Having thus obtained decisive success in their first enterprise, and an advantageous position, the Scotch leaders availed themselves of their victory, but with moderation. They agreed for supplies, which they required, but gave money in part, and security for the balance. Their occupation of Newcastle, however, and the retreat of the King’s army, produced the greatest consternation. Of the ten thousand persons employed in the coal mines, not a man was to be seen. Four or five hundred vessels, employed in the coal trade, either sailed from the river, or refrained from entering it, when they discovered the state of matters; and for several days all the shops were shut, and many families fled, leaving their houses and property at the mercy of the Scotch. The panic spread to Durham, where the shops were all shut, and not one house in ten was occupied by its possessors, who had fled for safety. The English army continued its retreat from Durham towards York. The Bishop and clergy of Durham, too, all fled; among whom was Dr Balcanquell, who had no desire, it is to be presumed, to experience the tender mercies of the Sheriff of Teviotdale and Lord Kirkcudbright, or the spiritual consolations of “Master Andro Cant.”
The news of this defeat reached Strafford at Darlington the day after. He was on his way to join the army before any engagement should take place. But he now sent orders to the troops, in full retreat, to rally and concentrate in Yorkshire. The King had, at that time, reached Northallerton on his way to the army; but, on learning the unfortunate issue of the first conflict, he immediately returned to York; and next day Strafford issued an order to the soldiers to destroy all millstones on their retreat.
When the Royal army was mustered at York, it was found to amount to 17,383; and, on the 31st of August, the King issued a summons to all the Lords, spiritual and temporal, and other Nobles, to attend his Majesty at York, and, the same day, issued an order to the Earl of Craufurd to engage a hundred Scotch officers in his service.
On the 4th of September, his Majesty received a Petition from the Commissioners of the late Parliament in Scotland, in a letter to the Earl of Lanerick, to which an answer was next day returned;[262] and, on the 7th, a writ was issued summoning a council of the Peers at York, upon, the 24th of the month.[263] Upon the 8th, the Scotch Commissioners sent a second letter to Lanerick; and, on the 9th, they sent another to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, setting forth the objects and purposes of their expedition; and, about the same time, the Earl of Essex and other Noblemen, and the Citizens of London, also applied, by petition, to his Majesty to call a Parliament, which last the Privy Council endeavoured, in vain, to quash. The purport of all these documents, will be most satisfactorily seen in the writings themselves;[264] and the result of the whole was, that the King appointed Commissioners to meet others from the Scotch at Rippon, to treat of peace, and called a Parliament for the 3d of November. The negotiations were afterwards transferred to London; and the combined movements of the English and Scottish malcontents ultimately ended in a great revolution throughout the British empire, of which it is difficult, even in later times, to predicate whether the evils or the benefits preponderated.
The negotiations at Rippon commenced on the 1st of October, and, on the 23d of that month, were transferred to London, that the English Noblemen might attend the Parliament summoned to meet there, in the beginning of November; and a cessation of hostilities was agreed on.[265] It is needless here to enumerate all the points of treaty, which were necessarily very numerous and complicated. From that affair, therefore, we turn, for a brief space, to the proceedings in the Long Parliament of England, which was opened by the King on the 3d of November, and in which, the discontented party having a preponderance, proceeded at once to the most decisive courses.
Strafford, by his energy and decision of character, although he had governed Ireland for eight years with great advantage to the State, became peculiarly obnoxious to the malcontents, English, Scottish, and Irish, by reason of his devotion to the King’s service, and his high talents and vigour. Whenever, therefore, he appeared in London, a vehement and preconcerted attack was made upon him in the House of Commons, on the 11th of November. Pym led on the attack, imputing it to Strafford that he was one of the chief among those who had formed a deliberate plan for changing the form of Government, and subverting the ancient laws and liberties of the kingdom; and, after various elaborate invectives, it was moved that he should be immediately impeached for high treason. This motion was unanimously adopted, nor was even one man found who had the moral courage to utter a word in his defence. The impeachment was instantly voted and carried to the upper house, where Strafford, who had just entered, unaware of what had been secretly carried through in the other house, and who had come to London under a royal guarantee that the Parliament should not touch a hair of his head, was ordered into custody; and soon after Laud was similarly treated, and, with Strafford, sent to the Tower.
It belongs to the History of England to trace these and other proceedings of the Long Parliament to their issues; but one of the immediate effects was a close alliance betwixt the leaders of the Opposition and the Scottish Commissioners then in London, with whom they made common cause against the King and his supporters. Rothes, Loudoun, and other Scottish Statesmen, with an auxiliary force of clergymen, availed themselves of this alliance; and, while in London, busied themselves, not exclusively in effecting a favourable conclusion to the treaty, but in preaching and intriguing for the subversion of the English hierarchy and planting Presbytery in its stead; and they joined their moiety of accusations against Strafford and Laud, before the English Parliament, as incendiaries and prime causes of all their own grievances. They were not inattentive, however, to the business of their mission, and made various demands in the negotiations, of very considerable importance:—That the Acts of the late Parliament of Scotland should be ratified and published by the King; that public incendiaries, who had excited hostilities betwixt the two kingdoms, should be referred to the judgment of the respective Parliaments, and not afterwards exempted from the punishments which might be awarded; and these, with some subordinate matters about indemnification for losses, &c., constituted the particulars for which they contended. To these demands the King was, at length, (15th December,) constrained to yield by the necessity of his circumstances; and thus his favourite Episcopacy was not only overthrown in Scotland, but shaken to its foundation in England; the royal prerogatives were virtually relinquished; and the whole power of the State vested in the democratic oligarchies of both kingdoms, under the guidance of aristocratical leaders; and every man who had hazarded life and fortune, in what he deemed a loyal adherence to his Sovereign, was thus delivered over to the arbitrary power of these semi-republican Conventions. Among other boons conferred on the Scottish by the English Parliament, was the sum of £300,000 for “brotherly assistance”—a subsidy which was by many understood, not merely as an indemnification for the expense of their expeditions, but as a consideration, for similar instances of fraternal aid, should the malcontent party in England require it on some future occasion.[266]
The final pacification, however, was not concluded till the 7th of August, 1641, when both armies were immediately disbanded; but during the dependence of the treaty, the General Assembly, of the year 1641, met at St Andrew’s, on Tuesday the 20th of July—John Earl of Weymes being the King’s Commissioner. A deputation from the Parliament having craved that its sittings should be transferred to Edinburgh, their request was complied with; and an adjournment to that city, where its next sederunt was appointed to be held on the 27th, took place. At the adjourned meeting, Mr Alexander Henderson was once more chosen Moderator.
We may just remark, that, during the protracted negotiations now alluded to, the Scottish Commissioners and Ministers, in the moat indecent manner, exerted themselves to overthrow the Church of England. Henderson and Gillespie wrote and published tractates against it. They openly approved of what was called the “Root and Branch Petition” of the English nonconformists, and went the length of presenting to the King a paper, in which they demanded “unity of religion and uniformity of Church government”—in other words, the adoption of the Presbyterian Covenant, and the coercive edicts for its adoption; thus violating their duty as negotiators for the affairs of Scotland only, and invading the rights and privileges of an independent nation; fostering the spirit of intolerance and revolution; and propelling the movement in which the Throne and both the Protestant Churches were, for many sad years, involved in one common ruin.
This intrusion, by the Scotch Covenanters, into the internal affairs of England, and their zealous exertions for the overthrow of its ecclesiastical establishment, and the destruction of Strafford and Laud, is one part of their conduct of which we have never seen any tenable defence, and which, on every sound principle of international law, was altogether unwarrantable, and incapable of justification. Whatever be the relative merits of Episcopacy and Presbytery, whatever the misdemeanours of Strafford, of Laud, or of other English counsellors of the King—these were matters with which the Scottish Commissioners, in their diplomatic character as the ambassadors of Scotland, had no earthly warrant to intermeddle. Strafford and Laud were the sworn Privy Councillors of England; and whether the advice they gave in that capacity, or the services which they rendered to the King, were, in the opinion of these Scotchmen, right or wrong—they were responsible only to their Sovereign, and not amenable to the English Parliament at the instance of any knot of foreigners, who had no title, under any theory of the law of nations ever yet recognised, to impeach men in such circumstances. The whole proceedings against Strafford were an utter disgrace to the Parliament of England. He was not accused of any single offence which subjected him, under the well-defined law of England, to the penalties of high treason, wherewithal a bill of attainder charged him; and the first principles of all civilized jurisprudence were grossly outraged in the judgment by which, although each item of imputed offence was found insufficient, yet, by accumulating them all, they were construed to amount to that crime. But Strafford was a doomed man; the first victim of that reign of terror which thus commenced—consigning to the scaffold a brave, loyal, and splendid man, in violation of every principle of universe as well as of municipal law—robbing the monarch of his brightest attribute—and plunging the two kingdoms into the vortex of a fierce democracy, which henceforward filled the land with tyranny and hypocricy under the mask of Religion and Liberty. In the guilt of that foul judicial murder, the leaders of the Scotch Covenanters were deeply implicated; and we record the fact with shame and sorrow, upon grounds of historical evidence which we believe cannot be shaken.