In the Council Records of Inverness occurs, under this year, the following petition: ‘To the Right Honourable the Magistrates and Town Council of the burgh of Inverness, the supplication of Frederick Fraser, tailor burgess of Inverness, and Alexander Duff, burgess there, for ourselves and in behalf the remanent freemen of that trade, humbly sheweth—That your supplicants are very much damnified and prejudged in the enjoyment of their trade, the same being in-falled upon and taken away by many outlandish men, who dwell round about the burgh for eschewing of burden, and yet peeps in by night and by day and steals away the trade of the place, and works the same in the landward, to our great loss and apparent ruin, so that if speedy redress be not found, and this evil to this poor trade be not stayed, your supplicants and our poor families will undoubtedly perish. We are able to shew your lordships, and to make it out, that in these times we gain not by our trade for our own subsistence and the upholding of the burdens of the place, that which our servants were wont to gain under us. May it please your lordships, therefore, to take the premises into consideration, and to allow us, your supplicants, or such others of the trade as your lordships please to nominate, such power and freedom in the exercise of that trade as formerly we had, and that for the better restraining of all such as are neither profitable nor allowable to the place, and for the further and better encouragement of us your poor supplicants who has and are willing daily to contribute with the place in weal and woe according to our poor power.’
A local journalist, after giving a transcript of this petition, adds: ‘Provost Cuthbert and the council turned a friendly ear to the supplication, and authorised the petitioners to “look and see to restrain all outlandish tailors,” and empowering them to seize upon the work of the transgressors, and bring the whole before a magistrate. Two years afterwards, however, the same parties, with the addition of John Cumming, tailor, again complain of the outlandish tailors. They petition that all unfreemen in the town should be discharged from usurping to themselves the benefits of freemen, and from keeping apprentices and servants, and made to live within the verge of their own calling. The provost and council granted the desire of the petition, and authorised the supplicants, with the concurrence of the burgh officers, to put the act in force. The principles of political economy or free-trade were not then understood, but the inhabitants seem to have been willing enough to avail themselves of the cheap services of the outlandish tailors, else the freemen would not so strongly have urged their claims upon the council.’[185]
REIGN OF CHARLES II.: 1660-1673.
The wild joy with which the people of England hailed the close of anarchy and military tyranny in the restoration of Charles II. to the throne, was fully participated in Scotland by a small loyalist party. The bulk of the community were also made happy by the event, for they were pleased to see the monarchy restored, accompanied as the event was by the revival of their national independence; but the general happiness was mixed with anxiety regarding the fate of their favourite church, to which they had long been accustomed to consider all other institutions as subordinate. In England, almost as a matter of course, the Episcopal Church was restored with the monarchy, to the slighting of that Solemn League and Covenant with which the interests of Presbyterianism had been so long bound up. The temper of the English people was now strongly against all that had been done during the troubles by those with whom the Scottish Presbyterians had been in alliance, and consequently against Scottish Presbyterianism itself. The joy of the Presbyterian monarchists of Scotland might therefore well be mixed with fear.
Very naturally, the men of high rank who had done and suffered most for the cause of monarchy in the late evil days, were appointed to be at the head of affairs in Scotland. The Earl of Glencairn, chief of the guerrilla resistance to Cromwell in 1653, was made Chancellor. Major-general Middleton, who had finally commanded in that insurrection, and was now promoted to the peerage as Earl of Middleton, was appointed to be his majesty’s commissioner to parliament. The Earls of Crawford and Lauderdale, Presbyterian monarchists of 1650-1, who had since suffered a ten years’ imprisonment in England, were made respectively Lord Treasurer and Secretary of State. With them came a host of inferior officials, all more or less under a sense of suffering through over-zealous Presbyterianism, and mostly eager to repair their broken fortunes at the expense of their enemies. A reassemblage in September of the remains of that Committee of Estates which had been captured at Alyth in 1651, was the first movement made. It was superseded by the new parliament, which sat down on the 1st of January 1661 and proceeded to pass many acts for the settlement of affairs on the new basis. One of these at a single blow annulled all the acts of the irregular parliaments of the last twenty-three years; another imposed on men holding offices an oath acknowledging the king to be ‘supreme governor in all cases, over all persons, ecclesiastical and civil.’ Finally, in July of that year, the Privy Council was reconstituted—a judicial as well as political body. At the same time, the Courts of Session and Justiciary were reconstructed, in place of the English judicatories which had sat for the last eight years.
The vengeance of the new government fell only on those who had carried the Presbyterian views to a disloyal extreme, or who had complied with Cromwell. The chief victim was the Marquis of Argyle—who no doubt had placed the crown on the king’s head at Scone in 1651, but who had also been the prime leader in nearly all those movements subsequent to 1638, which had been so destructive to the interests of royalty. His execution (May 27, 1661) was considered by the royalists as a righteous retribution for that of Montrose eleven years before. Mr James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, the leader among the Remonstrators, was hanged. Sir Archibald Johnston—who had perhaps done more than any other single man throughout the troubles to promote the pure Presbyterian cause—escaped to Holland, but after a little time was brought back and executed (July 1663). Several other ministers of the Remonstrant party, who failed to make timely submission, were imprisoned, and subsequently for the most part banished.
The one great subject remaining for consideration was the church—how was it to be settled? The king, unlike his father, could have endured the Presbyterian forms, though he is said to have privately declared Presbyterianism unfit to be the religion of a gentleman. But Presbyterianism involved something more than forms. As professed by its more zealous and intelligent adherents, it claimed to have Christ for its sole head, and therefore to be completely independent of all civil control. The men in whose hands its fate was now cast—for the reaction of popular feeling in the entire island made it helpless—had to consider that this claim had been a source of constant trouble to the state ever since the minority of King James; they had to judge whether the Presbyterian Church, holding such a claim as essential to it, would, if now established, comport with any species of civil government whatever. Under the light of recent experiences, and led by the general temper of the time, it was not surprising, though very unfortunate, that they resolved to restore the so-called moderate Episcopacy of 1638, minus the Book of Canons and Liturgy.
The moderate or Resolutionist party in the church, being the great majority, had sent Mr James Sharpe, minister of Crail, to represent their interests in the little body of men surrounding the king at his return from the continent. Full reliance was placed on Mr Sharpe, for he was thought to be a conscientious as well as able man: we find Robert Baillie speaking of him at the time with an affection which could not have been inspired in so virtuous a bosom without many merits. But Mr Sharpe proved unable to resist the contagion of feeling to which he was exposed: he was induced to consent to the restoration of prelacy, and to take the position of primate. The Presbyterians considered themselves as betrayed by their own representative. The bishops of 1638 being all dead but one, and he unable to travel, Sharpe and three other Presbyterian clergymen received the rite of consecration in London, and, returning, imparted it to the other bishops in Holyrood Church. In May 1662, an act of the Estates formally reconstituted the church on the Episcopal model; the bulk of the people quietly submitting to what they could not resist, while the more earnest regarded it as a desertion of Christ’s own standard, calculated to bring down judgments upon the land.
The burst of loyal feeling at the Restoration had probably led the government to believe that the settlement of Episcopacy would be an easy, if not popular act. If they had truly known the antipathy still entertained for the prelatic model, they might have hesitated to take such a step, for it might then have appeared more hopeful that the claim of independence for presbytery would be practically overcome or made innocuous—as it afterwards was at the Revolution—than that bishops could be maintained in peace amongst a hostile people. But here we must remember how force was universally looked to in that age as a proper and legitimate means of inducing conformity. Under the recent rule of the Presbyterian Church, there had been heavy fines, depositions, banishings, excommunications, and confiscations, for Episcopalian and popish non-conformists; hangings and beheadings for those who proceeded to an active opposition. And the apparent conformity which such means can produce had really been attained. The authors of the new episcopate, having no light beyond their age on the subject of toleration, might very naturally think that what had succeeded in 1650 would succeed in 1662: they would compel the people to be Episcopalians. There was a difference in the two cases which it would have been well for them to observe. The severe measures of 1650 were the measures of a majority of really religious men—or at least men of very earnest religious convictions—against a minority of dissenters or indifferents. The measures now called for were to be carried out by a minority, chiefly animated by secular maxims, against a mass of people generally earnest in their peculiar religious views, and who were liable to become the more so, and consequently the more troublesome, under persecution. In the one case, the dominant church was a great Reality, solidly founded in the affections of the mass of the people; in the other, it was little more than a piece of statecraft, with the affections of the majority of the people against it. The right of enforcing conformity we may allow to have been the same in both cases; but the consequences, we can easily see, were likely to be very different. The new church had scarcely been constituted, when the unwiseness of the step might have easily been seen. The clergy generally, but especially in the south-western counties, shewed their unwillingness to give up their collective powers into the hands of the bishops. On a precipitate edict of the Archbishop of Glasgow, calling on the ministers of his province who had been inducted since 1649 to take out new presentations from the patrons, and receive collation from their bishops, three hundred and fifty, being a third of the entire church, resigned their cures. This was a startling blow to the new system, for, under that incapacity of judging of the influence of religious feelings which is to be marked in worldly men, it had been supposed that not more than ten would resign. Of course these men became troublesome dissenters, notwithstanding all that could be done to disperse or silence them. In reality, the substitution of a new bishop-approved minister for one who would not submit to bishops, was a matter not very immediately affecting congregations, for, under the late alteration in the church, the forms of worship and professed Christian doctrine remained the same as before. But the Scotch, during the last twenty-five years, had been generally instructed regarding the Presbyterian polity, and trained up to regard it with veneration; insomuch that the parity of ministers in the church-courts and the headship of Christ, as exclusive of all supremacy of king or human law, were points for which they were as much disposed to martyr themselves as for the most essential points of faith contained in the catechism. They therefore began to desert the parish churches, and hold private meetings for worship under the displaced clergy. In our time, no statesman would think of opposing the people in such a course. They would be allowed quietly to raise dissenting meeting-houses for themselves and favourite clergymen, and the peace of the country would not be disturbed. But the reader must have been prepared to see that no such course could then be adopted. The Presbyterian establishment itself had only a few years before sternly put down all external expression of dissent. It had even forbidden private meetings of little groups of its own members for worship, lest these should lead to or give shelter to schism. If they, with their deep religious feelings, were thus intolerant of dissent, what might we expect from the worldly statesmen and prelates now at the head of affairs? What but the most vigorous measures for preserving an outward conformity? The extruded ministers were forbidden to live within or near their former parishes, lest their people should attend their ministrations. The people of those parishes were commanded under heavy pains to attend the regular church, however odious the new minister might be to them. Even to go to the church of some neighbouring parish where there was still one of the old clergy officiating, was forbidden under the like penalties. Finally, bodies of soldiery were sent to raise the fines, or to exact free quarters till the fines were paid. These soldiers would enter the churches of the old Presbyterian clergy yet in possession of their pulpits, noting such of the congregation as could not swear that they belonged to the parish, taking the money from their pockets, or stripping them of articles of wearing apparel, as a punishment for their breach of law. In some districts, where a very earnest feeling of religion prevailed, the people were harassed and impoverished to a degree that made them anxious to leave their native country.
Middleton’s administration came to a sudden close in 1663, in consequence of an intrigue against Lauderdale; and the latter noble then succeeded to the chief power. Although he had been a Presbyterian, and was not originally in favour of setting up the Episcopal Church, his rule brought no relief. Still, there was a certain leniency in high quarters, till Sharpe, in order to secure unfaltering severity, obtained the erection of a court of commission, in which the prelates should have chief sway. Then came a mercilessness greater than before. The doings of the soldiery were such as to produce an approach to desolation in certain districts. Ministers, for merely performing worship in their own houses, were thrown into vile prisons, or banished to half-desert islands. Even to give charity to any of the proscribed clergy was declared to be a crime. When the war with Holland commenced in the spring of 1665, it was feared that there would be an insurrection in the west of Scotland, and the whole district was consequently disarmed. Nevertheless, in November of the ensuing year, the extreme severity of the soldiery under Sir James Turner occasioned a partial resistance at Dalry, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, and in a little time a small body of insurgents was collected. Marching through Ayrshire, their numbers increased to about two thousand, and they then turned towards Edinburgh, where they expected considerable accessions. It was a hasty and ill-considered affair, springing merely from the sense of intolerable suffering. The government, having a small standing army at its disposal, was at no moment in the least danger. About nine hundred poor half-armed peasants made a final stand at Rullion Green, on the eastern skirts of the Pentland Hills, where they were attacked by a strong body of dragoons under Sir Thomas Dalyell, routed, and dispersed (November 28, 1666). Many were killed on the field and in the pursuit, and eighteen were afterwards executed in Edinburgh. Several of these were previously tortured to extort confession, the instrument used being a loose frame of wood called the Boot, into which wedges were driven so as to crush the limb of the prisoner. Thirty-five more were executed in the country, not without some difficulty to the authorities, as the executioners generally refused to exercise their profession against such culprits.