 CHAPTER XXII. In 1582 Elizabeth was backing the exiled Presbyterian Earl of Angus and the Earl of Galerie, Rithvin, while Lennox was contemplating a coup d'etat in Edinburgh, August 27. Galerie, with the connivance of England, struck the first blow. He, Mar, and their accomplices captured James at Rithvin Castle, near Perth, August 23, the raid of Rithvin, with the approval of the General Assembly of the Kirk. It was a Douglas plot managed by Angus and Elizabeth. James Stewart of the Guard, now Earl of Arran, was made prisoner. Lennox fled the country. In October 1582, in a Parliament at Holy Road, the conspirators passed acts indemnifying themselves, and the General Assembly approved them. These acts were rescinded later, and James had learned for life his hatred of the Presbyterians, who had treacherously seized and insulted their king. In May 1583 Lennox died in Paris, leaving in air. On June 27 James made his escape, a free king, to the Castle of St. Andrews. He proclaimed an amnesty and feigned reconciliation with his captor, the Earl of Galerie. The chief of the house so hateful to marry, the Rithvins. At the same time James placed himself in friendly relations with his kinsfolk, the guises, the terror of Protestants. He had already been suspected, on account of Lennox, as inclined to Rome. In fact he was always a Protestant, but baited on every side. By England, by the Kirk, by a faction of his nobles, he intrigued for allies in every direction. The secret history of his intrigues has never been written. We find the persecuted and astute lad either in communication with Rome, or represented by shady adventurers as employing them to establish such communications. At one time, as has been recently discovered, a young man giving himself out as James's bastard brother, a son of Darnley, begotten in England, was professing to bear letters from James to the Pope. He was arrested on the Continent, and James could not be brought either to a vow or disclaim his kinsmen. A new Lennox, son of the last, was created Duke. A new Bothwell, Francis Stewart, nephew of Mary's Bothwell, began to rival his uncle in turbulence. Knowing that Anglo-Scottish plots to capture him, again, were being woven daily by Angus and others, James, in February 1584, wrote a friendly and compromising letter to the Pope. In April, Aaron, James Stewart, crushed a conspiracy by seizing Galerie at Dundee, and then routing a force with which Mar and Angus had entered Scotland. Galerie, confessing his guilt as a conspirator, was executed at Stirling, May 2, 1584, leaving, of course, his feud to his widow and son. The chief preachers fled. Andrew Melville was already in exile, with several others. In England, Melville, in February, had been charged with preaching seditious sermons, had brandished a Hebrew Bible at the Privy Council, had refused secular jurisdiction and appealed to a spiritual court, by which he was certain to be acquitted. Henceforward, when charged with uttering treasonable libals from the pulpit, the preachers were want to appeal, in the first instance, to a court of their own cloth, and on this point James in the long run triumphed over the Kirk. In a parliament of May 18, 1584, such decliniture of royal jurisdiction was, by the Black Axe made treason, Episcopacy was established, the heirs of Galerie were disinherited, Angus, Mar, and other rebels were forfeited. But such forfeitures never held long in Scotland. In August 1584 a new turn was given to James's policy by Aaron, who was a Protestant, if anything, in belief, and hoped to win over Elizabeth, the harbourer of all enemies of James. James's instrument was the beautiful young master of grey, in France a Catholic, a partisan of Mary, and it leagued with the guises. He was sent to persuade Elizabeth to banish James's exiled rebels, but like a Lethington on a smaller scale he set himself to obtain the restoration of these lords as against Aaron, while he gratified Elizabeth by betraying to her the secrets of Mary. This man was the adoring friend of the flower of chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney. As against Aaron the plot succeeded. Making Barrick, on English soil, their base, in November 1585 the exiles, lay and secular, backed by England, returned, captured James at Sterling, and drove Aaron to lurk about the country, till many years after Douglas a parkhead met and slew him, avenging Morton, and when opportunity offered Douglas was himself slain by an avenging steward of the cross of Edinburgh. The age reeked with such blood feuds, of which the preachers could not cure their fiery flocks. In December 1585 Parliament restored galleries forfeited family to their own, henceforth they were constantly conspiring against James, and the exiled preachers returned to their manses and pulpits. But bishops were not abolished, though the Kirk, through the Synod of Fife, excommunicated the Archbishop of St. Andrews, Adamson, who replied in kind. He was charged with witchcraft, and in the long run was dragged down and reduced to poverty, being accused of dealings with witches and hares. In July 1586 England and Scotland formed an alliance, and Elizabeth promised to make James an allowance of four thousand pounds a year. This it may be feared was the blood price of James's mother, from her son, and any hope of aid from her son, Mary was now cut off. Walsingham laid the snares into which she fell, deliberately providing for her means of communication with Babington and his company, and deciphering and copying the letters which passed through the channel which she had contrived. A trifle of forgery was also done by his agent, Phillips. Mary, knowing herself deserted by her son, was determined, as James knew, to disinherit him. For this reason and for the four thousand pounds he made no strong protest against her trial. One of his agents in London, the wretched accomplice in his father's murder, Archibald Douglas, was consenting to her execution. James himself thought that strict imprisonment was the best course, but the Presbyterian Angus declared that Mary could not be blamed if she had caused the Queen of England's throat to be cut for detaining her so unjustly imprisoned. The natural man within us entirely agrees with Angus. A mission was sent from Holy Road, including James's handsome new favourite, the Master of Grey, with his cousin, Logan of Relastrig, who sold the Master to Walsium. The envoys were to beg for Mary's life. The Master had previously betrayed her, but he was not wholly lost, and in London he did his best, contrary to what is commonly stated, to secure her life. He thus incurred the enmity of his former allies in the English Court, and as he had foreseen he was ruined in Scotland, his previous letters hostile to Mary, being betrayed by his aforesaid cousin, Logan of Russellrig. On February 8, 1567, ended the life-long tragedy of Mary Stewart. The woman whom Elizabeth vainly moved, Am Yess Pullet, to murder, was publicly decapitated at Fatheringay. James vowed that he would not accept from Elizabeth the price of his mother's blood, but despite the fury of his nobles, James sat still and took the money, at most some four thousand pounds annually, when he could get it. CHAPTER XXII. During the next fifteen years the reign of James, and his struggle for freedom from the Kirk, was perturbed by a long series of intrigues, of which the details are too obscure and too complex for presentation here. His chief minister was now John Maitland, a brother of Lethington, and as versatile, unscrupulous and intelligent as the rest of that house. Maitland had actually been present as Lethington's representative at the tragedy of the Kirkle Field. He was Protestant, and favoured the party of England. In the state the chief parties were the Presbyterian nobles, the majority of the gentry are lards, and the preachers on one side, and the great Catholic families of Huntley, Morton, the title being now held by a Maxwell, Errol, and Crawford on the other. Bothwell, a sister's son of Mary's Bothwell, flitted meteor-like, more Catholic than anything else, but always plotting to seize James's person, and in this he was backed by the widow of Gowrie and the preachers, and encouraged by Elizabeth. In her fear that James would join the Catholic nobles, whom the preachers eternally urged him to persecute, Elizabeth smiled on the Protestant plots, thereby of course fostering any inclination which James may have felt to seek Catholic aid at home and abroad. The plots of Mary were perpetually confused by intrigues of priestly emissaries, who interfered with the schemes of Spain and mixed in the interests of the guises. A fact which proved to be of the highest importance was the passing, in July 1587, of an act by which much of the ecclesiastical property of the ancient church was attached to the crown, to be employed in providing for the maintenance of the clergy. But James used much of it in making temporal lordships. For example, at the time of the mysterious Gowrie conspiracy, August 1600, we find that the Earl of Gowrie had obtained the church lands of the Abbey of Skone, which his brother, the master of Rithfen, desired. With the large revenues now at his disposal, James could buy the support of the baronage, who after the execution in 1584 of the Earl of Gowrie, the father of the Gowrie of the conspiracy of 1600, are not found leading and siding with the ministers in a resolute way. By 1600 young Gowrie was the only hope of the preachers, and probably James's ability to enrich the nobles helped to make them stand aloof. Meanwhile fears and hopes of the success of the Spanish armada held the minds of the Protestants and of the Catholic girls. In this world, Walter, as James said, no Scott moved for Spain except that Lord Maxwell, who had first received and then been deprived of the Earldom of Morton. James advanced against him in Dumfressshire and caused his flight. As for the armada, many ships drifted northward around Scotland, and one great vessel, blown up in Tibermory Bay by Lachlan McLean of Duart, still invites the attention of treasure-hunters. The Catholic Earl's Early in 1589 Elizabeth became mistress of some letters which proved that the Catholic girls, Huntley and Errol, were intriguing with Spain. The offence was lightly passed over, but when the Earl's, with Crawford and Montrose, drew to a head in the north, James, with much more than his usual spirit, headed the army which advanced against them. They fled from him near Aberdeen, surrendered, and were for a brief time imprisoned. As nobody knows how fortune's wheel may turn, and as James, hard-pressed by the preachers, could neglect no chance of support, he would never gratify the Kirk by crushing the Catholic girls. By temperament he was no persecutor. His calculated leniency caused him years of trouble. Meanwhile, James, after issuing a grotesque proclamation about the causes of his spirited resolve, sailed in October to woo a sea king's daughter from over the foam, the Princess Anne of Denmark. After happy months passed, he wrote, in drinking and driving oar, he returned with his bride in May 1590. The General Assembly then ordered prayers for the Puritans oppressed in England. Nonetheless, Elizabeth, the oppressor, continued to patronize the plots of the Puritans of Scotland. They now lent their approval to the foe of James's minister, England, namely the wild Francis Stuart, Earl of Bothwell, a sister's son of Mary's Bothwell. This young man had the engaging quality of gay and absolute recklessness. He was dear to ladies, and the wild young gentry of Lothian and the Borders. He broke prisons, released friends, dealt with wizards, aided by Lady Gowrie, stolen to Holy Road, his ruling ambition being to capture the king. The preachers prayed for sanctified plagues against James, and regarded Bothwell favorably as a sanctified plague. A strange conspiracy within the clan Campbell, in which Huntley and Maitland were implicated, now led to the murder, among others, of the Bonnie Earl of Murray by Huntley in partnership with Maitland, February 1592. James was accused of having instigated this crime from suspicion of Murray as a partner in the wild enterprises of Bothwell, and he was so hard-pressed by sermons that, early in the summer of 1592, he allowed the black acts to be abrogated, and the charter of the liberties of the Kirk to be passed. One of these liberties was to persecute Catholics in accordance with the penal acts of 1560. The Kirk was almost an imperium in imperio, but was still prohibited from appointing the time and place of its own general assemblies without royal assent. This weak point in their defences enabled James to vanquish him, but in June Bothwell attacked him in the Palace of Falkland and put him in considerable peril. The end of 1592 and the opening of 1593 were remarkable for the discovery of the Spanish blanks, papers addressed to Philip of Spain, signed by Huntley, the new Earl of Angus, and Errol, to be filled up with an oral message requesting military aid for Scottish Catholics. Such proceedings make our historians hold up obtesting hands against the perfidity of idolaters. But clearly, if Knox and the congregation were acting rightly when they besought the aid of England against Mary of Guise, then Errol and Huntley are not to blame for inviting Spain to free them from persecution. Some inkling of the scheme had reached James, and a paper in which he weighed the prose and cons as in existence. His suspected understanding with the Catholic girls, whom he merely did not wish to estrange hopelessly, was punished by a sanctified plague. On July 24, 1593, by aid of the late Earl Gowrie's daughter, Bothwell entered Holy Road, seized the King, extorted his own terms, went and amazed the Dean of Durham by his narrative of the adventure, and seemed to have the connivance of Elizabeth. But in September James found himself in a position to repudiate his forced engagement. Bothwell now allied himself with the Catholic girls, and as a Catholic had no longer the prayers of the preachers. James ordered levies to attack the Earls, while Argyle led his clan and the Macleans against Huntley, only to be defeated by the Gordon Horse at the Battle of Glenrhenis, October 3. Huntley and his allies, however, dared not encounter King James and Andrew Melville, who marched together against them, and they were obliged to flee to the Continent. Bothwell, with his retainer Coville, continued with Cecil's connivance to make desperate plots for seizing James. Indeed, Cecil was intriguing with them and other Desperados even after 1600. Throughout all the Tudor period, from Henry VII to 1601, England was engaged in a series of conspiracies against the persons of the princes of Scotland. The Catholics of the South of Scotland now lost Lord Maxwell, slain by a Lockerbie Lick, in a great clan battle with the Johnston's Dreyf Sands. In 1595 James' minister, John Maitland, brother of Lethington, died, and early in 1596 an organization called the Octavians was made to regulate the distracted finance of the country. On October 13, 1596, Walter Scott of Booklick made himself an everlasting name by the bloodless rescue of Kinmont Willie, an Armstrong Reaver from the Castle of Carlisle, where he was illegally held by Lord Scrope. The period is notable for the endless raids by the clans on both sides of the border, celebrated in battles. James had determined to recall the exiled Catholic girls, undeterred by the eloquence of the last of all our sincere assemblies, held with deep emotion in March 1596. The girls came home. In September at Falkland Palace Andrew Melville seized James by the sleeve, called him God's silly vassal, and warned him that Christ and his Kirk were the king's overlords. Even afterwards Mr. David Black of St. Andrew spoke against Elizabeth in a sermon which caused diplomatic remonstrances. Black would be tried in the first instance only by a spiritual court of his brethren. There was a long struggle. The ministers appointed a kind of standing committee of safety. James issued a proclamation dissolving it, and on December 17 inflammatory sermons led a deputation to try to visit James, who was with the Lords of Session and the Tollbooth. Whether an alarm of a Popish plot or not, the crowd became so fierce in menacing that the great Lachlan McLean of Doord rode to Stirling to bring up Argyle in the king's defense, with such forces as he could muster. The king retired to Linlethgau. The Reverend Mr. Bruce, a famous preacher credited with powers of prophecy, in vain appealed to the Duke of Hamilton to lead the godly. By threatening to withdraw the court and courts of justice from Edinburgh, James brought the citizens to their knees, and was able to take order with the preachers. CHAPTER XXIII James, in reducing the Kirk, relied as much on his cunning and king-craft as on his prerogative. He summoned the convention of preachers and of the estates to Perth at the end of February 1597, and thither he brought many ministers from the north, men unlike the zealots of Lothian and the Lowlands. He persuaded them to vote themselves a general assembly, and they admitted his right to propose modifications in church government, to forbid unusual convocations, as in Edinburgh during the autumn of 1596. They were not to preach against acts of parliament or of council, or point preachers in the great towns, without the royal assent, and were not to attack individuals from the pulpit. An attempt was to be made to convert the Catholic lords. A general assembly at Dundee in May ratified these decisions to the wrath of Andrew Melville, and the Catholic girls were more or less reconciled to the Kirk, which at this period had not one supporter among the nobility. James had made large grants of church lands among the noblesse, and they abstained from their wanted conspiracies for a while. The king occupied himself much in encouraging the persecution of witches, but even that did not endear him to the preachers. In the assembly of March 1598 certain ministers were allowed to sit and vote in parliament. In 1598 to 1599, a privately printed book by James, the Basilican Doran, came to the knowledge of the clergy. It revealed his opinions on the right of kings to rule the church, and on the tendency of the preachers to introduce a democracy with themselves as tribunes of the people, a very fair definition of their policy. It was to stop them that he gradually introduced a bastard kind of bishops, police to keep the pulpiteers in order. They were refusing, in the face of the king's license, to permit a company of English players to act in Edinburgh, for they took various powers into their hands. Meanwhile James's relations with England, where Elizabeth saw with dismay his victory over her allies, his clergy, were unfriendly. Plots were encouraged against him, but it is not probable that England was aware of the famous and mysterious conspiracy of the young Earl of Galerie, who was warmly welcomed by Elizabeth on his return from Padua, by way of Paris. He had been summoned by Bruce, James's chief clerical adversary, and the Kirk had high hopes of the son of the man of the Raid of Ruthven. He led the opposition to taxation for national defence in a convention of June to July 1600. On August 5, in his own house at Perth, where James, summoned thither by Galerie's younger brother, had dined with him, Galerie and his brother were slain by John Ramsey, a page to the king. This affair was mysterious. The preachers, and especially Bruce, refused to accept James's own account of the events, at first, and this was not surprising. Galerie was there one hope among the peers, and the story which James told is so strange that nothing could be stranger or less credible, except the various and manifestly mandatious versions of the Galerie party. James's version of the occurrences must be as much as possible condensed, and there is no room for the corroborating evidence of Lennox and others. As the king was leaving Falkland to hunt a buck early on August 5, the master of Ruthven, who had ridden over from his brother's house in Perth, accosted him. The master declared that he had, on the previous evening, arrested a man carrying a pot of gold, had said nothing to Galerie, had locked up the man and his gold in a room, and now wished James to come instantly and examine the fellow. The king's curiosity and cupidity were less powerful than his love of sport. He would first kill his buck. During the chase James told the story to Lennox, who corroborated. Ruthven sent a companion to inform his brother, nonetheless, when the king, with a considerable following, did appear at Galerie's house. No preparation for his reception had been made. The master was now in a quandary. He had no prisoner and no pot of gold. During dinner Galerie was very nervous. After it James and the master slipped upstairs together while Galerie took the gentleman into the garden to eat cherries. Ruthven finally led James into a turret off the long gallery. He locked the door and, pointing to a man in armor with a dagger, said that he had the king at his will. The man, however, fell a trembling. James made a speech and the master went to seek Galerie, locking the door behind him. At or about this moment, as was fully attested, Cranston, a retainer of Galerie, reported to him and the gentleman that the king had ridden away. They all rushed to the gate, where the porter, to whom Galerie gave the lie, swore that the king had not left the place. The gentleman going to the stables past under the turret window once appeared the king, red in the face, bellowing treason. The gentleman, with Lennox, rushed upstairs and through the gallery, but could not force open the door giving on the turret. But young Ramsay had run up a narrow stair in the tower, burst open the turret door, opening on the stair, found James struggling with the master, wounded the master, and pushed him downstairs. In the confusion, while the king's falcon flew wildly about the turret, till James set his foot on its chain, the man with the dagger vanished. The master was slain by two of James's attendants. The Earl, rushing, with four or five men of the turret stair, fell in fight by Ramsay's rapier. Lennox and his company now broke through the door between the gallery and the turret, and all was over except a riotous assemblage of the townsfolk. The man with the dagger had fled. He later came in and gave himself up. He was Gowrie's steward. His name was Henderson. It was he who rode with the master to Falkland and back to Perth to warn Gowrie of James's approach. He confessed that Gowrie had bidden him put on armour, on a false pretense, and the master had stationed him in the turret. The fact that Henderson had arrived from Falkland at Gowrie's house by half past ten was amply proved, yet Gowrie had made no preparations for the royal visit. If Henderson was not the man in the turret, his sudden and secret flight from Perth is unexplained. Moreover, Robert Oliphant, M.A., said in private talk, that the part of the man in the turret had, some time earlier, been offered to him by Gowrie. He refused and left the Earl's service. It is manifest that James could not have arranged this set of circumstances. The thing is impossible. Therefore the two Ruthfans plotted to get him into their hands early in the day, and when he arrived late, with a considerable train, they endeavored to send these gentlemen after the king, by a varying that he had written homewards. The dead Ruthfans, with their house, were forfeited. Among the preachers who refused publicly to accept James's account of the events in Gowrie's house on August 5th, Mr. Bruce was the most eminent and the most obstinate. He had, on the day after the famous ride of December 1596, written to Hamilton asking him to countenance as a chief nobleman, the godly barons and others who had convened themselves, at that time, in the cause of the Kirk. Bruce admitted that he knew Hamilton to be ambitious, but Hamilton's ambition did not induce him to appear as captain of a new congregation. The chief need of the minister's party was a leader among the great nobles. Now in 1593, the young Earl of Gowrie had leaked himself with the madcap Bothwell. In April 1594, Gowrie, Bothwell and Athel had addressed the Kirk, asking her to favour and direct their enterprise. Bothwell made an armed demonstration and failed. Gowrie then went abroad, to Padua and Rome, and apparently in 1600 Mr. Bruce sailed to France, for the calling, he says, of the master of Gowrie. He clearly means the Earl of Gowrie. The Earl came, wove his plot, and perished. Mr. Bruce, therefore, was adverse to accepting James's account of the affair at Gowrie House. After a long series of negotiations, Bruce was exiled north of Tay. End of Chapter 23 Part 1, read by Cibela Denton. For more free audio books or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Chapter 23 Part 2 of A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lange. Read for Librivox.org into the public domain. Chapter 23 The Gowrie Conspiracy Part 2 The Union of the Crowns In 1600 James imposed three bishops on the Kirk. Early in 1601 broke out Essex's rebellion of one day against Elizabeth, a futile attempt to imitate Scottish methods as exhibited in the many raids against James. Essex had been intriguing with the Scottish King, but to what extent James knew of and encouraged his enterprises unknown. He was on ill terms with Cecil, who in 1601 was dealing with several men that intended no good to James. Cecil is said to have received a sufficient warning as to how James, on ascending the English throne, would treat him, and he came to terms secretly with Marr and Kinloss, the King's envoys to Elizabeth. Their correspondence is extent, and proves that Cecil, at last, was running the Scottish course and making smooth the way for James's accession. The correspondence begins in June 1601. Very early on Thursday, March 24, 1603, Elizabeth went to her account, and James received the news from Sir Robert Kerry, who reached Holy Road on the Saturday night, March 26. James entered London on May 6, and England was free from the fear of many years concerning a war for the secession. The Catholics hoped for lenient usage. Disappointment led some desperate men to engage in the gunpowder plot. James was not more satisfactory to the Puritans. Encouraged by the fulsome adulation which grew up under the Tudor dynasty, and free from dread of personal danger, James henceforth governed Scotland with the pen, as he said, through the Privy Council. This method of ruling the ancient kingdom endured till the union of 1707, and was fraught with many dangers. The King was no longer in touch with his subjects. His best action was the establishment of a small force of mounted constabulary, which did more to put down the eternal homicides, robberies, and family feuds than all the sermons could achieve. The persons most notable in the Privy Council were Seton, later Lord Dumferlain, Hume, created Earl of Dunbar, and the King's advocate, Thomas Hamilton, later Earl of Haddington. Bishops with Spottiswode, the historian, Archbishop of Glasgow, sat in the Privy Council, and their progressive elevation, as hateful to the nobles as to the Kirk, was among the causes of the Civil War under Charles I. By craft and by illegal measures James continued to depress the Kirk. A general assembly, proclaimed by James for July 1604 in Aberdeen, was prorogued. Again, unconstitutionally, it was prorogued in July 1605. Nineteen ministers, disobeying a royal order, appeared and constituted the assembly. Joined by ten others, they kept open the right of way. James insisted that the council should prosecute them. They, by fixing a new date for an assembly without royal consent, and James, by letting years pass without an assembly, broke the charter of the Kirk of 1592. The preachers, when summoned to the trial, declined the jurisdiction. This was violently construed as treason, and a jury, threatened by the legal officers with secular, and by the preachers with future spiritual punishment, by a small majority condemned some of the ministers, January 1606. This roused the wrath of all classes. James wished for more prosecutions. The council in terror prevailed on him to desist. He continued to grant no assemblies till 1608, and would not allow caveats, limiting the powers of bishops to be enforced. He summoned, 1606, the two Melvilles, Andrew and his nephew James, to London, where Andrew bullied in his own violent style, and was quite illegally first imprisoned, and then banished to France. In December 1606 a convention of preachers was persuaded to allow the appointment of constant moderators to keep the presbyteries in order, and then James recognized the convention as a general assembly. Suspected ministers were confined to their parishes or locked up in Blackness Castle. In 1608 a general assembly was permitted the pleasure of excommunicating Huntley. In 1610 an assembly established episcopacy, and no excommunications not ratified by the bishop were allowed. The only comfort of the godly was the violent persecution of Catholics, who were nosed out by the constant moderators, excommunicated if they refused to conform, confiscated and banished. James could succeed in these measures, but his plan for uniting the two kingdoms into one, Great Britain, though supported by the wisdom and eloquence of Bacon, was frustrated by the jealousies of both peoples. Persons born after James's accession, the post-Nati, were, however, admitted to equal privileges in either kingdom, 1608. In 1610 James had two of his bishops, and Sputtiswood, consecrated by three English bishops, but he did not yet venture to interfere with the forms of Presbyterian public worship. In 1610 James established two courts of High Commission, in 1615 united in one court, to try offenses in morals and religion. The archbishops presided, laity and clergy formed the body of the court, and it was regarded as vexatious and tyrannical. The same terms, to be sure, would now be applied to the interference of preachers and presbyteries with private life and opinion. By 1612 the king had established episcopacy, which, for one reason or another, became equally hateful to the nobles, the gentry, and the populace. James's motives were motives of police. Long experience had taught him the inconveniences of Presbyterial government as it then existed in Scotland. To a church organized in the Presbyterian manner, as it has been practiced since 1689, James had originally, at least, no objection. But the combination of Presbyterian Hildebrandism, with factions of the turbulent noblesse, the alliance of the power of the keys with the sword and lance, was inconsistent with the freedom of the state and the individual. The absolutism of James, says Professor Hume Brown, was forced upon him in large degree by the excessive claims of the Presbyterian clergy. Meanwhile, the thievish border clans, especially the Armstrongs, were assailed by hangings and banishments, and Ulster was planted by Scottish settlers, willing or reluctant, attracted by promise of lands, or planted out, that they might not give trouble on the border. Persecution of Catholics was violent, and in spring 1615 Father Olgovy was hanged after very cruel treatment directed by Archbishop Spottiswood. In this year the two ecclesiastical courts of High Commission were fused into one, and an assembly was coerced into passing what James called Hodge-Poch Resolutions, about changes in public worship. James wanted greater changes, but deferred them till he visited Scotland in 1617, when he was attended by the luckless figure of Lod, who went to a funeral in a surplice. James had many personal bickering with preachers, but his five main points, the articles of Perth, of these the most detested, were, one, communicants must kneel, not sit, at the communion, four, Christmas Easter and Pentecost must be observed, and five, confirmation must be introduced, were accepted by an assembly in 1618. They could not be enforced, but were sanctioned by Parliament in 1621. The day was called Black Saturday, and omens were drawn by both parties from a thunderstorm which occurred at the time of the ratification of the articles of Perth by Parliament in Edinburgh, August 4, 1621. By enforcing these articles James passed the limit of his subjects endurance. In their opinion, as in Noxus, to kneel at the celebration of the Holy Communion was an act of idolatry, was ball worship, and no pressure could compel them to kneel. The three great festivals of the Christian Church, whether Roman, Geneva or Lutheran, had no certain warrant in Holy Scripture, but were rather repugnant to the word of God. The King did not live to see the bloodshed in misery caused by his reckless assault on the liberties and consciousness of his subjects. He died on March 27, 1625, just before the Easter season in which it was intended to enforce his decrees. The ungainliness of James's person, his lack of courage on certain occasions, he was by no means a constant coward, and the feebleness of his limbs might be attributed to prenatal influences. He was injured before he was born by the sufferings of his mother at the time of Riccio's murder. His deep dissimilation he learned in his bitter childhood and harassed youth. His ingenious mind was trained to pedantry. He did nothing worse and nothing more congenial to the cruel superstitions of his age than in his encouragement of witch-trials and witch-burnings promoted by the Scottish clergy down to the early part of the eighteenth century. His plantation of Ulster by Scottish settlers has greatly affected history down to our own times, while the most permanent result of the awards by which he stimulated the colonization of Nova Scotia has been the creation of hereditary knighthoods or baronesses. His encouragement of learning left its mark in the foundation of the town's College of Edinburgh on the side of Curcofield, the scene of his father's murder. The southwestern highlands, from Lacobar to Islay and Cantire, the scene of constant clan feuds and repressions resulting in the fall of the McDonald's and the rise of the Campbell Chief, Argyle, to the perilous power later wielded by the Marquise against Charles I. Many of the sons of the dispossessed McDonald's, driven into Ireland, were to constitute the nucleus of the army of Montrose. In the Orkneys and Shetlands the constant turbulence of Earl Patrick and his family ended in the annexation of the islands to the Crown, 1612, and the Earl's Execution, 1615. CHAPTER XXIV The reign of Charles I opened with every sign of the Tempest which were to follow. England and Scotland were both seething with religious fears and both parties in England, Puritans and Anglicans, could be satisfied with nothing less than complete domination. In England the extreme Puritans, with their yearning after the Geneva Presbyterian discipline, had been threatening civil war even under Elizabeth. James had treated them with a high hand and a proud heart. Under Charles, wedded to a Jezebel, a Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, the Puritan hatred of such prelates as Laud expressed itself in threats of murder, while heavy fines and cruel mutilations were inflicted by the party in power. The Protestant panic, the fear of a violent restoration of Catholicism in Scotland, never slumbered. In Scotland Catholics were at this time bitterly persecuted and believed that a Presbyterian general massacre of them all was being organized. By the people the Anglican bishops and the prayer-book were as much detested as priests and the mass. When Charles placed six prelates in his privy council and recognized the archbishop of St Andrews, Spottiswode, as first in precedence among his subjects, the nobles were angry and jealous. Charles would not do away with the infatuated articles of Perth. James, as he used to say, had governed Scotland by the pen through the privy council. Charles knew much less than James of the temper of the Scots, among whom he had never come since his infancy, and his privy council with six bishops was apt to be even more than commonly subservient. In Scotland as in England the expenses of national defense were a cause of anger, and the mismanagement of military affairs by the king's favorite, Buckingham, increased the irritation. It was brought to a head in Scotland by the act of revocation, under which all churchlands and crownlands bestowed since 1542 were to be restored to the crown. This act once more united in opposition the nobles and the preachers, since 1596 they had not been in harmony. In 1587, as we saw, James VI had annexed much of the old ecclesiastical property to the crown, but he had granted most of it to nobles and barons as temporal lordships. Now by Charles the temporal lords who held such lands were menaced. The judges, lords of Session, who would have defended their interests, were removed from the privy council, March 1626, and in August the temporal lords remonstrated with the king through deputations. In fact they took little harm, redeeming their holdings at the rate of ten years' purchase. The main result was that landowners were empowered to buy the tithes on their own lands from the multitude of titulars of tithes, 1629, who had rapaciously and oppressively extorted these tenths of the harvest every year. The ministers had a safe provision at last, secured on the tithes, in Scotland-styled tins, but this did not reconcile most of them to bishops and to the act of Perth. Several of the bishops were, in fact, Latitudinarian, or Arminian, in doctrine, wanderers from the severity of Knots and Calvin. With them began, perhaps, the moderateism which later invaded the Kirk, though their ideal slumbered during the Civil War, to awaken again with the teaching of Archbishop Layton under the restoration. Meanwhile, the nobles and gentry had been alarmed and mulked, and were ready to join hands with the Kirk in its day of resistance. In June 1633 Charles at last visited his ancient kingdom, accompanied by Lod. His subjects were alarmed and horrified by the sight of prelates in lawn-sleeves, candles in chapel, and even a tapestry showing the crucifixion. To this the bishops are said to have bowed, plain idolatry. In the Parliament of June 18 the eight representatives of each estate, who were practically all-powerful as lords of the Articles, were chosen not from each estate by its own members, but on a method instituted, or rather revived, by James VI and 1609. The nobles made the choice from the bishops, the bishops from the nobles, and the elected sixteen from Barons and Burgers. The twenty-four were all thus episcopally minded, they drew up the bills, and the bills were voted on without debate. The grant of supply made in these circumstances was liberal, and James's ecclesiastical legislation, including the sanction of the rags of Rome, worn by bishops, was ratified. Reminstances from the ministers of the old Kirk Party were disregarded, and, the thin edge of the wedge, the English liturgy was introduced in the Royal Chapel of Holy Road, and in that of St. Salvador's College, St. Andrews, where it has been read once on a funeral occasion in recent years. In 1634 to 1635, on the information of Archbishop Sputterswood, Lord Balmarino was tried for treason because he possessed a supplication or petition, which the lords of the minority, in the late parliament, had drawn up but not presented. He was found guilty but spared. The proceedings showed of what nature the bishops were, and alienated and alarmed the populace and the nobles and gentry. A remonstrance in manly spirit by Drummond of Hawthorndon, the poet was disregarded. In 1635 Charles authorized a book of cannons, heralding the imposition of a liturgy, which scarcely varied, and, when it varied, was thought to differ for the worse, from that of the Church of England. By these cannons, the most nakedly despotic of innovations, the preachers could not use their sword of excommunication without the ascent of the bishops. Since the sixth had ever regarded with horror and dread the license of conceived prayers, spoken by the minister, and believed to be extemporary or directly inspired. There is an old story that one minister prayed that James might break his leg. Certainly prayers for sanctified plagues on that prince were publicly offered, at the will of the minister. Even a very firm Presbyterian, the Lord of Brody, when he had once heard the Anglican service in London, confided to his journal that he had suffered much from the nonsense of conceived prayers. They were a dangerous weapon in Charles's opinion. He was determined to abolish them, rather that he might be free from the agitation of the pulpit than for reasons of ritual, and to proclaim his own headship of the Curric of King Christ. This in the opinion of the great majority of the preachers and populace was flat blasphemy, an assumption of the crown honors of Christ. The liturgy was an ill-mumbled mass. The mass was idolatry, and idolatry was a capital offense. However strange these convictions may appear, they were essential parts of the national belief. Yet with the most extreme folly, Charles, acting like Henry VIII as his own pope, thrust the cannons and this liturgy upon the Currican country. No sentimental arguments can palliate such open tyranny. The liturgy was to be used in St. Giles's Church, the town curc of Edinburgh, cleansed and restored by Charles himself, on July 23, 1637. The result was a furious brawl, begun by the women of all Presbyterians the fiercest, and it was said by men disguised as women. A gentleman was struck on the ear by a woman for the offence of saying amen, and the famous Jenny Gettis is traditionally reported to have thrown her stool at the dean's head. The service was interrupted, the bishop was the mark of stones, and the bishop's war, the civil war, began in this brawl. James VI, being on the spot, had thoroughly quieted Edinburgh after a more serious riot, on December 17, 1596. But Charles was far away, the city had not to fear the loss of the court and its custom, as on the earlier occasion, the removal of the council to Linlithgow in October 1637 was a trifle, and the council had to face a storm of petition from all classes of the community. Their prayer was that the liturgy should be withdrawn. From the country, multitudes of all classes flocked into Edinburgh and formed themselves into a committee of public safety, the four tables containing sixteen persons. CHAPTER XXIV The tables now demanded the removal of the bishops from the privy council, December 21, 1637. The question was, who were to govern the country, the council or the tables? The logic of the Presbyterians was not always consistent. The king must not force the liturgy on them, but later their quarrel with him was that he would not, at their desire, force the absence of the liturgy on England. If the king had the right to inflict Presbyterianism on England, he had the right to thrust the liturgy on Scotland. Of course he had neither one right nor the other. On February 19, 1638, Charles's proclamation, refusing the prayers of the supplication of December, was read at Stirling. Nobles and people replied with protestations to every royal proclamation. Foremost on the popular side was the young Earl of Montrose. You will not rest, said Roth, some more sober leader, till you be lifted up above the lave in three fathoms of rope. Roth's was a true prophet, but Montrose did not die for the cause that did his green, unknowing youth engage. The Presbyterians now desired yearly general assemblies, of which James VI had unlawfully robbed the Kirk. The enforcement of an old, brief-lived system of restrictions, caveats on the bishops, the abolition of the articles of Perth, and, as always, of the liturgy. If he granted all this, Charles might have had trouble with the preachers, as James VI had of old. Yet the demands were constitutional, and in Charles's position he would have done well to assent. He was obstinate in refusal. The Scots now fell upon the consideration of a band of union to be made legally, says Roth's, their leader, the chief of the House of Leslie, the family of Norman Leslie, the slayer of Cardinal Beaton. Now a band of this kind could not, by old Scott's law, be legally made. Such bands, like those for the murder of Riccio and Darnley, and for many other enterprises, were not smiled upon by the law. But in 1581, as we saw, James VI had signed a covenant against Popory. Its tenor was imitated in that of 1638, and there was added a general band for the maintenance of true religion, Presbyterianism, and of the king's person. That part of the band was scarcely kept when the Covenanting Army surrendered Charles to the English. They had vowed in their band to stand to the defense of our dread sovereign, the king's majesty, his person and authority. They kept this vow by hanging men who held the king's commission. The words as to defending the king's authority were followed by, in the defense and preservation of the aforesaid true religion. This appears to mean that only a Presbyterian king is to be defended. In any case, the preachers assumed the right to interpret the Covenant, which finally led to the conquest of Scotland by Cromwell. As the Covenant was made between God and the Covenanters on ancient Hebrew precedent, it was declared to be binding on all succeeding generations. Had Scotland resisted tyranny without this would be biblical, pedophogying Covenant, her condition would have been the more gracious. The signing of the band began at Edinburgh in Greyfriars Churchyard on February 28, 1638. This Covenant was a most potent instrument for the day, but the fruits thereof were blood and tears in desolation. For fifty-one years common sense did not come to her own again. In 1689 the Covenant was silently dropped when the carac was restored. This two-edged insatiable sword was drawn, great multitudes signed with enthusiasm, and they who would not sign were, of course, persecuted. As they said, it looked not like a thing approved of God, which was begun and carried on with fury and madness, and obtruded on people with threatenings, tearing of clothes and drawing of blood. Resistance to the king, if need were armed resistance was necessary, was laudable, but the terms of the Covenant were, in the highest degree, impolitic and unstatesmanlike. The country was handed over to the preachers, the Scots, as their great leader Argo was to discover, were distracted men in distracted times. Charles wavered and set down the Marquis of Hamilton to represent his waverings. The Marquis was as unsettled as his predecessor, Aaron, in the minority of Queen Mary. He dared not promulgate the proclamations. He dared not risk civil war. He knew that Charles, who, he said, was ready, was unprepared in his mutinous English kingdom. He granted at last a General Assembly and a Free Parliament, and produced another Covenant, the King's Covenant, which of course failed to thwart that of the country. The Assembly, at Glasgow, November 21, 1638, including noblemen and gentlemen as elders, was necessarily revolutionary, and needlessly riotous and profane. It arraigned and condemned the bishops in their absence. Hamilton, as royal commissioner, dissolved the Assembly, which continued to sit. The meeting was in the Cathedral, where, says a sincere Covenant to her Bailey, whose letters are a valuable source, our rascals without shame in great numbers made din and clamour. All the unconstitutional ecclesiastical legislation of the last forty years was rescinded, as all the new Presbyterian legislation was to be rescinded at the Restoration. Some bishops were excommunicated, the rest were deposed. The press was put under the censorship of the fanatical lawyer Johnston of Wareston, clerk of the Assembly. On December 20th the Assembly, which sat after Hamilton dissolved it, broke up. Among the Covenanters were to be reckoned the Earl of Argyle, later the only Marquis of his house, and the Earl, later Marquis of Montrose. They did not stand long together. The Scottish Revolution produced no man at once great and successful, but in Montrose it had one man of genius who gave his life for honour's sake, in Argyle, an astute man, not physically courageous, whose timidity in the field was equaled by his timidity in the council, says Mr. Gardner. In spring 1639 war began. Charles was to move in force on the border. The fleet was to watch the coasts. Hamilton, with some five thousand men, was to join hands with Huntley. Both men were wavering and incompetent. Antrim from North Ireland was to attack and contain Argyle. Ruth Vinn was to hold Edinburgh Castle. But Alexander Leslie took that castle for the Covenanters. They took Dumbarton, they fortified Leith, Argyle ravaged Huntley's lands, Montrose and Leslie occupied Aberdeen, and their party in circumstances supposed to be discreditable to Montrose carried Huntley to Edinburgh. The evidence is confused. Was Huntley unwilling to go? Charles, York, April 23, 1639, calls him feeble and false. Mr. Gardner says that, in this case, and in this alone, Montrose stooped to a mean action. Hamilton merely dwindled and did nothing. Montrose had entered Aberdeen, June 19, and then came news of negotiations between the King and the Covenanters. As Charles approached from the south, Alexander Leslie, a continental veteran, very many of the Covenanters' officers were Dugold Dalghettis from the foreign wars, occupied Dunslaw, with a numerous army and great difficulties as to supplies. A natural mind might despair, wrote Rariston, who was brought low before God indeed. Huntley was in a strait, but on the other side so was Charles, for a reconnaissance of Leslie's position was repulsed. The King lacked money and supplies, neither side was of a high fighting heart, and offers to negotiate came from the King informally. The Scots sent in a supplication, and on June 18 signed a treaty which was a mere futile truce. There were to be a new assembly and a new parliament in August and September. Charles should have fought. If he fell he would fall with honour, and if he survived defeat, all England behooved to have risen in revenge, says the Covenanting letter-writer, Bailey, later principal of Glasgow University. The Covenanters at this time could not have invaded England, could not have supported themselves if they did, and were far from being harmonious among themselves. The defeat of Charles at this moment would have aroused English pride and united the country. Charles set out from Barrick for London on July 29th, leaving many fresh causes of quarrel behind him. Charles supposed that he was merely giving way for the present, when he accepted the ratification by the new assembly of all the acts of that sixteen-thirty-eight. He never had a later chance to recover his ground. The new assembly made the Privy Council pass an act rendering the signature of the Covenant compulsory on men. The new freedom is worse than the old slavery, a lecaron remark. The parliament discussed the method of electing the Lords of the Articles, a method which, in fact, though of prime importance, had varied and continued to vary in practice. Argyle protested that the constitutional course was for each estate to elect its own members. Montrose was already suspected of being influenced by Charles. Charles refused to call Episcopacy unlawful, or to rescind the old acts establishing it. Trequere, as commissioner, dissolved the parliament. Later Charles refused to meet envoys sent from Scotland, who were actually trying, as their party also tried, to gain French mediations or assistance. Help from idolaters. CHAPTER XXIV PART III of a short history of Scotland by Andrew Lang. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. CHAPTER XXIV. In spring 1640 the Scots, by an instrument called the Blind Band, imposed taxation for military purposes, while Charles in England called the short parliament to provide supply. The parliament refused and was prorogued. Words used by Straford about the use of the army in Ireland to suppress Scotland were hoarded up against him. The Scots parliament, though the king had prorogued it, met in June, despite the opposition of Montrose. The parliament, when it ceased to meet, appointed a standing committee of some forty members of all ranks, including Montrose and his friends Lord Napier and Sterling of Keir. Argyle refused to be a member, but acted on a commission of fire and sword to root out of the country the Northern Recusants against the Covenant. It was now that Argyle burned Lord Ogilvy's Bonnie House of Arleigh in fourths. The cattle were driven into his own country. All this against, and perhaps in consequence of, the intercession of Ogilvy's friend and neighbour, Montrose. Meanwhile, the Scots were intriguing with discontented English peers, who could only give sympathy. Seville, however, forged a letter from six of them inviting a Scottish invasion. There was a movement for making Argyle practically dictator in the North. Montrose thwarted it, and in August, while Charles, with a reluctant and disorderly force, was marching on York Montrose at Cumbernauld, the House of the Earl of Wigtun made a secret band with the Earl's Marshal, Wigtun, Holm, Athel, Marr, Perth, Boyd, Galloway, and others, for their mutual defence against the scheme of dictatorship for Argyle. On August 20th Montrose, the foremost, thwarted Tweed, and led his regimen into England. On August 30th, almost unopposed, the Scots entered Newcastle, having routed a force which met them at Newburn on time. They again pressed their demands on the King, simultaneously twelve English peers petitioned for a parliament and the trial of the King's ministers. Charles gave way. At Ripon Scottish and English commissioners met, the Scots received brotherly assistance in money and supplies, a daily eight hundred and fifty pounds, and stayed where they were, while the long parliament met in November, and in April, 1641, condemned the Great Stratford. Lod soon shared his doom. On August 10th the demands of the Scots were granted, as a sympathetic historian writes, they had lived for a year at free quarters, and recrossed the border with the handsome sum of two hundred thousand pounds to their credit. During the absence of the army the Kirk exhibited symptoms not favourable to its own peace. Amateur theologians held private religious gatherings, which it was feared tended towards the heresy of the English independence and to the break-up of the whole Kirk, some of whose representatives forbade these conventicals, while the rigid sort asserted that the conventiclers were esteemed the godly of the land. An act of the General Assembly was passed against the meetings. We observe that here are the beginnings of strife between the most godly and the rather moderately pious. The secret of Montrose's Cumbernauld band had come to light after November 1640. Nothing worse at the moment befell then the burning of the band by the Committee of the Estates, to whom Argyle referred the matter. On May 21st 1641 the Committee was disturbed, for Montrose was collecting evidence as to the words and deeds of Argyle when he used his commission of fire and sword at the Bonnie House of Arleigh and in other places. Montrose had spoken of the matter to a preacher, he to another, and the news reached the Committee. Montrose had learned from a prisoner of Argyle, Stuart the Younger of Ladywell, that Argyle had held councils to discuss the deposition of the King. Ladywell produced to the Committee his written statement that Argyle had spoken before him of these consultations of lawyers and divines. He was placed in the castle, and was so worked on that he cleared Argyle and confessed that, advisedly by Montrose, he had reported Argyle's remarks to the King. Papers with hints and names in cipher were found in possession of the messenger. The whole affair is enigmatic. In any case, Ladywell was hanged for leasing making, spreading false reports, and offence not previously capital, and Montrose with his friends was imprisoned in the castle. Doubtless he had meant to accuse Argyle before Parliament of Treason. On July 27, 1641, being arraigned before Parliament, he said, My resolution is to carry with me fidelity and honour to the grave. He lay in prison when the King, vainly hoping for support against the English Parliament, visited Edinburgh, August 14th through November 17th, 1641. Charles was now servile to his Scottish Parliament, accepting an act by which it must consent to his nominations of Officers of State. Hamilton, with his brother, Lanark, had courted the Alliance and lived in the intimacy of Argyle. On October 12, Charles told the House a very strange story. On the previous day Hamilton had asked Leave to retire from court, in fear of his enemies. On the day of the King's speaking, Hamilton, Argyle, and Lanark had actually retired. On October 22, from their retreat, the brothers said that they had heard of a conspiracy by nobles and others in the King's favour to cut their throats. The evidence is very confused and contradictory. Hamilton and Argyle were said to have collected a force of five thousand men in the town, and on October 5th such a gathering was denounced in proclamation. Charles and Vane asked for a public inquiry into the affair before the whole House. He now raised some of his opponents a step in the peerage. Argyle became a Marquise, and Montrose was released from prison. On October 28, Charles announced the untoward news of an Irish rising in Massacre. He was, of course, accused of having caused it, and the Massacre was in turn the cause of, or pretext for, the shooting and hanging of Irish prisoners, men and women, in Scotland during the Civil War. On November 18 he left Scotland forever. The events in England of the spring in 1642, the attempted arrest of the five members, January 4, the retreat of the Queen to France, Charles's retirel to York, indicated a civil war, and the King set a piz standard at Nottingham on August 22. The coveners had received from Charles all that they asked. They had no quarrel with him, but they argued that if he were victorious in England he would use his strength and withdraw his concessions to Scotland. Sir Walter Scott leaves it to Causes to decide whether one contradicting party is justified in breaking a solemn treaty upon the suspicion that in future contingencies it might be infringed by the other. He suggests that to the needy nobles and do-gold doggetties of the Covenant the good pay in free quarters and handsome sums of England were an irresistible temptation, while the preachers thought they would be allowed to set up the golden candlestick of Presbytery in England. End of Montrose, Chapter 1 Of the two the preachers were the most grievously disappointed. A general assembly of July to August 1642 was, as usual, concerned with politics, for politics and religion were inextricably intermixed. The assembly appointed a standing commission to represent it, and the powers of the commission were of so high a strain that to some it is terrible already, says the covenanting letter-writer Bailey. A letter from the Kirk was carried to the English Parliament which acquiesced in the abolition of Episcopacy. In November 1642 the English Parliament, unsuccessful in war, appealed to Scotland for armed aid. In December Charles took the same course. The commission of the general assembly and the body of commissioners called conservators of the peace overpowered the Privy Council, put down a petition of Montrose's party who declared that they were bound by the Covenant to defend the king, and would obviously arm on the side of the English Parliament if England would adopt Presbyterian government. They held a convention of the estates, June 22nd, 1643. They discovered a popish plot for an attack on Argyle's country by the McDonald's in Ireland, once driven from Kentire by the Campbell's, and now to be led by Young Kolkidoe. While thus excited they received in the general assembly, August 7th, a deputation from the English Parliament, and now was framed a new band between the English Parliament and Scotland. It was an alliance, the solemn league in Covenant, by which Episcopacy was to be abolished and religion established according to the word of God. To the Covenanters this phrase meant that England would establish Presbyterianism, but they were disappointed. The ideas of the independence, such as Cromwell, were almost as much opposed to Presbyterianism as to Episcopacy, and though the Covenanters took the pay and fought the battles of the Parliament against their king, they never received what they had meant to stipulate for, the establishment of Presbyterian England. Far from that, Cromwell, like James VI, was to deprive them of their ecclesiastical Palladium, the general assembly. End of Chapter 24 Part 3. For seeing nothing, the Scots were delighted when the English accepted the new band. Their army, under Alexander Leslie, Earl of Levin, now too old for his post, crossed Tweed in January 1644. They might never have crossed had Charles, in the autumn of 1643, listened to Montrose, and allowed him to attack the Covenanters in Scotland. In December 1643, Hamilton and Lanark, who had opposed Montrose's views and confirmed the king in his waverings, came to him at Oxford. Montrose refused to serve with them, rather he would go abroad, and Hamilton was imprisoned on charges of treason. In fact, he had been double-minded, inconsistent, and incompetent. Montrose's scheme implied clan warfare, the use of exiled McDonald's, who were Catholics against the Campbell's. The obvious objections were very strong, but needs must when the devil drives. The Hanoverian kings employed foreign soldiers against their subjects in 1715 and 1745, but the McDonald's were subjects of King Charles. Hamilton's brother, Lanark, escaped, and now frankly joined the Covenanters. Montrose was promoted to a Marcusit, and received the Royal Commission as Lieutenant General, February 1644, which alienated Old Huntley, chief of the Gordons, who now and again divided and paralysed that gallant clan. Montrose rode north, where in February 1644, Old Leslie, with twenty regiments of foot, three thousand horse, and many guns, was besieging Newcastle. With him was the prototype of Scott's Dugal Dalghetti, Sir James Turner, who records examples of Leslie's senile incompetency. Leslie at least forced the Marquis of Newcastle to a retreat, and a movement of Montrose on Dumfries was paralysed by the cowardice or imbecility of the Scottish magnets on the western border. He returned, took Morpeth, was summoned by Prince Rupert, and reached him the day after the disaster of Marston Moor, July 2, 1644, from which Buckleck's Covenanting Regiment ran without stroke of sword, while Alexander Leslie also fled, carrying news of his own defeat. It appears that the Scottish horse under David Leslie were at Marston Moor, as always, the pick of their army. Rupert took over Montrose's men, and the great Marquis, disguised as a groom, rode hard to the house of a kinsman near Tay, between Perth and Dunkeld. Alone and comfortless in a little wood, Montrose met a man who was carrying the fiery cross, and summoning the country to resist the Irish scots of Alastair Macdonald, Colchito, who had landed with a force of fifteen hundred musketeers in Argyle, and was believed to be descending on Athol, pursued by Seaforth in Argyle, and phased by the men of Badenok. The two armies were confronting each other when Montrose, in plaid and kilt, approached Colchito and showed him his commission. Instantly the two opposed forces combined into one, and with twenty-five hundred men, some armed with bows and arrows, and others having only one charge for each musket, Montrose began his year of victories. The temptation to describe in detail his extraordinary series of successes and of unexampled marches over snow-clad and pathless mountains must be resisted. The mobility and daring of Montrose's irregular and capricious levies, with his own versatile military genius and the heroic valor of Colchito, enabled him to defeat a large covenanting force at Tippermure, near Perth, where he had but his twenty-five hundred men, September 1st, to repeat his victory at Aberdeen, September 13th, to evade and discourage Argyle, who returned to Inverary, to winter in and ravage Argyle's country, and to turn on his tracks from a northern retreat and destroy the camels at Inverlochie, where Argyle looked on from his galley, February 2, 1645. O'Bailey, a trained soldier, took the command of the covenanting levies and regular troops, redcoats, and nearly surprised Montrose in Dundee. By a retreat showing even more genius than his victories he escaped, appeared on the northeast coast, and scattered a covenanting force under hurry at Aldern, near Inverness, May 9th, 1645. Such victories as Montrose's were more than counterbalanced by Cromwell's defeat of Rupert and Charles at Naysby, June 14, 1645, while Presbyteries suffered a blow from Cromwell's demand that the English Parliament should grant freedom of conscience, not for Anglican or Catholic, of course, but for religious non-Presbyterians. The bloody sectaries, as the Presbyterians called Cromwell's independence, were now masters of the field, never would the blue banner of the covenant be set up south of Tweed. Meanwhile General Bailey marched against Montrose, who outmaneuvered him all over the eastern highlands, and finally gave him battle at Alford on the Don. Montrose had not hear Kalkiddo in the western clans, but his Gordon horse, his Irish, the Farcarsans, and the Badanock men were triumphantly successful. Unfortunately Lord Gordon was slain. He alone could bring out and lead the clan of Huntley. Only by joining hands with Charles could Montrose do anything decisive. The King, hoping for no more than a death in the field with honour and a good conscience, pushed as far north as Doncaster, where he was between Pointe's army and a great cavalry force, led by David Leslie from Hereford, to launch against Montrose. The heroes snatched a final victory. He had but a hundred horse, but he had Kalkiddo and the flower of the fighting clans, including the invincible MacLean's. Bailey, in command of new levies of some ten thousand men, was thwarted by a committee of Argyle and other noble amateurs. He met the enemy south of Forth, at Kilsith, between Sterling and Glasgow. The fiery Argyle made Bailey desert an admirable position. Montrose was on the plain, Bailey was on the heights, and exposed his flank by a march across Montrose's front. The MacLean's and MacDonald's, on the lower slope of the hill, without orders, saw their chance, and racing up a difficult glen, plunged into the covenanting flank. Meanwhile, the more advanced part of the covenanting force were driving back some Gordon's from a hill on Montrose's left, who were rescued by a desperate charge of a boyn's handful of horse among the redcoats. Arleigh charged with the Ogilvie's. The advanced force of the covenant was routed, and the MacLean's and MacDonald's completed the work they had begun, August 15. Few of the unmounted covenanters escaped from Kilsith, and Argyle, taking boat in the Forth, hurried to Newcastle, where David Leslie, coming north, obtained infantry regiments to back his four thousand cavalry. In a year Montrose, with forces so irregular and so apt to go home after every battle, had actually cleared militant covenanters out of Scotland. But the end had come. He would not permit the sack of Glasgow. Three thousand clansmen left him. Colchito went away to Harry Kintire. A boyn and the Gordon's rode home on some private peak, and Montrose relied on men whom he had already proved to be broken reeds, the Holmes and Curse, Roxborough, of the border, and the futile and timid Trocquere. When he came among them they first took him and fled. On September 10 at Kelso, Sir Robert Spottiswood recognized the desertion and the danger. Meanwhile Leslie, with an overpowering force of seasoned soldiers, horse and foot, marched with Argyle, not to Edinburgh, but down Gala to Tweed, while Montrose had withdrawn from Kelso up Ettrick to Philippa, on the left of Ettrick, within a mile of Selkirk. He had but five hundred Irish, who entrenched themselves, and an uncertain number of mounted border guards with their servants and tenants. Charterish of Hemsfield, who had been scouting, reported that Leslie was but two or three miles distant, at Sunderland Hall, where Tweed and Ettrick meet, but the news was not carried to Montrose who lay at Selkirk. At breakfast on September 13, Montrose learned that Leslie was attacking. What followed is uncertain in its details. A so-called contemporary ballad is incredibly impossible in its anachronisms, and is modern. In this egregious dog-roll we are told that a veteran who had fought at Solway Moss a century earlier, and at Cursed Dunbar a few years later, or under Edward I, advised Leslie to make a turning movement behind Lingley Hill. This is not evidence. Though Leslie may have made such a movement, he describes his victory as very easy, and so it should have been, as Montrose had only the remnant of his entrem men and a rabble of reluctant border recruits. A newsletter from Haddington of September 16th represents the Cavaliers as making a good fight. The mounted border lards galloped away. Most of the Irish fell fighting, the rest were massacred, whether after the promise of quarter or not is disputed. Their captured women were hanged in cold blood some months later. Montrose, the Napiers, and some forty horse either cut their way through or evaded Leslie's overpowering cavalry and galloped across the hills of Biero to the Tweed. He had lost only the remnant of his Scoto-Irish, but the Gordons, when Montrose was presently menacing Glasgow, were held back by Huntley, and Colchito pursued his private adventures. Montrose had been deserted by the clans and lured to ruin by the perfidious promises of the border lords and lards. The aim of his strategy had been to relieve the royalists of England by a diversion that would deprive the parliamentarians of their paid Scottish allies, and what man might do Montrose had done. After his first victory Montrose, an excommunicated man, fought under an offer of fifteen hundred pounds for his murder, and the Covenanters welcomed the assassin of his friend, Lord Kilpont. The result of Montrose's victories was hostility between the Covenanting Army in England and the English, who regarded them as expensive and inefficient. Indeed they seldom, say for the command of David Leslie, displayed military qualities, and later were invariably defeated when they encountered the English under Cromwell and Lambert. Montrose never slew a prisoner, but the Convention at St. Andrews in November, 1645, sentenced to death their Cavalier prisoners. Lord Ogilvy escaped disguised in his sister's dress, and they ordered the hanging of captives and of the women who had accompanied the Irish. It was certain of the clergy who pressed for the extremist measures. They had revived the barbarous belief, retained in the law of ancient Greece, that the land had been polluted by and must be cleansed by blood under penalty of divine wrath. As even the Covenanting Bailey wrote, to this day no man in England has been executed for bearing arms against the Parliament. The preachers argued that to keep the promises of quarter which had been given to the prisoners was to violate the oath of the Covenant. The prime object of the English opponents of the King was now to hustle the Scots out of England. Meanwhile Charles, not captured but hopeless, was negotiating with all the parties, and ready to yield on every point except that of forcing Presbytery on England, a matter of which, said Montreux, the French ambassador, did not concern them but their neighbors. Charles finally trusted the Scots with his person, and the question is, had he or had he not assurance that he would be well received? If he had any assurance it was merely verbal. A shadow of a security, wrote Montreux. Charles was valuable to the Scots only as a pledge for the payment of their arrears of wages. There was much chicanery and shuffling on both sides, and probably there were misconceptions on both sides. A letter of Montreux, April 26, 1646, convinced Charles that he might trust the Scots. They verbally promised safety, honour, and conscience, but refused to sign a copy of their words. Charles trusted them, wrote out of Oxford, joined them at Southwell, and says Sir James Turner, who was present, was commanded by Lothian to sign the Covenant and barbarously used. They took Charles to Newcastle, denying their assurance to him. With unblushed falsehood, says Mr. Gardner, they in other respects lied to the English Parliament. On May 19, Charles Badd Montreux left the country, which he succeeded in doing, despite the treacherous endeavours of his enemies to detain him till his day of safety, August 31, was passed. The Scots of the army were in a quandary. The preachers, their masters, would not permit them to bring to Scotland an uncovenanted king. They could not stay penniless in England. For two hundred thousand pounds down in a promise never kept of a similar sum later, they left Charles in English hands, with some assurances for his safety, and early in February 1647 crossed Tweed with their thirty-six cartloads of money. The act was hateful to very many Scots, but the estates, under the command of the preachers, had refused to let the king, while uncovenanted, cross into his native kingdom, and to bring him meant war with England. But that must ensue in any case. The hope of making England Presbyterian, as under the solemn league in Covenant, had already perished. Leslie, with the part of the army still kept up, chased Colchito, and at Duniverty, under the influence of Nouveau, a preacher, put three hundred Irish prisoners to the sword. The parties in Scotland were now, one, the Kirk, Argyll, the two Leslie's, and most of the commons, two, Hamilton, Lanark, and Lauderdale, who had no longer anything to fear as regards their estates, from Charles or from bishops, and who were ashamed of his surrender to the English, three, royalists in general. With Charles, December 27, 1647, in his prison at Caerysbrook, Lauderdale, Loudon, and Lanark made a secret treaty, the engagement, which they buried in the garden, for if it were discovered the independence of the army would have attacked Scotland. An assembly of the Scots estates on March 3, 1648, had a large majority of nobles, gentry, and many burgesses in favour of aiding the captive king. On the other side, Argyll was backed by the omnipotent commission of the General Assembly, and by the full force of prayers and sermons. The letter-writer Bailey now deemed that it were for the good of the world that churchmen did meddle with ecclesiastical affairs only. The Engagers insisted on establishing Presbyterian England, which neither satisfied the Kirk nor the Cavaliers in independence. Nothing more futile could have been devised. The estates, in May, began to raise an army. The Preachers denounced them. There was a battle between armed communicans of the Preachers Party and the soldiers of the State at Moccheline. Invading England on July 8, Hamilton had Lambert and Cromwell to face him, and left Argyll, the Preachers, and their slashing communicans in his rear. Lanark had vainly urged that the West Country fanatics should be crushed before the border was crossed. By a march worthy of mantros across the Fells into Lanarkshire, Cromwell reached Preston, cut in between the northern parts of Hamilton's army, defeated the English Royalists and Langdale, and cut to pieces or captured the Scots, disunited, as their generals were, at Wigan and Warrington, August 17th through 19th. Hamilton was taken and was decapitated later. The force that recrossed the border consisted of such mounted men as escaped, with the detachment of Monroe which had not joined Hamilton. The godly in Scotland rejoiced at the defeat of their army. The levees of the western shires of Aire, Renfrew, and Lanark occupied Edinburgh, Argyll and the Kirk Party were masters, and when Cromwell arrived in Edinburgh early in October he was entertained at dinner by Argyll. The left wing of the Covenant was now allied with the independence, the deadly foes of Presbytery. To the ordinary mind this looks like a new breach of the Covenant, that impossible treaty with omnipotence. Charles had written that the divisions of parties were probably God's way to punish them for their many rebellions and profidities. The punishment was now beginning in earnest, and the alliance of extreme Covenanters with bloody sectaries could not be maintained. Yet historians admired the statesmanship of Argyll. If the edge which the sword of the Covenant turned against the English enemies of Presbytery were blunted, the edge that smote Covenanters less extreme than Argyll and the Preachers was wedded afresh. In the estates of January 5, 1649, Argyll, whose party had a large majority, and the fanatical Johnston of Warestone, who made private Covenants with Jehovah, demanded disengaging acts against all who had in any degree been tainted by the engagement for the rescue of the king. The Engagers were divided into four classes, who were rendered incapable of the act of classes of holding any office, civil or military. This act deprived the country of the services of thousands of men, just at the moment when the English army, the independence, Argyll's allies, were holding the trial of Charles I, and in defense of Timon remonstrances from the Scottish commissioners in England, cut off that cumbly head, January 30th, 1649, which meant war with Scotland. This was certain, for on February 5, on the news of the deed done at Whitehall, the estates proclaimed Charles II as Scottish King, if he took the Covenant. By an ingenuous intrigue, Argyll allowed Lauderdale and Lannark, whom the estates had intended to arrest, to escape to Holland, where Charles was residing, and their business was to bring that uncovenanted Prince to sign the Covenant, and to overcome the influence of Montrose, who with Clarendon, of course, resisted such a trebly dishonourable act of perjured hypocrisy. During the whole struggle, since Montrose took the King's side, he had been thwarted by the Hamilton's. They invariably wavered. Now they were for a futile policy of dishonour, in which they involved their young King, Argyll, and Scotland. Montrose stood for honour and no covenant. Argyll, the Hamilton's, Lauderdale, and the majority of the preachers stood for the Covenant, with dishonour and perjury. The left wing of the preachers stood for the Covenant, but not for its dishonourable and foresworn acceptance by Charles. As a Covenanter, Charles II would be the official foe of the English Independence and Army. Scotland would need every sword in the kingdom, and the kingdom's best general, Montrose. Yet the act of classes, under the distinction of the preachers, rejected every man tainted with participation in or approval of the engagement, or of neglecting family prayers. CHAPTER XXIV Charles, in fact, began, February 22, by appointing Montrose his Lieutenant Governor and Captain General in Scotland, though Lauderdale and Lenarch abate not an acre of their damned Covenant in all their discourses, wrote Hyde. The dispute between Montrose, on the side of honour, and that of Lenarch, Lauderdale, and other Scottish envoys, ended, as given the character of Charles II and his destitution, it must end. Charles, January 22, 1650, dispatched Montrose to fight for him in Scotland, and sent him the garter. Montrose knew his doom. He replied, With the more alacrity shall I abandon still my life to search my death for the interests of your Majesty's honour and service. He searched his death, and soon he found it. On May 1, Charles, by the Treaty of Breda, vowed to sign the Covenant. A week earlier, Montrose, not joined by the Mackenzie's, had been defeated by Strachan at Carbizdale, on the south of the Kile, opposite Invershin, in Sutherlandshire. He was presently captured, and crowned a glorious life of honour by a more glorious death on the Jibbit, May 21. He had kept his promise. He had searched his death. He had loyally defended, like Jean Dark, a disloyal king. He had carried fidelity and honour with him to the grave. His body was mutilated. His limbs were exposed. They lie now in St. Giles's Church, Edinburgh, where is his beautiful monument. Montrose's last words to Charles, March 26, from Kirkwall, implored that Prince to be just to himself, not to perjure himself by signing the Covenant. The voice of honour is not always that of worldly wisdom, but events proved that Charles and Scotland could have lost nothing and must have gained much, had the king listened to Montrose. He submitted, we saw, to commissioners sent to him from Scotland. Says one of these gentlemen, he sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him. Our sin was more than his. While his subjects in Scotland were executing his loyal servants taken prisoners in Montrose's last defeat, Charles crossed the sea, signing the Covenants on board ship, and landed at the mouth of Spey. What he gained by his dishonour was the guilt of perjury, and the consequent distrust of the wilder but more honest Covenanters, who knew that he had perjured himself, and deemed his reception a cause of divine wrath and disastrous judgements. Next he was separated from most of his false friends, who had urged him to his guilt, and from all royalists, and he was not allowed to be with his army, which the preachers kept purging of all who did not come up to their standard of sanctity. Their hopeful scheme was to propitiate the deity in avert wrath by purging out officers of experience, while filling up their places with godly but incompetent novices in war, ministers' sons, clerks, and such other sanctified creatures. This final and fatal absurdity was the result of playing at being the Israel described in the early, historic books of the Old Testament, a policy initiated by Knox in spite of the humorous protests of Lettington. For the sure purging of that Atkin, Charles, and to conciliate the party who deemed him the greatest cause of wrath of all, the King had to sign a false and disgraceful declaration that he was afflicted in spirit before God because of the impieties of his father and mother. He was helpless in the hands of Argyle, David Leslie, and the rest. He knew that they would desert him if he did not sign, and he yielded, August 16. While Cromwell, with Lambert, Monk, sixteen thousand foot and horse, and a victualing fleet, had reached Musselborough, near Edinburgh, by July 28. David Leslie very artfully evaded every attempt to force a fight, but hung about him in all his movements. Cromwell was obliged to retreat for lack of supplies in a devastated country, and on September 1 reached Dunbar by the coast road. Leslie, marching parallel along the hill-riges, occupied Dunnoon, and secured a long, deep and steep ravine, the Peaths, near Cotburnspath, barring Cromwell's line of march. On September 2 the controlling clerical committee was still busily purging and depleting the Scottish army. The night of September 2 to 3 was very wet, the officers deserting their regiments to take shelter. Says Leslie himself, we might as easily have beaten them as we did James Graham at Philippa, if the officers had stayed by their own troops and regiments. Several witnesses and Cromwell himself asserted that, owing to the insistence of the preachers, Leslie moved his men to the lower slopes on the afternoon of September 2. The Lord hath delivered them into our hands, Cromwell is reported to have said. They now occupied a position where the banks of the lower Broxburn were flat and assailable, not steep in forming a strong natural moat as on the higher level. All night Cromwell rode along and among his regimen of horse, riding his lip till the blood ran down his chin. Leslie thought to surprise Cromwell. Cromwell surprised Leslie, crossing the Broxburn on the low level before dawn, and drove into the Scots who were all unready, the matches of their muskets being wet and unlighted. The centre made a good stand, but a flank charge by English cavalry cut up the Scots foot, and Leslie fled with the nobles, gentry and mounted men. In killed, wounded, and prisoners the Scots are said to have lost fourteen thousand men, a manifest exaggeration. It was an utter defeat. Surely, wrote Cromwell, it is probable the Kirk has done her due. The Kirk thought not, purging must go on, nobody must blame the Covenant. Neglect of family prayers was selected as one cause of the defeat. Strachan and Kerr, two extreme Whigamores of the left wing of the godly, went to raise a western force that would neither acknowledge Charles nor join Cromwell, who now took the Edinburgh Castle. Charles was reduced by Argyle to make to him the most slavish promises, including the payment of forty thousand pounds, the part of the price of Charles I, which Argyle had not yet touched. On October 4, Charles made the start. He fled to the Royalist of Angus, Obolvi and Airely. He was caught, brought back, and preached at. Then came fighting between the Royalist and the Estates. Middleton, a good soldier, Athel and others, declared that they must and would fight for Scotland, though they were purged out by the preachers. The Estates, November 4, gave them an indemnity. On this point the Kerr split into twain. The wilder men, led by the Reverend James Guthrie, refused reconciliation, the Reminstrance. The less fanatical would consent to it, on terms, the Resolutioners. The Committee of the Estates dared to resist the Reminstrance. Even the commissioners of the General Assembly cannot be against the raising of all sensible persons, and at last adopted the attitude of all sensible persons. By May 21, 1651, the Estates rescinded the insane act of classes, but the strife between clerical Reminstrance and Resolutioners persisted till after the Restoration, the Reminstrance later being named protesters. Charles had been crowned at Scone on January 1, again signing the Covenants. Everybody now occupied Stirling, avoiding an engagement. In July, while a General Assembly saw the strife of the two sects, came news that Lambert had crossed the Forth at Queensferry, and defeated a Scots force at Infer-Keithing, where the McLeans fell almost to a man. Monk captured a number of the General Assembly, and as Cromwell, moving to Perth, could now assail Leslie and the main Scottish force at Stirling, they, by a desperate Resolution, with four thousand horse and nine thousand foot, invaded England by the West Marches. Laughing, says one of them, at the ridiculousness of our own condition. On September 1, Monk stormed and sacked Dundee as Montrose sacked Aberdeen, but if he made a massacre like that by Edward I at Barrick, history is lenient to the crime. On August 22, Charles, with his army, reached Worcester, with their Cromwell marched with a force twice as great as that of the King. Worcester was a sedan. Charles could neither hold it nor, though he charged gallantly, could he break through Cromwell s lines. Before nightfall on September 3, Charles was a fugitive. He had no army, Hamilton was slain, Middleton and David Leslie, with thousands more were prisoners. Monk had already captured, at Ellith, August 28, the whole of the Government, the Committee of Estates, and had also caught some preachers, including James Sharp, later Archbishop of St. Andrews. Monk had conquered Scotland at last, after twelve years of Government by preachers acting as interpreters of the Covenant between Scotland and Jehovah. CHAPTER XXV of a short history of Scotland by Andrew Lang. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. CHAPTER XXV Conquered Scotland During the nine years of the English military occupation of Scotland, everything was merely provisional. Nothing decisive could occur. In the first place, October 1651, eight commissioners, including three soldiers, Monk, Lambert and Dean, undertook the administration of the conquered country. They announced tolerance and religion, except for Catholicism and Anglicanism, of course, and during their occupation the English never wavered on a point so odious to the Kirk. The English rulers also, as much as they could, protected the women and men whom the lards and preachers smelled out and tortured and burned for witchcraft. By way of compensation for the expenses of war, all the estates of men who had sided with Charles were confiscated. Taxation was also heavy. On several occasions, attempts were made to establish the union of the two countries. Scotland, finally, was to return thirty members to sit in the English Parliament. But as that Parliament, under Cromwell, was subject to strange and sudden changes, and as the Scottish representatives were usually men sold to the English side, the experiment was not promising. In its first stage it collapsed with Cromwell's dismissal of the long Parliament on April 20th, 1653. Argyle, meanwhile, had submitted, retaining his estates, August 1652, but of five garrisons in his country three were recaptured, not without his goodwill, by the Highlanders, and in these events began monks aversion, finally fatal, to the Marquis as a man whom none could trust, and in whom, finally, nobody trusted. An English commission of justice established in May 1652 was confessedly more fair and impartial than any Scotland had known, which was explained by the fact that the English judges were kinless loons. Northern Cavaliers were relieved by monks forbidding civil magistrates to outlaw and plunder persons lying under Presbyterian excommunication, and sanitary measures did something to remove from Edinburgh the ancient reproath of filth for the time. While the protesters and Resolutioners kept up their quarrel, the protesters, claiming to be the only genuine representatives of the Kirk and Covenant, the General Assembly of the Resolutioners was broken up, July 21st, 1653, by Lilburn, with a few soldiers, and henceforth the Kirk, having no General Assembly, was less capable of promoting civil broils. Lilburn suspected that the Assembly was in touch with new stirrings toward a rising in the Highlands, to lead which Charles had in 1652 promised to send Middleton, who had escaped from an English prison as General. It was always hard to find anyone under whom the great chiefs would serve, and Glen Carn, with Kenmer, was unable to check their jealousies. Charles heard that Argyle would appear in arms for the crown when he deemed the occasion good. Meanwhile, his heir, Lord Lorne, would join the rising. He did so in July 1653, under the curse of Argyle, who, by letters to Lilburn and Monk, and by giving useful information to the English, fatally committed himself as treasonable to the royal cause. Examples of his conduct were known to Glen Carn, who communicated them to Charles. At the end of February 1654 Middleton arrived in Sutherland to lead the insurrection, but Monk chased the small and disunited force from county to county, and in July Morgan defeated and scattered its remnants at Loch Gary, just south of Dolnospedal. The Armstrongs and other border clans, who had been moss-trupping in their ancient way, were also reduced, and new fortresses and garrisons bridled the fighting clans of the West. With Cromwell as protector in 1654, free trade with England was offered to the Scots with reduced taxation, an attempt to legislate for the Union failed. In 1655 to 56, a Council of State and a Commission of Justice included two or three Scottish members, and boroughs were allowed to elect magistrates who would swear loyalty to Cromwell. Cromwell died on the day of his fortunate star, September 3, 1658, and twenty-one members for Scotland sat in Richard Cromwell's Parliament. When that was dissolved, and when the rump was reinstated, a new Bill of Union was introduced, and by reason of the provisions for religious toleration, a thing absolutely impious in Presbyterian eyes, was delayed till October 1659 the rump was sent to its account. Conventions of boroughs and shires were now held by Monk, who, leading his army of occupation south in January 1660, left the Resolutioners and Protesters standing at Gays, as hostile as ever, awaiting what things should befall. Both parties cherished the Covenants, and so long as these documents were held to be forever binding on all generations, so long as the King's authority was to be resisted in defence of these treaties with omnipotence, it was plain that in Scotland there could neither be content nor peace. For twenty-eight years, during a generation of profligacy and turmoil, cruelty and corruption, the Kirk and country were to reap what they had sown in 1638. CHAPTER XXVI There was dancing and deray in Scotland among the Lady when the King came to his own again. The darkest page in the national history seemed to have been turned. The conquering English were gone with their abominable tolerance, their craze for soap and water, their aversion to witch-burnings. The nobles and gentry would recover their lands in compensation for their losses. There would be offices to win and the spoils of office. It seems that in Scotland none of the lessons of misfortune had been learned. Since January the chiefs of the milder party of the Preachers, the Resolutioners, they who had been reconciled with the Engagers, were employing the Reverend James Sharpe, who had been a prisoner in England, as their agent with Monk, with Lauderdale in April, with Charles in Holland, and again in London. Sharpe was no fanatic. From the first he assured his brethren, Douglas of Edinburgh, Bailey and the rest, that there was no chance for rigid Presbyterianism. They could conceive of no Presbyterianism which was not rigid, in the manner of Ender Melville, to whom his King was Christ's silly vassal. Sharpe warned them early that in face of the irreconcilable protestors moderate episcopacy would be preferred, and Douglas himself assured Sharpe that the new generation in Scotland bore a heart hatred to the Covenant, and are wearied of the yoke of Presbyterial government. This was true. The ruling classes had seen too much of Presbyterial government, and would prefer bishops as long as they were not pampered and all-powerful. On the other hand the lesser gentry, still more their godly wives, the farmers and burgesses and the preachers, regarded the very shadow of episcopacy as a breach of the Covenant and an insult to the Almighty. The Covenanters had forced the Covenant on the consciousness of thousands, from the King downward, who in soul and conscience loathed it. They were to drink of the same cup. Episcopacy was to be forced on them by fines and imprisonments. Scotland, her people and rulers were moving in a vicious circle. The Resolutioners admitted that, to allow the protestors to have any hand in affairs, was to breed continual distemper in disorders, and Bailey was for banishing the leaders of the protestors, irreconcilables like Reverend James Guthrie, to the Orkney Islands. But the Resolutioners, on the other hand, were no less eager to stop the use of the liturgy in Charles's own household, and to persecute every sort of Catholic, dissenter, sectary and Quaker in Scotland. Meanwhile Argyle, in debt, despised on all sides and yet dreaded, was holding a great open-air Communion meeting of protestors at Paisley, in the heart of the wildest Covenanting Region, May 27th, 1660. He was still dangerous. He was trying to make himself trusted by the protestors who were opposed to Charles. It may be doubted if any great potentate in Scotland, except the Marquis, wished to revive the constitutional triumphs of Argyle's party in the last parliament of Charles I. Charles now named his Privy Council and his ministers without waiting for parliamentary assent, though his first parliament would have assented to anything. He chose only his late supporters, Glencarn, who raised his standard in 1653, Roth's, a humorous and not cruel voluptuary, and as Secretary for Scotland in London, Lauderdale, who had urged him to take the Covenant, and who for twenty years was to be his buffoon, his favourite, and his wavering and unscrupulous advisor. Among these greedy and treacherous profligates there would, had he survived, been no place for mantros. In defiance of warnings from omens, second-sided men and sensible men, Argyle left the safe sanctuary of his mountains and sea-strates, and betook himself to London, a fey man. Most of his past was covered by an act of indemnity, but not his doings in 1653. He was arrested before he saw the king's face, July 8th, 1660, and lay in the tower till, in December, he was taken to be tried for treason in Scotland. Sharp's friends were anxious to interfere in favour of establishing Presbyterianism in England. He told them that the hope was vain. He repeatedly asked for leave to return home, and while an English preacher assured Charles that the route of Worcester had been God's vengeance for his taking of the Covenant, Sharp, June 25th, told his Resolutioners that the protestors' doom is tight. Administration in Scotland was entrusted to the Committee of Estates, whom Monk, 1650, had captured at Elith, and with them Glencarn as Chancellor entered Edinburgh on August 22nd. Next day, while the Committee was busy, James Guthrie and some protestor preachers met, and in the old way drew up a supplication. They denounced religious toleration, and asked for the establishment of Presbyterian England, and the filling of all offices with Covenanters. They were all arrested and accused of attempting to rekindle civil war, which would assuredly have followed had their prayer been accepted. Next year Guthrie was hanged. But ten days after his arrest, Sharp had brought down a letter of Charles to the Edinburgh Presbytery, promising to protect and preserve the Government of the Church of Scotland as it is established by law. Had the words run as it may be established by law, in Parliament, it would not have been a dishonourable quibble, as it was. Parliament opened on New Year's Day, 1661, with Middleton as Commissioner. In the words of Sir George McKenzie, then a very young advocate and man of letters, never was Parliament so upsequious. The King was declared Supreme Governor over all persons and in all causes, a blow at Church judicature, and all acts between 1633 and 1661 were rescinded, just as thirty years of ecclesiastical legislation had been rescinded by the Covenanters. A sum of forty thousand pounds yearly was settled on the King. Argyle was tried, was defended by a young George McKenzie, and, when he seemed safe, his doom was fixed by the arrival of a Campbell from London, bearing some of his letters to Lilburn and Monk, 1653 to 1655, which the indemnity of 1651 did not cover. He died by the acts, not the rope like Montrose, with dignity and courage. The question of Church government in Scotland was left to Charles and his advisers. The problem presented to the government of the Restoration by the Kirk was much more difficult and complicated than historians usually suppose. The pretensions which the preachers had inherited from Knox and Andrew Melville were practically incompatible, as has been proved, with the existence of the State. In the southern and western shires, such as those of Dumfries, Galloway, Eyre, Renfrew and Lannark, the forces which attacked the Engagers had been mustered. These shires had back Strachan and Kerr and Guthrie in the agitation against the King. The estates and the less violent clergy after Dunbar. But without Argyle and with no probable noble leaders they could do little harm. They had done none under the English occupation which abolished the General Assembly. To have restored the Assembly, or rather two assemblies, that of the protesters and that of the Resolutionists, would certainly have been perilous. Probably the wisest plan would have been to grant a General Assembly, to meet after the session of Parliament, not as had been the custom, to meet before it and influence or coerce the estates. Had that measure proved perilous to peace it need not have been repeated. The Kirk might have been left in the State to which the English had reduced it. This measure would not have so much infuriated the devout as did the introduction of black prelacy and the injection of some three hundred adored ministers chiefly in the south-west and the making of a desert first and then peopling it with owls and satyrs. The curates, as Archbishop Layton described the action of 1663. There ensued the findings of all who would not attend the ministrations of owls and satyrs, a grievance which produced two rebellions, 1666 and 1779, and a doctrine of anarchism and was only worn down by eternal and cruel persecutions. By violence the restoration achieved its aim. The Revolution of 1688 entered into the results. It was a bitter moment in the evolution of Scotland, a moment that need never have existed. Episcopacy was restored, four bishops were consecrated, and sharp accepted, as might have long been foreseen, the Sea of St Andrews. He was henceforth reckoned a Judas, and assuredly he had ruined his character for honour. He became a puppet of government, despised by his masters, loathed by the rest of Scotland.