“Such were the barbarities by which Sir Phelim O’Neale and the Irish in Ulster signalised their rebellion:—an event memorable in the annals of humankind, and worthy to be held in perpetual detestation and abhorrence. The generous nature of More was shocked at the recital of such enormous cruelties: he flew to O’Neale’s camp; but found that his authority, which was sufficient to excite the Irish to an insurrection, was too feeble to restrain their inhumanity. Soon after, he abandoned a cause polluted by so many crimes, and he retired into Flanders; Sir Phelim, recommended by the greatness of his family, and perhaps too by the unrestrained brutality of his nature, though without any courage or capacity, acquired the entire ascendant over the northern rebels. The English colonies were totally annihilated in the open country of Ulster: the Scots, at first, met with more favourable treatment. In order to engage them to a passive neutrality, the Irish pretended to distinguish between the British nations; and, claiming friendship and consanguinity with the Scots, extended not over them the fury of their massacres. Many of them found an opportunity to fly the country: others retired into places of security, and prepared themselves for defence: and by this means, the Scottish planters, most of them at least, escaped with their lives.
“From Ulster, the flames of rebellion diffused themselves in an instant over the other three provinces of Ireland: in all places death and slaughter were not uncommon, though the Irish in these other provinces pretended to act with moderation and humanity—but cruel and barbarous was their humanity. Not content with expelling the English their houses, with despoiling them of their goodly manors, with wasting their cultivated fields, they stripped them of their very clothes, and turned them out, naked and defenceless, to all the severities of the season. The heavens themselves, as if conspiring against that unhappy people, were armed with cold and tempest unusual to the climate, and executed what the merciless sword had left unfinished. The roads were covered with crowds of naked English, hastening towards Dublin and the other cities which yet remained in the hands of their countrymen: the feeble age of children, the tender sex of women, soon sunk under the multiplied rigours of cold and hunger. Here, the husband, bidding a final adieu to his expiring family, envied them that fate which he himself expected so soon to share: there, the son, having long supported his aged parent, with reluctance obeyed his last commands; and, abandoning him in his uttermost distress, reserved himself to the hopes of avenging that death which all his efforts could not prevent or delay. The astonishing greatness of the calamity deprived the sufferers of any relief from the view of companions in affliction: with silent tears or lamentable cries, they hurried on through the hostile territories; and found every heart which was not steeled by native barbarity, guarded by the more implacable furies of mistaken piety and religion.
“The saving of Dublin preserved in Ireland the remains of the English name: the gates of that city, though timorously opened, received the wretched supplicants, and presented to the view a scene of human misery beyond what any eye had ever before beheld. Compassion seized the amazed inhabitants, aggravated with the fear of like calamities; while they observed the numerous foes without and within which everywhere environed them and reflected on the weak resources by which they were themselves supported. The more vigorous of the unhappy fugitives, to the number of 3000, were enlisted into three regiments: the rest were distributed into the houses; and all care was taken, by diet and warmth, to recruit their feeble and torpid limbs; diseases of unknown name and species, derived from these multiplied distresses, seized many of them, and put a speedy period to their lives: others, having now leisure to reflect on their mighty loss of friends and fortune, cursed that being which they had saved. Abandoning themselves to despair, refusing all succour, they expired; without other consolation than that of receiving among their countrymen, the honours of a grave, which to their slaughtered companions had been denied by the inhuman barbarians.
“By some computations, those who perished by all these cruelties, are supposed to be 150,000, or 200,000; by the most moderate, and probably the most reasonable account, they are made to amount to 40,000; if this estimation itself be not, as is usual in such cases, somewhat exaggerated.”
Such were the calamitous circumstances in which the Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland were placed at the period to which we now refer, arising, primarily from the mistaken policy of the King, in attempting to rule the nations under his sway, (in which the seeds of public liberty had been planted at the time of the Reformation, and had become widely disseminated,) solely by virtue of the royal prerogative, suited only to a very different state of society. The dissolution and entire disuse of Parliaments in England, the wealthier of his Kingdoms—his rash attempt to enforce, by mere authority, an equivocal system of Episcopacy in Scotland—the results of these several unfortunate measures, which we have already detailed—and the fatal error which he committed in sacrificing one of his most heroical and devoted friends, Stratford, to the antipathy of the English Puritans and Republicans—combined to produce the lamentable state of affairs which we are now contemplating; and, assuredly, if ever a human being, in the whole range of history, has claims on our commiseration, that man was Charles I., when, in the month of November 1641, the tidings of this horrible carnage in Ireland reached him, at Holyrood, in the palace of his ancestors, and in the bosom of his fatherland, of which he was now, indeed, but a nominal sovereign. We pause not to detail the particulars of those jealousies and jarrings, the “plots” and “incidents,” which at the moment surrounded him in Scotland, or awaited him in England, on his return thither, of which ample accounts are elsewhere to be found. On receiving the news of the Irish massacre, the King immediately went to the Parliament House and communicated the intelligence, calling on the Estates to co-operate with the Parliament of England in suppressing this frightful rebellion. And although he repeatedly urged them to the dispatch of business, that he might return to England in the exigency of these complicated national affairs, it was not until the 17th day thereafter that he was enabled to prorogue the Parliament—the intermediate time being consumed in an infinite variety of legislative proceedings, many of them trivial, but others of them eminently calculated to consolidate the supremacy of the Estates, and to benefit and strengthen the Presbyterian Church now firmly established. The first long parliament of Scotland was adjourned on the 17th of November 1641, and continued till the 1st Tuesday of June 1644.[289] The King entertained all the nobility in the great banquet-hall of the palace, in the evening—after having previously bestowed honours on the chiefs among them; and early next morning, he set out on his journey towards London, never to revisit the home of his fathers, or to look with patriotic emotion on the hills of his native land.
Without enumerating all the public Statutes of this Parliament, it is important to notice some of them, and the acts of grace and favour bestowed by the King, during his residence, on that occasion.
Among the honours conferred, the Earl of Argyle was created a Marquis; the Lords Loudoun and Lindsay, and General Leslie, were promoted to the rank of Earls; and, to grace the elevation of the man who had twice been the leader in baffling his King in the field, four of his attendants were knighted. Balmerino was overlooked in this distribution of titles, and Rothes was cut off by death, from reaping, in a higher title, the first fruits of his exertions to shear the crown of its beams; thus eluding, too, the unpopularity which was impending over him, as a backslider in the cause of the Covenant. In this particular he was not singular; for Dunfermline and the Lairds of Waughton, Cavers, Riccarton, and others, besides Montrose and his “banders,” fell into discredit, on account of their “cauldrifeness” in the cause; whilst Hamilton, Traquair, and others were destined to suffer all the varieties of fortune, which political revolutions and popular favour, alternately and invariably exhibit.
But these were not the only boons which were bestowed by Charles on his Scottish subjects, and which called forth from the Lord Chancellor, Loudoun, and Sir Thomas Hope, in the face and name of Parliament, at its close, the grateful declaration, that his Majesty had given his Estates satisfaction in all things concerning religion and liberty, and that he was about to depart “a contented king from a contented country.” Among the more substantial largesses on this occasion, General Leslie, now Earl of Leven, obtained 100,000 merks out of the “brotherly assistance;” Alexander Henderson received a gift of the revenues belonging to the dean of the chapel royal; while other leading men, cities and universities, cast lots for the garments which had previously clothed the Episcopal establishment. The bishopricks and deanery of Edinburgh and Orkney, were bestowed on the university of Edinburgh. That of St Andrew’s obtained £1000 sterling per annum, out of the bishoprick and priory of St Andrew’s. The bishoprick of Galloway, and spirituality of Glasgow were given to its college, while the temporalities of the latter were bestowed on the Duke of Lennox. The old college of Aberdeen got its bishoprick revenues. The town of Perth got a moiety of the revenues of Dunkeld, to build a bridge over the Tay; the Hammermen of Edinburgh (doubtless for services in their own department) receiving the remainder. Argyle secured the revenues of that see and of the Isles, whilst Ross, Moray, and Caithness, were distributed amongst other zealous friends of the cause. These vulgar facts go far to explain some of the public phenomena of “the Second Reformation,” and to account for the zeal which had been manifested under the banner, with “Christ’s Crown and Covenant, in letters of gold,” inscribed upon its foldings. For the working clergy—for the Church, in its ordinary acceptation, nothing was done in this scramble for a share of the plunder; but the discontent thus excited, was partially allayed by the appointment of a Commission to value the teinds, and grant augmentations to the parish ministers—a barren and unfruitful gift, which left many of the Presbyterian clergy, for a long period, in a state approaching to pauperism, until within the last thirty years, that a decent provision was made for the maintenance of the Scottish Church, by an act of the British Parliament.[290]
The only other act of the King and Estates of Scotland in 1641, to which our attention is more especially called at present, is that by which a commission of that body was appointed as Conservators of the late treaty of peace with England, and under this guise invested with all the executive powers of the Crown, and the functions of Parliament. It consisted of fifty-six members, of whom seventeen were peers, twenty-one barons, and eighteen burgesses, any twelve of them a quorum; and on this junto was devolved, for the space of three years, with all the formalities of law, the supreme authority of the state, enabling them to levy men and taxes, and exercise uncontrolled sway over the land as they listed. Henceforward the Scottish monarchy was in abeyance, and the kingly authority and prerogatives extinguished, and the government vested in a motley oligarchy, to whose unlimited sway, no constitutional check was provided, save the remote contingency of rendering an account of their conduct to a full Parliament, to be held at the distance of three years thereafter. This extraordinary arrangement has been lauded by some historians, as a wise and safe measure; but we take leave to dissent from the theory, and to think that, had the royal prerogative of calling parliaments, not been thus practically abrogated for a time, many of the calamities which ensued in both kingdoms, might have been averted or greatly softened in their character.
But leaving Scotland, for the present, under the sway of its Parliamentary Commission, our attention is unavoidably called to the state of matters in England, after the King returned thither on the 25th of November. On that occasion he was warmly welcomed by the citizens of London, and sumptuously banqueted by the corporation, which His Majesty requited by bestowing honours on the chief functionaries. The amicable termination of the Scottish Parliament, and the prostration of royal authority which had there taken place, inspired the English malcontents at once with jealousy, lest their own schemes might eventually be thwarted by a good understanding betwixt Charles and his Scottish subjects—and with hopes that, by intimidation and coercion, they might constrain him into a similar subjection to their own designs. For this purpose, and in striking contrast with the professions of loyalty which had greeted the King’s return to Whitehall, the Commons appointed a committee to draw up a catalogue of grievances, which, when finally concocted in the shape of a “Remonstrance,” contained no fewer than 206 articles of accusation, enumerating almost every act of the King since his accession, as infringements of the liberties of the people. This remonstrance, or rather impeachment, was presented to the King, calling on him, amongst other unconstitutional propositions, to concur in ejecting the bishops from the House of Peers; and, without consulting the other branch of the legislature on the subject, the Commons, in violation of all the usages of Parliament, printed and dispersed it over the country, thereby exciting an agitation, and spreading this firebrand of sedition throughout the whole land. Proceedings of a most violent nature were also instituted against the bishops who had recently absented themselves from Parliament under protest, being deterred from attendance by the violence of the mob, which had been incited by the usual methods to insult and assail them personally. And the collision betwixt the King and the Commons was brought to a crisis by His Majesty going to the house in person, to arrest with an armed force, five of its members, as guilty of high treason, by reason of the part which they had acted in various matters. In this he failed—the objects of his resentment having escaped from the effects of his immediate and natural resentment. Failing in his object, the irritation of the Commons was unbounded, and the populace was so much excited by the alarm, real or affected, of the Commons, lest their personal safety and their privileges were endangered, that the King, to avoid indignity and outrage to himself and his family, (on January 10,) left Whitehall and retired to Hampton Court—a removal which afforded to the Commons and their supporters, the populace of London, a great advantage over him. The Commons had impeached the Bishops, and the King had impeached Lord Kimbolton, Hampden, Pym, and others of the Commons, as guilty of high treason; one chief ground of the latter being an accusation against them, that the Scots invasion had been mainly occasioned by their invitation and encouragement, of which it has been said that Montrose furnished the King with information.