[453] Arnot, pp. 67, 329; State Trials, ii. 884. The prisoner was told that he was not charged for saying mass, nor for seducing the people to popery, nor for anything that concerned his conscience; but for declining the king's authority, and maintaining treasonable opinions, as the statutes libelled on made it treason not to answer the king or his council in any matter which should be demanded.
It was one of the most monstrous iniquities of a monstrous jurisprudence, the Scots criminal law, to debar a prisoner from any defence inconsistent with the indictment; that is, he might deny a fact, but was not permitted to assert that, being true, it did not warrant the conclusion of guilt. Arnot, 354.
[454] Laing, iv. 20; Kirkton, p. 141. "Whoso shall compare," he says, "this set of bishops with the old bishops established in the year 1612, shall find that these were but a sort of pigmies compared with our new bishops."
[455] Laing, iv. 32. Kirkton says 300. P. 149. These were what were called the young ministers, those who had entered the church since 1649. They might have kept their cures by acknowledging the authority of bishops.
[456] Laing, iv. 116.
[457] Life of James II., i. 710.
[458] Cloud of Witnesses, passim; De Foe's Hist. of Church of Scotland; Kirkton; Laing; Scott's notes in Minstrelsy of Scottish Border, etc., etc.
[459] The practice observed in summoning or dissolving the great national assembly of the church of Scotland, which, according to the presbyterian theory, can only be done by its own authority, is rather amusing. "The moderator dissolves the assembly in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the head of the church; and, by the same authority, appoints another to meet on a certain day of the ensuing year. The lord high commissioner then dissolves the assembly in the name of the king, and appoints another to meet on the same day." Arnot's Hist. of Edinburgh, p. 269. I am inclined to suspect, but with no very certain recollection of what I have been told, that Arnot has misplaced the order in which this is done, and that the lord commissioner is the first to speak. In the course of debate, however, no regard is paid to him, all speeches being addressed to the moderator.
[460] The king's instructions by no means warrant the execution, especially with all its circumstances of cruelty, but they contain one unfortunate sentence: "If Maclean [sic], of Glencoe, and that tribe can be well separated from the rest, it will be a proper vindication of the public justice to extirpate that seat of thieves." This was written, it is to be remembered, while they were exposed to the penalties of the law for the rebellion. But the massacre would never have been perpetrated, if Lord Breadalbane and the master of Stair, two of the worst men in Scotland, had not used the foulest arts to effect it. It is an apparent great reproach to the government of William, that they escaped with impunity; but political necessity bears down justice and honour. Laing, iv. 246; Carstares' State Papers.
[461] Those who took the oaths were allowed to continue in their churches without compliance with the presbyterian discipline, and many more who not only refused the oaths but prayed openly for James and his family. Carstares, p. 40. But in 1693 an act for settling the peace and quiet of the church ordains, that no person be admitted or continued to be a minister or preacher unless he have taken the oath of allegiance, and subscribed the assurance that he held the king to be de facto et de jure, and also the confession of faith; and that he owns and acknowledges presbyterian church-government to be the only government of this church, and that he will submit thereto and concur therewith, and will never endeavour, directly or indirectly, the prejudice or subversion thereof. Id. 715; Laing, iv. 255.