Title: A Short History of Scotland
Author: Lang, Andrew, 1844-1912
Language: English
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Transcribed from the 1911 William Blackwood and Sons edition by David


A SHORT HISTORY OF SCOTLAND


CHAPTER I.  SCOTLAND AND THE ROMANS.


If we could see in a magic mirror the country now called Scotland as it
was when the Romans under Agricola (81 A.D.) crossed the Border, we
should recognise little but the familiar hills and mountains.  The
rivers, in the plains, overflowed their present banks; dense forests of
oak and pine, haunted by great red deer, elks, and boars, covered land
that has long been arable.  There were lakes and lagoons where for
centuries there have been fields of corn.  On the oldest sites of our
towns were groups of huts made of clay and wattle, and dominated,
perhaps, by the large stockaded house of the tribal prince.  In the
lochs, natural islands, or artificial islets made of piles (crannogs),
afforded standing-ground and protection to villages, if indeed these lake-
dwellings are earlier in Scotland than the age of war that followed the
withdrawal of the Romans.

The natives were far beyond the savage stage of culture.  They lived in
an age of iron tools and weapons and of wheeled vehicles; and were in
what is called the Late Celtic condition of art and culture, familiar to
us from beautiful objects in bronze work, more commonly found in Ireland
than in Scotland, and from the oldest Irish romances and poems.

In these "epics" the manners much resemble those described by Homer.  Like
his heroes, the men in the Cuchullain sagas fight from light chariots,
drawn by two ponies, and we know that so fought the tribes in Scotland
encountered by Agricola the Roman General (81-85 A.D.)  It is even said
in the Irish epics that Cuchullain learned his chariotry in _Alba_--that
is, in our Scotland. {2}  The warriors had "mighty limbs and flaming
hair," says Tacitus.  Their weapons were heavy iron swords, in bronze
sheaths beautifully decorated, and iron-headed spears; they had large
round bronze-studded shields, and battle-axes.  The dress consisted of
two upper garments: first, the smock, of linen or other fabric--in
battle, often of tanned hides of animals,--and the mantle, or plaid, with
its brooch.  Golden torques and heavy gold bracelets were worn by the
chiefs; the women had bronze ornaments with brightly coloured enamelled
decoration.

Agriculture was practised, and corn was ground in the circular querns of
stone, of which the use so long survived.  The women span and wove the
gay smocks and darker cloaks of the warriors.

Of the religion, we only know that it was a form of polytheism; that
sacrifices were made, and that Druids existed; they were soothsayers,
magicians, perhaps priests, and were attendant on kings.

Such were the people in Alba whom we can dimly descry around Agricola's
fortified frontier between the firths of Forth and Clyde, about 81-82
A.D.  When Agricola pushed north of the Forth and Tay he still met men
who had considerable knowledge of the art of war.  In his battle at Mons
Graupius (perhaps at the junction of Isla and Tay), his cavalry had the
better of the native chariotry in the plain; and the native infantry,
descending from their position on the heights, were attacked by his
horsemen in their attempt to assail his rear.  But they were swift of
foot, the woods sheltered and the hills defended them.  He made no more
effectual pursuit than Cumberland did at Culloden.

Agricola was recalled by Domitian after seven years' warfare, and his
garrisons did not long hold their forts on his lines or frontier, which
stretched across the country from Forth to Clyde; roughly speaking, from
Graham's Dyke, east of Borrowstounnis on the Firth of Forth, to Old
Kilpatrick on Clyde.  The region is now full of coal-mines, foundries,
and villages; but excavations at Bar Hill, Castlecary, and Roughcastle
disclose traces of Agricola's works, with their earthen ramparts.  The
Roman station at Camelon, north-west of Falkirk, was connected with the
southern passes of the Highland hills by a road with a chain of forts.
The remains of Roman pottery at Camelon are of the first century.

Two generations after Agricola, about 140-145, the Roman Governor,
Lollius Urbicus, refortified the line of Forth to Clyde with a wall of
sods and a ditch, and forts much larger than those constructed by
Agricola.  His line, "the Antonine Vallum," had its works on commanding
ridges; and fire-signals, in case of attack by the natives, flashed the
news "from one sea to the other sea," while the troops of occupation
could be provisioned from the Roman fleet.  Judging by the coins found by
the excavators, the line was abandoned about 190, and the forts were
wrecked and dismantled, perhaps by the retreating Romans.

After the retreat from the Antonine Vallum, about 190, we hear of the
vigorous "unrest" of the Meatae and Caledonians; the latter people are
said, on very poor authority, to have been little better than savages.
Against them Severus (208) made an expedition indefinitely far to the
north, but the enemy shunned a general engagement, cut off small
detachments, and caused the Romans terrible losses in this march to a non-
existent Moscow.

Not till 306 do we hear of the Picts, about whom there is infinite
learning but little knowledge.  They must have spoken Gaelic by Severus's
time (208), whatever their original language; and were long recognised in
Galloway, where the hill and river names are Gaelic.

The later years of the Romans, who abandoned Britain in 410, were
perturbed by attacks of the Scoti (Scots) from Ireland, and it is to a
settlement in Argyll of "Dalriadic" Scots from Ireland about 500 A.D.
that our country owes the name of Scotland.

Rome has left traces of her presence on Scottish soil--vestiges of the
forts and vallum wall between the firths; a station rich in antiquities
under the Eildons at Newstead; another, Ardoch, near Sheriffmuir; a third
near Solway Moss (Birrenswark); and others less extensive, with some
roads extending towards the Moray Firth; and a villa at Musselburgh,
found in the reign of James VI. {4}



CHAPTER II.  CHRISTIANITY--THE RIVAL KINGDOMS.


To the Scots, through St Columba, who, about 563, settled in Iona, and
converted the Picts as far north as Inverness, we owe the introduction of
Christianity, for though the Roman Church of St Ninian (397), at Whithern
in Galloway, left embers of the faith not extinct near Glasgow, St
Kentigern's country, till Columba's time, the rites of Christian Scotland
were partly of the Celtic Irish type, even after St Wilfrid's victory at
the Synod of Whitby (664).

St Columba himself was of the royal line in Ulster, was learned, as
learning was then reckoned, and, if he had previously been turbulent, he
now desired to spread the Gospel.  With twelve companions he settled in
Iona, established his cloister of cells, and journeyed to Inverness, the
capital of Pictland.  Here his miracles overcame the magic of the King's
druids; and his Majesty, Brude, came into the fold, his people following
him.  Columba was no less of a diplomatist than of an evangelist.  In a
crystal he saw revealed the name of the rightful king of the Dalriad
Scots in Argyll--namely, Aidan--and in 575, at Drumceat in North Ireland,
he procured the recognition of Aidan, and brought the King of the Picts
also to confess Aidan's independent royalty.

In the 'Life of Columba,' by Adamnan, we get a clear and complete view of
everyday existence in the Highlands during that age.  We are among the
red deer, and the salmon, and the cattle in the hills, among the second-
sighted men, too, of whom Columba was far the foremost.  We see the
saint's inkpot upset by a clumsy but enthusiastic convert; we even make
acquaintance with the old white pony of the monastery, who mourned when
St Columba was dying; while among secular men we observe the differences
in rank, measured by degrees of wealth in cattle.  Many centuries elapse
before, in Froissart, we find a picture of Scotland so distinct as that
painted by Adamnan.

The discipline of St Columba was of the monastic model.  There were
settlements of clerics in fortified villages; the clerics were a kind of
monks, with more regard for abbots than for their many bishops, and with
peculiar tonsures, and a peculiar way of reckoning the date of Easter.
Each missionary was popularly called a Saint, and the _Kil_, or cell, of
many a Celtic missionary survives in hundreds of place-names.

The salt-water Loch Leven in Argyll was on the west the south frontier of
"Pictland," which, on the east, included all the country north of the
Firth of Forth.  From Loch Leven south to Kintyre, a large cantle,
including the isles, was the land of the Scots from Ireland, the
Dalriadic kingdom.  The south-west, from Dumbarton, including our modern
Cumberland and Westmorland, was named Strathclyde, and was peopled by
British folk, speaking an ancient form of Welsh.  On the east, from
Ettrick forest into Lothian, the land was part of the early English
kingdom of Bernicia; here the invading Angles were already settled--though
river-names here remain Gaelic, and hill-names are often either Gaelic or
Welsh.  The great Northern Pictland was divided into seven provinces, or
sub-kingdoms, while there was an over-King, or Ardrigh, with his capital
at Inverness and, later, in Angus or Forfarshire.  The country about
Edinburgh was partly English, partly Cymric or Welsh.  The south-west
corner, Galloway, was called Pictish, and was peopled by Gaelic-speaking
tribes.

In the course of time and events the dynasty of the Argyll Scoti from
Ireland gave its name to Scotland, while the English element gave its
language to the Lowlands; it was adopted by the Celtic kings of the whole
country and became dominant, while the Celtic speech withdrew into the
hills of the north and northwest.

The nation was thus evolved out of alien and hostile elements, Irish,
Pictish, Gaelic, Cymric, English, and on the northern and western shores,
Scandinavian.



CHAPTER III.  EARLY WARS OF RACES.


In a work of this scope, it is impossible to describe all the wars
between the petty kingdoms peopled by races of various languages, which
occupied Scotland.  In 603, in the wild moors at Degsastane, between the
Liddel burn and the passes of the Upper Tyne, the English Aethelfrith of
Deira, with an army of the still pagan ancestors of the Borderers,
utterly defeated Aidan, King of Argyll, with the Christian converted
Scots.  Henceforth, for more than a century, the English between Forth
and Humber feared neither Scot of the west nor Pict of the north.

On the death of Aethelfrith (617), the Christian west and north exercised
their influences; one of Aethelfrith's exiled sons married a Pictish
princess, and became father of a Pictish king, another, Oswald, was
baptised at Iona; and the new king of the northern English of Lothian,
Edwin, was converted by Paullinus (627), and held Edinburgh as his
capital.  Later, after an age of war and ruin, Oswald, the convert of
Iona, restored Christianity in northern England; and, after his fall, his
brother, Oswiu, consolidated the north English.  In 685 Oswiu's son
Egfrith crossed the Forth and invaded Pictland with a Northumbrian army,
but was routed with great loss, and was slain at Nectan's Mere, in
Forfarshire.  Thenceforth, till 761, the Picts were dominant, as against
Scots and north English, Angus MacFergus being then their leader (731-
761).

Now the invaders and settlers from Scandinavia, the Northmen on the west
coast, ravaged the Christian Scots of the west, and burned Iona: finally,
in 844-860, Kenneth MacAlpine of Kintyre, a Scot of Dalriada on the
paternal, a Pict on the mother's side, defeated the Picts and obtained
their throne.  By Pictish law the crown descended in the maternal line,
which probably facilitated the coronation of Kenneth.  To the Scots and
"to all Europe" he was a Scot; to the Picts, as son of a royal Pictish
mother, he was a Pict.  With him, at all events, Scots and Picts were
interfused, and there began the _Scottish_ dynasty, supplanting the
Pictish, though it is only in popular tales that the Picts were
exterminated.

Owing to pressure from the Northmen sea-rovers in the west, the capital
and the seat of the chief bishop, under Kenneth MacAlpine (844-860), were
moved eastwards from Iona to Scone, near Perth, and after an interval at
Dunkeld, to St Andrews in Fife.

The line of Kenneth MacAlpine, though disturbed by quarrels over the
succession, and by Northmen in the west, north, and east, none the less
in some way "held a good grip o' the gear" against Vikings, English of
Lothian, and Welsh of Strathclyde.  In consequence of a marriage with a
Welsh princess of Strathclyde, or Cumberland, a Scottish prince, Donald,
brother of Constantine II., became king of that realm (908), and his
branch of the family of MacAlpin held Cumbria for a century.



ENGLISH CLAIMS OVER SCOTLAND.


In 924 the first claim by an English king, Edward, to the over-lordship
of Scotland appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  The entry contains a
manifest error, and the topic causes war between modern historians,
English and Scottish.  In fact, there are several such entries of
Scottish acceptance of English suzerainty under Constantine II., and
later, but they all end in the statement, "this held not long."  The
"submission" of Malcolm I. to Edmund (945) is not a submission but an
alliance; the old English word for "fellow-worker," or "ally," designates
Malcolm as fellow-worker with Edward of England.

This word (midwyrhta) was translated _fidelis_ (one who gives fealty) in
the Latin of English chroniclers two centuries later, but Malcolm I. held
Cumberland as an ally, not as a subject prince of England.  In 1092 an
English chronicle represents Malcolm III. as holding Cumberland "by
conquest."

The main fact is that out of these and similar dim transactions arose the
claims of Edward I. to the over-lordship of Scotland,--claims that were
urged by Queen Elizabeth's minister, Cecil, in 1568, and were boldly
denied by Maitland of Lethington.  From these misty pretensions came the
centuries of war that made the hardy character of the folk of Scotland.
{10}



THE SCOTTISH ACQUISITION OF LOTHIAN.


We cannot pretend within our scope to follow chronologically "the
fightings and flockings of kites and crows," in "a wolf-age, a war-age,"
when the Northmen from all Scandinavian lands, and the Danes, who had
acquired much of Ireland, were flying at the throat of England and
hanging on the flanks of Scotland; while the Britons of Strathclyde
struck in, and the Scottish kings again and again raided or sought to
occupy the fertile region of Lothian between Forth and Tweed.  If the
dynasty of MacAlpin could win rich Lothian, with its English-speaking
folk, they were "made men," they held the granary of the North.  By
degrees and by methods not clearly defined they did win the Castle of the
Maidens, the acropolis of Dunedin, Edinburgh; and fifty years later, in
some way, apparently by the sword, at the battle of Carham (1018), in
which a Scottish king of Cumberland fought by his side, Malcolm II. took
possession of Lothian, the whole south-east region, by this time entirely
anglified, and this was the greatest step in the making of Scotland.  The
Celtic dynasty now held the most fertile district between Forth and
Tweed, a district already English in blood and speech, the centre and
focus of the English civilisation accepted by the Celtic kings.  Under
this Malcolm, too, his grandson, Duncan, became ruler of Strathclyde--that
is, practically, of Cumberland.

Malcolm is said to have been murdered at haunted Glamis, in Forfarshire,
in 1034; the room where he died is pointed out by legend in the ancient
castle.  His rightful heir, by the strange system of the Scots, should
have been, not his own grandson, Duncan, but the grandson of Kenneth III.
The rule was that the crown went alternately to a descendant of the House
of Constantine (863-877), son of Kenneth MacAlpine, and to a descendant
of Constantine's brother, Aodh (877-888).  These alternations went on
till the crowning of Malcolm II. (1005-1034), and then ceased, for
Malcolm II. had slain the unnamed male heir of the House of Aodh, a son
of Boedhe, in order to open the succession to his own grandson, "the
gracious Duncan."  Boedhe had left a daughter, Gruach; she had by the
Mormaor, or under-king of the province of Murray, a son, Lulach.  On the
death of the Mormaor she married Macbeth, and when Macbeth slew Duncan
(1040), he was removing a usurper--as he understood it--and he ruled in
the name of his stepson, Lulach.  The power of Duncan had been weakened
by repeated defeats at the hands of the Northmen under Thorfinn.  In 1057
Macbeth was slain in battle at Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, and Malcolm
Canmore, son of Duncan, after returning from England, whither he had fled
from Macbeth, succeeded to the throne.  But he and his descendants for
long were opposed by the House of Murray, descendants of Lulach, who
himself had died in 1058.

The world will always believe Shakespeare's version of these events, and
suppose the gracious Duncan to have been a venerable old man, and Macbeth
an ambitious Thane, with a bloodthirsty wife, he himself being urged on
by the predictions of witches.  He was, in fact, Mormaor of Murray, and
upheld the claims of his stepson Lulach, who was son of a daughter of the
wrongfully extruded House of Aodh.

Malcolm Canmore, Duncan's grandson, on the other hand, represented the
European custom of direct lineal succession against the ancient Scots'
mode.



CHAPTER IV.  MALCOLM CANMORE--NORMAN CONQUEST.


The reign of Malcolm Canmore (1057-1093) brought Scotland into closer
connection with western Europe and western Christianity.  The Norman
Conquest (1066) increased the tendency of the English-speaking people of
Lothian to acquiesce in the rule of a Celtic king, rather than in that of
the adventurers who followed William of Normandy.  Norman operations did
not at first reach Cumberland, which Malcolm held; and, on the death of
his Norse wife, the widow of Duncan's foe, Thorfinn (she left a son,
Duncan), Malcolm allied himself with the English Royal House by marrying
Margaret, sister of Eadgar AEtheling, then engaged in the hopeless effort
to rescue northern England from the Normans.  The dates are confused:
Malcolm may have won the beautiful sister of Edgar, rightful king of
England, in 1068, or at the time (1070) of his raid, said to have been of
savage ferocity, into Northumberland, and his yet more cruel reprisals
for Gospatric's harrying of Cumberland.  In either case, St Margaret's
biographer, who had lived at her Court, whether or not he was her
Confessor, Turgot, represents the Saint as subduing the savagery of
Malcolm, who passed wakeful nights in weeping for his sins.  A lover of
books, which Malcolm could not read, an expert in "the delicate, and
gracious, and bright works of women," Margaret brought her own gentleness
and courtesy among a rude people, built the abbey church of Dunfermline,
and presented the churches with many beautiful golden reliquaries and
fine sacramental plate.

In 1072, to avenge a raid of Malcolm (1070), the Conqueror, with an army
and a fleet, came to Abernethy on Tay, where Malcolm, in exchange for
English manors, "became his man" _for them_, and handed over his son
Duncan as a hostage for peace.  The English view is that Malcolm became
William's "man for all that he had"--or for all south of Tay.

After various raidings of northern England, and after the death of the
Conqueror, Malcolm renewed, in Lothian, the treaty of Abernethy, being
secured in his twelve English manors (1091).  William Rufus then took and
fortified Carlisle, seized part of Malcolm's lands in Cumberland, and
summoned him to Gloucester, where the two Kings, after all, quarrelled
and did not meet.  No sooner had Malcolm returned home than he led an
army into Northumberland, where he was defeated and slain, near Alnwick
(Nov. 13, 1093).  His son Edward fell with him, and his wife, St
Margaret, died in Edinburgh Castle: her body, under cloud of night, was
carried through the host of rebel Celts and buried at Dunfermline.

Margaret, a beautiful and saintly Englishwoman, had been the ruling
spirit of the reign in domestic and ecclesiastical affairs.  She had
civilised the Court, in matters of costume at least; she had read books
to the devoted Malcolm, who could not read; and he had been her
interpreter in her discussions with the Celtic-speaking clergy, whose
ideas of ritual differed from her own.  The famous Culdees, originally
ascetic hermits, had before this day united in groups living under
canonical rules, and, according to English observers, had ceased to be
bachelors.  Masses are said to have been celebrated by them in some
"barbarous rite"; Saturday was Sabbath; on Sunday men worked.  Lent
began, not on Ash Wednesday, but on the Monday following.  We have no
clearer account of the Culdee peculiarities that St Margaret reformed.
The hereditary tenure of benefices by lay protectors she did not reform,
but she restored the ruined cells of Iona, and established _hospitia_ for
pilgrims.  She was decidedly unpopular with her Celtic subjects, who now
made a struggle against English influences.

In the year of her death died Fothadh, the last Celtic bishop of St
Andrews, and the Celtic clergy were gradually superseded and replaced by
monks of English name, English speech, and English ideas--or rather the
ideas of western Europe.  Scotland, under Margaret's influence, became
more Catholic; the celibacy of the clergy was more strictly enforced (it
had almost lapsed), but it will be observed throughout that, of all
western Europe, Scotland was least overawed by Rome.  Yet for centuries
the Scottish Church was, in a peculiar degree, "the daughter of Rome,"
for not till about 1470 had she a Metropolitan, the Archbishop of St
Andrews.

On the deaths, in one year, of Malcolm, Margaret, and Fothadh, the last
Celtic bishop of St Andrews, the see for many years was vacant or merely
filled by transient bishops.  York and Canterbury were at feud for their
superiority over the Scottish Church; and the other sees were not
constituted and provided with bishops till the years 1115 (Glasgow),
1150,--Argyll not having a bishop till 1200.  In the absence of a
Metropolitan, episcopal elections had to be confirmed at Rome, which
would grant no Metropolitan, but forbade the Archbishop of York to claim
a superiority which would have implied, or prepared the way for, English
superiority over Scotland.  Meanwhile the expenses and delays of appeals
from bishops direct to Rome did not stimulate the affection of the
Scottish "daughter of Rome."  The rights of the chapters of the
Cathedrals to elect their bishops, and other appointments to
ecclesiastical offices, in course of time were transferred to the Pope,
who negotiated with the king, and thus all manner of jobbery increased,
the nobles influencing the king in favour of their own needy younger
sons, and the Pope being amenable to various secular persuasions, so that
in every way the relations of Scotland with the Holy Father were
anomalous and irksome.

Scotland was, indeed, a country predestined to much ill fortune, to
tribulations against which human foresight could erect no defence.  But
the marriage of the Celtic Malcolm with the English Margaret, and the
friendly arrival of great nobles from the south, enabled Scotland to
receive the new ideas of feudal law in pacific fashion.  They were not
violently forced upon the English-speaking people of Lothian.



DYNASTY OF MALCOLM.


On the death of Malcolm the contest for the Crown lay between his
brother, Donald Ban, supported by the Celts; his son Duncan by his first
wife, a Norse woman (Duncan being then a hostage at the English Court,
who was backed by William Rufus); and thirdly, Malcolm's eldest son by
Margaret, Eadmund, the favourite with the anglicised south of the
country.  Donald Ban, after a brief period of power, was driven out by
Duncan (1094); Duncan was then slain by the Celts (1094).  Donald was
next restored, north of Forth, Eadmund ruling in the south, but was
dispossessed and blinded by Malcolm's son Eadgar, who reigned for ten
years (1097-1107), while Eadmund died in an English cloister.  Eadgar had
trouble enough on all sides, but the process of anglicising continued,
under himself, and later, under his brother, Alexander I., who ruled
north of Forth and Clyde; while the youngest brother, David, held Lothian
and Cumberland, with the title of Earl.  The sister of those sons of
Malcolm, Eadgyth (Matilda), married Henry I. of England in 1100.  There
seemed a chance that, north of Clyde and Forth, there would be a Celtic
kingdom; while Lothian and Cumbria would be merged in England.  Alexander
was mainly engaged in fighting the Moray claimants of his crown in the
north and in planting his religious houses, notably St Andrews, with
English Augustinian canons from York.  Canterbury and York contended for
ecclesiastical superiority over Scotland; after various adventures,
Robert, the prior of the Augustinians at Scone, was made Bishop of St
Andrews, being consecrated by Canterbury, in 1124; while York consecrated
David's bishop in Glasgow.  Thanks to the quarrels of the sees of York
and Canterbury, the Scottish clergy managed to secure their
ecclesiastical independence from either English see; and became, finally,
the most useful combatants in the long struggle for the independence of
the nation.  Rome, on the whole, backed that cause.  The Scottish
Catholic churchmen, in fact, pursued the old patriotic policy of
resistance to England till the years just preceding the Reformation, when
the people leaned to the reformed doctrines, and when Scottish national
freedom was endangered more by France than by England.



CHAPTER V.  DAVID I. AND HIS TIMES.


With the death of Alexander I. (April 25, 1124) and the accession of his
brother, David I., the deliberate Royal policy of introducing into
Scotland English law and English institutions, as modified by the Norman
rulers, was fulfilled.  David, before Alexander's death, was Earl of the
most English part of Lothian, the country held by Scottish kings, and
Cumbria; and resided much at the court of his brother-in-law, Henry I.  He
associated, when Earl, with nobles of Anglo-Norman race and language,
such as Moreville, Umfraville, Somerville, Gospatric, Bruce, Balliol, and
others; men with a stake in both countries, England and Scotland.  On
coming to the throne, David endowed these men with charters of lands in
Scotland.  With him came a cadet of the great Anglo-Breton House of
FitzAlan, who obtained the hereditary office of Seneschal or _Steward_ of
Scotland.  His patronymic, FitzAlan, merged in Stewart (later Stuart),
and the family cognizance, the _fesse chequy_ in azure and argent,
represents the Board of Exchequer.  The earliest Stewart holdings of land
were mainly in Renfrewshire; those of the Bruces were in Annandale.  These
two Anglo-Norman houses between them were to found the Stewart dynasty.

The wife of David, Matilda, widow of Simon de St Liz, was heiress of
Waltheof, sometime the Conqueror's Earl in Northumberland; and to gain,
through that connection, Northumberland for himself was the chief aim of
David's foreign policy,--an aim fertile in contentions.

We have not space to disentangle the intricacies of David's first great
domestic struggles; briefly, there was eternal dispeace caused by the
Celts, headed by claimants to the throne, the MacHeths, representing the
rights of Lulach, the ward of Macbeth. {20}  In 1130 the Celts were
defeated, and their leader, Angus, Earl of Moray, fell in fight near the
North Esk in Forfarshire.  His brother, Malcolm, by aid of David's Anglo-
Norman friends, was taken and imprisoned in Roxburgh Castle.  The result
of this rising was that David declared the great and ancient Celtic
Earldom of Moray--the home of his dynastic Celtic rivals--forfeit to the
Crown.  He planted the region with English, Anglo-Norman, and Lowland
landholders, a great step in the anglicisation of his kingdom.
Thereafter, for several centuries, the strength of the Celts lay in the
west in Moidart, Knoydart, Morar, Mamore, Lochaber, and Kintyre, and in
the western islands, which fell into the hands of "the sons of Somerled,"
the Macdonalds.

In 1135-1136, on the death of Henry I., David, backing his own niece,
Matilda, as Queen of England in opposition to Stephen, crossed the Border
in arms, but was bought off.  His son Henry received the Honour of
Huntingdom, with the Castle of Carlisle, and a vague promise of
consideration of his claim to Northumberland.  In 1138, after a disturbed
interval, David led the whole force of his realm, from Orkney to
Galloway, into Yorkshire.  His Anglo-Norman friends, the Balliols and
Bruces, with the Archbishop of York, now opposed him and his son Prince
Henry.  On August 22, 1138, at Cowton Moor, near Northallerton, was
fought the great battle, named from the huge English sacred banner, "The
Battle of the Standard."

In a military sense, the fact that here the men-at-arms and knights of
England fought as dismounted infantry, their horses being held apart in
reserve, is notable as preluding to the similar English tactics in their
French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Thus arrayed, the English received the impetuous charge of the wild
Galloway men, not in armour, who claimed the right to form the van, and
broke through the first line only to die beneath the spears of the
second.  But Prince David with his heavy cavalry scattered the force
opposed to him, and stampeded the horses of the English that were held in
reserve.  This should have been fatal to the English, but Henry, like
Rupert at Marston Moor, pursued too far, and the discipline of the Scots
was broken by the cry that their King had fallen, and they fled.  David
fought his way to Carlisle in a series of rearguard actions, and at
Carlisle was joined by Prince Henry with the remnant of his men-at-arms.
It was no decisive victory for England.

In the following year (1139) David got what he wanted.  His son Henry, by
peaceful arrangement, received the Earldom of Northumberland, without the
two strong places, Bamborough and Newcastle.

Through the anarchic weakness of Stephen's reign, Scotland advanced in
strength and civilisation despite a Celtic rising headed by a strange
pretender to the rights of the MacHeths, a "brother Wimund"; but all went
with the death of David's son, Prince Henry, in 1152.  Of the prince's
three sons, the eldest, Malcolm, was but ten years old; next came his
brothers William ("the Lion") and little David, Earl of Huntingdon.  From
this David's daughters descended the chief claimants to the Scottish
throne in 1292--namely, Balliol, Bruce, and Comyn: the last also was
descended, in the female line, from King Donald Ban, son of Malcolm
Canmore.

David had done all that man might do to settle the crown on his grandson
Malcolm; his success meant that standing curse of Scotland, "Woe to the
kingdom whose king is a child,"--when, in a year, David died at Carlisle
(May 24, 1153).



SCOTLAND BECOMES FEUDAL.


The result of the domestic policy of David was to bring all accessible
territory under the social and political system of western Europe, "the
Feudal System."  Its principles had been perfectly familiar to Celtic
Scotland, but had rested on a body of traditional customs (as in Homeric
Greece), rather than on written laws and charters signed and sealed.
Among the Celts the local tribe had been, theoretically, the sole source
of property in land.  In proportion as they were near of kin to the
recognised tribal chief, families held lands by a tenure of three
generations; but if they managed to acquire abundance of oxen, which they
let out to poorer men for rents in kind and labour, they were apt to turn
the lands which they held only temporarily, "in possession," into real
permanent _property_.  The poorer tribesmen paid rent in labour or
"services," also in supplies of food and manure.

The Celtic tenants also paid military service to their superiors.  The
remotest kinsmen of each lord of land, poor as they might be, were valued
for their swords, and were billeted on the unfree or servile tenants, who
gave them free quarters.

In the feudal system of western Europe these old traditional customs had
long been modified and stereotyped by written charters.  The King gave
gifts of land to his kinsmen or officers, who were bound to be "faithful"
(_fideles_); in return the inferior did homage, while he received
protection.  From grade to grade of rank and wealth each inferior did
homage to and received protection from his superior, who was also his
judge.  In this process, what had been the Celtic tribe became the new
"thanage"; the Celtic king (_righ_) of the tribe became the thane; the
province or group of tribes (say Moray) became the earldom; the Celtic
Mormaer of the province became the earl; and the Crown appointed _vice-
comites_, sub-earls, that is sheriffs, who administered the King's
justice in the earldom.

But there were regions, notably the west Highlands and isles, where the
new system penetrated slowly and with difficulty through a mountainous
and almost townless land.  The law, and written leases, "came slowly up
that way."

Under David, where his rule extended, society was divided broadly into
three classes--Nobles, Free, Unfree.  All holders of "a Knight's fee," or
part of one, holding by _free_ service, hereditarily, and by charter,
constituted the _communitas_ of the realm (we are to hear of the
_communitas_ later), and were free, noble, or gentle,--men of coat
armour.  The "ignoble," "not noble," men with no charter from the Crown,
or Earl, Thane, or Church, were, if lease-holders, though not "noble,"
still "free."  Beneath them were the "unfree" _nativi_, sold or given
with the soil.

The old Celtic landholders were not expropriated, as a rule, except where
Celtic risings, in Galloway and Moray, were put down, and the lands were
left in the King's hands.  Often, when we find territorial surnames of
families, "_de_" "of" this place or that,--the lords are really of Celtic
blood with Celtic names; disguised under territorial titles; and finally
disused.  But in Galloway and Ayrshire the ruling Celtic name, Kennedy,
remains Celtic, while the true Highlands of the west and northwest
retained their native magnates.  Thus the Anglicisation, except in very
rebellious regions, was gradual.  There was much less expropriation of
the Celt than disguising of the Celt under new family names and
regulation of the Celt under written charters and leases.



CHURCH LANDS.


David I. was, according to James VI., nearly five centuries later, "a
sair saint for the Crown."  He gave Crown-lands in the southern lowlands
to the religious orders with their priories and abbeys; for example,
Holyrood, Melrose, Jedburgh, Kelso, and Dryburgh--centres of learning and
art and of skilled agriculture.  Probably the best service of the regular
clergy to the State was its orderliness and attention to agriculture, for
the monasteries did not, as in England, produce many careful chroniclers
and historians.

Each abbey had its lands divided into baronies, captained by a lay
"Church baron" to lead its levies in war.  The civil centre of the barony
was the great farm or grange, with its mill, for in the thirteenth
century the Lowlands had water-mills which to the west Highlands were
scarcely known in 1745, when the Highland husbandmen were still using the
primitive hand-quern of two circular stones.  Near the mill was a hamlet
of some forty cottages; each head of a family had a holding of eight or
nine acres and pasturage for two cows, and paid a small money rent and
many arduous services to the Abbey.

The tenure of these cottars was, and under lay landlords long remained,
extremely precarious; but the tenure of the "bonnet laird" (_hosbernus_)
was hereditary.  Below even the free cottars were the unfree serfs or
_nativi_, who were handed over, with the lands they tilled, to the abbeys
by benefactors: the Church was forward in emancipating these serfs; nor
were lay landlords backward, for the freed man was useful as a spear-man
in war.

We have only to look at the many now ruined abbeys of the Border to see
the extent of civilisation under David I., and the relatively peaceful
condition, then, of that region which later became the cockpit of the
English wars, and the home of the raiding clans, Scotts, Elliots, and
Armstrongs, Bells, Nixons, Robsons, and Croziers.



THE BURGHS.


David and his son and successor, William the Lion, introduced a stable
middle and urban class by fostering, confirming, and regulating the
rights, privileges, and duties of the already existing free towns.  These
became _burghs_, royal, seignorial, or ecclesiastical.  In origin the
towns may have been settlements that grew up under the shelter of a
military castle.  Their fairs, markets, rights of trading, internal
organisation, and primitive police, were now, mainly under William the
Lion, David's successor, regulated by charters; the burghers obtained the
right to elect their own magistrates, and held their own burgh-courts;
all was done after the English model.  As the State had its "good men"
(_probi homines_), who formed its recognised "community," so had the
borough.  Not by any means all dwellers in a burgh were free burghers;
these free burghers had to do service in guarding the royal castle--later
this was commuted for a payment in money.  Though with power to elect
their own chief magistrate, the burghers commonly took as Provost the
head of some friendly local noble family, in which the office was apt to
become practically hereditary.  The noble was the leader and protector of
the town.  As to police, the burghers, each in his turn, provided men to
keep watch and ward from curfew bell to cock-crow.  Each ward in the town
had its own elected Bailie.  Each burgh had exclusive rights of trading
in its area, and of taking toll on merchants coming within its _Octroi_.
An association of four burghs, Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, and
Stirling, was the root of the existing "Convention of Burghs."



JUSTICE.


In early societies, justice is, in many respects, an affair to be settled
between the kindreds of the plaintiff, so to speak, and the defendant.  A
man is wounded, killed, robbed, wronged in any way; his kin retaliate on
the offender and _his_ kindred.  The blood-feud, the taking of blood for
blood, endured for centuries in Scotland after the peace of the whole
realm became, under David I., "the King's peace."  Homicides, for
example, were very frequently pardoned by Royal grace, but "the pardon
was of no avail unless it had been issued with the full knowledge of the
kin of the slaughtered man, who otherwise retained their _legal_ right of
vengeance on the homicide."  They might accept pecuniary compensation,
the blood-fine, or they might not, as in Homer's time. {27}  At all
events, under David, offences became offences against the King, not
merely against this or that kindred.  David introduced the "Judgment of
the Country" or _Visnet del Pais_ for the settlement of pleas.  Every
free man, in his degree, was "tried by his peers," but the old ordeal by
fire and Trial by Combat or duel were not abolished.  Nor did
"compurgation" cease wholly till Queen Mary's reign.  A powerful man,
when accused, was then attended at his trial by hosts of armed backers.
Men so unlike each other as Knox, Bothwell, and Lethington took advantage
of this usage.  All lords had their own Courts, but murder, rape, arson,
and robbery could now only be tried in the royal Courts; these were "The
Four Pleas of the Crown."



THE COURTS.


As there was no fixed capital, the King's Court, in David's time,
followed the King in his annual circuits through his realm, between
Dumfries and Inverness.  Later, the regions of Scotia (north of Forth),
Lothian, and the lawless realm of Galloway, had their Grand Justiciaries,
who held the Four Pleas.  The other pleas were heard in "Courts of
Royalty" and by earls, bishops, abbots, down to the baron, with his
"right of pit and gallows."  At such courts, by a law of 1180, the
Sheriff of the shire, or an agent of his, ought to be present; so that
royal and central justice was extending itself over the minor local
courts.  But if the sheriff or his sergeant did not attend when summoned,
local justice took its course.

The process initiated by David's son, William the Lion, was very slowly
substituting the royal authority, the royal sheriffs of shires, juries,
and witnesses, for the wild justice of revenge; and trial by ordeal, and
trial by combat.  But hereditary jurisdictions of nobles and gentry were
not wholly abolished till after the battle of Culloden!  Where Abbots
held courts, their procedure, in civil cases, was based on laws
sanctioned by popes and general councils.  But, alas! the Abbot might
give just judgment; to execute it, we know from a curious instance, was
not within his power, if the offender laughed at a sentence of
excommunication.

David and his successors, till the end of the thirteenth century, made
Scotland a more civilised and kept it a much less disturbed country than
it was to remain during the long war of Independence, while the beautiful
abbeys with their churches and schools attested a high stage of art and
education.



CHAPTER VI.  MALCOLM THE MAIDEN.


The prominent facts in the brief reign of David's son Malcolm the Maiden,
crowned (1153) at the age of eleven, were, first, a Celtic rising by
Donald, a son of Malcolm MacHeth (now a prisoner in Roxburgh Castle), and
a nephew of the famous Somerled Macgillebride of Argyll.  Somerled won
from the Norse the Isle of Man and the Southern Hebrides; from his sons
descend the great Macdonald Lords of the Isles, always the leaders of the
long Celtic resistance to the central authority in Scotland.  Again,
Malcolm resigned to Henry II. of England the northern counties held by
David I.; and died after subduing Galloway, and (on the death of
Somerled, said to have been assassinated) the tribes of the isles in
1165.



WILLIAM THE LION.


Ambition to recover the northern English counties revealed itself in the
overtures of William the Lion,--Malcolm's brother and successor,--for an
alliance between Scotland and France.  "The auld Alliance" now dawned,
with rich promise of good and evil.  In hopes of French aid, William
invaded Northumberland, later laid siege to Carlisle, and on July 13,
1174, was surprised in a morning mist and captured at Alnwick.  Scotland
was now kingless; Galloway rebelled, and William, taken a captive to
Falaise in Normandy, surrendered absolutely the independence of his
country, which, for fifteen years, really was a fief of England.  When
William was allowed to go home, it was to fight the Celts of Galloway,
and subdue the pretensions, in Moray, of the MacWilliams, descendants of
William, son of Duncan, son of Malcolm Canmore.

During William's reign (1188) Pope Clement III. decided that the Scottish
Church was subject, not to York or Canterbury, but to Rome.  Seven years
earlier, defending his own candidate for the see of St Andrews against
the chosen of the Pope, William had been excommunicated, and his country
and he had unconcernedly taken the issue of an Interdict.  The Pope was
too far away, and William feared him no more than Robert Bruce was to do.

By 1188, William refused to pay to Henry II. a "Saladin Tithe" for a
crusade, and in 1189 he bought from Richard I., who needed money for a
crusade, the abrogation of the Treaty of Falaise.  He was still disturbed
by Celts in Galloway and the north, he still hankered after
Northumberland, but, after preparations for war, he paid a fine and
drifted into friendship with King John, who entertained his little
daughters royally, and knighted his son Alexander.  William died on
December 4, 1214.  He was buried at the Abbey of Arbroath, founded by him
in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury, who had worked a strange posthumous
miracle in Scotland.  William was succeeded by his son, Alexander II.
(1214-1249).



ALEXANDER II.


Under this Prince, who successfully put down the usual northern risings,
the old suit about the claims to Northumberland was finally abandoned for
a trifling compensation (1237).  Alexander had married Joanna, daughter
of King John, and his brother-in-law, Henry III., did not press his
demand for homage for Scotland.  The usual Celtic pretenders to the
throne were for ever crushed.  Argyll became a sheriffdom, Galloway was
brought into order, and Alexander, who died in the Isle of Kerrera in the
bay of Oban (1249), well deserved his title of "a King of Peace."  He was
buried in Melrose Abbey.  In his reign the clergy were allowed to hold
Provincial or Synodal Councils without the presence of a papal Legate
(1225), and the Dominicans and Franciscans appeared in Scotland.



ALEXANDER III.


The term King of Peace was also applied to Alexander III., son of the
second wife of Alexander II., Marie de Coucy.  Alexander came to the
throne (1249) at the age of eight.  As a child he was taken and held
(like James II., James III., James V., and James VI.) by contending
factions of the nobles, Henry of England intervening.  In 1251 he wedded
another child, Margaret, daughter of Henry III. of England, but Henry
neither forced a claim to hold Scotland during the boy's minority (his
right if Scotland were his fief), nor in other respects pressed his
advantage.  In February 1261-1262 a girl was born to Alexander at
Windsor; she was Margaret, later wife of Eric of Norway.  Her daughter,
on the death of Alexander III. (March 19, 1286), was the sole direct
descendant in the male line.

After the birth of this heiress, Alexander won from Norway the isles of
the western coast of Scotland in which Norse chieftains had long held
sway.  They complained to Hakon of Norway concerning raids made on them
by the Earl of Ross, a Celtic potentate.  Alexander's envoys to Hakon
were detained, and in 1263, Hakon, with a great fleet, sailed through the
islands.  A storm blew most of his Armada to shore near Largs, where his
men were defeated by the Scots.  Hakon collected his ships, sailed north,
and (December 15) died at Kirkwall.  Alexander now brought the island
princes, including the Lord of Man, into subjection; and by Treaty, in
1266, placed them under the Crown.  In 1275 Benemund de Vicci (called
Bagimont), at a council in Perth, compelled the clergy to pay a tithe for
a crusade, the Pope insisting that the money should be assessed on the
true value of benefices--that is, on "Bagimont's Roll,"--thenceforth
recognised as the basis of clerical taxation.  In 1278 Edward I. laboured
to extract from Alexander an acknowledgment that he was England's vassal.
Edward signally failed; but a palpably false account of Alexander's
homage was fabricated, and dated September 29, 1278.  This was not the
only forgery by which England was wont to back her claims.

A series of bereavements (1281-1283) deprived Alexander of all his
children save his little grandchild, "the Maid of Norway."  She was
recognised by a great national assembly at Scone as heiress of the
throne; and Alexander had no issue by his second wife, a daughter of the
Comte de Dreux.  On the night of March 19, 1285, while Alexander was
riding from Edinburgh to visit his bride at Kinghorn, his horse slipped
over a cliff and the rider was slain.



CHAPTER VII.  ENCROACHMENTS OF EDWARD I.--WALLACE.


The Estates of Scotland met at Scone (April 11, 1286) and swore loyalty
to their child queen, "the Maid of Norway," granddaughter of Alexander
III.  Six guardians of the kingdom were appointed on April 11, 1286.  They
were the Bishops of St Andrews and Glasgow, two Comyns (Buchan and
Badenoch), the Earl of Fife, and Lord James, the Steward of Scotland.  No
Bruce or Baliol was among the Custodians.  Instantly a "band," or
covenant, was made by the Bruces, Earls of Annandale and Carrick, to
support their claims (failing the Maid) to the throne; and there were
acts of war on their part against another probable candidate, John
Balliol.  Edward (like Henry VIII. in the case of Mary Stuart) moved for
the marriage of the infant queen to his son.  A Treaty safeguarding all
Scottish liberties as against England was made by clerical influences at
Birgham (July 18, 1290), but by October 7 news of the death of the young
queen reached Scotland: she had perished during her voyage from Norway.
Private war now broke out between the Bruces and Balliols; and the party
of Balliol appealed to Edward, through Fraser, Bishop of St Andrews,
asking the English king to prevent civil war, and recommending Balliol as
a person to be carefully treated.  Next the Seven Earls, alleging some
dim elective right, recommended Bruce, and appealed to Edward as their
legal superior.

Edward came to Norham-on-Tweed in May 1291, proclaimed himself Lord
Paramount, and was accepted as such by the twelve candidates for the
Crown (June 3).  The great nobles thus, to serve their ambitions,
betrayed their country: _the communitas_ (whatever that term may here
mean) made a futile protest.

As lord among his vassals, Edward heard the pleadings and evidence in
autumn 1292; and out of the descendants, in the female line, of David
Earl of Huntingdon, youngest son of David I., he finally (November 17,
1292) preferred John Balliol (_great-grandson_ of the earl through his
eldest daughter) to Bruce the Old, grandfather of the famous Robert
Bruce, and _grandson_ of Earl David's second daughter.  The decision,
according to our ideas, was just; no modern court could set it aside.  But
Balliol was an unpopular weakling--"an empty tabard," the people said--and
Edward at once subjected him, king as he was, to all the humiliations of
a petty vassal.  He was summoned into his Lord's Court on the score of
the bills of tradesmen.  If Edward's deliberate policy was to goad
Balliol into resistance and then conquer Scotland absolutely, in the
first of these aims he succeeded.

In 1294 Balliol was summoned, with his Peers, to attend Edward in
Gascony.  Balliol, by advice of a council (1295), sought a French
alliance and a French marriage for his son, named Edward; he gave the
Annandale lands of his enemy Robert Bruce (father of the king to be) to
Comyn, Earl of Buchan.  He besieged Carlisle, while Edward took Berwick,
massacred the people, and captured Sir William Douglas, father of the
good Lord James.

In the war which followed, Edward broke down resistance by a sanguinary
victory at Dunbar, captured John Comyn of Badenoch (the Red Comyn),
received from Balliol (July 7, 1296) the surrender of his royal claims,
and took the oaths of the Steward of Scotland and the Bruces, father and
son.  He carried to Westminster the Black Rood of St Margaret and the
famous stone of Scone, a relic of the early Irish dynasty of the Scots;
as far north as Elgin he rode, receiving the oaths of all persons of note
and influence--except William Wallace.  _His_ name does not appear in the
list of submissions called "The Ragman's Roll."  Between April and
October 1296 the country was subjugated; the castles were garrisoned by
Englishmen.  But by January 1297, Edward's governor, Warenne, Earl of
Surrey, and Ormsby, his Chief Justice, found the country in an uproar,
and at midsummer 1297 the levies of the northern counties of England were
ordered to put down the disorders.



THE YEAR OF WALLACE.


In May the _commune_ of Scotland (whatever the term may here mean) had
chosen Wallace as their leader; probably this younger son of Sir Malcolm
Wallace of Elderslie, in Renfrewshire, had already been distinguished for
his success in skirmishes against the English, as well as for strength
and courage. {36}  The popular account of his early adventures given in
the poem by Blind Harry (1490?) is of no historical value.  His men
destroyed the English at Lanark (May 1297); he was abetted by Wishart,
Bishop of Glasgow, and the Steward; but by July 7, Percy and Clifford,
leading the English army, admitted the Steward, Robert Bruce (the future
king), and Wishart to the English peace at Irvine in Ayrshire.  But the
North was up under Sir Andrew Murray, and "that thief Wallace" (to quote
an English contemporary) left the siege of Dundee Castle which he was
conducting to face Warenne on the north bank of the Forth.  On September
11, the English, under Warenne, manoeuvred vaguely at Stirling Bridge,
and were caught on the flank by Wallace's army before they could deploy
on the northern side of the river.  They were cut to pieces, Cressingham
was slain, and Warenne galloped to Berwick, while the Scots harried
Northumberland with great ferocity, which Wallace seems to have been
willing but not often able to control.  By the end of March 1298 he
appears with Andrew Murray as Guardian of the Kingdom for the exiled
Balliol.  This attitude must have aroused the jealousy of the nobles, and
especially of Robert Bruce, who aimed at securing the crown, and who,
after several changes of side, by June 1298 was busy in Edward's service
in Galloway.

Edward then crossed the Border with a great army of perhaps 40,000 men,
met the spearmen of Wallace in their serried phalanxes at Falkirk, broke
the "schiltrom" or clump of spears by the arrows of his archers;
slaughtered the archers of Ettrick Forest; scattered the mounted nobles,
and avenged the rout of Stirling (July 22, 1298).  The country remained
unsubdued, but its leaders were at odds among themselves, and Wallace had
retired to France, probably to ask for aid; he may also conceivably have
visited Rome.  The Bishop of St Andrews, Lamberton, with Bruce and the
Red Comyn--deadly rivals--were Guardians of the Kingdom in 1299.  But in
June 1300, Edward, undeterred by remonstrances from the Pope, entered
Scotland; an armistice, however, was accorded to the Holy Father, and the
war, in which the Scots scored a victory at Roslin in February 1293,
dragged on from summer to summer till July 1304.  In these years Bruce
alternately served Edward and conspired against him; the intricacies of
his perfidy are deplorable.

Bruce served Edward during the siege of Stirling, then the central key of
the country.  On its surrender Edward admitted all men to his peace, on
condition of oaths of fealty, except "Messire Williame le Waleys."  Men
of the noblest Scottish names stooped to pursue the hero: he was taken
near Glasgow, and handed over to Sir John Menteith, a Stewart, and son of
the Earl of Menteith.  As Sheriff of Dumbartonshire, Menteith had no
choice but to send the hero in bonds to England.  But, if Menteith
desired to escape the disgrace with which tradition brands his name, he
ought to have refused the English blood-price for the capture of Wallace.
He made no such refusal.  As an outlaw, Wallace was hanged at London; his
limbs, like those of the great Montrose, were impaled on the gates of
various towns.

What we really know about the chief popular hero of his country, from
documents and chronicles, is fragmentary; and it is hard to find anything
trustworthy in Blind Harry's rhyming "Wallace" (1490), plagiarised as it
is from Barbour's earlier poem (1370) on Bruce. {38}  But Wallace was
truly brave, disinterested, and indomitable.  Alone among the leaders he
never turned his coat, never swore and broke oaths to Edward.  He arises
from obscurity, like Jeanne d'Arc; like her, he is greatly victorious;
like her, he awakens a whole people; like her, he is deserted, and is
unlawfully put to death; while his limbs, like her ashes, are scattered
by the English.  The ravens had not pyked his bones bare before the Scots
were up again for freedom.



CHAPTER VIII.  BRUCE AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.


The position towards France of Edward I. made it really more desirable
for him that Scotland should be independent and friendly, than half
subdued and hostile to his rule.  While she was hostile, England, in
attacking France, always left an enemy in her rear.  But Edward supposed
that by clemency to all the Scottish leaders except Wallace, by giving
them great appointments and trusting them fully, and by calling them to
his Parliament in London, he could combine England and Scotland in
affectionate union.  He repaired the ruins of war in Scotland; he began
to study her laws and customs; he hastily ran up for her a new
constitution, and appointed his nephew, John of Brittany, as governor.
But he had overlooked two facts: the Scottish clergy, from the highest to
the lowest, were irreconcilably opposed to union with England; and the
greatest and most warlike of the Scottish nobles, if not patriotic, were
fickle and insatiably ambitious.  It is hard to reckon how often Robert
Bruce had turned his coat, and how often the Bishop of St Andrews had
taken the oath to Edward.  Both men were in Edward's favour in June 1304,
but in that month they made against him a treasonable secret covenant.
Through 1305 Bruce prospered in Edward's service, on February 10, 1306,
Edward was conferring on him a new favour, little guessing that Bruce,
after some negotiation with his old rival, the Red Comyn, had slain him
(an uncle of his was also butchered) before the high altar of the Church
of the Franciscans in Dumfries.  Apparently Bruce had tried to enlist
Comyn in his conspiracy, and had found him recalcitrant, or feared that
he would be treacherous (February 10, 1306).

The sacrilegious homicide made it impossible for Bruce again to waver.  He
could not hope for pardon; he must be victorious or share the fate of
Wallace.  He summoned his adherents, including young James Douglas,
received the support of the Bishops of St Andrews and Glasgow, hurried to
Scone, and there was hastily crowned with a slight coronet, in the
presence of but two earls and three bishops.

Edward made vast warlike preparations and forswore leniency, while Bruce,
under papal excommunication, which he slighted, collected a few nobles,
such as Lennox, Atholl, Errol, and a brother of the chief of the Frazers.
Other chiefs, kinsmen of the slain Comyn, among them Macdowal of Argyll,
banded to avenge the victim; Bruce's little force was defeated at Methven
Wood, near Perth, by Aymer de Valence, and prisoners of all ranks were
hanged as traitors, while two bishops were placed in irons.  Bruce took
to the heather, pursued by the Macdowals no less than by the English; his
queen was captured, his brother Nigel was executed; he cut his way to the
wild west coast, aided only by Sir Nial Campbell of Loch Awe, who thus
founded the fortune of his house, and by the Macdonalds, under Angus Og
of Islay.  He wintered in the isle of Rathlin (some think he even went to
Norway), and in spring, after surprising the English garrison in his own
castle of Turnberry, he roamed, now lonely, now with a mobile little
force, in Galloway, always evading and sometimes defeating his English
pursuers.  At Loch Trool and at London Hill (Drumclog) he dealt them
heavy blows, while on June 7, 1307, his great enemy Edward died at
Borough-on-Sands, leaving the crown and the war to the weakling Edward
II.

Fortune had turned.  We cannot follow Bruce through his campaign in the
north, where he ruined the country of the Comyns (1308), and through the
victories in Galloway of his hard-fighting brother Edward.  With enemies
on every side, Bruce took them in detail; early in March 1309 he routed
the Macdowals at the west end of the Pass of Brander.  Edward II. was
involved in disputes with his own barons, and Bruce was recognised by his
country's Church in 1310 and aided by his great lieutenants, Sir James
Douglas and Thomas Randolph, Earl of Murray.  By August 1311 Bruce was
carrying the war into England, sacking Durham and Chester, failing at
Carlisle, but in January 1313, capturing Perth.  In summer, Edward Bruce,
in the spirit of chivalry, gave to Stirling Castle (Randolph had taken
Edinburgh Castle) a set day, Midsummer Day 1314, to be relieved or to
surrender; and Bruce kept tryst with Edward II. and his English and Irish
levies, and all his adventurous chivalry from France, Hainault, Bretagne,
Gascony, and Aquitaine.  All the world knows the story of the first
battle, the Scottish Quatre Bras; the success of Randolph on the right;
the slaying of Bohun when Bruce broke his battle-axe.  Next day Bruce's
position was strong; beneath the towers of Stirling the Bannockburn
protected his front; morasses only to be crossed by narrow paths impeded
the English advance.  Edward Bruce commanded the right wing; Randolph the
centre; Douglas and the Steward the left; Bruce the reserve, the
Islesmen.  His strength lay in his spearmen's "dark impenetrable wood";
his archers were ill-trained; of horse he had but a handful under Keith,
the Marischal.  But the heavy English cavalry could not break the squares
of spears; Keith cut up the archers of England; the main body could not
deploy, and the slow, relentless advance of the whole Scottish line
covered the plain with the dying and the flying.  A panic arose, caused
by the sight of an approaching cloud of camp-followers on the Gillie's
hill; Edward fled, and hundreds of noble prisoners, with all the waggons
and supplies of England, fell into the hands of the Scots.  In eight
strenuous years the generalship of Bruce and his war-leaders, the
resolution of the people, hardened by the cruelties of Edward, the
sermons of the clergy, and the utter incompetence of Edward II., had
redeemed a desperate chance.  From a fief of England, Scotland had become
an indomitable nation.



LATER DAYS OF BRUCE.


Bruce continued to prosper, despite an ill-advised attempt to win
Ireland, in which Edward Bruce fell (1318.)  This left the succession, if
Bruce had no male issue, to the children of his daughter, Marjory, and
her husband, the Steward.  In 1318 Scotland recovered Berwick, in 1319
routed the English at Mytton-on-Swale.  In a Parliament at Aberbrothock
(April 6, 1320) the Scots announced to the Pope, who had been
interfering, that, while a hundred of them survive, they will never yield
to England.  In October 1322 Bruce utterly routed the English at Byland
Abbey, in the heart of Yorkshire, and chased Edward II. into York.  In
March 1324 a son was born to Bruce named David; on May 4, 1328, by the
Treaty of Northampton, the independence of Scotland was recognised.  In
July the infant David married Joanna, daughter of Edward II.

On June 7, 1329, Bruce died and was buried at Dunfermline; his heart, by
his order, was carried by Douglas towards the Holy Land, and when Douglas
fell in a battle with the Moors in Spain, the heart was brought back by
Sir Simon Lockhart of the Lee.  The later career of Bruce, after he had
been excommunicated, is that of the foremost knight and most sagacious
man of action who ever wore the crown of Scotland.  The staunchness with
which the clergy and estates disregarded papal fulminations (indeed under
William the Lion they had treated an interdict as waste-paper) indicated
a kind of protestant tendency to independence of the Holy See.

Bruce's inclusion of representatives of the Burghs in the first regular
Scottish Parliament (at Cambuskenneth in 1326) was a great step forward
in the constitutional existence of the country.  The king, in Scotland,
was expected to "live of his own," but in 1326 the expenses of the war
with England compelled Bruce to seek permission for taxation.



CHAPTER IX.  DECADENCE AND DISASTERS--REIGN OF DAVID II.


The heroic generation of Scotland was passing off the stage.  The King
was a child.  The forfeiture by Bruce of the lands of hostile or
treacherous lords, and his bestowal of the estates on his partisans, had
made the disinherited nobles the enemies of Scotland, and had fed too
full the House of Douglas.  As the star of Scotland was thus clouded--she
had no strong man for a King during the next ninety years--the sun of
England rose red and glorious under a warrior like Edward III.  The
Scottish nobles in many cases ceased to be true to their proud boast that
they would never submit to England.  A very brief summary of the wretched
reign of David II. must here suffice.

First, the son of John Balliol, Edward, went to the English Court, and
thither thronged the disinherited and forfeited lords, arranging a raid
to recover their lands.  Edward III., of course, connived at their
preparations.

After Randolph's death (July 20, 1332), when Mar--a sister's son of
Bruce--was Regent, the disinherited lords, under Balliol, invaded
Scotland, and Mar, with young Randolph, Menteith, and a bastard of Bruce,
"Robert of Carrick," leading a very great host, fell under the shafts of
the English archers of Umfraville, Wake, the English Earl of Atholl,
Talbot, Ferrers, and Zouche, at Dupplin, on the Earn (August 12, 1332).
Rolled up by arrows loosed on the flanks of their charging columns, they
fell, and their dead bodies lay in heaps as tall as a lance.

On September 24, Edward Balliol was crowned King at Scone.  Later, Andrew
Murray, perhaps a son of the Murray who had been Wallace's companion-in-
arms, was taken, and Balliol acknowledged Edward III. as his liege-lord
at Roxburgh.  In December the second son of Randolph, with Archibald, the
new Regent, brother of the great Black Douglas, drove Balliol, flying in
his shirt, from Annan across the Border.  He returned, and was opposed by
this Archibald Douglas, called Tineman, the Unlucky, and on July 19,
1333, Tineman suffered, at Halidon Hill, near Berwick, a defeat as
terrible as Flodden; Berwick, too, was lost, practically for ever,
Tineman fell, and Sir William Douglas, the Knight of Liddesdale, was a
prisoner.  These Scots defeats were always due to rash frontal attacks on
strong positions, the assailants passing between lines of English bowmen
who loosed into their flanks.  The boy king, David, was carried to France
(1334) for safety, while Balliol delivered to Edward Berwick and the
chief southern counties, including that of Edinburgh, with their castles.

There followed internal wars between Balliol's partisans, while the
patriots were led by young Randolph, by the young Steward, by Sir Andrew
Murray, and the wavering and cruel Douglas, called the Knight of
Liddesdale, now returned from captivity.  In the desperate state of
things, with Balliol and Edward ravaging Scotland at will, none showed
more resolution than Bruce's sister, who held Kildrummie Castle; and
Randolph's daughter, "Black Agnes," who commanded that of Dunbar.  By
vast gifts Balliol won over John, Lord of the Isles.  The Celts turned to
the English party; Edward III. harried the province of Moray, but, in
1337, he began to undo his successes by formally claiming the crown of
France: France and Scotland together could always throw off the English
yoke.

Thus diverted from Scotland, Edward lost strength there while he warred
with Scotland's ally: in 1341 the Douglas, Knight of Liddesdale,
recovered Edinburgh Castle by a romantic surprise.  But David returned
home in 1341, a boy of eighteen, full of the foibles of chivalry, rash,
sensual, extravagant, who at once gave deadly offence to the Knight of
Liddesdale by preferring to him, as sheriff of Teviotdale, the brave Sir
Alexander Ramsay, who had driven the English from the siege of Dunbar
Castle.  Douglas threw Ramsay into Hermitage Castle in Liddesdale and
starved him to death.

In 1343 the Knight began to intrigue traitorously with Edward III.; after
a truce, David led his whole force into England, where his rash chivalry
caused his utter defeat at Neville's Cross, near Durham (October 17,
1346).  He was taken, as was the Bishop of St Andrews; his ransom became
the central question between England and Scotland.  In 1353 Douglas,
Knight of Liddesdale, was slain at Williamshope on Yarrow by his godson,
William, Lord Douglas: the fact is commemorated in a fragment of perhaps
our oldest narrative Border ballad.  French men-at-arms now helped the
Scots to recover Berwick, merely to lose it again in 1356; in 1357 David
was set free: his ransom, 100,000 merks, was to be paid by instalment.
The country was heavily taxed, but the full sum was never paid.  Meanwhile
the Steward had been Regent; between him, the heir of the Crown failing
issue to David, and the King, jealousies arose.  David was suspected of
betraying the kingdom to England; in October 1363 he and the Earl of
Douglas visited London and made a treaty adopting a son of Edward as king
on David's demise, and on his ransom being remitted, but in March 1364
his Estates rejected the proposal, to which Douglas had assented.  Till
1369 all was poverty and internal disunion; the feud, to be so often
renewed, of the Douglas and the Steward raged.  David was made
contemptible by a second marriage with Margaret Logie, but the war with
France drove Edward III. to accept a fourteen years' truce with Scotland.
On February 22, 1371, David died in Edinburgh Castle, being succeeded,
without opposition, by the Steward, Robert II., son of Walter, and of
Marjorie, daughter of Robert Bruce.  This Robert II., somewhat outworn by
many years of honourable war in his country's cause, and the father of a
family, by Elizabeth Mure of Rowallan, which could hardly be rendered
legitimate by any number of Papal dispensations, _was the first of the
Royal Stewart line_.  In him a cadet branch of the English FitzAlans,
themselves of a very ancient Breton stock, blossomed into Royalty.



PARLIAMENT AND THE CROWN.


With the coming of a dynasty which endured for three centuries, we must
sketch the relations, in Scotland, of Crown and Parliament till the days
of the Covenant and the Revolution of 1688.  Scotland had but little of
the constitutional evolution so conspicuous in the history of England.
The reason is that while the English kings, with their fiefs and wars in
France, had constantly to be asking their parliaments for money, and
while Parliament first exacted the redress of grievances, in Scotland the
king was expected "to live of his own" on the revenue of crown-lands,
rents, feudal aids, fines exacted in Courts of Law, and duties on
merchandise.  No "tenths" or "fifteenths" were exacted from clergy and
people.  There could be no "constitutional resistance" when the Crown
made no unconstitutional demands.

In Scotland the germ of Parliament is the King's court of vassals of the
Crown.  To the assemblies, held now in one place, now in another, would
usually come the vassals of the district, with such officers of state as
the Chancellor, the Chamberlain, the Steward, the Constable or Commander-
in-Chief, the Justiciar, and the Marischal, and such Bishops, Abbots,
Priors, Earls, Barons, and tenants-in-chief as chose to attend.  At these
meetings public business was done, charters were granted, and statutes
were passed; assent was made to such feudal aids as money for the king's
ransom in the case of William the Lion.  In 1295 the seals of six Royal
burghs are appended to the record of a negotiation; in 1326 burgesses, as
we saw, were consulted by Bruce on questions of finance.

The misfortunes and extravagance of David II. had to be paid for, and
Parliament interfered with the Royal prerogative in coinage and currency,
directed the administration of justice, dictated terms of peace with
England, called to account even hereditary officers of the Crown (such as
the Steward, Constable, and Marischal), controlled the King's expenditure
(or tried to do so), and denounced the execution of Royal warrants
against the Statutes and common form of law.  They summarily rejected
David's attempt to alter the succession of the Crown.

At the same time, as attendance of multitudes during protracted
Parliaments was irksome and expensive, arose the habit of intrusting
business to a mere "Committee of Articles," later "The Lords of the
Articles," selected in varying ways from the Three Estates--Spiritual,
Noble, and Commons.  These Committees saved the members of Parliament
from the trouble and expense of attendance, but obviously tended to
become an abuse, being selected and packed to carry out the designs of
the Crown or of the party of nobles in power.  All members, of whatever
Estate, sat together in the same chamber.  There were no elected Knights
of the Shires, no representative system.

The reign of David II. saw two Scottish authors or three, whose works are
extant.  Barbour wrote the chivalrous rhymed epic-chronicle 'The Brus';
Wyntoun, an unpoetic rhymed "cronykil"; and "Hucheoun of the Awle Ryal"
produced works of more genius, if all that he is credited with be his
own.



CHAPTER X.  EARLY STEWART KINGS: ROBERT II.  (1371-1390).


Robert II. was crowned at Scone on March 26, 1371.  He was elderly,
jovial, pacific, and had little to fear from England when the deaths of
Edward III. and the Black Prince left the crown to the infant Richard II.
There was fighting against isolated English castles within the Scottish
border, to amuse the warlike Douglases and Percies, and there were
truces, irregular and ill kept.  In 1384 great English and Scottish raids
were made, and gentlemen of France, who came over for sport, were
scurvily entertained, and (1385) saw more plundering than honest fighting
under James, Earl of Douglas, who merely showed them an army that, under
Richard II., burned Melrose Abbey and fired Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee.
Edinburgh was a town of 400 houses.  Richard insisted that not more than
a third of his huge force should be English Borderers, who had no idea of
hitting their Scottish neighbours, fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law,
too hard.  The one famous fight, that of Otterburn (August 15, 1388), was
a great and joyous passage of arms by moonlight.  The Douglas fell, the
Percy was led captive away; the survivors gained advancement in renown
and the hearty applause of the chivalrous chronicler, Froissart.  The
oldest ballads extant on this affair were current in 1550, and show
traces of the reading of Froissart and the English chroniclers.

In 1390 died Robert II.  Only his youth was glorious.  The reign of his
son, Robert III. (crowned August 14, 1390), was that of a weakling who
let power fall into the hands of his brother, the Duke of Albany, or his
son David, Duke of Rothesay, who held the reins after the Parliament (a
Parliament that bitterly blamed the Government) of January 1399.  (With
these two princes the title of Duke first appears in Scotland.)  The
follies of young David alienated all: he broke his betrothal to the
daughter of the Earl of March; March retired to England, becoming the man
of Henry IV.; and though Rothesay wedded the daughter of the Earl of
Douglas, he was arrested by Albany and Douglas and was starved to death
(or died of dysentery) in Falkland Castle (1402).  The Highlanders had
been in anarchy throughout the reign; their blood was let in the great
clan duel of thirty against thirty, on the Inch of Perth, in 1396.
Probably clans Cameron and Chattan were the combatants.

On Rothesay's death Albany was Governor, while Douglas was taken prisoner
in the great Border defeat of Homildon Hill, not far from Flodden.  But
then (1403) came the alliance of Douglas with Percy; Percy's quarrel with
Henry IV. and their defeat; and Hotspur's death, Douglas's capture at
Shrewsbury.  Between Shakespeare, in "Henry IV.," and Scott, in 'The Fair
Maid of Perth,' the most notable events in the reign of Robert III. are
immortalised.  The King's last misfortune was the capture by the English
at sea, on the way to France, of his son James in February-March 1406.
{52}  On April 4, 1406, Robert went to his rest, one of the most unhappy
of the fated princes of his line.



THE REGENCY OF ALBANY.


The Regency of Albany, uncle of the captured James, lasted for fourteen
years, ending with his death in 1420.  He occasionally negotiated for his
king's release, but more successfully for that of his son Murdoch.  That
James suspected Albany's ambition, and was irritated by his conduct,
appears in his letters, written in Scots, to Albany and to Douglas,
released in 1408, and now free in Scotland.  The letters are of 1416.

The most important points to note during James's English captivity are
the lawlessness and oppression which prevailed in Scotland, and the
beginning of Lollard heresies, nascent Protestantism, nascent Socialism,
even "free love."  The Parliament of 1399, which had inveighed against
the laxity of Government under Robert II., also demanded the extirpation
of heresies, in accordance with the Coronation Oath.  One Resby, a
heretical English priest, was arraigned and burned at Perth in 1407,
under Laurence of Lindores, the Dominican Inquisitor into heresies, who
himself was active in promoting Scotland's oldest University, St Andrews.
The foundation was by Henry Wardlaw, Bishop of St Andrews, by virtue of a
bull from the anti-pope Benedict XIII., of February 1414.  Lollard ideas
were not suppressed; the chronicler, Bower, speaks of their existence in
1445; they sprang from envy of the wealth, and indignation against the
corruptions of the clergy, and the embers of Lollardism in Kyle were not
cold when, under James V., the flame of the Reformation was rekindled.

The Celtic North, never quiet, made its last united effort in 1411, when
Donald, Lord of the Isles, who was in touch with the English Government,
claimed the earldom of Ross, in right of his wife, as against the Earl of
Buchan, a son of Albany; mustered all the wild clans of the west and the
isles at Ardtornish Castle on the Sound of Mull; marched through Ross to
Dingwall; defeated the great northern clan of Mackay, and was hurrying to
sack Aberdeen when he was met by Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, the
gentry of the northern Lowlands, mounted knights, and the burgesses of
the towns, some eighteen miles from Aberdeen, at Harlaw.  There was a
pitched battle with great slaughter, but the Celts had no cavalry, and
the end was that Donald withdrew to his fastnesses.  The event is
commemorated by an old literary ballad, and in Elspeth's ballad in
Scott's novel, 'The Antiquary.'

In the year of Albany's death, at a great age (1420), in compliance with
the prayer of Charles VII. of France, the Earl of Buchan, Archibald,
Douglas's eldest son, and Sir John Stewart of Derneley, led a force of
some 7000 to 10,000 men to war for France.  Henry V. then compelled the
captive James I. to join him, and (1421) at Bauge Bridge the Scots, with
the famed La Hire, routed the army of Henry's brother, the Duke of
Clarence, who, with 2000 of the English, fell in the action.  The victory
was fruitless; at Crevant (1423) the Scots were defeated; at Verneuil
(1424) they were almost exterminated.  None the less the remnant, with
fresh levies, continued to war for their old ally, and, under Sir Hugh
Kennedy and others, suffered at Rouvray (February 1429), and were with
the victorious French at Orleans (May 1429) under the leadership of
Jeanne d'Arc.  The combination of Scots and French, at the last push,
always saved the independence of both kingdoms.

The character of Albany, who, under his father, Robert III., and during
the captivity of James I., ruled Scotland so long, is enigmatic.  He is
well spoken of by the contemporary Wyntoun, author of a chronicle in
rhyme; and in the Latin of Wyntoun's continuator, Bower.  He kept on
friendly terms with the Douglases, he was popular in so far as he was
averse to imposing taxation; and perhaps the anarchy and oppression which
preceded the return of James I. to Scotland were due not to the weakness
of Albany but to that of his son and successor, Murdoch, and to the
iniquities of Murdoch's sons.

The death of Henry V. (1422) and the ambition of Cardinal Beaufort,
determined to wed his niece Jane Beaufort to a crowned king, may have
been among the motives which led the English Government (their own king,
Henry VI., being a child) to set free the royal captive (1424).



CHAPTER XI.  JAMES I.


On March 28, 1424, James I. was released, on a ransom of 40,000 pounds,
and after his marriage with Jane Beaufort, grand-daughter of John of
Gaunt, son of Edward III.  The story of their wooing (of course in the
allegorical manner of the age, and with poetical conventions in place of
actual details) is told in James's poem, "The King's Quair," a beautiful
composition in the school of Chaucer, of which literary scepticism has
vainly tried to rob the royal author.  James was the ablest and not the
most scrupulous of the Stuarts.  His captivity had given him an English
education, a belief in order, and in English parliamentary methods, and a
fiery determination to put down the oppression of the nobles.  "If God
gives me but a dog's life," he said, "I will make the key keep the castle
and the bracken bush keep the cow."  Before his first Parliament, in May
1424, James arrested Murdoch's eldest son, Sir Walter Fleming of
Cumbernauld, and the younger Boyd of Kilmarnock.  The Parliament left a
Committee of the Estates ("The Lords of the Articles") to carry out the
royal policy.  Taxes for the payment of James's ransom were imposed; to
impose them was easy, "passive resistance" was easier; the money was
never paid, and James's noble hostages languished in England.  He next
arrested the old Earl of Lennox, and Sir Robert Graham of the Kincardine
family, later his murderer.

These were causes of unpopularity.  During a new Parliament (1425) James
imprisoned the new Duke of Albany (Murdoch) and his son Alexander, and
seized their castles. {57}  The Albanys and Lennox were executed; their
estates were forfeited; but resentment dogged a king who was too fierce
and too hurried a reformer, perhaps too cruel an avenger of his own
wrongs.

Our knowledge of the events of his reign is vague; but a king of Scotland
could never, with safety, treat any of his nobles as criminals; the whole
order was concerned to prevent or avenge severity of justice.

At a Parliament in Inverness (1427) he seized the greatest of the
Highland magnates whom he had summoned; they were hanged or imprisoned,
and, after resistance, Alastair, the new Lord of the Isles, did penance
at Holyrood, before being immured in Tantallon Castle.  His cousin,
Donald Balloch, defeated Mar at Inverlochy (where Montrose later routed
Argyll) (1431).  Not long afterwards Donald fled to Ireland, whence a
head, said to be his, was sent to James, but Donald lived to fight
another day.

Without a standing army to garrison the inaccessible Highlands, the Crown
could neither preserve peace in those regions nor promote justice.  The
system of violent and perfidious punishments merely threw the Celts into
the arms of England.

Execution itself was less terrible to the nobles than the forfeiting of
their lands and the disinheriting of their families.  None the less,
James (1425-1427) seized the lands of the late Earl of Lennox, made
Malise Graham surrender the earldom of Strathearn in exchange for the
barren title of Earl of Menteith, and sent the sufferer as a hostage into
England.  The Earl of March, son of the Earl who, under Robert III., had
gone over to the English cause, was imprisoned and stripped of his
ancient domains on the Eastern Border; and James, disinheriting Lord
Erskine, annexed the earldom of Mar to the Crown.

In a Parliament at Perth (March 1428) James permitted the minor barons
and freeholders to abstain from these costly assemblies on the condition
of sending two "wise men" to represent each sheriffdom: a Speaker was to
be elected, and the shires were to pay the expenses of the wise men.  But
the measure was unpopular, and in practice lapsed.  Excellent laws were
passed, but were not enforced.

In July-November 1428 a marriage was arranged between Margaret the infant
daughter of James and the son (later Louis XI.) of the still uncrowned
Dauphin, Charles VIII. of France.  Charles announced to his subjects
early in 1429 that an army of 6000 Scots was to land in France; that
James himself, if necessary, would follow; but Jeanne d'Arc declared that
there was no help from Scotland, none save from God and herself.  She was
right: no sooner had she won her victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Pathay,
and elsewhere (May-June 1429) than James made a truce with England which
enabled Cardinal Beaufort to throw his large force of anti-Hussite
crusaders into France, where they secured Normandy.  The Scots in France,
nevertheless, fought under the Maid in her last successful action, at
Lagny (April 1430).

An heir to the Crown, James, was born in October 1430, while the King was
at strife with the Pope, and asserting for King and Parliament power over
the Provincial Councils of the Church.  An interdict was threatened,
James menaced the rich and lax religious orders with secular reformation;
settled the Carthusians at Perth, to show an example of holy living; and
pursued his severities against many of his nobles.

His treatment of the Earl of Strathearn (despoiled and sent as a hostage
to England) aroused the wrath of the Earl's uncle, Robert Graham, who
bearded James in Parliament, was confiscated, fled across the Highland
line, and, on February 20, 1437, aided, it is said by the old Earl of
Atholl (a grandson of Robert II. by his second marriage), led a force
against the King in the monastery of the Black Friars at Perth, surprised
him, and butchered him.  The energy of his Queen brought the murderers,
and Atholl himself, to die under unspeakable torments.

James's reforms were hurried, violent, and, as a rule, incapable of
surviving the anarchy of his son's minority: his new Court of Session,
sitting in judgment thrice a-year, was his most fortunate innovation.



CHAPTER XII.  JAMES II.


Scone, with its sacred stone, being so near Perth and the Highlands, was
perilous, and the coronation of James II. was therefore held at Holyrood
(March 25, 1437).  The child, who was but seven years of age, was bandied
to and fro like a shuttlecock between rival adventurers.  The Earl of
Douglas (Archibald, fifth Earl, died 1439) took no leading part in the
strife of factions: one of them led by Sir William Crichton, who held the
important post of Commander of Edinburgh Castle; the other by Sir
Alexander Livingstone of Callendar.

The great old Houses had been shaken by the severities of James I., at
least for the time.  In a Government of factions influenced by private
greed, there was no important difference in policy, and we need not
follow the transference of the royal person from Crichton in Edinburgh to
Livingstone in Stirling Castle; the coalitions between these worthies,
the battles between the Boyds of Kilmarnock and the Stewarts, who had to
avenge Stewart of Derneley, Constable of the Scottish contingent in
France, who was slain by Sir Thomas Boyd.  The queen-mother married Sir
James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorne, and (August 3, 1439) she was
captured by Livingstone, while her husband, in the mysterious words of
the chronicler, was "put in a pitt and bollit."  In a month Jane Beaufort
gave Livingstone an amnesty; he, not the Stewart family, not the queen-
mother, now held James.

To all this the new young Earl of Douglas, a boy of eighteen, tacitly
assented.  He was the most powerful and wealthiest subject in Scotland;
in France he was Duc de Touraine; he was descended in lawful wedlock from
Robert II.; "he micht ha'e been the king," as the ballad says of the
bonny Earl of Moray.  But he held proudly aloof from both Livingstone and
Crichton, who were stealing the king alternately: they then combined,
invited Douglas to Edinburgh Castle, with his brother David, and served
up the ominous bull's head at that "black dinner" recorded in a ballad
fragment. {61}  They decapitated the two Douglas boys; the earldom fell
to their granduncle, James the Fat, and presently, on _his_ death (1443),
to young William Douglas, after which "bands," or illegal covenants,
between the various leaders of factions, led to private wars of shifting
fortune.  Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews, opposed the Douglas party, now
strong both in lands newly acquired, till (July 3, 1449) James married
Mary of Gueldres, imprisoned the Livingstones, and relied on the Bishop
of St Andrews and the clergy.  While Douglas was visiting Rome in 1450,
the Livingstones had been forfeited, and Crichton became Chancellor.



FALL OF THE BLACK DOUGLASES.


The Douglases, through a royal marriage of an ancestor to a daughter of
the more legitimate marriage of Robert II., had a kind of claim to the
throne which they never put forward.  The country was thus spared
dynastic wars, like those of the White and Red Roses in England; but,
none the less, the Douglases were too rich and powerful for subjects.

The Earl at the moment held Galloway and Annandale, two of his brothers
were Earls of Moray and Ormond; in October 1448, Ormond had distinguished
himself by defeating and taking Percy, urging a raid into Scotland, at a
bloody battle on the Water of Sark, near Gretna.

During the Earl of Douglas's absence in Rome, James had put down some of
his unruly retainers, and even after his return (1451) had persevered in
this course.  Later in the year Douglas resigned, and received back his
lands, a not uncommon formula showing submission on the vassal's favour
on the lord's part, as when Charles VII., at the request of Jeanne d'Arc,
made this resignation to God!

Douglas, however, was suspected of intriguing with England and with the
Lord of the Isles, while he had a secret covenant or "band" with the
Earls of Crawford and Ross.  If all this were true, he was planning a
most dangerous enterprise.

He was invited to Stirling to meet the king under a safe-conduct, and
there (February 22, 1452) was dirked by his king at the sacred table of
hospitality.

Whether this crime was premeditated or merely passionate is unknown, as
in the case of Bruce's murder of the Red Comyn before the high altar.
Parliament absolved James on slender grounds.  James, the brother of the
slain earl, publicly defied his king, gave his allegiance to Henry VI. of
England, withdrew it, intrigued, and, after his brothers had been routed
at Arkinholm, near Langholm (May 18, 1455), fled to England.  His House
was proclaimed traitorous; their wide lands in southern and south-western
Scotland were forfeited and redistributed, the Scotts of Buccleuch
profiting largely in the long-run.  The leader of the Royal forces at
Arkinholm, near Langholm, was another Douglas, one of "the Red
Douglases," the Earl of Angus; and till the execution of the Earl of
Morton, under James VI., the Red Douglases were as powerful, turbulent,
and treacherous as the Black Douglases had been in their day.  When
attacked and defeated, these Douglases, red or black, always allied
themselves with England and with the Lords of the Isles, the hereditary
foes of the royal authority.

Meanwhile Edward IV. wrote of the Scots as "his rebels of Scotland," and
in the alternations of fortune between the Houses of York and Lancaster,
James held with Henry VI.  When Henry was defeated and taken at
Northampton (July 10, 1460), James besieged Roxburgh Castle, an English
hold on the Border, and (August 3, 1460) was slain by the explosion of a
great bombard.

James was but thirty years of age at his death.  By the dagger, by the
law, and by the aid of the Red Douglases, he had ruined his most powerful
nobles--and his own reputation.  His early training, like that of James
VI., was received while he was in the hands of the most treacherous,
bloody, and unscrupulous of mankind; later, he met them with their own
weapons.  The foundation of the University of Glasgow (1451), and the
building and endowment of St Salvator's College in St Andrews, by Bishop
Kennedy, are the most permanent proofs of advancing culture in the reign
of James.

Many laws of excellent tendency, including sumptuary laws, which suggest
the existence of unexpected wealth and luxury, were passed; but such laws
were never firmly and regularly enforced.  By one rule, which does seem
to have been carried out, no poisons were to be imported: Scottish
chemical science was incapable of manufacturing them.  Much later, under
James VI., we find a parcel of arsenic, to be used for political
purposes, successfully stopped at Leith.



CHAPTER XIII.  JAMES III.


James II. left three sons; the eldest, James III., aged nine, was crowned
at Kelso (August 10, 1460); his brothers, bearing the titles of Albany
and Mar, were not to be his supports.  His mother, Mary of Gueldres, had
the charge of the boys, and, as she was won over by her uncle, Philip of
Burgundy, to the cause of the House of York, while Kennedy and the Earl
of Angus stood for the House of Lancaster, there was strife between them
and the queen-mother and nobles.  Kennedy relied on France (Louis XL),
and his opponents on England.

The battle of Towton (March 30, 1461) drove Henry VI. and his queen
across the Border, where Kennedy entertained the melancholy exile in the
Castle of St Andrews.  The grateful Henry restored Berwick to the Scots,
who could not hold it long.  In June 1461, while the Scots were failing
to take Carlisle, Edward IV. was crowned, and sent his adherent, the
exiled Earl of Douglas, to treat for an alliance with the Celts, under
John, Lord of the Isles, and that Donald Balloch who was falsely believed
to have long before been slain in Ireland.

It is curious to think of the Lord of the Isles dealing as an independent
prince, through a renegade Douglas, with the English king.  A treaty was
made at John's Castle of Ardtornish--now a shell of crumbling stone on
the sea-shore of the Morvern side of the Sound of Mull--with the English
monarch at Westminster.  The Highland chiefs promise allegiance to
Edward, and, if successful, the Celts are to recover the ancient kingdom
from Caithness to the Forth, while Douglas is to be all-powerful from the
Forth to the Border!

But other intrigues prevailed.  The queen-mother and her son, in the most
friendly manner, met the kingmaker Warwick at Dumfries, and again at
Carlisle, and Douglas was disgraced by Edward, though restored to favour
when Bishop Kennedy declined to treat with Edward's commissioners.  The
Treaty of England with Douglas and the Celts was then ratified; but
Douglas, advancing in front of Edward's army to the Border, met old
Bishop Kennedy in helmet and corslet, and was defeated.  Louis XI.,
however, now deserted the Red for the White Rose.  Kennedy followed his
example; and peace was made between England and Scotland in October 1464.
Kennedy died in the summer of 1465.

There followed the usual struggles between confederations of the nobles,
and, in July 1466, James was seized, being then aged fourteen, by the
party of the Boyds, Flemings, and Kennedys, aided by Hepburn of Hailes
(ancestor of the turbulent Earl of Bothwell), and by the head of the
Border House of Cessford, Andrew Ker.

It was a repetition of the struggles of Livingstone and Crichton, and now
the great Border lairds begin to take their place in history.  Boyd made
himself Governor to the king, his son married the king's eldest sister,
Mary, and became Earl of Arran.  But brief was the triumph of the Boyds.
In 1469 James married Margaret of Norway; Orkney and Shetland were her
dower; but while Arran negotiated the affair abroad, at home the fall of
his house was arranged.  Boyd fled the country; the king's sister,
divorced from young Arran, married the Lord Hamilton; and his family, who
were Lords of Cadzow under Robert Bruce, and had been allies of the Black
Douglases till their fall, became the nearest heirs of the royal
Stewarts, if that family were extinct.  The Hamiltons, the wealthiest
house in Scotland, never produced a man of great ability, but their
nearness to the throne and their ambition were storm-centres in the time
of Mary Stuart and James VI., and even as late as the Union in 1707.

The fortunes of a nephew of Bishop Kennedy, Patrick Graham, Kennedy's
successor as Bishop of St Andrews, now perplex the historian.  Graham
dealt for himself with the Pope, obtained the rank of Archbishop for the
Bishop of St Andrews (1472), and thus offended the king and country,
always jealous of interference from Rome.  But he was reported on as more
or less insane by a Papal Nuncio, and was deposed.  Had he been defending
(as used to be said) the right of election of Bishop for the Canons
against the greed of the nobles, the Nuncio might not have taken an
unfavourable view of his intellect.  In any case, whether the clergy,
backed by Rome, elected their bishops, or whether the king and nobles
made their profit out of the Church appointments, jobbery was the
universal rule.  Ecclesiastical corruption and, as a rule, ignorance,
were attaining their lowest level. {67}  By 1476 the Lord of the Isles,
the Celtic ally of Edward IV., was reduced by Argyll, Huntly, and
Crawford, and lost the sheriffdom of Inverness, and the earldom of Ross,
which was attached to the Crown (1476).  His treaty of Ardtornish had
come to light.  But his bastard, Angus Og, filled the north and west with
fire and tumult from Ross to Tobermory (1480-1490), while James's
devotion to the arts--a thing intolerable--and to the society of low-born
favourites, especially Thomas Cockburn, "a stone-cutter," prepared the
sorrows and the end of his reign.

The intrigues which follow, and the truth about the character of James,
are exceedingly obscure.  We have no Scottish chronicle written at the
time; the later histories, by Ferrerius, an Italian, and, much later, by
Queen Mary's Bishop Lesley, and by George Buchanan, are full of rumours
and contradictions, while the State Papers and Treaties of England merely
prove the extreme treachery of James's brother Albany, and no evidence
tells us how James contrived to get the better of the traitor.  James's
brothers Albany and Mar were popular; were good horsemen, men of their
hands, and Cochrane is accused of persuading James to arrest Mar on a
charge of treason and black magic.  Many witches are said to have been
burned: perhaps the only such case before the Reformation.  However it
fell out--all is obscure--Mar died in prison; while Albany, also a
prisoner on charges of treasonable intrigues with the inveterate Earl of
Douglas, in the English interest, escaped to France.

Douglas (1482) brought him to England, where he swore allegiance to
Edward IV., under whom, like Edward Balliol, he would hold Scotland if
crowned.  He was advancing on the Border with Edward's support and with
the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), and James had gone to Lauder to
encounter him, when the Earl of Angus headed a conspiracy of nobles, such
as Huntly, Lennox, and Buchan, seized Cochrane and other favourites of
James, and hanged them over Lauder Bridge.  The most tangible grievance
was the increasing debasement of the coinage.  James was immured at
Edinburgh, but, by a compromise, Albany was restored to rank and estates.
Meanwhile Gloucester captured Berwick, never to be recovered by Scotland.
In 1483 Albany renewed, with many of the nobles, his intrigues with
Edward for the betrayal of Scotland.  In some unknown way James separated
Albany from his confederates Atholl, Buchan, and Angus; Albany went to
England, betrayed the Castle of Dunbar to England, and was only checked
in his treasons by the death of Edward IV. (April 9, 1483), after which a
full Parliament (July 7, 1483) condemned him and forfeited him in his
absence.  On July 22, 1484, he invaded Scotland with his ally, Douglas;
they were routed at Lochmaben, Douglas was taken, and, by singular
clemency, was merely placed in seclusion in the Monastery of Lindores,
while Albany, escaping to France, perished in a tournament, leaving a
descendant, who later, in the minority of James V., makes a figure in
history.

The death of Richard III. (August 18, 1485) and the accession of the
prudent Henry VII. gave James a moment of safety.  He turned his
attention to the Church, and determined to prosecute for treason such
Scottish clerics as purchased benefices through Rome.  He negotiated for
three English marriages, including that of his son James, Duke of
Rothesay, to a daughter of Edward IV.; he also negotiated for the
recovery of Berwick, taken by Gloucester during Albany's invasion of
1482.  After his death, and before it, James was accused, for these
reasons, of disloyal dealings with England; and such nobles as Angus, up
to the neck as they were in treason and rebellion, raised a party against
him on the score that he was acting as they did.  The almost aimless
treachery of the Douglases, Red or Black, endured for centuries from the
reign of David II. to that of James VI.  Many nobles had received no
amnesty for the outrage of Lauder Bridge; their hopes turned to the heir
of the Crown, James, Duke of Rothesay.  We see them offering peace for an
indemnity in a Parliament of October 1487; the Estates refused all such
pardons for a space of seven years; the king's party was manifestly the
stronger.  He was not to be intimidated; he offended Home and the Humes
by annexing the Priory of Coldingham (which they regarded as their own)
to the Royal Chapel at Stirling.  The inveterate Angus, with others,
induced Prince James to join them under arms.  James took the
Chancellorship from Argyll and sent envoys to England.

The rebels, proclaiming the prince as king, intrigued with Henry VII.;
James was driven across the Forth, and was supported in the north by his
uncle, Atholl, and by Huntly, Crawford, and Lord Lindsay of the Byres,
Errol, Glamis, Forbes, and Tullibardine, and the chivalry of Angus and
Strathtay.  Attempts at pacification failed; Stirling Castle was betrayed
to the rebels, and James's host, swollen by the loyal burgesses of the
towns, met the Border spears of Home and Hepburn, the Galloway men, and
the levies of Angus at Sauchie Burn, near Bannockburn.

In some way not understood, James, riding without a single knight or
squire, fell from his horse, which had apparently run away with him, at
Beaton's Mill, and was slain in bed, it was rumoured, by a priest,
feigned or false, who heard his confession.  The obscurity of his reign
hangs darkest over his death, and the virulent Buchanan slandered him in
his grave.  Under his reign, Henryson, the greatest of the Chaucerian
school in Scotland, produced his admirable poems.  Many other poets whose
works are lost were flourishing; and _The Wallace_, that elaborate
plagiarism from Barbour's 'The Brus,' was composed, and attributed to
Blind Harry, a paid minstrel about the Court. {71}



CHAPTER XIV.  JAMES IV.


The new king, with Angus for his Governor, Argyll for his Chancellor, and
with the Kers and Hepburns in office, was crowned at Scone about June 25,
1488.  He was nearly seventeen, no child, but energetic in business as in
pleasure, though lifelong remorse for his rebellion gnawed at his heart.
He promptly put down a rebellion of the late king's friends and of the
late king's foe, Lennox, then strong in the possession of Dumbarton
Castle, which, as it commands the sea-entrance by Clyde, is of great
importance in the reign of Mary and James VI.  James III. must have paid
attention to the navy, which, under Sir Andrew Wood, already faced
English pirates triumphantly.  James IV. spent much money on his fleet,
buying timber from France, for he was determined to make Scotland a power
of weight in Europe.  But at the pinch his navy vanished like a mist.

Spanish envoys and envoys from the Duchess of Burgundy visited James in
1488-1489; he was in close relations with France and Denmark, and caused
anxieties to the first Tudor king, Henry VII., who kept up the Douglas
alliance with Angus, and bought over Scottish politicians.  While James,
as his account-books show, was playing cards with Angus, that traitor was
also negotiating the sale of Hermitage Castle, the main hold of the
Middle Border, to England.  He was detected, and the castle was intrusted
to a Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell; it was still held by Queen Mary's
Bothwell in 1567.  The Hepburns rose to the earldom of Bothwell on the
death of Ramsay, a favourite of James III., who (1491) had arranged to
kidnap James IV. with his brother, and hand them over to Henry VII., for
277 pounds, 13s. 4d.!  Nothing came of this, and a truce with England was
arranged in 1491.  Through four reigns, till James VI. came to the
English throne, the Tudor policy was to buy Scottish traitors, and
attempt to secure the person of the Scottish monarch.

Meanwhile, the Church was rent by jealousies between the holder of the
newly-created Archbishop of Glasgow (1491) and the Archbishop of St
Andrews, and disturbed by the Lollards, in the region which was later the
centre of the fiercest Covenanters,--Kyle in Ayrshire.  But James laughed
away the charges against the heretics (1494), whose views were, on many
points, those of John Knox.  In 1493-1495 James dealt in the usual way
with the Highlanders and "the wicked blood of the Isles": some were
hanged, some imprisoned, some became sureties for the peacefulness of
their clans.  In 1495, by way of tit-for-tat against English schemes,
James began to back the claims of Perkin Warbeck, pretending to be
Richard, Duke of York, escaped from the assassins employed by Richard
III.  Perkin, whoever he was, had probably been intriguing between
Ireland and Burgundy since 1488.  He was welcomed by James at Stirling in
November 1495, and was wedded to the king's cousin, Catherine Gordon,
daughter of the Earl of Huntly, now supreme in the north.  Rejecting a
daughter of England, and Spanish efforts at pacification, James prepared
to invade England in Perkin's cause; the scheme was sold by Ramsay, the
would-be kidnapper, and came to no more than a useless raid of September
1496, followed by a futile attempt and a retreat in July 1497.  The
Spanish envoy, de Ayala, negotiated a seven-years' truce in September,
after Perkin had failed and been taken at Taunton.

The Celts had again risen while James was busy in the Border; he put them
down, and made Argyll Lieutenant of the Isles.  Between the Campbells and
the Huntly Gordons, as custodians of the peace, the fighting clans were
expected to be more orderly.  On the other hand, a son of Angus Og,
himself usually reckoned a bastard of the Lord of the Isles, gave much
trouble.  Angus had married a daughter of the Argyll of his day; their
son, Donald Dubh, was kidnapped (or, rather, his mother was kidnapped
before his birth) for Argyll; he now escaped, and in 1503, found allies
among the chiefs, did much scathe, was taken in 1506, but was as active
as ever forty years later.

The central source of these endless Highland feuds was the family of the
Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles, claiming the earldom of Ross, resisting
the Lowland influences and those of the Gordons and Campbells (Huntly and
Argyll), and seeking aid from England.  With the capture of Donald Dubh
(1506) the Highlanders became for the while comparatively quiescent;
under Lennox and Argyll they suffered in the defeat of Flodden.

From 1497 to 1503 Henry VII. was negotiating for the marriage of James to
his daughter Margaret Tudor; the marriage was celebrated on August 8,
1503, and a century later the great grandson of Margaret, James VI. came
to the English throne.  But marriage does not make friendship.  There had
existed since 1491 a secret alliance by which Scotland was bound to
defend France if attacked by England.  Henry's negotiations for the
kidnapping of James were of April of the same year.  Margaret, the young
queen, after her marriage, was soon involved in bitter quarrels over her
dowry with her own family; the slaying of a Sir Robert Ker, Warden of the
Marches, by a Heron in a Border fray (1508), left an unhealed sore, as
England would not give up Heron and his accomplice.  Henry VII. had been
pacific, but his death, in 1509, left James to face his hostile brother-
in-law, the fiery young Henry VIII.

In 1511 the Holy League under the Pope, against France, imperilled
James's French ally.  He began to build great ships of war; his
sea-captain, Barton, pirating about, was defeated and slain by ships
under two of the Howards, sons of the Earl of Surrey (August 1511).  James
remonstrated, Henry was firm, and the Border feud of Ker and Heron was
festering; moreover, Henry was a party to the League against France, and
France was urging James to attack England.  He saw, and wrote to the King
of Denmark, that, if France were down, the turn of Scotland to fall would
follow.  In March 1513, an English diplomatist, West, found James in a
wild mood, distraught "like a fey man."

Chivalry, and even national safety, called him to war; while his old
remorse drove him into a religious retreat, and he was on hostile terms
with the Pope.  On May 24th, in a letter to Henry, he made a last attempt
to obtain a truce, but on June 30th Henry invaded France.  The French
queen despatched to James, as to her true knight, a letter and a ring.  He
sent his fleet to sea; it vanished like a dream.  He challenged Henry
through a herald on July 26th, and, in face of strange and evil omens,
summoned the whole force of his kingdom, crossed the Border on August
22nd, took Norham Castle on Tweed, with the holds of Eital, Chillingham,
and Ford, which he made his headquarters, and awaited the approach of
Surrey and the levies of the Stanleys.  On September 5th he demolished
Ford Castle, and took position on the crest of Flodden Edge, with the
deep and sluggish water of Till at its feet.  Surrey, commanding an army
all but destitute of supplies, outmanoeuvred James, led his men unseen
behind a range of hills to a position where, if he could maintain
himself, he was upon James's line of communications, and thence marched
against him to Branxton Ridge, under Flodden Edge.

James was ignorant of Surrey's movement till he saw the approach of his
standards.  In place of retaining his position, he hurled his force down
to Branxton, his gunners could not manage their new French ordnance, and
though Home with the Border spears and Huntly had a success on the right,
the Borderers made no more efforts, and, on the left, the Celts fled
swiftly after the fall of Lennox and Argyll.  In the centre Crawford and
Rothes were slain, and James, with the steady spearmen of his command,
drove straight at Surrey.  James, as the Spaniard Ayala said, "was no
general: he was a fighting man."  He was outflanked by the Admiral
(Howard) and Dacre; his force was surrounded by charging horse and foot,
and rained on by arrows.  But

   "The stubborn spearmen still made good
   Their dark impenetrable wood,"

when James rushed from the ranks, hewed his way to within a lance's
length of Surrey (so Surrey writes), and died, riddled with arrows, his
neck gashed by a bill-stroke, his left hand almost sundered from his
body.  Night fell on the unbroken Scottish phalanx, but when dawn arrived
only a force of Border prickers was hovering on the fringes of the field.
Thirteen dead earls lay in a ring about their master; there too lay his
natural son, the young Archbishop of St Andrews, and the Bishops of
Caithness and the Isles.  Scarce a noble or gentle house of the Lowlands
but reckons an ancestor slain at Flodden.

Surrey did not pursue his victory, which was won, despite sore lack of
supplies, by his clever tactics, by the superior discipline of his men,
by their marching powers, and by the glorious rashness of the Scottish
king.  It is easy, and it is customary, to blame James's adherence to the
French alliance as if it were born of a foolish chivalry.  But he had
passed through long stress of mind concerning this matter.  If he
rejected the allurements of France, if France were overwhelmed, he knew
well that the turn of Scotland would come soon.  The ambitions and the
claims of Henry VIII. were those of the first Edwards.  England was bent
on the conquest of Scotland at the earliest opportunity, and through the
entire Tudor period England was the home and her monarch the ally of
every domestic foe and traitor to the Scottish Crown.

Scotland, under James, had much prospered in wealth and even in comfort.
Ayala might flatter in some degree, but he attests the great increase in
comfort and in wealth.

In 1495 Bishop Elphinstone founded the University of Aberdeen, while
(1496) Parliament decreed a course of school and college for the sons of
barons and freeholders of competent estate.  Prior Hepburn founded the
College of St Leonard's in the University of St Andrews; and in 1507
Chepman received a royal patent as a printer.  Meanwhile Dunbar, reckoned
by some the chief poet of Scotland before Burns, was already denouncing
the luxury and vice of the clergy, though his own life set them a bad
example.  But with Dunbar, Henryson, and others, Scotland had a school of
poets much superior to any that England had reared since the death of
Chaucer.  Scotland now enjoyed her brief glimpse of the Revival of
Learning; and James, like Charles II., fostered the early movements of
chemistry and physical science.  But Flodden ruined all, and the country,
under the long minority of James V., was robbed and distracted by English
intrigues; by the follies and loves of Margaret Tudor; by actual warfare
between rival candidates for ecclesiastical place; by the ambitions and
treasons of the Douglases and other nobles; and by the arrival from
France of the son of Albany, that rebel brother of James III.

The truth of the saying, "Woe to the kingdom whose king is a child," was
never more bitterly proved than in Scotland between the day of Flodden
and the day of the return of Mary Stuart from France (1513-1561).  James
V. was not only a child and fatherless; he had a mother whose passions
and passionate changes in love resembled those of her brother Henry VIII.
Consequently, when the inevitable problem arose, was Scotland during the
minority to side with England or with France? the queen-mother wavered
ceaselessly between the party of her brother, the English king, and the
party of France; while Henry VIII. could not be trusted, and the policy
of France in regard to England did not permit her to offer any stable
support to the cause of Scottish independence.  The great nobles changed
sides constantly, each "fighting for his own hand," and for the spoils of
a Church in which benefices were struggled for and sold like stocks in
the Exchange.

The question, Was Scotland to ally herself with England or with France?
later came to mean, Was Scotland to break with Rome or to cling to Rome?
Owing mainly to the selfish and unscrupulous perfidy of Henry VIII.,
James V. was condemned, as the least of two evils, to adopt the Catholic
side in the great religious revolution; while the statesmanship of the
Beatons, Archbishops of St Andrews, preserved Scotland from English
domination, thereby preventing the country from adopting Henry's Church,
the Anglican, and giving Calvinism and Presbyterianism the opportunity
which was resolutely taken and held.

The real issue of the complex faction fight during James's minority was
thus of the most essential importance; but the constant shiftings of
parties and persons cannot be dealt with fully in our space.  James's
mother had a natural claim to the guardianship of her son, and was left
Regent by the will of James IV., but she was the sister of Scotland's
enemy, Henry VIII.  Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow (later of St Andrews),
with the Earl of Arran (now the title of the Hamiltons), Huntly, and
Angus were to advise the queen till the arrival of Albany (son of the
brother of James III.), who was summoned from France.  Albany, of course,
stood for the French alliance, but when the queen-mother (August 6, 1514)
married the new young Earl of Angus, the grandson and successor of the
aged traitor, "Bell the Cat," the earl began to carry on the usual
unpatriotic policy of his house.  The appointment to the see of St
Andrews was competed for by the Poet Gawain Douglas, uncle of the new
Earl of Angus; and himself of the English party; by Hepburn, Prior of St
Andrews, who fortified the Abbey; and by Forman, Bishop of Moray, a
partisan of France, and a man accused of having induced James IV. to
declare war against England.

After long and scandalous intrigues, Forman obtained the see.  Albany was
Regent for a while, and at intervals he repaired to France; he was in the
favour of the queen-mother when later she quarrelled with her husband,
Angus.  At one moment, Margaret and Angus fled to England where was born
her daughter Margaret, later Lady Lennox and mother of Henry Darnley.

Angus, with Home, now recrossed the Border (1516), and was reconciled to
Albany; against all unity in Scotland Henry intrigued, bribing with a
free hand, his main object being to get Albany sent out of the country.
In early autumn, 1516, Home, the leader of the Borderers at Flodden, and
his brother were executed for treason; in June, 1517, Albany went to seek
aid and counsel in France; when the queen-mother returned from England to
Scotland, where, if she retained any influence, she might be useful to
her brother's schemes.  But, contrary to Henry's interests, in this year
Albany renewed the old alliance with France; while, in 1518, the queen-
mother desired to divorce Angus.  But Angus was a serviceable tool of
Henry, who prevented his sister from having her way; and now the heads of
the parties in the distracted country were Arran, chief of the Hamiltons,
and Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, standing for France; and Angus
representing the English party.

Their forces met at Edinburgh in the street battle of "Cleanse the
Causeway," wherein the Archbishop of Glasgow wore armour, and the
Douglases beat the Hamiltons out of the town (April 30, 1520).  Albany
returned (1521), but the nobles would not join with him in an English war
(1522).  Again he went to France, while Surrey devastated the Scottish
Border (1523).  Albany returned while Surrey was burning Jedburgh, was
once more deserted by the Scottish forces on the Tweed, and left the
country for ever in 1524.  Angus now returned from England; but the queen-
mother cast her affections on young Henry Stewart (Lord Methven), while
Angus got possession of the boy king (June 1526) and held him, a
reluctant ward, in the English interest.

Lennox was now the chief foe of Arran, and Angus, with whom Arran had
coalesced; and Lennox desired to deliver James out of Angus's hands.  On
July 26, 1526, not far from Melrose, Walter Scott of Buccleuch attacked
the forces guarding the prince; among them was Ker of Cessford, who was
slain by an Elliot when Buccleuch's men rallied at the rock called "Turn
Again."  Hence sprang a long-enduring blood-feud of Scotts and Kers; but
Angus retained the prince, and in a later fight in the cause of James's
delivery, Lennox was slain by the Hamiltons, near Linlithgow.  The spring
of 1528 was marked by the burning of a Hamilton, Patrick, Abbot of Ferne,
at St Andrews, for his Lutheran opinions.  Angus had been making futile
attacks on the Border thieves, mainly the Armstrongs, who now became very
prominent and picturesque robbers.  He meant to carry James with him on
one of these expeditions; but in June 1528 the young king escaped from
Edinburgh Castle, and rode to Stirling, where he was welcomed by his
mother and her partisans.  Among them were Arran, Argyll, Moray,
Bothwell, and other nobles, with Maxwell and the Laird of Buccleuch, Sir
Walter Scott.  Angus and his kin were forfeited; he was driven across the
Border in November, to work what mischief he might against his country;
he did not return till the death of James V.  Meanwhile James was at
peace with his uncle, Henry VIII.  He (1529-1530) attempted to bring the
Border into his peace, and hanged Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, with
circumstances of treachery, says the ballad,--as a ballad-maker was
certain to say.

Campbells, Macleans, and Macdonalds had all this while been burning each
other's lands, and cutting each other's throats.  James visited them, and
partly quieted them, incarcerating the Earl of Argyll.

Bothwell and Angus now conspired together to crown Henry VIII. in
Edinburgh; but, in May 1534, a treaty of peace was made, to last till the
death of either monarch and a year longer.



CHAPTER XV.  JAMES V. AND THE REFORMATION.


The new times were at the door.  In 1425 the Scottish Parliament had
forbidden Lutheran books to be imported.  But they were, of course,
smuggled in; and the seed of religious revolution fell on minds disgusted
by the greed and anarchy of the clerical fighters and jobbers of
benefices.

James V., after he had shaken off the Douglases and become "a free king,"
had to deal with a political and religious situation, out of which we may
say in the Scots phrase, "there was no outgait."  His was the dilemma of
his father before Flodden.  How, against the perfidious ambition, the
force in war, and the purchasing powers of Henry VIII., was James to
preserve the national independence of Scotland?  His problem was even
harder than that of his father, because when Henry broke with Rome and
robbed the religious houses a large minority, at least, of the Scottish
nobles, gentry, and middle classes were, so far, heartily on the anti-
Roman side.  They were tired of Rome, tired of the profligacy, ignorance,
and insatiable greed of the ecclesiastical dignitaries who, too often,
were reckless cadets of the noble families.  Many Scots had read the
Lutheran books and disbelieved in transubstantiation; thought that money
paid for prayers to the dead was money wasted; preferred a married and
preaching to a celibate and licentious clergy who celebrated Mass; were
convinced that saintly images were idols, that saintly miracles were
impostures.  Above all, the nobles coveted the lands of the Church, the
spoils of the religious houses.

In Scotland, as elsewhere, the causes of the religious revolution were
many.  The wealth and luxury of the higher clergy, and of the dwellers in
the abbeys, had long been the butt of satire and of the fiercer
indignation of the people.  Benefices, great and small, were jobbed on
every side between the popes, the kings, and the great nobles.  Ignorant
and profligate cadets of the great houses were appointed to high
ecclesiastical offices, while the minor clergy were inconceivably
ignorant just at the moment when the new critical learning, with
knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, was revolutionising the study of the
sacred books.  The celibacy of the clergy had become a mere farce; and
they got dispensations enabling them to obtain ecclesiastical livings for
their bastards.  The kings set the worst example: both James IV. and
James V. secured the richest abbeys, and, in the case of James IV., the
Primacy, for their bastard sons.  All these abuses were of old standing.
"Early in the thirteenth century certain of the abbots of Jedburgh,
supported by their chapters, had granted certain of their appropriate
churches to priests with a right of succession to their sons" (see 'The
Mediaeval Church in Scotland,' by the late Bishop Dowden, chap. xix.  Mac-
Lehose, 1910.)  Oppressive customs by which "the upmost claith," or a
pecuniary equivalent, was extorted as a kind of death-duty by the clergy,
were sanctioned by excommunication: no grievance was more bitterly felt
by the poor.  The once-dreaded curses on evil-doers became a popular
jest: purgatory was a mere excuse for getting money for masses.

In short, the whole mediaeval system was morally rotten; the statements
drawn up by councils which made vain attempts to check the stereotyped
abuses are as candid and copious concerning all these things as the
satires of Sir David Lyndsay.

Then came disbelief in mediaeval dogmas: the Lutheran and other heretical
books were secretly purchased and their contents assimilated.
Intercession of saints, images, pilgrimages, the doctrine of the
Eucharist, all fell into contempt.

As early as February 1428, as we have seen, the first Scottish martyr for
evangelical religion, Patrick Hamilton, was burned at St Andrews.  This
sufferer was the son of a bastard of that Lord Hamilton who married the
sister of James III.  As was usual, he obtained, when a little boy, an
abbey, that of Ferne in Ross-shire.  He drew the revenues, but did not
wear the costume of his place; in fact, he was an example of the ordinary
abuses.  Educated at Paris and Louvain, he came in contact with the
criticism of Erasmus and the Lutheran controversy.  He next read at St
Andrews, and he married.  Suspected of heresy in 1427, he retired to
Germany; he wrote theses called 'Patrick's Places,' which were reckoned
heretical; he was arrested, was offered by Archbishop Beaton a chance to
escape, disdained it, and was burned with unusual cruelty,--as a rule,
heretics in Scotland were strangled before burning.  There were other
similar cases, nor could James interfere--he was bound by his Coronation
Oath; again, he found in the bishops his best diplomatists, and they, of
course, were all for the French alliance, in the cause of the
independence of their country and Church as against Henry VIII.

Thus James, in justifiable dread of the unscrupulous ambition of Henry
VIII., could not run the English course, could not accept the varying
creeds which Henry, who was his own Pope, put forward as his spirit moved
him.  James was thus inevitably committed to the losing cause--the cause
of Catholicism and of France--while the intelligence no less than the
avarice of his nobles and gentry ran the English course.

James had practically no choice.  In 1536 Henry proposed a meeting with
James "as far within England as possible."  Knowing, as we do, that Henry
was making repeated attempts to have James kidnapped and Archbishop
Beaton also, we are surprised that James was apparently delighted at the
hope of an interview with his uncle--in England.  Henry declined to
explain why he desired a meeting when James put the question to his
envoy.  James said, in effect, that he must act by advice of his Council,
which, so far as it was clerical, opposed the scheme.  Henry justified
the views of the Council, later, when James, returning from a visit to
France, asked permission to pass through England.  "It is the king's
honour not to receive the King of Scots in his realm except as a vassal,
for there never came King of Scots into England in peaceful manner
otherwise."  Certain it is that, however James might enter England, he
would leave it only as a vassal.  Nevertheless his Council, especially
his clergy, are blamed for embroiling James with Henry by dissuading him
from meeting his uncle in England.  Manifestly they had no choice.  Henry
had shown his hand too often.

At this time James, by Margaret Erskine, became the father of James,
later the Regent Moray.  Strange tragedies would never have occurred had
the king first married Margaret Erskine, who, by 1536, was the wife of
Douglas of Loch Leven.  He is said to have wished for her a divorce that
he might marry her; this could not be: he visited France, and on New
Year's Day, 1537, wedded Madeline, daughter of Francis I.  Six months
later she died in Scotland.

Marriage for the king was necessary, and David Beaton, later Cardinal
Beaton and Archbishop of St Andrews, obtained for his lord a lady coveted
by Henry VIII., Mary, of the great Catholic house of Lorraine, widow of
the Duc de Longueville, and sister of the popular and ambitious Guises.
The pair were wedded on June 10, 1538; there was fresh offence to Henry
and a closer tie to the Catholic cause.  The appointment of Cardinal
Beaton (1539) to the see of St Andrews, in succession to his uncle, gave
James a servant of high ecclesiastical rank, great subtlety, and
indomitable resolution, but remote from chastity of life and from
clemency to heretics.  Martyrdoms became more frequent, and George
Buchanan, who had been tutor of James's son by Margaret Erskine, thought
well to open a window in a house where he was confined, walk out, and
depart to the Continent.  Meanwhile Henry, no less than Beaton, was
busily burning his own martyrs.  In 1539 Henry renewed his intercourse
with James, attempting to shake his faith in David Beaton, and to make
him rob his Church.  James replied that he preferred to try to reform it;
and he enjoyed, in 1540, Sir David Lyndsay's satirical play on the vices
of the clergy, and, indeed, of all orders of men.  In 1540 James ratified
the College of Justice, the fifteen Lords of Session, sitting as judges
in Edinburgh.

In 1541 the idea of a meeting between James and Henry was again mooted,
and Henry actually went to York, where James did not appear.  Henry, who
had expected him, was furious.  In August 1542, on a futile pretext, he
sent Norfolk with a great force to harry the Border.  The English had the
worse at the battle of Hadden Rig; negotiations followed; Henry
proclaimed that Scottish kings had always been vassals of England, and
horrified his Council by openly proposing to kidnap James.  Henry's
forces were now wrecking an abbey and killing women on the Border.  James
tried to retaliate, but his levies (October 31) at Fala Moor declined to
follow him across the Border: they remembered Flodden, moreover they
could not risk the person of a childless king.  James prepared, however,
for a raid on a great scale on the western Border, but the fact had been
divulged by Sir George Douglas, Angus's brother, and had also been sold
to Dacre, cheap, by another Scot.  The English despatches prove that
Wharton had full time for preparation, and led a competent force of
horse, which, near Arthuret, charged on the right flank of the Scots, who
slowly retreated, till they were entangled between the Esk and a morass,
and lost their formation and their artillery, with 1200 men: a few were
slain, most were drowned or were taken prisoners.  The raid was no secret
of the king and the priests, as Knox absurdly states; nobles of the
Reforming no less than of the Catholic party were engaged; the English
had full warning and a force of 3000 men, not of 400 farmers; the Scots
were beaten through their own ignorance of the ground in which they had
been burning and plundering.  As to confusion caused by the claim of
Oliver Sinclair to be commander, it is not corroborated by contemporary
despatches, though Sir George Douglas reports James's lament for the
conduct of his favourite, "Fled Oliver! fled Oliver!"  The misfortune
broke the heart of James.  He went to Edinburgh, did some business,
retired for a week to Linlithgow, {89} where his queen was awaiting her
delivery, and thence went to Falkland, and died of nothing more specific
than shame, grief, and despair.  He lived to hear of the birth of his
daughter, Mary (December 8, 1542).  "It came with a lass and it will go
with a lass," he is said to have muttered.

On December 14th James passed away, broken by his impossible task, lost
in the bewildering paths from which there was no outgait.

James was personally popular for his gaiety and his adventures while he
wandered in disguise.  Humorous poems are attributed to him.  A man of
greater genius than his might have failed when confronted by a tyrant so
wealthy, ambitious, cruel, and destitute of honour as Henry VIII.;
constantly engaged with James's traitors in efforts to seize or slay him
and his advisers.  It is an easy thing to attack James because he would
not trust Henry, a man who ruined all that did trust to his seeming
favour.



CHAPTER XVI.  THE MINORITY OF MARY STUART.


When James died, Henry VIII. seemed to hold in his hand all the winning
cards in the game of which Scotland was the stake.  He held Angus and his
brother George Douglas; when he slipped them they would again wield the
whole force of their House in the interests of England and of Henry's
religion.  Moreover, he held many noble prisoners taken at
Solway--Glencairn, Maxwell, Cassilis, Fleming, Grey, and others,--and all
of these, save Sir George Douglas, "have not sticked," says Henry
himself, "to take upon them to set the crown of Scotland on our head."
Henry's object was to get "the child, the person of the Cardinal, and of
such as be chief hindrances to our purpose, and also the chief holds and
fortresses into our hands."  By sheer brigandage the Reformer king hoped
to succeed where the Edwards had failed.  He took the oaths of his
prisoners, making them swear to secure for him the child, Beaton, and the
castles, and later released them to do his bidding.

Henry's failure was due to the genius and resolution of Cardinal Beaton,
heading the Catholic party.

What occurred in Scotland on James's death is obscure.  Later, Beaton was
said to have made the dying king's hand subscribe a blank paper filled up
by appointment of Beaton himself as one of a Regency Council of four or
five.  There is no evidence for the tale.  What actually occurred was the
proclamation of the Earls of Arran, Argyll, Huntly, Moray, and of Beaton
as Regents (December 19, 1542).  Arran, the chief of the Hamiltons, was,
we know, unless ousted by Henry VIII., the next heir to the throne after
the new-born Mary.  He was a good-hearted man, but the weakest of
mortals, and his constant veerings from the Catholic and national to the
English and reforming side were probably caused by his knowledge of his
very doubtful legitimacy.  Either party could bring up the doubt; Beaton,
having the ear of the Pope, could be specially dangerous, but so could
the opposite party if once firmly seated in office.  Arran, in any case,
presently ousted the Archbishop of Glasgow from the Chancellorship and
gave the seals to Beaton--the man whom he presently accused of a
shameless forgery of James's will. {91}

The Regency soon came into Arran's own hands: the Solway Moss prisoners,
learning this as they journeyed north, began to repent of their oaths of
treachery, especially as their oaths were known or suspected in Scotland.
George Douglas prevailed on Arran to seize and imprison Beaton till he
answered certain charges; but no charges were ever made public, none were
produced.  The clergy refused to christen or bury during his captivity.
Parliament met (March 12, 1543), and still there was silence as to the
nature of the accusations against Beaton; and by March 22 George Douglas
himself released the Cardinal (of course for a consideration) and carried
him to his own strong castle of St Andrews.

Parliament permitted the reading but forbade the discussion of the Bible
in English.  Arran was posing as a kind of Protestant.  Ambassadors were
sent to Henry to negotiate a marriage between his son Edward and the baby
Queen; but Scotland would not give up a fortress, would never resign her
independence, would not place Mary in Henry's hands, would never submit
to any but a native ruler.

The airy castle of Henry's hopes fell into dust, built as it was on the
oaths of traitors.  Love of such a religion as Henry professed, retaining
the Mass and making free use of the stake and the gibbet, was not, even
to Protestants, so attractive as to make them run the English course and
submit to the English Lord Paramount.  Some time was needed to make
Scots, whatever their religious opinions, lick the English rod.  But the
scale was soon to turn; for every reforming sermon was apt to produce the
harrying of religious houses, and every punishment of the robbers was
persecution intolerable against which men sought English protection.

Henry VIII. now turned to Arran for support.  To Arran he offered the
hand of his daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, who should later marry the
heir of the Hamiltons.  But by mid-April Arran was under the influence of
his bastard brother, the Abbot of Paisley (later Archbishop Hamilton).
The Earl of Lennox, a Stuart, and Keeper of Dumbarton Castle, arrived
from France.  He was hostile to Arran; for, if Arran were illegitimate,
Lennox was next heir to the crown after Mary: he was thus, for the
moment, the ally of Beaton against Arran.  George Douglas visited Henry,
and returned with his terms--Mary to be handed over to England at the age
of ten, and to marry Prince Edward at twelve; Arran (by a prior
arrangement) was to receive Scotland north of Forth, an auxiliary English
army, and the hand of Elizabeth for his son.  To the English contingent
Arran preferred 5000 pounds in ready money--that was his price.

Sadleyr, Henry's envoy, saw Mary of Guise, and saw her little daughter
unclothed; he admired the child, but could not disentangle the cross-webs
of intrigue.  The national party--the Catholic party--was strongest,
because least disunited.  When the Scottish ambassadors who went to Henry
in spring returned (July 21), the national party seized Mary and carried
her to Stirling, where they offered Arran a meeting, and (he said) the
child queen's hand for his son.  But Arran's own partisans, Glencairn and
Cassilis, told Sadleyr that he fabled freely.  Representatives of both
parties accepted Henry's terms, but delayed the ratification.  Henry
insisted that it should be ratified by August 24, but on August 16 he
seized six Scottish merchant ships.  Though the Treaty was ratified on
August 25, Arran was compelled to insist on compensation for the ships,
but on August 28 he proclaimed Beaton a traitor.  In the beginning of
September Arran favoured the wrecking of the Franciscan monastery in
Edinburgh; and at Dundee the mob, moved by sermons from the celebrated
martyr George Wishart, did sack the houses of the Franciscans and the
Dominicans; Beaton's Abbey of Arbroath and the Abbey of Lindores were
also plundered.  Clearly it was believed that Beaton was down, and that
church-pillage was authorised by Arran.  Yet on September 3 Arran joined
hands with Beaton!  The Cardinal, by threatening to disprove Arran's
legitimacy and ruin his hopes of the crown, or in some other way, had
dominated the waverer, while Henry (August 29) was mobilising an army of
20,000 men for the invasion of Scotland.  On September 9 Mary was crowned
at Stirling.  But Beaton could not hold both Arran and his rival Lennox,
who committed an act of disgraceful treachery.  With Glencairn he seized
large supplies of money and stores sent by France to Dumbarton Castle.  In
1544 he fled to England and to the protection of Henry, and married
Margaret, daughter of Angus and Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV.  He
became the father of Darnley, Mary's husband in later years, and the
fortunes of Scotland were fatally involved in the feud between the Lennox
Stewarts and the House of Hamilton.

Meanwhile (November 1543) Arran and Beaton together broke and persecuted
the abbey robbers of Perthshire and Angus, making "martyrs" and
incurring, on Beaton's part, fatal feuds with Leslies, Greys, Learmonths,
and Kirkcaldys.  Parliament (December 11) declared the treaty with
England void; the party of the Douglases, equally suspected by Henry and
by Beaton, was crushed, and George Douglas was held a hostage, still
betraying his country in letters to England.  Martyrs were burned in
Perth and Dundee, which merely infuriated the populace.  In April 1544,
while Henry was giving the most cruel orders to his army of invasion, one
Wishart visited him with offers, which were accepted, for the murder of
the Cardinal. {94}  Early in May the English army under Hertford took
Leith, "raised a jolly fire," says Hertford, in Edinburgh; he burned the
towns on his line of march, and retired.

On May 17 Lennox and Glencairn sold themselves to Henry; for ample
rewards they were to secure the teaching of God's word "as the mere and
only foundation whence proceeds all truth and honour"!  Arran defeated
Glencairn when he attempted his godly task, and Lennox was driven back
into England.

In June Mary of Guise fell into the hands of nobles led by Angus, while
the Fife, Perthshire, and Angus lairds, lately Beaton's deadly foes, came
into the Cardinal's party.  With him and Arran, in November, were banded
the Protestants who were to be his murderers, while the Douglases, in
December, were cleared by Parliament of all their offences, and Henry
offered 3000 crowns for their "trapping."  Angus, in February 1545,
protested that he loved Henry "best of all men," and would make Lennox
Governor of Scotland, while Wharton, for Henry, was trying to kidnap
Angus.  Enraged by the English desecration of his ancestors' graves at
Melrose Abbey, Angus united with Arran, Norman Leslie, and Buccleuch to
annihilate an English force at Ancrum Moor, where Henry's men lost 800
slain and 2000 prisoners.  The loyalty of Angus to his country was now,
by innocents like Arran, thought assured.  The plot for Beaton's murder
was in 1545 negotiated between Henry and Cassilis, backed by George
Douglas; and Crichton of Brunston, as before, was engaged, a godly laird
in Lothian.  In August the Douglases boast that, as Henry's friends, they
have frustrated an invasion of England with a large French contingent,
which they pretended to lead, while they secured its failure.  Meanwhile,
after forty years, Donald Dubh, and all the great western chiefs, none of
whom could write, renewed the alliance of 1463 with England, calling
themselves "auld enemies of Scotland."  Their religious predilections,
however, were not Protestant.  They promised to destroy or reduce half of
Scotland, and hailed Lennox as Governor, as in Angus's offer to Henry in
spring 1545.  Lennox did make an attempt against Dumbarton in November
with Donald Dubh.  They failed, and Donald died, without legitimate
issue, at Drogheda.  The Macleans, Macleods, and Macneils then came into
the national party.

In September 1545 Hertford, with an English force, destroyed the
religious houses at Melrose, Kelso, Dryburgh, and Jedburgh. {96}
Meanwhile the two Douglases skulked with the murderous traitor Cassilis
in Ayrshire, and Henry tried to induce French deserters from the Scottish
flag to murder Beaton and Arran.

Beaton could scarcely escape for ever from so many plots.  His capture,
in January 1546, of George Wishart, an eminently learned and virtuous
Protestant preacher, and an intimate associate of the murderous, double-
dyed traitor Brunston and of other Lothian pietists of the English party;
and his burning of Wishart at St Andrews, on March 1, 1546, sealed the
Cardinal's doom.  On May 29th he was surprised in his castle of St
Andrews and slain by his former ally, Norman Leslie, Master of Rothes,
with Kirkcaldy of Grange, and James Melville who seems to have dealt the
final stab after preaching at his powerless victim.  They insulted the
corpse, and held St Andrews Castle against all comers.

How gallant a fight Beaton had waged against adversaries how many and
multifarious, how murderous, self-seeking, treacherous, and hypocritical,
we have seen.  He maintained the independence of Scotland against the
most recklessly unscrupulous of assailants, though probably he was rather
bent on defending the lost cause of a Church entirely and intolerably
corrupt.

The two causes were at the moment inseparable, and, whatever we may think
of the Church of Rome, it was not more bloodily inclined than the Church
of which Henry was Pope, while it was less illogical, not being the
creature of a secular tyrant.  If Henry and his party had won their game,
the Church of Scotland would have been Henry's Church--would have been
Anglican.  Thus it was Beaton who, by defeating Henry, made Presbyterian
Calvinism possible in Scotland.



CHAPTER XVII.  REGENCY OF ARRAN.


The death of Cardinal Beaton left Scotland and the Church without a
skilled and resolute defender.  His successor in the see, Archbishop
Hamilton, a half-brother of the Regent, was more licentious than the
Cardinal (who seems to have been constant to Mariotte Ogilvy), and had
little of his political genius.  The murderers, with others of their
party, held St Andrews Castle, strong in its new fortifications, which
the queen-mother and Arran, the Regent, were unable to reduce.  Receiving
supplies from England by sea, and abetted by Henry VIII., the murderers
were in treaty with him to work all his will, while some nobles, like
Argyll and Huntly, wavered; though the Douglases now renounced their
compact with England, and their promise to give the child queen in
marriage to Henry's son.  At the end of November, despairing of success
in the siege, Arran asked France to send men and ships to take St Andrews
Castle from the assassins, who, in December, obtained an armistice.  They
would surrender, they said, when they got a pardon for their guilt from
the Pope; but they begged Henry VIII. to move the Emperor to move the
Pope to give no pardon!  The remission, none the less, arrived early in
April 1547, but was mocked at by the garrison of the castle. {99}

The garrison and inmates of the castle presently welcomed the arrival of
John Knox and some of his pupils.  Knox (born in Haddington, 1513-1515?),
a priest and notary, had borne a two-handed sword and been of the body-
guard of Wishart.  He was now invited by John Rough, the chaplain, to
take on him the office of preacher, which he did, weeping, so strong was
his sense of the solemnity of his duties.  He also preached and disputed
with feeble clerical opponents in the town.  The congregation in the
castle, though devout, were ruffianly in their lives, nor did he spare
rebukes to his flock.

Before Knox arrived, Henry VIII. and Francis II. had died; the successor
of Francis, Henri II., sent to Scotland Monsieur d'Oysel, who became the
right-hand man of Mary of Guise in the Government.  Meanwhile the advance
of an English force against the Border, where they occupied Langholm,
caused Arran to lead thither the national levies.  But this gave no great
relief to the besieged in the castle of St Andrews.  In mid-July a well-
equipped French fleet swept up the east coast; men were landed with guns;
French artillery was planted on the cathedral roof and the steeple of St
Salvator's College, and poured a plunging fire into the castle.  In a day
or two, on the last of July, the garrison surrendered.  Knox, with many
of his associates, was placed in the galleys and carried captive to
France.  On one occasion the galleys were within sight of St Andrews, and
the Reformer predicted (so he says) that he would again preach there--as
he did, to some purpose.

But the castle had not fallen before the English party among the nobles
had arranged to betray Scottish fortresses to England; and to lead 2000
Scottish "favourers of the Word of God" to fight under the flag of St
George against their country.  An English host of 15,000 was assembled,
and marched north accompanied by a fleet.  On the 9th of September 1547
the leader, Somerset, found the Scottish army occupying a well-chosen
position near Musselburgh: on their left lay the Firth, on their front a
marsh and the river Esk.  But next day the Scots, as when Cromwell
defeated them at Dunbar, left an impregnable position in their eagerness
to cut Somerset off from his ships, and were routed with great slaughter
in the battle of Pinkie.  Somerset made no great use of his victory: he
took and held Broughty Castle on Tay, fortified Inchcolme in the Firth of
Forth, and devastated Holyrood.  Mischief he did, to little purpose.

The child queen was conveyed to an isle in the loch of Menteith, where
she was safe, and her marriage with the Dauphin was negotiated.  In June
1548 a large French force under the Sieur d'Esse arrived, and later
captured Haddington, held by the English, while, despite some
Franco-Scottish successes in the field, Mary was sent with her Four
Maries to France, where she landed in August, the only passenger who had
not been sea-sick!  By April 1550 the English made peace, abandoning all
their holds in Scotland.  The great essential prize, the child queen, had
escaped them.

The clergy burned a martyr in 1550; in 1549 they had passed measures for
their own reformation: too late and futile was the scheme.  Early in 1549
Knox returned from France to England, where he was minister at Berwick
and at Newcastle, a chaplain of the child Edward VI., and a successful
opponent of Cranmer as regards kneeling at the celebration of the Holy
Communion.  He refused a bishopric, foreseeing trouble under Mary Tudor,
from whom he fled to the Continent.  In 1550-51 Mary of Guise, visiting
France, procured for Arran the Duchy of Chatelherault, and for his eldest
son the command of the Scottish Archer Guard, and, by way of exchange, in
1554 took from him the Regency, surrounding herself with French advisers,
notably De Roubay and d'Oysel.



CHAPTER XVIII.  REGENCY OF MARY OF GUISE.


In England, on the death of Edward VI., Catholicism rejoiced in the
accession of Mary Tudor, which, by driving Scottish Protestant refugees
back into their own country, strengthened there the party of revolt
against the Church, while the queen-mother's preference of French over
Scottish advisers, and her small force of trained French soldiers in
garrisons, caused even the Scottish Catholics to hold France in fear and
suspicion.  The French counsellors (1556) urged increased taxation for
purposes of national defence against England; but the nobles would rather
be invaded every year than tolerate a standing army in place of their old
irregular feudal levies.  Their own independence of the Crown was dearer
to the nobles and gentry than safety from their old enemy.  They might
have reflected that a standing army of Scots, officered by themselves,
would be a check on the French soldiers in garrison.

Perplexed and opposed by the great clan of Hamilton, whose chief, Arran,
was nearest heir to the crown, Mary of Guise was now anxious to
conciliate the Protestants, and there was a "blink," as the Covenanters
later said,--a lull in persecution.

After Knox's release from the French galleys in 1549, he had played, as
we saw, a considerable part in the affairs of the English Church, and in
the making of the second Prayer-Book of Edward VI., but had fled abroad
on the accession of Mary Tudor.  From Dieppe he had sent a tract to
England, praying God to stir up some Phineas or Jehu to shed the blood of
"abominable idolaters,"--obviously of Mary of England and Philip of
Spain.  On earlier occasions he had followed Calvin in deprecating such
sanguinary measures.  The Scot, after a stormy period of quarrels with
Anglican refugees in Frankfort, moved to Geneva, where the city was under
a despotism of preachers and of Calvin.  Here Knox found the model of
Church government which, in a form if possible more extreme, he later
planted in Scotland.

There, in 1549-52, the Church, under Archbishop Hamilton, Beaton's
successor, had been confessing her iniquities in Provincial Councils, and
attempting to purify herself on the lines of the tolerant and charitable
Catechism issued by the Archbishop in 1552.  Apparently a _modus vivendi_
was being sought, and Protestants were inclined to think that they might
be "occasional conformists" and attend Mass without being false to their
convictions.  But in this brief lull Knox came over to Scotland at the
end of harvest, in 1555.  On this point of occasional conformity he was
fixed.  The Mass was idolatry, and idolatry, by the law of God, was a
capital offence.  Idolaters must be converted or exterminated; they were
no better than Amalekites.

This was the central rock of Knox's position: tolerance was impossible.
He remained in Scotland, preaching and administering the Sacrament in the
Genevan way, till June 1556.  He associated with the future leaders of
the religious revolution: Erskine of Dun, Lord Lorne (in 1558, fifth Earl
of Argyll), James Stewart, bastard of James V., and lay Prior of St
Andrews, and of Macon in France; and the Earl of Glencairn.  William
Maitland of Lethington, "the flower of the wits of Scotland," was to Knox
a less congenial acquaintance.  Not till May 1556 was Knox summoned to
trial in Edinburgh, but he had a strong backing of the laity, as was the
custom in Scotland, where justice was overawed by armed gatherings, and
no trial was held.  By July 1556 he was in France, on his way to Geneva.

The fruits of Knox's labours followed him, in March 1557, in the shape of
a letter, signed by Glencairn, Lorne, Lord Erskine, and James Stewart,
Mary's bastard brother.  They prayed Knox to return.  They were ready "to
jeopardy lives and goods in the forward setting of the glory of God."
This has all the air of risking civil war.  Knox was not eager.  It was
October before he reached Dieppe on his homeward way.  Meanwhile there
had been hostilities between England and Scotland (as ally of France,
then at odds with Philip of Spain, consort King of England), and there
were Protestant tumults in Edinburgh.  Knox had scruples as to raising
civil war by preaching at home.  The Scottish nobles had no zeal for the
English war; but Knox, who received at Dieppe discouraging letters from
unknown correspondents, did not cross the sea.  He remained at Dieppe,
preaching, till the spring of 1558.

In Knox's absence even James Stewart and Erskine of Dun agreed to hurry
on the marriage between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Francis, Dauphin of
France, a feeble boy, younger than herself.  Their faces are pitiably
young as represented in their coronation medal.

While negotiations for the marriage were begun in October, on December 3,
1557, a godly "band" or covenant for mutual aid was signed by Argyll
(then near his death, in 1558); his son, Lorne; the Earl of Morton (son
of the traitor, Sir George Douglas); Glencairn; and Erskine of Dun, one
of the commissioners who were to visit France for the Royal marriage.
They vow to risk their lives against "the Congregation of Satan" (the
Church), and in defence of faithful Protestant preachers.  They will
establish "the blessed Word of God and His Congregation," and henceforth
the Protestant party was commonly styled "The Congregation."

Parliament (November 29, 1557) had accepted the French marriage, all the
ancient liberties of Scotland being secured, and the right to the throne,
if Mary died without issue, being confirmed to the House of Hamilton, not
to the Dauphin.  The marriage-contract (April 19, 1558) did ratify these
just demands; but, on April 4, Mary had been induced to sign them all
away to France, leaving Scotland and her own claims to the English crown
to the French king.

The marriage was celebrated on April 24, 1558.  In that week the last
Protestant martyr, Walter Milne, an aged priest and a married man, was
burned for heresy at St Andrews.  This only increased the zeal of the
Congregation.

Among the Protestant preachers then in Scotland, of whom Willock, an
Englishman, seems to have been the most reasonable, a certain Paul
Methuen, a baker, was prominent.  He had been summoned (July 28) to stand
his trial for heresy, but his backing of friends was considerable, and
they came before Mary of Guise in armour and with a bullying demeanour.
She tried to temporise, and on September 3 a great riot broke out in
Edinburgh, the image of St Giles was broken, and the mob violently
assaulted a procession of priests.  The country was seething with
discontent, and the death of Mary Tudor (November 17, 1558), with the
accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, encouraged the Congregation.  Mary
of Guise made large concessions: only she desired that there should be no
public meetings in the capital.  On January 1, 1559, church doors were
placarded with "The Beggars' Warning."  The Beggars (really the Brethren
in their name) claimed the wealth of the religious orders.  Threats were
pronounced, revolution was menaced at a given date, Whitsunday, and the
threats were fulfilled.

All this was the result of a plan, not of accident.  Mary of Guise was
intending to visit France, not longing to burn heretics.  But she fell
into the worst of health, and her recovery was doubted, in April 1559.
Willock and Methuen had been summoned to trial (February 2, 1559), for
their preachings were always apt to lead to violence on the part of their
hearers.  The summons was again postponed in deference to renewed
menaces: a Convention had met at Edinburgh to seek for some remedy, and
the last Provincial Council of the Scottish Church (March 1559) had
considered vainly some proposals by moderate Catholics for internal
reform. {106}

Again the preachers were summoned to Stirling for May 10, but just a week
earlier Knox arrived in Scotland.  The leader of the French Protestant
preachers, Morel, expressed to Calvin his fear that Knox "may fill
Scotland with his madness."  Now was his opportunity: the Regent was weak
and ill; the Congregation was in great force; England was at least not
unfavourable to its cause.  From Dundee Knox marched with many
gentlemen--unarmed, he says--accompanying the preachers to Perth: Erskine
of Dun went as an envoy to the Regent at Stirling; she is accused by Knox
of treacherous dealing (other contemporary Protestant evidence says
nothing of treachery); at all events, on May 10 the preachers were
outlawed for non-appearance to stand their trial.  The Brethren, "the
whole multitude with their preachers," says Knox, who were in Perth were
infuriated, and, after a sermon from the Reformer, wrecked the church,
sacked the monasteries, and, says Knox, denounced death against any
priest who celebrated Mass (a circumstance usually ignored by our
historians), at the same time protesting, "We require nothing but liberty
of conscience"!

On May 31 a composition was made between the Regent and the insurgents,
whom Argyll and James Stewart promised to join if the Regent broke the
conditions.  Henceforth the pretext that she had broken faith was made
whenever it seemed convenient, while the Congregation permitted itself a
godly liberty in construing the terms of treaties.  A "band" was signed
for "the destruction of idolatry" by Argyll, James Stewart, Glencairn,
and others; and the Brethren scattered from Perth, breaking down altars
and "idols" on their way home.  Mary of Guise had promised not to leave a
French garrison in Perth.  She did leave some Scots in French pay, and on
this slim pretext of her treachery, Argyll and James Stewart proclaimed
the Regent perfidious, deserted her cause, and joined the crusade against
"idolatry."



NOTE.


It is far from my purpose to represent Mary of Guise as a kind of
stainless Una with a milk-white lamb.  I am apt to believe that she
caused to be forged a letter, which she attributed to Arran.  See my
'John Knox and the Reformation,' pp. 280, 281, where the evidence is
discussed.  But the critical student of Knox's chapters on these events,
generally accepted as historical evidence, cannot but perceive his
personal hatred of Mary of Guise, whether shown in thinly veiled hints
that Cardinal Beaton was her paramour; or in charges of treacherous
breach of promise, which rest primarily on his word.  Again, that "the
Brethren" wrecked the religious houses of Perth is what he reports to a
lady, Mrs Locke; that "the rascal multitude" was guilty is the tale he
tells "to all Europe" in his History.  I have done my best to compare
Knox's stories with contemporary documents, including his own letters.
These documents throw a lurid light on his versions of events, as given
in this part of his History, which is merely a partisan pamphlet of
autumn 1559.  The evidence is criticised in my 'John Knox and the
Reformation,' pp. 107-157 (1905).  Unhappily the letter of Mary of Guise
to Henri II., after the outbreak at Perth, is missing from the archives
of France.



CHAPTER XIX.  THE GREAT PILLAGE.


The revolution was now under weigh, and as it had begun so it continued.
There was practically no resistance by the Catholic nobility and gentry:
in the Lowlands, apparently, almost all were of the new persuasion.  The
Duc de Chatelherault might hesitate while his son, the Protestant Earl of
Arran, who had been in France as Captain of the Scots Guard, was escaping
into Switzerland, and thence to England; but, on Arran's arrival there,
the Hamiltons saw their chance of succeeding to the crown in place of the
Catholic Mary.  The Regent had but a small body of professional French
soldiers.  But the other side could not keep their feudal levies in the
field, and they could not coin the supplies of church plate which must
have fallen into their hands, until they had seized the Mint at
Edinburgh, so money was scarce with them.  It was plain to Knox and
Kirkcaldy of Grange, and it soon became obvious to Maitland of
Lethington, who, of course, forsook the Regent, that aid from England
must be sought,--aid in money, and if possible in men and ships.

Meanwhile the reformers dealt with the ecclesiastical buildings of St
Andrews as they had done at Perth, Knox urging them on by his sermons.  We
may presume that the boys broke the windows and images with a sanctified
joy.  A mutilated head of the Redeemer has been found in a _latrine_ of
the monastic buildings.  As Commendator, or lay Prior, James Stewart may
have secured the golden sheath of the arm-bone of the Apostle, presented
by Edward I., and the other precious things, the sacred plate of the
Church in a fane which had been the Delphi of Scotland.  Lethington
appears to have obtained most of the portable property of St Salvator's
College except that beautiful monument of idolatry, the great silver mace
presented by Kennedy, the Founder, work of a Parisian silversmith, in
1461: this, with maces of rude native work, escaped the spoilers.  The
monastery of the Franciscans is now levelled with the earth; of the
Dominicans' chapel a small fragment remains.  Of the residential part of
the abbey a house was left: when the lead had been stripped from the roof
of the church it became a quarry.

"All churchmen's goods were spoiled and reft from them . . . for every
man for the most part that could get anything pertaining to any churchmen
thought the same well-won gear," says a contemporary Diary.  Arran
himself, when he arrived in Scotland, robbed a priest of all that he had,
for which Chatelherault made compensation.

By the middle of June the Regent was compelled to remove almost all her
French soldiers out of Fife.  Perth was evacuated.  The abbey of Scone
and the palace were sacked.  The Congregation entered Edinburgh: they
seem to have found the monasteries already swept bare, but they seized
Holyrood, and the stamps at the Mint.  The Regent proclaimed that this
was flat rebellion, and that the rebels were intriguing with England.

Knox denied it, in the first part of his History (in origin a
contemporary tract written in the autumn), but the charge was true, and
Knox and Kirkcaldy were, since June, the negotiators.  Already his party
were offering Arran (the heir of the crown after Mary) as a husband for
Elizabeth, who saw him but rejected his suit.  Arran's father,
Chatelherault, later openly deserted the Regent (July 1).  The death of
Henri II., wounded in a tournament, did not accelerate the arrival of
French reinforcements for the Regent.  The weaker Brethren, however,
waxed weary; money was scarce, and on July 24, the Congregation evacuated
Edinburgh and Leith, after a treaty which they misrepresented, broke, and
accused the Regent of breaking. {111a}

Knox visited England, about August 1, but felt dissatisfied with his
qualification for diplomacy.  Nothing, so far, was gained from Elizabeth,
save a secret supply of 3000 pounds.  On the other hand, fresh French
forces arrived at Leith: the place was fortified; the Regent was again
accused of perfidy by the perfidious; and on October 21 the Congregation
proclaimed her deposition on the alleged authority of her daughter, now
Queen of France, whose seal they forged and used in their documents.  One
Cokky was the forger; he saw Arran use the seal on public papers. {111b}
Cokky had made a die for the coins of the Congregation--a crown of
thorns, with the words _Verbum Dei_.  Leith, manned by French soldiers,
was, till in the summer of 1560 it surrendered to the Congregation and
their English allies, the centre of Catholic resistance.

In November the Congregation, after a severe defeat, fled in grief from
Edinburgh to Stirling, where Knox reanimated them, and they sent
Lethington to England to crave assistance.  Lethington, who had been in
the service of the Regent, is henceforth the central figure of every
intrigue.  Witty, eloquent, subtle, he was indispensable, and he had one
great ruling motive, to unite the crowns and peoples of England and
Scotland.  Unfortunately he loved the crafty exercise of his dominion
over men's minds for its own sake, and when, in some inscrutable way, he
entered the clumsy plot to murder Darnley, and knew that Mary could prove
his guilt, his shiftings and changes puzzle historians.  In Scotland he
was called Michael Wily, that is, Macchiavelli, and "the necessary evil."

In his mission to England Lethington was successful.  By December 21 the
English diplomatist, Sadleyr, informed Arran that a fleet was on its way
to aid the Congregation, who were sacking Paisley Abbey, and issuing
proclamations in the names of Francis and Mary.  The fleet arrived while
the French were about to seize St Andrews (January 23, 1560), and the
French plans were ruined.  The Regent, who was dying, found shelter in
Edinburgh Castle, which stood neutral.  On February 27, 1560, at Berwick,
the Congregation entered into a regular league with England, Elizabeth
appearing as Protectress of Scotland, while the marriage of Mary and
Francis endured.

Meanwhile, owing to the Huguenot disturbances in France (such as the
Tumult of Amboise, directed against the lives of Mary's uncles the
Cardinal and Duc de Guise), Mary and Francis could not help the Regent,
and Huntly, a Catholic, presently, as if in fear of the western clans,
joined the Congregation.  Mary of Guise had found the great northern
chief treacherous, and had disgraced him, and untrustworthy he continued
to be.  On May 7 the garrison of Leith defeated with heavy loss an Anglo-
Scottish attack on the walls; but on June 16 the Regent made a good end,
in peace with all men.  She saw Chatelherault, James Stewart, and the
Earl Marischal; she listened patiently to the preacher Willock; she bade
farewell to all, and died, a notable woman, crushed by an impossible
task.  The garrison of Leith, meanwhile, was starving on rats and
horseflesh: negotiations began, and ended in the Treaty of Edinburgh
(July 6, 1560).

This Treaty, as between Mary, Queen of France and Scotland, on one hand,
and England on the other, was never ratified by Mary Stuart: she appears
to have thought that one clause implied her abandonment of all her claims
to the English succession, typified by her quartering of the Royal
English arms on her own shield.  Thus there never was nor could be amity
between her and her sister and her foe, Elizabeth, who was justly
aggrieved by her assumption of the English arms, while Elizabeth
quartered the arms of France.  Again, the ratification of the Treaty as
regarded Mary's rebels depended on their fulfilling certain clauses
which, in fact, they instantly violated.

Preachers were planted in the larger town, some of which had already
secured their services; Knox took Edinburgh.  "Superintendents,"--by no
means bishops--were appointed, an order which soon ceased to exist in the
Kirk: their duties were to wander about in their provinces,
superintending and preaching.  By request of the Convention (which was
crowded by persons not used to attend), some preachers drew up, in four
days, a Confession of Faith, on the lines of Calvin's rule at Geneva:
this was approved and passed on August 17.  The makers of the document
profess their readiness to satisfy any critic of any point "from the
mouth of God" (out of the Bible), but the pace was so good that either no
criticism was offered or it was very rapidly "satisfied."  On August 24
four acts were passed in which the authority of "The Bishop of Rome" was
repudiated.  All previous legislation, not consistent with the new
Confession, was rescinded.  Against celebrants and attendants of the Mass
were threatened (1) confiscation and corporal punishment; (2) exile; and
(3) for the third offence, Death.  The death sentence is not known to
have been carried out in more than one or two cases.  (Prof. Hume-Brown
writes that "the penalties attached to the breach of these enactments"
(namely, the abjuration of Papal jurisdiction, the condemnation of all
practices and doctrines contrary to the new creed, and of the celebration
of Mass in Scotland) "were those approved and sanctioned by the example
of every country in Christendom."  But not, surely, for the same
offences, such as "the saying or hearing of Mass"?--' History of
Scotland,' ii. 71, 72: 1902.)  Suits in ecclesiastical were removed into
secular courts (August 29).

In the Confession the theology was that of Calvin.  Civil rulers were
admitted to be of divine institution, their duty is to "suppress
idolatry," and they are not to be resisted "when doing that which
pertains to their charge."  But a Catholic ruler, like Mary, or a
tolerant ruler, as James VI. would fain have been, apparently may be
resisted for his tolerance.  Resisted James was, as we shall see,
whenever he attempted to be lenient to Catholics.

The Book of Discipline, by Knox and other preachers, never was ratified
by the Estates, as the Confession of Faith had been.  It made admirable
provisions for the payment of preachers and teachers, for the
Universities, and for the poor; but somebody, probably Lethington, spoke
of the proposals as "devout imaginations."  The Book of Discipline
approved of what was later accepted by the General Assembly, The Book of
Common Order in Public Worship.  This book was not a stereotyped Liturgy,
but it was a kind of guide to the ministers in public prayers: the
minister may repeat the prayers, or "say something like in effect."  On
the whole, he prayed "as the Spirit moved him," and he really seems to
have been regarded as inspired; his prayers were frequently political
addresses.  To silence these the infatuated policy of Charles I. thrust
the Laudian Liturgy on the nation.

The preachers were to be chosen by popular election, after examination in
knowledge and as to morals.  There was to be no ordination "by laying on
of hands."  "Seeing the miracle is ceased, the using of the ceremony we
deem not necessary"; but, if the preachers were inspired, the miracle had
not ceased, and the ceremony was soon reinstated.  Contrary to Genevan
practice, such festivals as Christmas and Easter were abolished.  The
Scottish Sabbath was established in great majesty.  One "rag of Rome" was
retained, clerical excommunication--the Sword of Church Discipline.  It
was the cutting off from Christ of the excommunicated, who were handed
over to the devil, and it was attended by civil penalties equivalent to
universal boycotting, practical outlawry, and followed by hell fire:
"which sentence, lawfully pronounced on earth, is ratified in heaven."
The strength of the preachers lay in this terrible weapon, borrowed from
the armoury of Rome.

Private morals were watched by the elders, and offenders were judged in
kirk-sessions.  Witchcraft, Sabbath desecration, and sexual laxities were
the most prominent and popular sins.  The mainstay of the system is the
idea that the Bible is literally inspired; that the preachers are the
perhaps inspired interpreters of the Bible, and that the country must
imitate the old Hebrew persecution of "idolaters," that is, mainly
Catholics.  All this meant a theocracy of preachers elected by the
populace, and governing the nation by their General Assembly in which
nobles and other laymen sat as elders.  These peculiar institutions came
hot from Geneva, and the country could never have been blessed with them,
as we have observed, but for that instrument of Providence, Cardinal
Beaton.  Had he disposed of himself and Scotland to Henry VIII. (who
would not have tolerated Presbyterian claims for an hour), Scotland would
not have received the Genevan discipline, and the Kirk would have groaned
under bishops.

The Reformation supplied Scotland with a class of preachers who were pure
in their lives, who were not accessible to bribes (a virtue in which they
stood almost alone), who were firm in their faith, and soon had learning
enough to defend it; who were constant in their parish work, and of whom
many were credited with prophetic and healing powers.  They could
exorcise ghosts from houses, devils from men possessed.

The baldness of the services, the stern nature of the creed, were
congenial to the people.  The drawbacks were the intolerance, the
spiritual pretensions of the preachers to interference in secular
affairs, and the superstition which credited men like Knox, and later,
Bruce, with the gifts of prophecy and other miraculous workings, and
insisted on the burning of witches and warlocks, whereof the writer knows
scarcely an instance in Scotland before the Reformation.

The pulpit may be said to have discharged the functions of the press (a
press which was all on one side).  When, in 1562, Ninian Winzet, a
Catholic priest and ex-schoolmaster, was printing a controversial
tractate addressed to Knox, the magistrates seized the manuscript at the
printer's house, and the author was fortunate in making his escape.  The
nature of the Confession of Faith, and of the claims of the ministers to
interfere in secular affairs, with divine authority, was certain to cause
war between the Crown and the Kirk.  That war, whether open and armed, or
a conflict in words, endured till, in 1690, the weapon of excommunication
with civil penalties was quietly removed from the ecclesiastical armoury.
Such were the results of a religious revolution hurriedly effected.

The Lords now sent an embassy to Elizabeth about the time of the death of
Amy Robsart, and while Amy's husband, Robert Dudley, was very dear to the
English queen, to urge, vainly, her marriage with Arran.  On December 5,
1560, Francis II. died, leaving Mary Stuart a mere dowager; while her
kinsmen, the Guises, lost power, which fell into the unfriendly hands of
Catherine de Medici.  At once Arran, who made Knox his confidant, began
to woo Mary with a letter and a ring.  Her reply perhaps increased his
tendency to madness, which soon became open and incurable by the science
of the day.

Here we must try to sketch Mary, _la, Reine blanche_, in her white royal
mourning.  Her education had been that of the learned ladies of her age;
she had some knowledge of Latin, and knew French and Italian.  French was
to her almost a mother-tongue, but not quite; she had retained her Scots,
and her attempts to write English are, at first, curiously imperfect.  She
had lived in a profligate Court, but she was not the wanton of hostile
slanders.  She had all the guile of statesmanship, said the English
envoy, Randolph; and she long exercised great patience under daily
insults to her religion and provocations from Elizabeth.  She was
generous, pitiful, naturally honourable, and most loyal to all who served
her.  But her passions, whether of love or hate, once roused, were
tyrannical.  In person she was tall, like her mother, and graceful, with
beautiful hands.  Her face was somewhat long, the nose long and straight,
the lips and chin beautifully moulded, the eyebrows very slender, the
eyes of a reddish brown, long and narrow.  Her hair was russet, drawn
back from a lofty brow; her smile was captivating; she was rather
fascinating than beautiful; her courage and her love of courage in others
were universally confessed. {118}

In January, 1561, the Estates of Scotland ordered James Stuart, Mary's
natural brother, to visit her in France.  In spring she met him, and an
envoy from Huntly (Lesley, later Bishop of Ross), who represented the
Catholic party, and asked Mary to land in Aberdeen, and march south at
the head of the Gordons and certain northern clans.  The proposal came
from noblemen of Perthshire, Angus, and the north, whose forces could not
have faced a Lowland army.  Mary, who had learned from her mother that
Huntly was treacherous, preferred to take her chance with her brother,
who, returning by way of England, moved Elizabeth to recognise the
Scottish queen as her heir.  But Elizabeth would never settle the
succession, and, as Mary refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh,
forbade her to travel home through England.



CHAPTER XX.  MARY IN SCOTLAND.


On August 19, 1561, in a dense fog, and almost unexpected and unwelcomed,
Mary landed in Leith.  She had told the English ambassador to France that
she would constrain none of her subjects in religion, and hoped to be
unconstrained.  Her first act was to pardon some artisans, under censure
for a Robin Hood frolic: her motive, says Knox, was her knowledge that
they had acted "in despite of religion."

The Lord James had stipulated that she might have her Mass in her private
chapel.  Her priest was mobbed by the godly; on the following Sunday Knox
denounced her Mass, and had his first interview with her later.  In vain
she spoke of her conscience; Knox said that it was unenlightened.
Lethington wished that he would "deal more gently with a young princess
unpersuaded."  There were three or four later interviews, but Knox,
strengthened by a marriage with a girl of sixteen, daughter of Lord
Ochiltree, a Stewart, was proof against the queen's fascination.  In
spite of insults to her faith offered even at pageants of welcome, Mary
kept her temper, and, for long, cast in her lot with Lethington and her
brother, whose hope was to reconcile her with Elizabeth.

The Court was gay with riotous young French nobles, well mated with
Bothwell, who, though a Protestant, had sided with Mary of Guise during
the brawls of 1559.  He was now a man of twenty-seven, profligate,
reckless, a conqueror of hearts, a speaker of French, a ruffian, and well
educated.

In December it was arranged that the old bishops and other high clerics
should keep two-thirds of their revenues, the other third to be divided
between the preachers and the queen, "between God and the devil," says
Knox.  Thenceforth there was a rift between the preachers and the
politicians, Lethington and Lord James (now Earl of Mar), on whom Mary
leaned.  The new Earl of Mar was furtively created Earl of Murray and
enjoyed the gift after the overthrow of Huntly.

In January 1562 Mary asked for an interview with Elizabeth.  Certainly
Lethington hoped that Elizabeth "would be able to do much with Mary in
religion," meaning that, if Mary's claims to succeed Elizabeth were
granted, she might turn Anglican.  The request for a meeting, dallied
with but never granted, occupied diplomatists, while, at home, Arran
(March 31) accused Bothwell of training him into a plot to seize Mary's
person.  Arran probably told truth, but he now went mad; Bothwell was
imprisoned in the castle till his escape to England in August 1562.
Lethington, in June, was negotiating for Mary's interview with Elizabeth;
Knox bitterly opposed it; the preachers feared that the queen would turn
Anglican, and bishops might be let loose in Scotland.  The masques for
Mary's reception were actually being organised, when, in July, Elizabeth,
on the pretext of persecutions by the Guises in France, broke off the
negotiations.

The rest of the year was occupied by an affair of which the origins are
obscure.  Mary, with her brother and Lethington, made a progress into the
north, were affronted by and attacked Huntly, who died suddenly (October
28) at the fight of Corrichie; seized a son of his, who was executed
(November 2), and spoiled his castle which contained much of the property
of the Church of Aberdeen.  Mary's motives for destroying her chief
Catholic subject are not certainly known.  Her brother, Lord James, in
February made Earl of Mar, now received the lands and title of Earl of
Murray.  At some date in this year Knox preached against Mary because she
gave a dance.  He chose to connect her dance with some attack on the
Huguenots in France.  According to 'The Book of Discipline' he should
have remonstrated privately, as Mary told him.  The dates are
inextricable.  (See my 'John Knox and the Reformation,' pp. 215-218.)
Till the spring of 1565 the main business was the question of the queen's
marriage.  This continued to divide the ruling Protestant nobles from the
preachers.  Knox dreaded an alliance with Spain, a marriage with Don
Carlos.  But Elizabeth, to waste time, offered Mary the hand of Lord
Robert Dudley (Leicester), and, strange as it appears, Mary would
probably have accepted him, as late as 1565, for Elizabeth let it be
understood that to marry a Catholic prince would be the signal for war,
while Mary hoped that, if she accepted Elizabeth's favourite, Dudley, she
would be acknowledged as Elizabeth's heiress.  Mary was young, and showed
little knowledge of the nature of woman.

In 1563 came the affair of Chatelard, a French minor poet, a Huguenot
apparently, who, whether in mere fatuity or to discredit Mary, hid
himself under her bed at Holyrood, and again at Burntisland.  Mary had
listened to his rhymes, had danced with him, and smiled on him, but
Chatelard went too far.  He was decapitated in the market street of St
Andrews (Feb. 22, 1563).  It is clear, if we may trust Knox's account,
singularly unlike Brantome's, that Chatelard was a Huguenot.

About Easter priests were locked up in Ayrshire, the centre of
Presbyterian fanaticism, for celebrating Mass.  This was in accordance
with law, and to soften Knox the girl queen tried her personal influence.
He resisted "the devil"; Mary yielded, and allowed Archbishop Hamilton
and some fifty other clerics to be placed "in prison courteous."  The
Estates, which met on May 27 for the first time since the queen landed,
were mollified, but were as far as ever from passing the Book of
Discipline.  They did pass a law condemning witches to death, a source of
unspeakable cruelties.  Knox and Murray now ceased to be on terms till
their common interests brought them together in 1565.

In June 1563 Elizabeth requested Mary to permit the return to Scotland of
Lennox (the traitor to the national cause and to Cardinal Beaton, and the
rival of the Hamiltons for the succession to the thrones), apparently for
the very purpose of entangling Mary in a marriage with Lennox's son
Darnley, and then thwarting it.  (It was not Mary who asked Elizabeth to
send Lennox.)  Knox's favourite candidate was Lord Robert Dudley: despite
his notorious character he sometimes favoured the English Puritans.  When
Holyrood had been invaded by a mob who, in Mary's absence in autumn 1563,
broke up the Catholic attendants on Mass (such attendance, in Mary's
absence, was illegal), and when both parties were summoned to trial, Knox
called together the godly.  The Council cleared him of the charge of
making an unlawful convocation (they might want to make one, any day,
themselves), and he was supported by the General Assembly.  Similar
conduct of the preachers thirty years later gave James VI. the
opportunity to triumph over the Kirk.

In June 1564 there was still discord between the Kirk and the Lords, and,
in a long argument with Lethington, Knox maintained the right of the
godly to imitate the slayings of idolaters by Phineas and Jehu: the
doctrine bore blood-red fruits among the later Covenanters.  Elizabeth,
in May 1564, in vain asked Mary to withdraw the permission (previously
asked for by her) to allow Lennox to visit Scotland and plead for the
restitution of his lands.  The objection to Lennox's appearance had come,
through Randolph, from Knox.  "You may cause us to take the Lord
Darnley," wrote Kirkcaldy to Cecil, to stop Elizabeth's systems of
delays; and Sir James Melville, after going on a mission to Elizabeth,
warned Mary that she would never part with her minion, now Earl of
Leicester.

Lennox, in autumn 1564, arrived and was restored to his estates, while
Leicester and Cecil worked for the sending of his son Darnley to
Scotland.  Leicester had no desire to desert Elizabeth's Court and his
chance of touching her maiden heart.

The intrigues of Cecil, Leicester, and Elizabeth resemble rather a
chapter in a novel than a page in history.  Elizabeth notoriously hated
and, when she could, thwarted all marriages.  She desired that Mary
should never marry: a union with a Catholic prince she vetoed,
threatening war; and Leicester she offered merely "to drive time."  But
Mary, evasively tempted by hints, later withdrawn, of her recognition as
Elizabeth's successor, was, till the end of March 1565, encouraged by
Randolph, the English ambassador at her Court, to remain in hope of
wedding Leicester.

Randolph himself was not in the secret of the English intrigue, which was
to slip Darnley at Mary.  He came (February 1565): Cecil and Leicester
had "used earnest means" to ensure his coming.  On March 17 Mary was
informed that she would never be recognised as Elizabeth's successor till
events should occur which never could occur.  On receiving this news Mary
wept; she also was indignant at the long and humiliating series of
Elizabeth's treacheries.  Her patience broke down; she turned to Darnley,
thereby, as the English intriguers designed, breaking up the concord of
her nobles.  To marry Darnley involved the feud of the Hamiltons, and the
return of Murray (whom Darnley had offended), of Chatelherault, Argyll,
and many other nobles to the party of Knox and the preachers.  Leicester
would have been welcome to Knox; Darnley was a Catholic, if anything, and
a weak passionate young fool.  Mary, in the clash of interests, was a
lost woman, as Randolph truly said, with sincere pity.  Her long
endurance, her attempts to "run the English course," were wasted.

David Riccio, who came to Scotland as a musician in 1561, was now high in
her and in Darnley's favour.  Murray was accused of a conspiracy to seize
Darnley and Lennox; the godly began to organise an armed force (June
1565); Mary summoned from exile Bothwell, a man of the sword.  On July
29th she married Darnley, and on August 6th Murray, who had refused to
appear to answer the charges of treason brought against him, though a
safe-conduct was offered, was outlawed and proclaimed a rebel, while
Huntly's son, Lord George, was to be restored to his estates.  Thus
everything seemed to indicate that Mary had been exasperated into
breaking with the party of moderation, the party of Murray and
Lethington, and been driven into courses where her support, if any, must
come from France and Rome.  Yet she married without waiting for the
necessary dispensation from the Pope.  Her policy was henceforth
influenced by her favour to Riccio, and by the jealous and arrogant
temper of her husband.  Mary well knew that Elizabeth had sent money to
her rebels, whom she now pursued all through the south of Scotland; they
fled from Edinburgh, where the valiant Brethren, brave enough in throwing
stones at pilloried priests, refused to join them; and despite the feuds
in her own camp, where Bothwell and Darnley were already on the worst
terms, Mary drove the rebel lords across the Border at Carlisle on
October 8.

Mary seemed triumphant, but the men with her--Lethington, and Morton the
Chancellor--were disaffected; Darnley was mutinous: he thought himself
neglected; he and his father resented Mary's leniency to Chatelherault,
who had submitted and been sent to France; all parties hated Riccio.
There was to be a Parliament early in March 1566.  In February Mary sent
the Bishop of Dunblane to Rome to ask for a subsidy; she intended to
reintroduce the Spiritual Estate into the House as electors of the Lords
of the Articles, "tending to have done some good anent the restoring of
the old religion."  The Nuncio who was to have brought the Pope's money
later insisted that Mary should take the heads of Murray, Argyle, Morton,
and Lethington!  Whether she aimed at securing more than tolerance for
Catholics is uncertain; but the Parliament, in which the exiled Lords
were to be forfeited, was never held.  The other nobles would never
permit such a measure.

George Douglas, a stirring cadet of the great House was exciting
Darnley's jealousy of Riccio, but already Randolph (February 5, 1566) had
written to Cecil that "the wisest were aiming at putting all in hazard"
to restore the exiled Lords.  The nobles, in the last resort, would all
stand by each other: there was now a Douglas plot of the old sort to
bring back the exiles; and Darnley, with his jealous desire to murder
Riccio, was but the cat's-paw to light the train and explode Mary and her
Government.  Ruthven, whom Mary had always distrusted, came into the
conspiracy.  Through Randolph all was known in England.  "Bands" were
drawn up, signed by Argyll (safe in his own hills), Murray, Glencairn,
Rothes, Boyd, Ochiltree (the father of Knox's young wife), and Darnley.
His name was put forward; his rights and succession were secured against
the Hamiltons; Protestantism, too, was to be defended.  Many Douglases,
many of the Lothian gentry, were in the plot.  Murray was to arrive from
England as soon as Riccio had been slain and Mary had been seized.

Randolph knew all and reported to Elizabeth's ministers.

The plan worked with mechanical precision.  On March 9 Morton and his
company occupied Holyrood, going up the great staircase about eight at
night; while Darnley and Ruthven, a dying man, entered the queen's supper-
room by a privy stair.  Morton's men burst in, Riccio was dragged forth,
and died under forty daggers.  Bothwell, Atholl, and Huntly, partisans of
Mary, escaped from the palace; with them Mary managed to communicate on
the morrow, when she also held talk with Murray, who had returned with
the other exiles.  She had worked on the fears and passions of Darnley;
by promises of amnesty the Lords were induced to withdraw their guards
next day, and in the following night, by a secret passage, and through
the tombs of kings, Mary and Darnley reached the horses brought by Arthur
Erskine.

It was a long dark ride to Dunbar, but there Mary was safe.  She pardoned
and won over Glencairn, whom she liked, and Rothes; Bothwell and Huntly
joined her with a sufficient force, Ruthven and Morton fled to Berwick
(Ruthven was to die in England), and Knox hastened into Kyle in Ayrshire.
Darnley, who declared his own innocence and betrayed his accomplices, was
now equally hated and despised by his late allies and by the queen and
Murray,--indeed, by all men, chiefly by Morton and Argyll.  Lethington
was in hiding; but he was indispensable, and in September was reconciled
to Mary.

On June 19, in Edinburgh Castle, she bore her child, later James VI.; on
her recovery Darnley was insolent, and was the more detested, while
Bothwell was high in favour.  In October most of the Lords signed, with
Murray, a band for setting Darnley aside--_not_ for his murder.  He is
said to have denounced Mary to Spain, France, and Rome for neglecting
Catholic interests.  In mid-October Mary was seriously ill at Jedburgh,
where Bothwell, wounded in an encounter with a Border reiver, was
welcomed, while Darnley, coldly received, went to his father's house on
the Forth.  On her recovery Mary resided in the last days of November at
Craigmillar Castle, near Edinburgh.  Here Murray, Argyll, Bothwell,
Huntly, and Lethington held counsel with her as to Darnley.  Lethington
said that "a way would be found," a way that Parliament would approve,
while Murray would "look through his fingers."  Lennox believed that the
plan was to arrest Darnley on some charge, and slay him if he resisted.

At Stirling (December 17), when the young prince was baptised with
Catholic rites, Darnley did not appear; he sulked in his own rooms.  A
week later, the exiles guilty of Riccio's murder were recalled, among
them Morton; and Darnley, finding all his enemies about to be united,
went to Glasgow, where he fell ill of smallpox.  Mary offered a visit
(she had had the malady as a child), and was rudely rebuffed (January 1-
13, 1567), but she was with him by January 21.  From Glasgow, at this
time, was written the long and fatal letter to Bothwell, which places
Mary's guilt in luring Darnley to his death beyond doubt, if we accept
the letters as authentic. {129}

Darnley was carried in a litter to the lonely house of Kirk o' Field, on
the south wall of Edinburgh.  Here Mary attended him in his sickness.  On
Sunday morning, February 9, Murray left Edinburgh for Fife.  In the night
of Sunday 9-Monday 10, the house where Darnley lay was blown up by
gunpowder, and he, with an attendant, was found dead in the garden: how
he was slain is not known.

That Bothwell, in accordance with a band signed by himself, Huntly,
Argyll, and Lethington, and aided by some Border ruffians, laid and
exploded the powder is certain.  Morton was apprised by Lethington and
Bothwell of the plot, but refused to join it without Mary's written
commission, which he did not obtain.  Against the queen there is no
trustworthy direct evidence (if we distrust her alleged letters to
Bothwell), but her conduct in protecting and marrying Bothwell (who was
really in love with his wife) shows that she did not disapprove.  The
trial of Bothwell was a farce; Mary's abduction by him (April 24) and
retreat with him to Dunbar was collusive.  She married Bothwell on May
15.  Her nobles, many of whom had signed a document urging her to marry
Bothwell, rose against her; on June 15, 1567, she surrendered to them at
Carberry Hill, while they, several of them deep in the murder plot, were
not sorry to let Bothwell escape to Dunbar.  After some piratical
adventures, being pursued by Kirkcaldy he made his way to Denmark, where
he died a prisoner.

Mary, first carried to Edinburgh and there insulted by the populace, was
next hurried to Lochleven Castle.  Her alleged letters to Bothwell were
betrayed to the Lords (June 21), probably through Sir James Balfour, who
commanded in Edinburgh Castle.  Perhaps Murray (who had left for France
before the marriage to Bothwell), perhaps fear of Elizabeth, or human
pity, induced her captors, contrary to the counsel of Lethington, to
spare her life, when she had signed her abdication, while they crowned
her infant son.  Murray accepted the Regency; a Parliament in December
established the Kirk; acquitted themselves of rebellion; and announced
that they had proof of Mary's guilt in her own writing.  Her romantic
escape from Lochleven (May 2, 1568) gave her but an hour of freedom.
Defeated on her march to Dumbarton Castle in the battle of Langside Hill,
she lost heart and fled to the coast of Galloway; on May 16 crossed the
Solway to Workington in Cumberland; and in a few days was Elizabeth's
prisoner in Carlisle Castle.

Mary had hitherto been a convinced but not a very obedient daughter of
the Church; for example, it appears that she married Darnley before the
arrival of the Pope's dispensation.  At this moment Philip of Spain, the
French envoy to Scotland, and the French Court had no faith in her
innocence of Darnley's death; and the Pope said "he knew not which of
these ladies were the better"--Mary or Elizabeth.  But from this time,
while a captive in England, Mary was the centre of the hopes of English
Catholics: in miniatures she appears as queen, quartering the English
arms; she might further the ends of Spain, of France, of Rome, of English
rebels, while her existence was a nightmare to the Protestants of
Scotland and a peril to Elizabeth.

After Mary's flight, Murray was, as has been said, Regent for the crowned
baby James.  In his council were the sensual, brutal, but vigorous
Morton, with Mar, later himself Regent, a man of milder nature;
Glencairn; Ruthven, whom Mary detested--he had tried to make unwelcome
love to her at Lochleven; and "the necessary evil," Lethington.  How a
man so wily became a party to the murder of Darnley cannot be known: now
he began to perceive that, if Mary were restored, as he believed that she
would be, his only safety lay in securing her gratitude by secret
services.

On the other side were the Hamiltons with their ablest man, the
Archbishop; the Border spears who were loyal to Bothwell; and two of the
conspirators in the murder of Darnley, Argyll and Huntly; with Fleming
and Herries, who were much attached to Mary.  The two parties, influenced
by Elizabeth, did not now come to blows, but awaited the results of
English inquiries into Mary's guilt, and of Elizabeth's consequent
action.



CHAPTER XXI.  MINORITY OF JAMES VI.


"Let none of them escape" was Elizabeth's message to the gaolers of Mary
and her companions at Carlisle.  The unhappy queen prayed to see her in
whose hospitality she had confided, or to be allowed to depart free.
Elizabeth's policy was to lead her into consenting to reply to her
subjects' accusations, and Mary drifted into the shuffling English
inquiries at York in October, while she was lodged at Bolton Castle.
Murray, George Buchanan, Lethington (now distrusted by Murray), and
Morton produced, for Norfolk and other English Commissioners at York,
copies, at least, of the incriminating letters which horrified the Duke
of Norfolk.  Yet, probably through the guile of Lethington, he changed
his mind, and became a suitor for Mary's hand.  He bade her refuse
compromise, whereas compromise was Lethington's hope: a full and free
inquiry would reveal his own guilt in Darnley's murder.  The inquiry was
shifted to London in December, Mary always being refused permission to
appear and speak for herself; nay, she was not allowed even to see the
letters which she was accused of having written.  Her own Commissioners,
Lord Herries and Bishop Lesley, who (as Mary knew in Herries's case) had
no faith in her innocence, showed their want of confidence by proposing a
compromise; this was not admitted.  Morton explained how he got the
silver casket with the fatal letters, poems to Bothwell, and other
papers; they were read in translations, English and Scots; handwritings
were compared, with no known result; evidence was heard, and Elizabeth,
at last, merely decided--that she could not admit Mary to her presence.
The English Lords agreed, "as the case does now stand," and presently
many of them were supporting Norfolk in his desire to marry the accused.
Murray was told (January 10, 1669) that he had proved nothing which could
make Elizabeth "take any evil opinion of the queen, her good sister,"
nevertheless, Elizabeth would support him in his government of Scotland,
while declining to recognise James VI. as king.

All compromises Mary now utterly refused: she would live and die a queen.
Henceforth the tangled intrigues cannot be disengaged in a work of this
scope.  Elizabeth made various proposals to Mary, all involving her
resignation as queen, or at least the suspension of her rights.  Mary
refused to listen; her party in Scotland, led by Chatelherault, Herries,
Huntly, and Argyll, did not venture to meet Murray and his party in war,
and was counselled by Lethington, who still, in semblance, was of
Murray's faction.  Lethington was convinced that, sooner or later, Mary
would return; and he did not wish to incur "her _particular_ ill-will."
He knew that Mary, as she said, "had that in black and white which would
hang him" for the murder of Darnley.  Now Lethington, Huntly, and Argyll
were daunted, without stroke of sword, by Murray, and a Convention to
discuss messages from Elizabeth and Mary met at Perth (July 25-28, 1569),
and refused to allow the annulment of her marriage with Bothwell, though
previously they had insisted on its annulment.  Presently Lethington was
publicly accused of Darnley's murder by Crawford, a retainer of Lennox;
was imprisoned, but was released by Kirkcaldy, commander in Edinburgh
Castle, which henceforth became the fortress of Mary's cause.

The secret of Norfolk's plan to marry the Scottish queen now reached
Elizabeth, making her more hostile to Mary; an insurrection in the North
broke out; the Earl of Northumberland was driven into Scotland, was
betrayed by Hecky Armstrong, and imprisoned at Loch Leven.  Murray
offered to hand over Northumberland to Elizabeth in exchange for Mary,
her life to be guaranteed by hostages, but, on January 23, 1570, Murray
was shot by Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh from a window of a house in
Linlithgow belonging to Archbishop Hamilton.  The murderer escaped and
joined his clan.  During his brief regency, Murray had practically
detached Huntly and Argyll from armed support of Mary's cause; he had
reduced the Border to temporary quiet by the free use of the gibbet; but
he had not ventured to face Lethington's friends and bring him to trial:
if he had, many others would have been compromised.  Murray was sly and
avaricious, but, had he been legitimate, Scotland would have been well
governed under his vigour and caution.



REGENCIES OF LENNOX, MAR, AND MORTON.


Randolph was now sent to Edinburgh to make peace between Mary's party and
her foes impossible.  He succeeded; the parties took up arms, and Sussex
ravaged the Border in revenge of a raid by Buccleuch.  On May 14, Lennox,
with an English force, was sent north: he devastated the Hamilton
country; was made Regent in July; and, in April 1571, had his revenge on
Archbishop Hamilton, who was taken at the capture, by Crawford, of
Dumbarton Castle, held by Lord Fleming, a post of vital moment to the
Marians; and was hanged at Stirling for complicity in the slaying of
Murray.  George Buchanan, Mary's old tutor, took advantage of these facts
to publish quite a fresh account of Darnley's murder: the guilt of the
Hamiltons now made that of Bothwell almost invisible!

Edinburgh Castle, under Kirkcaldy with Lethington, held out; Knox
reluctantly retired from Edinburgh to St Andrews, where he was unpopular;
but many of Mary's Lords deserted her, and though Lennox was shot
(September 4) in an attack by Buccleuch and Ker of Ferniehirst on
Stirling Castle, where he was holding a Parliament, he was succeeded by
Mar, who was inspired by Morton, a far stronger man.  Presently the
discovery of a plot between Mary, Norfolk, the English Catholics, and
Spain, caused the Duke's execution, and more severe incarceration for
Mary.

In Scotland there was no chance of peace.  Morton and his associates
would not resign the lands of the Hamiltons, Lethington, and Kirkcaldy;
Lethington knew that no amnesty would cover his guilt (though he had been
nominally cleared) in the slaying of Darnley.  One after the other of
Mary's adherents made their peace; but Kirkcaldy and Lethington, in
Edinburgh Castle, seemed safe while money and supplies held out.  Knox
had prophesied that Kirkcaldy would be hanged, but did not live to see
his desire on his enemy, or on Mary, whom Elizabeth was about to hand
over to Mar for instant execution.  Knox died on November 24, 1572; Mar,
the Regent, had predeceased him by a month, leaving Morton in power.  On
May 28, 1573, the castle, attacked by guns and engineers from England,
and cut off from water, struck its flag.  The brave Kirkcaldy was hanged;
Lethington, who had long been moribund, escaped by an opportune death.
The best soldier in Scotland and the most modern of her wits thus
perished together.  Concerning Knox, the opinions of his contemporaries
differed.  By his own account the leaders of his party deemed him "too
extreme," and David Hume finds his ferocious delight in chronicling the
murders of his foes "rather amusing," though sad!  Quarrels of religion
apart, Knox was a very good-hearted man; but where religion was
concerned, his temper was remote from the Christian.  He was a perfect
agitator; he knew no tolerance, he spared no violence of language, and in
diplomacy, when he diplomatised, he was no more scrupulous than another.
Admirably vigorous and personal as literature, his History needs constant
correction from documents.  While to his secretary, Bannatyne, Knox
seemed "a man of God, the light of Scotland, the mirror of godliness";
many silent, douce folk among whom he laboured probably agreed in the
allegation quoted by a diarist of the day, that Knox "had, as was
alleged, the most part of the blame of all the sorrows of Scotland since
the slaughter of the late Cardinal."

In these years of violence, of "the Douglas wars" as they were called,
two new tendencies may be observed.  In January 1572, Morton induced an
assembly of preachers at Leith to accept one of his clan, John Douglas,
as Archbishop of St Andrews: other bishops were appointed, called
_Tulchan_ bishops, from the _tulchan_ or effigy of a calf employed to
induce cows to yield their milk.  The Church revenues were drawn through
these unapostolic prelates, and came into the hands of the State, or at
least of Morton.  With these bishops, superintendents co-existed, but not
for long.  "The horns of the mitre" already began to peer above
Presbyterian parity, and Morton is said to have remarked that there would
never be peace in Scotland till some preachers were hanged.  In fact,
there never was peace between Kirk and State till a deplorable number of
preachers were hanged by the Governments of Charles II. and James II.

A meeting of preachers in Edinburgh, after the Bartholomew massacre, in
the autumn of 1572, demanded that "it shall be lawful to all the subjects
in this realm to invade them and every one of them to the death."  The
persons to be "invaded to the death" are recalcitrant Catholics, "grit or
small," persisting in remaining in Scotland. {137}

The alarmed demands of the preachers were merely disregarded by the Privy
Council.  The ruling nobles, as Bishop Lesley says, would never gratify
the preachers by carrying out the bloody penal Acts to their full extent
against Catholics.  There was no expulsion of all Catholics who dared to
stay; no popular massacre of all who declined to go.  While Morton was in
power he kept the preachers well in hand.  He did worse: he starved the
ministers, and thrust into the best livings wanton young gentlemen, of
whom his kinsman, Archibald Douglas, an accomplice in Darnley's death and
a trebly-dyed traitor, was the worst.  But in 1575, the great Andrew
Melville, an erudite scholar and a most determined person, began to
protest against the very name of bishop in the Kirk; and in Adamson, made
by Morton successor of John Douglas at St Andrews, Melville found a mark
and a victim.  In economics, as an English diplomatist wrote to Cecil in
November 1572, the country, despite the civil war, was thriving; "the
noblemen's great credit decaying, . . . the ministry and religion
increaseth, and the desire in them to prevent the practice of the
Papists."  The Englishman, in November, may refer to the petition for
persecution of October 20, 1572.

The death of old Chatelherault now left the headship of the Hamiltons in
more resolute hands; Morton was confronted by opposition from Argyll,
Atholl, Buchan, and Mar; and Morton, in 1576-1577, made approaches to
Mary.  When the young James VI. came to his majority Morton's enemies
would charge him with his guilty foreknowledge, through Both well, of
Darnley's murder, so he made advances to Mary in hope of an amnesty.  She
suspected a trap and held aloof.



CHAPTER XXII.  REIGN OF JAMES VI.


On March 4, 1578, a strong band of nobles, led by Argyll, presented so
firm a front that Morton resigned the Regency; but in April 1578, a
Douglas plot, backed by Angus and Morton, secured for the Earl of Mar the
command of Stirling Castle and custody of the King; in June 1578, after
an appearance of civil war, Morton was as strong as ever.  After dining
with him, in April 1579, Atholl, the main hope of Mary in Scotland, died
suddenly, and suspicion of poison fell on his host.  But Morton's ensuing
success in expelling from Scotland the Hamilton leaders, Lord Claude and
Arbroath, brought down his own doom.  With them Sir James Balfour, deep
in the secrets of Darnley's death, was exiled; he opened a correspondence
with Mary, and presently procured for her "a contented revenge" on
Morton.

Two new characters in the long intrigue of vengeance now come on the
scene.  Both were Stewarts, and as such were concerned in the feud
against the Hamiltons.  The first was a cousin of Darnley, brought up in
France, namely Esme Stuart d'Aubigny, son of John, a brother of Lennox.
He had all the accomplishments likely to charm the boy king, now in his
fourteenth year.

James had hitherto been sternly educated by George Buchanan, more mildly
by Peter Young.  Buchanan and others had not quite succeeded in bringing
him to scorn and hate his mother; Lady Mar, who was very kind to him, had
exercised a gentler influence.  The boy had read much, had hunted yet
more eagerly, and had learned dissimulation and distrust, so natural to a
child weak and ungainly in body and the conscious centre of the intrigues
of violent men.  A favourite of his was James Stewart, son of Lord
Ochiltree, and brother-in-law of John Knox.  Stewart was Captain of the
Guard, a man of learning, who had been in foreign service; he was skilled
in all bodily feats, was ambitious, reckless, and resolute, and no friend
of the preachers.  The two Stewarts, d'Aubigny and the Captain, became
allies.

In a Parliament at Edinburgh (November 1579) their foes, the chiefs of
the Hamiltons, were forfeited (they had been driven to seek shelter with
Elizabeth), while d'Aubigny got their lands and the key of Scotland,
Dumbarton Castle, on the estuary of Clyde.  The Kirk, regarding
d'Aubigny, now Earl of Lennox, despite his Protestant professions, as a
Papist or an atheist, had little joy in Morton, who was denounced in a
printed placard as guilty in Darnley's murder: Sir James Balfour could
show his signature to the band to slay Darnley, signed by Huntly,
Bothwell, Argyll, and Lethington.  This was not true.  Balfour knew much,
was himself involved, but had not the band to show, or did not dare to
produce it.

To strengthen himself, Lennox was reconciled to the Kirk; to help the
Hamiltons, Elizabeth sent Bowes to intrigue against Lennox, who was
conspiring in Mary's interest, or in that of the Guises, or in his own.
When Lennox succeeded in getting Dumbarton Castle, an open door for
France, into his power, Bowes was urged by Elizabeth to join with Morton
and "lay violent hands" on Lennox (August 31, 1580), but in a month
Elizabeth cancelled her orders.

Bowes was recalled; Morton, to whom English aid had been promised, was
left to take his chances.  Morton had warning from Lord Robert Stewart,
Mary's half-brother, to fly the country, for Sir James Balfour, with his
information, had landed.  On December 31, 1580, Captain Stewart accused
Morton, in presence of the Council, of complicity in Darnley's murder.  He
was put in ward; Elizabeth threatened war; the preachers stormed against
Lennox; a plot to murder him (a Douglas plot) and to seize James was
discovered; Randolph, who now represented Elizabeth, was fired at, and
fled to Berwick; James Stewart was created Earl of Arran.  In March 1581
the king and Lennox tried to propitiate the preachers by signing a
negative Covenant against Rome, later made into a precedent for the
famous Covenant of 1638.  On June 1 Morton was tried for guilty
foreknowledge of Darnley's death.  He was executed deservedly, and his
head was stuck on a spike of the Tolbooth.  The death of this avaricious,
licentious, and resolute though unamiable Protestant was a heavy blow to
the preachers and their party, and a crook in the lot of Elizabeth.



THE WAR OF KIRK AND KING.


The next twenty years were occupied with the strife of Kirk and King,
whence arose "all the cumber of Scotland" till 1689.  The preachers, led
by the learned and turbulent Andrew Melville, had an ever-present terror
of a restoration of Catholicism, the creed of a number of the nobles and
of an unknown proportion of the people.  The Reformation of 1559-1560 had
been met by no Catholic resistance; we might suppose that the enormous
majority of the people were Protestants, though the reverse has been
asserted.  But whatever the theological preferences of the country may
have been, the justifiable fear of practical annexation by France had
overpowered all other considerations.  By 1580 it does not seem that
there was any good reason for the Protestant nervousness, even if some
northern counties and northern and Border peers preferred Catholicism.
The king himself, a firm believer in his own theological learning and
acuteness, was thoroughly Protestant.

But the preachers would scarcely allow him to remain a Protestant.  Their
claims, as formulated by Andrew Melville, were inconsistent with the
right of the State to be mistress in her own house.  In a General
Assembly at Glasgow (1581) Presbyteries were established; Episcopacy was
condemned; the Kirk claimed for herself a separate jurisdiction,
uninvadable by the State.  Elizabeth, though for State reasons she
usually backed the Presbyterians against James, also warned him of "a
sect of dangerous consequence, which would have no king but a
presbytery."  The Kirk, with her sword of excommunication, and with the
inspired violence of the political sermons and prayers, invaded the
secular authority whenever and wherever she pleased, and supported the
preachers in their claims to be tried first, when accused of treasonable
libels, in their own ecclesiastical courts.  These were certain to acquit
them.

James, if not pressed in this fashion, had no particular reason for
desiring Episcopal government of the Kirk, but being so pressed he saw no
refuge save in bishops.  Meanwhile his chief advisers--d'Aubigny, now
Duke of Lennox, and James Stewart, the destroyer of Morton, now, to the
prejudice of the Hamiltons, Earl of Arran--were men whose private life,
at least in Arran's case, was scandalous.  If Arran were a Protestant, he
was impatient of the rule of the pulpiteers; and Lennox was working, if
not sincerely in Mary's interests, certainly in his own and for those of
the Catholic House of Guise.  At the same time he favoured the king's
Episcopal schemes, and, late in 1581, appointed a preacher named
Montgomery to the recently vacant Archbishopric of Glasgow, while he
himself, like Morton, drew most of the revenues.  Hence arose tumults,
and, late in 1581 and in 1582, priestly and Jesuit emissaries went and
came, intriguing for a Catholic rising, to be supported by a large
foreign force which they had not the slightest chance of obtaining from
any quarter.  Archbishop Montgomery was excommunicated by the Kirk, and
James, as we saw, had signed "A Negative Confession" (1581).

In 1582 Elizabeth was backing the exiled Presbyterian Earl of Angus and
the Earl of Gowrie (Ruthven), while Lennox was contemplating a _coup
d'etat_ in Edinburgh (August 27).  Gowrie, with the connivance of
England, struck the first blow.  He, Mar, and their accomplices captured
James at Ruthven Castle, near Perth (August 23, "the Raid of Ruthven"),
with the approval of the General Assembly of the Kirk.  It was a Douglas
plot managed by Angus and Elizabeth.  James Stewart of the Guard (now
Earl of Arran) was made prisoner; Lennox fled the country.  In October
1582, in a Parliament at Holyrood, the conspirators passed Acts
indemnifying themselves, and the General Assembly approved them.  These
Acts were rescinded later, and James had learned for life his hatred of
the Presbyterians who had treacherously seized and insulted their king.
{144}

In May 1583 Lennox died in Paris, leaving an heir.  On June 27 James made
his escape, "a free king," to the castle of St Andrews: he proclaimed an
amnesty and feigned reconciliation with his captor, the Earl of Gowrie,
chief of the house so hateful to Mary--the Ruthvens.  At the same time
James placed himself in friendly relations with his kinsfolk, the Guises,
the terror of Protestants.  He had already been suspected, on account of
Lennox, as inclined to Rome: in fact, he was always a Protestant, but
baited on every side--by England, by the Kirk, by a faction of his
nobles: he intrigued for allies in every direction.

The secret history of his intrigues has never been written.  We find the
persecuted and astute lad either in communication with Rome, or
represented by shady adventurers as employing them to establish such
communications.  At one time, as has been recently discovered, a young
man giving himself out as James's bastard brother (a son of Darnley
begotten in England) was professing to bear letters from James to the
Pope.  He was arrested on the Continent, and James could not be brought
either to avow or disclaim his kinsman!

A new Lennox, son of the last, was created a duke; a new Bothwell,
Francis Stewart (nephew of Mary's Bothwell), began to rival his uncle in
turbulence.  Knowing that Anglo-Scottish plots to capture him again were
being woven daily by Angus and others, James, in February 1584, wrote a
friendly and compromising letter to the Pope.  In April, Arran (James
Stewart) crushed a conspiracy by seizing Gowrie at Dundee, and then
routing a force with which Mar and Angus had entered Scotland.  Gowrie,
confessing his guilt as a conspirator, was executed at Stirling (May 2,
1584), leaving, of course, his feud to his widow and son.  The chief
preachers fled; Andrew Melville was already in exile, with several
others, in England.  Melville, in February, had been charged with
preaching seditious sermons, had brandished a Hebrew Bible at the Privy
Council, had refused secular jurisdiction and appealed to a spiritual
court, by which he was certain to be acquitted.  Henceforward, when
charged with uttering treasonable libels from the pulpit, the preachers
were wont to appeal, in the first instance, to a court of their own
cloth, and on this point James in the long-run triumphed over the Kirk.

In a Parliament of May 18, 1584, such declinature of royal jurisdiction
was, by "The Black Acts," made treason: Episcopacy was established; the
heirs of Gowrie were disinherited; Angus, Mar, and other rebels were
forfeited.  But such forfeitures never held long in Scotland.

In August 1584 a new turn was given to James's policy by Arran, who was
Protestant, if anything, in belief, and hoped to win over Elizabeth, the
harbourer of all enemies of James.  Arran's instrument was the beautiful
young Master of Gray, in France a Catholic, a partisan of Mary, and
leagued with the Guises.  He was sent to persuade Elizabeth to banish
James's exiled rebels, but, like a Lethington on a smaller scale, he set
himself to obtain the restoration of these lords as against Arran, while
he gratified Elizabeth by betraying to her the secrets of Mary.  This man
was the adoring friend of the flower of chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney!

As against Arran the plot succeeded.  Making Berwick, on English soil,
their base, in November 1585 the exiles, lay and secular, backed by
England, returned, captured James at Stirling, and drove Arran to lurk
about the country, till, many years after, Douglas of Parkhead met and
slew him, avenging Morton; and, when opportunity offered, Douglas was
himself slain by an avenging Stewart at the Cross of Edinburgh.  The age
reeked with such blood feuds, of which the preachers could not cure their
fiery flocks.

In December 1585 Parliament restored Gowrie's forfeited family to their
own (henceforth they were constantly conspiring against James), and the
exiled preachers returned to their manses and pulpits.  But bishops were
not abolished, though the Kirk, through the Synod of Fife, excommunicated
the Archbishop of St Andrews, Adamson, who replied in kind.  He was
charged with witchcraft, and in the long-run was dragged down and reduced
to poverty, being accused of dealings with witches--and hares!

In July 1586 England and Scotland formed an alliance, and Elizabeth
promised to make James an allowance of 4000 pounds a-year.  This, it may
be feared, was the blood-price of James's mother: from her son, and any
hope of aid from her son, Mary was now cut off.  Walsingham laid the
snares into which she fell, deliberately providing for her means of
communication with Babington and his company, and deciphering and copying
the letters which passed through the channel which he had contrived.  A
trifle of forgery was also done by his agent, Phelipps.  Mary, knowing
herself deserted by her son, was determined, as James knew, to disinherit
him.  For this reason, and for the 4000 pounds, he made no strong protest
against her trial.  One of his agents in London--the wretched accomplice
in his father's murder, Archibald Douglas--was consenting to her
execution.  James himself thought that strict imprisonment was the best
course; but the Presbyterian Angus declared that Mary "could not be
blamed if she had caused the Queen of England's throat to be cut for
detaining her so unjustly imprisoned."  The natural man within us
entirely agrees with Angus!

A mission was sent from Holyrood, including James's handsome new
favourite, the Master of Gray, with his cousin, Logan of Restalrig, who
sold the Master to Walsingham.  The envoys were to beg for Mary's life.
The Master had previously betrayed her; but he was not wholly lost, and
in London he did his best, contrary to what is commonly stated, to secure
her life.  He thus incurred the enmity of his former allies in the
English Court, and, as he had foreseen, he was ruined in Scotland--his
_previous_ letters, hostile to Mary, being betrayed by his aforesaid
cousin, Logan of Restalrig.

On February 8, 1567, ended the lifelong tragedy of Mary Stuart.  The
woman whom Elizabeth vainly moved Amyas Paulet to murder was publicly
decapitated at Fotheringay.  James vowed that he would not accept from
Elizabeth "the price of his mother's blood."  But despite the fury of his
nobles James sat still and took the money, at most some 4000 pounds
annually,--when he could get it.

During the next fifteen years the reign of James, and his struggle for
freedom from the Kirk, was perturbed by a long series of intrigues of
which the details are too obscure and complex for presentation here.  His
chief Minister was now John Maitland, a brother of Lethington, and as
versatile, unscrupulous, and intelligent as the rest of that House.
Maitland had actually been present, as Lethington's representative, at
the tragedy of the Kirk-o'-Field.  He was Protestant, and favoured the
party of England.  In the State the chief parties were the Presbyterian
nobles, the majority of the gentry or lairds, and the preachers on one
side; and the great Catholic families of Huntly, Morton (the title being
now held by a Maxwell), Errol, and Crawford on the other.  Bothwell (a
sister's son of Mary's Bothwell) flitted meteor-like, more Catholic than
anything else, but always plotting to seize James's person; and in this
he was backed by the widow of Gowrie and the preachers, and encouraged by
Elizabeth.  In her fear that James would join the Catholic nobles, whom
the preachers eternally urged him to persecute, Elizabeth smiled on the
Protestant plots--thereby, of course, fostering any inclination which
James may have felt to seek Catholic aid at home and abroad.  The plots
of Mary were perpetually confused by intrigues of priestly emissaries,
who interfered with the schemes of Spain and mixed in the interests of
the Guises.

A fact which proved to be of the highest importance was the passing, in
July 1587, of an Act by which much of the ecclesiastical property of the
ancient Church was attached to the Crown, to be employed in providing for
the maintenance of the clergy.  But James used much of it in making
temporal lordships: for example, at the time of the mysterious Gowrie
Conspiracy (August 1600), we find that the Earl of Gowrie had obtained
the Church lands of the Abbey of Scone, which his brother, the Master of
Ruthven, desired.  With the large revenues now at his disposal James
could buy the support of the baronage, who, after the execution in 1584
of the Earl of Gowrie (the father of the Gowrie of the conspiracy of
1600), are not found leading and siding with the ministers in a resolute
way.  By 1600 young Gowrie was the only hope of the preachers, and
probably James's ability to enrich the nobles helped to make them stand
aloof.  Meanwhile, fears and hopes of the success of the Spanish Armada
held the minds of the Protestants and of the Catholic earls.  "In this
world-wolter," as James said, no Scot moved for Spain except that Lord
Maxwell who had first received and then been deprived of the Earldom of
Morton.  James advanced against him in Dumfriesshire and caused his
flight.  As for the Armada, many ships drifted north round Scotland, and
one great vessel, blown up in Tobermory Bay by Lachlan Maclean of Duart,
still invites the attention of treasure-hunters (1911).



THE CATHOLIC EARLS.


Early in 1589 Elizabeth became mistress of some letters which proved that
the Catholic earls, Huntly and Errol, were intriguing with Spain.  The
offence was lightly passed over, but when the earls, with Crawford and
Montrose, drew to a head in the north, James, with much more than his
usual spirit, headed the army which advanced against them: they fled from
him near Aberdeen, surrendered, and were for a brief time imprisoned.  As
nobody knows how Fortune's wheel may turn, and as James, hard pressed by
the preachers, could neglect no chance of support, he would never gratify
the Kirk by crushing the Catholic earls, by temperament he was no
persecutor.  His calculated leniency caused him years of trouble.

Meanwhile James, after issuing a grotesque proclamation about the causes
of his spirited resolve, sailed in October to woo a sea-king's daughter
over the foam, the Princess Anne of Denmark.  After happy months passed,
he wrote, "in drinking and driving ower," he returned with his bride in
May 1590.

The General Assembly then ordered prayers for the Puritans oppressed in
England; none the less Elizabeth, the oppressor, continued to patronise
the plots of the Puritans of Scotland.  They now lent their approval to
the foe of James's minister, Maitland, namely, the wild Francis Stewart,
Earl of Bothwell, a sister's son of Mary's Bothwell.  This young man had
the engaging quality of gay and absolute recklessness; he was dear to
ladies and the wild young gentry of Lothian and the Borders; he broke
prisons, released friends, dealt with wizards, aided by Lady Gowrie stole
into Holyrood, his ruling ambition being to capture the king.  The
preachers prayed for "sanctified plagues" against James, and regarded
Bothwell favourably as a sanctified plague.

A strange conspiracy within Clan Campbell, in which Huntly and Maitland
were implicated, now led to the murder, among others, of the bonny Earl
of Murray by Huntly in partnership with Maitland (February 1592).

James was accused of having instigated this crime, from suspicion of
Murray as a partner in the wild enterprises of Bothwell, and was so hard
pressed by sermons that, in the early summer of 1592, he allowed the
Black Acts to be abrogated, and "the Charter of the liberties of the
Kirk" to be passed.  One of these liberties was to persecute Catholics in
accordance with the penal Acts of 1560.  The Kirk was almost an _imperium
in imperio_, but was still prohibited from appointing the time and place
of its own General Assemblies without Royal assent.  This weak point in
their defences enabled James to vanquish them, but, in June, Bothwell
attacked him in the Palace of Falkland and put him in considerable peril.

The end of 1592 and the opening of 1593 were remarkable for the discovery
of "The Spanish Blanks," papers addressed to Philip of Spain, signed by
Huntly, the new Earl of Angus, and Errol, to be filled up with an oral
message requesting military aid for Scottish Catholics.  Such proceedings
make our historians hold up obtesting hands against the perfidy of
idolaters.  But clearly, if Knox and the congregation were acting rightly
when they besought the aid of England against Mary of Guise, then Errol
and Huntly are not to blame for inviting Spain to free them from
persecution.  Some inkling of the scheme had reached James, and a paper
in which he weighed the pros and cons is in existence.  His suspected
understanding with the Catholic earls, whom he merely did not wish to
estrange hopelessly, was punished by a sanctified plague.  On July 24,
1593, by aid of the late Earl Gowrie's daughter, Bothwell entered
Holyrood, seized the king, extorted his own terms, went and amazed the
Dean of Durham by his narrative of the adventure, and seemed to have the
connivance of Elizabeth.  But in September James found himself in a
position to repudiate his forced engagement.  Bothwell now allied himself
with the Catholic earls, and, as a Catholic, had no longer the prayers of
the preachers.  James ordered levies to attack the earls, while Argyll
led his clan and the Macleans against Huntly, only to be defeated by the
Gordon horse at the battle of Glenrinnes (October 3).  Huntly and his
allies, however, dared not encounter King James and Andrew Melville, who
marched together against them, and they were obliged to fly to the
Continent.  Bothwell, with his retainer, Colville, continued, with
Cecil's connivance, to make desperate plots for seizing James; indeed,
Cecil was intriguing with them and other desperadoes even after 1600.
Throughout all the Tudor period, from Henry VII. to 1601, England was
engaged in a series of conspiracies against the persons of the princes of
Scotland.  The Catholics of the south of Scotland now lost Lord Maxwell,
slain by a "Lockerby Lick" in a great clan battle with the Johnstones at
Dryfe Sands.

In 1595, James's minister, John Maitland, brother of Lethington, died,
and early in 1596 an organisation called "the Octavians" was made to
regulate the distracted finance of the country.  On April 13, 1596,
Walter Scott of Buccleuch made himself an everlasting name by the
bloodless rescue of Kinmont Willie, an Armstrong reiver, from the Castle
of Carlisle, where he was illegally held by Lord Scrope.  The period was
notable for the endless raids by the clans on both sides of the Border,
celebrated in ballads.

James had determined to recall the exiled Catholic earls, undeterred by
the eloquence of "the last of all our sincere Assemblies," held with deep
emotion in March 1596.  The earls came home; in September at Falkland
Palace Andrew Melville seized James by the sleeve, called him "God's
silly vassal," and warned him that Christ and his Kirk were the king's
overlords.  Soon afterwards Mr David Black of St Andrews spoke against
Elizabeth in a sermon which caused diplomatic remonstrances.  Black would
be tried, in the first instance, only by a Spiritual Court of his
brethren.  There was a long struggle, the ministers appointed a kind of
standing Committee of Safety; James issued a proclamation dissolving it,
and, on December 17, inflammatory sermons led a deputation to try to
visit James, who was with the Lords of Session in the Tolbooth.  Whether
under an alarm of a Popish plot or not, the crowd became so fierce and
menacing that the great Lachlan Maclean of Duart rode to Stirling to
bring up Argyll in the king's defence with such forces as he could
muster.  The king retired to Linlithgow; the Rev. Mr Bruce, a famous
preacher credited with powers of prophecy, in vain appealed to the Duke
of Hamilton to lead the godly.  By threatening to withdraw the Court and
Courts of Justice from Edinburgh James brought the citizens to their
knees, and was able to take order with the preachers.



CHAPTER XXIII.  THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY.


James, in reducing the Kirk, relied as much on his cunning and
"kingcraft" as on his prerogative.  He summoned a Convention of preachers
and of the Estates to Perth at the end of February 1597, and thither he
brought many ministers from the north, men unlike the zealots of Lothian
and the Lowlands.  He persuaded them to vote themselves a General
Assembly; and they admitted his right to propose modifications in Church
government, to forbid unusual convocations (as in Edinburgh during the
autumn of 1596); they were not to preach against Acts of Parliament or of
Council, nor appoint preachers in the great towns without the Royal
assent, and were not to attack individuals from the pulpit.  An attempt
was to be made to convert the Catholic lords.  A General Assembly at
Dundee in May ratified these decisions, to the wrath of Andrew Melville,
and the Catholic earls were more or less reconciled to the Kirk, which at
this period had not one supporter among the nobility.  James had made
large grants of Church lands among the noblesse, and they abstained from
their wonted conspiracies for a while.  The king occupied himself much in
encouraging the persecution of witches, but even that did not endear him
to the preachers.

In the Assembly of March 1598 certain ministers were allowed to sit and
vote in Parliament.  In 1598-1599 a privately printed book by James, the
'Basilicon Doron,' came to the knowledge of the clergy: it revealed his
opinions on the right of kings to rule the Church, and on the tendency of
the preachers to introduce a democracy "with themselves as Tribunes of
the People," a very fair definition of their policy.  It was to stop them
that he gradually introduced a bastard kind of bishops, police to keep
the pulpiteers in order.  They were refusing, in face of the king's
licence, to permit a company of English players to act in Edinburgh, for
they took various powers into their hands.

Meanwhile James's relations with England, where Elizabeth saw with dismay
his victory over her allies, his clergy, were unfriendly.  Plots were
encouraged against him, but it is not probable that England was aware of
the famous and mysterious conspiracy of the young Earl of Gowrie, who was
warmly welcomed by Elizabeth on his return from Padua, by way of Paris.
He had been summoned by Bruce, James's chief clerical adversary, and the
Kirk had high hopes of the son of the man of the Raid of Ruthven.  He led
the opposition to taxation for national defence in a convention of June-
July 1600.  On August 5, in his own house at Perth, where James, summoned
thither by Gowrie's younger brother, had dined with him, Gowrie and his
brother were slain by John Ramsay, a page to the king.

This affair was mysterious.  The preachers, and especially Bruce, refused
to accept James's own account of the events, at first, and this was not
surprising.  Gowrie was their one hope among the peers, and the story
which James told is so strange that nothing could be stranger or less
credible except the various and manifestly mendacious versions of the
Gowrie party. {156}

James's version of the occurrences must be as much as possible condensed,
and there is no room for the corroborating evidence of Lennox and others.
As the king was leaving Falkland to hunt a buck early on August 5, the
Master of Ruthven, who had ridden over from his brother's house in Perth,
accosted him.  The Master declared that he had on the previous evening
arrested a man carrying a pot of gold; had said nothing to Gowrie; had
locked up the man and his gold in a room, and now wished James to come
instantly and examine the fellow.  The king's curiosity and cupidity were
less powerful than his love of sport: he would first kill his buck.
During the chase James told the story to Lennox, who corroborated.
Ruthven sent a companion to inform his brother; none the less, when the
king, with a considerable following, did appear at Gowrie's house, no
preparation for his reception had been made.

The Master was now in a quandary: he had no prisoner and no pot of gold.
During dinner Gowrie was very nervous; after it James and the Master
slipped upstairs together while Gowrie took the gentlemen into the garden
to eat cherries.  Ruthven finally led James into a turret off the long
gallery; he locked the door, and pointing to a man in armour with a
dagger, said that he "had the king at his will."  The man, however, fell
a-trembling, James made a speech, and the Master went to seek Gowrie,
locking the door behind him.  At or about this moment, as was fully
attested, Cranstoun, a retainer of Gowrie, reported to him and the
gentlemen that the king had ridden away.  They all rushed to the gate,
where the porter, to whom Gowrie gave the lie, swore that the king had
not left the place.  The gentlemen going to the stables passed under the
turret-window, whence appeared the king, red in the face, bellowing
"treason!"  The gentlemen, with Lennox, rushed upstairs, and through the
gallery, but could not force open the door giving on the turret.  But
young Ramsay had run up a narrow stair in the tower, burst open the
turret-door opening on the stair, found James struggling with the Master,
wounded the Master, and pushed him downstairs.  In the confusion, while
the king's falcon flew wildly about the turret till James set his foot on
its chain, the man with the dagger vanished.  The Master was slain by two
of James's attendants; the Earl, rushing with four or five men up the
turret-stair, fell in fight by Ramsay's rapier.

Lennox and his company now broke through the door between the gallery and
the turret, and all was over except a riotous assemblage of the town's
folk.  The man with the dagger had fled: he later came in and gave
himself up; he was Gowrie's steward; his name was Henderson; it was he
who rode with the Master to Falkland and back to Perth to warn Gowrie of
James's approach.  He confessed that Gowrie had then bidden him put on
armour, on a false pretence, and the Master had stationed him in the
turret.  The fact that Henderson had arrived (from Falkland) at Gowrie's
house by half-past ten was amply proved, yet Gowrie had made no
preparations for the royal visit.  If Henderson was not the man in the
turret, his sudden and secret flight from Perth is unexplained.  Moreover,
Robert Oliphant, M.A., said, in private talk, that the part of the man in
the turret had, some time earlier, been offered to him by Gowrie; he
refused and left the Earl's service.  It is manifest that James could not
have arranged this set of circumstances: the thing is impossible.
Therefore the two Ruthvens plotted to get him into their hands early in
the day; and, when he arrived late, with a considerable train, they
endeavoured to send these gentlemen after the king, by averring that he
had ridden homewards.  The dead Ruthvens with their house were forfeited.

Among the preachers who refused publicly to accept James's account of the
events in Gowrie's house on August 5, Mr Bruce was the most eminent and
the most obstinate.  He had, on the day after the famous riot of December
1596, written to Hamilton asking him to countenance, as a chief nobleman,
"the godly barons and others who had convened themselves," at that time,
in the cause of the Kirk.  Bruce admitted that he knew Hamilton to be
ambitious, but Hamilton's ambition did not induce him to appear as
captain of a new congregation.  The chief need of the ministers' party
was a leader among the great nobles.  Now, in 1593, the young Earl of
Gowrie had leagued himself with the madcap Bothwell.  In April 1594,
Gowrie, Bothwell, and Atholl had addressed the Kirk, asking her to favour
and direct their enterprise.  Bothwell made an armed demonstration and
failed; Gowrie then went abroad, to Padua and Rome, and, apparently in
1600, Mr Bruce sailed to France, "for the calling," he says, "of the
Master of Gowrie"--he clearly means "the Earl of Gowrie."  The Earl came,
wove his plot, and perished.  Mr Bruce, therefore, was averse to
accepting James's account of the affair at Gowrie House.  After a long
series of negotiations Bruce was exiled north of Tay.



UNION OF THE CROWNS.


In 1600 James imposed three bishops on the Kirk.  Early in 1601 broke out
Essex's rebellion of one day against Elizabeth, a futile attempt to
imitate Scottish methods as exhibited in the many raids against James.
Essex had been intriguing with the Scottish king, but to what extent
James knew of and encouraged his enterprise is unknown.  He was on ill
terms with Cecil, who, in 1601, was dealing with several men that
intended no good to James.  Cecil is said to have received a sufficient
warning as to how James, on ascending the English throne, would treat
him; and he came to terms, secretly, with Mar and Kinloss, the king's
envoys to Elizabeth.  Their correspondence is extant, and proves that
Cecil, at last, was "running the Scottish course," and making smooth the
way for James's accession.  (The correspondence begins in June 1601.)

Very early on Thursday, March 24, 1603, Elizabeth went to her account,
and James received the news from Sir Robert Carey, who reached Holyrood
on the Saturday night, March 26.  James entered London on May 6, and
England was free from the fear of many years concerning a war for the
succession.  The Catholics hoped for lenient usage: disappointment led
some desperate men to engage in the Gunpowder Plot.  James was not more
satisfactory to the Puritans.

Encouraged by the fulsome adulation which grew up under the Tudor
dynasty, and free from dread of personal danger, James henceforth
governed Scotland "with the pen," as he said, through the Privy Council.
This method of ruling the ancient kingdom endured till the Union of 1707,
and was fraught with many dangers.  The king was no longer in touch with
his subjects.  His best action was the establishment of a small force of
mounted constabulary which did more to put down the eternal homicides,
robberies, and family feuds than all the sermons could achieve.

The persons most notable in the Privy Council were Seton (later Lord
Dunfermline), Hume, created Earl of Dunbar, and the king's advocate,
Thomas Hamilton, later Earl of Haddington.  Bishops, with Spottiswoode,
the historian, Archbishop of Glasgow, sat in the Privy Council, and their
progressive elevation, as hateful to the nobles as to the Kirk, was among
the causes of the civil war under Charles I.  By craft and by illegal
measures James continued to depress the Kirk.  A General Assembly,
proclaimed by James for July 1604 in Aberdeen, was prorogued; again,
unconstitutionally, it was prorogued in July 1605.  Nineteen ministers,
disobeying a royal order, appeared and constituted the Assembly.  Joined
by ten others, they kept open the right of way.  James insisted that the
Council should prosecute them: they, by fixing a new date for an
Assembly, without royal consent; and James, by letting years pass without
an Assembly, broke the charter of the Kirk of 1592.

The preachers, when summoned to the trial, declined the jurisdiction.
This was violently construed as treason, and a jury, threatened by the
legal officers with secular, and by the preachers with future spiritual
punishment, by a small majority condemned some of the ministers (January
1606).  This roused the wrath of all classes.  James wished for more
prosecutions; the Council, in terror, prevailed on him to desist.  He
continued to grant no Assemblies till 1608, and would not allow "caveats"
(limiting the powers of Bishops) to be enforced.  He summoned (1606) the
two Melvilles, Andrew and his nephew James, to London, where Andrew
bullied in his own violent style, and was, quite illegally, first
imprisoned and then banished to France.

In December 1606 a convention of preachers was persuaded to allow the
appointment of "constant Moderators" to keep the presbyteries in order;
and then James recognised the convention as a General Assembly.  Suspected
ministers were confined to their parishes or locked up in Blackness
Castle.  In 1608 a General Assembly was permitted the pleasure of
excommunicating Huntly.  In 1610 an Assembly established Episcopacy, and
no excommunications not ratified by the Bishop were allowed: the only
comfort of the godly was the violent persecution of Catholics, who were
nosed out by the "constant Moderators," excommunicated if they refused to
conform, confiscated, and banished.

James could succeed in these measures, but his plan for uniting the two
kingdoms into one, Great Britain, though supported by the wisdom and
eloquence of Bacon, was frustrated by the jealousies of both peoples.
Persons born after James's accession (the _post nati_) were, however,
admitted to equal privileges in either kingdom (1608).  In 1610 James had
two of his bishops, and Spottiswoode, consecrated by three English
bishops, but he did not yet venture to interfere with the forms of
Presbyterian public worship.

In 1610 James established two Courts of High Commission (in 1615 united
in one Court) to try offences in morals and religion.  The Archbishops
presided, laity and clergy formed the body of the Court, and it was
regarded as vexatious and tyrannical.  The same terms, to be sure, would
now be applied to the interference of preachers and presbyteries with
private life and opinion.  By 1612 the king had established Episcopacy,
which, for one reason or another, became equally hateful to the nobles,
the gentry, and the populace.  James's motives were motives of police.
Long experience had taught him the inconveniences of presbyterial
government as it then existed in Scotland.

To a Church organised in the presbyterian manner, as it has been
practised since 1689, James had, originally at least, no objection.  But
the combination of "presbyterian Hildebrandism" with factions of the
turbulent _noblesse_; the alliance of the Power of the Keys with the
sword and lance, was inconsistent with the freedom of the State and of
the individual.  "The absolutism of James," says Professor Hume Brown,
"was forced upon him in large degree by the excessive claims of the
Presbyterian clergy."

Meanwhile the thievish Border clans, especially the Armstrongs, were
assailed by hangings and banishments, and Ulster was planted by Scottish
settlers, willing or reluctant, attracted by promise of lands, or planted
out, that they might not give trouble on the Border.

Persecution of Catholics was violent, and in spring 1615 Father Ogilvie
was hanged after very cruel treatment directed by Archbishop
Spottiswoode.  In this year the two ecclesiastical Courts of High
Commission were fused into one, and an Assembly was coerced into passing
what James called "Hotch-potch resolutions" about changes in public
worship.  James wanted greater changes, but deferred them till he visited
Scotland in 1617, when he was attended by the luckless figure of Laud,
who went to a funeral--in a surplice!  James had many personal bickerings
with preachers, but his five main points, "The Articles of Perth" (of
these the most detested were: (1) Communicants must kneel, not sit, at
the Communion; (4) Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost must be observed; and
(5) Confirmation must be introduced), were accepted by an Assembly in
1618.  They could not be enforced, but were sanctioned by Parliament in
1621.  The day was called Black Saturday, and omens were drawn by both
parties from a thunderstorm which occurred at the time of the
ratification of the Articles of Perth by Parliament in Edinburgh (August
4, 1621).

By enforcing these Articles James passed the limit of his subjects'
endurance.  In their opinion, as in Knox's, to kneel at the celebration
of the Holy Communion was an act of idolatry, was "Baal worship," and no
pressure could compel them to kneel.  The three great festivals of the
Christian Church, whether Roman, Genevan, or Lutheran, had no certain
warrant in Holy Scripture, but were rather repugnant to the Word of God.
The king did not live to see the bloodshed and misery caused by his
reckless assault on the liberties and consciences of his subjects; he
died on March 27, 1625, just before the Easter season in which it was
intended to enforce his decrees.

The ungainliness of James's person, his lack of courage on certain
occasions (he was by no means a constant coward), and the feebleness of
his limbs might be attributed to pre-natal influences; he was injured
before he was born by the sufferings of his mother at the time of
Riccio's murder.  His deep dissimulation he learnt in his bitter
childhood and harassed youth.  His ingenious mind was trained to
pedantry; he did nothing worse, and nothing more congenial to the cruel
superstitions of his age, than in his encouragement of witch trials and
witch burnings promoted by the Scottish clergy down to the early part of
the eighteenth century.

His plantation of Ulster by Scottish settlers has greatly affected
history down to our own times, while the most permanent result of the
awards by which he stimulated the colonisation of Nova Scotia has been
the creation of hereditary knighthoods or baronetcies.

His encouragement of learning left its mark in the foundation of the
Town's College of Edinburgh, on the site of Kirk-o'-Field, the scene of
his father's murder.

The south-western Highlands, from Lochaber to Islay and Cantyre, were, in
his reign, the scene of constant clan feuds and repressions, resulting in
the fall of the Macdonalds, and the rise of the Campbell chief, Argyll,
to the perilous power later wielded by the Marquis against Charles I.
Many of the sons of the dispossessed Macdonalds, driven into Ireland,
were to constitute the nucleus of the army of Montrose.  In the Orkneys
and Shetlands the constant turbulence of Earl Patrick and his family
ended in the annexation of the islands to the Crown (1612), and the
Earl's execution (1615).



CHAPTER XXIV.  CHARLES I.


The reign of Charles I. opened with every sign of the tempests which were
to follow.  England and Scotland were both seething with religious fears
and hatreds.  Both parties in England, Puritans and Anglicans, could be
satisfied with nothing less than complete domination.  In England the
extreme Puritans, with their yearning after the Genevan presbyterian
discipline, had been threatening civil war even under Elizabeth.  James
had treated them with a high hand and a proud heart.  Under Charles,
wedded to a "Jezebel," a Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, the Puritan
hatred of such prelates as Laud expressed itself in threats of murder;
while heavy fines and cruel mutilations were inflicted by the party in
power.  The Protestant panic, the fear of a violent restoration of
Catholicism in Scotland, never slumbered.  In Scotland Catholics were at
this time bitterly persecuted, and believed that a presbyterian general
massacre of them all was being organised.  By the people the Anglican
bishops and the prayer-book were as much detested as priests and the
Mass.  When Charles placed six prelates on his Privy Council, and
recognised the Archbishop of St Andrews, Spottiswoode, as first in
precedence among his subjects, the nobles were angry and jealous.  Charles
would not do away with the infatuated Articles of Perth.  James, as he
used to say, had "governed Scotland by the pen" through his Privy
Council.  Charles knew much less than James of the temper of the Scots,
among whom he had never come since his infancy, and _his_ Privy Council
with six bishops was apt to be even more than commonly subservient.

In Scotland as in England the expenses of national defence were a cause
of anger; and the mismanagement of military affairs by the king's
favourite, Buckingham, increased the irritation.  It was brought to a
head in Scotland by the "Act of Revocation," under which all Church lands
and Crown lands bestowed since 1542 were to be restored to the Crown.
This Act once more united in opposition the nobles and the preachers;
since 1596 they had not been in harmony.  In 1587, as we saw, James VI.
had annexed much of the old ecclesiastical property to the Crown; but he
had granted most of it to nobles and barons as "temporal lordships."  Now,
by Charles, the temporal lords who held such lands were menaced, the
judges ("Lords of Session") who would have defended their interests were
removed from the Privy Council (March 1626), and, in August, the temporal
lords remonstrated with the king through deputations.

In fact, they took little harm--redeeming their holdings at the rate of
ten years' purchase.  The main result was that landowners were empowered
to buy the tithes on their own lands from the multitude of "titulars of
tithes" (1629) who had rapaciously and oppressively extorted these tenths
of the harvest every year.  The ministers had a safe provision at last,
secured on the tithes, in Scotland styled "teinds," but this did not
reconcile most of them to bishops and to the Articles of Perth.  Several
of the bishops were, in fact, "latitudinarian" or "Arminian" in doctrine,
wanderers from the severity of Knox and Calvin.  With them began,
perhaps, the "Moderatism" which later invaded the Kirk; though their
ideal slumbered during the civil war, to awaken again, with the teaching
of Archbishop Leighton, under the Restoration.  Meanwhile the nobles and
gentry had been alarmed and mulcted, and were ready to join hands with
the Kirk in its day of resistance.

In June 1633 Charles at last visited his ancient kingdom, accompanied by
Laud.  His subjects were alarmed and horrified by the sight of prelates
in lawn sleeves, candles in chapel, and even a tapestry showing the
crucifixion.  To this the bishops are said to have bowed,--plain
idolatry.  In the Parliament of June 18 the eight representatives of each
Estate, who were practically all-powerful as Lords of the Articles, were
chosen, not from each Estate by its own members, but on a method
instituted, or rather revived, by James VI. in 1609.  The nobles made the
choice from the bishops, the bishops from the nobles, and the elected
sixteen from the barons and burghers.  The twenty-four were all thus
episcopally minded: they drew up the bills, and the bills were voted on
without debate.  The grant of supply made in these circumstances was
liberal, and James's ecclesiastical legislation, including the sanction
of the "rags of Rome" worn by the bishops, was ratified.  Remonstrances
from the ministers of the old Kirk party were disregarded; and--the thin
end of the wedge--the English Liturgy was introduced in the Royal Chapel
of Holyrood and in that of St Salvator's College, St Andrews, where it
has been read once, on a funeral occasion, in recent years.

In 1634-35, on the information of Archbishop Spottiswoode, Lord Balmerino
was tried for treason because he possessed a supplication or petition
which the Lords of the minority, in the late Parliament, had drawn up but
had not presented.  He was found guilty, but spared: the proceeding
showed of what nature the bishops were, and alienated and alarmed the
populace and the nobles and gentry.  A remonstrance in a manly spirit by
Drummond of Hawthornden, the poet, was disregarded.

In 1635 Charles authorised a Book of Canons, heralding the imposition of
a Liturgy, which scarcely varied, and when it varied was thought to
differ for the worse, from that of the Church of England.  By these
canons, the most nakedly despotic of innovations, the preachers could not
use their sword of excommunication without the assent of the Bishops.
James VI. had ever regarded with horror and dread the licence of
"conceived prayers," spoken by the minister, and believed to be
extemporary or directly inspired.  There is an old story that one
minister prayed that James might break his leg: certainly prayers for
"sanctified plagues" on that prince were publicly offered, at the will of
the minister.  Even a very firm Presbyterian, the Laird of Brodie, when
he had once heard the Anglican service in London, confided to his journal
that he had suffered much from the nonsense of "conceived prayers."  They
were a dangerous weapon, in Charles's opinion: he was determined to
abolish them, rather that he might be free from the agitation of the
pulpit than for reasons of ritual, and to proclaim his own headship of
the Kirk of "King Christ."

This, in the opinion of the great majority of the preachers and populace,
was flat blasphemy, an assumption of "the Crown Honours of Christ."  The
Liturgy was "an ill-mumbled Mass," the Mass was idolatry, and idolatry
was a capital offence.  However strange these convictions may appear,
they were essential parts of the national belief.  Yet, with the most
extreme folly, Charles, acting like Henry VIII. as his own Pope, thrust
the canons and this Liturgy upon the Kirk and country.  No sentimental
arguments can palliate such open tyranny.

The Liturgy was to be used in St Giles' Church, the town kirk of
Edinburgh (cleansed and restored by Charles himself), on July 23, 1637.
The result was a furious brawl, begun by the women, of all presbyterians
the fiercest, and, it was said, by men disguised as women.  A gentleman
was struck on the ear by a woman for the offence of saying "Amen," and
the famous Jenny Geddes is traditionally reported to have thrown her
stool at the Dean's head.  The service was interrupted, the Bishop was
the mark of stones, and "the Bishops' War," the Civil War, began in this
brawl.  James VI., being on the spot, had thoroughly quieted Edinburgh
after a more serious riot, on December 17, 1596.  But Charles was far
away; the city had not to fear the loss of the Court and its custom, as
on the earlier occasion (the removal of the Council to Linlithgow in
October 1637 was a trifle), and the Council had to face a storm of
petitions from all classes of the community.  Their prayer was that the
Liturgy should be withdrawn.  From the country, multitudes of all classes
flocked into Edinburgh and formed themselves into a committee of public
safety, "The Four Tables," containing sixteen persons.

The Tables now demanded the removal of the bishops from the Privy Council
(December 21, 1637).  The question was: Who were to govern the country,
the Council or the Tables?  The logic of the Presbyterians was not always
consistent.  The king must not force the Liturgy on them, but later,
their quarrel with him was that he would not, at their desire, force the
absence of the Liturgy on England.  If the king had the right to inflict
Presbyterianism on England, he had the right to thrust the Liturgy on
Scotland: of course he had neither one right nor the other.  On February
19, 1638, Charles's proclamation, refusing the prayers of the
supplication of December, was read at Stirling.  Nobles and people
replied with protestations to every royal proclamation.  Foremost on the
popular side was the young Earl of Montrose: "you will not rest," said
Rothes, a more sober leader, "till you be lifted up above the lave in
three fathoms of rope."  Rothes was a true prophet; but Montrose did not
die for the cause that did "his green unknowing youth engage."

The Presbyterians now desired yearly General Assemblies (of which James
VI. had unlawfully robbed the Kirk); the enforcement of an old
brief-lived system of restrictions (_caveats_) on the bishops; the
abolition of the Articles of Perth; and, as always, of the Liturgy.  If
he granted all this Charles might have had trouble with the preachers, as
James VI. had of old.  Yet the demands were constitutional; and in
Charles's position he would have done well to assent.  He was obstinate
in refusal.

The Scots now "fell upon the consideration of a band of union to be made
legally," says Rothes, their leader, the chief of the House of Leslie
(the family of Norman Leslie, the slayer of Cardinal Beaton).  Now a
"band" of this kind could not, by old Scots law, be legally made; such
bands, like those for the murder of Riccio and of Darnley, and for many
other enterprises, were not smiled upon by the law.  But, in 1581, as we
saw, James VI. had signed a covenant against popery; its tenor was
imitated in that of 1638, and there was added "a general band for the
maintenance of true religion" (Presbyterianism) "_and of the King's
person_."  That part of the band was scarcely kept when the Covenanting
army surrendered Charles to the English.  They had vowed, in their band,
to "stand to the defence of our dread Sovereign the King's Majesty, his
person and authority."  They kept this vow by hanging men who held the
king's commission.  The words as to defending the king's authority were
followed by "in the defence and preservation of the aforesaid true
religion."  This appears to mean that only a presbyterian king is to be
defended.  In any case the preachers assumed the right to interpret the
Covenant, which finally led to the conquest of Scotland by Cromwell.  As
the Covenant was made between God and the Covenanters, on ancient Hebrew
precedent it was declared to be binding on all succeeding generations.
Had Scotland resisted tyranny without this would-be biblical pettifogging
Covenant, her condition would have been the more gracious.  The signing
of the band began at Edinburgh in Greyfriars' Churchyard on February 28,
1638.

This Covenant was a most potent instrument for the day, but the fruits
thereof were blood and tears and desolation: for fifty-one years common-
sense did not come to her own again.  In 1689 the Covenant was silently
dropped, when the Kirk was restored.

This two-edged insatiable sword was drawn: great multitudes signed with
enthusiasm, and they who would not sign were, of course, persecuted.  As
they said, "it looked not like a thing approved of God, which was begun
and carried on with fury and madness, and obtruded on people with
threatenings, tearing of clothes, and drawing of blood."  Resistance to
the king--if need were, armed resistance--was necessary, was laudable,
but the terms of the Covenant were, in the highest degree impolitic and
unstatesmanlike.  The country was handed over to the preachers; the
Scots, as their great leader Argyll was to discover, were "distracted men
in distracted times."

Charles wavered and sent down the Marquis of Hamilton to represent his
waverings.  The Marquis was as unsettled as his predecessor, Arran, in
the minority of Queen Mary.  He dared not promulgate the proclamations;
he dared not risk civil war; he knew that Charles, who said he was ready,
was unprepared in his mutinous English kingdom.  He granted, at last, a
General Assembly and a free Parliament, and produced another Covenant,
"the King's Covenant," which of course failed to thwart that of the
country.

The Assembly, at Glasgow (November 21, 1638), including noblemen and
gentlemen as elders, was necessarily revolutionary, and needlessly
riotous and profane.  It arraigned and condemned the bishops in their
absence.  Hamilton, as Royal Commissioner, dissolved the Assembly, which
continued to sit.  The meeting was in the Cathedral, where, says a
sincere Covenanter, Baillie, whose letters are a valuable source, "our
rascals, without shame, in great numbers, made din and clamour."  All the
unconstitutional ecclesiastical legislation of the last forty years was
rescinded,--as all the new presbyterian legislation was to be rescinded
at the Restoration.  Some bishops were excommunicated, the rest were
deposed.  The press was put under the censorship of the fanatical lawyer,
Johnston of Waristoun, clerk of the Assembly.

On December 20 the Assembly, which sat on after Hamilton dissolved it,
broke up.  Among the Covenanters were to be reckoned the Earl of Argyll
(later the only Marquis of his House), and the Earl, later Marquis, of
Montrose.  They did not stand long together.  The Scottish Revolution
produced no man at once great and successful, but, in Montrose, it had
one man of genius who gave his life for honour's sake; in Argyll, an
astute man, not physically courageous, whose "timidity in the field was
equalled by his timidity in the Council," says Mr Gardiner.

In spring (1639) war began.  Charles was to move in force on the Border;
the fleet was to watch the coasts; Hamilton, with some 5000 men, was to
join hands with Huntly (both men were wavering and incompetent); Antrim,
from north Ireland, was to attack and contain Argyll; Ruthven was to hold
Edinburgh Castle.  But Alexander Leslie took that castle for the
Covenanters; they took Dumbarton; they fortified Leith; Argyll ravaged
Huntly's lands; Montrose and Leslie occupied Aberdeen; and their party,
in circumstances supposed to be discreditable to Montrose, carried Huntly
to Edinburgh.  (The evidence is confused.  Was Huntly unwilling to go?
Charles (York, April 23, 1639) calls him "feeble and false."  Mr Gardiner
says that, in this case, and in this alone, Montrose stooped to a mean
action.)  Hamilton merely dawdled and did nothing: Montrose had entered
Aberdeen (June 19), and then came news of negotiations between the king
and the Covenanters.

As Charles approached from the south, Alexander Leslie, a Continental
veteran (very many of the Covenant's officers were Dugald Dalgettys from
the foreign wars), occupied Dunse Law, with a numerous army in great
difficulties as to supplies.  "A natural mind might despair," wrote
Waristoun, who "was brought low before God indeed."  Leslie was in a
strait; but, on the other side, so was Charles, for a reconnaissance of
Leslie's position was repulsed; the king lacked money and supplies;
neither side was of a high fighting heart; and offers to negotiate came
from the king, informally.  The Scots sent in "a supplication," and on
June 18 signed a treaty which was a mere futile truce.  There were to be
a new Assembly, and a new Parliament in August and September.

Charles should have fought: if he fell he would fall with honour; and if
he survived defeat "all England behoved to have risen in revenge," says
the Covenanting letter-writer, Baillie, later Principal of Glasgow
University.  The Covenanters at this time could not have invaded England,
could not have supported themselves if they did, and were far from being
harmonious among themselves.  The defeat of Charles at this moment would
have aroused English pride and united the country.  Charles set out from
Berwick for London on July 29, leaving many fresh causes of quarrel
behind him.

Charles supposed that he was merely "giving way for the present" when he
accepted the ratification by the new Assembly of all the Acts of that of
1638.  He never had a later chance to recover his ground.  The new
Assembly made the Privy Council pass an Act rendering signature of the
Covenant compulsory on all men: "the new freedom is worse than the old
slavery," a looker-on remarked.  The Parliament discussed the method of
electing the Lords of the Articles--a method which, in fact, though of
prime importance, had varied and continued to vary in practice.  Argyll
protested that the constitutional course was for each Estate to elect its
own members.  Montrose was already suspected of being influenced by
Charles.  Charles refused to call Episcopacy unlawful, or to rescind the
old Acts establishing it.  Traquair, as Commissioner, dissolved the
Parliament; later Charles refused to meet envoys sent from Scotland, who
were actually trying, as their party also tried, to gain French mediation
or assistance,--help from "idolaters"!

In spring 1640 the Scots, by an instrument called "The Blind Band,"
imposed taxation for military purposes; while Charles in England called
The Short Parliament to provide Supply.  The Parliament refused and was
prorogued; words used by Strafford about the use of the army in Ireland
to suppress Scotland were hoarded up against him.  The Scots Parliament,
though the king had prorogued it, met in June, despite the opposition of
Montrose.  The Parliament, when it ceased to meet, appointed a Standing
Committee of some forty members of all ranks, including Montrose and his
friends Lord Napier and Stirling of Keir.  Argyll refused to be a member,
but acted on a commission of fire and sword "to root out of the country"
the northern recusants against the Covenant.  It was now that Argyll
burned Lord Ogilvy's Bonny House of Airlie and Forthes; the cattle were
driven into his own country; all this against, and perhaps in consequence
of, the intercession of Ogilvy's friend and neighbour, Montrose.

Meanwhile the Scots were intriguing with discontented English peers, who
could only give sympathy; Saville, however, forged a letter from six of
them inviting a Scottish invasion.  There was a movement for making
Argyll practically Dictator in the North; Montrose thwarted it, and in
August, while Charles with a reluctant and disorderly force was marching
on York Montrose at Cumbernauld, the house of the Earl of Wigtoun made a
secret band with the Earls Marischal, Wigtoun, Home, Atholl, Mar, Perth,
Boyd, Galloway, and others, for their mutual defence against the scheme
of dictatorship for Argyll.  On August 20 Montrose, the foremost, forded
Tweed, and led his regiment into England.  On August 30, almost
unopposed, the Scots entered Newcastle, having routed a force which met
them at Newburn-on-Tyne.

They again pressed their demands on the king; simultaneously twelve
English peers petitioned for a parliament and the trial of the king's
Ministers.  Charles gave way.  At Ripon Scottish and English
commissioners met; the Scots received "brotherly assistance" in money and
supplies (a daily 850 pounds), and stayed where they were; while the Long
Parliament met in November, and in April 1641 condemned the great
Strafford: Laud soon shared his doom.  On August 10 the demands of the
Scots were granted: as a sympathetic historian writes, they had lived for
a year at free quarters, "and recrossed the Border with the handsome sum
of 200,000 pounds to their credit."

During the absence of the army the Kirk exhibited symptoms not favourable
to its own peace.  Amateur theologians held private religious gatherings,
which, it was feared, tended towards the heresy of the English
Independents and to the "break up of the whole Kirk," some of whose
representatives forbade these conventicles, while "the rigid sort"
asserted that the conventiclers "were esteemed the godly of the land."  An
Act of the General Assembly was passed against the meetings; we observe
that here are the beginnings of strife between the most godly and the
rather moderately pious.

The secret of Montrose's Cumbernauld band had come to light after
November 1640: nothing worse, at the moment, befell than the burning of
the band by the Committee of Estates, to whom Argyll referred the matter.
On May 21, 1641, the Committee was disturbed, for Montrose was collecting
evidence as to the words and deeds of Argyll when he used his commission
of fire and sword at the Bonny House of Airlie and in other places.
Montrose had spoken of the matter to a preacher, he to another, and the
news reached the Committee.  Montrose had learned from a prisoner of
Argyll, Stewart the younger of Ladywell, that Argyll had held counsels to
discuss the deposition of the king.  Ladywell produced to the Committee
his written statement that Argyll had spoken before him of these
consultations of lawyers and divines.  He was placed in the castle, and
was so worked on that he "cleared" Argyll and confessed that, advised by
Montrose, he had reported Argyll's remarks to the king.  Papers with
hints and names in cypher were found in possession of the messenger.

The whole affair is enigmatic; in any case Ladywell was hanged for
"leasing-making" (spreading false reports), an offence not previously
capital, and Montrose with his friends was imprisoned in the castle.
Doubtless he had meant to accuse Argyll before Parliament of treason.  On
July 27, 1641, being arraigned before Parliament, he said, "My resolution
is to carry with me fidelity and honour to the grave."  He lay in prison
when the king, vainly hoping for support against the English Parliament,
visited Edinburgh (August 14-November 17, 1641).

Charles was now servile to his Scottish Parliament, accepting an Act by
which it must consent to his nominations of officers of State.  Hamilton
with his brother, Lanark, had courted the alliance and lived in the
intimacy of Argyll.  On October 12 Charles told the House "a very strange
story."  On the previous day Hamilton had asked leave to retire from
Court, in fear of his enemies.  On the day of the king's speaking,
Hamilton, Argyll, and Lanark had actually retired.  On October 22, from
their retreat, the brothers said that they had heard of a conspiracy, by
nobles and others in the king's favour, to cut their throats.  The
evidence is very confused and contradictory: Hamilton and Argyll were
said to have collected a force of 5000 men in the town, and, on October
5, such a gathering was denounced in a proclamation.  Charles in vain
asked for a public inquiry into the affair before the whole House.  He
now raised some of his opponents a step in the peerage: Argyll became a
marquis, and Montrose was released from prison.  On October 28 Charles
announced the untoward news of an Irish rising and massacre.  He was, of
course, accused of having caused it, and the massacre was in turn the
cause of, or pretext for, the shooting and hanging of Irish prisoners--men
and women--in Scotland during the civil war.  On November 18 he left
Scotland for ever.

The events in England of the spring in 1642, the attempted arrest of the
five members (January 4), the retreat of the queen to France, Charles's
retiral to York, indicated civil war, and the king set up his standard at
Nottingham on August 22.  The Covenanters had received from Charles all
that they asked; they had no quarrel with him, but they argued that if he
were victorious in England he would use his strength and withdraw his
concessions to Scotland.

Sir Walter Scott "leaves it to casuists to decide whether one contracting
party is justified in breaking a solemn treaty upon the suspicion that in
future contingencies it might be infringed by the other."  He suggests
that to the needy nobles and Dugald Dalgettys of the Covenant "the good
pay and free quarters" and "handsome sums" of England were an
irresistible temptation, while the preachers thought they would be
allowed to set up "the golden candlestick" of presbytery in England
('Legend of Montrose,' chapter i.)  Of the two the preachers were the
more grievously disappointed.

A General Assembly of July-August 1642 was, as usual, concerned with
politics, for politics and religion were inextricably intermixed.  The
Assembly appointed a Standing Commission to represent it, and the powers
of the Commission were of so high a strain that "to some it is terrible
already," says the Covenanting letter-writer Baillie.  A letter from the
Kirk was carried to the English Parliament which acquiesced in the
abolition of Episcopacy.  In November 1642 the English Parliament,
unsuccessful in war, appealed to Scotland for armed aid; in December
Charles took the same course.

The Commission of the General Assembly, and the body of administrators
called Conservators of the Peace, overpowered the Privy Council, put down
a petition of Montrose's party (who declared that they were bound by the
Covenant to defend the king), and would obviously arm on the side of the
English Parliament if England would adopt Presbyterian government.  They
held a Convention of the Estates (June 22, 1643); they discovered a
Popish plot for an attack on Argyll's country by the Macdonalds in
Ireland, once driven from Kintyre by the Campbells, and now to be led by
young Colkitto.  While thus excited, they received in the General
Assembly (August 7) a deputation from the English Parliament; and now was
framed a new band between the English Parliament and Scotland.  It was an
alliance, "The Solemn League and Covenant," by which Episcopacy was to be
abolished and religion established "according to the Word of God."  To
the Covenanters this phrase meant that England would establish
Presbyterianism, but they were disappointed.  The ideas of the
Independents, such as Cromwell, were almost as much opposed to presbytery
as to episcopacy, and though the Covenanters took the pay and fought the
battles of the Parliament against their king, they never received what
they had meant to stipulate for,--the establishment of presbytery in
England.  Far from that, Cromwell, like James VI., was to deprive them of
their ecclesiastical palladium, the General Assembly.

Foreseeing nothing, the Scots were delighted when the English accepted
the new band.  Their army, under Alexander Leslie (Earl of Leven), now
too old for his post, crossed Tweed in January 1644.  They might never
have crossed had Charles, in the autumn of 1643, listened to Montrose and
allowed him to attack the Covenanters in Scotland.  In December 1643,
Hamilton and Lanark, who had opposed Montrose's views and confirmed the
king in his waverings, came to him at Oxford.  Montrose refused to serve
with them, rather he would go abroad; and Hamilton was imprisoned on
charges of treason: in fact, he had been double-minded, inconstant, and
incompetent.  Montrose's scheme implied clan warfare, the use of exiled
Macdonalds, who were Catholics, against the Campbells.  The obvious
objections were very strong; but "needs must when the devil drives": the
Hanoverian kings employed foreign soldiers against their subjects in 1715
and 1745; but the Macdonalds were subjects of King Charles.

Hamilton's brother, Lanark, escaped, and now frankly joined the
Covenanters.  Montrose was promoted to a Marquisate, and received the
Royal Commission as Lieutenant-General (February 1644), which alienated
old Huntly, chief of the Gordons, who now and again divided and paralysed
that gallant clan.  Montrose rode north, where, in February 1644, old
Leslie, with twenty regiments of foot, three thousand horse, and many
guns, was besieging Newcastle.  With him was the prototype of Scott's
Dugald Dalgetty, Sir James Turner, who records examples of Leslie's
senile incompetency.  Leslie, at least, forced the Marquis of Newcastle
to a retreat, and a movement of Montrose on Dumfries was paralysed by the
cowardice or imbecility of the Scottish magnates on the western Border.
He returned, took Morpeth, was summoned by Prince Rupert, and reached him
the day after the disaster of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644), from which
Buccleuch's Covenanting regiment ran without stroke of sword, while
Alexander Leslie also fled, carrying news of his own defeat.  It appears
that the Scottish horse, under David Leslie, were at Marston Moor, as
always, the pick of their army.

Rupert took over Montrose's men, and the great Marquis, disguised as a
groom, rode hard to the house of a kinsman, near Tay, between Perth and
Dunkeld.  Alone and comfortless, in a little wood, Montrose met a man who
was carrying the Fiery Cross, and summoning the country to resist the
Irish Scots of Alastair Macdonald (Colkitto), who had landed with a force
of 1500 musketeers in Argyll, and was believed to be descending on
Atholl, pursued by Seaforth and Argyll, and faced by the men of Badenoch.
The two armies {181} were confronting each other when Montrose, in plaid
and kilt, approached Colkitto and showed him his commission.  Instantly
the two opposed forces combined into one, and with 2500 men, some armed
with bows and arrows, and others having only one charge for each musket,
Montrose began his year of victories.

The temptation to describe in detail his extraordinary series of
successes and of unexampled marches over snow-clad and pathless mountains
must be resisted.  The mobility and daring of Montrose's irregular and
capricious levies, with his own versatile military genius and the heroic
valour of Colkitto, enabled him to defeat a large Covenanting force at
Tippermuir, near Perth: here he had but his 2500 men (September 1); to
repeat his victory at Aberdeen {182} (September 13), to evade and
discourage Argyll, who retired to Inveraray; to winter in and ravage
Argyll's country, and to turn on his tracks from a northern retreat and
destroy the Campbells at Inverlochy, where Argyll looked on from his
galley (February 2, 1645).

General Baillie, a trained soldier, took the command of the Covenanting
levies and regular troops ("Red coats"), and nearly surprised Montrose in
Dundee.  By a retreat showing even more genius than his victories, he
escaped, appeared on the north-east coast, and scattered a Covenanting
force under Hurry, at Auldearn, near Inverness (May 9, 1645).

Such victories as Montrose's were more than counterbalanced by Cromwell's
defeat of Rupert and Charles at Naseby (June 14, 1645); while presbytery
suffered a blow from Cromwell's demand, that the English Parliament
should grant "freedom of conscience," not for Anglican or Catholic, of
course, but for religions non-Presbyterian.  The "bloody sectaries," as
the Presbyterians called Cromwell's Independents, were now masters of the
field: never would the blue banner of the Covenant be set up south of
Tweed.

Meanwhile General Baillie marched against Montrose, who outmanoeuvred him
all over the eastern Highlands, and finally gave him battle at Alford on
the Don.  Montrose had not here Colkitto and the western clans, but his
Gordon horse, his Irish, the Farquharsons, and the Badenoch men were
triumphantly successful.  Unfortunately, Lord Gordon was slain: he alone
could bring out and lead the clan of Huntly.  Only by joining hands with
Charles could Montrose do anything decisive.  The king, hoping for no
more than a death in the field "with honour and a good conscience,"
pushed as far north as Doncaster, where he was between Poyntz's army and
a great cavalry force, led by David Leslie, from Hereford, to launch
against Montrose.  The hero snatched a final victory.  He had but a
hundred horse, but he had Colkitto and the flower of the fighting clans,
including the invincible Macleans.  Baillie, in command of new levies of
some 10,000 men, was thwarted by a committee of Argyll and other noble
amateurs.  He met the enemy south of Forth, at Kilsyth, between Stirling
and Glasgow.  The fiery Argyll made Baillie desert an admirable
position--Montrose was on the plain, Baillie was on the heights--and
expose his flank by a march across Montrose's front.  The Macleans and
Macdonalds, on the lower slope of the hill, without orders, saw their
chance, and racing up a difficult glen, plunged into the Covenanting
flank.  Meanwhile the more advanced part of the Covenanting force were
driving back some Gordons from a hill on Montrose's left, who were
rescued by a desperate charge of Aboyne's handful of horse among the red
coats; Airlie charged with the Ogilvies; the advanced force of the
Covenant was routed, and the Macleans and Macdonalds completed the work
they had begun (August 15).  Few of the unmounted Covenanters escaped
from Kilsyth; and Argyll, taking boat in the Forth, hurried to Newcastle,
where David Leslie, coming north, obtained infantry regiments to back his
4000 cavalry.

In a year Montrose, with forces so irregular and so apt to go home after
every battle, had actually cleared militant Covenanters out of Scotland.
But the end had come.  He would not permit the sack of Glasgow.  Three
thousand clansmen left him; Colkitto went away to harry Kintyre.  Aboyne
and the Gordons rode home on some private pique; and Montrose relied on
men whom he had already proved to be broken reeds, the Homes and Kers
(Roxburgh) of the Border, and the futile and timid Traquair.  When he
came among them they forsook him and fled; on September 10, at Kelso, Sir
Robert Spottiswoode recognised the desertion and the danger.

Meanwhile Leslie, with an overpowering force of seasoned soldiers, horse
and foot, marched with Argyll, not to Edinburgh, but down Gala to Tweed;
while Montrose had withdrawn from Kelso, up Ettrick to Philiphaugh, on
the left of Ettrick, within a mile of Selkirk.  He had but 500 Irish, who
entrenched themselves, and an uncertain number of mounted Border lairds
with their servants and tenants.  Charteris of Hempsfield, who had been
scouting, reported that Leslie was but two or three miles distant, at
Sunderland Hall, where Tweed and Ettrick meet; but the news was not
carried to Montrose, who lay at Selkirk.  At breakfast, on September 13,
Montrose learned that Leslie was attacking.  What followed is uncertain
in its details.  A so-called "contemporary ballad" is incredibly
impossible in its anachronisms, and is modern.  In this egregious
doggerel we are told that a veteran who had fought at Solway Moss a
century earlier, and at "cursed Dunbar" a few years later (or under
Edward I.?), advised Leslie to make a turning movement behind Linglie
Hill.  This is not evidence.  Though Leslie may have made such a
movement, he describes his victory as very easy: and so it should have
been, as Montrose had only the remnant of his Antrim men and a rabble of
reluctant Border recruits.

A news letter from Haddington, of September 16, represents the Cavaliers
as making a good fight.  The mounted Border lairds galloped away.  Most
of the Irish fell fighting: the rest were massacred, whether after
promise of quarter or not is disputed.  _Their captured women were hanged
in cold blood some months later_.  Montrose, the Napiers, and some forty
horse either cut their way through or evaded Leslie's overpowering
cavalry, and galloped across the hills of Yarrow to the Tweed.  He had
lost only the remnant of his Scoto-Irish; but the Gordons, when Montrose
was presently menacing Glasgow, were held back by Huntly, and Colkitto
pursued his private adventures.  Montrose had been deserted by the clans,
and lured to ruin by the perfidious promises of the Border lords and
lairds.  The aim of his strategy had been to relieve the Royalists of
England by a diversion that would deprive the Parliamentarians of their
paid Scottish allies, and what man might do Montrose had done.

After his first victory Montrose, an excommunicated man, fought under an
offer of 1500 pounds for his murder, and the Covenanters welcomed the
assassin of his friend, Lord Kilpont.

The result of Montrose's victories was hostility between the Covenanting
army in England and the English, who regarded them as expensive and
inefficient.  Indeed, they seldom, save for the command of David Leslie,
displayed military qualities, and later, were invariably defeated when
they encountered the English under Cromwell and Lambert.

Montrose never slew a prisoner, but the Convention at St Andrews, in
November 1645, sentenced to death their Cavalier prisoners (Lord Ogilvy
escaped disguised in his sister's dress), and they ordered the hanging of
captives and of the women who had accompanied the Irish.  "It was certain
of the clergy who pressed for the extremest measures." {186a}   They had
revived the barbarous belief, retained in the law of ancient Greece, that
the land had been polluted by, and must be cleansed by, blood, under
penalty of divine wrath.  As even the Covenanting Baillie wrote, "to this
day no man in England has been executed for bearing arms against the
Parliament."  The preachers argued that to keep the promises of quarter
which had been given to the prisoners was "_to violate the oath of the
Covenant_." {186b}

The prime object of the English opponents of the king was now "to hustle
the Scots out of England." {187}  Meanwhile Charles, not captured but
hopeless, was negotiating with all the parties, and ready to yield on
every point except that of forcing presbytery on England--a matter which,
said Montereuil, the French ambassador, "did not concern them but their
neighbours."  Charles finally trusted the Scots with his person, and the
question is, had he or had he not assurance that he would be well
received?  If he had any assurance it was merely verbal, "a shadow of a
security," wrote Montereuil.  Charles was valuable to the Scots only as a
pledge for the payment of their arrears of wages.  There was much
chicanery and shuffling on both sides, and probably there were
misconceptions on both sides.  A letter of Montereuil (April 26, 1646)
convinced Charles that he might trust the Scots; they verbally promised
"safety, honour, and conscience," but refused to sign a copy of their
words.  Charles trusted them, rode out of Oxford, joined them at
Southwell, and, says Sir James Turner, who was present, was commanded by
Lothian to sign the Covenant, and "barbarously used."  They took Charles
to Newcastle, denying their assurance to him.  "With unblushing
falsehood," says Mr Gardiner, they in other respects lied to the English
Parliament.  On May 19 Charles bade Montrose leave the country, which he
succeeded in doing, despite the treacherous endeavours of his enemies to
detain him till his day of safety (August 31) was passed.

The Scots of the army were in a quandary.  The preachers, their masters,
would not permit them to bring to Scotland an uncovenanted king.  They
could not stay penniless in England.  For 200,000 pounds down and a
promise, never kept, of a similar sum later, they left Charles in English
hands, with some assurances for his safety, and early in February 1647
crossed Tweed with their thirty-six cartloads of money.  The act was
hateful to very many Scots, but the Estates, under the command of the
preachers, had refused to let the king, while uncovenanted, cross into
his native kingdom, and to bring him meant war with England.  But _that_
must ensue in any case.  The hope of making England presbyterian, as
under the Solemn League and Covenant, had already perished.

Leslie, with the part of the army still kept up, chased Colkitto, and, at
Dunavertie, under the influence of Nevoy, a preacher, put 300 Irish
prisoners to the sword.

The parties in Scotland were now: (1) the Kirk, Argyll, the two Leslies,
and most of the Commons; (2) Hamilton, Lanark, and Lauderdale, who had no
longer anything to fear, as regards their estates, from Charles or from
bishops, and who were ashamed of his surrender to the English; (3)
Royalists in general.  With Charles (December 27, 1647) in his prison at
Carisbrooke, Lauderdale, Loudoun, and Lanark made a secret treaty, _The
Engagement_, which they buried in the garden, for if it were discovered
the Independents of the army would have attacked Scotland.

An Assembly of the Scots Estates on March 3, 1648, had a large majority
of nobles, gentry, and many burgesses in favour of aiding the captive
king; on the other side Argyll was backed by the omnipotent Commission of
the General Assembly, and by the full force of prayers and sermons.  The
letter-writer, Baillie, now deemed "that it were for the good of the
world that churchmen did meddle with ecclesiastical affairs only."  The
Engagers insisted on establishing presbytery in England, which neither
satisfied the Kirk nor the Cavaliers and Independents.  Nothing more
futile could have been devised.

The Estates, in May, began to raise an army; the preachers denounced
them: there was a battle between armed communicants of the preachers'
party and the soldiers of the State at Mauchline.  Invading England on
July 8, Hamilton had Lambert and Cromwell to face him, and left Argyll,
the preachers, and their "slashing communicants" in his rear.  Lanark had
vainly urged that the west country fanatics should be crushed before the
Border was crossed.  By a march worthy of Montrose across the fells into
Lanarkshire, Cromwell reached Preston; cut in between the northern parts
of Hamilton's army; defeated the English Royalists and Langdale, and cut
to pieces or captured the Scots, disunited as their generals were, at
Wigan and Warrington (August 17-19).  Hamilton was taken and was
decapitated later.  The force that recrossed the Border consisted of such
mounted men as escaped, with the detachment of Monro which had not joined
Hamilton.

The godly in Scotland rejoiced at the defeat of their army: the levies of
the western shires of Ayr, Renfrew, and Lanark occupied Edinburgh: Argyll
and the Kirk party were masters, and when Cromwell arrived in Edinburgh
early in October he was entertained at dinner by Argyll.  The left wing
of the Covenant was now allied with the Independents--the deadly foes of
presbytery!  To the ordinary mind this looks like a new breach of the
Covenant, that impossible treaty with Omnipotence.  Charles had written
that the divisions of parties were probably "God's way to punish them for
their many rebellions and perfidies."  The punishment was now beginning
in earnest, and the alliance of extreme Covenanters with "bloody
sectaries" could not be maintained.  Yet historians admire the
statesmanship of Argyll!

If the edge which the sword of the Covenant turned against the English
enemies of presbytery were blunted, the edge that smote Covenanters less
extreme than Argyll and the preachers was whetted afresh.  In the Estates
of January 5, 1649, Argyll, whose party had a large majority, and the
fanatical Johnston of Waristoun (who made private covenants with Jehovah)
demanded disenabling Acts against all who had in any degree been tainted
by the _Engagement_ for the rescue of the king.  The Engagers were
divided into four "Classes," who were rendered incapable by "The Act of
Classes" of holding any office, civil or military.  This Act deprived the
country of the services of thousands of men, just at the moment when the
English army, the Independents, Argyll's allies, were holding the Trial
of Charles I.; and, in defiance of timid remonstrances from the Scottish
Commissioners in England, cut off "that comely head" (January 30, 1649),
which meant war with Scotland.



SCOTLAND AND CHARLES II.


This was certain, for, on February 5, on the news of the deed done at
Whitehall, the Estates proclaimed Charles II. as Scottish King--if he
took the Covenant.  By an ingenious intrigue Argyll allowed Lauderdale
and Lanark, whom the Estates had intended to arrest, to escape to
Holland, where Charles was residing, and their business was to bring that
uncovenanted prince to sign the Covenant, and to overcome the influence
of Montrose, who, with Clarendon, of course resisted such a trebly
dishonourable act of perjured hypocrisy.  During the whole struggle,
since Montrose took the king's side, he had been thwarted by the
Hamiltons.  They invariably wavered: now they were for a futile policy of
dishonour, in which they involved their young king, Argyll, and Scotland.
Montrose stood for honour and no Covenant; Argyll, the Hamiltons,
Lauderdale, and the majority of the preachers stood for the Covenant with
dishonour and perjury; the left wing of the preachers stood for the
Covenant, but not for its dishonourable and foresworn acceptance by
Charles.

As a Covenanter, Charles II. would be the official foe of the English
Independents and army; Scotland would need every sword in the kingdom,
and the kingdom's best general, Montrose, yet the Act of Classes, under
the dictation of the preachers, rejected every man tainted with
participation in or approval of the Engagement--or of neglecting family
prayers!

Charles, in fact, began (February 22) by appointing Montrose his
Lieutenant-Governor and Captain-General in Scotland, though Lauderdale
and Lanark "abate not an ace of their damned Covenant in all their
discourses," wrote Hyde.  The dispute between Montrose, on the side of
honour, and that of Lanark, Lauderdale, and other Scottish envoys, ended
as--given the character of Charles II. and his destitution--it must end.
Charles (January 22, 1650) despatched Montrose to fight for him in
Scotland, and sent him the Garter.  Montrose knew his doom: he replied,
"With the more alacrity shall I abandon still my life to search my death
for the interests of your Majesty's honour and service."  He searched his
death, and soon he found it.

On May 1, Charles, by the Treaty of Breda, vowed to sign the Covenant; a
week earlier Montrose, not joined by the Mackenzies, had been defeated by
Strachan at Carbisdale, on the south of the Kyle, opposite Invershin, in
Sutherlandshire.  He was presently captured, and crowned a glorious life
of honour by a more glorious death on the gibbet (May 21).  He had kept
his promise; he had searched his death; he had loyally defended, like
Jeanne d'Arc, a disloyal king; he had "carried fidelity and honour with
him to the grave."  His body was mutilated, his limbs were exposed,--they
now lie in St Giles' Church, Edinburgh, where is his beautiful monument.

Montrose's last words to Charles (March 26, from Kirkwall) implored that
Prince "to be just to himself,"--not to perjure himself by signing the
Covenant.  The voice of honour is not always that of worldly wisdom, but
events proved that Charles and Scotland could have lost nothing and must
have gained much had the king listened to Montrose.  He submitted, we
saw, to commissioners sent to him from Scotland.  Says one of these
gentlemen, "_He_ . . . sinfully complied with what _we_ most sinfully
pressed upon him, . . . _our_ sin was more than _his_."

While his subjects in Scotland were executing his loyal servants taken
prisoners in Montrose's last defeat, Charles crossed the sea, signing the
Covenants on board ship, and landed at the mouth of Spey.  What he gained
by his dishonour was the guilt of perjury; and the consequent distrust of
the wilder but more honest Covenanters, who knew that he had perjured
himself, and deemed his reception a cause of divine wrath and disastrous
judgments.  Next he was separated from most of his false friends, who had
urged him to his guilt, and from all Royalists; and he was not allowed to
be with his army, which the preachers kept "purging" of all who did not
come up to their standard of sanctity.

Their hopeful scheme was to propitiate the Deity and avert wrath by
purging out officers of experience, while filling up their places with
godly but incompetent novices in war, "ministers' sons, clerks, and such
other sanctified creatures."  This final and fatal absurdity was the
result of playing at being the Israel described in the early historic
books of the Old Testament, a policy initiated by Knox in spite of the
humorous protests of Lethington.

For the surer purging of that Achan, Charles, and to conciliate the party
who deemed him the greatest cause of wrath of all, the king had to sign a
false and disgraceful declaration that he was "afflicted in spirit before
God because of the impieties of his father and mother"!  He was helpless
in the hands of Argyll, David Leslie, and the rest: he knew they would
desert him if he did not sign, and he yielded (August 16).  Meanwhile
Cromwell, with Lambert, Monk, 16,000 foot and horse, and a victualling
fleet, had reached Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, by July 28.

David Leslie very artfully evaded every attempt to force a fight, but
hung about him in all his movements.  Cromwell was obliged to retreat for
lack of supplies in a devastated country, and on September 1 reached
Dunbar by the coast road.  Leslie, marching parallel along the
hill-ridges, occupied Doonhill and secured a long, deep, and steep
ravine, "the Peaths," near Cockburnspath, barring Cromwell's line of
march.  On September 2 the controlling clerical Committee was still
busily purging and depleting the Scottish army.  The night of September 2-
3 was very wet, the officers deserted their regiments to take shelter.
Says Leslie himself, "We might as easily have beaten them as we did James
Graham at Philiphaugh, if the officers had stayed by their own troops and
regiments."  Several witnesses, and Cromwell himself, asserted that,
owing to the insistence of the preachers, Leslie moved his men to the
lower slopes on the afternoon of September 2.  "The Lord hath delivered
them into our hands," Cromwell is reported to have said.  They now
occupied a position where the banks of the lower Broxburn were flat and
assailable, not steep and forming a strong natural moat, as on the higher
level.  All night Cromwell rode along and among his regiments of horse,
biting his lip till the blood ran down his chin.  Leslie thought to
surprise Cromwell; Cromwell surprised Leslie, crossed the Broxburn on the
low level, before dawn, and drove into the Scots who were all unready,
the matches of their muskets being wet and unlighted.  The centre made a
good stand, but a flank charge by English cavalry cut up the Scots foot,
and Leslie fled with the nobles, gentry, and mounted men.  In killed,
wounded, and prisoners the Scots are said to have lost 14,000 men, a
manifest exaggeration.  It was an utter defeat.

"Surely," wrote Cromwell, "it is probable the Kirk has done her do."  The
Kirk thought not; purging must go on, "nobody must blame the Covenant."
Neglect of family prayers was selected as one cause of the defeat!
Strachan and Ker, two extreme whigamores of the left wing of the godly,
went to raise a western force that would neither acknowledge Charles nor
join Cromwell, who now took Edinburgh Castle.  Charles was reduced by
Argyll to make to him the most slavish promises, including the payment of
40,000 pounds, the part of the price of Charles I. which Argyll had not
yet touched.

On October 4 Charles made "the Start"; he fled to the Royalists of
Angus,--Ogilvy and Airlie: he was caught, brought back, and preached at.
Then came fighting between the Royalists and the Estates.  Middleton, a
good soldier, Atholl, and others, declared that they must and would fight
for Scotland, though they were purged out by the preachers.  The Estates
(November 4) gave them an indemnity.  On this point the Kirk split into
twain: the wilder men, led by the Rev. James Guthrie, refused
reconciliation (the Remonstrants); the less fanatical would consent to
it, on terms (the Resolutioners).  The Committee of Estates dared to
resist the Remonstrants: even the Commissioners of the General Assembly
"cannot be against the raising of all fencible persons,"--and at last
adopted the attitude of all sensible persons.  By May 21, 1651, the
Estates rescinded the insane Act of Classes, but the strife between
clerical Remonstrants and Resolutioners persisted till after the
Restoration, the _Remonstrants_ being later named _Protesters_.

Charles had been crowned at Scone on January 1, again signing the
Covenants.  Leslie now occupied Stirling, avoiding an engagement.  In
July, while a General Assembly saw the strife of the two sects, came news
that Lambert had crossed the Forth at Queensferry, and defeated a Scots
force at Inverkeithing, where the Macleans fell almost to a man; Monk
captured a number of the General Assembly, and, as Cromwell, moving to
Perth, could now assail Leslie and the main Scottish force at Stirling,
they, by a desperate resolution, with 4000 horse and 9000 foot, invaded
England by the west marches, "laughing," says one of them, "at the
ridiculousness of our own condition."  On September 1 Monk stormed and
sacked Dundee as Montrose sacked Aberdeen, but if he made a massacre like
that by Edward I. at Berwick, history is lenient to the crime.

On August 22 Charles, with his army, reached Worcester, whither Cromwell
marched with a force twice as great as that of the king.  Worcester was a
Sedan: Charles could neither hold it nor, though he charged gallantly,
could he break through Cromwell's lines.  Before nightfall on September 3
Charles was a fugitive: he had no army; Hamilton was slain, Middleton and
David Leslie with thousands more were prisoners.  Monk had already
captured, at Alyth (August 28), the whole of the Government, the
Committee of Estates, and had also caught some preachers, including James
Sharp, later Archbishop of St Andrews.  England had conquered Scotland at
last, after twelve years of government by preachers acting as
interpreters of the Covenant between Scotland and Jehovah.



CHAPTER XXV.  CONQUERED SCOTLAND.


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.



CHAPTER XXVI.  THE RESTORATION.


There was "dancing and derray" in Scotland among the laity when the king
came to his own again.  The darkest page in the national history seemed
to have been turned; the conquering English were gone with their
abominable tolerance, their craze for soap and water, their aversion to
witch-burnings.  The nobles and gentry would recover their lands and
compensation for their losses; there would be offices to win, and "the
spoils of office."

It seems that in Scotland none of the lessons of misfortune had been
learned.  Since January the chiefs of the milder party of preachers, the
Resolutioners,--they who had been reconciled with the Engagers,--were
employing the Rev. James Sharp, who had been a prisoner in England, as
their agent with Monk, with Lauderdale, in April, with Charles in
Holland, and, again, in London.  Sharp was no fanatic.  From the first he
assured his brethren, Douglas of Edinburgh, Baillie, and the rest, that
there was no chance for "rigid Presbyterianism."  They could conceive of
no Presbyterianism which was not rigid, in the manner of Andrew Melville,
to whom his king was "Christ's silly vassal."  Sharp warned them early
that in face of the irreconcilable Protesters, "moderate Episcopacy"
would be preferred; and Douglas himself assured Sharp that the new
generation in Scotland "bore a heart-hatred to the Covenant," and are
"wearied of the yoke of presbyterial government."

This was true: the ruling classes had seen too much of presbyterial
government, and would prefer bishops as long as they were not pampered
and all-powerful.  On the other hand the lesser gentry, still more their
godly wives, the farmers and burgesses, and the preachers, regarded the
very shadow of Episcopacy as a breach of the Covenant and an insult to
the Almighty.  The Covenanters had forced the Covenant on the consciences
of thousands, from the king downwards, who in soul and conscience loathed
it.  They were to drink of the same cup--Episcopacy was to be forced on
them by fines and imprisonments.  Scotland, her people and rulers were
moving in a vicious circle.  The Resolutioners admitted that to allow the
Protesters to have any hand in affairs was "to breed continual distemper
and disorders," and Baillie was for banishing the leaders of the
Protesters, irreconcilables like the Rev. James Guthrie, to the Orkney
islands.  But the Resolutioners, on the other hand, were no less eager to
stop the use of the liturgy in Charles's own household, and to persecute
every sort of Catholic, Dissenter, Sectary, and Quaker in Scotland.
Meanwhile Argyll, in debt, despised on all sides, and yet dreaded, was
holding a great open-air Communion meeting of Protesters at Paisley, in
the heart of the wildest Covenanting region (May 27, 1660).  He was still
dangerous; he was trying to make himself trusted by the Protesters, who
were opposed to Charles.  It may be doubted if any great potentate in
Scotland except the Marquis wished to revive the constitutional triumphs
of Argyll's party in the last Parliament of Charles I.  Charles now named
his Privy Council and Ministers without waiting for parliamentary
assent--though his first Parliament would have assented to anything.  He
chose only his late supporters: Glencairn who raised his standard in
1653; Rothes, a humorous and not a cruel voluptuary; and, as Secretary
for Scotland in London, Lauderdale, who had urged him to take the
Covenant, and who for twenty years was to be his buffoon, his favourite,
and his wavering and unscrupulous adviser.  Among these greedy and
treacherous profligates there would, had he survived, have been no place
for Montrose.

In defiance of warnings from omens, second-sighted men, and sensible men,
Argyll left the safe sanctuary of his mountains and sea-straits, and
betook himself to London, "a fey man."  Most of his past was covered by
an Act of Indemnity, but not his doings in 1653.  He was arrested before
he saw the king's face (July 8, 1660), and lay in the Tower till, in
December, he was taken to be tried for treason in Scotland.

Sharp's friends were anxious to interfere in favour of establishing
Presbyterianism in England; he told them that the hope was vain; he
repeatedly asked for leave to return home, and, while an English preacher
assured Charles that the rout of Worcester had been God's vengeance for
his taking of the Covenant, Sharp (June 25) told his Resolutioners that
"the Protesters' doom is dight."

Administration in Scotland was intrusted to the Committee of Estates whom
Monk (1650) had captured at Alyth, and with them Glencairn, as
Chancellor, entered Edinburgh on August 22.  Next day, while the
Committee was busy, James Guthrie and some Protester preachers met, and,
in the old way, drew up a "supplication."  They denounced religious
toleration, and asked for the establishment of Presbytery in England, and
the filling of all offices with Covenanters.  They were all arrested and
accused of attempting to "rekindle civil war," which would assuredly have
followed had their prayer been accepted.  Next year Guthrie was hanged.
But ten days after his arrest Sharp had brought down a letter of Charles
to the Edinburgh Presbytery, promising to "protect and preserve the
government of the Church of Scotland as it is established by law."  Had
the words run "as it may be established by law" (in Parliament) it would
not have been a dishonourable quibble--as it was.

Parliament opened on New Year's Day 1661, with Middleton as Commissioner.
In the words of Sir George Mackenzie, then a very young advocate and man
of letters, "never was Parliament so obsequious."  The king was declared
"supreme Governor over all persons and in all causes" (a blow at Kirk
judicature), and all Acts between 1633 and 1661 were rescinded, just as
thirty years of ecclesiastical legislation had been rescinded by the
Covenanters.  A sum of 40,000 pounds yearly was settled on the king.
Argyll was tried, was defended by young George Mackenzie, and, when he
seemed safe, his doom was fixed by the arrival of a Campbell from London
bearing some of his letters to Lilburne and Monk (1653-1655) which the
Indemnity of 1651 did not cover.  He died, by the axe (not the rope, like
Montrose), with dignity and courage.

The question of Church government in Scotland was left to Charles and his
advisers.  The problem presented to the Government of the Restoration by
the Kirk was much more difficult and complicated than historians usually
suppose.  The pretensions which the preachers had inherited from Knox and
Andrew Melville were practically incompatible, as had been proved, with
the existence of the State.  In the southern and western shires,--such as
those of Dumfries, Galloway, Ayr, Renfrew, and Lanark,--the forces which
attacked the Engagers had been mustered; these shires had backed Strachan
and Ker and Guthrie in the agitation against the king, the Estates, and
the less violent clergy, after Dunbar.  But without Argyll, and with no
probable noble leaders, they could do little harm; they had done none
under the English occupation, which abolished the General Assembly.  To
have restored the Assembly, or rather two Assemblies--that of the
Protesters and that of the Resolutionists,--would certainly have been
perilous.  Probably the wisest plan would have been to grant a General
Assembly, to meet _after_ the session of Parliament; not, as had been the
custom, to meet before it and influence or coerce the Estates.  Had that
measure proved perilous to peace it need not have been repeated,--the
Kirk might have been left in the state to which the English had reduced
it.

This measure would not have so much infuriated the devout as did the
introduction of "black prelacy," and the ejection of some 300 adored
ministers, chiefly in the south-west, and "the making of a desert first,
and then peopling it with owls and satyrs" (the curates), as Archbishop
Leighton described the action of 1663.  There ensued the finings of all
who would not attend the ministrations of "owls and satyrs,"--a grievance
which produced two rebellions (1666 and 1679) and a doctrine of
anarchism, and was only worn down by eternal and cruel persecutions.

By violence the Restoration achieved its aim: the Revolution of 1688
entered into the results; it was a bitter moment in the evolution of
Scotland--a moment that need never have existed.  Episcopacy was
restored, four bishops were consecrated, and Sharp accepted (as might
have long been foreseen) the See of St Andrews.  He was henceforth
reckoned a Judas, and assuredly he had ruined his character for honour:
he became a puppet of Government, despised by his masters, loathed by the
rest of Scotland.

In May-September 1662, Parliament ratified the change to Episcopacy.  It
seems to have been thought that few preachers except the Protesters would
be recalcitrant, refuse collation from bishops, and leave their manses.
In point of fact, though they were allowed to consult their consciences
till February 1663, nearly 300 ministers preferred their consciences to
their livings.  They remained centres of the devotion of their flocks,
and the "curates," hastily gathered, who took their places, were
stigmatised as ignorant and profligate, while, as they were resisted,
rabbled, and daily insulted, the country was full of disorder.

The Government thus mortally offended the devout classes, though no
attempt was made to introduce a liturgy.  In the churches the services
were exactly, or almost exactly, what they had been; but excommunications
could now only be done by sanction of the bishops.  Witch-burnings, in
spite of the opposition of George Mackenzie and the Council, were soon as
common as under the Covenant.  Oaths declaring it unlawful to enter into
Covenants or take up arms against the king were imposed on all persons in
office.

Middleton, of his own authority, now proposed the ostracism, by
parliamentary ballot, of twelve persons reckoned dangerous.  Lauderdale
was mainly aimed at (it is a pity that the bullet did not find its
billet), with Crawford, Cassilis, Tweeddale, Lothian, and other peers who
did not approve of the recent measures.  But Lauderdale, in London,
seeing Charles daily, won his favour; Middleton was recalled (March
1663), and Lauderdale entered freely on his wavering, unscrupulous,
corrupt, and disastrous period of power.

The Parliament of June 1663, meeting under Rothes, was packed by the
least constitutional method of choosing the Lords of the Articles.
Waristoun was brought from France, tried, and hanged, "expressing more
fear than I ever saw," wrote Lauderdale, whose Act "against Separation
and Disobedience to Ecclesiastical Authority" fined abstainers from
services in their parish churches.  In 1664, Sharp, who was despised by
Lauderdale and Glencairn, obtained the erection of that old grievance--a
Court of High Commission, including bishops, to punish nonconformists.
Sir James Turner was intrusted with the task of dragooning them, by
fining and the quartering of soldiers on those who would not attend the
curates and would keep conventicles.  Turner was naturally clement and
good-natured, but wine often deprived him of his wits, and his soldiery
behaved brutally.  Their excesses increased discontent, and war with
Holland (1664) gave them hopes of a Dutch ally.  Conventicles became
common; they had an organisation of scouts and sentinels.  The
malcontents intrigued with Holland in 1666, and schemed to capture the
three Keys of the Kingdom--the castles of Stirling, Dumbarton, and
Edinburgh.  The States-General promised, when this was done, to send
ammunition and 150,000 gulden (July 1666).

When rebellion did break out it had no foreign aid, and a casual origin.
In the south-west Turner commanded but seventy soldiers, scattered all
about the country.  On November 14 some of them mishandled an old man in
the clachan of Dalry, on the Ken.  A soldier was shot in revenge
(Mackenzie speaks as if a conventicle was going on in the neighbourhood);
people gathered in arms, with the Laird of Corsack, young Maxwell of
Monreith, and M'Lennan; caught Turner, undressed, in Dumfries, and
carried him with them as they "went conventicling about," as Mackenzie
writes, holding prayer-meetings, led by Wallace, an old soldier of the
Covenant.  At Lanark they renewed the Covenant.  Dalziel of Binns, who
had learned war in Russia, led a pursuing force.  The rebels were
disappointed in hopes of Dutch or native help at Edinburgh; they turned,
when within three miles of the town, into the passes of the Pentland
Hills, and at Bullion Green, on November 28, displayed fine soldierly
qualities and courage, but fled, broken, at nightfall.  The soldiers and
countryfolk, who were unsympathetic, took a number of prisoners,
preachers and laymen, on whom the Council, under the presidency of Sharp,
exercised a cruelty bred of terror.  The prisoners were defended by
George Mackenzie: it has been strangely stated that he was Lord Advocate,
and persecuted them!  Fifteen rebels were hanged: the use of torture to
extract information was a return, under Fletcher, the King's Advocate, to
a practice of Scottish law which had been almost in abeyance since
1638--except, of course, in the case of witches.  Turner vainly tried to
save from the Boot {208} the Laird of Corsack, who had protected his life
from the fanatics.  "The executioner favoured Mr Mackail," says the Rev.
Mr Kirkton, himself a sufferer later.  This Mr Mackail, when a lad of
twenty-one (1662), had already denounced the rulers, in a sermon, as on
the moral level of Haman and Judas.

It is entirely untrue that Sharp concealed a letter from the king
commanding that no blood should be shed (Charles detested hanging
people).  If any one concealed his letter, it was Burnet, Archbishop of
Glasgow.  Dalziel now sent Ballantyne to supersede Turner and to exceed
him in ferocity; and Bellenden and Tweeddale wrote to Lauderdale
deprecating the cruelties and rapacity of the reaction, and avowing
contempt of Sharp.  He was "snibbed," confined to his diocese, and "cast
down, yea, lower than the dust," wrote Rothes to Lauderdale.  He was held
to have exaggerated in his reports the forces of the spirit of revolt;
but Tweeddale, Sir Robert Murray, and Kincardine found when in power that
matters were really much more serious than they had supposed.  In the
disturbed districts--mainly the old Strathclyde and Pictish Galloway--the
conformist ministers were perpetually threatened, insulted, and robbed.

According to a sympathetic historian, "on the day when Charles should
abolish bishops and permit free General Assemblies, the western Whigs
would become his law-abiding subjects; but till that day they would be
irreconcilable."  But a Government is not always well advised in yielding
to violence.  Moreover, when Government had deserted its clergy, and had
granted free General Assemblies, the two Covenants would re-arise, and
the pretensions of the clergy to dominate the State would be revived.
Lauderdale drifted into a policy of alternate "Indulgences" or
tolerations, and of repression, which had the desired effect, at the
maximum of cost to justice and decency.  Before England drove James II.
from the throne, but a small remnant of fanatics were in active
resistance, and the Covenants had ceased to be dangerous.

A scheme of partial toleration was mooted in 1667, and Rothes was removed
from his practical dictatorship, while Turner was made the scapegoat of
Rothes, Sharp, and Dalziel.  The result of the scheme of toleration was
an increase in disorder.  Bishop Leighton had a plan for abolishing all
but a shadow of Episcopacy; but the temper of the recalcitrants displayed
itself in a book, 'Naphtali,' advocating the right of the godly to murder
their oppressors.  This work contained provocations to anarchism, and, in
Knox's spirit, encouraged any Phinehas conscious of a "call" from Heaven
to do justice on such persons as he found guilty of troubling the godly.

Fired by such Christian doctrines, on July 11, 1668, one Mitchell--"a
preacher of the Gospel, and a youth of much zeal and piety," says Wodrow
the historian--shot at Sharp, wounded the Bishop of Orkney in the street
of Edinburgh, and escaped.  This event delayed the project of
conciliation, but in July 1669 the first Indulgence was promulgated.  On
making certain concessions, outed ministers were to be restored.  Two-and-
forty came in, including the Resolutioner Douglas, in 1660 the
correspondent of Sharp.  The Indulgence allowed the indulged to reject
Episcopal collation; but while brethren exiled in Holland denounced the
scheme (these brethren, led by Mr MacWard, opposed all attempts at
reconciliation), it also offended the Archbishops, who issued a
Remonstrance.  Sharp was silenced; Burnet of Glasgow was superseded, and
the see was given to the saintly but unpractical Leighton.  By 1670
conventiclers met in arms, and "a clanking Act," as Lauderdale called it,
menaced them with death: Charles II. resented but did not rescind it.  In
fact, the disorders and attacks on conformist ministers were of a
violence much overlooked by our historians.  In 1672 a second Indulgence
split the Kirk into factions--the exiles in Holland maintaining that
preachers who accepted it should be held men unholy, false brethren.  But
the Indulged increased in numbers, and finally in influence.

To such a man as Leighton the whole quarrel seemed "a scuffle of drunken
men in the dark."  An Englishman entering a Scottish church at this time
found no sort of liturgy; prayers and sermons were what the minister
chose to make them--in fact, there was no persecution for religion, says
Sir George Mackenzie.  But if men thought even a shadow of Episcopacy an
offence to Omnipotence, and the king's authority in ecclesiastical cases
a usurping of "the Crown Honours of Christ"; if they consequently broke
the law by attending armed conventicles and assailing conformist
preachers, and then were fined or imprisoned,--from their point of view
they were being persecuted for their religion.  Meanwhile they bullied
and "rabbled" the "curates" for _their_ religion: such was Leighton's
"drunken scuffle in the dark."

In 1672 Lauderdale married the rapacious and tyrannical daughter of Will
Murray--of old the whipping-boy of Charles I., later a disreputable
intriguer.  Lauderdale's own ferocity of temper and his greed had created
so much dislike that in the Parliament of 1673 he was met by a
constitutional opposition headed by the Duke of Hamilton, and with Sir
George Mackenzie as its orator.  Lauderdale consented to withdraw
monopolies on salt, tobacco, and brandy; to other grievances he would not
listen (the distresses of the Kirk were not brought forward), and he
dissolved the Parliament.  The opposition tried to get at him through the
English Commons, who brought against him charges like those which were
fatal to Strafford.  They failed; and Lauderdale, holding seven offices
himself, while his brother Haltoun was Master of the Mint, ruled through
a kind of clique of kinsmen and creatures.

Leighton, in despair, resigned his see: the irreconcilables of the Kirk
had crowned him with insults.  The Kirk, he said, "abounded in furious
zeal and endless debates about the empty name and shadow of a difference
in government, in the meanwhile not having of solemn and orderly public
worship as much as a shadow."

Wodrow, the historian of the sufferings of the Kirk, declares that
through the riotous proceedings of the religious malcontents "the country
resembled war as much as peace."  But an Act of Council of 1677 bidding
landowners sign a bond for the peaceable behaviour of all on their lands
was refused obedience by many western lairds.  They could not enforce
order, they said: hence it seemed to follow that there was much disorder.
Those who refused were, by a stretch of the law of "law-burrows," bound
over to keep the peace of the Government.  Lauderdale, having nothing
that we would call a police, little money, and a small insufficient force
of regulars, called in "the Highland Host," the retainers of Atholl,
Glenorchy, Mar, Moray, and Airlie, and other northern lords, and
quartered them on the disturbed districts for a month.  They were then
sent home bearing their spoils (February 1678).  Atholl and Perth (later
to be the Catholic minister of James II.) now went over to "the Party,"
the opposition, Hamilton's party; Hamilton and others rode to London to
complain against Lauderdale, but he, aided by the silver tongue of
Mackenzie, who had changed sides, won over Charles, and Lauderdale's
assailants were helpless.

Great unpopularity and disgrace were achieved by the treatment of the
pious Mitchell, who, we have seen, missed Sharp and shot the Bishop of
Orkney in 1668.  In 1674 he was taken, and confessed before the Council,
after receiving from Rothes, then Chancellor, assurance of his life: this
with Lauderdale's consent.  But when brought before the judges, he
retracted his confession.  He was kept a prisoner on the Bass Rock; in
1676 was tortured; in January 1678 was again tried.  Haltoun (who in a
letter of 1674 had mentioned the assurance of life), Rothes, Sharp, and
Lauderdale, all swore that, to their memory, no assurance had been given
in 1674.  Mitchell's counsel asked to be allowed to examine the Register
of the Council, but, for some invisible technical reasons, the Lords of
the Justiciary refused; the request, they said, came too late.  Mackenzie
prosecuted; he had been Mitchell's counsel in 1674, and it is impossible
to follow the reasoning by which he justifies the condemnation and
hanging of Mitchell in January 1678.  Sharp was supposed to have urged
Mitchell's trial, and to have perjured himself, which is far from
certain.  Though Mitchell was guilty, the manner of his taking off was
flagrantly unjust and most discreditable to all concerned.

Huge armed conventicles, and others led by Welsh, a preacher, marched
about through the country in December 1678 to May 1679.  In April 1679
two soldiers were murdered while in bed; next day John Graham of
Claverhouse, who had served under the Prince of Orange with credit, and
now comes upon the scene, reported that Welsh was organising an armed
rebellion, and that the peasants were seizing the weapons of the militia.
Balfour of Kinloch (Burley) and Robert Hamilton, a laird in Fife, were
the leaders of that extreme sect which was feared as much by the indulged
preachers as by the curates, and, on May 2, 1679, Balfour, with Hackstoun
of Rathillet (who merely looked on), and other pious desperadoes, passed
half an hour in clumsily hacking Sharp to death, in the presence of his
daughter, at Magus Moor near St Andrews.

The slayers, says one of them, thanked the Lord "for leading them by His
Holy Spirit in every step they stepped in that matter," and it is obvious
that mere argument was unavailing with gentlemen who cherished such
opinions.  In the portraits of Sharp we see a face of refined goodness
which makes the physiognomist distrust his art.  From very early times
Cromwell had styled Sharp "Sharp of that ilk."  He was subtle, he had no
fanaticism, he warned his brethren in 1660 of the impossibility of
restoring their old authority and discipline.  But when he accepted an
archbishopric he sold his honour; his servility to Charles and Lauderdale
was disgusting; fear made him cruel; his conduct at Mitchell's last trial
is, at best, ambiguous; and the hatred in which he was held is proved by
the falsehoods which his enemies told about his private life and his
sorceries.

The murderers crossed the country, joined the armed fanatics of the west,
under Robert Hamilton, and on Restoration Day (May 29) burned Acts of the
Government at Rutherglen.  Claverhouse rode out of Glasgow with a small
force, to inquire into this proceeding; met the armed insurgents in a
strong position defended by marshes and small lochs; sent to Lord Ross at
Glasgow for reinforcements which did not arrive; and has himself told how
he was defeated, pursued, and driven back into Glasgow.  "This may be
accounted the beginning of the rebellion in my opinion."

Hamilton shot with his own hand one of the prisoners, and reckoned the
sparing of the others "one of our first steppings aside."  Men so
conscientious as Hamilton were rare in his party, which was ruined
presently by its own distracted counsels.

The forces of the victors of Drumclog were swollen by their success, but
they were repulsed with loss in an attack on Glasgow.  The commands of
Ross and Claverhouse were then withdrawn to Stirling, and when
Livingstone joined them at Larbert, the whole army mustered but 1800
men--so weak were the regulars.  The militia was raised, and the king
sent down his illegitimate son, Monmouth, husband of the heiress of
Buccleuch, at the head of several regiments of redcoats.  Argyll was not
of service; he was engaged in private war with the Macleans, who refused
an appeal for help from the rebels.  They, in Glasgow and at Hamilton,
were quarrelling over the Indulgence: the extremists called Mr Welsh's
party "rotten-hearted"--Welsh would not reject the king's authority--the
Welshites were the more numerous.  On June 22 the Clyde, at Bothwell
Bridge, separated the rebels--whose preachers were inveighing against
each other--from Monmouth's army.  Monmouth refused to negotiate till the
others laid down their arms, and after a brief artillery duel, the Royal
infantry carried the bridge, and the rest of the affair was pursuit by
the cavalry.  The rival Covenanting leaders, Russel, one of Sharp's
murderers, and Ure, give varying accounts of the affair, and each party
blames the other.  The rebel force is reckoned at from five to seven
thousand, the Royal army was of 2300 according to Russel.  "Some
hundreds" of the Covenanters fell, and "many hundreds," the Privy Council
reported, were taken.

The battle of Bothwell Bridge severed the extremists, Robert Hamilton,
Richard Cameron and Cargill, the famous preachers, and the rest, from the
majority of the Covenanters.  They dwindled to the "Remnant," growing the
fiercer as their numbers decreased.  Only two ministers were hanged;
hundreds of prisoners were banished, like Cromwell's prisoners after
Dunbar, to the American colonies.  Of these some two hundred were drowned
in the wreck of their vessel off the Orkneys.  The main body were penned
up in Greyfriars Churchyard; many escaped; more signed a promise to
remain peaceful, and shun conventicles.  There was more of cruel
carelessness than of the deliberate cruelty displayed in the massacres
and hangings of women after Philiphaugh and Dunaverty.  But the
avaricious and corrupt rulers, after 1679, headed by James, Duke of York
(Lauderdale being removed), made the rising of Bothwell Bridge the
pretext for fining and ruining hundreds of persons, especially lairds,
who were accused of helping or harbouring rebels.  The officials were
rapacious for their own profit.  The records of scores of trials
prosecuted for the sake of spoil, and disgraced by torture and injustice,
make miserable reading.  Between the trials of the accused and the
struggle with the small minority of extremists led by Richard Cameron and
the aged Mr Cargill, the history of the country is monotonously wretched.
It was in prosecuting lairds and peasants and preachers that Sir George
Mackenzie, by nature a lenient man and a lover of literature, gained the
name of "the bluidy advocate."

Cameron and his followers rode about after issuing the wildest
manifestoes, as at Sanquhar in the shire of Dumfries (June 22, 1680).
Bruce of Earlshall was sent with a party of horse to pursue, and, in the
wild marshes of Airs Moss, in Ayrshire, Cameron "fell praying and
fighting"; while Hackstoun of Rathillet, less fortunate, was taken, and
the murder of Sharp was avenged on him with unspeakable cruelties.  The
Remnant now formed itself into organised and armed societies; their
conduct made them feared and detested by the majority of the preachers,
who longed for a quiet life, not for the establishment of a Mosaic
commonwealth, and "the execution of righteous judgments" on "malignants."
Cargill was now the leader of the Remnant, and Cargill, in a conventicle
at Torwood, of his own authority excommunicated the king, the Duke of
York, Lauderdale, Rothes, Dalziel, and Mackenzie, whom he accused of
leniency to witches, among other sins.  The Government apparently thought
that excommunication, to the mind of Cargill and his adherents, meant
outlawry, and that outlawry might mean the assassination of the
excommunicated.  Cargill was hunted, and (July 12, 1681) was captured by
"wild Bonshaw."  It was believed by his party that the decision to
execute Cargill was carried by the vote of Argyll, in the Privy Council,
and that Cargill told Rothes (who had signed the Covenant with him in
their youth) that Rothes would be the first to die.  Rothes died on July
26, Cargill was hanged on July 27.

On the following day James, Duke of York, as Royal Commissioner, opened
the first Parliament since 1673-74.  James secured an Act making the
right of succession to the Crown independent of differences of religion;
he, of course, was a Catholic.  The Test Act was also passed, a thing so
self-contradictory in its terms that any man might take it whose sense of
humour overcame his sense of honour.  Many refused, including a number of
the conformist ministers.  Argyll took the Test "as far as it is
consistent with itself and with the Protestant religion."

Argyll, the son of the executed Marquis, had recovered his lands, and
acquired the title of Earl mainly through the help of Lauderdale.  During
the religious troubles from 1660 onwards he had taken no great part, but
had sided with the Government, and approved of the torture of preachers.
But what ruined him now (though the facts have been little noticed) was
his disregard of the claims of his creditors, and his obtaining the lands
of the Macleans in Mull and Morven, in discharge of an enormous debt of
the Maclean chief to the Marquis, executed in 1661.  The Macleans had
vainly attempted to prove that the debt was vastly inflated by familiar
processes, and had resisted in arms the invasion of the Campbells.  They
had friends in Seaforth, the Mackenzies, and in the Earl of Errol and
other nobles.

These men, especially Mackenzie of Tarbet, an astute intriguer, seized
their chance when Argyll took the Test "with a qualification," and
though, at first, he satisfied and was reconciled to the Duke of York,
they won over the Duke, accused Argyll to the king, brought him before a
jury, and had him condemned of treason and incarcerated.  The object may
have been to intimidate him, and destroy his almost royal power in the
west and the islands.  In any case, after a trial for treason, in which
one vote settled his doom, he escaped in disguise as a footman (perhaps
by collusion, as was suspected), fled to England, conspired there with
Scottish exiles and a Covenanting refugee, Mr Veitch, and, as Charles
would not allow him to be searched for, he easily escaped to Holland.
(For details, see my book, 'Sir George Mackenzie.')

It was, in fact, clan hatred that dragged down Argyll.  His condemnation
was an infamous perversion of justice, but as Charles would not allow him
to be captured in London, it is most improbable that he would have
permitted the unjust capital sentence to be carried out.  The escape was
probably collusive, and the sole result of these intricate iniquities was
to create for the Government an enemy who would have been dangerous if he
had been trusted by the extreme Presbyterians.  In England no less than
in Scotland the supreme and odious injustice of Argyll's trial excited
general indignation.  The Earl of Aberdeen (Gordon of Haddo) was now
Chancellor, and Queensberry was Treasurer for a while; both were
intrigued against at Court by the Earl of Perth and his brother, later
Lord Melfort, and probably by far the worst of all the knaves of the
Restoration.

Increasing outrages by the Remnant, now headed by the Rev. Mr James
Renwick, a very young man, led to more furious repression, especially as
in 1683 Government detected a double plot--the wilder English aim being
to raise the rabble and to take or slay Charles and his brother at the
Rye House; while the more respectable conspirators, English and Scots,
were believed to be acquainted with, though not engaged in, this design.
The Rev. Mr Carstares was going and coming between Argyll and the exiles
in Holland and the intriguers at home.  They intended as usual first to
surprise Edinburgh Castle.  In England Algernon Sidney, Lord Russell, and
others were arrested, while Baillie of Jerviswoode and Carstares were
apprehended--Carstares in England.  He was sent to Scotland, where he
could be tortured.  The trial of Jerviswoode was if possible more unjust
than even the common run of these affairs, and he was executed (December
24, 1684).

The conspiracy was, in fact, a very serious affair: Carstares was
confessedly aware of its criminal aspect, and was in the closest
confidence of the ministers of William of Orange.  What his dealings were
with them in later years he would never divulge.  But it is clear that if
the plotters slew Charles and James, the hour had struck for the Dutch
deliverer's appearance.  If we describe the Rye House Plot as aiming
merely at "the exclusion of the Duke of York from the throne," we shut
our eyes to evidence and make ourselves incapable of understanding the
events.  There were plotters of every degree and rank, and they were
intriguing with Argyll, and, through Carstares who knew, though he
refused a part in the murder plot, were in touch at once with Argyll and
the intimates of William of Orange.

Meanwhile "the hill men," the adherents of Renwick, in October 1684,
declared a war of assassination against their opponents, and announced
that they would try malignants in courts of their own.  Their manifesto
("The Apologetical Declaration") caused an extraordinary measure of
repression.  A test--the abjuration of the _criminal_ parts of Renwick's
declaration--was to be offered by military authority to all and sundry.
Refusal to abjure entailed military execution.  The test was only
obnoxious to sincere fanatics; but among them must have been hundreds of
persons who had no criminal designs, and merely deemed it a point of
honour not to "homologate" any act of a Government which was corrupt,
prelatic, and unholy.

Later victims of this view of duty were Margaret Lauchleson and Margaret
Wilson--an old woman and a young girl--cruelly drowned by the local
authorities at Wigtown (May 1685).  A myth represents Claverhouse as
having been present.  The shooting of John Brown, "the Christian
Carrier," by Claverhouse in the previous week was an affair of another
character.  Claverhouse did not exceed his orders, and ammunition and
treasonable papers were in Brown's possession; he was also sheltering a
red-handed rebel.  Brown was not shot merely "because he was a
Nonconformist," nor was he shot by the hand of Claverhouse.

These incidents of "the killing time" were in the reign of James II.;
Charles II. had died, to the sincere grief of most of his subjects, on
February 2, 1685.  "Lecherous and treacherous" as he was, he was humorous
and good-humoured.  The expected invasion of Scotland by Argyll, of
England by Monmouth, did not encourage the Government to use respective
lenity in the Covenanting region, from Lanarkshire to Galloway.

Argyll, who sailed from Holland on May 2, had a council of Lowlanders who
thwarted him.  His interests were in his own principality, but he found
it occupied by Atholl and his clansmen, and the cadets of his own House
as a rule would not rally to him.  The Lowlanders with him, Sir Patrick
Hume, Sir John Cochrane, and the rest, wished to move south and join
hands with the Remnant in the west and in Galloway; but the Remnant
distrusted the sudden religious zeal of Argyll, and were cowed by
Claverhouse.  The coasts were watched by Government vessels of war, and
when, after vain movements round about his own castle, Inveraray, Argyll
was obliged by his Lowlanders to move on Glasgow, he was checked at every
turn; the leaders, weary and lost in the marshes, scattered from
Kilpatrick on Clyde; Argyll crossed the river, and was captured by
servants of Sir John Shaw of Greenock.  He was not put to trial nor to
torture; he was executed on the verdict of 1681.  About 200 suspected
persons were lodged by Government in Dunottar Castle at the time and
treated with abominable cruelty.

The Covenanters were now effectually put down, though Renwick was not
taken and hanged till 1688.  The preachers were anxious for peace and
quiet, and were bitterly hostile to Renwick.  The Covenant was a dead
letter as far as power to do mischief was concerned.  It was not
persecution of the Kirk, but demand for toleration of Catholics and a
manifest desire to restore the Church, that in two years lost James his
kingdoms.

On April 29, 1686, James's message to the Scots Parliament asked
toleration for "our innocent subjects" the Catholics.  He had substituted
Perth's brother, now entitled Earl of Melfort, for Queensberry; Perth was
now Chancellor; both men had adopted their king's religion, and the
infamous Melfort can hardly be supposed to have done so honestly.  Their
families lost all in the event except their faith.  With the request for
toleration James sent promises of free trade with England, and he asked
for no supplies.  Perth had introduced Catholic vestments and furnishings
in Holyrood chapel, which provoked a No Popery riot.  Parliament would
not permit toleration; James removed many of the Council and filled their
places with Catholics.  Sir George Mackenzie's conscience "dirled"; he
refused to vote for toleration and he lost the Lord Advocateship, being
superseded by Sir James Dalrymple, an old Covenanting opponent of
Claverhouse in Galloway.

In August James, by prerogative, did what the Estates would not do, and
he deprived the Archbishop of Glasgow and the Bishop of Dunkeld of their
Sees: though a Catholic, he was the king-pope of a Protestant church!  In
a decree of July 1687 he extended toleration to the Kirk, and a meeting
of preachers at Edinburgh expressed "a deep sense of your Majesty's
gracious and surprising favour."  The Kirk was indeed broken, and, when
the Revolution came, was at last ready for a compromise from which the
Covenants were omitted.  On February 17, 1688, Mr Renwick was hanged at
Edinburgh: he had been prosecuted by Dalrymple.  On the same day
Mackenzie superseded Dalrymple as Lord Advocate.

After the birth of the White Rose Prince of Wales (June 10, 1688),
Scotland, like England, apprehended that a Catholic king would be
followed by a Catholic son.  The various contradictory lies about the
child's birth flourished, all the more because James ventured to select
the magistrates of the royal burghs.  It became certain that the Prince
of Orange would invade, and Melfort madly withdrew the regular troops,
with Claverhouse (now Viscount Dundee) to aid in resisting William in
England, though Balcarres proposed a safer way of holding down the
English northern counties by volunteers, the Highland clans, and new
levies.  Thus the Privy Council in Scotland were left at the mercy of the
populace.

Of the Scottish army in England all were disbanded when James fled to
France, except a handful of cavalry, whom Dundee kept with him.  Perth
fled from Edinburgh, but was taken and held a prisoner for four years;
the town train-band, with the mob and some Cameronians, took Holyrood,
slaying such of the guard as they did not imprison; "many died of their
wounds and hunger."  The chapel and Catholic houses were sacked, and
gangs of the armed Cameronian societies went about in the south-west,
rabbling, robbing, and driving away ministers of the Episcopalian sort.
Atholl was in power in Edinburgh; in London, where James's Scots friends
met, the Duke of Hamilton was made President of Council, and power was
left till the assembling of a Convention at Edinburgh (March 1689) in the
hands of William.

In Edinburgh Castle the wavering Duke of Gordon was induced to remain by
Dundee and Balcarres; while Dundee proposed to call a Jacobite convention
in Stirling.  Melfort induced James to send a letter contrary to the
desires of his party; Atholl, who had promised to join them, broke away;
the life of Dundee was threatened by the fanatics, and on March 18,
seeing his party headless and heartless, Dundee rode north, going
"wherever might lead him the shade of Montrose."

Mackay now brought to Edinburgh regiments from Holland, which overawed
the Jacobites, and he secured for William the key of the north, the
castle of Stirling.  With Hamilton as President, the Convention, with
only four adverse votes, declared against James and his son; and Hamilton
(April 3) proclaimed at the cross the reign of William and Mary.  The
claim of rights was passed and declared Episcopacy intolerable.  Balcarres
was thrown into prison: on May 11 William took the Coronation oath for
Scotland, merely protesting that he would not "root out heretics," as the
oath enjoined.

This was "the end o' an auld sang," the end of the Stuart dynasty, and of
the equally "divine rights" of kings and of preachers.

In a sketch it is impossible to convey any idea of the sufferings of
Scotland, at least of Covenanting Scotland, under the Restoration.  There
was contest, unrest, and dragoonings, and the quartering of a brutal and
licentious soldiery on suspected persons.  Law, especially since 1679,
had been twisted for the conviction of persons whom the administration
desired to rob.  The greed and corruption of the rulers, from Lauderdale,
his wife, and his brother Haltoun, to Perth and his brother, the Earl of
Melfort, whose very title was the name of an unjustly confiscated estate,
is almost inconceivable. {225}  Few of the foremost men in power, except
Sir George Mackenzie and Claverhouse, were free from personal profligacy
of every sort.  Claverhouse has left on record his aversion to severities
against the peasantry; he was for prosecuting such gentry as the
Dalrymples.  As constable of Dundee he refused to inflict capital
punishment on petty offenders, and Mackenzie went as far as he dared in
opposing the ferocities of the inquisition of witches.  But in cases of
alleged treason Mackenzie knew no mercy.

Torture, legal in Scotland, was used with barbarism unprecedented there
after each plot or rising, to extract secrets which, save in one or two
cases like that of Carstares, the victims did not possess.  They were
peasants, preachers, and a few country gentlemen: the nobles had no
inclination to suffer for the cause of the Covenants.  The Covenants
continued to be the idols of the societies of Cameronians, and of many
preachers who were no longer inclined to die for these documents,--the
expression of such strange doctrines, the causes of so many sorrows and
of so many martyrdoms.  However little we may sympathise with the
doctrines, none the less the sufferers were idealists, and, no less than
Montrose, preferred honour to life.

With all its sins, the Restoration so far pulverised the pretensions
which, since 1560, the preachers had made, that William of Orange was not
obliged to renew the conflict with the spiritual sons of Knox and Andrew
Melville.

This fact is not so generally recognised as it might be.  It is therefore
proper to quote the corroborative opinion of the learned Historiographer-
Royal of Scotland, Professor Hume Brown.  "By concession and repression
the once mighty force of Scottish Presbyterianism had been broken.  Most
deadly of the weapons in the accomplishment of this result had been the
three Acts of Indulgence which had successively cut so deep into the
ranks of uniformity.  In succumbing to the threats and promises of the
Government, the Indulged ministers had undoubtedly compromised the
fundamental principles of Presbyterianism. . . .  The compliance of these
ministers was, in truth, the first and necessary step towards that
religious and political compromise which the force of circumstances was
gradually imposing on the Scottish people," and "the example of the
Indulged ministers, who composed the great mass of the Presbyterian
clergy, was of the most potent effect in substituting the idea of
toleration for that of the religious absolutism of Knox and Melville."
{226}

It may be added that the pretensions of Knox and Melville and all their
followers were no essential part of Presbyterial Church government, but
were merely the continuation or survival of the clerical claims of
apostolic authority, as enforced by such popes as Hildebrand and such
martyrs as St Thomas of Canterbury.



CHAPTER XXVII.  WILLIAM AND MARY.


While Claverhouse hovered in the north the Convention (declared to be a
Parliament by William on June 5) took on, for the first time in Scotland
since the reign of Charles I, the aspect of an English Parliament, and
demanded English constitutional freedom of debate.  The Secretary in
Scotland was William, Earl of Melville; that hereditary waverer, the Duke
of Hamilton, was Royal Commissioner; but some official supporters of
William, especially Sir James and Sir John Dalrymple, were criticised and
thwarted by "the club" of more extreme Liberals.  They were led by the
Lowland ally who had vexed Argyll, Hume of Polwarth; and by Montgomery of
Skelmorley, who, disappointed in his desire of place, soon engaged in a
Jacobite plot.

The club wished to hasten the grant of Parliamentary liberties which
William was anxious not to give; and to take vengeance on officials such
as Sir James Dalrymple, and his son, Sir John, now Lord Advocate, as he
had been under James II.  To these two men, foes of Claverhouse, William
clung while he could.  The council obtained, but did not need to use,
permission to torture Jacobite prisoners, "Cavaliers" as at this time
they were styled; but Chieseley of Dalry, who murdered Sir George
Lockhart, President of the College of Justice, was tortured.

The advanced Liberal Acts which were passed did not receive the touch of
the sceptre from Hamilton, William's Commissioner: thus they were
"vetoed," and of no effect.  The old packed committee, "The Lords of the
Articles," was denounced as a grievance; the king was to be permitted to
appoint no officers of State without Parliament's approbation.  Hamilton
offered compromises, for William clung to "the Articles"; but he
abandoned them in the following year, and thenceforth till the Union
(1707) the Scottish was "a Free Parliament."  Various measures of
legislation for the Kirk---some to emancipate it as in its palmy days,
some to keep it from meddling in politics--were proposed; some measures
to abolish, some to retain lay patronage of livings, were mooted.  The
advanced party for a while put a stop to the appointment of judges, but
in August came news of the Viscount Dundee in the north which terrified
parliamentary politicians.

Edinburgh Castle had been tamely yielded by the Duke of Gordon;
Balcarres, the associate of Dundee, had been imprisoned; but Dundee
himself, after being declared a rebel, in April raised the standard of
King James.  As against him the Whigs relied on Mackay, a brave officer
who had been in Dutch service, and now commanded regiments of the Scots
Brigade of Holland.  Mackay pursued Dundee, as Baillie had pursued
Montrose, through the north: at Inverness, Dundee picked up some
Macdonalds under Keppoch, but Keppoch was not satisfactory, being
something of a freebooter.  The Viscount now rode to the centre of his
hopes, to the Macdonalds of Glengarry, the Camerons of Lochiel, and the
Macleans who had been robbed of their lands by the Earl of Argyll,
executed in 1685.  Dundee summoned them to Lochiel's house on Loch Arkaig
for May 18; he visited Atholl and Badenoch; found a few mounted men as
recruits at Dundee; returned through the wilds to Lochaber, and sent
round that old summons to a rising, the Fiery Cross, charred and dipped
in a goat's blood.

Much time was spent in preliminary manoeuvring and sparring between
Mackay, now reinforced by English regulars, and Dundee, who for a time
disbanded his levies, while Mackay went to receive fresh forces and to
consult the Government at Edinburgh.  He decided to march to the west and
bridle the clans by erecting a strong fort at Inverlochy, where Montrose
routed Argyll.  A stronghold at Inverlochy menaced the Macdonalds to the
north, and the Camerons in Lochaber, and, southwards, the Stewarts in
Appin.  But to reach Inverlochy Mackay had to march up the Tay, past
Blair Atholl, and so westward through very wild mountainous country.  To
oppose him Dundee had collected 4000 of the clansmen, and awaited
ammunition and men from James, then in Ireland.  By the advice of the
great Lochiel, a man over seventy but miraculously athletic, Dundee
decided to let the clans fight in their old way,--a rush, a volley at
close quarters, and then the claymore.  By June 28 Dundee had received no
aid from James,--of money "we have not twenty pounds"; and he was between
the Earl of Argyll (son of the martyr of 1685) and Mackay with his 4000
foot and eight troops of horse.

On July 23 Dundee seized the castle of Blair Atholl, which had been the
base of Montrose in his campaigns, and was the key of the country between
the Tay and Lochaber.  The Atholl clans, Murrays and Stewarts, breaking
away from the son of their chief, the fickle Marquis of Atholl, were led
by Stewart of Ballechin, but did not swell Dundee's force at the moment.
From James Dundee now received but a battalion of half-starved Irishmen,
under the futile General Cannon.

On July 27, at Blair, Dundee learned that Mackay's force had already
entered the steep and narrow pass of Killiecrankie, where the road
skirted the brawling waters of the Garry.  Dundee had not time to defend
the pass; he marched his men from Blair, keeping the heights, while
Mackay emerged from the gorge, and let his forces rest on the wide level
haugh beside the Garry, under the house of Runraurie, now called Urrard,
with the deep and rapid river in their rear.  On this haugh the tourist
sees the tall standing stone which, since 1735 at least, has been known
as "Dundee's stone."  From the haugh rises a steep acclivity, leading to
the plateau where the house of Runraurie stood.  Mackay feared that
Dundee would occupy this plateau, and that the fire thence would break up
his own men on the haugh below.  He therefore seized the plateau, which
was an unfortunate manoeuvre.  He was so superior in numbers that both of
his wings extended beyond Dundee's, who had but forty ill-horsed
gentlemen by way of cavalry.  After distracting Mackay by movements along
the heights, as if to cut off his communications with the south, Dundee,
who had resisted the prayers of the chiefs that he would be sparing of
his person, gave the word to charge as the sun sank behind the western
hills.  Rushing down hill, under heavy fire and losing many men, the
clans, when they came to the shock, swept the enemy from the plateau,
drove them over the declivity, forced many to attempt crossing the Garry,
where they were drowned, and followed, slaying, through the pass.  Half
of Hastings' regiment, untouched by the Highland charge, and all of
Leven's men, stood their ground, and were standing there when sixteen of
Dundee's horse returned from the pursuit.  Mackay, who had lost his army,
stole across the Garry with this remnant and made for Stirling.  He knew
not that Dundee lay on the field, dying in the arms of Victory.  Precisely
when and in what manner Dundee was slain is unknown; there is even a fair
presumption, from letters of the English Government, that he was murdered
by two men sent from England on some very secret mission.  When last seen
by his men, Dundee was plunged in the battle smoke, sword in hand, in
advance of his horse.

When the Whigs--terrified by the defeat and expecting Dundee at Stirling
with the clans and the cavaliers of the Lowlands--heard of his fall,
their sorrow was changed into rejoicing.  The cause of King James was
mortally wounded by the death of "the glory of the Grahams," who alone
could lead and keep together a Highland host.  Deprived of his leadership
and distrustful of his successor, General Cannon, the clans gradually
left the Royal Standard.  The Cameronian regiment, recruited from the
young men of the organised societies, had been ordered to occupy Dunkeld.
Here they were left isolated, "in the air," by Mackay or his
subordinates, and on August 21 these raw recruits, under Colonel Cleland,
who had fought at Drumclog, had to receive the attack of the Highlanders.
Cleland had fortified the Abbey church and the "castle," and his
Cameronians fired from behind walls and from loopholes with such success
that Cannon called off the clansmen, or could not bring them to a second
attack: both versions are given.  Cleland fell in the fight; the clans
disbanded, and Mackay occupied the castle of Blair.

Three weeks later the Cameronians, being unpaid, mutinied; and Ross,
Annandale, and Polwarth, urging their demands for constitutional rights,
threw the Lowlands into a ferment.  Crawford, whose manner of speech was
sanctimonious, was evicting from their parishes ministers who remained
true to Episcopacy, and would not pray for William and Mary.  Polwarth
now went to London with an address to these Sovereigns framed by "the
Club," the party of liberty.  But the other leaders of that party,
Annandale, Ross, and Montgomery of Skelmorley, all of them eager for
place and office, entered into a conspiracy of intrigue with the
Jacobites for James's restoration.  In February 1690 the Club was
distracted; and to Melville, as Commissioner in the Scottish Parliament,
William gave orders that the Acts for re-establishing Presbytery and
abolishing lay patronage of livings were to be passed.  Montgomery was
obliged to bid yet higher for the favour of the more extreme preachers
and devotees,--but he failed.  In April the Lords of the Articles were
abolished at last, and freedom of parliamentary debate was thus secured.
The Westminster Confession was reinstated, and in May, after the last
remnants of a Jacobite force in the north had been surprised and
scattered or captured by Sir Thomas Livingstone at Cromdale Haugh (May
1), the alliance of Jacobites and of the Club broke down, and the leaders
of the Club saved themselves by playing the part of informers.

The new Act regarding the Kirk permitted the holding of Synods and
General Assemblies, to be summoned by permission of William or of the
Privy Council, with a Royal Commissioner present to restrain the
preachers from meddling, as a body, with secular politics.  The Kirk was
to be organised by the "Sixty Bishops," the survivors of the ministers
ejected in 1663.  The benefices of ejected Episcopalian conformists were
declared to be vacant.  Lay patronage was annulled: the congregations had
the right to approve or disapprove of presentees.  But the Kirk was
deprived of her old weapon, the attachment of civil penalties (that is
practical outlawry) to her sentences of excommunication (July 19, 1690).
The Covenant was silently dropped.

Thus ended, practically, the war between Kirk and State which had raged
for nearly a hundred and twenty years.  The cruel torturing of Nevile
Payne, an English Jacobite taken in Scotland, showed that the new
sovereigns and Privy Council retained the passions and methods of the
old, but this was the last occasion of judicial torture for political
offences in Scotland.  Payne was silent, but was illegally imprisoned
till his death.

The proceedings of the restored General Assembly were awaited with
anxiety by the Government.  The extremists of the Remnant, the
"Cameronians," sent deputies to the Kirk.  They were opposed to
acknowledging sovereigns who were "the head of the Prelatics" in England,
and they, not being supported by the Assembly, remained apart from the
Kirk and true to the Covenants.

Much had passed which William disliked--the abolition of patronage, the
persecution of Episcopalians--and Melville, in 1691, was removed by the
king from the Commissionership.

The Highlands were still unsettled.  In June 1691 Breadalbane, at heart a
Jacobite, attempted to appease the chiefs by promises of money in
settlement of various feuds, especially that of the dispossessed Macleans
against the occupant of their lands, Argyll.  Breadalbane was known by
Hill, the commander of Fort William at Inverlochy, to be dealing between
the clans and James, as well as between William and the clans.  William,
then campaigning in Flanders, was informed of this fact, thought it of no
importance, and accepted a truce from July 1 to October 1 with Buchan,
who commanded such feeble forces as still stood for James in the north.
At the same time William threatened the clans, in the usual terms, with
"fire and sword," if the chiefs did not take the oaths to his Government
by January 1, 1692.  Money and titles under the rank of earldoms were to
be offered to Macdonald of Sleat, Maclean of Dowart, Lochiel, Glengarry,
and Clanranald, if they would come in.  All declined the bait--if
Breadalbane really fished with it.  It is plain, contrary to Lord
Macaulay's statement, that Sir John Dalrymple, William's trusted man for
Scotland, at this time hoped for Breadalbane's success in pacifying the
clans.  But Dalrymple, by December 1691, wrote, "I think the Clan Donell
must be rooted out, and Lochiel."  He could not mean that he hoped to
massacre so large a part of the population.  He probably meant by
"punitive expeditions" in the modern phrase--by "fire and sword," in the
style current then--to break up the recalcitrants.  Meanwhile it was
Dalrymple's hope to settle ancient quarrels about the "superiorities" of
Argyll over the Camerons, and the question of compensation for the lands
reft by the Argyll family from the Macleans.

Before December 31, in fear of "fire and sword," the chiefs submitted,
except the greatest, Glengarry, and the least in power, MacIan or
Macdonald, with his narrow realm of Glencoe, whence his men were used to
plunder the cattle of their powerful neighbour, Breadalbane.  Dalrymple
now desired not peace, but the sword.  By January 9, 1692, Dalrymple, in
London, heard that Glencoe had come in (he had accidentally failed to
come in by January 1), and Dalrymple was "sorry."  By January 11
Dalrymple knew that Glencoe had not taken the oath before January 1, and
rejoiced in the chance to "root out that damnable sect."  In fact, in the
end of December Glencoe had gone to Fort William to take the oaths before
Colonel Hill, but found that he must do so before the Sheriff of the
shire at remote Inveraray.  Various accidents of weather delayed him; the
Sheriff also was not at Inveraray when Glencoe arrived, but administered
the oaths on January 6.  The document was taken to Edinburgh, where Lord
Stair, Dalrymple's father, and others caused it to be deleted.  Glengarry
was still unsworn, but Glengarry was too strong to be "rooted out";
William ordered his commanding officer, Livingstone, "to extirpate that
sect of thieves," the Glencoe men (January 16).  On the same day
Dalrymple sent down orders to hem in the MacIans, and to guard all the
passes, by land or water, from their glen.  Of the actual _method_ of
massacre employed Dalrymple may have been ignorant; but orders "from
Court" to "spare none," and to take no prisoners, were received by
Livingstone on January 23.

On February 1, Campbell of Glenlyon, with 120 men, was hospitably
received by MacIan, whose son, Alexander, had married Glenlyon's niece.
On February 12, Hill sent 400 of his Inverlochy garrison to Glencoe to
join hands with 400 of Argyll's regiment, under Major Duncanson.  These
troops were to guard the southern passes out of Glencoe, while Hamilton
was to sweep the passes from the north.

At 5 A.M. on February 13 the soldier-guests of MacIan began to slay and
plunder.  Men, women, and children were shot or bayoneted, 1000 head of
cattle were driven away; but Hamilton arrived too late.  Though the aged
chief had been shot at once, his sons took to the hills, and the greater
part of the population escaped with their lives, thanks to Hamilton's
dilatoriness.  "All I regret is that any of the sect got away," wrote
Dalrymple on March 5, "and there is necessity to prosecute them to the
utmost."  News had already reached London "that they are murdered in
their beds."  The newspapers, however, were silenced, and the story was
first given to Europe in April by the 'Paris Gazette.'  The crime was
unprecedented: it had no precedent, admits of no apology.  Many an
expedition of "fire and sword" had occurred, but never had there been a
midnight massacre "under trust" of hosts by guests.  King William, on
March 6, went off to his glorious wars on the Continent, probably hoping
to hear that the fugitive MacIans were still being "prosecuted"--if,
indeed, he thought of them at all.  But by October they were received
into his peace.

William was more troubled by the General Assembly, which refused to take
oaths of allegiance to him and his wife, and actually appointed a date
for an Assembly without his consent.  When he gave it, it was on
condition that the members should take the oaths of allegiance.  They
refused: it was the old deadlock, but William at the last moment withdrew
from the imposition of oaths of allegiance--moved, it is said, by Mr
Carstares, "Cardinal Carstares," who had been privy to the Rye House
Plot.  Under Queen Anne, however, the conscientious preachers were
compelled to take the oaths like mere laymen.



CHAPTER XXVIII.  DARIEN.


The Scottish Parliament of May-July 1695, held while William was abroad,
saw the beginning of evils for Scotland.  The affair of Glencoe was
examined into by a Commission, headed by Tweeddale, William's
Commissioner: several Judges sat in it.  Their report cleared William
himself: Dalrymple, it was found, had "exceeded his instructions."  Hill
was exonerated.  Hamilton, who commanded the detachment that arrived too
late, fled the country.  William was asked to send home for trial
Duncanson and other butchers who were with his army.  The king was also
invited to deal with Dalrymple as he thought fit.  He thought fit to give
Dalrymple an indemnity, and made him Viscount Stair, with a grant of
money, but did not retain him in office.  He did not send the subaltern
butchers home for trial.  Many years later, in 1745, the MacIans insisted
on acting as guards of the house and family of the descendant of Campbell
of Glenlyon, the guest and murderer of the chief of Glencoe.

Perhaps by way of a sop to the Scots, William allowed an Act for the
Establishment of a Scottish East India Company to be passed on June 20,
1695.  He afterwards protested that in this matter he had been "badly
served," probably meaning "misinformed."  The result was the Darien
Expedition, a great financial disaster for Scotland, and a terrible
grievance.  Hitherto since the Union of the Crowns all Scottish efforts
to found trading companies, as in England, had been wrecked on English
jealousy: there had always been, and to this new East India Company there
was, a rival, a pre-existing English company.  Scottish Acts for
protection of home industries were met by English retaliation in a war of
tariffs.  Scotland had prohibited the exportation of her raw materials,
such as wool, but was cut off from English and other foreign markets for
her cloths.  The Scots were more successful in secret and unlegalised
trading with their kinsmen in the American colonies.

The Scottish East India Company's aim was to sell Scottish goods in many
places, India for example; and it was secretly meant to found a factory
and central mart on the isthmus of Panama.  For these ends capital was
withdrawn from the new and unsuccessful manufacturing companies.  The
great scheme was the idea of William Paterson (born 1658), the
far-travelled and financially-speculative son of a farmer in
Dumfriesshire.  He was the "projector," or one of the projectors, of the
Bank of England of 1694, investing 2000 pounds.  He kept the Darien part
of his scheme for an East India Company in the background, and it seems
that William, when he granted a patent to that company, knew nothing of
this design to settle in or near the Panama isthmus, which was quite
clearly within the Spanish sphere of influence.  When the philosopher
John Locke heard of the scheme, he wished England to steal the idea and
seize a port in Darien: it thus appears that he too was unaware that to
do so was to inflict an insult and injury on Spain.  There is reason to
suppose that the grant of the patent to the East India Company was
obtained by bribing some Scottish politician or politicians unnamed,
though one name is not beyond probable conjecture.

In any case Paterson admitted English capitalists, who took up half of
the shares, as the Act of Patent permitted them to do.  By December
William was writing that he "had been ill-served by some of my
Ministers."  He had no notice of the details of the Act of Patent till he
had returned to England, and found English capitalists and the English
Parliament in a fury.  The Act committed William to interposing his
authority if the ships of the company were detained by foreign powers,
and gave the adventurers leave to take "reparation" by force from their
assailants (this they later did when they captured in the Firth of Forth
an English vessel, the _Worcester_).

On the opening of the books of the new company in London (October 1695)
there had been a panic, and a fall of twenty points in the shares of the
English East India Company.  The English Parliament had addressed William
in opposition to the Scots Company.  The English subscribers of half the
paid up capital were terrorised, and sold out.  Later, Hamburg
investments were cancelled through William's influence.  All lowland
Scotland hurried to invest--in the dark--for the Darien part of the
scheme was practically a secret: it was vaguely announced that there was
to be a settlement somewhere, "in Africa or the Indies, or both."
Materials of trade, such as wigs, combs, Bibles, fish-hooks, and
kid-gloves, were accumulated.  Offices were built--later used as an
asylum for pauper lunatics.

When, in July 1697, the secret of Panama came out, the English Council of
Trade examined Dampier, the voyager, and (September) announced that the
territory had never been Spain's, and that England ought to anticipate
Scotland by seizing Golden Island and the port on the mainland.

In July 1698 the Council of the intended Scots colony was elected, bought
three ships and two tenders, and despatched 1200 settlers with two
preachers, but with most inadequate provisions, and flour as bad as that
paid to Assynt for the person of Montrose.  On October 30, in the Gulf of
Darien they found natives who spoke Spanish; they learned that the
nearest gold mines were in Spanish hands, and that the chiefs were
carrying Spanish insignia of office.  By February 1699 the Scots and
Spaniards were exchanging shots.  Presently a Scottish ship, cruising in
search of supplies, was seized by the Spanish at Carthagena; the men lay
in irons at Seville till 1700.  Spain complained to William, and the
Scots seized a merchant ship.  The English Governor of Jamaica forbade
his people, by virtue of a letter addressed by the English Government to
all the colonies, to grant supplies to the starving Scots, most of whom
sailed away from the colony in June, and suffered terrible things by sea
and land.  Paterson returned to Scotland.  A new expedition which left
Leith on May 12, 1699, found at Darien some Scots in two ships, and
remained on the scene, distracted by quarrels, till February 1700, when
Campbell of Fonab, sent with provisions in the _Speedy Return_ from
Scotland, arrived to find the Spaniards assailing the adventurers.  He
cleared the Spaniards out of their fort in fifteen minutes, but the
Colonial Council learned that Spain was launching a small but adequate
armada against them.  After an honourable resistance the garrison
capitulated, and marched out with colours flying (March 30).  This
occurred just when Scotland was celebrating the arrival of the news of
Fonab's gallant feat of arms.

At home the country was full of discontent: William's agent at Hamburg
had prevented foreigners from investing in the Scots company.  English
colonists had been forbidden to aid the Scottish adventurers.  Two
hundred thousand pounds, several ships, and many lives had been lost.  "It
is very like 1641," wrote an onlooker, so fierce were the passions that
raged against William.  The news of the surrender of the colonists
increased the indignation.  The king refused (November 1700) to gratify
the Estates by regarding the Darien colony as a legal enterprise.  To do
so was to incur war with Spain and the anger of his English subjects.  Yet
the colony had been legally founded in accordance with the terms of the
Act of Patent.  While the Scots dwelt on this fact, William replied that
the colony being extinct, circumstances were altered.  The Estates voted
that Darien _was_ a lawful colony, and (1701) in an address to the Crown
demanded compensation for the nation's financial losses.  William replied
with expressions of sympathy and hopes that the two kingdoms would
consider a scheme of Union.  A Bill for Union brought in through the
English Lords was rejected by the English Commons.

There was hardly an alternative between Union and War between the two
nations.  War there would have been had the exiled Prince of Wales been
brought up as a Presbyterian.  His father James VII. died a few months
before William III. passed away on March 7, 1702.  Louis XIV.
acknowledged James, Prince of Wales, as James III. of England and Ireland
and VIII, of Scotland; and Anne, the boy's aunt, ascended the throne.  As
a Stuart she was not unwelcome to the Jacobites, who hoped for various
chances, as Anne was believed to be friendly to her nephew.

In 1701 was passed an Act for preventing wrongous imprisonment and
against undue delay in trials.  But Nevile Payne continued to be untried
and illegally imprisoned.  Offenders, generally, could "run their
letters" and protest, if kept in durance untried for sixty days.

The Revolution of 1688-89, with William's very reluctant concessions, had
placed Scotland in entirely new relations with England.  Scotland could
now no longer be "governed by the pen" from London; Parliament could no
longer be bridled and led, at English will, by the Lords of the Articles.
As the religious mainspring of Scottish political life, the domination of
the preachers had been weakened by the new settlement of the Kirk; as the
country was now set on commercial enterprises, which England everywhere
thwarted, it was plain that the two kingdoms could not live together on
the existing terms.  Union there must be, or conquest, as under Cromwell;
yet an English war of conquest was impossible, because it was impossible
for Scotland to resist.  Never would the country renew, as in the old
days, the alliance of France, for a French alliance meant the acceptance
by Scotland of a Catholic king.

England, on her side, if Union came, was accepting a partner with very
poor material resources.  As regards agriculture, for example, vast
regions were untilled, or tilled only in the straths and fertile spots by
the hardy clansmen, who could not raise oats enough for their own
subsistence, and periodically endured famines.  In "the ill years" of
William, years of untoward weather, distress had been extreme.  In the
fertile Lowlands that old grievance, insecurity of tenure, and the
raising of rents in proportion to improvements made by the tenants, had
baffled agriculture.  Enclosures were necessary for the protection of the
crops, but even if tenants or landlords had the energy or capital to make
enclosures, the neighbours destroyed them under cloud of night.  The old
labour-services were still extorted; the tenant's time and strength were
not his own.  Land was exhausted by absence of fallows and lack of
manure.  The country was undrained, lochs and morasses covered what is
now fertile land, and hillsides now in pasture were under the plough.  The
once prosperous linen trade had suffered from the war of tariffs.

The life of the burghs, political and municipal and trading, was little
advanced on the mediaeval model.  The independent Scot steadily resisted
instruction from foreign and English craftsmen in most of the mechanical
arts.  Laws for the encouragement of trades were passed and bore little
fruit.  Companies were founded and were ruined by English tariffs and
English competition.  The most energetic of the population went abroad,
here they prospered in commerce and in military service, while an
enormous class of beggars lived on the hospitality of their neighbours at
home.  In such conditions of inequality it was plain that, if there was
to be a Union, the adjustment of proportions of taxation and of
representation in Parliament would require very delicate handling, while
the differences of Church Government were certain to cause jealousies and
opposition.



CHAPTER XXIX.  PRELIMINARIES TO THE UNION.


The Scottish Parliament was not dissolved at William's death, nor did it
meet at the time when, legally, it ought to have met.  Anne, in a
message, expressed hopes that it would assent to Union, and promised to
concur in any reasonable scheme for compensating the losers by the Darien
scheme.  When Parliament met, Queensberry, being Commissioner, soon found
it necessary (June 30, 1702) to adjourn.  New officers of State were then
appointed, and there was a futile meeting between English and Scottish
Commissioners chosen by the Queen to consider the Union.

Then came a General Election (1703), which gave birth to the last
Scottish Parliament.  The Commissioner, Queensberry, and the other
officers of State, "the Court party," were of course for Union; among
them was prominent that wavering Earl of Mar who was so active in
promoting the Union, and later precipitated the Jacobite rising of 1715.
There were in Parliament the party of Courtiers, friends of England and
Union; the party of Cavaliers, that is Jacobites; and the Country party,
led by the Duke of Hamilton, who was in touch with the Jacobites, but was
quite untrustworthy, and much suspected of desiring the Crown of Scotland
for himself.

Queensberry cozened the Cavaliers--by promises of tolerating their
Episcopalian religion--into voting a Bill recognising Anne, and then
broke his promise.  The Bill for tolerating worship as practised by the
Episcopalians was dropped; for the Commissioner of the General Assembly
of the Kirk declared that such toleration was "the establishment of
iniquity by law."

Queensberry's one aim was to get Supply voted, for war with France had
begun.  But the Country and the Cavalier parties refused Supply till an
Act of Security for religion, liberty, law, and trade should be passed.
The majority decided that, on the death of Anne, the Estates should name
as king of Scotland a Protestant representative of the House of Stewart,
who should not be the successor to the English crown, save under
conditions guaranteeing Scotland as a sovereign state, with frequent
Parliaments, and security for Scottish navigation, colonies, trade, and
religion (the Act of Security).

It was also decided that landholders and the burghs should drill and arm
their tenants and dependants--if Protestant.  Queensberry refused to pass
this Act of Security; Supply, on the other side, was denied, and after a
stormy scene Queensberry prorogued Parliament (September 16, 1703).

In the excitement, Atholl had deserted the Court party and voted with the
majority.  He had a great Highland following, he might throw it on the
Jacobite side, and the infamous intriguer, Simon Frazer (the Lord Lovat
of 1745), came over from France and betrayed to Queensberry a real or a
feigned intrigue of Atholl with France and with the Ministers of James
VIII., called "The Pretender."

Atholl was the enemy of Frazer, a canting, astute, and unscrupulous
ruffian.  Queensberry conceived that in a letter given to him by Lovat he
had irrefutable evidence against Atholl as a conspirator, and he allowed
Lovat to return to France, where he was promptly imprisoned as a traitor.
Atholl convinced Anne of his own innocence, and Queensberry fell under
ridicule and suspicion, lost his office of Commissioner, and was
superseded by Tweeddale.  In England the whole complex affair of Lovat's
revelations was known as "The Scottish Plot"; Hamilton was involved, or
feared he might be involved, and therefore favoured the new proposals of
the Courtiers and English party for placing limits on the prerogative of
Anne's successor, whoever he might be.

In the Estates (July 1704), after months passed in constitutional
chicanery, the last year's Act of Security was passed and touched with
the sceptre; and the House voted Supply for six months.  But owing to a
fierce dispute on private business--namely, the raising of the question,
"Who were the persons accused in England of being engaged in the
'Scottish Plot'?"--no hint of listening to proposals for Union was
uttered.  Who could propose, as Commissioners to arrange Union, men who
were involved--or in England had been accused of being involved--in the
plot?  Scotland had not yet consented that whoever succeeded Anne in
England should also succeed in Scotland.  They retained a means of
putting pressure on England, the threat of having a separate king; they
had made and were making military preparations (drill once a-month!), and
England took up the gauntlet.  The menacing attitude of Scotland was
debated on with much heat in the English Upper House (November 29), and a
Bill passed by the Commons declared the retaliatory measures which
England was ready to adopt.

It was at once proved that England could put a much harder pinch on
Scotland than Scotland could inflict on England.  Scottish drovers were
no longer to sell cattle south of the Border, Scottish ships trading with
France were to be seized, Scottish coals and linen were to be excluded,
and regiments of regular troops were to be sent to the Border if Scotland
did not accept the Hanoverian succession before Christmas 1705.  If it
came to war, Scotland could expect no help from her ancient ally, France,
unless she raised the standard of King James.  As he was a Catholic, the
Kirk would prohibit this measure, so it was perfectly clear to every
plain man that Scotland must accept the Union and make the best bargain
she could.

In spring 1705 the new Duke of Argyll, "Red John of the Battles," a man
of the sword and an accomplished orator, was made Commissioner, and, of
course, favoured the Union, as did Queensberry and the other officers of
State.  Friction between the two countries arose in spring, when an
Edinburgh jury convicted, and the mob insisted on the execution of, an
English Captain Green, whose ship, the _Worcester_, had been seized in
the Forth by Roderick Mackenzie, Secretary of the Scottish East India
Company.  Green was supposed to have captured and destroyed a ship of the
Company's, the _Speedy Return_, which never did return.  It was not
proved that this ship had been Green's victim, but that he had committed
acts of piracy is certain.  The hanging of Green increased the animosity
of the sister kingdoms.

When Parliament met, June 28, 1705, it was a parliament of groups.
Tweeddale and others, turned out of office in favour of Argyll's
Government, formed the Flying Squadron (_Squadrone volante_), voting in
whatever way would most annoy the Government.  Argyll opened by
proposing, as did the Queen's Message, the instant discussion of the
Union (July 3).  The House preferred to deliberate on anything else, and
the leader of the Jacobites or Cavaliers, Lockhart of Carnwath, a very
able sardonic man, saw that this was, for Jacobite ends, a tactical
error.  The more time was expended the more chance had Queensberry to win
votes for the Union.  Fletcher of Saltoun, an independent and eloquent
patriot and republican, wasted time by impossible proposals.  Hamilton
brought forward, and by only two votes lost, a proposal which England
would never have dreamed of accepting.  Canny Jacobites, however,
abstained from voting, and thence Lockhart dates the ruin of his country.
Supply, at all events, was granted, and on that Argyll adjourned.  The
queen was to select Commissioners of both countries to negotiate the
Treaty of Union; among the Commissioners Lockhart was the only Cavalier,
and he was merely to watch the case in the Jacobite interest.

The meetings of the two sets of Commissioners began at Whitehall on April
16.  It was arranged that all proposals, modifications, and results
should pass in writing, and secrecy was to be complete.

The Scots desired Union with Home Rule, with a separate Parliament.  The
English would negotiate only on the lines that the Union was to be
complete, "incorporating," with one Parliament for both peoples.  By
April 25, 1706, the Scots Commissioners saw that on this point they must
acquiesce; the defeat of the French at Ramilies (May 23) proved that,
even if they could have leaned on the French, France was a broken reed.
International reciprocity in trade, complete freedom of trade at home and
abroad, they did obtain.

As England, thanks to William III. with his incessant Continental wars,
had already a great National debt, of which Scotland owed nothing, and as
taxation in England was high, while Scottish taxes under the Union would
rise to the same level, and to compensate for the Darien losses, the
English granted a pecuniary "Equivalent" (May 10).  They also did not
raise the Scottish taxes on windows, lights, coal, malt, and salt to the
English level, that of war-taxation.  The Equivalent was to purchase the
Scottish shares in the East India Company, with interest at five per cent
up to May 1, 1707.  That grievance of the shareholders was thus healed,
what public debt Scotland owed was to be paid (the Equivalent was about
400,000 pounds), and any part of the money unspent was to be given to
improve fisheries and manufactures.

The number of Scottish members of the British Parliament was fixed at
forty-five.  On this point the Scots felt that they were hardly used; the
number of their elected representatives of peers in the Lords was
sixteen.  Scotland retained her Courts of Law; the feudal jurisdictions
which gave to Argyll and others almost princely powers were retained, and
Scottish procedure in trials continued to vary much from the English
model.  Appeals from the Court of Session had previously been brought
before the Parliament of Scotland; henceforth they were to be heard by
the Judges, Scots and English, in the British House of Lords.  On July
23, 1706, the treaty was completed; on October 3 the Scottish Parliament
met to debate on it, with Queensberry as Commissioner.  Harley, the
English Minister, sent down the author of 'Robinson Crusoe' to watch,
spy, argue, persuade, and secretly report, and De Foe's letters contain
the history of the session.

The parties in Parliament were thus variously disposed: the Cavaliers,
including Hamilton, had been approached by Louis XIV. and King James (the
Pretender), but had not committed themselves.  Queensberry always knew
every risky step taken by Hamilton, who began to take several, but in
each case received a friendly warning which he dared not disregard.  At
the opposite pole, the Cameronians and other extreme Presbyterians
loathed the Union, and at last (November-December) a scheme for the
Cameronians and the clans of Angus and Perthshire to meet in arms in
Edinburgh and clear out the Parliament caused much alarm.  But Hamilton,
before the arrangement came to a head, was terrorised, and the intentions
of the Cameronians, as far as their records prove, had never been
officially ratified by their leaders. {250}  There was plenty of popular
rioting during the session, but Argyll rode into Edinburgh at the head of
the Horse Guards, and Leven held all the gates with drafts from the
garrison of the castle.  The Commissioners of the General Assembly made
protests on various points, but were pacified after the security of the
Kirk had been guaranteed.  Finally, Hamilton prepared a parliamentary
mine, which would have blown the Treaty of Union sky-high, but on the
night when he should have appeared in the House and set the match to his
petard--he had toothache!  This was the third occasion on which he had
deserted the Cavaliers; the Opposition fell to pieces.  The _Squadrone
volante_ and the majority of the peers supported the Bill, which was
passed.  On January 16, 1707, the Treaty of Union was touched with the
sceptre, "and there is the end of an auld sang," said Seafield.  In May
1707 a solemn service was held at St Paul's to commemorate the Union.

There was much friction in the first year of the Union over excisemen and
tax-collectors: smuggling began to be a recognised profession.  Meanwhile,
since 1707, a Colonel Hooke had been acting in Scotland, nominally in
Jacobite, really rather in French interests.  Hooke's intrigues were in
part betrayed by De Foe's agent, Ker of Kersland, an amusingly impudent
knave, and were thwarted by jealousies of Argyll and Hamilton.  By
deceptive promises (for he was himself deceived into expecting the aid of
the Ulster Protestants) Hooke induced Louis XIV. to send five men-of-war,
twenty-one frigates, and only two transports, to land James in Scotland
(March 1708).  The equinoctial gales and the severe illness of James, who
insisted on sailing, delayed the start; the men on the outlook for the
fleet were intoxicated, and Forbin, the French commander, observing
English ships of war coming towards the Firth of Forth, fled, refusing
James's urgent entreaties to be landed anywhere on the coast (March 24).
It was believed that had he landed only with a valet the discontented
country would have risen for their native king.

In Parliament (1710-1711) the Cavalier Scottish members, by Tory support,
secured the release from prison of a Rev. Mr Greenshields, an
Episcopalian who prayed for Queen Anne, indeed, but had used the liturgy.
The preachers were also galled by the imposition on them of an abjuration
oath, compelling them to pray for prelatical Queen Anne.  Lay patronage
of livings was also restored (1712) after many vicissitudes, and this
thorn rankled in the Kirk, causing ever-widening strife for more than a
century.

The imposition of a malt tax produced so much discontent that even
Argyll, with all the Scottish members of Parliament, was eager for the
repeal of the Act of Union, and proposed it in the House of Peers, when
it was defeated by a small majority.  In 1712, when about to start on a
mission to France, Hamilton was slain in a duel by Lord Mohun.  According
to a statement of Lockhart's, "Cavaliers were to look for the best" from
Hamilton's mission: it is fairly clear that he was to bring over James in
disguise to England, as in Thackeray's novel, 'Esmond.'  But the sword of
Mohun broke the Jacobite plans.  Other hopes expired when Bolingbroke and
Harley quarrelled, and Queen Anne died (August 1, 1714).  "The best cause
in Europe was lost," cried Bishop Atterbury, "for want of spirit."  He
would have proclaimed James as king, but no man supported him, and the
Elector of Hanover, George I., peacefully accepted the throne.



CHAPTER XXX.  GEORGE I.


For a year the Scottish Jacobites, and Bolingbroke, who fled to France
and became James's Minister, mismanaged the affairs of that most
unfortunate of princes.  By February 1715 the Earl of Mar, who had been
distrusted and disgraced by George I., was arranging with the clans for a
rising, while aid from Charles XII. of Sweden was expected from March to
August 1715.  It is notable that Charles had invited Dean Swift to visit
his Court, when Swift was allied with Bolingbroke and Oxford.  From the
author of 'Gulliver' Charles no doubt hoped to get a trustworthy account
of their policy.  The fated rising of 1715 was occasioned by the Duke of
Berwick's advice to James that he must set forth to Scotland or lose his
honour.  The prince therefore, acting hastily on news which, two or three
days later, proved to be false, in a letter to Mar fixed August 10 for a
rising.  The orders were at once countermanded, when news proving their
futility was received, but James's messenger, Allan Cameron, was detained
on the road, and Mar, not waiting for James's answer to his own last
despatch advising delay, left London for Scotland without a commission;
on August 27 held an Assembly of the chiefs, and, _still without a
commission from James_, raised the standard of the king on September 6.
{254a}

The folly of Mar was consummate.  He knew that Ormonde, the hope of the
English Jacobites, had deserted his post and had fled to France.

Meanwhile Louis XIV. was dying; he died on August 30, and the Regent
d'Orleans, at the utmost, would only connive at, not assist, James's
enterprise.

Everything was contrary, everywhere was ignorance and confusion.  Lord
John Drummond's hopeful scheme for seizing Edinburgh Castle (September 8)
was quieted _pulveris exigui jactu_, "the gentlemen were powdering their
hair"--drinking at a tavern--and bungled the business.  The folly of
Government offered a chance: in Scotland they had but 2000 regulars at
Stirling, where "Forth bridles the wild Highlandman."  Mar, who promptly
occupied Perth, though he had some 12,000 broadswords, continued till the
end to make Perth his headquarters.  A Montrose, a Dundee, even a Prince
Charles, would have "masked" Argyll at Stirling and seized Edinburgh.  In
October 21-November 3, Berwick, while urging James to sail, absolutely
refused to accompany him.  The plans of Ormonde for a descent on England
were betrayed by Colonel Maclean, in French service (November 4).  In
disguise and narrowly escaping from murderous agents of Stair (British
ambassador to France) on his road, {254b} James journeyed to St Malo
(November 8).

In Scotland the Macgregors made a futile attempt on Dumbarton Castle,
while Glengarry and the Macleans advanced on Inveraray Castle, negotiated
with Argyll's brother, the Earl of Islay, and marched back to
Strathfillan.  In Northumberland Forster and Derwentwater, with some
Catholic fox-hunters, in Galloway the pacific Viscount Kenmure, cruised
vaguely about and joined forces.  Mackintosh of Borlum, by a
well-concealed movement, carried a Highland detachment of 1600 men across
the Firth of Forth by boats (October 12-13), with orders to join Forster
and Kenmure and arouse the Border.  But on approaching Edinburgh
Mackintosh found Argyll with 500 dragoons ready to welcome him; Mar took
no advantage of Argyll's absence from Stirling, and Mackintosh, when
Argyll returned thither, joined Kenmure and Forster, occupied Kelso, and
marched into Lancashire.  The Jacobite forces were pitifully
ill-supplied, they had very little ammunition (the great charge against
Bolingbroke was that he sent none from France), they seem to have had no
idea that powder could be made by the art of man; they were torn by
jealousies, and dispirited by their observation of Mar's incompetence.

We cannot pursue in detail the story of the futile campaign.  On November
12 the mixed Highland, Lowland, and English command found itself cooped
up in Preston, and after a very gallant defence of the town the English
leaders surrendered to the king's mercy, after arranging an armistice
which made it impossible for Mackintosh to cut his way through the
English ranks and retreat to the north.  About 1600 prisoners were taken.
Derwentwater and Kenmure were later executed.  Forster and Nithsdale made
escapes; Charles Wogan, a kinsman of the chivalrous Wogan of 1650, and
Mackintosh, with six others, forced their way out of Newgate prison on
the night before their trial.  Wogan was to make himself heard of again.
Mar had thrown away his Highlanders, with little ammunition and without
orders, on a perfectly aimless and hopeless enterprise.

Meanwhile he himself, at Perth, had been doing nothing, while in the
north, Simon Frazer (Lord Lovat) escaped from his French prison, raised
his clan and took the castle of Inverness for King George.  He thus
earned a pardon for his private and public crimes, and he lived to ruin
the Jacobite cause and lose his own head in 1745-46.

While the north, Ross-shire and Inverness, were daunted and thwarted by
the success of Lovat, Mar led his whole force from Perth to Dunblane,
apparently in search of a ford over Forth.  His Frazers and many of his
Gordons deserted on November 11; on November 12 Mar, at Ardoch (the site
of an old Roman camp), learned that Argyll was marching through Dunblane
to meet him.  Next day Mar's force occupied the crest of rising ground on
the wide swell of Sheriffmuir: his left was all disorderly; horse mixed
with foot; his right, with the fighting clans, was well ordered, but the
nature of the ground hid the two wings of the army from each other.  On
the right the Macdonalds and Macleans saw Clanranald fall, and on
Glengarry's cry, "Vengeance to-day!" they charged with the claymore and
swept away the regulars of Argyll as at Killiecrankie and Prestonpans.
But, as the clans pursued and slew, their officers whispered that their
own centre and left were broken and flying.  Argyll had driven them to
Allan Water; his force, returning, came within close range of the
victorious right of Mar.  "Oh, for one hour of Dundee!" cried Gordon of
Glenbucket, but neither party advanced to the shock.  Argyll retired
safely to Dunblane, while Mar deserted his guns and powder-carts, and
hurried to Perth.  He had lost the gallant young Earl of Strathmore and
the brave Clanranald; on Argyll's side his brother Islay was wounded, and
the Earl of Forfar was slain.  Though it was a drawn battle, it proved
that Mar could not move: his forces began to scatter; Huntly was said to
have behaved ill.  It was known that Dutch auxiliaries were to reinforce
Argyll, and men began to try to make terms of surrender.  Huntly rode off
to his own country, and on December 22 (old style) James landed at
Peterhead.

James had no lack of personal courage.  He had charged again and again at
Malplaquet with the Household cavalry of Louis XIV., and he had
encountered great dangers of assassination on his way to St Malo.  But
constant adversity had made him despondent and resigned, while he saw
facts as they really were with a sad lucidity.  When he arrived in his
kingdom the Whig clans of the north had daunted Seaforth's Mackenzies,
while in the south Argyll, with his Dutch and other fresh reinforcements,
had driven Mar's men out of Fife.  Writing to Bolingbroke, James
described the situation.  Mar, with scarcely any ammunition, was facing
Argyll with 11,000 men; the north was held in force by the Whig clans,
Mackays, Rosses, Munroes, and Frazers; deep snow alone delayed the
advance of Argyll, now stimulated by the hostile Cadogan, Marlborough's
favourite, and it was perfectly plain that all was lost.

For the head of James 100,000 pounds was offered by Hanoverian chivalry:
he was suffering from fever and ague; the Spanish gold that had at last
been sent to him was lost at sea off Dundee, and it is no wonder that
James, never gay, presented to his troops a disconsolate and discouraging
aspect.

On January 29 his army evacuated Perth; James wept at the order to burn
the villages on Argyll's line of march, and made a futile effort to
compensate the people injured.  From Montrose (February 3-14) he wrote
for aid to the French Regent, but next day, urged by Mar, and unknown to
his army, he, with Mar, set sail for France.  This evasion was doubtless
caused by a circumstance unusual in warfare: there was a price of 100,000
pounds on James's head, moreover his force had not one day's supply of
powder.  Marshal Keith (brother of the Earl Marischal who retreated to
the isles) says that perhaps one day's supply of powder might be found at
Aberdeen.  Nevertheless the fighting clans were eager to meet Argyll, and
would have sold their lives at a high price.  They scattered to their
western fastnesses.  The main political result, apart from executions and
the passing of forfeited estates into the management of that noted
economist, Sir Richard Steele, and other commissioners, was--the disgrace
of Argyll.  He, who with a petty force had saved Scotland, was
represented by Cadogan and by his political enemies as dilatory and
disaffected!  The Duke lost all his posts, and in 1716 (when James had
hopes from Sweden) Islay, Argyll's brother, was negotiating with Jacobite
agents.  James was creating him a peer of England!

In Scotland much indignation was aroused by the sending of Scottish
prisoners of war out of the kingdom for trial--namely, to Carlisle--and
by other severities.  The Union had never been more unpopular: the
country looked on itself as conquered, and had no means of resistance,
for James, now residing at Avignon, was a Catholic, and any insults and
injuries from England were more tolerable than a restored nationality
with a Catholic king.

Into the Jacobite hopes and intrigues, the eternal web which from 1689 to
1763 was ever being woven and broken, it is impossible here to enter,
though, in the now published Stuart Papers, the details are well known.
James was driven from Avignon to Italy, to Spain, finally to live a
pensioner at Rome.  The luckless attempt of the Earl Marischal, Keith,
his brother, and Lord George Murray, brother of the Duke of Atholl, to
invade Scotland on the west with a small Spanish force, was crushed on
June 10, 1719, in the pass of Glenshiel.

Two or three months later, James, returning from Spain, married the fair
and hapless Princess Clementina Sobieska, whom Charles Wogan, in an
enterprise truly romantic, had rescued from prison at Innspruck and
conveyed across the Alps.  From this wedding, made wretched by the
disappointment of the bride with her melancholy lord,--always busied with
political secrets from which she was excluded,--was born, on December 31,
1720, Charles Edward Stuart: from his infancy the hope of the Jacobite
party; from his cradle surrounded by the intrigues, the jealousies, the
adulations of an exiled Court, and the quarrels of Protestants and
Catholics, Irish, Scottish, and English.  Thus, among changes of tutors
and ministers, as the discovery or suspicion of treachery, the bigotry of
Clementina, and the pressure of other necessities might permit, was that
child reared whose name, at least, has received the crown of Scottish
affection and innumerable tributes of Scottish song.



CHAPTER XXXI.  THE ARGATHELIANS AND THE SQUADRONE.


Leaving the fortunes of the Jacobite party at their lowest ebb, and
turning to the domestic politics of Scotland, after 1719, we find that if
it be happiness to have no history, Scotland had much reason to be
content.  There was but a dull personal strife between the faction of
Argyll and his brother Islay (called the "Argathelians," from the
Latinised _Argathelia_, or Argyll), and the other faction known, since
the Union, as the _Squadrone volante_, or Flying Squadron, who professed
to be patriotically independent.  As to Argyll, he had done all that man
might do for George I.  But, as we saw, the reports of Cadogan and the
jealousy of George (who is said to have deemed Argyll too friendly with
his detested heir) caused the disgrace of the Duke in 1716, and the
_Squadrone_ held the spoils of office.  But in February-April 1719 George
reversed his policy, heaped Argyll with favours, made him, as Duke of
Greenwich, a peer of England, and gave him the High Stewardship of the
Household.

At this time all the sixteen representative peers of Scotland favoured,
for various reasons of their own, a proposed Peerage Bill.  The Prince of
Wales might, when he came to the throne, swamp the Lords by large new
creations in his own interest, and the Bill laid down that, henceforth,
not more than six peers, exclusive of members of the Royal Family, should
be created by any sovereign; while in place of sixteen _representative_
Scotland should have twenty-five _permanent_ peers.  From his new hatred
of the Prince of Wales, Argyll favoured the Bill, as did the others of
the sixteen of the moment, because they would be among the permanencies.
The Scottish Jacobite peers (not representatives) and the Commons of both
countries opposed the Bill.  The election of a Scottish representative
peer at this juncture led to negotiations between Argyll and Lockhart as
leader of the suffering Jacobites, but terms were not arrived at; the
Government secured a large Whig majority in a general election (1722),
and Walpole began his long tenure of office.



ENCLOSURE RIOTS.


In 1724 there were some popular discontents.  Enclosures, as we saw, had
scarcely been known in Scotland; when they were made, men, women, and
children took pleasure in destroying them under cloud of night.
Enclosures might keep a man's cattle on his own ground, keep other men's
off it, and secure for the farmer his own manure.  That good Jacobite,
Mackintosh of Borlum, who in 1715 led the Highlanders to Preston, in 1729
wrote a book recommending enclosures and plantations.  But when, in 1724,
the lairds of Galloway and Dumfriesshire anticipated and acted on his
plan, which in this case involved evictions of very indolent and ruinous
farmers, the tenants rose.  Multitudes of "Levellers" destroyed the loose
stone dykes and slaughtered cattle.  They had already been passive
resisters of rent; the military were called in; women were in the
forefront of the brawls, which were not quieted till the middle of 1725,
when Lord Stair made an effort to introduce manufactures.



MALT RIOTS.


Other disturbances began in a resolution of the House of Commons, at the
end of 1724, _not_ to impose a Malt Tax equal to that of England (this
had been successfully resisted in 1713), but to levy an additional
sixpence on every barrel of ale, and to remove the bounties on exported
grain.  At the Union Scotland had, for the time, been exempted from the
Malt Tax, specially devised to meet the expenses of the French war of
that date.  Now, in 1724-1725, Scotland was up in arms to resist the
attempt "to rob a poor man of his beer."  But Walpole could put force on
the Scottish Members of Parliament,--"a parcel of low people that could
not subsist," says Lockhart, "without their board wages."  Walpole
threatened to withdraw the ten guineas hitherto paid weekly by Government
to those legislators.  He offered to drop the sixpence on beer and put
threepence on every bushel of malt, a half of the English tax.  On June
23, 1725, the tax was to be exacted.  The consequence was an attack on
the military by the mob of Glasgow, who wrecked the house of their Member
in Parliament, Campbell of Shawfield.  Some of the assailants were shot:
General Wade and the Lord Advocate, Forbes of Culloden, marched a force
on Glasgow, the magistrates of the town were imprisoned but released on
bail, while in Edinburgh the master brewers, ordered by the Court of
Session to raise the price of their ale, struck for a week; some were
imprisoned, others were threatened or cajoled and deserted their Union.
The one result was that the chief of the Squadrone, the Duke of Roxburgh,
lost his Secretaryship for Scotland, and Argyll's brother, Islay, with
the resolute Forbes of Culloden, became practically the governors of the
country.  The Secretaryship, indeed, was for a time abolished, but Islay
practically wielded the power that had so long been in the hands of the
Secretary as agent of the Court.



THE HIGHLANDS.


The clans had not been disarmed after 1715, moreover 6000 muskets had
been brought in during the affair that ended at Glenshiel in 1719.
General Wade was commissioned in 1724 to examine and report on the
Highlands: Lovat had already sent in a report.  He pointed out that
Lowlanders paid blackmail for protection to Highland raiders, and that
independent companies of Highlanders, paid by Government, had been
useful, but were broken up in 1717.  What Lovat wanted was a company and
pay for himself.  Wade represented the force of the clans as about 22,000
claymores, half Whig (the extreme north and the Campbells), half
Jacobite.  The commandants of forts should have independent companies:
cavalry should be quartered between Inverness and Perth, and Quarter
Sessions should be held at Fort William and Ruthven in Badenoch.  In 1725
Wade disarmed Seaforth's clan, the Mackenzies, easily, for Seaforth, then
in exile, was on bad terms with James, and wished to come home with a
pardon.  Glengarry, Clanranald, Glencoe, Appin, Lochiel, Clan Vourich,
and the Gordons affected submission--but only handed over two thousand
rusty weapons of every sort.  Lovat did obtain an independent company,
later withdrawn--with results.  The clans were by no means disarmed, but
Wade did, from 1725 to 1736, construct his famous military roads and
bridges, interconnecting the forts.

The death of George I. (June 11, 1727) induced James to hurry to Lorraine
and communicate with Lockhart.  But there was nothing to be done.
Clementina had discredited her husband, even in Scotland, much more in
England, by her hysterical complaints, and her hatred of every man
employed by James inflamed the petty jealousies and feuds among the
exiles of his Court.  No man whom he could select would have been
approved of by the party.

To the bishops of the persecuted Episcopalian remnant, quarrelling over
details of ritual called "the Usages," James vainly recommended
"forbearance in love."  Lockhart, disgusted with the clergy, and siding
with Clementina against her husband, believed that some of the wrangling
churchmen betrayed the channel of his communications with his king
(1727).  Islay gave Lockhart a hint to disappear, and he sailed from
Scotland for Holland on April 8, 1727.

Since James dismissed Bolingbroke, every one of his Ministers was
suspected, by one faction or another of the party, as a traitor.
Atterbury denounced Mar, Lockhart denounced Hay (titular Earl of
Inverness), Clementina told feminine tales for which even the angry
Lockhart could find no evidence.  James was the butt of every slanderous
tongue; but absolutely nothing against his moral character, or his
efforts to do his best, or his tolerance and lack of suspiciousness, can
be wrung from documents. {264}

By 1734 the elder of James's two sons, Prince Charles, was old enough to
show courage and to thrust himself under fire in the siege of Gaeta,
where his cousin, the Duc de Liria, was besieging the Imperialists.  He
won golden opinions from the army, but was already too strong for his
tutors--Murray and Sir Thomas Sheridan.  He had both Protestant and
Catholic governors; between them he learned to spell execrably in three
languages, and sat loose to Catholic doctrines.  In January 1735 died his
mother, who had found refuge from her troubles in devotion.  The grief of
James and of the boys was acute.

In 1736 Lovat was looking towards the rising sun of Prince Charles; was
accused by a witness of enabling John Roy Stewart, Jacobite and poet, to
break prison at Inverness, and of sending by him a message of devotion to
James, from whom he expected a dukedom.  Lovat therefore lost his
sheriffship and his independent company, and tried to attach himself to
Argyll, when the affair of the Porteous Riot caused a coldness between
Argyll and the English Government (1736-1737).



THE PORTEOUS RIOT.


The affair of Porteous is so admirably well described in 'The Heart of
Mid-Lothian,' and recent research {265} has thrown so little light on the
mystery (if mystery there were), that a brief summary of the tale may
suffice.

In the spring of 1736 two noted smugglers, Wilson and Robertson, were
condemned to death.  They had, while in prison, managed to widen the
space between the window-bars of their cell, and would have escaped; but
Wilson, a very stoutly built man, went first and stuck in the aperture,
so that Robertson had no chance.  The pair determined to attack their
guards in church, where, as usual, they were to be paraded and preached
at on the Sunday preceding their execution.  Robertson leaped up and
fled, with the full sympathy of a large and interested congregation,
while Wilson grasped a guard with each hand and a third with his teeth.
Thus Robertson got clean away--to Holland, it was said,--while Wilson was
to be hanged on April 14.  The acting lieutenant of the Town Guard--an
unpopular body, mainly Highlanders--was John Porteous, famous as a
golfer, but, by the account of his enemies, notorious as a brutal and
callous ruffian.  The crowd in the Grassmarket was great, but there was
no attempt at a rescue.  The mob, however, threw large stones at the
Guard, who fired, killing or wounding, as usual, harmless spectators.  The
case for Porteous, as reported in 'The State Trials,' was that the attack
was dangerous; that the plan was to cut down and resuscitate Wilson; that
Porteous did not order, but tried to prevent, the firing; and that
neither at first nor in a later skirmish at the West Bow did he fire
himself.  There was much "cross swearing" at the trial of Porteous (July
20); the jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to be hanged on
September 8.  A petition from him to Queen Caroline (George II. was
abroad) drew attention to palpable discrepancies in the hostile evidence.
Both parties in Parliament backed his application, and on August 28 a
delay of justice for six weeks was granted.

Indignation was intense.  An intended attack on the Tolbooth, where
Porteous lay, had been matter of rumour three days earlier: the prisoner
should have been placed in the Castle.  At 10 P.M. on the night of
September 7 the magistrates heard that boys were beating a drum, and
ordered the Town Guard under arms; but the mob, who had already secured
the town's gates, disarmed the veterans.  Mr Lindsay, lately Provost,
escaped by the Potter Row gate (near the old fatal Kirk-o'-Field), and
warned General Moyle in the Castle.  But Moyle could not introduce
soldiers without a warrant.  Before a warrant could arrive the mob had
burned down the door of the Tolbooth, captured Porteous--who was hiding
up the chimney,--carried him to the Grassmarket, and hanged him to a
dyer's pole.  The only apparent sign that persons of rank above that of
the mob were concerned, was the leaving of a guinea in a shop whence they
took the necessary rope.  The magistrates had been guilty of gross
negligence.  The mob was merely a resolute mob; but Islay, in London,
suspected that the political foes of the Government were engaged, or that
the Cameronians, who had been renewing the Covenants, were concerned.

Islay hurried to Edinburgh, where no evidence could be extracted.  "The
High Flyers of our Scottish Church," he wrote, "have made this infamous
murder a point of conscience. . . .  All the lower rank of the people who
have distinguished themselves by the pretensions of superior sanctity
speak of this murder as the hand of God doing justice."  They went by the
precedent of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, it appears.  In the Lords
(February 1737) a Bill was passed for disabling the Provost--one
Wilson--for public employment, destroying the Town Charter, abolishing
the Town Guard, and throwing down the gate of the Nether Bow.  Argyll
opposed the Bill; in the Commons all Scottish members were against it;
Walpole gave way.  Wilson was dismissed, and a fine of 2000 pounds was
levied and presented to the widow of Porteous.  An Act commanding
preachers to read monthly for a year, in church, a proclamation bidding
their hearers aid the cause of justice against the murderers, was an
insult to the Kirk, from an Assembly containing bishops.  It is said that
at least half of the ministers disobeyed with impunity.  It was
impossible, of course, to evict half of the preachers in the country.

Argyll now went into opposition against Walpole, and, at least, listened
to Keith--later the great Field-Marshal of Frederick the Great, and
brother of the exiled Earl Marischal.

In 1737 the Jacobites began to stir again: a committee of five Chiefs and
Lords was formed to manage their affairs.  John Murray of Broughton went
to Rome, and lost his heart to Prince Charles--now a tall handsome lad of
seventeen, with large brown eyes, and, when he pleased, a very attractive
manner.  To Murray, more than to any other man, was due the Rising of
1745.

Meanwhile, in secular affairs, Scotland showed nothing more remarkable
than the increasing dislike, strengthened by Argyll, of Walpole's
Government.



CHAPTER XXXII.  THE FIRST SECESSION.


For long we have heard little of the Kirk, which between 1720 and 1740
passed through a cycle of internal storms.  She had been little vexed,
either during her years of triumph or defeat, by heresy or schism.  But
now the doctrines of Antoinette Bourignon, a French lady mystic, reached
Scotland, and won the sympathies of some students of divinity--including
the Rev. John Simson, of an old clerical family which had been notorious
since the Reformation for the turbulence of its members.  In 1714, and
again in 1717, Mr Simson was acquitted by the Assembly on the charges of
being a Jesuit, a Socinian, and an Arminian, but was warned against "a
tendency to attribute too much to natural reason."  In 1726-29 he was
accused of minimising the doctrines of the creed of St Athanasius, and
tending to the Arian heresy,--"lately raked out of hell," said the Kirk-
session of Portmoak (1725), addressing the sympathetic Presbytery of
Kirkcaldy.  At the Assembly of 1726 that Presbytery, with others,
assailed Mr Simson, who was in bad health, and "could talk of nothing but
the Council of Nice."  A committee, including Mar's brother, Lord Grange
(who took such strong measures with his wife, Lady Grange, forcibly
translating her to the isle of St Kilda), inquired into the views of Mr
Simson's own Presbytery--that of Glasgow.  This Presbytery cross-examined
Mr Simson's pupils, and Mr Simson observed that the proceedings were "an
unfruitful work of darkness."  Moreover, Mr Simson was of the party of
the _Squadrone_, while his assailants were Argathelians.  A large
majority of the Assembly gave the verdict that Mr Simson was a heretic.
Finally, though in 1728 his answers to questions would have satisfied
good St Athanasius, Mr Simson found himself in the ideal position of
being released from his academic duties but confirmed in his salary.  The
lenient good-nature of this decision, with some other grievances, set
fire to a mine which blew the Kirk in twain.

The Presbytery of Auchterarder had set up a kind of "standard" of their
own--"The Auchterarder Creed"--which included this formula: "It is not
sound or orthodox to teach that we must forsake sin in order to our
coming to Christ, and instating us in Covenant with God."  The General
Assembly condemned this part of the Creed of Auchterarder.  The Rev. Mr
Hog, looking for weapons in defence of Auchterarder, republished part of
a forgotten book of 1646, 'The Marrow of Modern Divinity.'  The work
appears to have been written by a speculative hairdresser, an
Independent.  A copy of the Marrow was found by the famous Mr Boston of
Ettrick in the cottage of a parishioner.  From the Marrow he sucked much
advantage: its doctrines were grateful to the sympathisers with
Auchterarder, and the republication of the book rent the Kirk.

In 1720 a Committee of the General Assembly condemned a set of
propositions in the Marrow as tending to Antinomianism (the doctrine that
the saints cannot sin, professed by Trusty Tompkins in 'Woodstock').
But--as in the case of the five condemned propositions of Jansenius--the
Auchterarder party denied that the heresies could be found in the Marrow.

It was the old quarrel between Faith and Works.  The clerical petitioners
in favour of the Marrow were rebuked by the Assembly (May 21, 1722); they
protested: against a merely human majority in the Assembly they appealed
to "The Word of God," to which the majority also appealed; and there was
a period of passion, but schism had not yet arrived.

The five or six friends of the Marrow really disliked moral preaching, as
opposed to weekly discourses on the legal technicalities of
justification, sanctification, and adoption.  They were also opposed to
the working of the Act which, in 1712, restored lay patronage.  If the
Assembly enforced the law of the land in this matter (and it did), the
Assembly sinned against the divine right of congregations to elect their
own preachers.  Men of this way of thinking were led by the Rev. Mr
Ebenezer Erskine, a poet who, in 1714, addressed an Ode to George I.  He
therein denounced "subverting patronage" and

         "the woful dubious Abjuration
   Which gave the clergy ground for speculation."

But a Jacobite song struck the same note--

   "Let not the Abjuration
   Impose upon the nation!"

and George was deaf to the muse of Mr Erskine.

In 1732, 1733, Mr Erskine, in sermons concerning patronage, offended the
Assembly; would not apologise, appeared (to a lay reader) to claim direct
inspiration, and with three other brethren constituted himself and them
into a Presbytery.  Among their causes of separation (or rather of
deciding that the Kirk had separated from them) was the salary of
Emeritus Professor Simson.  The new Presbytery declared that the
Covenants were still and were eternally binding on Scotland; in fact,
these preachers were "platonically" for going back to the old
ecclesiastical claims, with the old war of Church and State.  They
naturally denounced the Act of 1736, which abolished the burning of
witches.  After a period of long-suffering patience and conciliatory
efforts, in 1740 the Assembly deposed the Seceders.

In 1747 a party among the Seceders excommunicated Mr Erskine and his
brother; one of those who handed Mr Erskine over to Satan (if the old
formula were retained) was his son-in-law.

The feuds of Burghers and Antiburghers (persons who were ready to take or
refused to take the Burgess oath), New Lights and Old Lights, lasted very
long and had evil consequences.  As the populace love the headiest
doctrines, they preferred preachers in proportion as they leaned towards
the Marrow, while lay patrons preferred candidates of the opposite views.
The Assembly must either keep the law and back the patrons, or break the
law and cease to be a State Church.  The corruption of patronage was
often notorious on one side; on the other the desirability of burning
witches and the belief in the eternity of the Covenants were articles of
faith; and such articles were not to the taste of the "Moderates,"
educated clergymen of the new school.  Thus arose the war of "High
Flyers" and "Moderates" within the Kirk,--a war conducing to the great
Disruption of 1843, in which gallant little Auchterarder was again in the
foremost line.



CHAPTER XXXIII.  THE LAST JACOBITE RISING.


While the Kirk was vainly striving to assuage the tempers of Mr Erskine
and his friends, the Jacobites were preparing to fish in troubled waters.
In 1739 Walpole was forced to declare war against Spain, and Walpole had
previously sounded James as to his own chances of being trusted by that
exiled prince.  James thought that Walpole was merely angling for
information.  Meanwhile Jacobite affairs were managed by two rivals,
Macgregor (calling himself Drummond) of Balhaldy and Murray of Broughton.
The sanguine Balhaldy induced France to suppose that the Jacobites in
England and Scotland were much more united, powerful, and ready for
action than they really were, when Argyll left office in 1742, while
Walpole fell from power, Carteret and the Duke of Newcastle succeeding.
In 1743 Murray found that France, though now at war with England over the
Spanish Succession, was holding aloof from the Jacobite cause, though
plied with flourishing and fabulous reports from Balhaldy and the
Jacobite Lord Sempill.  But, in December 1743, on the strength of alleged
Jacobite energy in England, Balhaldy obtained leave from France to visit
Rome and bring Prince Charles.  The Prince had kept himself in training
for war and was eager.  Taking leave of his father for the last time,
Charles drove out of Rome on January 9, 1744; evaded, in disguise, every
trap that was set for him, and landed at Antibes, reaching Paris on
February 10.  Louis did not receive him openly, if he received him at
all; the Prince lurked at Gravelines in disguise, with the Earl
Marischal, while winds and waves half ruined, and the approach of a
British fleet drove into port, a French fleet of invasion under
Roqueville (March 6, 7, 1744).

The Prince wrote to Sempill that he was ready and willing to sail for
Scotland in an open boat.  In July 1744 he told Murray that he would come
next summer "if he had no other companion than his valet."  He nearly
kept his word; nor did Murray resolutely oppose his will.  At the end of
May 1745 Murray's servant brought a letter from the Prince; "fall back,
fall edge," he would land in the Highlands in July.  Lochiel regretted
the decision, but said that, as a man of honour, he would join his Prince
if he arrived.

On July 2 the Prince left Nantes in the _Dutillet_ (usually styled _La
Doutelle_).  He brought some money (he had pawned the Sobieski rubies),
some arms, Tullibardine, his Governor Sheridan, Parson Kelly, the titular
Duke of Atholl, Sir John Macdonald, a banker, Sullivan, and one
Buchanan--the Seven Men of Moidart.

On July 20 his consort, _The Elizabeth_, fought _The Lion_ (Captain
Brett) off the Lizard; both antagonists were crippled.  On [July
22/August 2] Charles passed the night on the little isle of Eriskay;
appealed vainly to Macleod and Macdonald of Sleat; was urged, at
Kinlochmoidart, by the Macdonalds, to return to France, but swept them
off their feet by his resolution; and with Lochiel and the Macdonalds
raised the standard at the head of Glenfinnan on August [19/30].

The English Government had already offered 30,000 pounds for the Prince's
head.  The clans had nothing to gain; they held that they had honour to
preserve; they remembered Montrose; they put it to the touch, and
followed Prince Charlie.

The strength of the Prince's force was, first, the Macdonalds.  On August
16 Keppoch had cut off two companies of the Royal Scots near Loch Lochy.
But the chief of Glengarry was old and wavering; young Glengarry,
captured on his way from France, could not be with his clan; his young
brother AEneas led till his accidental death after the battle of Falkirk.

Of the Camerons it is enough to say that their leader was the gentle
Lochiel, and that they were worthy of their chief.  The Macphersons came
in rather late, under Cluny.  The Frazers were held back by the crafty
Lovat, whose double-dealing, with the abstention of Macleod (who was
sworn to the cause) and of Macdonald of Sleat, ruined the enterprise.
Clan Chattan was headed by the beautiful Lady Mackintosh, whose husband
adhered to King George.  Of the dispossessed Macleans, some 250 were
gathered (under Maclean of Drimnin), and of that resolute band some fifty
survived Culloden.  These western clans (including 220 Stewarts of Appin
under Ardshiel) were the steel point of Charles's weapon; to them should
be added the Macgregors under James Mor, son of Rob Roy, a shifty
character but a hero in fight.

To resist these clans, the earliest to join, Sir John Cope, commanding in
Scotland, had about an equal force of all arms, say 2500 to 3000 men,
scattered in all quarters, and with very few field-pieces.  Tweeddale,
holding the revived office of Secretary for Scotland, was on the worst
terms, as leader of the _Squadrone_, with his Argathelian rival, Islay,
now (through the recent death of his brother, Red Ian of the Battles)
Duke of Argyll.  Scottish Whigs were not encouraged to arm.

The Prince marched south, while Cope, who had concentrated at Stirling,
marched north to intercept him.  At Dalnacardoch he learned that Charles
was advancing to meet him in Corryarrick Pass (here came in Ardshiel,
Glencoe, and a Glengarry reinforcement).  At Dalwhinnie, Cope found that
the clans held the pass, which is very defensible.  He dared not face
them, and moved by Ruthven in Badenoch to Inverness, where he vainly
expected to be met by the great Whig clans of the north.

Joined now by Cluny, Charles moved on that old base of Montrose, the
Castle of Blair of Atholl, where the exiled duke (commonly called Marquis
of Tullibardine) was received with enthusiasm.  In the mid-region between
Highland and Lowland, the ladies, Lady Lude and the rest, simply forced
their sons, brothers, and lovers into arms.  While Charles danced and
made friends, and tasted his first pine-apple at Blair, James Mor took
the fort of Inversnaid.  At Perth (September 4-10) Charles was joined by
the Duke of Perth, the Ogilvys under Lord Ogilvy, some Drummonds under
Lord Strathallan, the Oliphants of Gask, and 200 Robertsons of Struan.
Lord George Murray, brother of the Duke of Atholl, who had been out in
1715, out in 1719, and later was _un reconcilie_, came in, and with him
came Discord.  He had dealt as a friend and ally with Cope at Crieff; his
loyalty to either side was thus not unnaturally dubious; he was suspected
by Murray of Broughton; envied by Sullivan, a soldier of some experience;
and though he was loyal to the last,--the best organiser, and the most
daring leader,--Charles never trusted him, and his temper was always
crossing that of the Prince.

The race for Edinburgh now began, Cope bringing his troops by sea from
Aberdeen, and Charles doing what Mar, in 1715, had never ventured.  He
crossed the Forth by the fords of Frew, six miles above Stirling, passed
within gunshot of the castle, and now there was no force between him and
Edinburgh save the demoralised dragoons of Colonel Gardiner.  The sole
use of the dragoons was, wherever they came, to let the world know that
the clans were at their heels.  On September 16 Charles reached
Corstorphine, and Gardiner's dragoons fell back on Coltbridge.

On the previous day the town had been terribly perturbed.  The old walls,
never sound, were dilapidated, and commanded by houses on the outside.
Volunteers were scarce, and knew not how to load a musket.  On Sunday,
September 15, during sermon-time, "The bells were rung backwards, the
drums they were beat," the volunteers, being told to march against the
clans, listened to the voices of mothers and aunts and of their own
hearts, and melted like a mist.  Hamilton's dragoons and ninety of the
late Porteous's Town Guard sallied forth, joining Gardiner's men at
Coltbridge.  A few of the mounted Jacobite gentry, such as Lord Elcho,
eldest son of the Earl of Wemyss, trotted up to inspect the dragoons, who
fled and drew bridle only at Musselburgh, six miles east of Edinburgh.

The magistrates treated through a caddie or street-messenger with the
Prince.  He demanded surrender, the bailies went and came, in a hackney
coach, between Charles's quarters, Gray's Mill, and Edinburgh, but on
their return about 3 A.M. Lochiel with the Camerons rushed in when the
Nether Bow gate was opened to admit the cab of the magistrates.  Murray
had guided the clan round by Merchiston.  At noon Charles entered "that
unhappy palace of his race," Holyrood; and King James was proclaimed at
Edinburgh Cross, while the beautiful Mrs Murray, mounted, distributed
white cockades.  Edinburgh provided but few volunteers, though the ladies
tried to "force them out."

Meanwhile Cope was landing his men at Dunbar; from Mr John Home (author
of 'Douglas, a Tragedy') he learnt that Charles's force was under 2000
strong.  He himself had, counting the dragoons, an almost equal strength,
with six field-pieces manned by sailors.

On September 20 Cope advanced from Haddington, while Charles, with all
the carriages he could collect for ambulance duty, set forth from his
camp at Duddingston Loch, under Arthur's Seat.  Cope took the low road
near the sea, while Charles took the high road, holding the ridge, till
from Birsley brae he beheld Cope on the low level plain, between Seaton
and Prestonpans.  The manoeuvres of the clans forced Cope to change his
front, but wherever he went, his men were more or less cooped up and
confined to the defensive, with the park wall on their rear.

Meanwhile Mr Anderson of Whitburgh, a local sportsman who had shot ducks
in the morass on Cope's left, brought to Charles news of a practicable
path through that marsh.  Even so, the path was wet as high as the knee,
says Ker of Graden, who had reconnoitred the British under fire.  He was
a Roxburghshire laird, and there was with the Prince no better officer.

In the grey dawn the clans waded through the marsh and leaped the ditch;
Charles was forced to come with the second line fifty yards behind the
first.  The Macdonalds held the right, as they said they had done at
Bannockburn; the Camerons and Macgregors were on the left they "cast
their plaids, drew their blades," and, after enduring an irregular fire,
swept the red-coat ranks away; "they ran like rabets," wrote Charles in a
genuine letter to James.  Gardiner was cut down, his entire troop having
fled, while he was directing a small force of foot which stood its
ground.  Charles stated his losses at a hundred killed and wounded, all
by gunshot.  Only two of the six field-pieces were discharged, by Colonel
Whitefoord, who was captured.  Friends and foes agree in saying that the
Prince devoted himself to the care of the wounded of both sides.  Lord
George Murray states Cope's losses, killed, wounded, and taken, at 3000,
Murray, at under 1000.

The Prince would fain have marched on England, but his force was thinned
by desertions, and English reinforcements would have been landed in his
rear.  For a month he had to hold court in Edinburgh, adored by the
ladies to whom he behaved with a coldness of which Charles II. would not
have approved.  "These are my beauties," he said, pointing to a burly-
bearded Highland sentry.  He "requisitioned" public money, and such
horses and fodder as he could procure; but to spare the townsfolk from
the guns of the castle he was obliged to withdraw his blockade.  He sent
messengers to France, asking for aid, but received little, though the
Marquis Boyer d'Eguilles was granted as a kind of representative of Louis
XV.  His envoys to Sleat and Macleod sped ill, and Lovat only dallied,
France only hesitated, while Dutch and English regiments landed in the
Thames and marched to join General Wade at Newcastle.  Charles himself
received reinforcements amounting to some 1500 men, under Lord Ogilvy,
old Lord Pitsligo, the Master of Strathallan (Drummond), the brave Lord
Balmerino, and the Viscount Dundee.  A treaty of alliance with France,
made at Fontainebleau, neutralised, under the Treaty of Tournay, 6000
Dutch who might not, by that treaty, fight against the ally of France.

The Prince entertained no illusions.  Without French forces, he told
D'Eguilles, "I cannot resist English, Dutch, Hessians, and Swiss."  On
October [15/26] he wrote his last extant letter from Scotland to King
James.  He puts his force at 8000 (more truly 6000), with 300 horse.
"With these, as matters stand, I shal have one decisive stroke for't, but
iff the French" (do not?) "land, perhaps none. . . .  As matters stand I
must either conquer or perish in a little while."

Defeated in the heart of England, and with a prize of 30,000 pounds
offered for his head, he could not hope to escape.  A victory for him
would mean a landing of French troops, and his invasion of England had
for its aim to force the hand of France.  Her troops, with Prince Henry
among them, dallied at Dunkirk till Christmas, and were then dispersed,
while the Duke of Cumberland arrived in England from Flanders on October
19.

On October 30 the Prince held a council of war.  French supplies and guns
had been landed at Stonehaven, and news came that 6000 French were ready
at Dunkirk: at Dunkirk they were, but they never were ready.  The news
probably decided Charles to cross the Border; while it appears that his
men preferred to be content with simply making Scotland again an
independent kingdom, with a Catholic king.  But to do this, with French
aid, was to return to the state of things under Mary of Guise!

The Prince, judging correctly, wished to deal his "decisive stroke" near
home, at the old and now futile Wade in Northumberland.  A victory would
have disheartened England, and left Newcastle open to France.  If Charles
were defeated, his own escape by sea, in a country where he had many well-
wishers, was possible, and the clans would have retreated through the
Cheviots.  Lord George Murray insisted on a march by the western road,
Lancashire being expected to rise and join the Prince.  But this plan
left Wade, with a superior force, on Charles's flank!  The one
difficulty, that of holding a bridge, say Kelso Bridge, over Tweed, was
not insuperable.  Rivers could not stop the Highlanders.  Macdonald of
Morar thought Charles the best general in the army, and to the layman,
considering the necessity for an _instant_ stroke, and the advantages of
the east, as regards France, the Prince's strategy appears better than
Lord George's.  But Lord George had his way.

On October 31, Charles, reinforced by Cluny with 400 Macphersons,
concentrated at Dalkeith.  On November 1, the less trusted part of his
force, under Tullibardine, with the Atholl men, moved south by Peebles
and Moffat to Lockerbie, menacing Carlisle; while the Prince, Lord
George, and the fighting clans marched to Kelso--a feint to deceive Wade.
The main body then moved by Jedburgh, up Rule Water and down through
Liddesdale, joining hands with Tullibardine on November 9, and
bivouacking within two miles of Carlisle.  On the 10th the Atholl men
went to work at the trenches; on the 11th the army moved seven miles
towards Newcastle, hoping to discuss Wade at Brampton on hilly ground.
But Wade did not gratify them by arriving.

On the 13th the Atholl men were kept at their spade-work, and Lord George
in dudgeon resigned his command (November 14), but at night Carlisle
surrendered, Murray and Perth negotiating.  Lord George expressed his
anger and jealousy to his brother, Tullibardine, but Perth resigned his
command to pacify his rival.  Wade feebly tried to cross country, failed,
and went back to Newcastle.  On November 10, with some 4500 men (there
had been many desertions), the march through Lancashire was decreed.  Save
for Mr Townley and two Vaughans, the Catholics did not stir.  Charles
marched on foot in the van; he was a trained pedestrian; the townspeople
stared at him and his Highlanders, but only at Manchester (November 29-
30) had he a welcome, enlisting about 150 doomed men.  On November 27
Cumberland took over command at Lichfield; his foot were distributed
between Tamworth and Stafford; his cavalry was at Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Lord George was moving on Derby, but learning Cumberland's dispositions
he led a column to Congleton, inducing Cumberland to concentrate at
Lichfield, while he himself, by way of Leek and Ashburn, joined the
Prince at Derby.

The army was in the highest spirits.  The Duke of Richmond on the other
side wrote from Lichfield (December 5), "If the enemy please to cut us
off from the main army, they may; and also, if they please to give us the
slip and march to London, I fear they may, before even this _avant garde_
can come up with them; . . . there is no pass to defend, . . . the camp
at Finchley is confined to paper plans"--and Wales was ready to join the
Prince!  Lord George did not know what Richmond knew.  Despite the
entreaties of the Prince, his Council decided to retreat.  On December 6
the clans, uttering cries of rage, were set with their faces to the
north.

The Prince was now an altered man.  Full of distrust, he marched not with
Lord George in the rear, he rode in the van.

Meanwhile Lord John Drummond, who, on November 22, had landed at Montrose
with 800 French soldiers, was ordered by Charles to advance with large
Highland levies now collected and meet him as he moved north.  Lord John
disobeyed orders (received about December 18).  Expecting his advance,
Charles most unhappily left the Manchester men and others to hold
Carlisle, to which he would return.  Cumberland took them all,--many were
hanged.

In the north, Lord Lewis Gordon routed Macleod at Inverurie (December
23), and defeated his effort to secure Aberdeen.  Admirably commanded by
Lord George, and behaving admirably for an irregular retreating force,
the army reached Penrith on December 18, and at Clifton, Lord George and
Cluny defeated Cumberland's dragoons in a rearguard action.

On December 19 Carlisle was reached, and, as we saw, a force was left to
guard the castle; all were taken.  On December 20 the army forded the
flooded Esk; the ladies, of whom several had been with them, rode it on
their horses: the men waded breast-high, as, had there been need, they
would have forded Tweed if the eastern route had been chosen, and if
retreat had been necessary.  Cumberland returned to London on January 5,
and Horace Walpole no longer dreaded "a rebellion that runs away."  By
different routes Charles and Lord George met (December 26) at Hamilton
Palace.  Charles stayed a night at Dumfries.  Dumfries was hostile, and
was fined; Glasgow was also disaffected, the ladies were unfriendly.  At
Glasgow, Charles heard that Seaforth, chief of the Mackenzies, was aiding
the Hanoverians in the north, combining with the great Whig clans, with
Macleod, the Munroes, Lord Loudoun commanding some 2000 men, and the
Mackays of Sutherland and Caithness.

Meanwhile Lord John Drummond, Strathallan, and Lord Lewis Gordon, with
Lord Macleod, were concentrating to meet the Prince at Stirling, the
purpose being the hopeless one of capturing the castle, the key of the
north.  With weak artillery, and a futile and foolish French engineer
officer to direct the siege, they had no chance of success.  The Prince,
in bad health, stayed (January 4-10) at Sir Hugh Paterson's place,
Bannockburn House.

At Stirling, with his northern reinforcements, Charles may have had some
seven or eight thousand men wherewith to meet General Hawley (a veteran
of Sheriffmuir) advancing from Edinburgh.  Hawley encamped at Falkirk,
and while the Atholl men were deserting by scores, Lord George skilfully
deceived him, arrived on the Falkirk moor unobserved, and held the ridge
above Hawley's position, while the General was lunching with Lady
Kilmarnock.  In the first line of the Prince's force the Macdonalds held
the right wing, the Camerons (whom the great Wolfe describes as the
bravest of the brave) held the left; with Stewarts of Appin, Frazers, and
Macphersons in the centre.  In the second line were the Atholl men, Lord
Lewis Gordon's levies, and Lord Ogilvy's.  The Lowland horse and
Drummond's French details were in the rear.  The ground was made up of
eminences and ravines, so that in the second line the various bodies were
invisible to each other, as at Sheriffmuir--with similar results.  When
Hawley found that he had been surprised he arrayed his thirteen
battalions of regulars and 1000 men of Argyll on the plain, with three
regiments of dragoons, by whose charge he expected to sweep away
Charles's right wing; behind his cavalry were the luckless militia of
Glasgow and the Lothians.  In all, he had from 10,000 to 12,000 men
against, perhaps, 7000 at most, for 1200 of Charles's force were left to
contain Blakeney in Stirling Castle.  Both sides, on account of the heavy
roads, failed to bring forward their guns.

Hawley then advanced his cavalry up hill: their left faced Keppoch's
Macdonalds; their right faced the Frazers, under the Master of Lovat, in
Charles's centre.  Hawley then launched his cavalry, which were met at
close range by the reserved fire of the Macdonalds and Frazers.  Through
the mist and rain the townsfolk, looking on, saw in five minutes "the
break in the battle."  Hamilton's and Ligonier's cavalry turned and fled,
Cobham's wheeled and rode across the Highland left under fire, while the
Macdonalds and Frazers pursuing the cavalry found themselves among the
Glasgow militia, whom they followed, slaying.  Lord George had no pipers
to sound the recall; they had flung their pipes to their gillies and gone
in with the claymore.

Thus the Prince's right, far beyond his front, were lost in the tempest;
while his left had discharged their muskets at Cobham's Horse, and could
not load again, their powder being drenched with rain.  They received the
fire of Hawley's right, and charged with the claymore, but were
outflanked and enfiladed by some battalions drawn up _en potence_.  Many
of the second line had blindly followed the first: the rest shunned the
action; Hawley's officers led away some regiments in an orderly retreat;
night fell; no man knew what had really occurred till young Gask and
young Strathallan, with the French and Atholl men, ventured into Falkirk,
and found Hawley's camp deserted.  The darkness, the rain, the nature of
the ground, and the clans' want of discipline, prevented the annihilation
of Hawley's army; while the behaviour of his cavalry showed that the
Prince might have defeated Cumberland's advanced force beyond Derby with
the greatest ease, as the Duke of Richmond had anticipated.

Perhaps the right course now was to advance on Edinburgh, but the
hopeless siege of Stirling Castle was continued--Charles perhaps hoping
much from Hawley's captured guns.

The accidental shooting of young AEneas Macdonnell, second son of
Glengarry, by a Clanranald man, begat a kind of blood feud between the
clans, and the unhappy cause of the accident had to be shot.  Lochgarry,
writing to young Glengarry after Culloden, says that "there was a general
desertion in the whole army," and this was the view of the chiefs, who,
on news of Cumberland's approach, told Charles (January 29) that the army
was depleted and resistance impossible.

The chiefs were mistaken in point of fact: a review at Crieff later
showed that even then only 1000 men were missing.  As at Derby, and with
right on his side, Charles insisted on meeting Cumberland.  He did well,
his men were flushed with victory, had sufficient supplies, were to
encounter an army not yet encouraged by a refusal to face it, and, if
defeated had the gates of the hills open behind them.  In a very
temperately written memorial Charles placed these ideas before the
chiefs.  "Having told you my thoughts, I am too sensible of what you have
already ventured and done for me, not to yield to your unanimous
resolution if you persist."

Lord George, Lovat, Lochgarry, Keppoch, Ardshiel, and Cluny did persist;
the fatal die was cast; and the men who--well fed and confident--might
have routed Cumberland, fled in confusion rather than retreated,--to be
ruined later, when, starving, out-wearied, and with many of their best
forces absent, they staggered his army at Culloden.  Charles had told the
chiefs, "I can see nothing but ruin and destruction to us in case we
should retreat." {287}

This retreat embittered Charles's feelings against Lord George, who may
have been mistaken--who, indeed, at Crieff, seems to have recognised his
error (February 5); but he had taken his part, and during the campaign,
henceforth, as at Culloden, distinguished himself by every virtue of a
soldier.

After the retreat Lord George moved on Aberdeen; Charles to Blair in
Atholl; thence to Moy, the house of Lady Mackintosh, where a blacksmith
and four or five men ingeniously scattered Loudoun and the Macleods,
advancing to take him by a night surprise.  This was the famous Rout of
Moy.

Charles next (February 20) took Inverness Castle, and Loudoun was driven
into Sutherland, and cut off by Lord George's dispositions from any
chance of joining hands with Cumberland.  The Duke had now 5000 Hessian
soldiers at his disposal: these he would not have commanded had the
Prince's army met him near Stirling.

Charles was now at or near Inverness: he lost, through illness, the
services of Murray, whose successor, Hay, was impotent as an officer of
Commissariat.  A gallant movement of Lord George into Atholl, where he
surprised all Cumberland's posts, but was foiled by the resistance of his
brother's castle, was interrupted by a recall to the north, and, on April
2, he retreated to the line of the Spey.  Forbes of Culloden and Macleod
had been driven to take refuge in Skye; but 1500 men of the Prince's best
had been sent into Sutherland, when Cumberland arrived at Nairn (April
14), and Charles concentrated his starving forces on Culloden Moor.  The
Macphersons, the Frazers, the 1500 Macdonalds, and others in Sutherland
were absent on various duties when "the wicked day of destiny"
approached.

The men on Culloden Moor, a flat waste unsuited to the tactics of the
clans, had but one biscuit apiece on the eve of the battle.  Lord George
"did not like the ground," and proposed to surprise by a night attack
Cumberland's force at Nairn.  The Prince eagerly agreed, and, according
to him, Clanranald's advanced men were in touch with Cumberland's
outposts before Lord George convinced the Prince that retreat was
necessary.  The advance was lagging; the way had been missed in the dark;
dawn was at hand.  There are other versions: in any case the hungry men
were so outworn that many are said to have slept through next day's
battle.

A great mistake was made next day, if Lochgarry, who commanded the
Macdonalds of Glengarry, and Maxwell of Kirkconnel are correct in saying
that Lord George insisted on placing his Atholl men on the right wing.
The Macdonalds had an old claim to the right wing, but as far as research
enlightens us, their failure on this fatal day was not due to jealous
anger.  The battle might have been avoided, but to retreat was to lose
Inverness and all chance of supplies.  On the Highland right was the
water of Nairn, and they were guarded by a wall which the Campbells
pulled down, enabling Cumberland's cavalry to take them in flank.
Cumberland had about 9000 men, including the Campbells.  Charles,
according to his muster-master, had 5000; of horse he had but a handful.

The battle began with an artillery duel, during which the clans lost
heavily, while their few guns were useless, and their right flank was
exposed by the breaking down of the protecting wall.  After some
unexplained and dangerous delay, Lord George gave the word to charge, in
face of a blinding tempest of sleet, and himself went in, as did Lochiel,
claymore in hand.  But though the order was conveyed by Ker of Graden
first to the Macdonalds on the left, as they had to charge over a wider
space of ground, the Camerons, Clan Chattan, and Macleans came first to
the shock.  "Nothing could be more desperate than their attack, or more
properly received," says Whitefoord.  The assailants were enfiladed by
Wolfe's regiment, which moved up and took position at right angles, like
the fifty-second on the flank of the last charge of the French Guard at
Waterloo.  The Highland right broke through Barrel's regiment, swept over
the guns, and died on the bayonets of the second line.  They had thrown
down their muskets after one fire, and, says Cumberland, stood "and threw
stones for at least a minute or two before their total rout began."
Probably the fall of Lochiel, who was wounded and carried out of action,
determined the flight.  Meanwhile the left, the Macdonalds, menaced on
the flank by cavalry, were plied at a hundred yards by grape.  They saw
their leaders, the gallant Keppoch and Macdonnell of Scothouse, with many
others, fall under the grape-shot: they saw the right wing broken, and
they did not come to the shock.  If we may believe four sworn witnesses
in a court of justice (July 24, 1752), whose testimony was accepted as
the basis of a judicial decreet (January 10, 1756), {290} Keppoch was
wounded while giving his orders to some of his men not to outrun the line
in advancing, and was shot dead as a friend was supporting him.  When all
retreated they passed the dead body of Keppoch.

The tradition constantly given in various forms that Keppoch charged
alone, "deserted by the children of his clan," is worthless if sworn
evidence may be trusted.

As for the unhappy Charles, by the evidence of Sir Robert Strange, who
was with him, he had "ridden along the line to the right animating the
soldiers," and "endeavoured to rally the soldiers, who, annoyed by the
enemy's fire, were beginning to quit the field."  He "was got off the
field when the men in general were betaking themselves precipitately to
flight; nor was there any possibility of their being rallied."  Yorke, an
English officer, says that the Prince did not leave the field till after
the retreat of the second line.

So far the Prince's conduct was honourable and worthy of his name.  But
presently, on the advice of his Irish entourage, Sullivan and Sheridan,
who always suggested suspicions, and doubtless not forgetting the great
price on his head, he took his own way towards the west coast in place of
joining Lord George and the remnant with him at Ruthven in Badenoch.  On
April 26 he sailed from Borradale in a boat, and began that course of
wanderings and hairbreadth escapes in which only the loyalty of Highland
hearts enabled him at last to escape the ships that watched the isles and
the troops that netted the hills.

Some years later General Wolfe, then residing at Inverness, reviewed the
occurrences, and made up his mind that the battle had been a dangerous
risk for Cumberland, while the pursuit (though ruthlessly cruel) was
inefficient.

Despite Cumberland's insistent orders to give no quarter (orders
justified by the absolutely false pretext that Prince Charles had set the
example), Lochgarry reported that the army had not lost more than a
thousand men.  Fire and sword and torture, the destruction of tilled
lands, and even of the shell-fish on the shore, did not break the spirit
of the Highlanders.  Many bands held out in arms, and Lochgarry was only
prevented by the Prince's command from laying an ambush for Cumberland.
The Campbells and the Macleods under their recreant chief, the Whig
Macdonalds under Sir Alexander of Sleat, ravaged the lands of the
Jacobite clansmen; but the spies of Albemarle, who now commanded in
Scotland, reported the Macleans, the Grants of Glenmoriston, with the
Macphersons, Glengarry's men, and Lochiel's Camerons, as all eager "to do
it again" if France would only help.

But France was helpless, and when Lochiel sailed for France with the
Prince only Cluny remained, hunted like a partridge in the mountains, to
keep up the spirit of the Cause.  Old Lovat met a long-deserved death by
the executioner's axe, though it needed the evidence of Murray of
Broughton, turned informer, to convict that fox.  Kilmarnock and
Balmerino also were executed; the good and brave Duke of Perth died on
his way to France; the aged Tullibardine in the Tower; many gallant
gentlemen were hanged; Lord George escaped, and is the ancestor of the
present Duke of Atholl; many gentlemen took French service; others fought
in other alien armies; three or four in the Highlands or abroad took the
wages of spies upon the Prince.  The 30,000 pounds of French gold, buried
near Loch Arkaig, caused endless feuds, kinsman denouncing kinsman.  The
secrets of the years 1746-1760 are to be sought in the Cumberland and
Stuart MSS. in Windsor Castle and the Record Office.

Legislation, intended to scotch the snake of Jacobitism, began with
religious persecution.  The Episcopalian clergy had no reason to love
triumphant Presbyterianism, and actively, or in sympathy, were favourers
of the exiled dynasty.  Episcopalian chapels, sometimes mere rooms in
private houses, were burned, or their humble furniture was destroyed.  All
Episcopalian ministers were bidden to take the oath and pray for King
George by September 1746, or suffer for the second offence transportation
for life to the American colonies.  Later, the orders conferred by
Scottish bishops were made of no avail.  Only with great difficulty and
danger could parents obtain the rite of baptism for their children.  Very
little is said in our histories about the sufferings of the Episcopalians
when it was their turn to be under the harrow.  They were not violent,
they murdered no Moderator of the General Assembly.  Other measures were
the Disarming Act, the prohibition to wear the Highland dress, and the
abolition of "hereditable jurisdictions," and the chief's right to call
out his clansmen in arms.  Compensation in money was paid, from 21,000
pounds to the Duke of Argyll to 13 pounds, 6s. 8d. to the clerks of the
Registrar of Aberbrothock.  The whole sum was 152,237 pounds, 15s. 4d.

In 1754 an Act "annexed the forfeited estates of the Jacobites who had
been out (or many of them) inalienably to the Crown."  The estates were
restored in 1784; meanwhile the profits were to be used for the
improvement of the Highlands.  If submissive tenants received better
terms and larger leases than of old, Jacobite tenants were evicted for
not being punctual with rent.  Therefore, on May 14, 1752, some person
unknown shot Campbell of Glenure, who was about evicting the tenants on
the lands of Lochiel and Stewart of Ardshiel in Appin.  Campbell rode
down from Fort William to Ballachulish ferry, and when he had crossed it
said, "I am safe now I am out of my mother's country."  But as he drove
along the old road through the wood of Lettermore, perhaps a mile and a
half south of Ballachulish House, the fatal shot was fired.  For this
crime James Stewart of the Glens was tried by a Campbell jury at
Inveraray, with the Duke on the bench, and was, of course, convicted, and
hanged on the top of a knoll above Ballachulish ferry.  James was
innocent, but Allan Breck Stewart was certainly an accomplice of the man
with the gun, which, by the way, was the property neither of James
Stewart nor of Stewart of Fasnacloich.  The murderer was anxious to save
James by avowing the deed, but his kinsfolk, saying, "They will only hang
both James and you," bound him hand and foot and locked him up in the
kitchen on the day of James's execution. {293}  Allan lay for some weeks
at the house of a kinsman in Rannoch, and escaped to France, where he had
a fight with James Mor Macgregor, then a spy in the service of the Duke
of Newcastle.

This murder of "the Red Fox" caused all the more excitement, and is all
the better remembered in Lochaber and Glencoe, because agrarian violence
in revenge for eviction has scarcely another example in the history of
the Highlands.



CONCLUSION.


Space does not permit an account of the assimilation of Scotland to
England in the years between the Forty-five and our own time: moreover,
the history of this age cannot well be written without a dangerously
close approach to many "burning questions" of our day.  The History of
the Highlands, from 1752 to the emigrations witnessed by Dr Johnson (1760-
1780), and of the later evictions in the interests of sheep farms and
deer forests, has never been studied as it ought to be in the rich
manuscript materials which are easily accessible.  The great literary
Renaissance of Scotland, from 1745 to the death of Sir Walter Scott; the
years of Hume, a pioneer in philosophy and in history, and of the Rev.
Principal Robertson (with him and Hume, Gibbon professed, very modestly,
that he did not rank); the times of Adam Smith, of Burns, and of Sir
Walter, not to speak of the Rev. John Home, that foremost tragic poet,
may be studied in many a history of literature.  According to Voltaire,
Scotland led the world in all studies, from metaphysics to gardening.  We
think of Watt, and add engineering.

The brief and inglorious administration of the Earl of Bute at once gave
openings in the public service to Scots of ability, and excited that
English hatred of these northern rivals which glows in Churchill's
'Satires,' while this English jealousy aroused that Scottish hatred of
England which is the one passion that disturbs the placid letters of
David Hume.

The later alliance of Pitt with Henry Dundas made Dundas far more
powerful than any Secretary for Scotland had been since Lauderdale, and
confirmed the connection of Scotland with the services in India.  But,
politically, Scotland, till the Reform Bill, had scarcely a recognisable
existence.  The electorate was tiny, and great landholders controlled the
votes, whether genuine or created by legal fiction--"faggot votes."
Municipal administration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was terribly corrupt, and reform was demanded, but the French
Revolution, producing associations of Friends of the People, who were
prosecuted and grievously punished in trials for sedition, did not afford
a fortunate moment for peaceful reforms.

But early in the nineteenth century Jeffrey, editor of 'The Edinburgh
Review,' made it the organ of Liberalism, and no less potent in England
than in Scotland; while Scott, on the Tory side, led a following of
Scottish penmen across the Border in the service of 'The Quarterly
Review.'  With 'Blackwood's Magazine' and Wilson, Hogg, and Lockhart;
with Jeffrey and 'The Edinburgh,' the Scottish metropolis almost rivalled
London as the literary capital.

About 1818 Lockhart recognised the superiority of the Whig wits in
literature; but against them all Scott is a more than sufficient set-off.
The years of stress between Waterloo (1815) and the Reform Bill (1832)
made Radicalism (fostered by economic causes, the enormous commercial and
industrial growth, and the unequal distribution of its rewards) perhaps
even more pronounced north than south of the Tweed.  In 1820 "the Radical
war" led to actual encounters between the yeomanry and the people.  The
ruffianism of the Tory paper 'The Beacon' caused one fatal duel, and was
within an inch of leading to another, in which a person of the very
highest consequence would have "gone on the sod."  For the Reform Bill
the mass of Scottish opinion, so long not really represented at all, was
as eager as for the Covenant.  So triumphant was the first Whig or
Radical majority under the new system, that Jeffrey, the Whig pontiff,
perceived that the real struggle was to be "between property and no
property," between Capital and Socialism.  This circumstance had always
been perfectly clear to Scott and the Tories.

The watchword of the eighteenth century in literature, religion, and
politics had been "no enthusiasm."  But throughout the century, since
1740, "enthusiasm," "the return to nature," had gradually conquered till
the rise of the Romantic school with Coleridge and Scott.  In religion
the enthusiastic movement of the Wesleys had altered the face of the
Church in England, while in Scotland the "Moderates" had lost position,
and "zeal" or enthusiasm pervaded the Kirk.  The question of lay
patronage of livings had passed through many phases since Knox wrote, "It
pertaineth to the people, and to every several congregation, to elect
their minister."  In 1833, immediately after the passing of the Reform
Bill, the return to the primitive Knoxian rule was advocated by the
"Evangelical" or "High Flying" opponents of the Moderates.  Dr Chalmers,
a most eloquent person, whom Scott regarded as truly a man of genius, was
the leader of the movement.  The Veto Act, by which the votes of a
majority of heads of families were to be fatal to the claims of a
patron's presentee, had been passed by the General Assembly; it was
contrary to Queen Anne's Patronage Act of 1711,--a measure carried,
contrary to Harley's policy, by a coalition of English Churchmen and
Scottish Jacobite members of Parliament.  The rejection, under the Veto
Act, of a presentee by the church of Auchterarder, was declared illegal
by the Court of Session and the judges in the House of Lords (May 1839);
the Strathbogie imbroglio, "with two Presbyteries, one taking its orders
from the Court of Session, the other from the General Assembly" (1837-
1841), brought the Assembly into direct conflict with the law of the
land.  Dr Chalmers would not allow the spiritual claims of the Kirk to be
suppressed by the State.  "King Christ's Crown Honours" were once more in
question.  On May 18, 1843, the followers of the principles of Knox and
Andrew Melville marched out of the Assembly into Tanfield Hall, and made
Dr Chalmers Moderator, and themselves "The Free Church of Scotland."  In
1847 the hitherto separated synods of various dissenting bodies came
together as United Presbyterians, and in 1902 they united with the Free
Church as "the United Free Church," while a small minority, mainly
Highland, of the former Free Church, now retains that title, and
apparently represents Knoxian ideals.  Thus the Knoxian ideals have
modified, even to this day, the ecclesiastical life of Scotland, while
the Church of James I., never by persecution extinguished (_nec tamen
consumebatur_), has continued to exist and develop, perhaps more in
consequence of love of the Liturgy than from any other cause.

Meanwhile, and not least in the United Free Church, extreme tenacity of
dogma has yielded place to very advanced Biblical criticism; and Knox,
could he revisit Scotland with all his old opinions, might not be wholly
satisfied by the changes wrought in the course of more than three
centuries.  The Scottish universities, discouraged and almost destitute
of pious benefactors since the end of the sixteenth century, have
profited by the increase of wealth and a comparatively recent outburst of
generosity.  They always provided the cheapest, and now they provide the
cheapest and most efficient education that is offered by any homes of
learning of mediaeval foundation.



FOOTNOTES


{2}  A good example of these Celtic romances is 'The Tain Bo Cualgne.'

{4}  The best account of Roman military life in Scotland, from the time
of Agricola to the invasion by Lollius Urbicus (140-158 A.D.), may be
studied in Mr Curie's 'A Roman Frontier Post and Its People' (Maclehose,
Glasgow, 1911).  The relics, weapons, arms, pottery, and armour of Roman
men, and the ornaments of the native women, are here beautifully
reproduced.  Dr Macdonald's excellent work, 'The Roman Wall in Scotland'
(Maclehose, 1911), is also most interesting and instructive.

{10}  For the Claims of Supremacy see Appendix C. to vol. i. of my
'History of Scotland,' pp. 496-499.

{20}  Lord Reay, according to the latest book on Scottish peerages,
represents these MacHeths or Mackays.

{27}  'Iliad,' xviii. 496-500.

{36}  As Waleys was then an English as much as a Scottish name, I see no
reason for identifying the William le Waleys, outlawed for bilking a poor
woman who kept a beer house (Perth, June-August, 1296), with the great
historical hero of Scotland.

{38}  See Dr Neilson on "Blind Harry's Wallace," in 'Essays and Studies
by Members of the English Association,' p. 85 ff. (Oxford, 1910.)

{52}  The precise date is disputed.

{57}  By a blunder which Sir James Ramsay corrected, history has accused
James of arresting his "whole House of Lords"!

{61}  The ballad fragments on the Knight of Liddesdale's slaying, and on
"the black dinner," are preserved in Hume of Godscroft's 'History of he
House of Douglas,' written early in the seventeenth century.

{67}  The works of Messrs Herkless and Hannay on the Bishops of St
Andrews may be consulted.

{71}  See p. 38, note 1.

{89}  Knox gives another account.  Our evidence is from a household book
of expenses, _Liber Emptorum_, in MS.

{91}  As to the story of forgery, see a full discussion in the author's
'History of Scotland,' i. 460-467.  1900.

{94}  There is no proof that this man was the preacher George Wishart,
later burned.

{96}  A curious controversy is constantly revived in this matter.  It is
urged that Knox's mobs did not destroy the abbey churches of Kelso,
Melrose, Dryburgh, Roxburgh, and Coldingham: that was done by Hertford's
army.  If so, they merely deprived the Knoxian brethren of the pleasures
of destruction which they enjoyed almost everywhere else.  The English,
if guilty, left at Melrose, Jedburgh, Coldingham, and Kelso more
beautiful remains of mediaeval architecture than the Reformers were wont
to spare.

{99}  This part of our history is usually and erroneously told as given
by Knox, writing fifteen years later.  He needs to be corrected by the
letters and despatches of the day, which prove that the Reformer's
memory, though picturesque, had, in the course of fifteen years, become
untrustworthy.  He is the chief source of the usual version of Solway
Moss.

{106}  The dates and sequence of events are perplexing.  In 'John Knox
and the Reformation' (pp. 86-95) I have shown the difficulties.

{111a}  The details of these proceedings and the evidence for them may be
found in the author's book, 'John Knox and the Reformation,' pp. 135-141.
Cf. also my 'History of Scotland,' ii. 58-60.

{111b}  See 'Affaires Etrangeres: Angleterre,' xv. 131-153.  MS.

{118}  Mary's one good portrait is that owned by Lord Leven and Melville.

{129}  I have no longer any personal doubt that Mary wrote the lost
French original of this letter, usually numbered II. in the Casket
Letters (see my paper, "The Casket Letters," in 'The Scottish Historical
Review,' vol. v., No. 17, pp. 1-12).  The arguments tending to suggest
that parts of the letter are forged (see my 'Mystery of Mary Stuart') are
(I now believe) unavailing.

{137}  I can construe in no other sense the verbose "article."  It may be
read in Dr Hay Fleming's 'Reformation in Scotland,' pp. 449, 450, with
sufficient commentary, pp. 450-453.

{144}  It appears that there was both a plot by Lennox, after the Raid of
Ruthven, to seize James--"preaching will be of no avail to convert him,"
his mother wrote; and also an English plot, rejected by Gowrie, to poison
both James and Mary!  For the former, see Professor Hume Brown, 'History
of Scotland,' vol. ii. p. 289; for the latter, see my 'History of
Scotland,' vol. ii. pp. 286, 287, with the authorities in each case.

{156}  Of these versions, that long lost one which was sent to England
has been published for the first time, with the previously unnoticed
incident of Robert Oliphant, in the author's 'James VI. and the Gowrie
Mystery.'  Here it is also demonstrated that all the treasonable letters
attributed in 1606-1608 to Logan were forged by Logan's solicitor, George
Sprot, though the principal letter seems to me to be a copy of an
authentic original.  That all, _as they stand_, are forgeries is the
unanimous opinion of experts.  See the whole of the documents in the
author's 'Confessions of George Sprot.'  Roxburghe Club.

{181}  Colkitto's men and the Badenoch contingent.

{182}  Much has been made of cruelties at Aberdeen.  Montrose sent in a
drummer, asking the Provost to remove the old men, women, and children.
The drummer was shot, as, at Perth, Montrose's friend, Kilpont, had been
murdered.  The enemy were pursued through the town.  Spalding names 115
townsmen slain in the whole battle and pursuit.  Women were slain if they
were heard to mourn their men--not a very probable story.  Not one woman
is named.  The Burgh Records mention no women slain.  Baillie says "the
town was well plundered."  Jaffray, who fled from the fight as fast as
his horse could carry him, says that women and children were slain.  See
my 'History of Scotland,' vol. iii. pp. 126-128.

{186a}  Craig-Brown, 'History of Selkirkshire,' vol. i. pp. 190, 193.
'Act. Parl. Scot.,' vol. vi. pt. i. p. 492.

{186b}  'Act. Parl. Scot.,' vol. vi. pt. i. p. 514.

{187}  Hume Brown, vol. ii. p. 339.

{208}  The Boot was an old French and Scottish implement.  It was a
framework into which the human leg was inserted; wedges were then driven
between the leg and the framework.

{225}  Many disgusting details may be read in the author's 'Life of Sir
George Mackenzie.'

{226}  Hume Brown, ii. 414, 415.

{250}  Dr Hay Fleming finds no mention of this affair in the Minutes of
the Societies.

{254a}  All this is made clear from the letters of the date in the Stuart
Papers (Historical Manuscript Commission).

{254b}  In addition to Saint Simon's narrative we have the documentary
evidence taken in a French inquiry.

{264}  See 'The King over the Water,' by Alice Shield and A. Lang.
Thackeray's King James, in 'Esmond,' is very amusing but absolutely false
to history.

{265}  'The Porteous Trial,' by Mr Roughead, W.S.

{287}  See the author's 'History of Scotland,' iv. 446-500, where the
evidence is examined.

{290}  'Register of Decreets,' vol. 482.

{293}  Tradition in Glencoe.





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