This took place in the seventh session of the Assembly, on November 28, 1638. On the 29th a proclamation from the King was read in the Market-place of Glasgow, by which all A.D. 1638. further meetings of the members of the illegal Assembly were forbidden, and all resolutions which it might draw up were declared null and void. The Assembly made answer on the same spot by means of a protestation, in which they refused to allow this dissolution to take effect. One of their reasons was the necessity in which they found themselves of rejecting the Royal Covenant and of maintaining their own. The members of the Privy Council had all of them signed the King’s proclamation: only one name was missing, that of Lord Lorne, now Earl of Argyle, one of those ambitious and capable men, who with sure instinct attach themselves to the power which is strongest. He had chosen this moment for passing over from the side of the royal Covenant to that of the Covenant of the nobles and the people.
Thus these elements, whose previous struggles had still left a hope of reconciliation, now opposed one another face to face in open and irreconcilable hostility.
The intention originally professed was only that of abolishing the arbitrary innovations of King Charles, and of returning to the ordinances which James I had carried out in the General Assemblies and Parliaments after his accession to the throne of England. But it had always been the opinion of the staunch presbyterians, who dated the decay of the Church from the rise of the royal influence, that even this course should be opposed: and the ruling thought of the Assembly at Glasgow was directed to the same end. Everything was there declared invalid, which had been enacted in the Assembly of Linlithgow in the year 1606 and in subsequent Assemblies. The two Books, the High Commission, and with them also the Articles of Perth were not merely rejected: it was declared a crime to have taken part in their composition or introduction. Episcopacy was not only abolished on the ground that it had no warrant in God’s Word, but it was abjured. Upon the Bishops who had taken part in the ecclesiastical enactments of the last ten years, sentence of excommunication and deposition was pronounced; upon the others sentence of deposition alone. And how could bishops and lay elders even exist side by side? The former exhibit the authority of the Church as A.D. 1638. hierarchical; the latter exhibit it as democratic in principle. The chief obstacle that prevented the Kings from establishing the authority of the bishops was in truth the independent origin of the Scottish national Church, and the correspondence which existed in consequence between its fundamental arrangements and this origin. The institution which they had wished to make the basis of their influence over the Church was now shattered and annihilated. The most important agencies affecting the state of affairs were involved in the opposition between the bishops who supported the crown, and the lay elders whose rights were bound up with the congregation and with the subordinate temporal authorities.
We shall not, I think, go too far if we consider the Scottish General Assembly at Glasgow, notwithstanding its original ecclesiastical purpose, as nevertheless affording at the same time a type of subsequent national assemblies which had a purely political aim. In the conflict of opposite tendencies a party has here grown up which enjoys general sympathy to a wide extent, and aims at effecting a thorough transformation of the whole condition of Church and State: the supreme authority is compelled by it to assent to the meeting of an assembly able to bring about this result: this party controls the elections, and by a definite organisation brings to pass a result wholly in accordance with its wish: its leaders themselves are thus invested with a public character: they obtain a position in which they proclaim their intentions as the desire and will of the nation, above all of the national Church, and are able to force them upon the sovereign, whose ecclesiastical authority they repudiate. The moment at which Henderson refused to dissolve the Assembly at the demand of the King’s Commissary, however widely the circumstances may differ in other respects, may well be compared with the first steps by which, a century and a half later, the newly-created French National Assembly for the first time withstood the commands of its King. The Assembly of Glasgow held its sittings, carried on its deliberations, and drew up resolutions after it had been dissolved by the King, and its continued existence had been declared an act of treason. People realised quite well what this state of A.D. 1638. things meant[110]. Into the world, already filled with various fermenting elements, another was introduced which, not only from its inherent nature, but from the method in which it asserted itself, had, both here in Scotland and everywhere else, a boundless prospect open before it.
FOOTNOTES:
[103] Report of James Gordon, in Napier, Montrose and the Covenanters i. 153. ‘Some were threatened and beaten who durst refuse, especially in great citys, as likewise in other smaller towns: namely at Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Lanark.’
[104] Burnet: Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton 409.
[105] ‘Statuentes ex pio eiga antiquum nostrum regnum affectu, ut omnia gratiose stabiliantur et instaurenter similiter adeo ac si nos in sacrosancta persona nostra ibidem adessemus.’ Letters of Authorisation of May 20.
[106] Articles of Advise offered to His Majesty, August 1638. They were signed by Hamilton himself, Traquair, Roxburgh and Southesk. Rushworth ii. 758.
[107] Narrative of proceedings, in Rothes 220.