“Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country, lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge.”
Finally, he rebuked them for their hypocrisy and their blindness. Was it not hypocritical “to pretend to cry down all Malignants, and yet to receive and set up the head of them, and to act for the kingdom of Christ in his name?” Was it not blindness to shut their eyes to the meaning of their late defeat? God had given judgment in their controversy at Dunbar, and they refused to see it. “Did not you solemnly appeal and pray? Did not we do so too? And ought not you and we to think with fear and trembling of the hand of the great God in this mighty and strange appearance of his?”
Either events or Cromwell’s arguments produced their effect in the Scotch camp. There were great searchings of heart amongst devout Presbyterians, and a schism broke out in the army. Rigid Covenanters renounced worldly alliances and compliance with an ungodly monarch. “I desire to serve the King faithfully,” said Colonel Ker, “but on condition that the King himself be subject to the King of Kings.” Colonel Strachan, after some negotiation with Cromwell, laid down his commission. Ker, with three or four thousand Westland Whigs, refused obedience to the Committee of Estates, and tried to wage war independently. But attempting to surprise Lambert, at Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, on December 1st, he was taken prisoner, his force scattered, and the whole of the south-west fell into Cromwell’s power.
More lasting was the division amongst the clergy. One party, headed by Gillespie and Guthry, published a Remonstrance repudiating the idea of fighting for Charles II. till he had proved his fitness to be a covenanted king, and condemning those who had closed their eyes to his insincerity. The Remonstrants, as they were termed, would have no alliance with either Malignants or Engagers. The other party, laxer in its moral views, and moved more by national than religious feeling, was ready to accept the compromises which the necessities of the State demanded. When Parliament passed resolutions allowing Malignants and Engagers to fight in the national ranks, it consented to their employment on a simple profession of penitence. For the next ten years the quarrels of Resolutioners and Remonstrants made up Scotland’s ecclesiastical history.
Cromwell had foreseen the political consequences of Dunbar. “Surely,” he predicted, “it’s probable the Kirk has done their do. I believe their King will set up upon his own score now.” The prediction now came true. Charles had suffered great humiliations since he came to Scotland. He had submitted to all conditions and sworn many kinds of oaths. He had been obliged to declare his sorrow for his father’s hostility to the work of reformation and his mother’s love of idolatry. He had seen the Scottish ranks purged of Royalists, and had been forbidden to approach the army that was fighting in his name. At last, events had brought the Parliament round to his policy. From the date of his coronation at Scone on January 1, 1651, Charles was King of Scotland in fact as well as name. Partly driven by necessity, because the ecclesiastical divisions had deprived him of his strongest supporters, partly lured by hope, because Charles offered to marry his daughter, Argyle fell in with the King’s policy. But each stage in its development diminished his influence. First he had to share his power with Hamilton and his partisans, and then the repeal of the Act of Classes put an end to it altogether by allowing even Montrose’s adherents to hold office.
Thus within a year from his landing in Scotland Charles had succeeded in combining both Royalists and Presbyterians in support of his cause. His hopes were never higher. It seemed possible to effect a similar combination between the Presbyterians and Royalists in England. In March, 1651, the English Government detected a plot for a rising in Lancashire which was to be helped by troops from Scotland, and isolated insurrections which broke out in Norfolk (December, 1650) and in Cardiganshire (June, 1651) proved the reality of these conspiracies. If a Scottish army entered England, the general royalist rising of 1648 might be repeated, and perhaps with a different issue.
The campaign of 1651 began late. During the winter, Blackness and Tantallon castles were captured, and in February there was an advance on Stirling which the tempestuous weather frustrated. In the spring, Cromwell’s illness delayed operations. The hardships of Irish campaigning had impaired his health. “I grow an old man, and feel the infirmities of age marvellously stealing upon me,” he wrote to his wife on the day after Dunbar; but he never spared himself, and in February, 1651, he fell ill of an intermittent fever brought on by exposure. Three successive relapses brought him to the verge of the grave, and more than once his life was despaired of. Parliament in alarm sent him two of the best physicians of the day, and advised him to remove to England for change of air. In June he was sufficiently recovered to take the field, and found Leslie’s army posted on the hills south of Stirling. “We cannot come to fight him except he please, or we go upon too manifest hazards,” wrote Cromwell, “he having very strongly laid himself, and having a very great advantage there.”
Unable to attack or to lure Leslie from his position, Cromwell resolved to turn it. The English fleet commanded the sea, and it was easy to throw Lambert and four thousand men across the Forth into Fife. Leslie sent Sir John Brown against him with a like force, but Lambert annihilated Brown’s force at Inverkeithing on July 20th. Cromwell poured more troops across the water till he had fourteen thousand men in Fife, and then taking their command himself he marched on Perth, which fell after a siege of twenty-four hours (August 2nd).
The capture of Perth cut off Leslie from his supplies, and severed his communications with the north of Scotland. But the way to England was left open, and confident that English Royalists would flock to his banner Charles and his whole army marched for the border. Cromwell had foreseen the movement, and was well aware that it might alarm the English Government. But he justified his strategy with sober confidence.
“We have done,” he said, “to the best of our judgment, knowing that if some issue were not put to this business it would occasion another winter’s war, to the ruin of your soldiery, for whom the Scots are too hard in respect of enduring the winter difficulties of this country, and to the endless expense of the treasury of England in prosecuting this war. It may be supposed we might have kept the enemy from this by interposing between him and England; which truly I believe we might, but how to remove him out of this place without doing what we have done, unless we had a commanding army on both sides the river of Forth, is not clear to us; or how to answer the inconveniences afore-mentioned we understand not.”