This was the last of Middleton’s acts in Scotland. His rival, Lauderdale, had so well employed the access he had to the king to undermine his influence, that he was called to court to answer charges of having encroached upon the royal prerogative by the balloting act, and defrauded the royal treasury by appropriating the fines. While the affair was under discussion, Lauderdale procured an order to delay levying the fines due the first term and dismiss the collector. Middleton, who saw that this was a deadly blow at his interest in Scotland, countermanded the royal letter upon alleged verbal authority, which Charles either never gave, or found it convenient to disown; and this completed his ruin. His rashness and inconsideration were too palpable to be denied; but, by the interest of his friends, Clarendon and the Bishop of London, his fall was softened, and he was sent into a kind of honourable banishment as governor of Tangiers. There he continued to indulge his habits of intemperance, and, falling down a stair in a fit of intoxication, broke his right arm so severely, that the bone protruded through the flesh, and, penetrating his side, a mortification ensued, which terminated his life.
Middleton, who never appears to have had any serious religion, was the friend of Lord Clarendon—a statesman bigoted to Episcopacy, rather on account of its political than its spiritual advantages—and employed by him for rearing in Scotland, upon the ruins of Presbytery, which he detested, an establishment more in accordance with those high notions of the prerogative which, notwithstanding the melancholy example of the first Charles, were adopted and cherished by the court of his son. Well calculated for carrying through the most despotic measures by force, he must be acquitted of the mean duplicity of Charles’s letter to the ministers of Edinburgh, the obloquy of which rests upon the crafty politics of Sharpe. When first shown it, he considered it as opposed to Episcopacy, and expressed his regret; but when told that, upon rescinding all the laws in favour of Presbytery, then Episcopacy remained the church government settled by law, he observed, “that might be done; but for his part he was not fond of making his majesty’s first appearance in Scotland to be in the character of a cheat.” Once, however, fairly embarked, he never hesitated, and concurred with the bishops in their every project, however treacherous or oppressive. He first overturned the Presbyterian church government, which had been settled under as solemn sanctions, and as strong legal guarantees, as can ever possibly be devised to secure any religious establishment, and then sent to the scaffold, from motives of avarice and revenge, the noblest ornaments of that religion, whose only crime was, adhering to a profession he himself had, with uplifted hand, sworn to support.
In council, he unwarrantably extended the tyrannical acts of his servile parliament, and wantonly laid waste hundreds of peaceable and flourishing congregations. With a cunning worthy the priesthood of Rome, he invited numbers of unsuspecting ministers from distant parts of the country to Edinburgh, as if to consult them on the affairs of the church, then ensnared them by insidious questions, and punished their unsuspecting simplicity with deprivation, imprisonment, and exile. Without any shadow of law, and without the form of a trial, he turned ministers from their congregations—prohibited them from preaching, praying, or expounding the Scriptures, and sent them to the most distant corners of the land, or forced them to seek an asylum in foreign countries—then intruded on the desolated parishes worthless and incapable hirelings—and concluded his career by commanding the people to attend upon their ministrations under a severe and oppressive penalty. His own expatriation to the barren coast of Africa was looked upon by the sufferers as a righteous retribution, and his melancholy end as an evident mark of divine displeasure; nor could the coincidence between his own rash imprecation and the manner of his death fail to strike the most careless. Like many other political hypocrites, with a zeal as furious as false, he had sworn and subscribed the covenants when it was the fashion of the time to do so; and, on retiring from the place where he had taken these vows upon him, he said to some of those who were with him, “that that was the pleasantest day he had ever seen; and if ever he should do any thing against that blessed work, he had been engaging in,” holding up his right arm, “he wished that it might be his death!” The enormous fines he imposed, he never was empowered to exact; and, in return for impoverishing his country, he died an exile and a beggar.
Lauderdale having succeeded in removing his formidable antagonist, from thenceforth for a number of years almost solely directed Scottish affairs. The Presbyterians, who believed that he was secretly attached to their cause, anticipated better days under his protection; but ambition was his master-passion, and to it he was prepared to sacrifice all his early attachments and principles. While religion appeared the only road to power in the state, he had been foremost in the ranks of the covenanters; and, by the warmth of his professions, and the consistency of his conduct, had gained the confidence of those who were sincerely devoted to the cause; but when the path of preferment on Charles’s restoration struck off in an opposite direction, he deserted to the prelates, and evinced the sincerity of his change by at once forsaking his sobriety of manners, and apostatizing from his form of religion; and, as he understood well the principles he betrayed, and at one time certainly had strong convictions of their truth, his opposition was proportionably inveterate, and he became outrageously furious at whatever tended to remind him of his former “fanaticism.”
BOOK IV.
DECEMBER, A.D. 1662-1664.
State of the West and South—Bishops—Curates—Their reception—Tumult at Irongray—Commission sent to Kirkcudbright and Dumfries—Field-preaching—Rothes and Lauderdale arrive in Scotland—Parliament—Warriston’s arrest and execution—Principal Wood of St Andrews and other ministers silenced and scattered—Troops ordered to enforce the Acts of Parliament—Their outrages—Sir James Turner—High Commission Court—Its atrocities—Privy Council—Its exactions—Prohibits private prayer-meetings or contributing money for the relief of the sufferers—William Guthrie of Fenwick laid aside—Donaldson of Dalgetty’s case—Death of Glencairn—Political changes.
While these struggles were going forward at court, the affairs of Scotland were in a state of the most woful confusion. Almost the whole parishes in the west and south had been deprived of their ministers; and as their own churches remained vacant, the people in crowds flocked to those where the few old Presbyterian ministers were yet allowed to officiate. These assemblies having been denounced by the council’s proclamation, attracted the attention of the soldiers; and numerous parties patrolled the country to disturb the meetings and levy the fines to which offenders were liable.
When the vacant charges came to be filled, (1663,) new sources of disturbance arose. No preparation had been made for such an exigence as bad now arisen. The regular candidates for the ministry were too few; and of these but a small proportion were willing to pursue their studies under the direction of the bishops, or accept of Episcopal ordination. The north was therefore ransacked, and a great number of ignorant, uneducated young men, not more deficient in talents and acquirements than in decent common moral conduct,[[31]] were hastily brought forward to supply the places of the ejected ministers, who in general were both pious, learned, and of respectable abilities; many of them eminently so, and all laborious in the discharge of their duties, exemplary in their lives, and dear to their people. These presentees, who were contemptuously styled by the people “bishops’ curates,” when intruded upon them without any regard to their wishes or choice, were received in many places with the most determined opposition; in some, they were compelled to retire; and, in others, obliged to enter by the windows, the doors being built up; and thus literally to display the scriptural characteristic of spiritual thieves and robbers. The Presbyterian ministers had uniformly classed prelacy and popery together; and, at the settlement of the new clergy, the prelates justified the charge by employing the military to enforce their ecclesiastical appointments, and ordaining their parsons at the point of the sword. The patrons, in most cases, had allowed their rights to devolve upon the bishops; and thus the whole undivided obloquy rested on their consecrated heads, which was not lessened when some of the careless or profane heritors, to ingratiate themselves with the rulers, feasted the clergy at their settlements, and, aping the loyalty of their superiors, conducted their entertainments with an equally jovial disregard of decency and temperance.