This he showed no signs of doing, but merely desired a number of the leading covenanters to appear before him. Six only obeyed, at the risk, some thought, of imprisonment or death, but neither Rothes nor Montrose, who headed them, was given to think of peril to themselves. The old covenanter seems to have told Charles some plain truths, and the king in return forgot the courtesy which so distinguished him, and retorted that Rothes was a liar. No man was present when Montrose was summoned to confer with the king, and neither he nor Charles ever let fall a word upon the subject; but after that day his friends noted that he was no longer as bitter as before against his sovereign, nor so entirely convinced that the covenanters were right in their acts. Yet, whatever his feelings may have been, he strongly opposed the king's desire of filling the bishops' vacant places with inferior clergy at the meeting of Parliament, and, as might have been expected, the assembly was prorogued, leaving matters precisely as they were. * * * * * After this the Scotch took on themselves the management of their own affairs, and a Committee of Estates was formed, to which was entrusted absolute power both in state and army. Leslie was one of this committee; Montrose was another, and immediately he set about raising troops from his own lands, and carried out the plan of campaign that had been agreed on by attacking Airlie castle. On its surrender he garrisoned it with a few men, and went away; but shortly after Argyll arrived, turned out the garrison, and burned the castle, at the same time accusing Montrose of treason to the covenant in having spared it. But the Committee of Estates declared Montrose 'to have done his duty as a true soldier of the covenant,' and the accusation fell to the ground. Montrose, however, though entirely cleared of the charge, was not slow to read the signs of the times. He saw that the covenanters were no longer content with guarding their own liberties of church and state, but desired to set at naught the king's authority, perhaps even to depose him. So he and certain of his friends, Mar, Almond, and Erskine among them, formed a bond by which they swore to uphold the old covenant which they had signed in 1638, 'to the hazard of their lives, fortunes, and estates, against the particular perhaps indirect practising of a few.' This was the covenant to which Montrose held all his life, and for which he was hanged beside the city cross. * * * * *