CHAP. XII This hostility was excited by Clarendon, and it was the commencement of a misunderstanding between him and the King, which ultimately terminated in an open quarrel. From this moment, Charles yielded himself, without reserve, to Buckingham, Ashley Cooper, and the other men who, afterwards, formed the Cabal.* 10. Repeal of the Triennial Act, and passing of the Conventicle Act. The parliament did not rest satisfied with merely rejecting this royal declaration, but addressed the King, to issue a proclamation, ordering all Catholic priests to quit the kingdom, under penalty of death. He yielded; but he made an exception in favour of the priests attached to the service of his wife and mother, which neutralised the whole measure. The parliament, however, was too loyal to resent this; and they not only loyalty of increased the revenue to £2,000,000, and connived at the the parliasale of Dunkirk, but, in the next session (March, 1664), they repealed the Triennial Act, at the King's request, retaining, however, the general provision that no interval between two parliaments should exceed three years.t Slavish ment. The rising in Farnley Wood. In the summer of 1663, some Fifth-monarchy men and others raised a slight insurrection in Farnley Wood, near Leeds, which, together with some obscure risings in other parts of Yorkshire, and in Westmoreland, was made the pretext for "An Act to Prevent and Suppress Seditious Conventicles" (May, 1664.) Assuming that all religious assemblies of Nonconformists were seditious, it enacted, that if five or more persons besides the household were present at any religious meeting not according to the Book of Common Prayer, then each person present should be fined £5 and imprisoned three months, for the first offence: £10 and six months for the second; and transported seven years for the third offence. Conventicle Under this abominable statute, the ejected Puritan ministers Effect of the were thrown into prison, and the ordinary affairs of life Act. among the Nonconformist families, were severely deranged. They dared not have the family prayers, if above four persons ame to visit them, which, Baxter tells us, was a common occurrence in gentlemen's families. In London, where the houses were contiguous, some thought if they heard one another through the wall or a window, they would avoid the law; and others thought that if they did not meet for a religious purpose, but simply came on a visit, or on business, it would be no breach of the law. But the judges always decided against them. The Quakers resolutely defied the act, and. met openly; they were * Armand Carrel's "Counter Revolution in England," p. 71. 1661 therefore dragged to jail in great numbers, where many of them died. This persecution continued many years.* II. THE RESTORATION IN SCOTLAND. drunken 11. The Execution of Argyle. The first measures of the restored monarch, with regard to Scotland, gratified the pride of his northern subjects. He restored to them their former independence, by giving them a separate government and a separate parliament; the Committee of Estates was restored; the Earl of Middleton was appointed lord commissioner; the Earl of Glencairn, chancellor ; the Earl of Lauderdale, secretary of state; Rothes, president of the council; and Crawford, lord treasurer. But the people soon found that they had purchased their nationality by the loss of their civil and religious rights. The "drunken parliament," as it was called, which met on the 1st of January, 1661, by the Acts of the "act rescissory," rescinded all the statutes passed in 1641, parliament. because Charles I. had assented to them through force. The Scots constitution, therefore, fell back at once to a state of despotism; the lords of the articles were revived; and the kirk was levelled to the dust. Episcopacy was restored, and unlimited jurisdiction. given to the bishops; the general assemblies, so dear to the people, were set aside; 350 of the Presbyterian clergy, being more than one-third of the whole number, were ejected from their livings; a large standing army of 22,000 men was kept up; and enormous fines were imposed upon the Covenanters, whose leaders were immediately singled out for punishment. First came the Marquis of Argyle, whom it was determined to put to death, in revenge for the execution of Montrose. At the Restoration he had hastened to London to offer his homage to the King; but he was arrested and sent back to Scotland, to be there tried for his alleged offences. As the English government admitted his plea of the amnesty which Charles had granted in 1651, the charges against him were confined to his actions since that date. These were that he had received a grant from Cromwell; that he had aided the English invaders; that he had sat in Richard Cromwell's parliament, and voted for a bill which abolished the rights of the Stuarts to the crown. His enemies felt that these trivial accusations were utterly insufficient to convict him; but at this moment, Monk infamously delivered up two letters from the doomed nobleman, in which Argyle spoke more favourably of the Cromwells than the Stuarts. The Scots parliament declared that these letters established the presumption of Argyle's complicity in the late King's death; and the presumption being declared sufficient proof, he was condemned and executed at Edinburgh (May 27th, 1661). Baxter's Life, p. 463. + Because the chief men in it were perpetually drunk. CHAP. XII. At the same time, the son of Argyle, having written a private letter which was intercepted, complaining of the injustice of his father's condemnation, was sentenced to lose his life on such a construction of the ancient law against leasing-making, i. e. sowing dissension by falsehood, that no man could escape. Thus effect of the the Restoration produced this result in Scotland: the in Scotland. worst system of laws was administered by the worst men ; and there was left no alternative but implicit obedience or desperate rebellion.* Miserable Restoration of episcopal 12. Persecution of the Covenanters. The Pentland Rising. Amidst these excesses against individuals, the more extensive tyranny of forcing Episcopacy upon a people so devoted to Restoration presbytery, was resolutely pushed forward. Sharp, whom authority. the Presbyterians had sent to London as their agent, for the purpose of preserving the kirk, returned Bishop of St. Andrews and Primate of Scotland; other prelates rapidly followed; and in May, 1662, the parliament gave the bishops full ecclesiastical authority and jurisdiction. Then followed an Act of Uniformity, and a furious mandate, framed, it was said, at a drunken revel at Glasgow, commanding all incumbents who had not received lay presentation and Episcopal induction, to resign their livings, on pain of being removed by the military. Then began the preaching in conventicles, and the secession of the people from the churches, especially in the western shires; followed by the fines and penalties imposed by an ecclesiastical commission, and the free quartering of soldiers upon the people. The Solemn League and Covenant was publicly burnt; the western Whigamores were burnt in effigy; every one had to renounce the Covenant or endure persecution; and the number of vacant pulpits was so great, that. the Highland gentlemen complained of there being no lads to herd the cattle, because they had all been taken away to become curates or parish priests! But all this violence found little favour with the English government, and Middleton was sent to be governor of Tangiers, where he died. The new commissioner, the Earl of Tweedale, was, however, urged on by Sharp, so that the severities were not relaxed. But the Scots, driven from their churches, did not the less observe their religious rites; they assembled in their venticles. houses, in barns, in the open air, on the hill sides, and in the fastnesses and rocky defiles of the western wilds. When the Conventicle Act prohibited these meetings, it was no easy matter to surprise the worshippers, for scouts and watchers gave early * Hallam, II., 488; Lingard, XI., 230-232; Carrel, 63-64. The con 1666-69 warning of the approach of the military; and the people went armed to the conventicle, and were thus prepared for resistance. At length, a body of troops, under Sir James Turner, a soldier of fortune, was sent to scour the counties of Dumfries, Ayr, and Galloway. This drove the Covenanters into open rebellion; but they were defeated on Rullion Green, in the Pentland Hills (November 28th, 1666), by Generals Dalziel and Drummond, who, having been bred in the Russian wars, carried on their warfare with the direst cruelty. The leaders of the rebellion, which was called the Pentland Rising, were sent to The PentEdinburgh, tortured with the boot, and then executed. land rising. The rebel counties were subjected to the most horrible military severities, and the cruelties which were perpetrated are still remembered, with shuddering fear, by the western peasantry. Such a policy as this was too terrible to last; the English government, ashamed of its colleagues in Scotland, dismissed the primate from the administration. Rothes also was sharp deprived, but Lauderdale was retained. More lenient from office. measures were then adopted, and a proclamation of indulgence was issued (July, 1669), permitting such of the ejected clergy as had not given any particular offence, to preach in vacant parishes. dismissed 13. The Restoration in Ireland. The great difficulty which resulted from the Restoration in Ireland was, the settlement of the titles and boundaries of each man's private estate. On the 28th of November, 1660, Charles published his celebrated Declaration for the the settlement of the country, to serve as the basis of an act of parliament. The Declaration or Act of Settlement. served in It confirmed the title of all the adventurers who had received lands from the parliament in return for money which they had advanced for quelling the rebellion, on the faith of the acts passed in 1642. The soldiers also were confirmed in the estates which had been allotted for their pay, with the exception of church lands and some others. Officers who had the royal army against the Irish before 1649, were to receive lands to the value of five-eighths of their pay. Innocent papists, such as were not concerned in the rebellion, and whom Cromwell had transplanted into Connaught, were to be restored to their estates, and those who possessed them to be indemnified. To this arrangement was appended a list of the qualifications of innocence. But the Declaration was not altogether satisfactory, especially to the Roman Catholics, because the qualifications were SO constructed as to exclude most of them from the benefits. The Irish Commons, however, the majority of whom were soldiers and adventurers, confirmed the Declaration: the Lords opposed it, and the dispute was referred to London, where the King's council formed itself into a Court of Claims, for the purpose of making a settlement. The result of all the intrigues which now The Court CHAP. XII. followed was, that the Declaration was very little altered, and it was passed into a law under the name of the Act of Settlement. When the act came to be executed, still greater difficulties than before were found, although a number of English of Claims. commissioners were sent over, to constitute a Court of Claims, that impartiality might be observed. Such improvident grants of lands had been made to the church, and to the Dukes of York, Ormond, Albemarle, and others, that the fund for reprisals had been almost exhausted; more of the Irish were pronounced innocent than had been expected; and the new possessors, having the sway in the House of Commons, a clamour was raised that the popish interest had prevailed. To secure themselves, they demanded that a closer inquisition should be Act of Ex. made, and stricter qualifications required, and that a planation. supplementary measure, called the Act of Explanation, should be passed (1665). The adventurers and soldiers relinquished about one-third of their estates; all those who had not already been adjudged innocent, were cut off from any hope of restitution; and the Irish Catholics, who had previously held about two-thirds of the kingdom, lost more than one-half of their possessions.* The mar III. DURING THE FIRST DUTCH WAR. 14. The King's marriage. When Charles was restored, Alphonso, King of Portugal, sought to renew the alliance which had existed between him and the Protector; and, in order to bind the friendship closer, he offered the English King, in riage treaty, marriage, his sister Catherine of Braganza, with a portion of £500,000, together with two fortressess,-Tangiers in Africa, and Bombay in the East Indies, and freedom of trade to Portugal and her colonies. The offer was accepted, and the treaty concluded, on the 21st of May, 1662; the marriage being celebrated in a private room, at Portsmouth, according to the Roman Catholic rites. The negotiations which led to this marriage introduced Charles to Louis XIV. That monarch had First just concluded the treaty of the Pyrenees with Spain, by between which he engaged to give no support to Portugal, which Louis XIV. had lately, under the House of Braganza, released itself from the Spanish yoke. Yet he did not hesitate to persuade Charles to accept the alliance; he offered him money, to purchase votes in parliament, to silence opposition; and he agreed to furnish him with supplies, in the event of the marriage leading to a rupture with Spain. Thus was laid the foundation of that negotiation Charles and *Hallam, II., 557, Notes; Lingard, XI., 239-243. |