well also come from this period. 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. Literary assessment Montgomerie's poetic output of over 100 pieces is mostly known from just one witness, the Ker manuscript, presented to Edinburgh University Library by the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden. It is possible that this was assembled from Montgomerie's papers soon after his death; it must, in any case, have been written soon afterwards. The range of his work is extensive, from elegant court songs including Lyk as the dum Solsequium and Melancholie, grit deput of Dispair to the bitter, sometimes contorted word-play of the sonnets associated with the dispute over his pension, from witty pieces addressed to the king to the profound religious sensibility of A godly prayer and the extraordinary Come, my childrene dere. Montgomerie is one of the finest of Middle Scots poets, and perhaps the greatest Scottish exponent of the sonnet form (although the twentieth-century poets Robert Garioch and Edwin Morgan were also fine sonnetteers). The Cherrie and the Slae, which he probably revised and completed shortly before his death, is an ambitious religious allegory, employing a demanding, lyrical stanza form which suggests that it was intended for singing, despite its considerable length. His poetry reaches back to the earlier makars, Henryson, Dunbar