At the death of Cromwell there was not, in the general aspect of political matters, any definite forecast of what twelve months after would be the form of government; certainly an easy and unopposed restoration of the Stuart monarchy was about the last idea, warranted by the history of the previous fifteen years. But one man, the still-tongued, close-minded General Monk, solved the question. By his influence as head of the army, and his tact and sagacity in party wire-pulling, he so managed that within eight months of the Protector’s death, Charles II. was quietly proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland. It was a twenty-seven years of as mean rule, as has ever darkened the pages of British history. Retaliations and persecutions—one long attempt to turn back the stream of progress—a corrupt court, leavening the national life with foulness and frivolity, such might be the general headings of the chapters chronicling the reign of the “Merry Monarch.”

The restoration was in England baptized in blood. Ten “regicides” were hanged at Charing Cross. This was harsh—revengeful; but not despicable or unprecedented. But it is with disgust, with shame for our common humanity, that we learn that the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were taken from their graves in Westminster Abbey, and on the death anniversary (30th January) of “King Charles the Martyr,” drawn on hurdles to Tyburn, and there hung on the gallows; then the heads cut off and fixed on Westminster Hall.

And Scotland must not be left without examples of severity. The Marquis of Argyle was the first victim. At the coronation of Charles at Scone, he was the noble who placed the crown on the king’s head. But Charles hated him as a leader of the presbyterians, who then held him in irksome tutelage. After a most unfair trial, nothing tangible being found against him except some private letters to General Monk, in which he expressed himself favourable to Cromwell, he was found guilty, and condemned to death. He met his fate with great firmness, saying that if he could not brave death like a Roman, he could submit to it like a Christian.

Other victims followed. Swinburne has said of Mary of Scotland, “A kinder or more faithful friend, a deadlier or more dangerous enemy, it would be impossible to dread or to desire.” Mary’s descendants were noways remarkable for fidelity in friendship, but they were implacable in their hatreds. When he was in the over-careful hands of the Covenanters, Charles had treasured up against a day of vengeance, many affronts, brow-beatings, and intimidations, and now he meant, in his stubborn way, to demand payment, with heavy interest, of the old debts.

And so Charles, the Covenanted King of Scotland, and in whose cause its best blood had been shed, had nothing but hatred for the land of his fathers, and for its presbyterian faith. A packed and subservient Scottish Parliament proceeded to pass, first a Rescissory Act, rescinding all statutes, good and bad, which had been passed since the commencement of the civil wars; and next, an Act of Supremacy, making the king supreme judge in all matters, both civil and ecclesiastical. Charles soon made it evident that he meant to establish episcopacy. James Sharpe, minister of the little Fifeshire town of Crail, was sent to London to look after presbyterian interests; he was got at on the selfish side, and made archbishop of St. Andrews. Nine other pliant Scottish ministers received episcopal ordination in Westminster Abbey.

On the third anniversary of the Restoration, 29th May, 1662, copies of the Covenants were in Edinburgh publicly torn to pieces by the common hangman. The ministers were ordered to attend diocesan meetings, and to acknowledge the authority of their bishops. The majority acquiesced; but it is pleasing to learn that nearly four hundred resigned their livings, rather than submit to the prelatic yoke. To take the places of the recusants, a hosts of curates, often persons of mean character and culture, were ordained. The people did not like the men thus thrust upon them as ministers, and they still sought the services of their old pastors; hence originated the “conventicles,” a contemptuous title for a meeting-place of dissenters.

And now began, chiefly in the west and south of Scotland, those field meetings which afterwards became so notable. At first they were simply assemblies for worship, no arms were worn; after service a quiet dispersal. But, as signifying nonconformity to prescribed forms, they gave great offence. A new Act forbade, under punishment for sedition, any preaching without the sanction of the bishops; and inflicting pains and penalties on all persons absenting themselves from their parish churches. If fines were not paid, soldiers were quartered on the recusants, and their cattle, furniture, and very clothing were sold. It was even accounted seditious to give sustenance to the ejected ministers.

It can be easily asked, why did this Scottish people, with the memory of their past, submit to these things? There was, as in England, a reaction to an extreme of loyalty; there was the satisfaction of finding themselves freed from English domination in its tangible form of Cromwell’s troops and garrisons; there was the pleasure of once more seeing a Parliament in Edinburgh, even though it merely registered and gave legal form to the king’s decrees. They were told that the advantage of being governed by their own native prince implied as its price the establishment of that prince’s form of religious faith. Their own nobles and many of their ministers had conformed; and thus bereft of their natural leaders, there was weakness and division. Despite of all these discouragements, they were often goaded into insurrections; which were cruelly suppressed, and made the excuses for further intolerance, and still harsher persecutions.

The field conventicles continued. In the solitudes of nature, in lonely glens, or on pine-shaded hillsides, with sentinels posted on the heights, arose the solemn psalm, and the preachers prayer and exhortation. And men now came armed to these gatherings, the women had to be defended, force was to be met by force. To suppress such meetings, troops were sent into the insubordinate districts, under a wild fanatical Royalist, General Dalziel, and had free quarters on the inhabitants. By 1666, a reign of terror was fully inaugurated; Dalziel flared like a baleful meteor over the West of Scotland. In November of this year, without concert or premeditation, an open insurrection broke out. At Dalry, in Ayrshire, four soldiers were grossly maltreating an aged man, and common humanity could not stand by and look on with indifference or mere sympathy. The people rescued the old man, disarmed the soldiers, and took their officer prisoner to Dumfries. A resolution was suddenly taken to march on Edinburgh. They gathered in a fortnight’s march to barely 2000 men, and wearied and worn out, encamped on a plateau, called Rullion Green, on the Pentland hills, a few miles south of Edinburgh. Here they were attacked by double their numbers under Dalziel, and, after a gallant resistance, considering their inferior arms and discipline, were put to flight. Some fifty were killed on the field, one hundred and thirty were taken prisoners, thirty-four of whom were, chiefly at the instigation of Archbishop Sharpe, hanged as rebels, and the rest banished.

And tortures—such as have had no place in modern history since the palmy days of the Spanish Inquisition were inflicted to extort confessions of complicity in a rising, which was really the offspring of momentary excitement. Thumbikins squeezed the fingers by iron screws. These tortures were generally borne with heroic patience and resolution. One young minister, Hugh McKail, comely in person, well educated, an enthusiast in his covenanting faith, was subjected to the torture of the boot. His leg was crushed, but he uttered no cry, only moving his lips in silent prayer. He had taken very little part in the insurrection, but was condemned to death. On the gallows-ladder his last words were:—“Farewell father, mother, and all my friends in life, farewell earth and all its delights, farewell sun, moon, and stars, welcome death, glory, and eternal life.” Seeing what impressions such words made on the listeners, in after executions drums were beaten to drown the voices of the sufferers.

A weary ten years ensued of alternate “indulgence,” and renewed intolerance. In 1667, the Duke of Lauderdale was placed at the head of Scottish affairs. He had subscribed to the covenant, and had been a Presbyterian representative at the Westminster Assembly. He was now a subservient courtier, but did not at first assume the role of a persecutor. He disbanded the army, and proclaimed an indemnity to those who had fought at Rullion Green, on their signing a bond of peace. The ministers ousted from their parishes were permitted to return, but on conditions which the strict consciences of many could not accept; and those who did accept were placed under close surveillance, and under severe penalties forbidden to take part in any field meetings. Some of the bishops were good men, striving earnestly to make peace within the church. One of these, Leighton, Bishop of Dunblane, made an attempt to reconcile Presbyterianism with a modified episcopacy. The bishops were merely to sit as chairmen, or moderators, in the diocesan convocations, and to have no veto on the proceedings, but the Covenanters thought this a snare for entrapping them into an acknowledgment of prelacy, and the idea was abandoned.

And Lauderdale who had begun his rule leniently, now afraid of being represented to the King as lukewarm in his service, blossomed out into a cruel persecutor, forcibly suppressing field meetings, and enforcing extreme penalties on nonconformists. It has been estimated that up to this date seventeen thousand persons had suffered in fine, imprisonment, and death. It was said that fines extorted for non-attendance at the parish churches, were applied to supply the extravagance of Lady Lauderdale,—a rapacious, bad, clever woman. Landowners were required under penalties to become bound for their tenants, that they would attend their parish churches, take no part in conventicles, and not relieve outlawed persons.

The gentry generally refused to enter into such bonds; and Lauderdale wrote to the King that the country was in a state of incipient rebellion, and required reduction by force of arms. He treated the whole of the west country as if in open revolt. Not only did he send ordinary troops with field artillery into the devoted districts, but he brought down from the hills a Highland host of 9000 men to live upon, and with every encouragement to plunder and oppress, the poor people. Speaking an unknown tongue, strange in manners and attire, they were to the lowlanders a veritable plague of human locusts. When, after a few months of free quarterage, they went back to their hills, themselves and a number of horses were loaded with booty, as if from the sack of a rich town. But so far as we can learn they were not guilty of personal violence upon those they were sent to despoil; perhaps in this respect hardly coming up to the wishes and expectations of their employers.

In May, 1679, occurred a deed of blood which widened the gulf between the Covenanters and the government, and gave legal colouring to harshness and persecution. In Fifeshire, one Carmichael had become especially obnoxious as a cruel persecutor, and an active commissioner for receiving the fines laid upon the malcontents. On 3rd May, a party of twelve men, chiefly small farmers in the district, with David Hackston of Rathillet and John Balfour of Burley as the leaders, lay in wait for Carmichael, with full purpose to slay him. It appears he had received some warning, and kept out of the way. After waiting long, the band were, in sullen disappointment, preparing to separate, when the carriage of Sharpe, the Archbishop, appeared unexpectedly, conveying him and his daughter home to St. Andrews. To these superstitious men, nursed under persecution by old biblical texts into religious fanaticism, it appeared as if an act of necessary vengeance was here thrust upon them, that instead of an inferior agent, a foremost persecutor, who had hounded to the death many of their brethren, was now delivered into their hands. They took him from his carriage, and there on Magus Muir—suing upon his knees for mercy, his grey hairs, and his daughter’s anguished cries, also pleading for his life—they slew him with many sword thrusts.

A general cry of horror and repudiation rang through the land. It was a savage murder; but so had been the deaths of hundreds of persons more innocent than he of offences against justice and common right. More severe measures of repression were taken; new troops were raised, and the officers instructed to act with the utmost rigour. And the Covenanters grew desperate; they assembled in greater numbers, were more fully armed, and more defiant in their language. On 29th May, the anniversary of the Restoration, a mounted party entered the village of Rutherglen, about two miles from Glasgow. They extinguished the festive bonfire, held a service of denunciatory psalms, prayers, and exhortations in the market place, and burned the Acts which had been issued against the Covenant. In quest of the insurgents, and to avenge the affront on the government, a body of cavalry rode out of Glasgow barracks, on the 1st of June. Their leader was a distinguished soldier—a man of courage and gallant bearing, John Graham of Claverhouse—afterwards, for his services in the royal cause, created Viscount Dundee.

In the annals of Scotland there is no name amongst the unworthiest of her sons,—Monteith the betrayer of Wallace, Cardinal Beaton, the ruthless persecutor, Dalziel, with a monomania for murder and oppression,—so utterly detestable as that of the dashing cavalier, Claverhouse. His portrait is that of a haughty, self-centred man; one would think too proud for the meanly savage work he was set to do, but which, with fell intensity, he seemed to revel in doing. In the conflict, he appeared to have a charmed life, and in these superstitious times he was believed to have made a paction with Satan:—for doing the fiend’s work he was to have so many years immunity from death: neither lead nor steel could harm him. It was said that his mortal wound, received in the moment of victory at Killiecrankie, was from being shot by a silver bullet.

Claverhouse, in quest of the demonstrators at Rutherglen, came, at Drumclog, about twenty miles south of Glasgow, on the body of insurgents; about fifty horsemen fairly well appointed, as many infantry with fire-arms, and a number armed with pikes, scythes, and pitch-forks. The Covenanters had skilfully posted themselves; a morass and broad ditch in front, the infantry in the centre, a troop of horse on each flank. Claverhouse’s call to surrender was answered by the singing of a verse of a warlike psalm. The troops gave a loud cheer, and rode into the morass; they found it impassable and themselves under a steady fire from the Covenanters. Claverhouse sent flanking parties to right and left. These were boldly met before they had time to form after crossing the ditch, and nearly cut to pieces. And then the Covenanters made a sudden rush, and after a desperate defence by Claverhouse, they utterly routed him,—the only battle he ever lost.

This victory of the Covenanters over regular troops, ably commanded, was a general surprise, and it found the victors ill-prepared to follow it up to advantage. They next day occupied Hamilton, and, reinforced by numbers, proceeded to attack Glasgow. They were at first beaten back by Claverhouse, but he thought it advisable to retreat to Edinburgh; and then the insurgents occupied Glasgow. The King meanwhile had sent the Duke of Monmouth—a courteous and courageous gentleman,—albeit the bar sinister ran through his escutcheon—to collect an army to quell the rebellion. On 21st June the Covenanters—who had now their headquarters near Hamilton, on the south-western bank of the Clyde, learned that the Duke, at the head of a powerful army, was advancing towards Bothwell Bridge—crossing which he would be upon them.

In the face of the common enemy, polemical disputes between the different presbyterian parties brought confusion into their councils. The moderate party drew up a supplication to the Duke, describing their many grievances, and asking that they be submitted to a free parliament. The Duke sent a courteous reply, expressing sympathy, and offering to intercede for them with the King,—but they must first lay down their arms. This condition the extreme party would not listen to, and at this most unsuitable moment, they nominated fresh officers—men indisposed to acknowledge any allegiance to the King, or, in matters appertaining to religion, to submit to the civil power. Under Rathillet, Burley and other irreconcilables, 300 men were posted to hold the bridge; they made a stout defence; but it was forced at the point of the bayonet. Bishop Burnet says,—“The main body of the insurgents had not the grace to submit, the courage to fight, nor the sense to run away.” But when the cannon began to make havoc in their ranks, and they saw the deadly array of horsemen, and the serried ranks of disciplined infantry preparing to charge—they threw down their arms, and became a mob of fugitives.

And now Claverhouse had to avenge Drumclog. His war-cry on that day had been “No Quarter,” and this was his intention at Bothwell Bridge. Four hundred were killed on the field and in the flight, but the strict orders of the Duke were “Give quarter to all who surrender—make prisoners, but spare life;” and thus the relentless swords of Claverhouse and Dalziel were stayed. With the indignation of a true soldier, Monmouth rejected a proposal to burn Hamilton and to devastate the surrounding country; and he issued a proclamation promising pardon to all who made their submission by a certain day.

But the milder spirit of Monmouth found no place in the treatment of the prisoners taken at Bothwell. They were marched to Edinburgh, suffering much on the way; there, 1200 men were huddled together without shelter in the Greyfriars churchyard—sleeping amongst the tombs upon the bare ground. Several supposed leaders were executed, some escaped further misery by death from exposure, others were set free on signing a declaration never to take arms against the King, and 257 were sent as slaves to Barbadoes.

And meantime Claverhouse was passing as a destroying angel through the western shires. Making little distinction between those who had, and those who had not, taken part in the late insurrection—he seized the property, and imprisoned or put to death, all against whom any charge of contumacy could be laid. The hunted Covenanters were driven into wilder seclusions, and their barbarous treatment naturally made them more aggressive and extravagant in their language. Useless to talk to men frenzied to despair of loyalty to a King, who, in his life of unhallowed pleasure in distant London, heard not, or cared not, for the bitter cry of the people whose rights he had sworn to protect. When they met at midnight in lonely glen or trackless moor, the leaders, Cameron, Cargill, Renwick, and others, would, like the Hebrew Prophets of old, mingle prophecy with denunciation; their high-strung enthusiasm bordered on insanity.

Cameron and Cargill published a declaration denouncing Charles, calling on all true sons of the Covenant to throw off their allegiance, and take up arms against him. And government had now a pretext for putting Scotland under what was really martial law. The common soldiers were authorised to put to death, without any pretence of trial, all who refused to take the prescribed oath, or to answer all interrogations. It was a capital crime to have any intercourse with prescribed persons; and torture was inflicted, even on women, to extort the whereabouts of these persons. At Wigtown, Margaret McLauchlan, a widow of sixty-three years, and Margaret Wilson, a girl of eighteen, were drowned by being bound to stakes within flood-mark.

Amongst many murders perpetrated at this time, that of John Brown, the Ayrshire carrier, stands out conspicuous in horror. He was a quiet, sedate man, leading a blameless life; his only offence was that he did not on Sundays attend the parish church, but either read his bible at home, or, with a few like-minded, met in a quiet place for a little service of praise and prayer. One morning, whilst digging peats for the house fire, he was surrounded by Claverhouse’s dragoons, and brought to his own door. Here, his wife and children being by—a baby in its mother’s arms—Claverhouse asked him why he did not attend on the King’s curate; and John, answering that he had to obey his conscience rather than the King, Claverhouse told him to prepare for death. He said he had long been so prepared. He prayed with fervour, until interrupted by Claverhouse, who saw his wild dragoons beginning to shew tokens of sympathy; Brown kissed his wife and little ones, and he was then shot dead. “What do you think of your bonnie man now?” the devil-hearted slayer asked of the newly-made widow. “I aye thocht muckle o’ him, but never sae muckle as I do this day.” She laid her infant on the ground, tied up the poor shattered head in her kerchief, composed the limbs, covered the body with a plaid, and then she sat down beside it, and, in heart-rending sobs and tears, gave full course to natural sorrow. The tragedy enacted on Magus Moor was a cruel murder, but if there are degrees of guilt in such an awful crime, that committed at the cottage door in Ayrshire was surely the more heinous and atrocious of the two.

Monmouth remained only a short time in Scotland; Lauderdale was still nominally at the head of affairs. But in November, 1679, the King sent his brother James to Edinburgh, partly to keep him out of sight from the people of England. As a rigid Roman Catholic, standing next in succession to the throne, he was very unpopular. A cry of popish plots had been got up, and an Exclusion Bill would have been carried in Parliament,^[4] but Charles dissolved it, and he never called another; for the last four years of his life he reigned as an absolute monarch.

James, a royal Stuart, residing in long untenanted Holyrood, was made much of by the Scottish nobility and gentry, and to conciliate them he so far unbent his generally sombre and unamiable demeanour. He paid particular attention to the Highland chieftains, and thus laid a foundation for that loyalty to himself and his descendants, so costly to the clansmen. But his presence and his influence in public affairs did no good to the poor Covenanters. Against nonconformity of every shade his only remedies were persecution and suppression. The poor wanderers of the Covenant were hunted as wild beasts. Richard Cameron was slain at Aire Moss. Hackston and Cargill were hanged. It is said that James often amused his leisure hours by witnessing the tortures of the boot and the thumb-screw.

And not the common people only were thus vexed and harassed. Strangely-worded oaths, acknowledging the laws and statutes, and also the King’s supremacy, were administered to all holding official positions. When, as a privy counsellor, the oath was tendered to the Earl of Argyle—son of the Marquis who was beheaded at the commencement of the reign—he declared he took it so far as it was consistent with itself, and with the Protestant religion. For adding this qualification, he was tried for, and found guilty of, high treason. He contrived to escape from Edinburgh Castle in the disguise of a page holding up his step-daughter’s train. He reached Holland, a sentence of death hanging over him.

And in England, after dismissing the Oxford parliament, the King was despotic. If he had any religious faith at all, it was towards Catholicism, and thus he took up his brother’s quarrel. In the administration of justice, juries were packed, and judges were venal. London was adjudged to have illegally extended its political powers, was fined heavily, and condemned to lose its charters. Breaches of their charters by provincial towns were looked for, and something was generally found sufficient to raise prosecutions upon, the award being always given for the Crown. Fines were levied for the King’s private advantage, and by his veto in the election of magistrates he held in his hand Parliamentary elections. The university of Oxford issued a solemn decree, affirming unlimited submission to the Royal authority; and the most detestable of the very few judges whose names are a stain upon the history of English jurisprudence—Jeffreys—was the very incarnation of venality and injustice; he was a vulgar bully, ever finding a demoniacal pleasure in cruelty and wrong-doing.

The country had been sickened of civil war, and public spirit seemed to have deserted the land. Still the Whig leaders of the late majority in Parliament made some attempts at organizing resistance. Shaftesbury was for immediate rebellion; but Lords Essex, Howard, and William Russell, and Algernon Sidney, more cautiously resolved to wait the course of events, and act when an opportunity arose. They certainly meant an insurrection in London, to be supported by a rising in the West of England, and another in Scotland under the Earl of Argyle.

But a conspiracy in a lower stratum of political influence, called the Ryehouse Plot, which proposed the deaths of the King and his brother, having been divulged to the Government, and certain arrests made, the prisoners, to save themselves, declared that Lords Howard and Russell, and Sidney, Hampden (a grandson of the John Hampden of ship-money fame), and others were implicated. Howard—recreant to the traditions of his name—turned approver. Lord William Russell was tried for treason—nobly supported by his wife—and although the evidence against him was weak, a packed jury convicted him, and he was beheaded at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Sidney was tried by Judge Jeffreys. Howard was the only witness against him, and for a conviction of treason the law required at least two witnesses; but a manuscript treatise on Government had been found amongst Sidney’s papers; certain passages on political liberty would nowadays be considered as mere truisms, but Jeffreys ruled that they were equal to two-and-twenty adverse witnesses. He also was found guilty, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. Lord Essex—a true nobleman—blaming himself for having put it into Howard’s power to injure Lord Russell, committed suicide.

And some Scottish gentlemen were also implicated in the Whig plot. Bailie, of Jerviswood, had been in correspondence with Lord Russell, and was asked to give evidence against him. On his refusal, he was himself tried for treason,—condemned and executed. Many were fined and imprisoned; many left the country, or otherwise could not be found, but were tried in their absence—outlawed, and their estates forfeited.

James returned to London: he feared the influence of the Duke of Monmouth, who, trading on his father’s favour and his own handsome face and genial manners, posed as an ultra-Protestant, and, in spite of his illegitimate birth, aspired to the succession. James had Monmouth sent to Holland—then, under the Prince of Orange, the refuge for English and Scottish exiles.

But for Charles the world of time was now at its vanishing point. He was only in his fifty-fifth year when, in the midst of his sensuous pleasures, apoplexy seized him, and Bishop Ken had to tell him his hours were numbered. Certain religious exercises were gone through, and the sacramental elements being brought in, the bishop proposed their administration. The King put this off, and the bishop retired. And now James looked up a Catholic priest, and had him smuggled in by a private door to the King’s chamber. The King made confession, and had the last rites of the Church administered. Thus made safe by a Romish passport into heaven—the dying King no doubt enjoyed as a good joke the prayers and admonitions of the Protestant prelates, who, with the lords-in-waiting, were afterwards ushered into his chamber. He died February 6th, 1684-5.