excepted, received orders from Whitehall to march to Carlisle in view of the anticipated invasion. Lieutenant-General Douglas had three thousand men of all arms, including eight hundred and forty-one horse and dragoons under Major-General Graham. They continued their march till they reached London in the end of October.1 They pushed on to join the royal army lying at Salisbury. Before James left London he raised the loyal Claverhouse to the peerage with the titles of Viscount of Dundee and Lord Graham of Claverhouse, in recognition of that soldier's 'many good and eminent services,' and his 'constant loyalty and firm adherence (upon all occasions) to the true interests of the Crown.' James threw away any opportunity left to him at this crisis. Nothing could induce James to act boldly and give his daring generals a chance of victory. He skulked away, leaving his army to be disbanded. William failed to win Dundee and Balcarres over to his party-Dundee only promising that 'unless he were forced to it he would live quietly'; but William did not interfere with their return to Scotland, Dundee riding home at the head of his own troop, at the end of February.2 Holyrood, 1688. The advent of the Liberator gave the students an opportunity Mêléeat of burning an effigy of the Pope in Glasgow. On 10th December, 10th December a rabble, some Cameronians among the rest, proceeded to Holyrood Abbey to purge that ancient fane of its monuments of idolatry, and were met by the deadly fire of Captain John Wallace and a guard, which killed twelve of the assailants and wounded thrice as many. The enraged townsmen, led by the provost and Captain Graham, formerly of the town-guard, surrounded the palace, put Wallace to flight, killed some of the guard, wrecked the chapel, looted the Jesuits' quarters and schools, drank dry the cellars of Chancellor Perth, and fired themselves into a fit condition for plundering every Papist's house they knew.3 Chancellor Perth thought it was time to seek safety with the King in France, Capture of but was captured near the Bass, brought back to Kirkcaldy jail, and Perth. sent to Stirling, where he lay for four years. In many parishes mobs 4 1 Terry, 236. 2 Balcarres, An Account, 58. 3 Ibid., 38-43. 4 Ibid., 47. The Societymen and rabbling. Barbaric rabblings. of angry men and women emptied the manses and showed violence to the inmates. The Society-men considered this disorderly method of 'rabbling out' the ministry to be improper and wanting in ecclesiastical formality and dignity, and resolved to prepare a warrant of ejection to be politely forwarded to all obnoxious incumbents, inviting them to cease from official duty, and to deliver up the church keys and communion plate before the inevitable eviction took place.1 Rabbling was brutal procedure. Christmastide was reckoned to be a seasonable time for commencing it. By day and by night bands of despoilers and immodest viragoes sallied forth to find the curates, and broke up doors of church and manse in their quest. They made free of meat and drink, turned the plenishing upside down or out into the open, and drove into the snow and frostbound fields women, children, and cattle. The incumbent, invested in his canonical robes, they bore to the market cross or into the churchyard. They cudgelled him on the route. They tore up his vestments into ribbons, and cast these with his hat into an improvised fire, before which the shivering wretch was made to beg his life, give up the keys, and swear that henceforth he would desist from his hateful office. Captain James Harkness, in all likelihood a hero of Enterkin, at the head of a band of Amazons, invaded the manse of Kirkpatrick-Juxta, in Annandale, and seized Archibald Fergusson, the minister. Each from her girdle drew an ugly knife, and began incontinently to undress the prostrate pastor. An eye-witness said that 'their modesty could not prevail against their zeal as to spare his shirt and drawers, but all were cut in pieces and sacrificed to a broken Covenant.' 2 Then the barbarians allowed the naked wretch with bruised bones to crawl back to his wife-she was enceinte—who was also maltreated in trying to protect her husband. Robert Bell, minister of Kilmarnock, left a graphic account of his 1 Faithful Contendings, 375; The Case of the present Afflicted Clergy (Lond., 1690), 21-71. This pamphlet was answered by Gilbert Rule in A Second Vindication, 1691. 2 G. M. in the Case, 61. forced compearance in a crowd of howling fanatics, who burned the 2 Alexander The iron gates of the wind-swept dungeons of Blackness Castle Liberation of opened to permit Alexander Gordon of Earlston, after years of Gordon, incarceration, to attend a meeting of the Societies in Sanquhar on 1650-1726. 23rd January 1689, where he more than satisfied that inquisition that his past defections were pardonable; and that bold freeman in turn even went the length of animadverting upon the defection of the Remnant in associating with Malignant sympathisers with the Prince of Orange. After all their bickerings they became unanimous in resolving to renew the Covenants, to prepare a list of defections, and to organise their supporters before the Estates met. Another great meeting of the Covenanters assembled in Lesmahagow Church, and marched up to Borland Hill, on Sabbath, 3rd March, when, after William Boyd and Thomas Lining preached, 'Mr. Lining read before the Congregation the Acknowledgment of Sins, and Engagement to Duties, and next the Covenants-National and Solemn League-which 1 Six Saints, i. 321; ii. 183, 184. 2 Faithful Contendings, 373. Covenants subscribed at Lesmahagow, 3rd March 1689. Explanation of the violence were fairly written at length, with some alterations which the circumstances of the times of necessity called for, such as when they mention the King, in place thereof is put the Civil Magistrate.' The people with uplifted hands swore the two Covenants. In the evening many subscribed them in Lesmahagow Church.1 A wave of violence spread over the south-west counties of Scotof the victors. land, as if the worst passions of a rude enslaved people had been unleashed, and got beyond control, the more they recollected the indignities and sufferings to which they had been for a generation subjected. The peasantry, as much as the zealots, rebels, and mountain men, had their own scores to settle with callous governors and pitiless sympathisers with the late misgovernment. All the sufferings were not for the Covenant's sake. There was many a roofless home, empty cupboard, lonely green grave, many a footsore vagabond as well as unkempt saint, to testify to the truth that the authorities had not always been scrupulous in discriminating whose farms were fired, whose goods were spoiled, whose lives were gangrened out in dungeons, rotted on the moorland, wasted in the cane-brakes, ended by bullet, rope, or rising tide. William's Declaration mentioned these facts. No religion has ever yet subdued the Scottish spirit to a clemency willing to overlook and excuse the long course of barbarity which met a paltry retribution in the rabbling of about two hundred Episcopal pastors. It was in keeping with William's own tolerant spirit that one of his first proclamations was that of 6th February 1689-'For the Keeping of the Peace'-in which he adjures all lovers of concord to bear with one another, and not accentuate differences. Only the violent disregarded this order.2 An English convention, 1689. William, well advised, summoned a convention of English legislators, which met on 22nd January 1689. First the Commons and afterwards the Lords resolved that James II., having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, had abdicated the Government, and that the throne had thereby 2 Aldis, List, 2931. 1 Faithful Contendings, 381. become vacant.' Both Houses united in offering the Crown of England to William and Mary as joint Sovereigns. Sovereignty thus became the result of a Parliamentary vote, and the theory of divine right was exploded. Here again was light out of an old window by which the more prescient Covenanters had been guided through the valley of humiliation for half a century, and even longer; for by this resolution the political dogmas of Knox, Buchanan, and Melville, and the ecclesiastical doctrines of Henderson, Guthrie, Cargill, Cameron, and Renwick, received the national imprimatur. Soon the Protestant dissenters in England were satisfied by a Toleration Act, but the demand that all officials should take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, resulted in the removal of Archbishop Sancroft, six bishops, and four hundred clergy, who refused to take the oaths. They too were tolerated as a new sect of Non-Jurors.1 tion of Estates, The Scots Convention of Estates, summoned by a letter from Scots ConvenWilliam, duly met in Edinburgh on 14th March. Test and disability 14th March were ignored. The Anti-Jacobite party secured the chair for William, 1689. third Duke of Hamilton (1635-94). The sederunt of one hundred and eighty-nine members was highly representative. Among others sat these blood-stained executioners of the expiring Government— Dundee, Sir John Dalrymple, Dalziel of Glenae, Johnstone of Westerhall, and Coltran of Wigtown. Nine bishops also sat for the last time. A debate arose as to which letter should be read firstthat of the King or that of the invader. The latter was preferred.3 Thereafter the legislators passed an Act declaring the Convention a free and lawful Parliament. Dundie' actually subscribed this Act.* The Duke of Gordon, a Papist, still held the Castle of Edinburgh for King James. When Balcarres and Dundee returned from England, they lost no time in communicating with Gordon, and in inducing him to hold the arsenal for the King, as also to menace the Capital with its guns. How Dundee could harmonise this 1 Foxcroft's Supplement to Burnet, 315, 317, citing Hist., ii. 6, 12. 2 Mar MSS., 222; Act. Parl. Scot., ix. 3. 3 Letter, Aldis, List, 2987. 4 Cf. facsimile in Act. Parl. Scot., ix. 9. |