The King could no longer blind himself to the truth. Hamilton had failed, and it was now clear that his failure had been inevitable from the first. He came with his brother to Oxford to justify himself before his indignant master. But Montrose was there also, with many a loyal Scotsman, Crawford and Nithsdale, Ogilvy and Aboyne, who had been cajoled into attending the Convention, and in the face of their evidence no justification was possible. Whether he had been traitor or fool mattered little now; but even the long-suffering King was forced to own that, if an honest man, the favourite had at least shown his honesty after a strange and disastrous fashion. The brothers were arrested. Lanark made his escape to the Covenanters; but Hamilton was sent a prisoner under a strong guard to Pendennis Castle in Cornwall. Then, at last, the King turned for help to Montrose. Was the plan he had been urging for the last twelve months on unheeding ears still practicable? The Scots had crossed the Tweed; all the garrisons and passes of the Border were in their hands; any day might bring Leven and Newcastle face to face. Even Montrose could not but confess the venture to be a desperate one. But desperate ventures only raised that dauntless spirit. The plan that had seemed so easy a few short months since could not be impossible now, with all his friends round him, with his sovereign at his back, and no Hamilton in his path. If Newcastle could spare a few troopers he could make his way through the Lowlands to his own lands beyond the Tay. There, among his own people, with the royal commission in his hand, with Aboyne and Ogilvy for his lieutenants, he would rally the loyal North to the King's standard, and, sweeping down on the rear of the invading Scots, would soon send them back over their borders faster than they had come. Meanwhile Antrim, who was at large again, must effect a diversion from Ireland on the west, and beard the Dictator in his own country. The plan was thought sheer madness at Oxford, where little confidence was felt in Montrose, and none at all in Antrim, a vain and foolish man, notorious for nothing, in Clarendon's contemptuous phrase, but for his marriage with the great Duke of Buckingham's widow. But Digby, who dearly loved a hazard and could persuade the King to anything, favoured the scheme. Antrim was despatched to Ireland, and Montrose made ready for his more perilous journey to the Border. He knew his jealous countrymen too well to come before them in the character Charles wished him to assume, of Viceroy and Captain-General of the Royal Forces in Scotland. On his own advice these sounding titles were conferred on the King's nephew, Prince Maurice, as whose Lieutenant-General Montrose left Oxford for the North early in March, 1644. Crawford, Nithsdale, Reay, Ogilvy, and Aboyne rode with him, and a miscellaneous following of gentlemen-adventurers and their servants, some hundred in all.