The substance of this interview was at once reported by Montrose, first to the Queen at Oxford, and then to the King in his camp before Gloucester. Still they both hesitated, nor was it till Hamilton himself confessed his failure that their eyes were opened. A Convention of the Estates had been summoned to meet in Edinburgh at the very time of the conference on the banks of the Forth. It was soon made clear that Henderson had spoken no more than truth when he told Montrose that the King need hope for nothing from Scotland. Though the Convention had been summoned without royal warrant, Hamilton attended as the Royal Commissioner, and was urgent with all loyal subjects to be in their places to secure him that diplomatic triumph which he had promised his confiding master. With Montrose he had been especially urgent, but Montrose had refused to attend unless the Commissioner would promise, should fair words prove useless, to sanction an appeal to force. Hamilton would not give the promise. "I will protest," he said, "but I will not fight." He did not even protest. Argyll asked him scornfully if he had nothing to say on the King's behalf. Lanark answered for him that he would not wrong himself and them by protesting against the wisdom of a whole kingdom. Hamilton muttered some confused words to the same purpose, and the loyal peers, who had obeyed his summons, left the hall in disgust. All went forward as Henderson had predicted. Whatever reluctance might have been felt by the moderate Covenanters to declare open war against the King had been removed by the recent capture of Antrim in Ireland, with letters in his pocket from Nithsdale and Aboyne concerning a rising in Scotland to be backed by a force of Irish Catholics. There was no proof that this plan had been proposed to the King, still less that he had accepted it; but the mere whisper of the hated word _Papist_ was enough to set Presbyterian Scotland in a blaze. The elections for the new Convention resulted in a large majority in favour of a military alliance with England. At the same time Waller's defeat at Roundway Down removed the last scruple entertained at Westminster on employing a Scottish army against Englishmen. The Commissioners from London, among whom was the younger Vane, were authorised to demand a force of eleven thousand men. Terms were soon arranged, and Lanark, as Secretary of State, set the seal on his treachery by affixing the King's signature to a warrant authorising the levy of an army to be employed against the King's authority. Then, to draw the bond still closer between the English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians, a new Covenant was formed by Vane and Henderson for mutual adoption under the title of the Solemn League and Covenant, which, after ratification by the Estates, was accepted by both Houses at Westminster, and solemnly subscribed in Saint Margaret's Church on September 25th, 1643.