During the latter years of Charles II., a number of persons from England and Scotland had taken refuge in Holland, to escape state prosecutions with which they were threatened. Among the Scottish exiles, besides Argyle, were Sir James Dalrymple, afterwards Earl of Stair, the celebrated Fletcher of Salton, and Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth,—all of whom, as martyrs of liberty, longed for an opportunity of vindicating its cause in the face of their country. The accession of James II, in 1685, to the crown of his brother, seemed an event favourable to their plans, and at a meeting which some of the exiled leaders held at Rotterdam, they resolved to raise the standard of revolt in England and Scotland, and invited the Duke of Monmouth, also an exile, and the Earl of Argyle, to join them.[531] Monmouth, who was then living in retirement at Brussels, spending his time in illicit amours, accepted the invitation, and having repaired to Rotterdam, offered either to attempt a descent on England, at the head of the English exiles, or to go to Scotland as a volunteer, under Argyle.[532] The latter, who had never ceased since his flight to keep up a correspondence with his friends in Scotland, had already been making preparations, and by means of a large sum of money he had received from a rich widow of Amsterdam, had there purchased a ship and arms, and ammunition. He now also repaired to Rotterdam, where it was finally arranged that two expeditions should be fitted out,—one for England, under Monmouth, and the other for Scotland, under the command of Argyle, who was appointed by the council at Rotterdam captain-general of the army, “with as full power as was usually given to generals by the free states in Europe.”[533]
On the 2d of May, 1685, the expedition under Argyle, which consisted of three ships and about 300 men, left the shores of Holland, and reached Cairston in the Orkneys on the 6th, after a pleasant voyage. The seizure, by the natives, of Spence, the earl’s secretary, and of Blackadder, his surgeon, both of whom had incautiously ventured on shore, afforded the government the necessary information as to the strength and destination of the expedition. A proclamation had been issued, on the 28th of April, for putting the kingdom in a posture of defence, hostages had been taken from the vassals of Argyle as sureties for their fidelity, and all persons whose loyalty was suspected were either imprisoned or had to find security for their fidelity to the government; but as soon as the council at Edinburgh received the intelligence of Argyle’s having reached the Orkneys, they despatched troops to the west, and ordered several frigates to cruise among the Western Isles. After taking four Orcadians as hostages for the lives of his secretary and surgeon, Argyle left the Orkneys on the 7th of May, and arrived at Tobermory in the isle of Mull on the 11th, whence he sailed to the mainland, and landed in Kintyre. Here he published a declaration which had been drawn up in Holland by Sir James Stuart, afterwards king’s advocate, full of invective against the government, and attributing all the grievances under which the country had laboured in the preceding reign to a conspiracy between popery and tyranny, which had, he observed, been evidently disclosed by the cutting off of the late king and the ascension of the Duke of York to the throne. It declared that the object of the invaders was to restore the true Protestant religion, and that as the Duke of York was, from his religion, as they supposed, incapable of giving security on that head, they declared that they would never enter into any treaty with him. The earl issued, a few days thereafter, a second declaration, from Tarbet, reciting his own wrongs, and calling upon his former vassals to join his standard. Messengers were despatched in all directions, bearing aloft the fiery cross, and in a short time about 800 of his clan, headed by Sir Duncan Campbell of Auchinbreck, rallied around their chief. Other reinforcements arrived, which increased his army to 2,500 men; a force wholly insufficient to meet a body of about 7,000 militia and a considerable number of regular troops already assembled in the west to oppose his advance.
Although Argyle’s obvious plan was at once to have dashed into the western Lowlands, where the spirit of disaffection was deeply prevalent, and where a great accession of force might have been expected, he, contrary to the advice of some of his officers, remained in Argyle a considerable time in expectation of hearing of Monmouth’s landing, and spent the precious moments in chasing out of his territories a few stragglers who infested his borders. Amid the dissensions which naturally arose from this difference of opinion, the royalists were hemming Argyle in on all sides. Whilst the Duke of Gordon was advancing upon his rear with the northern forces, and the Earl of Dumbarton with the regular troops pressing him in front, the Marquis of Athole and Lord Charles Murray, at the head of 1,500 men, kept hanging on his right wing, and a fleet watched his ships to prevent his escape by sea. In this conjuncture Argyle yielded to the opinion of his officers, and, leaving his stores in the castle of Allangreg, in charge of a garrison of 150 men, he began his march, on the 10th of June, to the Lowlands, and gave orders that his vessels should follow close along the coast. The commander of the castle, on the approach of the king’s ships under Sir Thomas Hamilton, abandoned it five days thereafter, without firing a single shot, and the warlike stores which it contained, consisting of 5,000 stand of arms and 300 barrels of powder, besides a standard bearing the inscription “Against Popery, Prelacy, and Erastianism,” fell a prey to the royalists. The vessels also belonging to Argyle were taken at the same time.[534]
On the 16th of June Argyle crossed the Leven near Dumbarton, but finding it impracticable, from the numerous forces opposed to him, and which met him at every point, to proceed on his intended route to Glasgow by the ordinary road, he betook himself to the hills, in the expectation of eluding his foes during the darkness of the night; but this desperate expedient did not succeed, and next morning Argyle found his force diminished by desertion to 500 men. Thus abandoned by the greater part of his men, he, in his turn, deserted those who remained with him, and endeavoured to secure his own safety. Disguised in a common dress he wandered for some time in the company of Major Fullarton in the vicinity of Dumbarton, and on the opposite side of the Clyde, but was at last taken prisoner by a few militiamen in attempting to reach his own country.[535] About 100 of the volunteers from Holland crossed the Clyde in boats, but being attacked by the royalists were dispersed. Thus ended this ill concerted and unfortunate expedition.[536]
Argyle was carried to Glasgow, and thence to Edinburgh, where he underwent the same ignominious and brutal treatment which the brave Montrose had suffered on being brought to the capital after his capture. As the judgment which had been pronounced against Argyle, after his escape from the castle of Edinburgh, was still in force, no trial was considered necessary. He was beheaded accordingly on the 26th of June, evincing in his last moments the fortitude of a Roman, and the faith of a martyr. “When this nobleman’s death,” observes Sir Walter Scott, “is considered as the consequence of a sentence passed against him for presuming to comment upon and explain an oath which was self-contradictory, it can only be termed a judicial murder.” His two sons, Lord Lorn and Lord Neill Campbell, were banished. Monmouth, who did not land in England till the 11th of June, was equally unfortunate, and suffered the death of a traitor on Tower Hill on the 15th of July.
Ninth Earl of Argyle.
The ill-fated result of Argyle’s expedition, and the suppression of Monmouth’s rebellion, enabled James to turn the whole of his attention to the accomplishment of an object more valuable, in his opinion, than the crown itself—the restoration of the Catholic religion. In furtherance of this design, the king adopted a series of the most unconstitutional and impolitic measures, which destroyed the popularity he had acquired on his accession, and finally ended in his expulsion from the throne.
It was not, however, till the Scottish parliament, which met on the 28th of April, 1686, and on the obsequiousness of which the king had placed great reliance, had refused to repeal the test, that he resolved upon those desperate measures which proved so fatal to him. This parliament was prorogued by order of the king on the 15th of June, and in a few months thereafter, he addressed a succession of letters to the council,—from which he had previously removed some individuals who were opposed to his plans,—in which he stated, that in requiring the parliament to repeal the penal statutes, he merely meant to give them an opportunity of evincing their loyalty, as he considered that he had sufficient power, by virtue of his prerogative, to suspend or dispense with those laws; a most erroneous and dangerous doctrine certainly, but which could never be said to have been exploded till the era of the revolution. In these letters the king ordered the council to allow the Catholics to exercise their worship freely in private, to extend the protection of government to his Protestant as well as Catholic subjects, to receive the conformist clergy in general to livings in the church, and to admit certain individuals whom he named to offices in the state without requiring any of them to take the test.[537]