The preachers next Sunday exclaimed against this movement of rebel nature, as they termed it; and reproached the people with their profane tenderness towards the capital enemy of piety and religion.
When he was carried before the parliament, which was then sitting, Loudon, the chancellor, in a violent declamation, reproached him with the breach of the national covenant, which he had subscribed; his rebellion against God, the king, and the kingdom; and the many horrible murders, treasons, and impieties for which he was now to be brought to condign punishment.

Montrose, in his answer, maintained the same superiority above his enemies, to which, by his fame and great actions, as well as by the consciousness of a good cause, he was justly entitled.
He told the parliament, that since the king, as he was informed, had so far avowed their authority as to enter into a treaty with them, he now appeared uncovered before their tribunal: a respect which, while they stood in open defiance to their sovereign, they would in vain have required of him: that he acknowledged, with infinite shame and remorse, the errors of his early conduct, when their plausible pretences had seduced him to tread with them the paths of rebellion, and bear arms against his prince and country: that his following services, he hoped, had sufficiently testified his repentance; and his death would now atone for that guilt, the only one with which he could justly reproach himself.

That in all his warlike enterprises he was warranted by that commission which he had received from his and their master, against whose lawful authority they had erected their standard: that to venture his life for his sovereign was the least part of his merit: he had even thrown down his arms in obedience to the sacred commands of the king; and had resigned to them the victory, which, in defiance of all their efforts, he was still enabled to dispute with them: that no blood had ever been shed by him but in the field of battle; and many persons were now in his eye, many now dared to pronounce sentence of death upon him, whose life, forfeited by the laws of war, he had formerly saved from the fury of the soldiers: that he was sorry to find no better testimony of their return to allegiance than the murder of so faithful a subject, in whose death the king's commission must be at once so highly injured and affronted: that as to himself, they had in vain endeavored to vilify and degrade him by all their studied indignities: the justice of his cause, he knew, would ennoble any fortune; nor had he other affliction than to see the authority of his prince, with which he was invested, treated with so much ignominy: and that he now joyfully followed, by a like unjust sentence, his late sovereign; and should be happy, if in his future destiny he could follow him to the same blissful mansions, where his piety and humane virtues had already, without doubt, secured him an eternal recompense.
Montrose's sentence was next pronounced against him: "That he James Graham," (for this was the only name they vouchsafed to give him,) "should next day be carried to Edinburgh Cross, and there be hanged on a gibbet, thirty feet high, for the space of three hours: then be taken down, his head, he cut off upon a scaffold, and affixed to the prison: his legs and arms be stuck up on the four chief towns of the kingdom: his body be buried in the place appropriated for common malefactors; except the church, upon his repentance, should take off his excommunication." The clergy, hoping that the terrors of immediate death had now given them an advantage over their enemy, flocked about him, and insulted over his fallen fortunes.

They pronounced his damnation, and assured him that the judgment which he was so soon to suffer, would prove but an easy prologue to that which he must undergo hereafter.

They next offered to pray with him; but he was too well acquainted with those forms of imprecation which they called prayers.