And meantime Claverhouse was passing as a destroying angel through the western shires. Making little distinction between those who had, and those who had not, taken part in the late insurrection—he seized the property, and imprisoned or put to death, all against whom any charge of contumacy could be laid. The hunted Covenanters were driven into wilder seclusions, and their barbarous treatment naturally made them more aggressive and extravagant in their language. Useless to talk to men frenzied to despair of loyalty to a King, who, in his life of unhallowed pleasure in distant London, heard not, or cared not, for the bitter cry of the people whose rights he had sworn to protect. When they met at midnight in lonely glen or trackless moor, the leaders, Cameron, Cargill, Renwick, and others, would, like the Hebrew Prophets of old, mingle prophecy with denunciation; their high-strung enthusiasm bordered on insanity.
Cameron and Cargill published a declaration denouncing Charles, calling on all true sons of the Covenant to throw off their allegiance, and take up arms against him. And government had now a pretext for putting Scotland under what was really martial law. The common soldiers were authorised to put to death, without any pretence of trial, all who refused to take the prescribed oath, or to answer all interrogations. It was a capital crime to have any intercourse with prescribed persons; and torture was inflicted, even on women, to extort the whereabouts of these persons. At Wigtown, Margaret McLauchlan, a widow of sixty-three years, and Margaret Wilson, a girl of eighteen, were drowned by being bound to stakes within flood-mark.
Amongst many murders perpetrated at this time, that of John Brown, the Ayrshire carrier, stands out conspicuous in horror. He was a quiet, sedate man, leading a blameless life; his only offence was that he did not on Sundays attend the parish church, but either read his bible at home, or, with a few like-minded, met in a quiet place for a little service of praise and prayer. One morning, whilst digging peats for the house fire, he was surrounded by Claverhouse’s dragoons, and brought to his own door. Here, his wife and children being by—a baby in its mother’s arms—Claverhouse asked him why he did not attend on the King’s curate; and John, answering that he had to obey his conscience rather than the King, Claverhouse told him to prepare for death. He said he had long been so prepared. He prayed with fervour, until interrupted by Claverhouse, who saw his wild dragoons beginning to shew tokens of sympathy; Brown kissed his wife and little ones, and he was then shot dead. “What do you think of your bonnie man now?” the devil-hearted slayer asked of the newly-made widow. “I aye thocht muckle o’ him, but never sae muckle as I do this day.” She laid her infant on the ground, tied up the poor shattered head in her kerchief, composed the limbs, covered the body with a plaid, and then she sat down beside it, and, in heart-rending sobs and tears, gave full course to natural sorrow. The tragedy enacted on Magus Moor was a cruel murder, but if there are degrees of guilt in such an awful crime, that committed at the cottage door in Ayrshire was surely the more heinous and atrocious of the two.
Monmouth remained only a short time in Scotland; Lauderdale was still nominally at the head of affairs. But in November, 1679, the King sent his brother James to Edinburgh, partly to keep him out of sight from the people of England. As a rigid Roman Catholic, standing next in succession to the throne, he was very unpopular. A cry of popish plots had been got up, and an Exclusion Bill would have been carried in Parliament,[[4]] but Charles dissolved it, and he never called another; for the last four years of his life he reigned as an absolute monarch.
James, a royal Stuart, residing in long untenanted Holyrood, was made much of by the Scottish nobility and gentry, and to conciliate them he so far unbent his generally sombre and unamiable demeanour. He paid particular attention to the Highland chieftains, and thus laid a foundation for that loyalty to himself and his descendants, so costly to the clansmen. But his presence and his influence in public affairs did no good to the poor Covenanters. Against nonconformity of every shade his only remedies were persecution and suppression. The poor wanderers of the Covenant were hunted as wild beasts. Richard Cameron was slain at Aire Moss. Hackston and Cargill were hanged. It is said that James often amused his leisure hours by witnessing the tortures of the boot and the thumb-screw.
And not the common people only were thus vexed and harassed. Strangely-worded oaths, acknowledging the laws and statutes, and also the King’s supremacy, were administered to all holding official positions. When, as a privy counsellor, the oath was tendered to the Earl of Argyle—son of the Marquis who was beheaded at the commencement of the reign—he declared he took it so far as it was consistent with itself, and with the Protestant religion. For adding this qualification, he was tried for, and found guilty of, high treason. He contrived to escape from Edinburgh Castle in the disguise of a page holding up his step-daughter’s train. He reached Holland, a sentence of death hanging over him.
And in England, after dismissing the Oxford parliament, the King was despotic. If he had any religious faith at all, it was towards Catholicism, and thus he took up his brother’s quarrel. In the administration of justice, juries were packed, and judges were venal. London was adjudged to have illegally extended its political powers, was fined heavily, and condemned to lose its charters. Breaches of their charters by provincial towns were looked for, and something was generally found sufficient to raise prosecutions upon, the award being always given for the Crown. Fines were levied for the King’s private advantage, and by his veto in the election of magistrates he held in his hand Parliamentary elections. The university of Oxford issued a solemn decree, affirming unlimited submission to the Royal authority; and the most detestable of the very few judges whose names are a stain upon the history of English jurisprudence—Jeffreys—was the very incarnation of venality and injustice; he was a vulgar bully, ever finding a demoniacal pleasure in cruelty and wrong-doing.
The country had been sickened of civil war, and public spirit seemed to have deserted the land. Still the Whig leaders of the late majority in Parliament made some attempts at organizing resistance. Shaftesbury was for immediate rebellion; but Lords Essex, Howard, and William Russell, and Algernon Sidney, more cautiously resolved to wait the course of events, and act when an opportunity arose. They certainly meant an insurrection in London, to be supported by a rising in the West of England, and another in Scotland under the Earl of Argyle.
But a conspiracy in a lower stratum of political influence, called the Ryehouse Plot, which proposed the deaths of the King and his brother, having been divulged to the Government, and certain arrests made, the prisoners, to save themselves, declared that Lords Howard and Russell, and Sidney, Hampden (a grandson of the John Hampden of ship-money fame), and others were implicated. Howard—recreant to the traditions of his name—turned approver. Lord William Russell was tried for treason—nobly supported by his wife—and although the evidence against him was weak, a packed jury convicted him, and he was beheaded at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Sidney was tried by Judge Jeffreys. Howard was the only witness against him, and for a conviction of treason the law required at least two witnesses; but a manuscript treatise on Government had been found amongst Sidney’s papers; certain passages on political liberty would nowadays be considered as mere truisms, but Jeffreys ruled that they were equal to two-and-twenty adverse witnesses. He also was found guilty, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. Lord Essex—a true nobleman—blaming himself for having put it into Howard’s power to injure Lord Russell, committed suicide.
And some Scottish gentlemen were also implicated in the Whig plot. Bailie, of Jerviswood, had been in correspondence with Lord Russell, and was asked to give evidence against him. On his refusal, he was himself tried for treason,—condemned and executed. Many were fined and imprisoned; many left the country, or otherwise could not be found, but were tried in their absence—outlawed, and their estates forfeited.