After my father and brothers, with our neighbours that went with them,
had returned from the bloodless raid of Dunse Law, as the first
expedition was called, a solemn thanksgiving was held in all the
country-side; but the minds of men were none pacified by the treaty
concluded with the King at Berwick. For it was manifest to the world,
that coming in his ire, and with all the might of his power, to punish
the Covenanters as rebels, he would never have consented to treat with
them on anything like equal terms, had he not been daunted by their
strength and numbers; so that the spirit awakened by his Ahab-like
domination continued as alive and as distrustful of his word and
pactions as ever.
After the rumours of his plain juggling about the verbals of the
stipulated conditions, and his arbitrary prorogation of the parliament
at Edinburgh, a thing which the best and bravest of the Scottish
monarchs had never before dared to do without the consent of the States
then assembled, the thud and murmur of warlike preparation was renewed
both on anvil and in hall. And when it was known that the King, fey and
distempered with his own weak conceits and the instigations of cruel
counsellors, had, as soon as he heard that the Covenanters were
disbanded, renewed his purposes of punishment and oppression, a gurl of
rage, like the first brush of the tempest on the waves, passed over the
whole extent of Scotland, and those that had been in arms fiercely
girded themselves again for battle.
As the King's powers came again towards the borders, the Covenanters,
for the second time, mustered under Lesley at Dunse; but far different
was this new departure of our men from the solemnity of their first
expedition. Their spirits were now harsh and angry, and their drums
sounded hoarsely on the breeze. Godly Mr Swinton, as he headed them
again, struck the ground with his staff, and, instead of praying, said,
"It is the Lord's pleasure, and he will make the Aggressor fin' the
weight of the arm of flesh. Honest folk are no ever to be thus obligated
to leave their fields and families by the provocations of a prerogative
that has so little regard for the people. In the name and strength of
God, let us march."
With six-and-twenty thousand horse and foot Lesley crossed the Tweed,
and in the first onset the King's army was scattered like chaff before
the wind. When the news of the victory arrived among us, every one was
filled with awe and holy wonder; for it happened on the very day which
was held as a universal fast throughout the land; on that day, likewise,
even in the time of worship, the castle of Dumbarton was won, and the
covenanted Earl of Haddington repelled a wasteful irruption from the
garrison of Berwick.
Such disasters smote the King with consternation; for the immediate
fruit of the victory was the conquest of Newcastle, Tynemouth, Shields
and Durham.
Baffled and mortified, humbled but not penitent, the rash and vindictive
monarch, in a whirlwind of mutiny and desertion, was obligated to
retreat to York, where he was constrained, by the few sound and
sober-minded that yet hovered around him, to try the effect of another
negotiation with his insulted and indignant subjects. But as all the
things which thence ensued are mingled with the acts of perfidy and
aggression by which, under the disastrous influence of the fortunes of
his doomed and guilty race, he drew down the vengeance of his English
subjects, it would lead me far from this household memorial to enter
more at large on circumstances so notour, though they have been
strangely palliated by the supple spirit of latter times, especially by
the sordid courtliness of the crafty Clarendon. I shall therefore skip
the main passages of public affairs, and hasten forward to the time when
I became myself enlisted on the side of our national liberties, briefly,
however, noticing, as I proceed, that after the peace which was
concluded at Ripon my father and my five brothers came home. None of
them received any hurt in battle; but in the course of the winter the
old man was visited with a great income of pains and aches, in so much
that, for the remainder of his days, he was little able to endure
fatigue or hardship of any kind; my second brother, Robin, was therefore
called from his trade in Glasgow to look after the mailing, for I was
still owre young to be of any effectual service; Alexander continued a
bonnet-maker at Kilmarnock; but Michael, William and Jacob, joined and
fought with the forces that won the mournful triumph of Marston Moor,
where fifty thousand subjects of the same King and laws contended with
one another, and where the Lord, by showing himself on the side of the
people, gave a dreadful admonition to the government to recant and
conciliate while there was yet time.
Meanwhile the worthy Mr Swinton, having observed in me a curiosity
towards books of history and piety, had taken great pains to instruct me
in the rights and truths of religion, and to make it manifest alike to
the ears and eyes of my understanding, that no human authority could, or
ought to, dictate in matters of faith, because it could not discern the
secrets of the breast, neither know what was acceptable to Heaven in
conduct or in worship. He likewise expounded to me in what manner the
Covenant was not a temporal but a spiritual league, trenching in no
respect upon the natural and contributed authority of the kingly office.
But, owing to the infirm state of my father's health, neither my brother
Robin nor I could be spared from the farm, in any of the different raids
that germinated out of the King's controversy with the English
parliament; so that in the whigamore expedition, as it was profanely
nicknamed, from our shire, with the covenanted Earls of Cassilis and
Eglinton, we had no personality, though our hearts went with those that
were therein.
When, however, the hideous tidings came of the condemnation and
execution of the King, there was a stop in the current of men's minds,
and as the waters of Jordan, when the ark was carried in, rushed back to
their fountain-head, every true Scot on that occasion felt in his heart
the ancient affections of his nature returning with a compassionate
horror. Yet even in this they were true to the Covenant; for it was not
to be hidden that the English parliament, in doing what it did in that
tragical event, was guided by a speculative spirit of political
innovation and change, different and distinct, both in principle and
object, from the cause which made our Scottish Covenanters have recourse
to arms. In truth, the act of bringing kings to public condign
punishment was no such new thing in the chronicles of Scotland, as that
brave historian, George Buchanan, plainly shows, to have filled us with
such amazement and affright, had the offences of King Charles been
proven as clearly personal, as the crimes for which the ancient tyrants
of his pedigree suffered the death;--but his offences were shared with
his counsellors, whose duty it was to have bridled his arbitrary
pretensions. He was in consequence mourned as a victim, and his son, the
second Charles, at once proclaimed and acknowledged King of Scotland.
How he deported himself in that capacity, and what gratitude he and his
brother showed the land for its faith and loyalty in the wreck and
desperation of their royal fortunes, with a firm and a fearless pen I
now purpose to show. But as the tale of their persecutions is ravelled
with the sorrows and the sufferings of my friends and neighbours, and
the darker tissue of my own woes, it is needful, before proceeding
therein, that I should entreat the indulgence of the courteous reader to
allow a few short passages of my private life now to be here recorded.