Great unpopularity and disgrace were achieved by the treatment of the pious Mitchell, who, 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 Rothes, then Chancellor, assurance of his life: this with Lauderdale’s consent. But when brought before the judges, he retracted his confession. He was kept a prisoner on the Bass Rock; in 1676 was tortured; in January 1678 was again tried. Haltoun (who in a letter of 1674 had mentioned the assurance of life), Rothes, Sharp, and Lauderdale, all swore that, to their memory, no assurance had been given in 1674. Mitchell’s counsel 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. Mackenzie prosecuted; he had been Mitchell’s counsel 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 conventicles, 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 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 organising an armed rebellion, and that the peasants were seizing the weapons of the militia. Balfour of Kinloch (Burley) and Robert Hamilton, a laird in Fife, were the leaders of that extreme sect which was feared as much by the indulged preachers as by the curates, and, on May 2, 1679, Balfour, with Hackstoun of Rathillet (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 Magus Moor 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 honour; 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 29) burned 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 lochs; 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 steppings aside.” Men so conscientious as Hamilton were rare in his party, which was ruined presently by its own distracted counsels.
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 Livingstone joined them at Larbert, the whole army mustered but 1800 men—so weak were the regulars. The militia was raised, and the king sent down his illegitimate son, Monmouth, husband of the heiress of Buccleuch, at the head of several regiments of redcoats. Argyll was not of service; he was engaged in private war with the Macleans, who refused an appeal for help from the rebels. They, in Glasgow and at Hamilton, were quarrelling 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 inveighing 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 pursuit by the cavalry. The rival Covenanting leaders, Russel, one of Sharp’s murderers, and Ure, give varying accounts of the affair, and each party blames the other. The rebel force is reckoned at from five to seven thousand, the Royal army was of 2300 according to Russel. “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. Only 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 a promise to remain peaceful, and shun conventicles. There was more of cruel carelessness than of the deliberate cruelty displayed in the massacres and hangings of women after Philiphaugh and Dunaverty. 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 fining and ruining hundreds of persons, especially lairds, who were accused of helping or harbouring 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 lairds and peasants and preachers that Sir George Mackenzie, by nature a lenient man and a lover of literature, gained the name of “the bluidy advocate.”
Cameron and his followers rode about after issuing the wildest manifestoes, as at Sanquhar in the shire of Dumfries (June 22, 1680). Bruce of Earlshall was sent with a party of horse to pursue, and, in the wild marshes of Airs Moss, in Ayrshire, Cameron “fell praying and fighting”; while Hackstoun of Rathillet, less fortunate, was taken, and the murder of Sharp was avenged on him with unspeakable cruelties. The Remnant now formed itself into organised 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 “malignants.” 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, Rothes, Dalziel, and Mackenzie, 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 12, 1681) was captured by “wild Bonshaw.” It was believed by his party that the decision to execute Cargill was carried by the vote of Argyll, in the Privy Council, and that Cargill told Rothes (who had signed the Covenant with him in their youth) that Rothes would be the first to die. Rothes died on July 26, Cargill was hanged on July 27.
On the following day James, Duke of York, as Royal Commissioner, opened the first Parliament since 1673-74. 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 humour overcame his sense of honour. Many refused, including a number of the conformist ministers. Argyll took the Test “as far as it is consistent with itself and with the Protestant religion.”
Argyll, the son of the executed Marquis, had recovered his lands, and acquired the title of Earl mainly through the help of Lauderdale. During the religious troubles from 1660 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 Macleans in Mull and Morven, in discharge of an enormous debt of the Maclean chief to the Marquis, executed in 1661. The Macleans 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 Mackenzies, and in the Earl of Errol and other nobles.