, though circumstances had placed him at the head of an English army, was still at heart a Scotsman. He therefore landed his men on the little islands of Inchcolm and Inchkeith, where they could be taught at least how to handle their muskets, opened negotiations with the enemy, and commenced a lugubrious correspondence with the King. Meanwhile Aboyne had gone south to find Charles, and had met him at Newcastle. The spirited young fellow undertook to raise his father's vassals, if some help in men and money were forthcoming. Money there was none, but some of the men now lying idle in the Forth might be available. Aboyne was therefore sent back to Scotland with instructions to Hamilton to furnish him with what troops he could spare; but before he could reach the fleet the position of affairs had again changed. The Gordons had risen without waiting for their young chief, had scattered the Covenanting garrison in a skirmish popularly known as the Trot of Turriff (which marks the virtual beginning of the Civil War), and had re-occupied Aberdeen. Montrose had marched north again with a force of four thousand men. And Hamilton, on whom the eyes of all Royalists and Covenanters in Scotland were now anxiously turned, had sent two out of his three regiments south to swell the army Charles was now laboriously mustering at York!