Expulsion and Death
Mongomerie largely disappears from view after the collapse of his legal case, until he became involved, in late 1596 or early 1597, in a Catholic plot to seize the rocky outcrop of Ailsa Craig, in the lower Firth of Clyde, as support for a Spanish intervention in the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland. Led by Montgomerie’s friend and fellow-poet Hugh Barclay of Ladyland, this enterprise soon collapsed, Barclay being killed in the process, and on 14 July 1597 Montgomerie was declared an outlaw.
He may have planned to leave the country, perhaps to go to the Scottish Benedictine monastery in Würzburg, but he was still in Scotland at the time of his death in August 1598. His death proved as controversial as much of his life, for the authorities of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh refused to allow him to be buried in the churchyard on the grounds of his Catholicism, only an intervention by the king himself forcing them to change their minds. Montgomerie’s exact place of burial is unknown, but it must have been in the church or grounds of Holyrood Abbey, which was then used by the Canongate congregation.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Montgomerie
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