During the nine years of the English military occupation of Scotland
everything was merely provisional; nothing decisive could occur. In the
first place (October 1651), eight English Commissioners, including three
soldiers, Monk, Lambert, and Deane, undertook the administration of the
conquered country. They announced tolerance in religion (except for
Catholicism and Anglicanism, of course), and during their occupation the
English never wavered on a point so odious to the Kirk. The English
rulers also, as much as they could, protected the women and men whom the
lairds and preachers smelled out and tortured and burned for witchcraft.
By way of compensation for the expenses of war all the estates of men who
had sided with Charles were confiscated. Taxation also was heavy. On
four several occasions attempts were made to establish the Union of the
two countries; Scotland, finally, was to return thirty members to sit in
the English Parliament. But as that Parliament, under Cromwell, was
subject to strange and sudden changes, and as the Scottish
representatives were usually men sold to the English side, the experiment
was not promising. In its first stage it collapsed with Cromwell's
dismissal of the Long Parliament on April 20, 1653. Argyll meanwhile had
submitted, retaining his estates (August 1652); but of five garrisons in
his country three were recaptured, not without his goodwill, by the
Highlanders; and in these events began Monk's aversion, finally fatal, to
the Marquis as a man whom none could trust, and in whom finally nobody
trusted.
An English Commission of Justice, established in May 1652, was
confessedly more fair and impartial than any Scotland had known, which
was explained by the fact that the English judges "were kinless loons."
Northern cavaliers were relieved by Monk's forbidding civil magistrates
to outlaw and plunder persons lying under Presbyterian excommunication,
and sanitary measures did something to remove from Edinburgh the ancient
reproach of filth, for the time. While the Protesters and Resolutioners
kept up their quarrel, the Protesters claiming to be the only genuine
representatives of Kirk and Covenant, the General Assembly of the
Resolutioners was broken up (July 21, 1653) by Lilburne, with a few
soldiers, and henceforth the Kirk, having no General Assembly, was less
capable of promoting civil broils. Lilburne suspected that the Assembly
was in touch with new stirrings towards a rising in the Highlands, to
lead which Charles had, in 1652, promised to send Middleton, who had
escaped from an English prison, as general. It was always hard to find
any one under whom the great chiefs would serve, and Glencairn, with
Kenmure, was unable to check their jealousies.
Charles heard that Argyll would appear in arms for the Crown, when he
deemed the occasion good; meanwhile his heir, Lord Lorne, would join the
rising. He did so in July 1653, under the curse of Argyll, who, by
letters to Lilburne and Monk, and by giving useful information to the
English, fatally committed himself as treasonable to the Royal cause.
Examples of his conduct were known to Glencairn, who communicated them to
Charles.
At the end of February 1654 Middleton arrived in Sutherland to head the
insurrection: but Monk chased the small and disunited force from county
to county, and in July Morgan defeated and scattered its remnants at Loch
Garry, just south of Dalnaspidal. The Armstrongs and other Border clans,
who had been moss-trooping in their ancient way, were also reduced, and
new fortresses and garrisons bridled the fighting clans of the west. With
Cromwell as protector in 1654, Free Trade with England was offered to the
Scots with reduced taxation: an attempt to legislate for the Union
failed. In 1655-1656 a Council of State and a Commission of Justice
included two or three Scottish members, and burghs were allowed to elect
magistrates who would swear loyalty to Cromwell. Cromwell died on the
day of his fortunate star (September 3, 1658), and twenty-one members for
Scotland sat in Richard Cromwell's Parliament. When that was dissolved,
and when the Rump was reinstated, a new Bill of Union was introduced,
and, by reason of the provisions for religious toleration (a thing
absolutely impious in Presbyterian eyes), was delayed till (October 1659)
the Rump was sent to its account. Conventions of Burghs and Shires were
now held by Monk, who, leading his army of occupation south in January
1660, left the Resolutioners and Protesters standing at gaze, as hostile
as ever, awaiting what thing should befall. Both parties still cherished
the Covenants, and so long as these documents were held to be for ever
binding on all generations, so long as the king's authority was to be
resisted in defence of these treaties with Omnipotence, it was plain that
in Scotland there could neither be content nor peace. For twenty-eight
years, during a generation of profligacy and turmoil, cruelty and
corruption, the Kirk and country were to reap what they had sown in 1638.