The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

Scotland as the surest pledge of their

loyalty, the most sanguinary law that has ever in our island been

enacted against Protestant Nonconformists.


With this law the whole spirit of his administration was in

perfect harmony. The fiery persecution, which had raged when he

ruled Scotland as vicegerent, waxed hotter than ever from the day

on which he became sovereign. Those shires in which the

Covenanters were most numerous were given up to the license of

the army. With the army was mingled a militia, composed of the

most violent and profligate of those who called themselves

Episcopalians. Preeminent among the bands which oppressed and

wasted these unhappy districts were the dragoons commanded by

John Graham of Claverhouse. The story ran that these wicked men

used in their revels to play at the torments of hell, and to call

each other by the names of devils and damned souls.287 The chief

of this Tophet, a soldier of distinguished courage and

professional skill, but rapacious and profane, of violent temper

and of obdurate heart, has left a name which, wherever the

Scottish race is settled on the face of the globe, is mentioned

with a peculiar energy of hatred. To recapitulate all the crimes,

by which this man, and men like him, goaded the peasantry of the

Western Lowlands into madness, would be an endless task. A few

instances must suffice; and all those instances shall be taken

from the history of a single fortnight, that very fortnight in

which the Scottish Parliament, at the urgent request of James,

enacted a new law of unprecedented severity against Dissenters.


John Brown, a poor carrier of Lanarkshire, was, for his singular

piety, commonly called the Christian carrier. Many years later,

when Scotland enjoyed rest, prosperity, and religious freedom,

old men who remembered the evil days described him as one versed

in divine things, blameless in life, and so peaceable that the

tyrants could find no offence in him except that he absented

himself from the public worship of the Episcopalians. On the

first of May he was cutting turf, when he was seized by

Claverhouse's dragoons, rapidly examined, convicted of

nonconformity, and sentenced to death. It is said that, even

among the soldiers, it was not easy to find an executioner. For

the wife of the poor man was present; she led one little child by

the hand: it was easy to see that she was about to give birth to

another; and even those wild and hardhearted men, who nicknamed

one another Beelzebub and Apollyon, shrank from the great

wickedness of butchering her husband before her face. The

prisoner, meanwhile, raised above himself by the near prospect of

eternity, prayed loud and fervently as one inspired, till

Claverhouse, in a fury, shot him dead. It was reported by

credible witnesses that the widow cried out in her agony, "Well,

sir, well; the day of reckoning will come;" and that the murderer

replied, "To man I can answer for what I have done; and as for

God, I will take him into mine own hand." Yet it was rumoured

that even on his seared conscience and adamantine heart the dying

ejaculations of his victim made an impression which was never

effaced.288


On the fifth of May two artisans, Peter Gillies and John Bryce,

were tried in Ayrshire by a military tribunal consisting of

fifteen soldiers. The indictment is still extant. The prisoners

were charged, not with any act of rebellion, but with holding the

same pernicious doctrines which had impelled others to rebel, and

with wanting only opportunity to act upon those doctrines. The

proceeding was summary. In a few hours the two culprits were

convicted, hanged, and flung together into a hole under the

gallows.289


The eleventh of May was made remarkable by more than one great

crime. Some rigid Calvinists had from the doctrine of reprobation

drawn the consequence that to pray for any person who had been

predestined to perdition was an act of mutiny against the eternal

decrees of the Supreme Being. Three poor labouring men, deeply

imbued with this unamiable divinity, were stopped by an officer

in the neighbourhood of Glasgow. They were asked whether they

would pray for King James the Seventh. They refused to do so

except under the condition that he was one of the elect. A file

of musketeers was drawn out. The prisoners knelt down; they were

blindfolded; and within an hour after they had been arrested,

their blood was lapped up by the dogs.290


While this was done in Clydesdale, an act not less horrible was

perpetrated in Eskdale. One of the proscribed Covenanters,

overcome by sickness, had found shelter in the house of a

respectable widow, and had died there. The corpse was discovered

by the Laird of Westerhall, a petty tyrant who had, in the days

of the Covenant, professed inordinate zeal for the Presbyterian

Church, who had, since the Restoration, purchased the favour of

the government by apostasy, and who felt towards the party which

he had deserted the implacable hatred of an apostate. This man

pulled down the house of the poor woman, carried away her

furniture, and, leaving her and her younger children to wander in

the fields, dragged her son Andrew, who was still a lad, before

Claverhouse, who happened to be marching through that part of the

country. Claverhouse was just then strangely lenient. Some

thought that he had not been quite himself since the death of the

Christian carrier, ten days before. But Westerhall was eager to

signalise his loyalty, and extorted a sullen consent. The guns

were loaded, and the youth was told to pull his bonnet over his

face. He refused, and stood confronting his murderers with the

Bible in his hand. "I can look you in the face," he said; "I have

done nothing of which I need be ashamed. But how will you look in

that day when you shall be judged by what is written in this

book?" He fell dead, and was buried in the moor.291


On the same day two women, Margaret Maclachlin and Margaret

Wilson, the former an aged widow, the latter a maiden of

eighteen, suffered death for their religion in Wigtonshire. They

were offered their lives if they would consent to abjure the

cause of the insurgent Covenanters, and to attend the Episcopal

worship. They refused; and they were sentenced to be drowned.

They were carried to a spot which the Solway overflows twice a

day, and were fastened to stakes fixed in the sand between high

and low water mark. The elder sufferer was placed near to the

advancing flood, in the hope that her last agonies might terrify

the younger into submission. The sight was dreadful. But the

courage of the survivor was sustained by an enthusiasm as lofty

as any that is recorded in martyrology. She saw the sea draw

nearer and nearer, but gave no sign of alarm. She prayed and sang

verses of psalms till the waves choked her voice. After she had

tasted the bitterness of death, she was, by a cruel mercy unbound

and restored to life. When she came to herself, pitying friends

and neighbours implored her to yield. "Dear Margaret, only say,

God save the King!" The poor girl, true to her stern theology,

gasped out, "May God save him, if it be God's will!" Her friends

crowded round the presiding officer. "She has said it; indeed,

sir, she has said it." "Will she take the abjuration?" he

demanded. "Never!" she exclaimed. "I am Christ's: let me go!" And

the waters closed over her for the last time.292


Thus was Scotland governed by that prince whom ignorant men have

represented as a friend of religious liberty, whose misfortune it

was to be too wise and too good for the age in which he lived.

Nay, even those laws which authorised him to govern thus were in

his judgment reprehensibly lenient. While his officers were

committing the murders which have just been related, he was

urging the Scottish Parliament to pass a new Act compared with

which all former Acts might be called merciful.


In England his authority, though great, was circumscribed by

ancient and noble laws which even the Tories would not patiently

have seen him infringe. Here he could not hurry Dissenters before

military tribunals, or enjoy at Council the luxury of seeing them

swoon in the boots. Here he could not drown young girls for

refusing to take the abjuration, or shoot poor countrymen for

doubting whether he was one of the elect. Yet even in England he

continued to persecute the Puritans as far as his power extended,

till events which will hereafter be related induced him to form

the design of uniting Puritans and Papists in a coalition for the

humiliation and spoliation of the established Church.


One sect of Protestant Dissenters indeed he, even at this early

period of his reign, regarded with some tenderness, the Society

of Friends. His partiality for that singular fraternity cannot be

attributed to religious sympathy; for, of all who acknowledge the

divine mission of Jesus, the Roman Catholic and the Quaker differ

most widely. It may seem paradoxical to say that this very

circumstance constituted a tie between the Roman Catholic and the

Quaker; yet such was really the case. For they deviated in

opposite directions so far from what the great body of the nation

regarded as right, that even liberal men generally considered

them both as lying beyond the pale of the largest toleration.

Thus the two extreme sects, precisely because they were extreme

sects, had a common interest distinct from the interest of the

intermediate sects. The Quakers were also guiltless of all

offence against James and his House. They had not been in

existence as a community till the war between his father and the

Long Parliament was drawing towards a close. They had been

cruelly persecuted by some of the revolutionary governments. They

had, since the Restoration, in spite of much ill usage, submitted

themselves meekly to the royal authority. For they had, though

reasoning on premises which the Anglican divines regarded as

heterodox, arrived, like the Anglican divines, at the conclusion,

that no excess of tyranny on the part of a prince can justify

active resistance on the part of a subject. No libel on the

government had ever been traced to a Quaker.293 In no conspiracy

against the government had a Quaker been implicated. The society

had not joined in the clamour for the Exclusion Bill, and had

solemnly condemned the Rye House plot as a hellish design and a

work of the devil.294 Indeed, the friends then took very little

part in civil contentions; for they were not, as now, congregated

in large towns, but were generally engaged in agriculture, a

pursuit from which they have been gradually driven by the

vexations consequent on their strange