COVENANTERS EVICTING AN EPISCOPALIAN CLERGYMAN. (See p. [403].)

[[See larger version]]

The Royalists, thus hopeless of effecting anything in the Convention, and yet unwilling to yield up the cause, adopted the advice of Dundee and Balcarres, who had the authority of James to open a rival Convention at Stirling. Athol consented to go with them; but on Monday, the 18th, he showed a fear of so far committing himself, and requested the party to wait for him another day. But the case of Dundee did not admit even a day's delay. The Covenanters of the West, whom Hamilton, and the Dalrymples had summoned to Edinburgh, and who for some time had come dropping in in small parties, till all the cellars and wynds of the city were thronged with them, vowed to kill the hated persecutor; and he made haste to flee, accompanied by his dare-devil followers, all as well-known to, and as detested by, the Covenanters as himself for their atrocities in the West. Whilst the Convention was in deliberation, sentinels from the castle hurried in to say that Claverhouse had galloped up to the foot of the fortress on the road to Stirling, accompanied by a detachment of his horsemen, and that he had climbed up the precipice high enough to hold a conversation with Gordon.

At this news the Convention was thrown into a tumult of indignation. Hamilton ordered the doors to be locked, and the keys laid on the table, so that no one should go out but such persons as should be sent by the assembly to call the citizens to arms. By this means all such Royalists as were in became prisoners till such time as the citizens were ready. Lord Leven, the second son of Lord Melville, who inherited the title of old General Leslie in right of his mother, was sent to call the Covenanters to arms; and presently the streets were thronged with the men of the West in rude military array, sufficient to ensure the safety of the Estates. As the drums beat to arms, Dundee descended from the rock and, waving his cap, with the cry that he went to where the spirit of Montrose called him, rode off towards Stirling.

The Convention now proceeded with their business. They sent a letter of thanks to William, which the bishops to a man refused to sign; the Bishop of Edinburgh having, as chaplain, before prayed for the return of James. William has been said to have privately wished that Episcopacy might be established in Scotland; but, if so, such specimens of the prelatic spirit there must have gone far to extinguish that desire. Other symptoms of opposition were not wanting, even yet. The Duke of Queensberry arrived from London, and revived the spirits of the Jacobites. Again they urged the Duke of Gordon to fire on the city, but he refused; and the chances of resistance were now taken away by the arrival of General Mackay with the three regiments of Scots who had served under William in Holland. The Convention immediately appointed Mackay general of their forces; and, thus placed at their ease, they proceeded to arrange the government. They appointed a committee, after the manner of the Lords of the Articles, to draw up the plan which should be adopted. As a last means of postponing this business, a proposal was made by the Jacobites to join with the Whigs to concert a scheme of union of the kingdom with England. This was a scheme which was now growingly popular. During the Commonwealth the trade of England had been opened to Scotland. All custom-houses, and levying of duties on goods imported or exported between the countries, had been removed. The Scots had been admitted to perfect freedom of foreign trade with England, and the benefit had become too apparent to be lightly relinquished. But, on the Restoration, all this had been altered. The old and invidious restrictions had been renewed, and the great loss of wealth thus induced had wonderfully modified the spirit of national pride which opposed the abandonment of the ancient independence of the nation. The Dalrymples and Lord Tarbet were favourable to this proposition, but the Convention at large was too wise to endanger the defeat of the acknowledgment of the new sovereign by an indefinitely-prolonged debate on so vital a question. They proceeded to declare that James, by his misconduct, had "forfaulted" his right to the crown; that is, that he had forfeited it—a much more manly and correct plea than that James had "abdicated," which he continued to protest that he never had done, and he was at this moment in arms with Ireland asserting his unrelinquished claim to it. As the term "forfaulted," according to Scottish law, would have excluded all his posterity, an exception was made in favour of Mary and Anne, and their issue. This resolution was warmly defended by Sir John Dalrymple, and as warmly by Sir James Montgomery, the member for Ayrshire, who had been a determined champion of the Covenanters; and was resisted by the bishops, especially by the Archbishop of Glasgow. It was carried with only five dissentient voices, and was then read at the Market Cross, in the High Street, by Hamilton, attended by the Lord Provost and the heralds, and the Earl of Argyll, the son of James's decapitated victim. Sir John Dalrymple and Sir James Montgomery were deputed to carry it, with the second resolution that the crown should be offered to William and Mary, to London. To define on what principles this offered transfer of the crown was made, a Claim of Right, in imitation of the English Bill of Rights, was drawn up and accompanied it.

But with the acknowledgment of William as King of Scotland he was far from having acquired a state of comfort. In both his Governments his ministers and pretended friends were his continual tormentors. In England his Council and his chief ministers were at daggers drawn—every one dissatisfied with the post he occupied, jealous of the promotion of his rivals, and numbers of them in close correspondence with the Court of James. In Scotland it was precisely the same; it was impossible to satisfy the ambition and the cupidity of his principal adherents. The Covenanters were exasperated because the Episcopalians were merely dismissed from the Establishment, and were not handed over to retaliation of all the injuries they had received from them. Sir James Montgomery, who expected a much higher post, was offered that of Chief Justice Clerk, and refused it with disdain. He at once concerted plans of opposition, and made his attack amidst a whole host of similarly disappointed aspirants. Amongst these were two who had been in the insurrections of Monmouth and Argyll—Sir Patrick Hume and Fletcher of Saltoun, men of great ability, but of reckless and insubordinate character. A club was formed, in which these men, with Montgomery, the Lords Annandale and Ross, and a whole tribe of minor malcontents, did all in their power to thwart and embarrass the government of William. The chief promotion had been conferred on the Duke of Hamilton, who was made Lord High Commissioner; the Earl of Crawford, a very indigent, but very bitter Presbyterian, who before this appointment did not know where to get a dinner, was made President of Parliament; Sir James Dalrymple was appointed the Principal Lord of Session, and his son, Sir John, was restored to his office of Lord Advocate. Lord Melville became Secretary of State, and Sir William Lockhart Solicitor-General. But whilst some of these thought they ought to have had something higher or more lucrative, there were scores for whom the limited administration of Scotland afforded no situation in accordance with their own notions of their merits, and these hastened to join the opposition.

Meanwhile Dundee was exerting himself in the Highlands to rouse the clans in favour of King James. But this he found an arduous matter. The Highlanders, at a distance from the scenes and the interests which divided both England and the Lowlands of Scotland, occupied with their hunting and their own internal feuds, cared little for either King James or King William. If anything, they would probably have given the preference to William, for James had more than once sent his troops after them to chastise them for their inroads into the domains of their Saxon fellow-subjects. Dundee himself had retired to his own estate, and offered to remain at peace if he received from William's ministers a pledge that he should not be molested. But, unfortunately for him, an emissary from James in Ireland, bearing letters to Dundee and Balcarres, was intercepted, and immediately Balcarres was arrested, and Dundee made his escape into the Highlands. There, though he could not move any of the clans by motives of loyalty to declare for James, he contrived to effect this object through their own internal enmities. Most of them had an old and violent feud with the clan Campbell. The Argyll family had, through a long succession of years, extended its territories and its influence over the Western Highlands at the expense of the other clans, some of which it had nearly extirpated; and now the head of the family came back from exile in the favour of the new monarch, and all these clans, the Stuarts, the Macnaghtens, the Camerons, the Macdonalds, the Macleans, were in alarm and expectation of a severe visitation for past offences, and for unpaid feudal dues. They were, therefore, moved from this cause to unite against William, because it was to unite against MacCallum More, the chieftain of Argyll. If William was put down, Argyll was put down. Whilst Dundee was busy mustering these clans, and endeavouring to reconcile their petty jealousies and bring them to act together, he sent earnestly to James in Ireland to despatch to him a tolerable body of regular troops, for without them he despaired of keeping long together his half savage and unmanageable Highlanders. Till then he avoided a conflict with the troops sent by the Convention under Mackay against him. It was in vain that Mackay marched from one wild district to another; the enemy still eluded him amongst the intricate fastnesses and forests of the Highlands till his troops were wearied out with climbing crags, and threading rugged defiles and morasses; and he returned to quarters in Stirling, Aberdeen, and other towns at the foot of the mountain district.

It was the opinion of Lord Tarbet, who understood the statistics of the Highlands well, that, if William would send about five thousand pounds to enable the clans to discharge their debts to the Earl of Argyll, and obtain from that chieftain an assurance that he would abstain from hostilities against them, they would all submit at once, and leave Dundee to find support where he could. But his advice was attempted to be carried out in so absurd a manner, by choosing an agent from the clan Campbell as the mediator on the occasion, that the clans refused to treat with him, and became all the more devoted to the interests of James.

Things were in this position when in June a civil contention broke out in Athol. The marquis, unwilling to declare for either side, had retired to England, and his eldest son, Lord Murray, who had married a daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, and declared for King William, was opposed by the marquis's steward, who declared for King James. The steward held Blair Castle, and Lord Murray besieged him in it. This called out Dundee to repel Murray and support the steward, the adherent of James; and Mackay, hoping now to meet with him, put his forces in march for the place of strife. The two armies, in fact, at length came into contact in the stern pass of Killiecrankie, near Dunkeld. This was then one of the wildest and most terrible defiles in the Highlands; the mountain torrent of the Garry roaring through its deep and rocky strait.