“Murdered—in cold blood!” muttered the Duke, as if he could not quite believe the news,—and perhaps realised for the first time that there were others besides the Archbishop of Saint Andrews who richly deserved a similar fate.
Hastily ordering the prisoner to be removed to the Tolbooth, he retired with his infamous companions to an inner room.
The well-known historical incident which was thus announced shall receive but brief comment here. There is no question at all as to the fact that Sharp was unlawfully killed, that he was cruelly slain, without trial and without judicial condemnation, by a party of Covenanters. Nothing justifies illegal killing. The justice of even legal killing is still an unsettled question, but one which does not concern us just now. We make no attempt to defend the deed of those men. It is not probable that any average Christian, whether in favour of the Covenanters or against them, would justify the killing of an old man by illegal means, however strongly he might hold the opinion that the old man deserved to die. In order to form an unprejudiced opinion on this subject recourse must be had to facts. The following are briefly the facts of the case.
A merchant named William Carmichael, formerly a bailie of Edinburgh, was one of Sharp’s favourites, and one of his numerous commissioners for suppressing conventicles in Fife. He was a licentious profligate, greedy of money, and capable of undertaking any job, however vile. This man’s enormities were at last so unbearable that he became an object of general detestation, and his excessive exactions had ruined so many respectable lairds, owners, and tenants, that at last nine of these (who had been outlawed, interdicted the common intercourse of society, and hunted like wild beasts on the mountains) resolved, since all other avenues of redressing their unjust sufferings were denied them, to take the law into their own hands and personally chastise Carmichael. Accordingly, hearing that the commissioner was hunting on the moors in the neighbourhood of Cupar, they rode off in search of him. They failed to find him, and were about to disperse, when a boy brought intelligence that the coach of Archbishop Sharp was approaching.
Baffled in their previous search, and smarting under the sense of their intolerable wrongs, the party regarded this as a providential deliverance of their arch-enemy into their hands. Here was the chief cause of all their woes, the man who, more almost than any other, had been instrumental in the persecution and ruin of many families, in the torture and death of innumerable innocent men and women, and the banishment of some of their nearest and dearest to perpetual exile on the plantations, where they were treated as slaves. They leaped at the sudden and unexpected opportunity. They reasoned that what had been done in the past, and was being done at the time, would continue to be done in the future, for there was no symptom of improvement, but rather of increasing severity in the Government and ecclesiastics. Overtaking the coach, which contained the Prelate and his daughter, they stopped it, made Archbishop Sharp step out, and slew him there on Magus Moor.
It was a dark unwarrantable deed, but it was unpremeditated, and necessarily unknown, at first, to any but the perpetrators, so that it would be inexcusably unfair to saddle it upon the great body of the Covenanters, who, as far as we can ascertain from their writings and opinions, condemned it, although, naturally, they could not but feel relieved to think that one of their chief persecutors was for evermore powerless for further evil, and some of them refused to admit that the deed was murder. They justified it by the case of Phinehas. A better apology lies in the text, “oppression maketh a wise man mad.”
This event had the effect, apparently, of causing the Council to forget our friends Black and Ramblin’ Peter for a time, for they were left in the Tolbooth for about three weeks after that, whereat Andrew was much pleased, for it gave his maimed limb time to recover. As Peter remarked gravely, “it’s an ill wund that blaws naebody guid!”
A robust and earnest nation cannot be subdued by persecution. The more the Council tyrannised over and trampled upon the liberties of the people of Scotland, the more resolutely did the leal-hearted and brave among them resist the oppressors. It is ever thus. It ever should be thus; for while an individual man has a perfect right, if he chooses, to submit to tyranny on his own account, he has no right to stand tamely by and see gross oppression and cruelty exercised towards his family, and neighbours, and country. At least, if he does so, he earns for himself the character of an unpatriotic poltroon. True patriotism consists in a readiness to sacrifice one’s-self to the national well-being. As far as things temporal are concerned, the records of the Scottish Covenanters prove incontestably that those long-tried men and women submitted with unexampled patience for full eight-and-twenty years to the spoiling of their goods and the ruin of their prospects; but when it came to be a question of submission to the capricious will of the King or loyalty to Jesus Christ, thousands of them chose the latter alternative, and many hundreds sealed their testimony with their blood.
When at last the question arose, “Shall we consent to the free preaching of the Gospel being suppressed altogether, or shall we assert our rights at the point of the sword?” there also arose very considerable difference of opinion among the Covenanters. Many of those who held the peace-at-almost-any-price principle, counselled submission. Others, such as Richard Cameron, Donald Cargill, and Thomas Douglas, who believed in the right of self-defence, and in such a text as “smite a scorner and the simple will beware,” advocated the use of carnal weapons for protection alone, although, when driven to desperation, they were compelled to go further. Some of the ejected ministers, such as Blackadder and Welsh, professed to be undecided on this point, and leant to a more or less submissive course.
Matters were now hastening to a crisis. A lawless Government had forced a law-abiding people into the appearance, though not the reality, of rebellion. The bands of armed men who assembled at conventicles became so numerous as to have the appearance of an army. The council, exasperated and alarmed, sent forth more troops to disperse and suppress these, though they had been guilty of no act of positive hostility.