LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

nation had been all along on the side of the Resolutioners. Much as the character and religious views of Charles were to their distaste, the principle of the Covenant was for a king, and it was by the principle of the Covenant that the Scottish nation stood. The stern and narrow bigotry of the Remonstrants, whom their short taste of power had made of course more fanatical and more quarrelsome than ever, had almost succeeded in forcing the more moderate Presbyterians into the arms of the Royalists. A little tolerance, a little tact on the English side would probably have cemented the alliance. But it was not to be.

      It is important to remember this. The extreme party with which Claverhouse had to deal no more represented the Scottish nation than the Irishmen who follow Mr. Parnell's call in the House of Commons represent their nation now, or than men like Napper Tandy and Wolfe Tone represented it a century ago. It seems still a common belief that Claverhouse and his troopers were sent to force upon a sober, patient, God-fearing nation a religion and a king that they abhorred. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The large majority of the Scottish nation was as eager to welcome Charles as the old squires who had lost their fortunes for his father, or the young bloods who hoped to find fortunes under the son. The narrow and blatant form of religion professed by the extreme party was as repulsive to the bulk of their countrymen as to the King himself.

      These men were a remnant of the old Remonstrants of the Mauchline Convention. They had originally, as we have seen, looked to Argyle as their leader; but when Argyle ranged himself on the side of the young King there were some among them who would not follow him. These maintained, and so far they were unquestionably right, that the "young man Charles Stuart" was, for all his protestations and oaths, as much at heart a Malignant as his father; and that those who pretended to believe him were playing the Kirk and the Covenant false. When Cromwell marched into Scotland to win the battle of Dunbar these men had formed themselves into a separate party under Colonel Archibald Strachan, an able soldier who commanded that division of Leslie's army which had defeated Montrose in Rossshire. Strachan's design seems to have been to stand aloof for the present from either side; but from some not very intelligible cause he fell into disgrace with his party, and this is said to have so preyed upon his mind as to have caused his death. From that time the Wild Westland Whigs, as they began now to be called, had no ostensible leader. They withdrew sullenly to their own homes, contenting themselves during the remaining years of the Commonwealth with protesting against everybody and everything outside their own narrow circle. They must not be confounded with the general body of the Remonstrants, between whom and the Resolutioners Cromwell had to keep the balance. They were a people apart. Throughout the wild hill-districts of the Western Lowlands they preached their fierce crusade against all who were not prepared to stand by the spirit of the Covenant as they chose to interpret it. The toleration they demanded they would not give. No man should be free to worship God as he pleased: every man must worship Him in the way which seemed good to them, and in that way only. The moderate Presbyterians were as hateful to them as Charles himself and all his bishops; and they in their turn were as obnoxious to the majority of the Scottish nation as to the English Government. Cleric and layman alike was weary of the unending squabbles that had distracted the Church of Scotland since the days of Knox. They wished for peace; and no peace was possible so long as an ignorant and noisy minority would suffer it only at their own price.

      One other point should also be remembered. It has been the custom to excuse the cruelties of the Covenanters, when they could not be denied, as the acts of men goaded into madness by years of persecution. This excuse will hardly serve. It might, indeed, serve to explain the murder of Sharp and the savage deeds of such men as Hamilton and Burley; but long before that time the Scottish fanatic had proved himself a match in ferocity for the bloodiest Malignant of them all. After Philiphaugh one hundred Irish prisoners were shot in cold blood, while a minister of the Covenanting Church stood by, reiterating in savage glee, "The wark goes bonnily on." About the same time eighty women and children were in one day flung over the bridge at Linlithgow for the crime of having been followers of the camp of Montrose. In 1647 three hundred of the Macdonalds who held a fortified post on a hill in Kintire surrendered at discretion to David Leslie. It is said that Leslie would have let them go but for his chaplain, John Nave. Borrowing the words of Samuel, "What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" in a long and fiery harangue this man of God exhorted the conquerors to finish their work, and threatened their captain with the curse of Saul who spared the Amalekites. The prisoners were butchered to a man.[9]

      If, then, it be but a delusion of later times that Scotland could at the Restoration have been conciliated into accepting a moderate form of Episcopacy, it is at least clear that there was at that time a strong party in the country anxious for a compromise between the two Churches, and willing to make all reasonable advances towards one. Unfortunately the first move on both sides was of a nature to make all chances of a compromise impossible.

      Charles had conceived a violent dislike to Presbyterianism, and with his experiences of it the dislike was not unnatural. It was not, he told Burnet, a religion for gentlemen, and he found few among his court to contradict him. Scarcely had he settled himself in his capital when the Presbyterians were upon him. Sharp had already been some months in London as ambassador of the moderate party, the party of the old Resolutioners. But an easy way of reconciling Sharp's conscience was soon found. It is not precisely clear when the bargain was struck which was to convert the chosen champion of the Presbyterian Church into an archbishop, but struck it was, and in no long time. He had by Monk's advice visited Charles at Breda, and some suppose that the first interview completed the transformation. If so, he managed to delude his party very skilfully. His letters to the Assembly, though the light of subsequent events enables us to translate them more clearly than was possible at the time, were full of wise counsel, of apparently honest confessions of the many difficulties he foresaw in the way, and of protestations of fidelity and firmness which were no less implicitly believed. "I told him," said his colleague Robert Douglas, a man of very different stamp, when Sharp went up to London later for his ordination, "I told him the curse of God would be on him for his treacherous dealing; and that I may speak my heart of this man, I profess I did no more suspect him in reference to Prelacy than I did myself."[10]

      Meanwhile the extreme party had not been idle. It will be perhaps most convenient henceforth to distinguish them as Covenanters: to call them Whigs, as Burnet and other historians of the time call them, would not convey to modern ears the significance it had for their contemporaries. Even those stern and unbending Tories of whom Mr. Gladstone was once the spokesman have long ceased to regard the men who are still sometimes called Whigs as the most fanatical members of the body politic. It would be no mere fanciful application of modern terms to distinguish the two parties of the Scottish Church as Liberals and Radicals; but it will for many reasons be best henceforth to write of them as Presbyterians and Covenanters.

      The Covenanters, then, had not been idle. Shortly after the Restoration they had, through a deputation of their elders and ministers, called upon their brethren of the Church to unite with them in an address to the King, praying him, as a member of the Covenant with themselves, to remember his obligations to that sacred institution and zealously to prosecute its blessed work in all his three kingdoms. Toleration in things religious was especially denounced as a vast mischief disguised under the specious pretence of liberty for tender consciences. Schismatics were to be stamped out as sternly as Papists and Prelatists; and by Schismatics were meant all men, members of their own Church no less than of others, who ventured to differ from them on any point of doctrine whatsoever.

      The Committee of Estates, which had resumed its sittings, did not like the job. They called the deputation a private meeting of some protesting ministers, and clapped the leaders into prison.

      A government had now been formed for Scotland. Middleton was Lord High Commissioner, a soldier of fortune who had been raised to the peerage for the occasion. He was also named commander-in-chief of the forces and governor of Edinburgh Castle. With him were associated Glencairn as Lord Chancellor, Lauderdale as Secretary of State, Rothes as President of the Council, and Crawford as Lord Treasurer. The first proceeding of this Parliament, known in the gossip of the time as the Drunken Parliament from the too

Скачать книгу