The Early History of the Scottish Union Question Part 7

The recent conferences had shown how strong the feeling of Scotland was on the subject of trade; and no candid-minded Englishman could deny that the grievances complained of by the commissioners from beyond the Tweed were real grievances. It was true that the more powerful nation was master of the field, and could, by obstinately opposing the demands of her weaker neighbour, debar her from the trade in which she was so anxious to obtain a share. But the lessons of the great Civil War had not been altogether forgotten at the Court; and, in the secret conclave of the king's advisers, there always had been, ever since the Restoration, an uneasy feeling that a day might come when the Crown would find itself opposed by the Parliament. At such a crisis much would depend on what was done by Scotland. It was, therefore, of importance to persuade the people of Scotland that, so far as the king's influence went, everything had been done to remove the commercial disabilities of which they so justly complained.

Lauderdale, who at the Restoration had supported the policy of separation, was now eager on the side of Union. No Parliament had met in Scotland since 1663. It would be necessary to summon the Estates together if the Union was to be discussed; and Lauderdale coveted the office of Lord High Commissioner. A Parliament was, therefore, summoned.

It met at Edinburgh in October 1669. Lauderdale was Commissioner. A letter from the king was read, in which the Union was recommended to the favourable consideration of the Estates; and his Majesty's servants proposed that an answer should at once be returned, announcing that the Parliament of Scotland was in favour of the Union. Some opposition was offered by Sir George Gordon of Haddo, then member for Aberdeens.h.i.+re, and afterwards first Earl of Aberdeen, and by Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, who a few years later became Lord Advocate; but, in the end, a letter was despatched in which the Estates approved of the Union, and left it to the king to name commissioners to treat upon the subject.

The Parliament of England took the same view; and in September 1670, the commissioners met in London.[101]

Five questions were submitted to them: the preserving entire to both kingdoms of their laws, civil and ecclesiastical; the uniting of the two kingdoms into one monarchy; the reducing of both parliaments to one; the regulation of trade; and the best means of preserving the conditions of the Union.

The subject of trade, the most important of all, was never reached; for, before very long, the treaty broke down on the question of the representation of Scotland in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The Scottish commissioners proposed that all the members of the Scottish Estates should be members of the Parliament. To this the English commissioners could not agree; and the proceedings came to an abrupt conclusion.

During these negotiations the Scotsmen had not been on very good terms with each other. Lauderdale and Tweeddale quarrelled; and Sir George Mackenzie says that the Lord Chancellor, at dinner one day, abused two of the commissioners, Sir Archibald Primrose, father of the first Earl of Rosebery, and Sir John Nisbet, then Lord Advocate, for walking on foot when they had a handsome allowance for expenses, and called them "d.a.m.ned lawyers." They were heard to express their resentment at this; whereupon Lauderdale, who bore them a grudge as supporters of Tweeddale, told them he would accuse them to the king of trying to frustrate the Union by causing bad feeling among the commissioners. "And thus," says Mackenzie, "in place of uniting the nations, these wise commissioners disunited themselves, and returned to Scotland as men from a rout."

However popular an Union might have been among the Scottish merchants, it would have been most unpopular in England. The English merchants, who had exulted in the failure of the Commission on Trade, were up in arms against the idea of giving to Scotland the privileges which she would have secured by the Union; and the majority of Englishmen still hated and despised the very name of Scotland. This hatred and contempt of the neighbour country, an inheritance from the long years of international warfare, found vent in abusive descriptions of Scotland and the Scottish people, which were circulated all over the island, causing laughter in England and rousing bitter indignation beyond the Tweed. "The country,"

says one writer, "is full of lakes and loughs, and they are well stocked with islands; so that a map thereof looks like a pillory coat bespattered all over with dirt and rotten eggs, some pieces of the sh.e.l.ls floating here and there representing the islands." The towns of Scotland were briefly described as poor and populous, especially Edinburgh, which resembled its inhabitants in "being high and dirty." It was compared to a double comb, an article which Scotsmen did not often use, having one great street, with a number of alleys branching from it, which might be mistaken for common sewers.

As to the Scottish women, "the meaner sort go barefoot and bareheaded, with two black elf-locks on either side their faces; some of them have scarce any clothes at all, some part of their bed-clothes pinned about their shoulders, and their children have nothing else on them but a little blanket. Those women that can purchase plaids need not bestow much upon other clothes, these cover-s.l.u.ts being sufficient. Those of the best sort, that are very well habited in their modish silks, yet must wear a plaid over all for the credit of their country."

The English language could scarcely furnish language violent enough for the purpose of describing the Scots: "The people are proud, arrogant, vain-glorious boasters, b.l.o.o.d.y, barbarous, and inhuman butchers.

Cozenage and theft are in perfection among them, and they are perfect English-haters. They show their pride in exalting themselves and depressing their neighbours. When the palace at Edinburgh is finished they expect his Majesty will leave his rotten house at Whitehall, and live splendidly among his own countrymen, the Scots, for they say that Englishmen are much beholden to them that we have their king amongst us."[102]

If, in 1670, an Union had been accomplished by the terms of which the people of Scotland had obtained everything which they desired with regard to trade, it would have been an immense blessing to the country.

But knowing what we know of the councillors who surrounded the throne, and of the character of the last two princes of the house of Stuart, we may be perfectly certain that an attempt would have been made to unite the Churches. In England, the Scottish Church question was completely misunderstood; nay more, to most Englishmen it was unintelligible. It was known that there were troubles in the North; and it was vaguely supposed that the Government had to cope with false doctrine, heresy, and schism, evils for delivery from which every good Anglican was accustomed to pray. But few imagined that month after month, and year after year, the majority of the Scottish nation was being treated in a manner which the majority of the English nation would not have tolerated for a single week. Even those Englishmen who had the best means of knowing the truth had been totally deceived as to the number and determination of the Presbyterians. At the Restoration, Sharp had told the Government that if Episcopacy was established not more than twenty ministers would refuse to conform. As a matter of fact, more than three hundred gave up their livings. The parish churches were deserted in many places by the people, and meetings were held in private houses. Not only was this declared to be illegal, but mere nonconformity was made a crime; and the madness of the Scottish Privy Council may be seen from the fact that any landowner who failed to attend his parish church was fined a fourth of his rents for the year in which he was convicted; while for the same offence tenants and burgesses were fined a fourth of their personal estates. Forbidden by a law resembling the English Five Mile Act to live within twenty miles of their parishes, within six miles of a cathedral town, or within three miles of a burgh, the ejected ministers took to preaching in the fields. This was punished as sedition; and the law was administered in so cruel and relentless a fas.h.i.+on that, if the whole truth had been known in England, there can be little doubt that indignant remonstrances would have been addressed to the Government; especially when, in 1670, the Scottish Parliament pa.s.sed an Act by which any person who, without a licence from a bishop or the Privy Council, preached or prayed at a field meeting, was to be put to death,--a savage law which was savagely executed. To the people of England, however, very little of all this was known.

Tweeddale possibly saw, in the abolition of the Scottish Parliament, and in those reforms of the Privy Council which might be expected to follow an incorporating Union, some prospect that a wiser and more moderate system of government might be introduced. But the whole course of Scottish history during the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second shows that nothing less than that sweeping removal of every trace of Prelacy which took place at the Revolution could have restored peace and order to the country. It is, therefore, well that the Union did not take place at a time when the statesmen in both countries, by whom the terms of Union would have been arranged, were pertinaciously bent on establis.h.i.+ng a system of Church government which, loved and honoured though it was in England, was hated and despised in Scotland.

FOOTNOTES:

[91] A Discourse upon the Union of England and Scotland, addressed to King Charles II., March 19th, in the year 1664.

[92] Account of his own Life, part ii. p. 50.

[93] Act for the encouraging and increasing of s.h.i.+pping and Navigation, 12 Car. II. cap. 18.

[94] _Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland_, p. 25.

[95] 15 Car. II. cap. 7.

[96] 14 Car. II. cap. 11.

[97] Scots Acts, 1661, cap. 44; 1663, cap. 13.

[98] 19 and 20 Car. II. cap. 5, Act for settling Freedom and Intercourse of Trade between England and Scotland.

[99] _The grievances of Scotland in relation to their trade with England, sent up to the Council_, 3 Feb. 1668. See also a paper given in by the Scots Commissioners for adjusting the differences of trade between the two kingdoms, Jan. 21, 1667 (1668), printed in Defoe, App.

No. xiii., and in the "Report on the events and circ.u.mstances which produced the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland" (App. No.

x.x.xi.). This report, which was prepared for the private use of the Government, at the request of the Duke of Portland, in 1799, when the Union with Ireland was being discussed, contains most of the papers which pa.s.sed between the Commissioners on Trade in 1668. The _Calendar of State Papers, Domestic_, 1667-1668, published in 1893, throws some light on these transactions. It appears that the coal merchants of Newcastle and the North of England had a grievance in the inequality of the export duties levied on coal in the two countries. English coal paid eight s.h.i.+llings, and Scottish coal only twenty pence. The result was said to be that the customs from coal had fallen in that part of the country, from 20,000 a year to 4000, and that English merchants were suffering from the importation into Scotland, in exchange for coal, of foreign goods which the Scots used to obtain from England. (Memorial of 24th Feb. 1668. _Calendar_, p. 247.)

[100] Burnet, i. 513. Lord Dartmouth, in a note on this pa.s.sage, states that William the Third told Lord Jersey that it was a standing maxim in the Stuart family, "Whatever advances they pretended to make towards it," never to allow a union. Their reason, he said, was that it could not take place without admitting Scotsmen to both Houses of Parliament, who must depend for a living on the Crown. He further a.s.serts that King William said he hoped it would never take place during his reign, for "he had not the good fortune to know what would satisfy a Scotsman."

[101] Defoe, p. 21; Mackenzie's _Memoirs_, p. 197.

[102] "_A modern account of Scotland, being an exact description of the country, and a true character of the people and their manners. Written from thence by an English gentleman._" Printed in the year 1670 (_Harleian Miscellany_, vi. 135). "_Scotland characterized: In a letter written to a young gentleman, to dissuade him from an intended journey thither_" (_Harleian Miscellany_, vii. 377). "_The False Brother, or A New Map of Scotland, drawn by an English Pencil, London, 1651._"

CHAPTER V

THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT

After the failure of the treaty of 1670, eighteen years, eventful in the history of both kingdoms, pa.s.sed; and at the Revolution the question of the Union was again discussed.

In the letter which William addressed to the Scottish Estates in March 1689, he said that he was glad to find that many peers and gentlemen of Scotland, whom he had consulted in London, were "so much inclined to a union of both kingdoms, that they did look upon it as one of the best means for procuring the happiness of these nations, and settling of a lasting peace among them." He himself was of the same opinion, and was resolved to do everything in his power to bring it about.

Among the members of the Estates there was a strong party in favour of delaying the settlement of the Crown until the Union had been accomplished, on the ground that terms favourable to Scotland would be more easily obtained when the affairs of England were in a critical and unsettled condition. Among those who took this view was Sir John Dalrymple, who afterwards, as first Earl of Stair, was to play a prominent part in the final settlement of the question. The fact, however, that this view was supported by some astute members of the Jacobite party, who saw in it a means of causing delay, induced a majority of the Estates to resolve that the settlement of the Crown should come first.

William had instructed Melville, and his other representatives in Scotland, that nothing was to interfere with the settlement of the Government. That was to be their first concern. If the Estates were in earnest for the Union, care was to be taken that it was not made an excuse for delay. If the Union was insisted on, then an attempt must be made to obtain from the Estates an offer of terms such as the English Parliament was likely to accept at once, without entering upon a treaty.

He indicated his own view to be that the laws and customs of Scotland should be preserved intact, while questions relating to the public safety, and also the proportion of Scottish members in the united Parliament, should be referred to himself.[103]

Although William thus antic.i.p.ated a discussion on the Union, he was determined that nothing should prevent or delay the immediate settlement of the Government. The resolution of the Estates was, therefore, in accordance with his wishes. But as soon as the memorable declaration that James had forfeited his right to the Crown had been adopted, along with the offer of the vacant throne to William and Mary, the Estates lost no time in taking up the question of Union; and an Act was pa.s.sed appointing commissioners "to meet with such persons as shall be nominate commissioners by the Parliament of England, and to treat concerning the Union of the two kingdoms." This Act became law on the 23rd of April, and on the following day a letter to the king was approved, in which the Estates informed his Majesty that certain of their number would wait upon him with the offer of the Crown, and would present to him a Claim of Rights, and a list of grievances for which they asked redress. At the same time they expressed the hope that the Union would be speedily accomplished, "that as both kingdoms are united in one head and sovereign, so they may become one body politic, one nation, to be represented in one Parliament."

The Scottish Estates had proposed the Union. But at Westminster nothing could be done to further their wishes. William alluded to the question in his speech from the throne in March 1690. "I must," he said, "recommend, also, to your consideration a Union with Scotland. I do not mean that it should now be entered upon; but they having proposed this to me, some time since, and the Parliament there having nominated commissioners for that purpose, I should be glad that commissioners might also be nominated here, to treat with them, and so see if such terms could be agreed on, as might be for the benefit of both nations, so as to be presented to you in some future session."[104] Nothing more, however, was heard of the Union at that time. It was evident that the affairs of both kingdoms were in such a state that it was hopeless to press forward so delicate a piece of business. In England, important questions which could not be delayed awaited decision; and in Parliament party feeling was running high, not only between the Tories and the Whigs, but also between the Lords and the Commons. In Scotland, the factions which contended for the mastery would only have found in the Union another question about which to wrangle. The keen eyes of William had perceived the necessity of the Union, but the time had not yet come.

Although the project of an Union was abandoned, the statutes relating to the Church pa.s.sed by the Scottish Parliament at this time, const.i.tuting what is known as the Revolution Settlement, had a most important bearing on the final accomplishment of the Union. Prelacy was abolished, and Presbytery was re-established. Most of the ministers who had been ejected at the Restoration were now dead, but sixty veterans still survived, and they were restored to their livings. The Act which a.s.serted the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical causes was repealed. The Westminster Confession of Faith was declared to be the national creed.

The Law of Patronage was reformed by an Act which gave the Protestant landowners in counties, and the town councils in burghs, power to buy the patronage of livings, for a small sum; and the right of choosing the minister was handed over to the landowners and the elders, against whose choice the congregation might appeal to the Presbytery.[105]

The statutes which introduced these reforms were accepted by an overwhelming majority of the Scottish people. In 1707 they were embodied in the Act of Union; and it is certain that if, while the terms of the great international contract were being arranged, any serious attempt had been made to alter them, the Union would never have been accomplished.

It is, indeed, hardly possible to overestimate the importance of the Church question during the Union controversy. It is certain that if the Church of the majority had not been established in Scotland at the Revolution, another civil war would have been the result. The Presbyterian clergy were Whigs, almost to a man, and their influence in the country was enormous. The views held by the extreme branch of the Church did not affect, to any great extent, the course of events in Scotland. These were the men who, under their various designations of Cameronians, or Hill men, or Society men, still clung tenaciously to the old Covenanting ideas in their most uncompromising form. They could hardly bring themselves to submit to the existing Government. The old formula of a "Covenanted King" of the Stuart dynasty was still full of meaning to them; and long afterwards, during the reign of Anne, the Jacobites tried to make use of them for the purpose of defeating the Union. They were, however, Whigs, and would never, under any circ.u.mstances, have acquiesced in the overthrow of the Presbyterian system. The great danger to the cause of the Union and the Hanoverian succession lay in the sentiments of the Episcopalians. Every Episcopal clergyman in Scotland, with scarcely an exception, was a Tory and a Jacobite. On the eve of the Revolution, when the bishops of England were opposing, with dignified firmness, the arbitrary pretensions of the king, the Scottish bishops had addressed him in terms of the most servile eulogy. They a.s.sured him that they regarded a steadfast allegiance to the throne as an essential part of their religion. They declared that the line of Stuart was the greatest glory of Scotland.

They spoke of James himself as the darling of heaven, and described the amazement and horror with which they had heard the rumours of an invasion from Holland.[106] It is not wonderful that the Presbyterians, when they obtained the ascendency, should have excluded from power the authors of this address. Nor is it wonderful that, in those parts of the country where the persecutors had been at work, the peasantry should have subjected the obnoxious clergymen to every species of indignity.

For more than a quarter of a century their oppressors had appealed to the law to justify their misdeeds, and it was natural that, when the hour of deliverance came, the oppressed should take the law into their own hands. Locked out of their churches and expelled from their houses, with their gowns torn from their backs, the Episcopal clergy in Scotland learned how precarious is the situation of a priesthood which is protected by the law, but has no place in the affections of the people.

The Church affairs of Scotland were not settled in accordance with the desires of William. It was no secret that he wished to secure complete toleration for all dissenters. He was anxious to avoid all measures which could interfere with the projected Union of the Kingdoms; and it is probable that his hope was that some plan might be devised for establis.h.i.+ng the same system of Church government throughout the whole island. When he received from the Government in Scotland the draft of the Act which it was proposed to pa.s.s for the establishment of Presbytery, he made a number of amendments which had a double purpose; to remove expressions which might raise doubts in England with regard to the Union, and to conciliate the Episcopalians in Scotland. For instance, it was stated in the draft that the Reformation in Scotland had been the work of Presbyters "without Prelacy." This statement he deleted. In the draft, Presbytery was described as "the only government of Christ's Church in this kingdom." William was of opinion that a better expression would be "the government of the Church in this kingdom established by law." The rest of his suggestions were of a similar character. Everything in the shape of an a.s.sertion that Presbytery was a better system than Episcopacy was carefully avoided, and the only reason given for establis.h.i.+ng the former was, that it was more in accordance with the wishes of the Scottish people. At the same time he explained that it was his desire "that those who do not own and yield submission to the present Church government in Scotland shall have the like indulgence that the Presbyterians have in England."

The Act was submitted to the Estates, and became law on the 7th of June 1690. It declared Presbytery to be "the only government of Christ's Church within this kingdom"; it condoned the action of the peasantry in expelling the Episcopal clergy by force; and it placed the government of the Church in the hands of the sixty ministers who had been replaced in the livings from which they had been ejected at the Restoration. Yet the Government acted on tolerant principles. All Episcopal clergymen who took the oaths were left in peaceable possession of their churches, without being called on to submit to the Presbyterian Church courts; and some even of those who refused to take the oaths, and who prayed publicly for the late king and his family, continued to enjoy their livings without molestation.[107] After a few years, when it was seen that the Jacobites were quite irreconcilable, an Act was pa.s.sed which provided that no one could hold a benefice without taking the oath of allegiance, signing the a.s.surance, which was a declaration that William and Mary were the only lawful sovereigns of the realm, signing the Westminster Confession of Faith, and submitting to the Presbyterian system of Church government. Yet so lenient was the spirit of the Whigs that, instead of vigorously enforcing this law, they superseded it, to a great extent, by another and milder Act, under which taking the oaths to Government became the only qualification required from any Episcopal preacher in Scotland.

At the Revolution, and in consequence of the position in which the Episcopal clergy found themselves, it became the fixed policy of the Jacobites to call the attention of Englishmen to what was going on in the North; and during the reign of William there issued from the press a series of pamphlets, the purpose of which was to create a feeling against the Presbyterians so strong that, if a favourable opportunity should occur, the Scottish Establishment might be attacked and overthrown. The first to take the field were "two persons of quality."

Sir George Mackenzie, the late Lord Advocate, and Lord Tarbat, afterwards the first Earl of Cromartie, went to London at the crisis of the Revolution, and published a pamphlet, the purpose of which was to persuade the Prince of Orange that the principles of the Presbyterians were not only inconsistent with monarchy, but even destructive of all human society.[108] This production did not attract much notice; but a great effect was produced by a more elaborate piece of work, to which Mackenzie devoted the last months of his life. This was a vindication of the system of government pursued in Scotland during the reign of Charles the Second.[109] It was, in a measure, a vindication of his own life, for few of the rulers of Scotland had taken a more important part in the questionable transactions of that reign. When his public career was ended by the Revolution, he had retired to Oxford, where Whigs and Tories alike were amused and instructed by his conversation, in which he did not fail to present the worst features of Presbytery.[110] The _Vindication_, the greater part of which was probably written at Oxford, was a serious attempt to show that the Executive Government in Scotland had not been guilty of oppression and cruelty, that no one had suffered on account of his religion, that the Presbyterians were merely rebels, and that the laws which had been made against them were not only necessary, but had never been harshly administered. He did not live to publish this pamphlet himself, but after his death it was printed by Dr.

Alexander Monro, who had lately been deprived of the place of Princ.i.p.al of the University of Edinburgh. Coming from the pen of a well-known member of the late Government, who had, for a number of years, been the first law officer of the Crown in the country about which he was writing, the _Vindication_ had great weight in England.

Monro also published a tract of his own, defending himself against charges made by the commissioners who had been appointed to visit the Scottish universities, and "purge" them of all professors who would not swear allegiance to William and Mary.[111] The effect of this work, and others upon the same subject, was to raise a feeling of contempt for the state of learning in Scotland, and to cause Englishmen to believe that, under the Presbyterian system, literature and science were doomed. Other pamphlets were published giving an account of the proceedings in the General a.s.sembly and in the Parliament connected with the establishment of the Church.[112] These, certainly, contain materials of great historical value; but they do not even pretend to be impartial, and were written to excite sympathy with the ejected Episcopal ministers and dislike to their successors.

The author of one of these pamphlets, the Rev. John Sage, wrote also an elaborate treatise on the history and nature of Presbytery, in which he maintained that the article in the Claim of Rights which declared that Prelacy was a grievance, and contrary to the inclinations of the Scottish people, was utterly without foundation.[113] The Presbyterians, he a.s.serted, had, in pursuance of a carefully-arranged plan, encouraged the rabble to eject the Episcopal ministers, and had managed, during the confusion of the times, to secure a majority in the Estates, which did not represent the wishes of the country. It was obvious that if this could be proved to the satisfaction of the Whigs of England, they would, in any treaty of Union, consider seriously whether the religious Establishment of Scotland should not be brought into conformity with that of England. If a majority of the people desired Presbytery, the Whigs, on principle, were bound to support Presbytery. But if neither the mob nor the Parliament represented the wishes of the people; if the real desire of the nation could only be discovered by private consultations with the Tory and Jacobite laity, or gathered from the writings of the Episcopal clergy; if the majority of the Parliament represented the minority of the nation, then it was the duty of the Whigs to support Episcopacy.

But the pamphlets which were most widely read in England were those which held up the Presbyterians to execration as persecutors, and to ridicule as fanatics. Monro and his friends took great pains to collect accounts of the hards.h.i.+ps which the Episcopal clergy had suffered at the hands of the mob, and published them for the purpose of influencing public opinion in England.[114] The clergy were described as "a company of resolute Christians that dare lay down their lives for the truth of those doctrines which they have formerly taught." In point of fact, none of them were called upon to lay down their lives. One of the worst cases of "rabbling," which the Episcopalians described as a "tragedy," took place at Kirkpatrick in Annandale. On Easter day a party of men and women went to the clergyman's house in the morning, knocked him down, and then threw him into "a nasty puddle." His wife, who ran out of the house, was also thrown down. "Then their n.o.ble Captain at this honourable expedition gave the word of command to his female janizaries, which was _Strip the Curate_ (for they think this a most disgraceful appellation, and therefore they apply it to all Episcopal ministers).

The order was no sooner given, than these Amazons prepared to put it in execution, for throwing away their plaids (_i.e._ loose upper garments) each of them drew from her girdle a great sharp-pointed dagger, prepared, it seems, for a thorough reformation. The good minister lying panting and prostrate on the ground, had first his night-gown torn and cut off him, his close coat, waistcoat, and britches ript open with their knives, nay, their modesty could not so far prevail against their zeal, as to spare his s.h.i.+rt and drawers, but all were cut in pieces and sacrificed to a broken Covenant. The forementioned Captain gave the finis.h.i.+ng stroke himself with a great Reforming Club, the blow was designed for the minister's head or breast, but he naturally throwing up his hands to save those vital parts, occasioned it to fall upon his s.h.i.+n-bones, which he had drawn up to cover his Nakedness; the blow was such as greatly bruised his legs, and made them swell extraordinarily after; however the Captain thinking they were broke, and finding it uneasie for himself and his companions to stand longer in a great storm of wind and snow which happened to fall out that morning, he drew off his company, and left the Semi-Martyr, who afterwards, by the a.s.sistance of his servants, crawled home to his bed, and but a little after, the whole herd of his persecutors broke in again upon him, and told him: they had treated him so because he prayed for the Tyrant York (so these people ordinarily called King _James_, tho' he was too kind to them), and because he had presumed to preach and visit the paris.h.i.+oners as if he had been their minister, which they had formerly forbidden him to do; they required him also to be gone from their Covenanted Lands, under pain of death, before that day Sevennight, and never again to meddle with the ministry."[115]

Such stories--and this is only one of many which were printed and circulated--could not fail to produce anger and alarm in England; and the conduct of the Presbyterian ministers was, at the same time, represented in the most unfavourable light. Not one of them, it was said, had ever been heard to condemn these outrages from the pulpit. On the contrary, sermons had been preached in which the mob had been applauded for their zeal. In the cathedral church of Saint Giles at Edinburgh the congregation had been told that "such shakings as these were the shakings of G.o.d, and without such shakings his Church was not in use to be settled."