Annals of the persecution in Scotland

by James Aikman

DECEMBER 1660 to 12th JULY 1661.

Lord High Commissioner arrives in Edinburgh—Parliament—Its composition—Act of indemnity withheld—Lord Chancellor restored to the Presidentship—Oath of allegiance—Retrogression in reformation-work—Divine right of Kings asserted—Solemn League and Covenant repealed—Engagement approved, &c.—Declaration—Resolutioners begin to perceive their error—Middleton amuses the ministers of Edinburgh—Manner of concocting the Act rescissory and of getting it passed—Middleton’s interview with D. Dickson and part of the Edinburgh presbytery—Distress of the ministers—Dispersion of the synods—Concluding acts—Trial of Argyle—His behaviour before and at the place of execution—Trial of James Guthrie—His behaviour and execution—Captain Govan—Prosecutions of Mr Traill of Edinburgh—Mr Moncrief of Scone—Intrepid reply of his wife—Mr Robert Macwaird of Glasgow—His striking picture of the effects of the Restoration—His accusation—Defence—Banishment—Swinton of Swinton—Sir John Christy and Mr P. Gillespie’s escape—Parliament rises—Samuel Rutherford.

The Earl of Middleton, Lord High Commissioner, arrived at the ancient Palace of Holyrood on the last day of December 1660. He entered upon his office with great pomp; and, being allowed a princely salary for the support of his establishment, he vied with royalty itself in the profusion of his expenditure. Every preparation had been made for his reception: he was met and conducted to his residence by a large concourse of the nobility and the magistrates of the capital; and the venerable cathedral of St Giles had been elegantly fitted up with a throne for his Grace and lofts for the parliament.

That parliament which met on the first day of the new year, was one entirely suited for promoting the schemes of the Scottish rulers. The old nobles, who had been active in the cause of the covenant, had almost all died out, their estates had been wasted, and of the new race too many, neglected in their education, were now dependant in their circumstances. When the king arrived, they had flocked to London to put in their claims upon his justice or generosity for their sufferings in the royal cause, and had been received with specious condescension, and sent home with empty pockets and magnificent expectations. But they had learned at court to laugh at sobriety, to ridicule religion, and to consider even common decency a mark of disloyalty, while they looked to a rich harvest of fines and confiscations from the estates of the remonstrators, as a reward for their sacrificing their principles and profession at the shrine of prerogative. The commissioners for counties and burghs were chosen entirely from among those who were considered devoted to the court and averse to the strict Presbyterians. In some cases, when persons of an opposite description had been returned, the ruling party interfered and procured others to be substituted; and to prevent such as were distinguished for their attachment to the cause of religious freedom from offering themselves as candidates, they got them accused of complying with the usurpers, and summoned as criminals.[^[10]]

[10]. Were it not that mankind have a strange propensity to reward with injury favours they feel too great to repay, and to heap injustice upon their benefactors in order to conceal their ingratitude, we would be astonished at the conduct of Charles; but having often, in private life, seen that to raise a wretch from penury, was to incur his hatred, if we did not, at the same time, rise in proportion. We confess that the ingratitude of princes to those who have succoured them in distress, ceases to excite those strong feelings of reprobation, which we have often heard men in humbler life, who were themselves guilty of grosser injustice, express against crimes, whose highest aggravation was, that they were committed by persons of rank.

From a parliament so constituted, the most servile compliance might have been anticipated; but, to ensure their submission, an act of indemnity had been withheld from Scotland; and, while every one dreaded his individual safety, the whole assisted in destroying that public liberty which might have afforded a better chance for security than the will of a prince or the favour of a parasite. The regalia, always carried before the commissioner at the opening of a session, were borne—the crown by the Earl of Crawford, the sceptre by Sutherland, and the sword by Mar. The Duke of Hamilton and the Marquis of Montrose rode immediately behind. Mr Robert Douglas, who had preached the coronation sermon before Charles when he was inaugurated at Scone, delivered upon this occasion a faithful and appropriate discourse from 2 Chron. xix. 6.—“Take heed what you do; for you judge not for man but for the Lord, who is with you in the judgment.”

The Earl of Middleton’s commission was then presented, and, as had been previously agreed upon, an act was brought forward to restore to the Lord Chancellor the Presidentship of parliament. This act, which struck at the root of the whole reformation in Scotland, deserves particular notice. By several acts of the estates, passed during the troublous times, particularly one of the last, held in 1651, at which the king himself had presided, it was enacted, that, before entering upon business, every member should swear and subscribe the covenant, without which the constitution of parliament would become null and void. To have set aside these statutes openly and at once, was thought too flagrant; but it had also been enacted during the late struggle, that the President of the parliament should be elected by parliament, instead of the Chancellor nominated by the king; and it was therefore proposed to abolish this privilege, as trenching upon the royal prerogative. In this act, however, brought forward for that purpose, was inserted an oath of allegiance, which went to annul all preceding oaths, and covertly to revive the abhorred supremacy of the king. It was insidiously worded, in order that those who wished to have an excuse for compliance might take it without appearing undisguisedly to violate their former engagements, yet sufficiently plain to justify a refusal by men who were not altogether prepared to surrender their principles to their interest.

By it the sovereign was acknowledged only supreme governor in the kingdom over all persons and in all causes; and it was declared that no foreign prince, power, or state, nor person, civil nor ecclesiastic, had any jurisdiction, power, or superiority over the same; “and therefore,” it was added, “I utterly renounce and forsake all foreign jurisdictions, powers, and authorities, and shall, at my utmost power, defend, assist, and maintain his majesty’s jurisdiction aforesaid against all deadly, and never decline his majesty’s power and jurisdiction.” The consistent and stricter part of the Presbyterians were not imposed upon. They considered, and correctly as it afterwards appeared, that this was a complete acknowledgment of the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy, and conferred upon him the power to alter or innovate at his pleasure upon the religion of the country. In parliament, however, almost the whole took the oath without remark, except the Earls of Cassils and Melville of the nobles, and the Laird of Kilburnie of the commissioners, who would not subscribe it unless allowed to limit the king’s supremacy to civil matters—an explanation which Middleton was disposed to admit of verbally, but, knowing the extent to which allegiance was to be required, he refused to permit this explanation to be recorded.

Having thus dispensed with the obligation of the covenant as a parliament-oath, and reinstated his majesty in his ecclesiastical power, they proceeded to restore to him a less questionable part of the prerogative—the nomination of the officers of state, privy councillors, and Lords of Session, the right of convoking and dissolving parliament, of commanding the militia, and of making peace and war. These powers, which are now deemed necessary for the support of the crown in regular ordinary times, had been assumed by the estates of Scotland (1649) on account of their abuse by the English ministers and favourites, at a period when our country, from being the poorest of the two united kingdoms, and the most distant from the immediate presence of the king, was peculiarly liable to be oppressed by those who obtained possession of the royal ear:—and the whole of the succeeding melancholy period, evince but too clearly how well founded was the jealousy entertained of the power intrusted to a monarch who was a non-resident. But what then particularly disgusted the friends of freedom, was, to observe in their re-enactment, the express unqualified avowal of the slavish tenets of the divine rights of kings, and their accountability to God alone, the assertion of which had occasioned all the troubles of the land, had brought Charles I. to the block, and which was eventually to forfeit for the Stuarts the throne of their fathers.

Sudden and astonishing as had been the revolution that had taken place in the public feelings and morals, and outrageously violent as the shoutings of newfangled loyalty had been against the treasons and insults of the remonstrators, still the covenants were esteemed sacred bonds by an imposing number of the worthiest part of the community, whom it might not have been adviseable to shock too abruptly. These revered engagements were therefore first attacked obliquely in an act which purported merely to assert a constitutional truth respecting “his majesty’s royal prerogative in making of leagues and the convention of the subjects,” which, after narrating some enactments forbidding councils, conventions, or assemblies, for determining matters of state, civil or ecclesiastic, without his majesty’s command or license, declared that any explanation or glosse that, during these troubles, had been put upon these acts—“as, ‘that they are not to be extended against any leagues, councils, conventions, assemblies, or meetings, made, holden, or kept by the subjects for preservation of the king’s majesty, the religion, laws, or liberties of the kingdom, or for the public good either of kirk or kingdom,’ are false and disloyal.” No opposition having been made to this act, a more decisive followed, annulling the “pretended” convention of estates kept in 1643, which had entered into the Solemn League and Covenant, but which, not having been convoked by the king, although afterwards approved, afforded at least some pretext for disallowing it. Next came an act “concerning the League and Covenant, declaring that there was no obligation on the kingdom by covenant to endeavour, by arms, a reformation of religion in the kingdom of England; or to meddle in any seditious way in any thing concerning the religion and government of the churches of England and Ireland.” With this, perhaps, there was little quarrel. The attempts to obtain uniformity in religion, and to procure a hollow profession of the form, where the reality was notoriously wanting, was a political sin, for which the covenanters had suffered severely already, and the repetition of which it might be laudable to prevent; yet, as the Solemn League and Covenant had been formally, fully, and repeatedly sanctioned by all the members of the state in subsequent parliaments, and was by many good men considered irreversible, it might have been more decorous to have allowed it to remain a dead letter, especially as it had been renounced by the English, and could not in such circumstances be acted upon by the Scots. Considerable reluctance was expressed respecting this measure; and, to silence opposition, the commissioner informed the House that he had no orders from his royal master to encroach upon the National Covenant or upon the consciences of the people; but as to leagues with other nations, he conceived they could not now subsist with the laws of the king. One honest man, however, had the courage publicly to avow that he could do nothing against his lawful oath and covenant; and numbers who could not approve of the act, silently withdrew. To make the annulling of the covenant more palatable, the managers sweetened the draught by an act against papists, priests, and jesuits, whose numbers they asserted more abounded of late, and insinuated as if the covenants had been the cause of the increase!