Regency of Mary Guise & Emergence of Knox
The regency of the Queen's mother is a period of religious tumult fomented by John Knox that sets Scotland on its new religious course.
History of Scotland
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1560s THE GREAT PILLAGE
The revolution was now under way, 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 Châtelherault 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 Châtelherault 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, Châtelherault, 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.
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. 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. 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 Châtelherault, 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.
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.
Death of Huntly
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. 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.
Chatelard Affair
In 1563 came the affair of Châtelard, 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 Châtelard 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 Brantôme’s, that Châtelard 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 Châtelherault, 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 Châtelherault, 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.
Death of Riccio
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.
Death of Darnley
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 Flees to England
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 Châtelherault, 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 Châtelherault 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’état 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 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, 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 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), 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 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 outmanœuvred 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 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 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, 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.