Short History of Scotland — 33 - Ch. 24: Charles I, pt 3

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 pounds), 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 pounds 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.