savage murder; but so had been the deaths of hundreds of persons more
innocent than he of offences against justice and common right. More
severe measures of repression were taken; new troops were raised, and
the officers instructed to act with the utmost rigour. And the
Covenanters grew desperate; they assembled in greater numbers, were more
fully armed, and more defiant in their language. On 29th May, the
anniversary of the Restoration, a mounted party entered the village of
Rutherglen, about two miles from Glasgow. They extinguished the festive
bonfire, held a service of denunciatory psalms, prayers, and
exhortations in the market place, and burned the Acts which had been
issued against the Covenant. In quest of the insurgents, and to avenge
the affront on the government, a body of cavalry rode out of Glasgow
barracks, on the 1st of June. Their leader was a distinguished soldier—a
man of courage and gallant bearing, John Graham of Claverhouse—
afterwards, for his services in the royal cause, created Viscount
Dundee.
In the annals of Scotland there is no name amongst the unworthiest of
her sons,—Monteith the betrayer of Wallace, Cardinal Beaton, the
ruthless persecutor, Dalziel, with a monomania for murder and
oppression,—so utterly detestable as that of the dashing cavalier,
Claverhouse. His portrait is that of a haughty, self-centred man; one
would think too proud for the meanly savage work he was set to do, but
which, with fell intensity, he seemed to revel in doing. In the
conflict, he appeared to have a charmed life, and in these superstitious
times he was believed to have made a paction with Satan:—for doing the
fiend’s work he was to have so many years immunity from death: neither
lead nor steel could harm him. It was said that his mortal wound,
received in the moment of victory at Killiecrankie, was from being shot
by a silver bullet.
Claverhouse, in quest of the demonstrators at Rutherglen, came, at
Drumclog, about twenty miles south of Glasgow, on the body of
insurgents; about fifty horsemen fairly well appointed, as many infantry
with fire-arms, and a number armed with pikes, scythes, and pitch-forks.
The Covenanters had skilfully posted themselves; a morass and broad
ditch in front, the infantry in the centre, a troop of horse on each
flank. Claverhouse’s call to surrender was answered by the singing of a
verse of a warlike psalm. The troops gave a loud cheer, and rode into
the morass; they found it impassable and themselves under a steady fire
from the Covenanters. Claverhouse sent flanking parties to right and
left. These were boldly met before they had time to form after crossing
the ditch, and nearly cut to pieces. And then the Covenanters made a
sudden rush, and after a desperate defence by Claverhouse, they utterly
routed him,—the only battle he ever lost.
This victory of the Covenanters over regular troops, ably commanded, was
a general surprise, and it found the victors ill-prepared to follow it
up to advantage. They next day occupied Hamilton, and, reinforced by
numbers, proceeded to attack Glasgow. They were at first beaten back by
Claverhouse, but he thought it advisable to retreat to Edinburgh; and
then the insurgents occupied Glasgow. The King meanwhile had sent the
Duke of Monmouth—a courteous and courageous gentleman,—albeit the bar
sinister ran through his escutcheon—to collect an army to quell the
rebellion. On 21st June the Covenanters—who had now their headquarters
near Hamilton, on the south-western bank of the Clyde, learned that the
Duke, at the head of a powerful army, was advancing towards Bothwell
Bridge—crossing which he would be upon them.
In the face of the common enemy, polemical disputes between the
different presbyterian parties brought confusion into their councils.
The moderate party drew up a supplication to the Duke, describing their
many grievances, and asking that they be submitted to a free parliament.
The Duke sent a courteous reply, expressing sympathy, and offering to
intercede for them with the King,—but they must first lay down their
arms. This condition the extreme party would not listen to, and at this
most unsuitable moment, they nominated fresh officers—men indisposed to
acknowledge any allegiance to the King, or, in matters appertaining to
religion, to submit to the civil power. Under Rathillet, Burley and
other irreconcilables, 300 men were posted to hold the bridge; they made
a stout defence; but it was forced at the point of the bayonet. Bishop
Burnet says,—“The main body of the insurgents had not the grace to
submit, the courage to fight, nor the sense to run away.” But when the
cannon began to make havoc in their ranks, and they saw the deadly array
of horsemen, and the serried ranks of disciplined infantry preparing to
charge—they threw down their arms, and became a mob of fugitives.
And now Claverhouse had to avenge Drumclog. His war-cry on that day had
been “No Quarter,” and this was his intention at Bothwell Bridge. Four
hundred were killed on the field and in the flight, but the strict
orders of the Duke were “Give quarter to all who surrender—make
prisoners, but spare life;” and thus the relentless swords of
Claverhouse and Dalziel were stayed. With the indignation of a true
soldier, Monmouth rejected a proposal to burn Hamilton and to devastate
the surrounding country; and he issued a proclamation promising pardon
to all who made their submission by a certain day.
But the milder spirit of Monmouth found no place in the treatment of the
prisoners taken at Bothwell. They were marched to Edinburgh, suffering
much on the way; there, 1200 men were huddled together without shelter
in the Greyfriars churchyard—sleeping amongst the tombs upon the bare
ground. Several supposed leaders were executed, some escaped further
misery by death from exposure, others were set free on signing a
declaration never to take arms against the King, and 257 were sent as
slaves to Barbadoes.
And meantime Claverhouse was passing as a destroying angel through the
western shires. Making little distinction between those who had, and
those who had not, taken part in the late insurrection—he seized the
property, and imprisoned or put to death, all against whom any charge of
contumacy could be laid. The hunted Covenanters were driven into wilder
seclusions, and their barbarous treatment naturally made them more
aggressive and extravagant in their language. Useless to talk to men
frenzied to despair of loyalty to a King, who, in his life of unhallowed
pleasure in distant London, heard not, or cared not, for the bitter cry
of the people whose rights he had sworn to protect. When they met at
midnight in lonely glen or trackless moor, the leaders, Cameron,
Cargill, Renwick, and others, would, like the Hebrew Prophets of old,
mingle prophecy with denunciation; their high-strung enthusiasm bordered
on insanity.
Cameron and Cargill published a declaration denouncing Charles, calling
on all true sons of the Covenant to throw off their allegiance, and take
up arms against him. And government had now a pretext for putting
Scotland under what was really martial law. The common soldiers were
authorised to put to death, without any pretence of trial, all who
refused to take the prescribed oath, or to answer all interrogations. It
was a capital crime to have any intercourse with prescribed persons; and
torture was inflicted, even on women, to extort the whereabouts of these
persons. At Wigtown, Margaret McLauchlan, a widow of sixty-three years,
and Margaret Wilson, a girl of eighteen, were drowned by being bound to
stakes within flood-mark.
Amongst many murders perpetrated at this time, that of John Brown, the
Ayrshire carrier, stands out conspicuous in horror. He was a quiet,
sedate man, leading a blameless life; his only offence was that he did
not on Sundays attend the parish church, but either read his bible at
home, or, with a few like-minded, met in a quiet place for a little
service of praise and prayer. One morning, whilst digging peats for the
house fire, he was surrounded by Claverhouse’s dragoons, and brought to
his own door. Here, his wife and children being by—a baby in its
mother’s arms—Claverhouse asked him why he did not attend on the King’s
curate; and John, answering that he had to obey his conscience rather
than the King, Claverhouse told him to prepare for death. He said he had
long been so prepared. He prayed with fervour, until interrupted by
Claverhouse, who saw his wild dragoons beginning to shew tokens of
sympathy; Brown kissed his wife and little ones, and he was then shot
dead. “What do you think of your bonnie man now?” the devil-hearted
slayer asked of the newly-made widow. “I aye thocht muckle o’ him, but
never sae muckle as I do this day.” She laid her infant on the ground,
tied up the poor shattered head in her kerchief, composed the limbs,
covered the body with a plaid, and then she sat down beside it, and, in
heart-rending sobs and tears, gave full course to natural sorrow. The
tragedy enacted on Magus Moor was a cruel murder, but if there are
degrees of guilt in such an awful crime, that committed at the cottage
door in Ayrshire was surely the more heinous and atrocious of the two.
Monmouth remained only a short time in Scotland; Lauderdale was still
nominally at the head of affairs. But in November, 1679, the King sent
his brother James to Edinburgh, partly to keep him out of sight from the
people of England. As a rigid Roman Catholic, standing next in
succession to the throne, he was very unpopular. A cry of popish plots
had been got up, and an Exclusion Bill would have been carried in
Parliament,[4] but Charles dissolved it, and he never called another;
for the last four years of his life he reigned as an absolute monarch.
Footnote 4:
A concession which was proposed on the King’s authority now sounds
very strange. It was that at his death James should be King, but for
ever banished five hundred miles from his dominions; his daughter,
Princess of Orange, to reign as Regent. Parliament would not listen to
this rather impracticable project.
James, a royal Stuart, residing in long untenanted Holyrood, was made
much of by the Scottish nobility and gentry, and to conciliate them he
so far unbent his generally sombre and unamiable demeanour. He paid
particular attention to the Highland chieftains, and thus laid a
foundation for that loyalty to himself and his descendants, so costly to
the clansmen. But his presence and his influence in public affairs did
no good to the poor Covenanters. Against nonconformity of every shade
his only remedies were persecution and suppression. The poor wanderers
of the Covenant were hunted as wild beasts. Richard Cameron was slain at
Aire Moss. Hackston and Cargill were hanged. It is said that James often
amused his leisure hours by witnessing the tortures of the boot and the
thumb-screw.
And not the common people only were thus vexed and harassed. Strangely-
worded oaths, acknowledging the laws and statutes, and also the King’s
supremacy, were administered to all holding official positions. When, as
a privy counsellor, the oath was tendered to the Earl of Argyle—son of
the Marquis who was beheaded at the commencement of the reign—he
declared he took it so far as it was consistent with itself, and with
the Protestant religion. For adding this qualification, he was tried
for, and found guilty of, high treason. He contrived to escape from
Edinburgh Castle in the disguise of a page holding up his step-
daughter’s train. He reached Holland, a sentence of death hanging over
him.
And in England, after dismissing the Oxford parliament, the King was
despotic. If he had any religious faith at all, it was towards
Catholicism, and thus he took up his brother’s quarrel. In the
administration of justice, juries were packed, and judges were venal.
London was adjudged to have illegally extended its political powers, was
fined heavily, and condemned to lose its charters. Breaches of their
charters by provincial towns were looked for, and something was
generally found sufficient to raise prosecutions upon, the award being
always given for the Crown. Fines were levied for the King’s private
advantage, and by his veto in the election of magistrates he held in his
hand Parliamentary elections. The university of Oxford issued a solemn
decree, affirming unlimited submission to the Royal authority; and the
most detestable of the very few judges whose names are a stain upon the
history of English jurisprudence—Jeffreys—was the very incarnation of
venality and injustice; he was a vulgar bully, ever finding a demoniacal
pleasure in cruelty and wrong-doing.
The country had been sickened of civil war, and public spirit seemed to
have deserted the land. Still the Whig leaders of the late majority in
Parliament made some attempts at organizing resistance. Shaftesbury was
for immediate rebellion; but Lords Essex, Howard, and William Russell,
and Algernon Sidney, more cautiously resolved to wait the course of
events, and act when an opportunity arose. They certainly meant an
insurrection in London, to be supported by a rising in the West of
England, and another in Scotland under the Earl of Argyle.
But a conspiracy in a lower stratum of political influence, called the
Ryehouse Plot, which proposed the deaths of the King and his brother,
having been divulged to the Government, and certain arrests made, the
prisoners, to save themselves, declared that Lords Howard and Russell,
and Sidney, Hampden (a grandson of the John Hampden of ship-money fame),
and others were implicated. Howard—recreant to the traditions of his
name—turned approver. Lord William Russell was tried for treason—nobly
supported by his wife—and although the evidence against him was weak, a
packed jury convicted him, and he was beheaded at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Sidney was tried by Judge Jeffreys. Howard was the only witness against
him, and for a conviction of treason the law required at least two
witnesses; but a manuscript treatise on Government had been found
amongst Sidney’s papers; certain passages on political liberty would
nowadays be considered as mere truisms, but Jeffreys ruled that they
were equal to two-and-twenty adverse witnesses. He also was found
guilty, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. Shaftesbury fled to Holland.
Lord Essex—a true nobleman—blaming himself for having put it into
Howard’s power to injure Lord Russell, committed suicide.
And some Scottish gentlemen were also implicated in the Whig plot.
Bailie, of Jerviswood, had been in correspondence with Lord Russell, and
was asked to give evidence against him. On his refusal, he was himself
tried for treason,—condemned and executed. Many were fined and
imprisoned; many left the country, or otherwise could not be found, but
were tried in their absence—outlawed, and their estates forfeited.
James returned to London: he feared the influence of the Duke of
Monmouth, who, trading on his father’s favour and his own handsome face
and genial manners, posed as an ultra-Protestant, and, in spite of his
illegitimate birth, aspired to the succession. James had Monmouth sent
to Holland—then, under the Prince of Orange, the refuge for English and
Scottish exiles.
But for Charles the world of time was now at its vanishing point. He was
only in his fifty-fifth year when, in the midst of his sensuous
pleasures, apoplexy seized him, and Bishop Ken had to tell him his hours
were numbered. Certain religious exercises were gone through, and the
sacramental elements being brought in, the bishop proposed their
administration. The King put this off, and the bishop retired. And now
James looked up a Catholic priest, and had him smuggled in by a private
door to the King’s chamber. The King made confession, and had the last
rites of the Church administered. Thus made safe by a Romish passport
into heaven—the dying King no doubt enjoyed as a good joke the prayers
and admonitions of the Protestant prelates, who, with the lords-in-
waiting, were afterwards ushered into his chamber. He died February 6th,
1684-5.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scotland under James the Second.
Within half-an-hour of his brother’s death, James was seated as the King
in Council. He declared that he would govern by the laws, and maintain
the established church. Loyal addresses from all parts of his dominions
were poured in upon him; and the commencement of his reign gave promise
of stability and popularity. In a lesser degree he had his brothers
vices; but he had shewn considerable aptitude for public business, and
was not deficient in personal courage. In 1665, he had, in a war with
Holland, taken the command of the Channel fleet. On the 3rd of June a
great battle was fought off the Norfolk coast, within sight of
Lowestoft. When the fight was at its hottest, the Dutch admiral’s ship
blew up, and a Dutch fire-ship grappled with and destroyed an English
ship. James had twice to shift his flag, as his ships were successively
disabled. After an obstinate contest the Dutch ships sailed for the
Texel; James pursued for a time,—eighteen of the enemy’s ships being
taken or destroyed.
But his accession to the throne was not to be unchallenged. The Duke of
Monmouth and the Earl of Argyle met in Holland, and concerted
simultaneous insurrections in England and Scotland.
Monmouth landed at Lyme, in Dorsetshire, on 11th June, and marched to
Taunton, in Somersetshire, at the head of 5,000 irregularly armed
troops. He had married the heiress of Buccleuch, and in other ways
became associated with the nobility; stories had been set afloat of a
marriage between his father and his Welsh mother, Lucy Walters, and he
was looked on by many as the true heir to the throne. At Taunton he was
received with acclamations; twenty young ladies presented him with a
pocket-bible, a flag, and a naked sword. He had himself proclaimed King.
After a good deal of tentative marching through the western counties, he
fell back on Bridgewater, and three miles from this town, at Sedgemoor,
a battle was fought, in which he was utterly defeated. He himself fled
before the close of the fight; and was afterwards captured hiding in a
bean-field.
He was taken to London, and at his own solicitation had an interview
with the King. A larger-minded man than James would have been moved to
generosity, at the sight of his brother’s son grovelling on his knees
before him, and humbly suing for mercy; but generosity towards fallen
enemies was not a distinguishing trait in the Stuart character. And this
young man had long been a thorn in James’s path; so now no mercy for
him—his doom was immediate execution.
And terrible was the vengeance of the King on not only the leaders of
the insurrection, but on inferior participants, and on all who had given
aid or countenance thereto. There were a number of military executions;
and then Jeffreys was let loose upon the western counties. His “bloody
assize” was a very devil’s carnival of barbarity and death. The campaign
was opened at Winchester with the trial of Alice Lisle, the aged widow
of one of Cromwell’s lieutenants, for affording food and shelter to two
of the fugitive insurgents. Jeffreys bullied the jury into a verdict of
guilty, and then he sentenced her to be burned alive that same
afternoon. Horror-stricken, the clergy of the cathedral obtained a
respite for three days. Noble ladies, whom she had befriended in the
time of the Commonwealth, solicited her pardon from the King. Her son in
the army had served against Monmouth. And James was actually moved to
change her sentence from burning alive to beheading! And so it was
executed. In this judicial massacre, more than three hundred persons
were put to death, and very many who escaped death, suffered mutilation,
imprisonment, or exile. Hundreds of the prisoners were presented to the
courtiers,—to be sold for ten years as slaves in the West Indies. The
twenty young ladies of Taunton, who had figured in the ovation to
Monmouth, were assigned to the Queen’s maids-of-honour, and they sold
pardons to the girls at the rate of a hundred pounds a head!
The accession of James brought no relaxation in the oppressive laws
bearing upon Scottish presbyterianism. It was still in the power of the
military to apprehend and interrogate, to torture, to confiscate the
goods, and even to take the lives of those suspected of nonconformity,
or of assisting outlawed persons. It was therefore to be expected that
any attempt to throw off the galling yoke would have general sympathy
and support. Argyle had himself been the victim of unjust persecution;
and yet his invasion of Scotland was as futile and disastrous as that of
Monmouth was of England.
Argyle was a Highland chief, influenced by his old family feuds; and his
foremost idea was to fight the clans which were the hereditary enemies
of his house, and also loyal Jacobites. So with about three hundred men
he landed on the western peninsula of Cantyre, and was joined by about a
thousand of his Campbell clansmen. He proposed marching to Inverary; but
the other leaders were afraid of their little army being shut up in the
highlands, and thought that the western shires—in which the covenanters
were numerically strong, and where they had already boldly faced the
government troops—would be a better field for operations. There was as
usual in such differences, much wordy recrimination; time was lost; and
when at length a movement was made into Lanarkshire, long, weary
marches, with mistakes in the route, disheartened and demoralized the
insurgents. The royal troops, in superior numbers, were fast closing in
on Argyle, and, without a battle, his following fell to pieces, and
himself was made prisoner. He was taken with disgraceful indignities to
Edinburgh, and his old, most iniquitous sentence was carried out. Like
his father, he met his fate with firmness; he said the grim instrument
of death was “a sweet Maiden, whose embrace would waft his soul into
heaven.” Upwards of twenty of the more considerable of his followers
also suffered death.
[Illustration: EXECUTION OF THE EARL OF ARGYLE.]
As shewing the mean and cruel spirit of James, we may mention that on
medals which he had struck, commemorative of his triumphs over Monmouth
and Argyle, one side bore two severed heads, and the reverse two
headless trunks.
And now in his plenitude of power, James began to shew openly what was
his great intention, namely, the subversion of the Protestant faith, and
the restitution of papal sway in Britain. His brother had so far paved
the way for such a change, that he had taken advantage of the reaction
of loyalty at the Restoration, of the general disgust at that detestable
imposture, the Titus Oates’ “popish plot,” and of the discovery of the
atrocious Rye House plot, to make his government despotic. He had, by
his foul example, sown the seeds of immorality and corruption broadcast
through the national life. Religious fervour and high political
principle seemed to have vanished from the land,—servile submission to
kingly authority was preached by divines, sung by poets, and practised
by statesmen,—as the only safeguard against sombre puritanism, political
strife, and the misrule of the mob.
And now here was a zealot,—seeing sycophants all around him; men of
position hasting to gain his favour through the Romish confessional; a
servile parliament granting him bountiful supplies; and a powerful
French king sending him subsidies,—with the property, the liberties, the
very lives of his subjects at his disposal,—can we wonder that he
thought that his authority could be stretched to lording it also over
their consciences?