"If ye offer to plunder or take our cattle, Be you assured we'll give you battle," was the clubmen's motto. A good one enough. But in time they became hopelessly involved in political plots, of which they understood nothing, demanded to garrison the coast-towns, picked out and killed peaceable Posts, fired on messengers of peace sent by General Cromwell, who had much pity for them, and finally had to be fallen upon and beaten from the field. "I believe," the General wrote to Sir Thomas Fairfax, "not twelve of them were killed, but very many were cut, and three hundred taken--poor silly creatures, whom if you please to let me send home, they promise to be very dutiful for time to come, and will be hanged before they come out again." So men and leaders were taken, and the army dispersed, and came not out again; and the land all around had quiet. But, as Job Forster said, it was the Ten Commandments that fought best for us. The king's cabinet at Naseby, with all the false and traitorous letters found therein in his handwriting, did more to undermine his power than a hundred battles. For in it was shown how, while solemnly promising to make no treaties with Papists, and speaking words of peace at Uxbridge, he was negotiating for six thousand Papist soldiers from Ireland, and for more than ten thousand from across the seas; that he had only agreed to call the Parliament Parliament "in the treating with them, in the sense that it was not the same to call them so, and to acknowledge them so to be." He spoke, moreover, of the gentlemen who gathered around him loyally at Oxford, as "the mongrel Parliament." So that many of his old friends were sorely aggrieved, and many neutrals began to see that, call men by what titles you will, there can be no loyalty where there is no truth. In the North affairs went not so prosperously, though there, too, reckless ravaging wrought its own terrible cure in time. For six weeks Montrose with his Irish, and Highlanders, and some English adventurers, laid Argyleshire waste, killing every man who could bear arms, plundering and burning every cottage. It was not like the war in England, save where Prince Rupert and Lord Goring brought the savage customs of foreign warfare in on us. It was a war of clans, bent on extirpating each other like so many wild beasts, and of mountain-robbers set on carrying away as much spoil as they could from the Lowland cities, and on inflicting as much misery as they could by the way to inspire a profitable terror for the future. Perth was sacked by them, and Aberdeen, and Dundee. At Kilsyth, near Stirling, Montrose and his men killed ten times as many of a Covenanted army, against which they fought, as fell of the Cavaliers at Naseby. Six hundred lay slain at Naseby; at Kilsyth, six thousand. And the king, meanwhile, speaking of this robber chief as the great restorer of his kingdom and support of his throne, with never an entreaty to spare his countrymen and subjects.