 CHAPTER XXVI. In May to September 1662 Parliament ratified the change to Episcopacy. It seems to have been thought that few preachers except the protesters would be recalcitrant, refuse collation from bishops, and leave their mansions. In point of fact, though they were allowed to consult their consciences till February 1663, nearly three hundred ministers preferred their consciences to their livings. They remained centers of the devotion of their flocks, and the curates, hastily gathered, who took their places, were stigmatized as ignorant and profligate, while, as they were resisted, rabbled, and daily insulted, the country was full of disorder. The government thus mortally offended the devout classes, though no attempt was made to introduce a liturgy. In the churches the service were exactly, or almost exactly, what they had been, but excommunications could now only be done by sanction of the bishops. Witch burnings, in spite of the opposition of George McKenzie and the Council, were soon as common as under the Covenant. Oaths declaring it unlawful to enter into Covenants or take up arms against the King were imposed on all persons in office. Middleton of his own authority now proposed the ostracism by parliamentary ballot of twelve persons reckoned dangerous. Lauderdale was mainly aimed at. It is a pity that the bullet did not find its billet, with Crawford, Casilisus, Tweeddale, Lothien, and other peers who did not approve of the recent measures. But Lauderdale in London, seeing Charles Daley, won his favour. Middleton was recalled, March 1663, and Lauderdale entered freely on his wavering, unscrupulous, corrupt, and disastrous period of power. The Parliament of June 1663, meeting under Roth's, was packed by the least constitutional method of choosing the lords of the Articles. Rouriston was brought from France, tried and hanged, expressing more fear than I ever saw, wrote Lauderdale, whose act against separation and disobedience to ecclesiastical authority find abstainers from services in their parish churches. In 1664, Sharp, who was despised by Lauderdale and Glencarn, obtained the erection of that old grievance, a court of high commission, including bishops, to punish nonconformists. Sir James Turner was entrusted with the task of dragooning them, by fining and the quartering of soldiers on those who could not attend the curates, and would keep conventicles. Turner was naturally clement and good-natured, but wine often deprived him of his wits, and his soldiery behaved brutally. Their excesses increased discontent, and war with Holland, 1664, gave them hopes of a Dutch ally. Conventicles became common. They had an organization of scouts and sentinels. The malcontents intrigued with Holland in 1666, and schemed to capture the three keys of the kingdom—the castles of Sterling, Dumbarton, and Edinburgh. The state's general promised, when this was done, to send ammunition and 150,000 guilders. July 1666. When rebellion did break out, it had no foreign aid, and a casual origin. In the southwest, Turner commanded but seventy soldiers, scattered all about the country. On November 14th some of them mishandled an old man in the clock and of dollory, on the ken. A soldier was shot in revenge, Mackenzie speaks, as if a conventicle was going on in the neighbourhood. People gathered in arms, with the Lord of Corsac, young Maxwell of Monreath, and Millenon, caught Turner, undressed in Dumfries, and carried him with them as they went conventicling about, as Mackenzie writes, holding prayer meetings led by Wallace, an old soldier of the Covenant. At Lannark they renewed the Covenant. Dalseel of Bins, who had learned war in Russia, led a pursuing force. The rebels were disappointed in hopes of Dutch or native help at Edinburgh. They turned, when within three miles of the town, into the passes of the Pentland Hills, and at Bullion Green, on November 28th, displayed fine soldierly qualities and courage, but fled, broken at nightfall. The soldiers and countryfolk, who were unsympathetic, took a number of prisoners, preachers and laymen, on whom the Council, under the presidency of Sharp, exercised your cruelty bread of terror. The prisoners were defended by George Mackenzie. It has been strangely stated that he was Lord Advocate, and persecuted them. Fifteen rebels were hanged. The use of torture to extract information was a return, under Fletcher, the King's Advocate, to a practice of Scottish law which had been almost in abeyance since 1638, except, of course, in the case of witches. Turner vainly tried to save from the boot the Lord of Corsac, who had protected his life from the fanatics. The executioner favoured Mr. McHale, says the Reverend Mr. Kirkton, himself a sufferer later. This Mr. McHale, when a lad of twenty-one, had already denounced the rulers in a sermon, as on the moral level of Haman and Judas. It is entirely untrue that Sharp concealed a letter from the King, commanding that no blood should be shed. Charles detested hanging people. If anyone concealed his letter, it was Burnett, Archbishop of Glasgow. Dalsiel now sent Ballantine to supersede Turner and to exceed him in ferocity, and Bellingdon and Tweeddale wrote to Lauderdale deprecating the cruelties and rapacity of the reaction, and a vowing contempt of Sharp. He was snipped, confined to his diocese, and cast down, yea, lower than the dust, wrote Roth to Lauderdale. He was said to have exaggerated in his reports the forces of the spirit of revolt, but Tweeddale, Sir Robert Murray, and Kincardine found, when in power, that matters were really much more serious than they had supposed. In the disturbed districts, mainly the old Strathclyde and Pictus Galloway, the conformist ministers were perpetually threatened, insulted, and robbed. According to a sympathetic historian, on the day when Charles should abolish bishops and permit free general assemblies, the Western Whigs would become his law-abiding subjects, but till that day they would be irreconcilable. But a government is not always well advised in yielding to violence. Moreover, when government had deserted its clergy and had granted free general assemblies, the two covenants would re-arise, and the pretensions of the clergy to dominate the state would be revived. Lauderdale drifted into a policy of alternate indulgences or tolerations and of repression, which had the desired effect at the maximum of cost to justice and decency. Before England drove James II from the throne, but a small remnant of fanatics were in active resistance, and the covenants had ceased to be dangerous. A scheme of partial toleration was mooted in 1667, and Roth's was removed from his practical dictatorship, while Turner was made the scapegoat of Roth's, Sharpe, and Daziel. The result of the scheme of toleration was an increase in disorder. Bishop Layton had a plan for abolishing all but a shadow of episcopacy, but the temper of the recalcitrance displayed itself in a book, Naftali, advocating the right of the godly to murder their oppressors. This work contained provocations to anarchism, and in Nox's spirit encouraged any Phineas conscious of a call from heaven to do justice on such persons as he found guilty of troubling the godly. Fired by such Christian doctrines, on July 11, 1668, one Mitchell, a preacher of the gospel, and a youth of much zeal and piety, Mrs. Woodrow, the historian, shot at Sharpe, wounded the Bishop of Orkney in the street of Edinburgh, and escaped. This event delayed the project of conciliation, but in July 1669 the first indulgence was promulgated. On making certain concessions, ousted ministers were to be restored. Two and forty came in, including the Resolutioner Douglas, in 1660 the correspondent of Sharpe. The indulgence allowed the indulge to reject Episcopal collation, but while Brethren exiled in Holland denounced the scheme, these brethren led by Mr. McWard opposed all attempts at reconciliation, it also offended the archbishops, who issued a remonstrance. Sharpe was silenced, Burnett of Glasgow was superseded, and the sea was given to the saintly but unpractical latent. By 1670 conventiclers met in arms, and a clanking act, as Lauderdale called it, menaced them with death. All the second resented, but did not rescind it. In fact, the disorders and attacks on conformist ministers were of a violence much overlooked by our historians. In 1672 a second indulgence split the caracan to factions. The exiles in Holland, maintaining that preachers who accepted it, should be held men unholy, false brethren. But the indulged increased in numbers, and finally in influence. To such a man as Layton the whole quarrel seemed a scuffle of drunken men in the dark. An Englishman entering a Scottish church at this time found no sort of liturgy, prayers and sermons were what the minister chose to make them. In fact, there was no persecution for religion, says Sir George McKenzie. But if men thought even a shadow of episcopacy in offense to omnipotence, and the king's authority in ecclesiastical cases, a usurping of the crown honors of Christ, if they consequently broke the law by attending armed conventicles and assailing conformist preachers, and then were fined or imprisoned, from their point of view they were being persecuted for their religion. Meanwhile, they bullied and rabbled the curits for their religion. Such was Layton's drunken scuffle in the dark. In 1672 Lauderdale married the rapacious and tyrannical daughter of Will Murray, of old the whipping-boy of Charles I, later a disreputable intriguer. Lauderdale's own ferocity of temper and his greed had created so much dislike that in Parliament of 1673 he was met by a constitutional opposition headed by the Duke of Hamilton, and with Sir George McKenzie as its orator. Lauderdale consented to withdraw monopolies on salt, tobacco, and brandy, to other grievances he would not listen. The distresses of the Kirk were not brought forward, and he dissolved the Parliament. The opposition tried to get at him through the English Commons, who brought against him charges like those which were fatal to Stratford. They failed, and Lauderdale, holding seven offices himself, while his brother Haltun was master of the Mint, ruled through a kind of clique of kinsmen and creatures. Layton, in despair, resigned his sea. The irreconcilables of the Kirk had crowned him with insults. The Kirk, he said, abounded in furious zeal and endless debates about the empty name and shadow of a difference in government, in the meanwhile not having of solemn and orderly public worship as much as a shadow. End of Chapter 26 Part 2 Read by Cibella Denton. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 26 Part 3 of A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lane. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter 26 The Restoration Part 3 Woodrow, the historian of the sufferings of the Kirk, declares that through the riotous proceedings of the religious malcontents the country resembled war as much as peace. But an active council of 1677 bidding landowners sign a bond for the peaceable behaviour of all on their lands was refused obedience by many western lords. They could not enforce order, they said, hence it seemed to follow that there was much disorder. Those who refused were, by a stretch of the law of law boroughs, bound over to keep the peace of the government. Lauderdale, having nothing that we would call a police, little money and a small insufficient force of regulars, called in the Highland Hoth, the retainers of Athol, Glenorchee, Mar, Moray, and Arleigh, and other northern lords, and quartered them on the disturbed districts for a month. They were then sent home bearing their spoils, February 1678. Athol and Perth, later to be the Catholic minister of James II, now went over to the party, the opposition, Hamilton's party. Hamilton and others rode to London to complain against Lauderdale, but he, aided by the silver tongue of Mackenzie, who had changed sides, won over Charles, and Lauderdale's assailants were helpless. Great unpopularity and disgrace were achieved by the treatment of the pious Mitchell, who, as we have seen, missed sharp and shot the Bishop of Orkney in 1668. In 1674 he was taken and confessed before the council, after receiving from Roth's, then Chancellor, assurance of his life, this with Lauderdale's consent. When brought before the judges he retracted his confession. He was kept a prisoner on the Bass Rock. In 1676 was tortured, and January 1678 was tried again. Haltun, who in a letter of 1674 had mentioned the assurance of life, Roth's, sharp, and Lauderdale all swore that, to their memory, no assurance had been given in 1674. Mitchell's council asked to be allowed to examine the register of the council, but for some invisible technical reasons the lords of the Justiciary refused. The request, they said, came too late. McKenzie prosecuted. He had been Mitchell's council in 1674, and it is impossible to follow the reasoning by which he justifies the condemnation and hanging of Mitchell in January 1678. Sharp was supposed to have urged Mitchell's trial, and to have perjured himself, which is far from certain. Though Mitchell was guilty, the manner of his taking off was flagrantly unjust and most discreditable to all concerned. Huge armed conventacles, and others led by Welsh, a preacher, marched about through the country in December 1678 to May 1679. In April 1679 two soldiers were murdered while in their bed. Next day John Graham of Claverhouse, who had served under the Prince of Orange with credit, and now comes upon the scene, reported that Welsh was organizing an armed rebellion, and that the peasants were seizing the weapons of the militia. Balfour of Kinloch, Burleigh, and Robert Hamilton, a lard in Fife, were the leaders of that extreme set which was feared as much by the indulged preachers as by the curates. And on May 2nd, 1679, Balfour, with Huckston of Wrethlilet, who merely looked on, and other pious desperadoes, passed half an hour in clumsily hacking sharp to death, in the presence of his daughter at Magusmoor near St. Andrews. The slayers, says one of them, thanked the Lord for leading them by his Holy Spirit in every step they stepped in that matter. And it is obvious that mere argument was unavailing with gentlemen who cherished such opinions. In the portraits of Sharp we see a face of refined goodness which makes the physiognomist distrust his art. From very early times Cromwell had styled Sharp, Sharp of that ilk. He was subtle, he had no fanaticism, he warned his brethren in 1660 of the impossibility of restoring their old authority and discipline. But when he accepted an archbishopric he sold his honor. His servility to Charles and Lauderdale was disgusting. Fear made him cruel. His conduct at Mitchell's last trial is, at best, ambiguous. And the hatred in which he was held is proved by the falsehoods, which his enemies told about his private life and his sorceries. The murderers crossed the country, joined the armed fanatics of the West under Robert Hamilton, and on Restoration Day, May 29th, joined acts of the government at Rutherglen. Claverhouse rode out of Glasgow with a small force to inquire into this proceeding, met the armed insurgents in a strong position defended by marshes and small locks, sent to Lord Ross at Glasgow for reinforcements which did not arrive, and has himself told how he was defeated, pursued, and driven back into Glasgow. This may be accounted the beginning of the rebellion in my opinion. Hamilton shot with his own hand one of the prisoners and reckoned the sparing of the others one of our first stepings aside. Men so conscientious as Hamilton were rare in his party, which was ruined presently by its own distracted councils. The forces of the victors of Drumclog were swollen by their success, but they were repulsed with loss in an attack on Glasgow. The commands of Ross and Claverhouse were then withdrawn to Stirling, and when Livingston joined them at Larbritt, the whole army mustered about eighteen hundred men, so weak were the regulars. The militia was raised, and the king sent down his illegitimate son, Monmouth, husband of the heiress of Booklick, at the head of several regiments of redcoats. Argyle was not of service. He was engaged in private war with the McLeans, who refused an appeal for help from the rebels. They in Glasgow and at Hamilton were quarreling over the indulgence. The extremists called Mr. Welsh's party rotten-hearted. Welsh would not reject the king's authority. The Welshites were the more numerous. On June 22 the Clyde at Bothwell Bridge separated the rebels, whose preachers were invading against each other, from Monmouth's army. Monmouth refused to negotiate till the others laid down their arms, and after a brief artillery duel the royal infantry carried the bridge and the rest of the affair was pursued by the cavalry. The rival covenanting leaders, Russell, one of Sharp's murderers, and Ur, give varying accounts of the affair, and each party blames the other. The rebel forces reckoned that from five to seven thousand the royal army of twenty-three hundred according to Russell. Some hundreds of the covenanters fell, and many hundreds, the Privy Council reported, were taken. The Battle of Bothwell Bridge severed the extremists, Robert Hamilton, Richard Cameron and Cargill, the famous preachers and the rest from the majority of the covenanters. They dwindled to the remnant, growing the fiercer as their numbers decreased. Twenty-two ministers were hanged. Hundreds of prisoners were banished, like Cromwell's prisoners after Dunbar, to the American colonies. Of these some two hundred were drowned in the wreck of their vessel off the Orkneys. The main body were penned up in Greyfriars' churchyard. Many escaped, more signed to promise to remain peaceful, and shunned conventicals. There was more of cruel carelessness than of the deliberate cruelty displayed in the massacres and hangings of women after Philip Ha and Dunavarity. But the avaricious and corrupt rulers, after 1679, headed by James, Duke of York, Lauderdale being removed, made the rising of Bothwell Bridge the pretext for finding and ruining hundreds of persons, especially lards, who were accused of helping or harboring the rebels. The officials were rapacious for their own profit. The records of scores of trials prosecuted for the sake of spoil, and disgraced by torture and injustice, make miserable reading. Between the trials of the accused and the struggle with the small minority of extremists led by Richard Cameron and the aged Mr. Cargill, the history of the country is monotonously wretched. It was in prosecuting lards and peasants and preachers that Sir George McKenzie, by nature a lenient man and a lover of literature, gained the name of the bloody advocate. CHAPTER XXVI. Cameron and his followers wrote about after issuing the wildest manifestos, as at Sanquare in the Shire of Dumfries, June 22, 1680. The use of earl-shell was sent with a party of horse to pursue, and in the wild marshes of Ayres-Moss in Ayrshire Cameron fell praying and fighting, while Huckstoon of Wrathillet, less fortunate, was taken, and the murder of Sharp was avenged on him with unspeakable cruelties. The remnant now formed itself into organized and armed societies. Their conduct made them feared and detested by the majority of the preachers, who longed for a quiet life, not for the establishment of a mosaic commonwealth, and the execution of righteous judgments on malignance. Cargill was now the leader of the remnant, and Cargill, in a conventicle at Torwood, of his own authority, excommunicated the king, the Duke of York, Lauderdale, Roth's, Dalsiel, and McKenzie, whom he accused of leniency to witches, among other sins. The government apparently thought that excommunication, to the mind of Cargill and his adherents, meant outlawry, and that outlawry might mean the assassination of the excommunicated. Cargill was hunted, and, July 12th, 1681, was captured by Wild Bonshaw. It was believed by his party that the decision to execute Cargill was carried by the vote of Argyle in the Privy Council, and that Cargill told Roths, who had signed the Covenant with him in their youth, that Roths would be the first to die. Roths died on July 26th. Cargill was hanged on July 27th. On the following day James, Duke of York, as royal commissioner, opened the first parliament since 1673 to 74. James secured an act making the right of succession to the crown independent of differences of religion. He, of course, was a Catholic. The test act was also passed, a thing so self-contradictory in its terms that any man might take it, whose sense of humor overcame his sense of honour. Many refused, including a number of the conformist ministers. Argyle took the test as far as it is consistent with itself and with the Protestant religion. Argyle, the son of the excommunicated Marquis, had recovered his lands and acquired the title of Earl mainly through the help of Lauderdale. During the religious troubles from 1600 onwards he had taken no great part, but had sided with the government and approved of the torture of preachers. But what ruined him now, though the facts have been little noticed, was his disregard of the claims of his creditors and his obtaining the lands of the Macleanes in Mull and Morvin in discharge of an enormous debt of the Maclean chief to the Marquis, executed in 1661. The Macleanes had vainly attempted to prove that the debt was vastly inflated by familiar processes and had resisted in arms the invasion of the Campbells. They had friends in Seaforth, the MacKenzie's, and in the Earl of Errol and other nobles. His men, especially MacKenzie of Tarbet and Astute Intriguer, seized their chance when Argyle took the test with qualification, and, though at first he satisfied and was reconciled to the Duke of York, they won over the Duke, accused Argyle to the King, brought him before a jury, and had him condemned of treason and incarcerated. The object may have been to intimidate him and destroy his almost royal power in the West and the Islands. In any case after a trial for treason, in which one vote settled his doom, he escaped in disguise as a footman, perhaps by collusion, as was suspected, led to England, conspired there with Scottish exiles and a covenanting refugee, Mr. Veach, and as Charles would not allow him to be searched for, he easily escaped to Holland. It was, in fact, clan hatred that dragged down Argyle. His condemnation was an infamous perversion of justice, but as Charles would not allow him to be captured in London, it is most improbable that he would have permitted the unjust capital sentence to be carried out. The escape was probably collusive, and the sole result of these intricate iniquities was to create for the government an enemy, who would have been dangerous if he had been trusted by the extreme Presbyterians. In England no less than in Scotland the supreme and odious injustice of Argyle's trial excited general indignation. The Earl of Aberdeen, Gordon of Haddow, was now Chancellor, and Queensbury was Treasurer for a while. Both were intrigued against it court by the Earl of Perth and his brother, later Lord Melford, and probably by far the worst of all the knaves of the restoration. Increasing outrageous by the remnant, now headed by the Reverend Mr. James Renwick, a very young man, led to more furious repression, especially as in 1683 government detected a double plot. The wilder English aim being to raise the rabble and to take or slay Charles and his brother at the Rye House, while the more respectable conspirators, English and Scots, were believed to be acquainted with, though not engaged in this design. The Reverend Mr. Carstairs was going and coming between Argyle and the Exiles in Holland and the Intricers at home. They intended, as usual, first to surprise Edinburgh Castle. In England, Algernon Sydney, Lord Russell, and others were arrested, while Bailey of Jerviswood and Carstairs were apprehended, Carstairs in England. He was sent to Scotland where he could be tortured. The trial of Jerviswood was, if possible, more unjust than even the common run of these affairs, and he was executed December 24th, 1684. The conspiracy was, in fact, a very serious affair. Carstairs was confessedly aware of its criminal aspect, and was in the closest confidence of the ministers of William of Orange. What his dealings were with them in later years he would never divulge. But it is clear that if the plotters slew James and Charles, the hour had struck for the Dutch Deliverer's appearance. If we describe the Rye House plot as aiming merely at the exclusion of the Duke of York from the Throne, we shut our eyes to evidence and make ourselves incapable of understanding the events. There were plotters of every degree and rank, and they were intriguing with Argyle, and through Carstairs who knew, though he refused a part in the murder plot, were in touch at once with Argyle and the intimates of William of Orange. Meanwhile, the Hillmen, the adherents of Renwick, in October 1684 declared a war of assassination against their opponents, and announced that they would try malignance in courts of their own. Their manifesto, the Apologetical Declaration, caused an extraordinary measure of repression. A test, the abjuration of the criminal parts of Renwick's declaration, was to be offered by military authority to all in sundry. Refusal to abjure entailed military execution. The test was only obnoxious to sincere families, but among them must have been hundreds of persons who had no criminal designs, and merely deemed it a point of honour not to homologate any act of a government which was corrupt, proletic, and unholy. Later victims of this view of duty were Margaret Lochison and Margaret Wilson, an old woman and a young girl, cruelly drowned by the local authorities at Wigtown, May 1685. A myth represents Claverhouse as having been present. The shooting of John Brown, the Christian carrier, by Claverhouse in the previous week was an affair of another character. Claverhouse did not exceed his orders, and ammunition and reasonable papers were in Brown's possession. He was also sheltering a red-handed rebel. Brown was not shot merely because he was a nonconformist, or was he shot by the hand of Claverhouse. These incidents of the killing time were in the reign of James II. Charles II had died to the sincere grief of most of his subjects on February 2, 1685. Letcheress and treacherous as he was, he was humorous and good-humoured. The expected invasion of Scotland by Argyle, of England by Monmouth, did not encourage the government to use respective lenity in the covenanting region, from Lanarkshire to Galloway. Argyle, who sailed from Holland on May 2, had a council of lowlanders who thwarted him. His interests were in his own principality, but he founded occupied by Athel and his clansmen, and the cadets of his own house as a rule would not rally to him. The lowlanders with him, Sir Patrick Hume, Sir John Cochran and the rest, wished to move south and join hands with the remnant in the west and in Galloway, but the remnant distrusted the sudden religious seal of Argyle, and there were cowed by Cleaverhouse. The coasts were watched by government vessels of war, and when, after vain movements round about his own castle, Inverary, Argyle was obliged by his lowlanders to move on to Glasgow, he was checked at every turn. The leaders, weary and lost in the marshes, scattered from Kilpatrick on Clyde. Argyle crossed the river, and was captured by servants of Sir John Shaw of Greenock. He was not put to trial nor to torture. He was executed on the verdict of 1681. About two hundred suspected persons were lodged by government in Donauter Castle at the time, and treated with abominable cruelty. Chapter 26 The Restoration, Part 5 The Covenanters were now effectually put down, though Rennick was not taken and hanged till 1688. The preachers were anxious for peace and quiet, and were bitterly hostile to Rennick. The Covenant was a dead letter as far as power to do mischief was concerned. It was not persecution of the Kirk, but demand for toleration of Catholics and a manifest desire to restore the Church, that in two years lost James his kingdoms. On April 29, 1686, James's message to the Scots Parliament asked toleration for our innocent subjects, the Catholics. He had substituted Perth's brother, now entitled Earl of Melfort, for Queensbury. Perth was now Chancellor. Both men had adopted their king's religion, and the infamous Melfort can hardly be supposed to have done so honestly. Their families lost all in the event except their faith. With a request for toleration, James sent promises of free trade with England, and he asked for no supplies. Perth had introduced Catholic vestments and furnishings in Holy Road Chapel, which provoked a no-pupry riot. Parliament would not permit toleration. James removed many of the council and filled their places with Catholics. Sir George McKenzie's conscience derailed. He refused to vote for toleration and he lost the Lord Advocate ship, being superseded by Sir James Dalrymple, an old covenanting opponent of Claverhouse and Galloway. In August James, by prerogative, did what the estates would not do, and he deprived the Archbishop of Glasgow and the Bishop of Dunkeld of their seas, though a Catholic, he was the king-pope of a Protestant church. In a decree of July 1687 he extended toleration to the Kirk, and a meeting of preachers at Edinburgh expressed a deep sense of your Majesty's gracious and surprising favour. The Kirk was indeed broken, and when the revolution came, was at last ready for a compromise from which the covenants were omitted. On February 17, 1688, Mr. Renwick was hanged at Edinburgh. He had been prosecuted by Dalrymple. On the same day McKenzie superseded Dalrymple as Lord Advocate. After the birth of the White Rose Prince of Wales, June 10, 1688, Scotland, like England, apprehended that a Catholic king would be followed by a Catholic son. The various contradictory lies about the child's birth flourished, all the more because James ventured to select the magistrates of the royal boroughs. It became certain that the Prince of Orange would invade, and Melford madly withdrew the regular troops, with Claverhouse, now Viscount Dundee, to aid in resisting William in England, though Balcairs proposed a safer way of holding down the English northern counties by volunteers, the Highland Clans, and new levees. Thus the privy council in Scotland were left at the mercy of the populace. Of the Scottish army in England all were disbanded when James fled to France, except a handful of cavalry whom Dundee kept with him. Perth fled from Edinburgh, but was taken and held a prisoner for four years. The town train-band, with the mob and some Cameroonians, took Holy Road, slaying such of the guards as they did not imprison. Many died of their wounds and hunger. The chapel and Catholic houses were sacked, and gangs of the armed Cameroonian societies went about in the south-west, rabbling, robbing, and driving away ministers of the Episcopalian sort. Athel was in power in Edinburgh, in London, where James's Scott's friends met, the Duke of Hamilton was made president of council, and power was left till the assembling of a covenant at Edinburgh, March 1689, in the hands of William. In Edinburgh Castle the wavering Duke of Gordon was induced to remain by Dundee and Balcairs, while Dundee proposed to call a Jacobite convention in Stirling. Melford induced James to send a letter contrary to the desires of his party. Athel, who had promised to join them, broke away. The life of Dundee was threatened by the fanatics, and on March 18th, seeing his party headless and heartless, Dundee rode north, going wherever might lead him the shade of Montrose. McKay now brought to Edinburgh regiments from Holland, which overawed the Jacobites, and he secured for William the key of the north, the Castle of Stirling. With Hamilton as president, the convention, with only four adverse votes, declared against James and his son, and Hamilton, April 3, proclaimed at the cross of the reign of William and Mary. The claim of rights was passed and declared episcopacy intolerable. Balcairs was thrown into prison. On May 11th William took the coronation oath for Scotland, merely protesting that he would not root out heretics as the oath enjoined. This was the end, oh an old, zang, the end of the Stuart dynasty and of the equally divine rights of kings and of preachers. In a sketch it is impossible to convey any idea of the sufferings of Scotland, at least of covenanting Scotland under the restoration. There was contest, unrest, and ragoonings, and the quartering of a brutal and licentious soldiery on suspected persons. Law, especially since 1679, had been twisted for the conviction of persons whom the administration desired to rob. The greed and corruption of the rulers, from Lauderdale, his wife and his brother Haltoun, to Perth and his brother, the Earl of Melfort, whose very title was the name of an unjustly confiscated estate, is all most inconceivable. Few of the foremost men in power, except Sir George McKenzie and Claverhouse, were free from personal profligacy of every sort. Claverhouse has left on record his aversion to severities against the peasantry. He was for prosecuting such gentry as the Dalrymples. As constable of Dundee he refused to inflict capital punishment on petty officers, and McKenzie went as far as he dared in opposing the ferocities of the inquisition of witches. But in cases of alleged treason, McKenzie knew no mercy. Torture, legal in Scotland, was used with barbarism unprecedented there after each plot or rising, to extract secrets which, save in one or two cases like that of car stares, the victims did not possess. They were peasants, preachers, and a few country-gentlemen. The nobles had no inclination to suffer for the cause of the covenants. The covenants continued to be the idols of the societies of the Cameroonians, and of many preachers who were no longer inclined to die for those documents. The expression of such strange doctrines, the cause of so many sorrows and of so many martyrdoms. However little we may sympathize with the doctrines, nonetheless the sufferers were idealists, and no less than mantros preferred honour to life. With all its sins the restoration so far pulverised the pretensions which, since 1560 the preachers had made, that William of Orange was not obliged to renew the conflict with the spiritual sons of Knox and Andrew Melville. This fact is not so generally recognised as it might be. It is therefore proper to quote the corroborative opinion of the learned historiographer, royal of Scotland, Professor Hume Brown. By concession and repression the once mighty force of Scottish Presbyterianism had been broken. Most deadly of the weapons in the accomplishment of this result had been the three acts of indulgence, which had successfully cut so deep into the ranks of uniformity. In succumbing to the threats and promises of the government, the indulged ministers had undoubtedly compromised the fundamental principles of Presbyterianism. The compliance of these ministers was, in truth, the first and necessary step towards that religious and political compromise which the force of circumstances was gradually imposing on the Scottish people. And the example of the indulged ministers, who composed the great mass of the Presbyterian clergy, was of the most potent effect in substituting the idea of toleration for that of the religious absolutism of Knox and Melville. It may be added that the pretensions of Knox and Melville and all their followers were no essential part of Presbyterial Church government, but were merely the continuation or survival of the claims of apostolic authority as enforced by such popes as Hildebrand and such martyrs as St. Thomas of Canterbury. CHAPTER 27 William and Mary Part I While Claverhouse hovered in the North the convention, declared to be a Parliament by William on June 5, took on for the first time in Scotland since the reign of Charles I, the aspect of an English Parliament, and demanded English constitutional freedom of debate. The Secretary in Scotland was William Earl of Melville, that hereditary waverer, the Duke of Hamilton, was royal commissioner, but some official supporters of William, especially Sir James and Sir John Dalrymple, were criticised and thwarted by the club of more extreme liberals. They were led by the lowland ally who had vexed Argyle, Hume of Poulworth, and by Montgomery of Sculmorely, who, disappointed in his desire of place, soon engaged in a Jacobite plot. The club wished to hasten the grant of parliamentary liberties, which William was anxious not to give, and to take vengeance on officials such as Sir James Dalrymple and his son Sir John, now Lord Advocate, as he had been under James II. To these two men, foes of Claverhouse, William clung while he could. The council obtained, but did not need to use, permission to torture Jacobite prisoners, Cavaliers, as at this time they were styled, but Cheesley of Dalry, whom murdered Sir George Lockhart, president of the College of Justice, was tortured. The advanced liberal acts which were passed did not receive the touch of the scepter from Hamilton, William's commissioner, thus they were vetoed and of no effect. The old packed committee, the Lords of the Articles, was denounced as a grievance, the King was to be permitted to appoint no officers of state without Parliament's approbation. Hamilton offered compromises, for William clung to the Articles, but he abandoned them in the following year, and thenceforth till the Union, 1707, the Scottish was a free Parliament. Various measures of legislation for the Kirk, some to emancipate it as in its palmy days, some to keep it for meddling in politics, were proposed. Some measures to abolish, some to retain lay patronages of livings, were mooted. The advanced party for a while put a stop to the appointment of judges, but in August came news of the Viscount Dundee in the North, which terrified parliamentary politicians. Edinburgh Castle had been tamely yielded by the Duke of Gordon. Baucairs, the associate of Dundee, had been imprisoned, but Dundee himself, after being declared a rebel, in April raised the standard of King James. As against him the Whigs relied on McKay, a brave officer who had been in Dutch service, and now commanded regiments of the Scots Brigade of Holland. McKay pursued Dundee, as Bailey had pursued Montrose through the North. At Inverness, Dundee picked up some McDonald's under Keppuck, but Keppuck was not satisfactory, being something of a free-booter. The Viscount now rode to the centre of his hopes, to the McDonald's of Glengarry, the Camerons of Lockeel, and the McLeans who had been robbed of their lands by the Earl of Argyle, executed in 1685. Dundee summoned them to Lockeel's house on Locke-Arcaig for May 18. He visited Athol and Badanock, found a few mounted men as recruits at Dundee, returned through the wilds to Lockebur, and sent round that old summons to a rising, the fiery cross, charred and dipped in a goat's blood. Such time was spent in preliminary manoeuvring and sparring between McKay, now reinforced by English regulars, and Dundee, who for a time disbanded his levees, while McKay went to receive fresh forces and to consult the government at Edinburgh. He decided to march to the west and bridle the clans by erecting a strong fort at Inverlockie, where Montrose routed Argyle. A stronghold at Inverlockie menaced the McDonald's to the North, and the Camerons in Lockebur, and southwards the Stewards in Appen. But to reach Inverlockie, McKay had to march up the Tay, past Blair Athol, and so westward through a very wild mountainous country. To oppose him Dundee had collected four thousand of the clansmen, and awaited ammunition and men from James, then in Ireland. By the advice of the great Lockeel, a man over seventy but miraculously athletic, Dundee decided to let the clans fight in their old way, a rush, a volley at close quarters, and then the Claymore. By June 28 Dundee had received no aid from James, of money we have not twenty pounds, and he was between the Earl of Argyle, a son of the martyr of sixteen eighty-five, and McKay with his four thousand foot and eight troops of horse. On July twenty-third Dundee seized the castle of Blair Athol, which had been the base of Montrose and his campaigns, and was the key of the country between the Tay and Lockebur. The Athol clans, armies and stewards, breaking away from the son of their chief, the fickle Marquis of Athol, were led by Steward of Balacan, but did not swell Dundee's force at the moment. From James Dundee now received but a battalion of half-starved Irishmen under the futile General Cannon. On July twenty-seventh at Blair Dundee learned that McKay's force had already entered the steep and narrow pass of Kilicrankey, where the roads girded the brawling waters of the Gary. Dundee had not time to defend the pass. He marched his men from Blair, keeping the heights, while McKay emerged from the gorge, and let his forces rest on the west-level haw beside Gary, and let his forces rest on the wide-level haw beside the Gary, under the house of Runrari, now called Urard, with the deep and rapid river in their rear. On this haw the tourist seized the tall standing stone which, since seventeen thirty-five at least, has been known as Dundee's stone. From the haw rises a steep aclivity, leading to the plateau where the house of Runrari stood. McKay feared that Dundee would occupy this plateau, and that the fired thence would break up his own men on the haw below. He therefore seized the plateau which was an unfortunate manoeuvre. He was so superior in numbers that both of his wings extended beyond Dundee's, who had but forty ill-horse gentlemen by way of cavalry. After distracting McKay by movements along the heights, as if to cut off his communications with the south, Dundee, who had resisted the prayers of the chiefs that he would be sparing of his person, gave the word to charge as the sun sank behind the western hills. Rushing down, under heavy fire and losing many men, the clans, when they came to the shock, swept the enemy from the plateau, drove them over the declivity, forced many to attempt crossing the Gary where they were drowned, and followed slaying through the pass. Half of Hastings' regiment, touched by the Highland Charge, and all of Leven's men stood their ground, and were standing there when sixteen of Dundee's horse returned from the pursuit. McKay, who had lost his army, stole across the Gary with this remnant and made for sterling. He knew not that Dundee lay on the field, dying in the arms of victory. Precisely when and in what matter Dundee is slain is unknown, there is even a fair presumption, from letters of the English government, that he was murdered by two men sent from England on some very secret mission. When last seen by his men, Dundee was plunged in the battle-smoke, soared in hand, in advance of his horse. When the wigs, terrified by the defeat and expecting Dundee at sterling with the clans and the cavaliers of the lowlands, heard of his fall, their sorrow was changed into rejoicing. The cause of King James was mortally wounded by the death of the glory of the Grahams, who alone could lead and keep together a Highland host. Deprived of his leadership and distrustful of a successor, General Cannon, the clans gradually left the royal standard. The Cameroonian regiment, recruited from the young men of the organized societies, had been ordered to occupy Dunkeld. Here they were left isolated in the air by McKay or his subordinates, and on August 24 these raw recruits, under Colonel Cleland, who had fought at Drumclog, and had to receive the attack of Highlanders. Cleland had fortified the Abbey Church and the castle, his Cameroonians fired from behind walls and from loopholes with such success that Cannon called off the clansmen, or could not bring them to a second attack. Both versions are given. Cleland fell in the fight. The clans disbanded and McKay occupied the castle of Blair. CHAPTER 27 William and Mary Part II Three weeks later the Cameroonians, being unpaid, mutinied, and Ross, Annondale, and Paulworth, urging their demands for constitutional rights, threw the lowlands into a ferment. Crawford, whose manner of speech was sanctimonious, was evicting from their parishes ministers who remained true to Episcopacy, and would not pray for William and Mary. Paulworth now went to London with an address to these sovereigns framed by the club, the Party of Liberty. But the other leaders of that party, Annondale, Ross, and Montgomery of Scalmorely, all of them eager for place and office, entered into a conspiracy of intrigue with the Jacobites for James's restoration. In February 1690 the club was distracted, and to Melville as Commissioner in the Scottish Parliament, William gave orders that the acts for re-establishing Presbytery and abolishing lay patronage of livings were to be passed. Montgomery was obliged to bid yet higher for the favour of the more extreme preachers and devotees, but he failed. In April the lords of the Articles were abolished at last, and freedom of parliamentary debate was thus secured. The Westminster Confession was reinstated, and in May, after the last remnants of a Jacobite force in the North had been surprised and scattered, or captured, by Sir Thomas Livingston at Cromdale Ha, May 1st, the Alliance of Jacobites and of the club broke down, and the leaders of the club saved themselves by playing the part of informers. The new act regarding the Kirk permitted the holding of synods and general assemblies, to be summoned by permission of William or of the Privy Council, with a royal commissioner present to restrain the preachers from meddling, as a body with secular politics. The Kirk was to be organised by the Sixty Bishops, the survivors of the ministers ejected in 1663. The benefits of ejected Episcopalian conformists were declared to be vacant. Lay patronage was annulled, the congregations had the right to approve or disprove a presentese. But the Kirk was deprived of her old weapon, the attachment of civil penalties, that is practical outlawry to her sentences of excommunication, July 19, 1690. The Covenant was silently dropped. Thus ended, practically, the war between the Kirk and State which had raged for nearly a hundred and twenty years. The cruel torturing of Neville Payne, an English Jacobite taken in Scotland, showed that the new sovereigns and Privy Council retained the passions and methods of the cold. But this was the last occasion of judicial torture for political offences in Scotland. Payne was silent, but was illegally imprisoned till his death. The proceedings of the restored General Assembly were weighted with anxiety by the Government. The extremists of the Remnant, the Cameroonians, sent deputies to the Kirk. They were opposed to acknowledging sovereigns who were the head of the preletics in England, and they, not being supported by the Assembly, remained apart from the Kirk and true to the Covenants. Much had passed which William disliked. The abolition of patronage, the persecution of Episcopalians, and Melville, in 1691, was removed by the King from the commissionership. The Highlands were still unsettled. In June 1691, Bredlebane, at heart a Jacobite, attempted to appease the chiefs by promises of money in settlement of various feuds, especially that of the dispossessed McLean's against the occupant of their lands, Argyle. Bredlebane was known by Hill, the commander of Fort William at Inverlochie, to be dealing between the clans and James, as well as between William and the clans. William, then campaigning in Flanders, was informed of this fact, thought it of no importance, and accepted a truce from July 1 to October 1 with Buchan, who commanded such feeble forces as stood for James in the North. At the same time, William threatened the clans, in the usual terms, with fire and sword, if the chiefs did not take the oaths to his government by January 1, 1692. Money and titles under the rank of Erldams were to be offered to MacDonald of Sleet, McLean of Dowert, Lockheal, Glengarry, and Glenrenald, if they would come in. All declined debate, if Bredlebane really fished with it. It is plain, contrary to Lord Macaulay's statement that Sir John Dalrymple, William's trusted man for Scotland, at this time hoped for Bredlebane's success in pacifying the clans. But Dalrymple, by December 1691, wrote, I think the clan Donald must be rooted out, and Lockheal. He could not mean that he hoped to massacre so large a part of the population. He probably meant by punitive expeditions in the modern phrase, by fire and sword in the style current then, to break up the recalcitrance. Meanwhile it was Dalrymple's hope to settle ancient quarrels about the superiorities of Argyle over the Camerons, and the question of compensation for the lands reffed by the Argyle family from the McLean's. Before December 31, in fear of fire and sword, the chiefs submitted, except the greatest, Glengarry, and the least in power, McEan or MacDonald, with his narrow realm of Glencoe, whence his men were used to plunder the cattle of their powerful neighbor, Bredlebane. Bredlebane now desired not peace but the sword. By January 9, 1692, Dalrymple in London, heard that Glencoe had come in. He had accidentally failed to come in by January 1, and Dalrymple was sorry. By January 11th Dalrymple knew that Glencoe had not taken the oath before January 1, and rejoiced in the chance to root out that damnable sect. In fact, in the end of December Glencoe had gone to Fort William to take the oaths before Colonel Hill, but found that he must do so before the Sheriff of the Shire at remote Inverary. Various accidents of weather delayed him. The Sheriff also was not at Inverary when Glencoe arrived, but administered the oaths on January 6. The document was taken to Edinburgh, where Lord Stair, Dalrymple's father, and others caused it to be deleted. Glenarry was still unsworn, but Glenarry was too strong to be rooted out. William ordered his commanding officer, Livingston, to extirpate that sect of thieves, the Glencoe men, January 16. On the same day Dalrymple set down orders to hem in the Mackeans, and to guard all the passes by land or water from their Glen. Of the actual method of massacre employed, Dalrymple may have been ignorant, but orders from court to spare none and to take no prisoners were received by Livingston on January 23. On February 1, Campbell of Glenlion, with one hundred and twenty men, was hospitably received by Mackean, whose son Alexander had married Glenlion's niece. On February 12, Hill sent four hundred of his interlocky garrison to Glencoe to join hands with four hundred of Argyle's Regiment under Major Duncanson. These troops were to guard the southern passes out of Glencoe, while Hamilton was to sweep the passes from the north. At five a.m. on February 13, the soldier-guests of Mackean began to slay in plunder. Men, women and children were shot or bayonetted, one thousand head of cattle were driven away, but Hamilton arrived too late. Though the aged chief had been shot at once, his sons took to the hills, and the greater part of the population escaped with their lives, thanks to Hamilton's dilatoriness. All I regret is that any of the sects got away, wrote Dalrymple on March 5, and there is necessity to prosecute them to the utmost. News had already reached London that they are murdered in their beds. The newspapers, however, were silenced and the story was first given to Europe in April by the Paris Gazette. The crime was unprecedented. It had no precedent, admits of no apology. Many an expedition of fire and sword had occurred but never had there been a midnight massacre under trust of hosts by guests. King William, on March 6, went off to his glorious wars on the Continent, probably hoping to hear that the fugitive McEons were still being prosecuted, if indeed he thought of them at all. But by October they were received into his peace. William was more troubled by the General Assembly, which refused to take oaths of allegiance to him and his wife, and actually appointed a date for an assembly without his consent. When he gave it, it was on condition that the members should take the oaths of allegiance. They refused. It was the old deadlock, but William at the last moment withdrew from the imposition of oaths of allegiance. Moved it is said by Mr. Carstairs, cardinal Carstairs, who had been privy to the Ryehouse plot. Under Queen Anne, however, the conscientious preachers were compelled to take the oaths, like Mere laymen. CHAPTER XXVIII DARRION The Scottish Parliament of May to July 1695, held while William was abroad, saw the beginnings of evils for Scotland. The affair of Glencoe was examined into by a commission, headed by Tweeddale, William's commissioner. Several judges sat in it. The report cleared William himself. Dalrymple, it was found, had exceeded his instructions. Hill was exonerated. Hamilton, who commanded the detachment that arrived too late, fled the country. William was asked to send home for trial Duncanson and other butchers who were with his army. The King was also invited to deal with Dalrymple as he thought fit. He thought fit to give Dalrymple an indemnity, and made him by count's stare, with a grant of money, but did not retain him in office. He did not send the subaltern butchers home for trial. Many years later, in 1745, the Mackeans insisted on acting as guards of the house and family of the descendant of Campbell of Glenlion, the guest and murderer of the chief of Glencoe. Perhaps by way of a sob to the Scots, William allowed an act for the establishment of a Scottish East India Company to be passed on June 20, 1695. He afterwards protested that in this matter he had been badly served, probably meaning misinformed. The result was the Darian expedition, a great financial disaster for Scotland and a terrible grievance. Hitherto, since the Union of the Crowns, all Scottish efforts to found trading companies, as in England, had been wrecked on English jealousy. There had always been, and to this New East India Company there was, a rival, a pre-existing English company. Scottish acts for protection of home industries were met by English retaliations in a war of tariffs. Scotland had prohibited the exportation of her raw materials, such as wool, but was cut off from English and other foreign markets for her cloths. The Scots were more successful in secret and unlegalized trading with their kinsmen in the American colonies. The Scottish East India Company's aim was to sell Scottish goods in many places, India, for example, and it was secretly meant to found a factory in Central Mart on the Isthmus of Panama. For these ends capital was withdrawn from the new and unsuccessful manufacturing companies. The great scheme was the idea of William Patterson, born 1658, the far-travelled and financially speculative son of a farmer and dump-free share. He was the projector, or one of the projectors, of the Bank of England of 1694, investing two thousand pounds. He kept the Darien part of his scheme for an East India Company in the background, and it seems that William, when he granted a patent to that company, knew nothing of this design to settle in or near the Panama Isthmus, which was quite clearly within the Spanish sphere of influence. When the philosopher John Locke heard of the scheme, he wished England to steal the idea and seize a port in Darien. It thus appears that he too was unaware that to do so was to inflict an insult and injury on Spain. There is reason to suppose that the grant of the patent to the East India Company was obtained by bribing some Scottish politician or politicians unnamed, though one name is not beyond probable conjecture. In any case, Patterson admitted English capitalists who took up half of the shares as the act of patent permitted them to do. By December William was writing that he had been ill-served by some of my ministers. He had no notice of the details of the act of patent till he had returned to England and found English capitalists and the English Parliament in a fury. The act committed William to interposing his authority if the ships of the company were detained by foreign powers, and gave the adventurers leave to take reparation by force from their assailants. This they later did when they captured in the Firth of Forth an English vessel, the Worcester. On the opening of the books of the new company in London, December 1695, there had been a panic, and a fall of twenty points in the shares of the English East India Company. The English Parliament had addressed William in opposition to the Scots Company. The English subscribers of half the paid-up capital were terrorised and sold out. Later Hamburg investments were cancelled through William's influence. All lowland Scotland hurried to invest, in the dark, for the Darien part of the scheme was practically a secret. It was vaguely announced that there was to be a settlement somewhere, in Africa or the Indies or both. Materials of trade, such as wigs, combs, bibles, fish-hooks and kid-gloves were accumulated. Offices were built, later used as an asylum for popper lunatics. When in July 1697 the secret of Panama came out, the English Council of Trade examined Dampier, the voyage, and September announced that the territory had never been Spain, and that England ought to anticipate Scotland by seizing Golden Island and the port on the mainland. In July 1698 the Council of the Intended Scots Colony was elected, bought three ships and two tenders, and dispatched twelve hundred settlers with two preachers, but with most inadequate provisions, and flower as bad as that paid to assent for the person of Montrose. On October 30th in the Gulf of Darien they found natives who spoke Spanish. They learned that the nearest gold mines were in Spanish hands, and that the chiefs were carrying Spanish insignia of office. By February 1699 the Scots and Spaniards were exchanging shots. Presently a Scottish ship, cruising in search of supplies, was seized by the Spanish at Cartagena. The men lay in irons at Sevilla till 1700. The Spanish complained to William and the Scots seized a merchant ship. The English Governor of Jamaica forbade his people, by virtue of a letter addressed by the English government to all the colonies, to grant supplies to the starving Scots, most of whom sailed away from the colony in June and suffered terrible things by sea and land. Patterson returned to Scotland. A new expedition, which left Leith on May 12th, 1699, found at Darien some Scots and two ships, and remained on the scene, distracted by quarrels till February 1700, when Campbell of Funab, sent with provisions in the speedy return from Scotland, arrived to find the Spaniards assailing the adventurers. He cleared the Spaniards out of their fort in fifteen minutes, but the Colonial Council learned that Spain was launching a small but adequate armada against them. After an honourable resistance the garrison capitulated and marched out with colours flying March 30th. This occurred just when Scotland was celebrating the arrival of the news of Funab's gallant feet of arms. At home the country was full of discontent. William's agent at Hamburg had prevented foreigners from investing in the Scots Company. English colonists had been forbidden to aid the Scottish adventurers. Two hundred thousand pounds, several ships, and many lives had been lost. It is very like 1641, wrote an onlooker, so fierce were the passions that raged against William. The news of the surrender of the colonists increased the indignation. The King refused, November 1700, to gratify the estates by regarding the Darien colony as a legal enterprise. To do so was to incur war with Spain and the anger of his English subjects. Yet the colony had been legally founded in accordance with the terms of the act of patent. While the Scots dwelt on this fact, William replied that the colony being extinct, circumstances were altered. The estates voted that Darien was a lawful colony, and 1701, in an address to the Crown, demanded compensation for the nation's financial losses. William replied with expressions of sympathy and hopes that the two kingdoms would consider a scheme of union. A bill for union brought in through the English lords was rejected by the English commons. There was hardly an alternative between union and war between the two nations. War there would have been had the exiled Prince of Wales been brought up as a Presbyterian. His father, James VII, died a few months before William III passed away on March 7, 1702. Louis XIV acknowledged James, Prince of Wales as James III of England and Ireland and VIII of Scotland, and Anne, the boy's aunt, ascended the throne. As a steward she was not unwelcome to the Jacobites, who hoped for various chances as Anne was believed to be friendly to her nephew. In 1701 was passed an act for preventing wrongous imprisonment and against undue delay in trials. But Neville Paine continued to be untried and illegally imprisoned. Offenders generally could run their letters in protest if kept endurance untried for sixty days. The Revolution of 1688-89, with William's very reluctant concessions, had placed Scotland in entirely new relations with England. Scotland could now no longer be governed by the pen from London. Parliament could no longer be bridled and led, at English will, by the Lords of the Articles. As the religious mainspring of Scottish political life, the domination of the preachers had been weakened by the new settlement of the Kirk, as the country was now set on commercial enterprises, which England everywhere thwarted. It was plain that the two kingdoms could not live together on the existing terms. Union there must be, or conquest, as under Cromwell, yet an English war of conquest was impossible, because it was impossible for Scotland to resist. Never would the country renew, as in the old days, the Alliance of France, for a French alliance meant the acceptance by Scotland of a Catholic king. England, on her side, if union came, was accepting a partner with very poor material resources. As regards agriculture, for example, vast regions were untilled, or tilled only in the strats and fertile spots by the hardy clansmen who could not raise enough votes for their own subsistence and periodically endured famines. In the ill years of William, years of untoward weather, distress had been extreme. In the fertile lowlands that old grievance, insecurity of tenure, and the raising of rents in proportion to improvements made by the tenants, had baffled agriculture. Enclosures were necessary for the protection of the crops, but even if tenants or landlords had the energy or capital to make enclosures, the neighbours destroyed them under cloud of night. The old labour services were still extorted, the tenants' time and strength were not his own. Land was exhausted by absence of fallows and lack of manure. The country was undrained, locks and morasses covered what is now fertile land, and hillsides now in pasture were under the plow. The once prosperous linen trade had suffered from the War of Terrace. The life of the boroughs, political and municipal trading, was little advanced on the medieval model. The independent scots steadily resisted instruction from foreign and English craftsmen in most of the mechanical arts. Laws for the encouragement of trade were pass and bore little fruit. Companies were founded and were ruined by English tariffs and English competition. The most energetic of the population went abroad. Here they prospered in commerce and in military service, while an enormous class of beggars lived on the hospitality of their neighbours at home. In such conditions of inequality it was plain that, if there was to be a union, the adjustment of proportions of taxation and of representation in Parliament would require very delicate handling, while the differences of church government were certain to cause jealousies and oppositions. The Scottish Parliament was not dissolved at William's death, nor did it meet at the time when, legally, it ought to have met. And in a message expressed hopes that it would assent to union and promised to concur in any reasonable scheme for compensating the losers by the Darien scheme. When Parliament met, Queensbury, being commissioner, soon found it necessary, June 30th, 1702, to adjourn. New officers of State were then appointed, and there was a futile meeting between English and Scottish commissioners chosen by the Queen to consider the union. Then came a general election, 1703, which gave birth to the last Scottish Parliament. The commissioner, Queensbury, and the other officers of State, the Court Party, were of course for union. Among them was prominent that wavering Earl of Marr who was so active in promoting the union, and later precipitated the Jacobite Rising of 1715. There were in Parliament the Party of Courtiers, Friends of England and Union, the Party of Cavaliers, that is, Jacobites, and the Country Party, led by the Duke of Hamilton, who was in touch with the Jacobites, but was quite untrustworthy, and much suspected of desiring the Crown of Scotland for himself. Queensbury cosened the Cavaliers by promises of tolerating their Episcopalian religion into voting a bill, recognizing Anne, and then broke his promise. The bill for tolerating worship as practiced by the Episcopalians was dropped, for the commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church declared that such toleration was the establishment of iniquity by law. Queensbury's one aim was to get supply voted, for war with France had begun. But the Country and the Cavalier parties refused supply till an act of security for religion, liberty, law and trade should be passed. The majority decided that, on the death of Anne, the estate should name as King of Scotland a Protestant representative of the House of Stuart, who should not be the successor to the English Crown, save under conditions guaranteeing Scotland as a sovereign state, with frequent parliaments and security for Scottish navigation, colonies, trade and religion, the act of security. It was also decided that landholders and the boroughs should drill and arm their tenants and dependents, if Protestant. Queensbury refused to pass this act of security, supply on the other side was denied, and after a stormy scene Queensbury prorogued Parliament, September 16, 1703. In the excitement Athol had deserted the court party and voted with the majority. He had a great Highland following, he might throw it on the Jacobite side, and the infamous intriguer, Simon Frazier, the Lord Lovett of 1745, came over from France, and betrayed to Queensbury a real or a feigned intrigue of Athol with France, and with the ministers of James VIII called the pretender. Athol was the enemy of Frazier, a canting, astute and unscrupulous Ruffian. Queensbury conceived that in a letter given to him by Lovett, he had irrefutable evidence against Athol as a conspirator, and he allowed Lovett to return to France, where he was promptly imprisoned as a traitor. Athol convinced Dan of his own innocence, and Queensbury fell under ridicule and suspicion, lost his office of commissioner, and was superseded by Tweedale. In England the whole complex affair of Lovett's revelations was known as the Scottish Plot. Hamilton was involved, or feared he might be involved, and therefore favoured the new proposals of the courtiers and English party for placing limits on the prerogative of Anne's successor, whoever he might be. In the estates, July 1704, after months passed in constitutional chicanery, the last year's act of security was passed and touched with the scepter, and the house voted supply for six months. But owing to a fierce dispute on private business, namely the raising of the question, who were the persons accused in England of being engaged in the Scottish Plot, no hint of listening to proposals for union was uttered. Who could propose, as commissioners to arrange union, men who were involved, or in England had been accused of being involved, in the plot? Scotland had not yet consented that whoever succeeded Anne in England should also succeed in Scotland. They retained a means of putting pressure on England, the threat of having a separate king. They had made and were making military preparations, drill once a month, and England took up the gauntlet. The menacing attitude of Scotland was debated on with much heat in the English upper house, November 29, and a bill passed by the commons declared the retaliatory measures which England was ready to adopt. It was at once proved that England could put a much harder pinch on Scotland than Scotland could inflict on England. Scottish drovers were no longer to sell cattle south of the border. Scottish ships trading with France were to be seized. Scottish coals and linen were to be excluded, and regiments of regular troops were to be sent to the border if Scotland did not accept the Hennoberian secession before Christmas 1705. If it came to war, Scotland could expect no help from her ancient ally, France, unless she raised the standard of King James. As he was a Catholic, the Kirk would prohibit this measure, so it was perfectly clear to every plain man that Scotland must accept the Union and make the best bargain she could. In Spring 1705 the new Duke of Argyle, Red John of the Battles, a man of the sword and an accomplished orator, was made commissioner, and of course favored the Union, as did Queensbury and the other officers of State. Friction between the two countries arose in Spring when an Edinburgh jury convicted, and the mob insisted on the execution of, and English Captain Green, whose ship the Worcester had been seized in the fourth by Roderick Mackenzie, secretary of the Scottish East India Company. Green was supposed to have captured and destroyed a ship of the companies, the Speedy Return, which never did return. It was not proved that this ship had been Green's victim, but that he had committed acts of piracy as certain. The hanging of Green increased the animosity of the sister kingdoms. When Parliament met, June 28, 1705, it was a parliament of groups. Tweedale and others, turned out of office in favour of Argyle's government, formed the Flying Squadron, Squadron Belante, voting in whatever way would most annoy the government. Argyle opened by proposing, as did the Queen's message, the instant discussion of the Union, July 3. The House preferred to deliberate on anything else, and the leader of the Jacobites or Cavaliers, Lockhart of Carnwath, a very able, sardonic man, saw that this was, for Jacobite ends, a tactical error. The more time was expended, the more chance had Queensbury to win votes for the Union. Fletcher of Salton, an independent and eloquent patriot and Republican, wasted time by impossible proposals. Hamilton brought forward, and by only two votes lost, a proposal which England would never have dreamed of accepting. Canney Jacobites, however, abstained from voting, and thence Lockhart dates the ruin of his country. Supply at all events was granted, and on that Argyle adjourned. The Queen was to select commissioners of both countries to negotiate the Treaty of Union. Among the commissioners, Lockhart was the only Cavalier, and he was merely to watch the case in the Jacobite interest. The meeting of the two sets of commissioners began at Whitehall on April 16. It was arranged that all proposals, modifications, and results should pass in writing, and secrecy was to be complete. The Scots desired Union with home rule, with a separate parliament. The English would negotiate only on the lines that the Union was to be complete, incorporating, with one parliament for both peoples. By April 25, 1706, the Scots commissioners saw that on this point they must acquiesce. The defeat of the French at Ramelies, May 23, proved that, even if they could have leaned on the French, France was a broken reed. International reciprocity and trade, complete freedom of trade at home and abroad, they did obtain. As England, thanks to William III, with his incessant continental wars, already had a great national debt, of which Scotland owed nothing, and as taxation in England was high, while Scottish taxes under the Union would rise to the same level, and to compensate for the Darien losses, the English granted a pecuniary equivalent, May 10. They also did not raise the Scottish taxes on windows, lights, coal, malt, and salt to the English level that of war taxation. The equivalent was to purchase the Scottish shares in the East India Company, with interest at five percent up to May 1, 1707. That grievance of the shareholders was thus healed. What public debt Scotland owed was to be paid, the equivalent was about four hundred thousand pounds, and any part of the money unspent was to be given to improve fisheries and manufacturers. The number of Scottish members of the British Parliament was fixed at forty-five. On this point the Scots felt that they were hardly used. The number of their elected representatives of peers in the lords was sixteen. Scotland retained her courts of law, the feudal jurisdictions which gave to Argyle and others almost princely powers were retained, and Scottish procedures and trials continued to vary much from the English model. Appeals from the Court of Session had previously been brought before the Parliament of Scotland, henceforth they were to be heard by the judges, Scots and English, in the British House of Lords. On July twenty-third, 1706, the treaty was completed. On October third the Scottish Parliament met to debate on it, with Queensbury as commissioner. Harley, the English minister, sent down the author of Robinson Crusoe to watch, spy, argue, persuade and secretly report, and to foes letters contain the history of the session. The parties in Parliament were thus variously disposed. The Cavaliers, including Hamilton, had been approached by Louis XIV and King James the Pretender, but had not committed themselves. Queensbury always knew every risky step taken by Hamilton, who began to take several, but in each case received a friendly warning which he dared not disregard. At the opposite pole the Cameroonians and other extreme Presbyterians load the Union, and at last, November-December, a scheme for the Cameroonians and the clans of Angus and Perthshire to meet in arms in Edinburgh and clear out the Parliament caused much alarm. But Hamilton, before the arrangement came to a head, was terrorized, and the intentions of the Cameroonians, as far as their records prove, had never been officially ratified by their leaders. There was plenty of popular rioting during the session, but Argyle rode into Edinburgh at the head of the horse guards, and Levin held all the gates with drafts from the garrison of the castle. The commissioners of the General Assembly made protests on various points, but were pacified after the security of the Kirk had been guaranteed. Finally, Hamilton prepared a parliamentary mine, which would have blown the Treaty of Union sky high, but on the night when he should have appeared in the house and set the match to his petard he had toothache. This was the third occasion on which he had deserted the Cavaliers. The opposition fell to pieces. The squadron Volante and the majority of the peers supported the bill, which passed. On January 16, 1707, the Treaty of Union was touched with the scepter, and there is the end of an old sang, said Seafeld. In May 1707 a solemn service was held at St. Paul's to commemorate the Union. There was much friction in the first year of the Union over excise men and tax collectors. Smuggling began to be a recognized profession. Meanwhile, since 1707, a Colonel Hook had been acting in Scotland, nominally in Jacobite, really rather in French interests. Hook's intrigues were in part betrayed by Defoe's agent, Kerr of Kursland, an amusing impudent nave, and were thwarted by jealousies of Argyle and Hamilton. By deceptive promises, for he was himself deceived into expecting the aid of the Ulster Protestants, Hook induced Louis XIV to send five men of war, twenty-one frigates, and only two transports, to land James in Scotland, March 1708. The equinoctial gales and the severe illness of James, who insisted on sailing, delayed the start. The men on the outlook for the fleet were intoxicated, and Forbin, the French commander, observing English ships of war coming towards the Firth of Fourth, fled, refusing James's urgent entreaties to be landed anywhere on the coast, March 24. It was believed that, had he landed only with a valet, the discontented country would have risen for their native king. In Parliament, 1710 to 1711, the Cavalier Scottish members, by Tory's support, secured the release from prison of a reverend Mr. Greenshields, an Episcopalian who prayed for Queen Anne, indeed, but had used the liturgy. The creatures were also galled by the imposition on them of an abjuration oath, compelling them to pray for proletical Queen Anne. Lay patronage of livings was also restored, 1712, after many vicissitudes, and this thorn rankled in the Kirk, causing ever widening strife for more than a century. The imposition of a malt tax produced so much discontent that even Argyle, with all the Scottish members of Parliament, was eager for the repeal of the Act of Union, and proposed it in the House of Peers, where it was defeated by a small majority. In 1712, when about to start on a mission to France, Hamilton was slain in a duel by Lord Mohan. According to a statement of Lockhart's, Cavaliers were to look for the best from Hamilton's mission. It is fairly clear that he was to bring over James in disguise to England, as in Thackeray's novel, Esmond. But the sort of Mohan broke the Jacobite plans. Other hopes expired when Bollingbroke and Harley quarreled, and Queen Anne died, August 1, 1714. The best cause in Europe was lost, cried Bishop Atterbury, for want of spirit. He would have proclaimed James as king, but no man supported him, and the elector of Hanover, George I, peacefully accepted the throne. End of CHAPTER XXVIII. For a year the Scottish Jacobites, and Bollingbroke, who fled to France and became James's minister, mismanaged the affairs of that most unfortunate of princes. By February 1715 the Earl of Mar, who had been distrusted and disgraced by George I, was arranging with the clans for a rising, while aid from Charles XII of Sweden was expected from March to August 1715. It is notable that Charles had invited Dean Swift to visit his court, when Swift was allied with Bollingbroke and Oxford. From the author of Gulliver, Charles no doubt hoped to get a trustworthy account of their policy. The fated rising of 1715 was occasioned by the Duke of Barracks advised to James that he must set forth to Scotland or lose his honour. The prince, therefore, acting hastily on news which, two or three days later, proved to be false, in a letter to Mar, fixed August 10th for a rising. The orders were at once countermanded, when news proving their futility was received, but James's messenger, Alan Cameron, was detained on the road, and Mar, not waiting for James's answer to his own last dispatch, advising Delay, left London for Scotland without a commission. On August 27th held an assembly of the chiefs, and still without a commission from James, raised the standard of the King on September 6th. The folly of Mar was consummate. He knew that Ormond, the hope of the English Jacobites, had deserted his post and had fled to France. Meanwhile Louis XIV was dying. He died on August 30th, and the regent, Dorleon, at the utmost, would only connive at, not assist, James's enterprise. Everything was contrary. Everywhere was ignorance and confusion. Lord Drummond's hopeful scheme for seizing Edinburgh Castle, September 8th, was quieted, pulverous, excejujective. The gentlemen were powdering their hair, drinking at a tavern, and bungled the business. The folly of government offered a chance. In Scotland they had but two thousand regulars at Stirling, where fourth bridles the wild Highlandmen. Mar, who promptly occupied Perth, though he had some twelve thousand broadswords, continued till the end to make Perth his headquarters. Amontros, a Dundee, even a Prince Charles, would have masked Argyle at Stirling and seized Edinburgh. In October 21st to November 3rd, Barrick, while urging James to sail, absolutely refused to accompany him. The plans of Ormond for a descent on England were betrayed by Colonel Maclean in French service November 4th. In disguise and narrowly escaping from murderous agents of stair, British Ambassador to France, on his road, James journeyed to Sainte-Malo, November 8th. In Scotland the McGregors made a futile attempt on Dumbarton Castle, while Glengarry and the McLeans advanced on Inverary Castle, negotiated with Argyle's brother, the Earl of Ishae, and marched back to Strathfillin. In Northumberland Forrester and Derwentwater, with some Catholic fox-hunters, in Galloway the Pacific Viscount Kenmore, cruised vaguely about and joined forces. Macintosh of Borlem, by a well-concealed movement, carried a Highland detachment of sixteen hundred men across the Firth of Forth by boats, October 12th to 13th, with orders to join Forrester and Kenmore and arouse the border. But on approaching Edinburgh, Macintosh found Argyle with five hundred dragoons ready to welcome him. Mar took no advantage of Argyle's absence from Stirling, and Macintosh, when Argyle returned dither, joined Kenmore and Forrester, occupied Kelso, and marched into Lancashire. The Jacobite forces were pitifully ill-supplied. They had very little ammunition. The great charge against Brollingbroke was that he sent none from France. They seemed to have had no idea that powder could be made by the art of man. They were torn by jealousies, and dispirited by their observation of Mars' incompetence. We cannot pursue in detail the story of the futile campaign. On November 12th the mixed Highland, Lowland, and English command found itself cooped up in Preston, and after a very gallant defense of the town the English leaders surrendered to the king's mercy, after arranging an armistice which made it impossible for Macintosh to cut his way through the English ranks and retreat to the north. About sixteen hundred prisoners were taken. Durwentwater and Kenmore were later executed. Forrester and Nithsdale made escapes. Charles Wogan, a kinsman of the chivalrous Wogan of 1650, and Macintosh, with six others, forced their way out of Newgate Prison on the night before their trial. Wogan was to make himself heard of again. Mar had thrown away his Highlanders, with little ammunition and without orders, on a perfectly aimless and hopeless enterprise. Meanwhile he himself at Perth had been doing nothing, while in the north Simon Frazier, Lord Lovett, escaped from his French prison, raised his clan and took the castle of Inverness for King George. He thus earned pardon for his private and public crimes, and he lived to ruin the Jacobite cause and lose his own head in 1745 to 46. While the north, Rosscher and Inverness, were daunted and thwarted by the success of Lovett, Mar led his whole force from Perth to Dunblane, apparently in search of a Ford overforth. His phrasers and many of his gordons deserted on November 11. On November 12, Mar, at Ardok, the site of an old Roman camp, learned that Argyle was marching through Dunblane to meet him. Next day Mar's force occupied the crest of rising ground on the wide swell of Sheriffmure. His left was all disorderly, horse mixed with foot. His right, with the fighting clans, was well ordered, but the nature of the ground hid the two wings of the army from each other. On the right the McDonald's and McLean saw Clan Ronald Fall, and on Glengarry's cry, Vengeance to-day, they charged with the claymores swept away the regulars of Argyle, as at Kilicranky and the Preston Pans. But as the clans pursued and slew, their officers whispered that their own center and left were broken and flying. Argyle had driven them to Allenwater. His force, returning, came within close range of the victorious right of Mar. Oh, for one hour of Dundee, cried Gordon of Glengbucket, but neither party advanced to the shock. Argyle retired safely to Dunblane, while Mar deserted his guns and powder carts and hurried to Perth. He had lost the gallant young Earl of Strathmore and the brave Clan Ronald. On Argyle's side his brother Ishe was wounded, and the Earl of Forfour was slain. Though it was a drawn battle it proved that Mar could not move. His forces began to scatter. Huntley was said to have behaved ill. It was known that Dutch auxiliaries were to reinforce Argyle, and men began to make terms of surrender. Huntley rode off to his own country, and on December 22nd, old style, James landed at Peterhead. James had no lack of personal courage. He had charged again and again at Malplacad with the household cavalry of Louis XIV, and he had encountered great dangers of assassination on his way to Scentmallow. But constant adversity had made him despondent and resigned, and he saw facts as they really were with a sad lucidity. When he arrived in his kingdom the Whig clans of the North had daunted Seaforth's MacKenzie's, while in the South Argyle, with his Dutch and other fresh reinforcements, had driven Mar's men out of Fife. Riding to Bowlingbroke, James described the situation. Mar, with scarcely any ammunition, was facing Argyle with eleven thousand men. The North was held enforced by the Whig clans, MacKenzie's, Ross's, Monroe's, and Frazier's. Deep snow alone delayed the advance of Argyle, now stimulated by the hostile Cadogan, Marborough's, favorite, and it was perfectly plain that all was lost. For the head of James one hundred thousand pounds was offered by Hanoverian chivalry. He was suffering from fever and awe. The Spanish gold that had at last been sent to him was lost at sea off Dundee, and it is no wonder that James, never gay, presented to his troops a disconsolate and discouraging aspect. On January twenty-ninth his army evacuated Perth. James wept at the order to burn the villages on Argyle's line of March, and made a futile effort to compensate the people injured. From Montrose, February third to fourteenth, he wrote for aid to the French regent, but next day urged by Mar and unknown to his army, he with Mar set sail for France. This evasion was doubtless caused by a circumstance unusual in warfare. There was a price of one hundred thousand pounds on James's head. Moreover, his force had not one day's supply of powder. Marshall Keith, brother of the Earl Marshall, who retreated to the Isles, says that perhaps one day's supply of powder might be found at Aberdeen. Nevertheless, the fighting clans were eager to meet Argyle and would have sold their lives at high price. They scattered to their western fastnesses. The main political result, apart from executions and the passing of forfeited estates into the management of that noted economist Sir Richard Steele and other commissioners, was the disgrace of Argyle. He, who with a petty force had saved Scotland, was represented by Cadogan and his political enemies as dillatory and disaffected. The Duke lost all his post, and in 1716, when James had hopes from Sweden, Isle, Argyle's brother, was negotiating with Jacobite agents. James was creating him a peer of England. In Scotland much indignation was aroused by the sending of Scottish prisoners of war out of the kingdom for trial, namely to Carlyle and by other severities. The Union had never been more unpopular. The country looked on itself as conquered and had no means of resistance. For James, now residing at Avignon, was a Catholic, and any insults and injuries from England were more tolerable than a restored nationality with a Catholic king. Into the Jacobite hopes and intrigues, the eternal web, which from 1689 to 1763 was ever being woven and broken, it is impossible here to enter, though in the now published Stuart papers the details are well known. James was driven from Avignon to Italy, to Spain, finally to live a pensioner at Rome. The luckless attempt of the Earl Marshall, Keith, his brother, and Lord George Murray, brother of the Duke of Athel, to invade Scotland on the west with a small Spanish force, was crushed on June 10th, 1719, in the pass of Glenshield. Two or three months later James, returning from Spain, married the fair and hapless Princess Clementina Sobiesca, whom Charles Wogan, in an enterprise truly romantic, had rescued from prison at Innsbruck, and conveyed across the Alps. From this wedding, made wretched by the disappointment of the bride with her melancholy lord, always busied with political secrets from which she was excluded, was born, on December 31st, 1720, Charles Edward Stuart, from his infancy the hope of the Jacobite party, from his cradle surrounded by the intrigues, the jealousies, the adulations of an exiled court, and the quarrels of Protestant and Catholics, Irish, Scottish, and English. Thus among changes of tutors and ministers, as the discovery or suspicion of treachery, the bigotry of Clementina, and the pressure of other necessities might permit, was that child reared, whose name, at least, has received the crown of Scottish affection and innumerable tributes of Scottish song. End of CHAPTER XXXI of a short history of Scotland by Andrew Lang. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. CHAPTER XXXI. The Argathelians and the Squadron. Leaving the fortunes of the Jacobite party at their lowest ebb, and turning to the domestic politics of Scotland after 1719, we find that if it be happiness to have no history, Scotland had much reason to be content. There was but a dull personal strife between the faction of Argyle and his brother Islay, called the Argathelians, from the Latinized Argathelia, or Argyle, and the other faction known since the Union as the Squadron Volante, or Flying Squadron, who professed to be patriotically independent. As to Argyle, he had done all that man might do for George I. But as we saw, the reports of Cadogan and the jealousy of George, who is said to have deemed Argyle too friendly with his detested heir, caused the disgrace of the Duke in 1716, and the Squadron held the spoils of office. But in February to April 1719, George reversed his policy, heaved Argyle with favours, made him, as Duke of Greenwich, a peer of England, and gave him the highest stewardship of the household. At this time all the sixteen representative peers of Scotland favoured, for various reasons of their own, a proposed peerage bill. The Prince of Wales might, when he came to the throne, swamp the lords by large new creations in his own interest, and the bill laid down that, henceforth, not more than six peers, exclusive of members of the royal family, should be created by any sovereign, while in place of sixteen representatives Scotland should have twenty-five permanent peers. From his new hatred of the Prince of Wales, Argyle favoured the bill, as did the others of the sixteen of the moment, because they would be among the permanencies. The Scottish Jacobite peers, not representatives, and the commons of both countries opposed the bill. The election of a Scottish representative peer at this juncture led to negotiations between Argyle and Lockhart as leaders of the suffering Jacobites. But terms were not arrived at. The government secured a large-wig majority in a general election, 1722, and Walpole began his long tenure of office. ENCLOSURE RIOTS In 1724 there were some popular discontents. Enclosures, as we saw, had scarcely been known in Scotland. When they were made, men, women, and children took pleasure in destroying them under cloud of night. Enclosures might keep a man's cattle on his own ground, keep other men's off it, and secure for the farmer his own manure. That good Jacobite, Macintosh of Borlum, who in 1715 led the Highlanders to Preston, in 1729 wrote a book recommending enclosures and plantations. But when in 1724 the lords of Galloway and Dumfrieshire anticipated and acted on his plan, which in this case involved evictions of very indolent and ruinous farmers, the tenants rose. Multitudes of levelers destroyed the loose stone dykes and slaughtered cattle. They had already been passive resistors of rent. The military were called in. Women were in the forefront of the brawls, which were not quieted till the middle of 1725, when lords stared, made an effort to introduce manufacturers. MULT RIOTS Other disturbances began in a resolution of the House of Commons, at the end of 1724, not to impose a malt tax equal to that of England. This had been successfully resisted in 1713, but to levy an additional sixpence on every barrel of ale, and to remove the bounties on exported grain. At the Union Scotland had, for the first time, been exempted from the malt tax, specially devised to meet the expense of the French War of that date. Now, in 1724 to 1725, Scotland was up in arms to resist the attempt to rob a poor man of his beer. But Walpole could put force on the Scottish members of Parliament, a parcel of low people that could not subsist, says Lockhart, without their board wages. Walpole threatened to withdraw the ten guineas hitherto paid weekly by the government to those legislators. He offered to drop the sixpence on beer and put threepence on every bushel of malt, a half of the English tax. On June 23, 1725, the tax was to be exacted. The consequence was an attack on the military by the mob of Glasgow, who wrecked the house of their member of Parliament, Campbell of Shawfield. Some of the assailants were shot. General Wade and the Lord Advocate, Forbes of Culloden, marched a force on Glasgow. The magistrates of the town were imprisoned but released on bail, while in Edinburgh the master brewers, murdered by the court of session to raise the price of their ale, struck for a week. Somewhere imprisoned, others were threatened or cajoled and deserted their union. The one result was that the chief of the squadron, the Duke of Roxborough, lost his secretary ship for Scotland, and Argyle's brother, Islay, with the resolute forms of Culloden, became practically the governors of the country. The secretarieship, indeed, was for a time abolished, but Islay practically wielded the power that had so long been in the hands of the secretary as an agent of the court. The Highlands The clans had not been disarmed after 1715. Moreover, six thousand muskets had been brought in during the affair that ended at Glenshield in 1719. General Wade was commissioned in 1724 to examine and report on the Highlands. Lovett had already sent in a report. He pointed out that lowlanders paid blackmail for protection to Highland raiders, and that independent companies of Highlanders, paid by government, had been useful, but were broken up in 1717. What Lovett wanted was a company and pay for himself. Wade represented the force of the clans as about twenty-two thousand claymores, half-wig, the extreme north, and the cambels, half-jacobite. The commandants of Fort should have independent companies. Cavalry should be quartered between Inverness and Perth, and quarter- sessions should be held at Fort William and Ruthven in Badanock. In 1725 Wade disarmed Seaforth's clan, the Mackenzie's, easily, for Seaforth then in exile was on bad terms with James, and wished to come home with a pardon. Glen Gary, Clan Randall, Glencoe, Appen, Lockheal, Clan Vorlich, and the Gordons affected submission, but only handed over two thousand rusty weapons of every sort. Lovett did obtain an independent company later withdrawn, with results. The clans were by no means disarmed, but Wade did from 1725 to 1736 construct his famous military roads and bridges, interconnecting the forts. The death of George I, June 11, 1727, induced James to hurry to Lorraine and communicate with Lockhart. But there was nothing to be done. Clementina had discredited her husband even in Scotland, much more in England by her hysterical complaints, and her hatred of every man employed by James inflamed the petty jealousies and feuds among the exiles of his court. No man whom he could select would have been approved of by the party. To the bishops of the persecuted Episcopalian remnant, quarreling over details of ritual called the Usages, James vainly recommended for barons in love. Lockhart, disgusted with the clergy and siding with Clementina against her husband, believed that some of the wrangling churchmen betrayed the channel of his communications with his king, 1727. Islay gave Lockhart a hint to disappear, and he sailed from Scotland for Holland on April 8, 1727. Since James dismissed Bollingbroke, every one of his ministers was suspected by one faction or another of the party as a traitor. Adderbury denounced Mar, Lockhart denounced Hay, titular Earl of Inverness, Clementina told feminine tales for which even the angry Lockhart could find no evidence. James was the butt of every slanderous tongue, but absolutely nothing against his moral character or his efforts to do his best or his tolerance and lack of suspiciousness can be wrung from documents. By 1734 the elder of James's two sons, Prince Charles, was old enough to show courage and to thrust himself under fire in the Siege of Gaeta, where his cousin, the Duke Deliria, was besieging the imperialists. He won golden opinions from the army, but was already too strong for his tutors, Murray and Sir Thomas Sheridan. He had both Protestant and Catholic governors. Between them he learned to spell excrubly in three languages and sat loose to Catholic doctrines. In January 35 died his mother, who had found refuge from her troubles in devotion. The grief of James and of the boys was acute. In 1736 Lovett was looking towards the rising son of Prince Charles, who was accused by a witness of enabling John Roy Stewart, Jacobite and poet, to break prison at Inverness, and of sending by him a message of devotion to James, from whom he expected a dukedom. Lovett therefore lost his sheriff's ship and his independent company and tried to attach himself to Argyle when the affair of the Porchus Riot caused a coldness between Argyle and the English government, 1736 to 1737. The affair of Porchus is so admirably well described in the heart of Midlothian, and recent research has thrown so little light on the mystery, if mystery there were, that a brief summary of the tale may suffice. In the spring of 1736 two noted smugglers, Wilson and Robertson, were condemned to death. They had, while in prison, managed to widen the space between the window-bars of their cell, and would have escaped, but Wilson, a very stoutly built man, went first and stuck in the aperture, so that Robertson had no chance. The pair determined to attack their guards in church, whereas usual they were to be paraded and preached at on the Sunday preceding their execution. Robertson leaped up and fled, with the full symphony of a large and interested congregation, while Wilson grasped a guard with each hand and a third with his teeth. Thus Robertson got clean away, to Holland, it was said, while Wilson was to be hanged on April 14. The acting lieutenant of the town guard, an unpopular body, mainly Highlanders, was John Porchus, famous as a golfer, but by the account of his enemies notorious as a brutal and callous ruffian. The crowd in the grass market was great, but there was no attempt at a rescue. The mob, however, threw large stones at the guard, who fired, killing or wounding as usual harmless spectators. The case for Porchus, as reported in the state trials, was that the attack was dangerous, that the plan was to cut down and resuscitate Wilson, that Porchus did not order but tried to prevent the firing, and that neither at first nor in a later skirmish at the West bow did he fire himself. There was much cross-swearing at the trial of Porchus, July 20, the jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to be hanged on September 8. A petition from him to Queen Carolyn, George II was abroad, drew attention to palpable discrepancies in the hostile evidence. Both parties in Parliament backed his application, and on August 28 a delay of justice for six weeks was granted. Indignation was intense. An intended attack on the toll booth, where Porchus lay, had been matter of rumour three days earlier. The prisoners should have been placed in the castle. At ten p.m. on the night of September 7 the magistrates heard that boys were beating a drum and ordered the town guard under arms, but the mob, who had already secured the town's gates, disarmed the veterans. Mr. Lindsay, lately provost, escaped by the Potter Row gate, near the old fatal Kerker Field, and warned General Moyle in the castle. But Moyle could not introduce soldiers without a warrant. Before a warrant could arrive the mob had burned down the door of the toll booth, captured Porchus, who was hiding up the chimney, carried him to the grass market and hanged him to a dire's pole. The only apparent sign that persons of rank above that of the mob were concerned, was the leaving of a guinea in a shop once they took the necessary rope. The magistrates had been guilty of gross negligence. The mob was merely a resolute mob, but Islay in London suspected that the political foes of the government were engaged, or that the Cameroonians who had been renewing the covenants were concerned. Islay hurried to Edinburgh, where no evidence could be extracted. The High Flyers of our Scottish Church, he wrote, have made this infamous murder a point of conscience. All the lower rank of the people who have distinguished themselves by the pretensions of superior sanctity speak of this murder as the hand of God doing justice. They went by the precedent of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, it appears. In the lords, February 1737, a bill was passed for disabling the provost, one Wilson, for public employment, destroying the town charter, abolishing the town guard, and throwing down the gate of the Netherbowl. Argyle opposed the bill. In the Commons all Scottish members were against it. Walpole gave way. Wilson was dismissed and a fine of two thousand pounds was levied and presented to the widow of porches. An act commending preachers to read monthly for a year in church, a proclamation bidding their hearers aid the cause of justice against the murderers, was an insult to the Kirk, from an assembly containing bishops. It is said that at least half of the ministers disobeyed with impunity. It was impossible, of course, to evict half the preachers in the country. Argyle now went into opposition against Walpole, and at least listened to Keith, later the great Field Marshal of Frederick the Great, and brother of the exiled Earl Marshal. In 1737 the Jacobites began to stir again. A committee of five chiefs and lords was formed to manage their affairs. John Murray of Broughton went to Rome and lost his heart to Prince Charlie, now a tall, handsome lad of seventeen, with large brown eyes, and when he pleased a very attractive manor. To Murray, more than to any other man, was due the rising of 1745. Meanwhile in secular affairs Scotland showed nothing more remarkable than the increasing dislike strengthened by Argyle of Walpole's government. CHAPTER 32. THE FIRST SUSSESSION For long we have heard little of the Kirk, which between 1720 and 1740 passed through a cycle of internal storms. She had been little vexed either during her years of triumph or defeat by heresy or schism. But now the doctrines of Antoinette, Bourignan, a French lady mystic, reached Scotland, and won the sympathies of some students of divinity, including the Reverend John Simpson, of an old clerical family which had been notorious since the Reformation for the turbulence of its members. In 1714 and again in 1717, Mr. Simpson was acquitted by the assembly on charges of being a Jesuit, a Sacconian, and an Armenian, but was warned against a tendency to attribute too much to natural reason. In 1726 to 1929 he was accused of minimizing the doctrines of the creed of St. Athanasius, and tending to the Arian heresy, lately raked out of hell, said the Kirk Session of Portmoke, 1725, addressing the sympathetic Presbytery of Kirkaldi. At the assembly of 1726 that Presbytery, with others, assailed Mr. Simpson, who was in bad health, and could talk of nothing but the Council of Neese. A committee, including Mars' brother, Lord Grange, who took such strong measures with his wife, Lady Grange, forcibly translating her to the Isle of St. Kilda, inquired into the views of Mr. Simpson's own Presbytery, that of Glasgow. This Presbytery cross-examined Mr. Simpson's pupils, and Mr. Simpson observed that the proceedings were an unruful work of darkness. Moreover Mr. Simpson was of the party of the squadron, while his assailants were argothillions. A large majority of the assembly gave the verdict that Mr. Simpson was a heretic. Finally, though in 1728 his answers to questions would have satisfied good St. Athanasius, Mr. Simpson found himself in the ideal position of being released from his academic duties, but confirmed in his salary. The lenient good nature of this decision, with some other grievances, set fire to a mine which blew the Kirk in twain. The Presbytery of Arcturidr had set up a kind of standard of their own, the Arcturidr Creed, which included this formula. It is not sound or orthodox to teach that we must forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ, and in stating us in the Covenant with God. The General Assembly condemned this part of the Creed of Arcturidr. The Reverend Mr. Hugg, looking for weapons and defence of Arcturidr, published part of a forgotten book of 1646, The Marrow of Modern Divinity. The work appears to have been written by a speculative hairdresser and independent. A copy of the Marrow was found by the famous Mr. Boston of Ettrick in the Cottage of a Paritioner. From the Marrow he sucked much advantage. Its doctrines were grateful to the sympathisers with Arcturidr, and the republication of the book rent the Kirk. In 1720 a committee of the General Assembly condemned a set of propositions in the Marrow as tending to antinomianism, the doctrine that the saints cannot sin, professed by trusty Tompkins in Woodstock. But as in the case of the five condemned propositions of Genesius, the Arcturidr party denied that heresies could be found in the Marrow. It was the old quarrel between faith and works. The clerical practitioners in favor of the Marrow were rebuked by the Assembly, May 21st, 1722. They protested against a merely human majority in the majority they appealed to the Word of God, to which the majority also appealed, and there was a period of passion but schism had not yet arrived. The five or six friends of the Marrow really disliked moral preaching, as opposed to weekly discourses on the legal technicalities of justification, sanctification and adoption. They were also opposed to the working of the Act which, in 1712, restored lay patronage. If the Assembly enforced the law of the land in this matter, and it did, the Assembly sinned against the divine right of congregations to elect their own preachers. Men of this way of thinking were led by the Reverend Mr. Ebenezer Erskine, a poet who, in 1714, addressed an ode to George I. He therein denounced subverting patronage and the woeful dubious abjuration which gave the clergy ground for speculation. But a Jacobite song struck the same note, let not the abjuration impose upon the nation, and George was deaf to the muse of Mr. Erskine. In 1732, 1733, Mr. Erskine, in sermons concerning patronage, defended the Assembly, would not apologize, appeared to a lay reader to claim direct inspiration, and with three other brethren constituted himself and them into a Presbytery. Among their causes of separation, or rather of deciding that the Caracad separated from them, was the salary of emeritus Professor Simpson. The new Presbytery declared that the covenants were still and were eternally binding on Scotland. In fact, these preachers were platonically for going back to the old ecclesiastical claims with the old war of church and state. They naturally denounced the act of 1736, which abolished the burning of witches. After a period of long-suffering patience and conciliating efforts, in 1740 the Assembly deposed the sisseters. In 1747 a party among the sisseters excommunicated Mr. Erskine and his brother, one of those who handed Mr. Erskine over to Satan if the old formula were retained, was his son-in-law. The feuds of burgers and anti-burgers, persons who were ready to take or refused to take the Burgess Oath, new lights and old lights, lasted very long and had evil consequences. As the populace loved the headiest doctrines, they preferred preachers in proportion as they leaned towards the marrow, while lay patrons preferred candidates of the opposite views. The Assembly must either keep the law and back the patrons, or break the law and cease to be a state church. The corruption of patronage was often notorious on one side, on the other the desirability of burning witches and the belief and the eternity of the covenants were articles of faith, and such articles were not to the taste of the moderates, educated clergymen of the new school. Thus arose the War of the High Flyers and moderates within the Kirk, a war conducing to the great disruption of 1843, in which gallant little arch-turretor was again in the foremost line. End of chapter thirty-two, read by Cibela Denton. 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