Reign of Charles II. (Concluded) page 2

At this critical moment William of Orange proposed to pay a visit to his uncles, which his loving father-in-law James, strenuously opposed, but which the easy Charles permitted. It was soon seen that William, though his ostensible object was to induce Charles to enter into a league against France - whose king continued, in spite of treaties, to press on his encroachments - yet was courted by the exclusionists, even by Monmouth, as well as lord Russell and the other whig leaders; and with all his habitual caution could not avoid letting it be seen that he was proud of the courtship. He even consented to accept an invitation from the city to dinner, to the great disgust of the court, which was in high dudgeon at the conduct of the sheriffs, and William soon returned. His object was to ascertain the strength of the whig party, and though the tide was rapidly running against it at that moment, he went back with the conviction that some violent change was not very far off. Though Charles promised William to join the alliance against France, and call a parliament, no sooner was the prince gone than he assured Louis that he was more than ever his friend, and received a fresh bribe of a million of livres to allow France to attack Luxemburg, one of the main keys of Holland.

James, during these months, had been distinguishing himself in Scotland in a manner which promised but a poor prospect to protestantism should he ever come to the throne. After the battle of Bothwell Bridge, the covenanting party seemed for a while to have sunk into the earth and disappeared; but ere long there was seen emerging again from their hiding-places, the more determined and enthusiastic section which followed Donald Cargill and Richard Cameron. These so-called Cameronians believed that Charles Stuart, by renouncing the solemn league and covenant, had renounced all right to rule over them; and Cameron, accompanied by about twenty of his adherents, affixed on the cross of Sanquhar "a declaration and testimony of the true presbyterian, anti-prelatic, anti-erastian, and persecuted party in Scotland." In this bold paper they disowned Charles Stuart, who ought, they said, to have been denuded years before of being king, ruler, or magistrate, on account of his tyranny. They declared war on him as a tyrant and usurper; they also disowned all power of James, duke of York, in Scotland, and declared that they would treat their 1 enemies as they had hitherto treated them.

The host of Israel, as they styled themselves, consisted of six-and-twenty horse and forty foot. At Airdmoss, in Kyle, this little knot of men who spoke such loud things was surprised by three troops of dragoons, and Cameron, as bold in action as in word, rushed on this unequal number, crying, "Lord, take the ripest, spare the greenest." He fell with his brother and seven others. Rathillet, who was there, was wounded and taken prisoner, but Cargill escaped. Rathillet was tried and executed for the murder of archbishop Sharp. His händs were first cut off at the foot of the gallows, after hanging, his head was cut off, and fixed on a spike at Cupar, and his body was hung in chains at Magus Moor. Cargill reappeared in September, 1680, at Torwood, in Stirlingshire, and there preached; and then, after the sermon, pronounced this extraordinary excommunication: - "I, being a minister of Jesus Christ, and having authority from him, do, in his name and by his spirit, excommunicate, cast out of the true church, and deliver up to Satan, Charles II., king of Scotland, for his mocking of God, his perjury, his uncleanness of adultery and incest, his drunkenness, and his dissembling with God and man." He also excommunicated the duke of York for idolatry, Monmouth for his slaughter of the Lord's people at Bothwell Bridge, Lauderdale for blasphemy, apostacy, and adultery, and other different offences.

The government thought it time to hunt out this nest of enthusiasts, and put to death as a terror the prisoners taken at Airdmoss. Two of these were women, Isabel Alison and Marian Harvey, who went to the gallows rejoicing. The duke of York offered to pardon some of them if they would only say," God save the king," but they refused, and congratulated each other that they should that night sup in Paradise. Cargill and four of his followers were taken in July, 1681, and hanged.

James now professed great leniency and liberality. Instead of persecuting the Cameronians, he drafted them off into a Scottish regiment which was serving abroad in Flanders, in the pay of Spain. He put a stop to many of Lauderdale's embezzlements, and turned out some of the worst of his official blood-suckers. He promised to maintain episcopacy, and to put down conventicles, and brought into parliament a new test act, which was to swear every one to the king's supremacy and to passive obedience. His leniency was then soon at an end, and the object he was driving at was too palpable to escape the slightest observation. But Fletcher of Saltoun, lord Stair, and some other bold patriots opposed the design, and carried a clause in the test act for the defence of the protestant religion, which was so worded as to make it mean presbyterianism of the confession of faith of 1560. This so little suited James that he was necessitated to add another clause, excusing the princes of the blood taking This own test. But lord Belhaven boldly declared that the great object of it was to bind a popish successor. At this avowal, the last vestige of James's assumed liberality deserted him, and he sent lord Belhaven prisoner to the castle, and ordered the attorney- general to impeach him. He removed lord Stair from his office of president of the court of session, and commenced prosecutions against both him and Fletcher of Saltoun. The earl of Argyll, however, whose father had been executed by Charles soon after his restoration, made a decided speech against the test, and James called upon him at the council board to take it. Argyll took it with certain qualifications, whereupon James appeared to be satisfied, and invited Argyll to sit beside him at the council-board, and repeatedly took the opportunity of whispering in his ear, as if he bestowed his highest confidence on him. But this was but the fawning of the tiger ere he made his spring. Two days after he sent him to the castle on a charge of treason, for limiting the test. James, however, when some of the courtiers surmised that his life and fortune must pay for his treason, exclaimed, "Life and fortune! God forbid! Yet on the 20th of November instructions arrived from England to accuse him of high treason, and on the 12th of December he was brought to trial. To show what was to be expected from such a trial, the marquis of Montrose, the grandson of the celebrated Montrose, whom the father of Argyll and the covenanters hanged, and who was, in consequence, the implacable enemy of the present earl and all his house, was made foreman of the jury, and delivered the sentence of guilty. The whole council were called on to indorse this sentence; even the bishops were not allowed to be exempt, according to their privilege, from being concerned in a doom of blood; and the earl's own friends and adherents had not the firmness to refuse selling their names. Argyll, however, disappointed his enemies, by escaping in the disguise of a page to his daughter-in-law, lady Lindsay, and made his way to England, and thence to Holland, where, like many other fugitives from England and Scotland, he took refuge with William of Orange. A decree was immediately issued, ordering him to be put to death whenever taken; his estates, goods, and chattels, to be forfeited to the crown; his name and honours to be extinct; and his posterity to be for ever incapable of holding place, honour, or office. The outraged feeling of the country against so wholesale and shameless a sentence for so trivial an offence as that of dissenting in his place in parliament from- some of the provisions of a proposed measure, compelled the court to restore the estates to the earl's son, the marquis of Lorn, but the king took care to strip away his hereditary jurisdictions, and parcel them out amongst the creatures of James's Scottish court, to be holden at the royal pleasure - a certain means of securing their adhesion.

James now, whilst the parliament was terror-stricken by this example of royal vengeance, brought in a bill making it high treason in any one to maintain the lawfulness of excluding him from the throne, either on account of his religion or for any other reason whatever. By this he showed to the exclusionists that they must expect a civil war with Scotland if they attempted to bar his way to the throne of England. Deeming himself now secure, he gave way to his natural cruelty of temper, and indulged in tortures and barbarities which seemed almost to cast the atrocities of Lauderdale into the shade. It was his custom to have the prisoners for religion so tortured in the privy council, that even the old hardened courtiers who had stood out the merciless doings of Lauderdale and Middleton, escaped from the board as soon as the iron boots were introduced. But James not only seemed to enjoy the agonies of the sentenced with a peculiar satisfaction, but he made an order that the whole of the privy council should remain dining these more than inquisitorial horrors. He was thus employing himself when he was summoned to England by Charles, who assured him that he should be allowed soon to return permanently on condition that he made over part of his parliamentary allowance to the French mistress, the duchess of Portland. James consented, and then returning to Scotland by sea, the country was very nearly relieved from all further apprehensions of him by his being wrecked on the sandbank called the Lemon and Ore, about twelve leagues from Yarmouth. Unfortunately, however, he escaped, though lord O'Brien, the earl of Roxburgh, Sir Joseph Douglas, one of the Hydes, a lieutenant of the frigate, the captain, and above a hundred and thirty other persons perished. His narrow escape had produced no better feeling in him, but on reaching Edinburgh he returned to his favourite exercises of hunting up, torturing, and destroying covenanters, Cameronians, and all who dared to show them any favour. The earls of Perth, Aberdeen, and Queens- bury were his unflinching agents. Above two thousand people were outlawed, courts of inquisition were erected all over the west and south of Scotland; the soldiers had orders to shoot down any who would not disavow Cargill's excommunication of the king, and say, "God bless him!" The persecuted people now began to deem that nothing but their utter destruction would satisfy the ruthless tyrant, and were contemplating shipping themselves to America, when political eauses removed James to London.

The duke being allowed to return, and being restored to the office of lord high admiral, and lodged in St. James's Palace, Monmouth, who had been assured that James should be retained in Scotland, also returned from abroad, in spite of the positive command of the king. On the duke of York's return, the tories, who regarded it as a proof of the ascendancy of their principles, framed an address of congratulation, and of abhorrence of Shaftesbury's scheme of association. When Monmouth arrived, the whig party received him with still more boisterous enthusiasm. The city was in a turmoil of delight, but in the blaze of his popularity, Monmouth, conceiving that the whig influence was on the decline, endeavoured to follow the example of Sunderland, who had made his peace with the king, and the duke was. readmitted to the cabinet. But Monmouth was too narrowly watched, and though he had sent offers of reconciliation through his wife, the reproaches of Shaftesbury, Russell, and his other partisans, made him draw back, and under pretence of paying a visit to the earl of Macclesfield, he set out as in 1680, in a tour through the provinces.

Nothing could exceed Monmouth's folly on this progress. Had he been the undoubted heir-apparent to the crown, he could not have assumed more airs of royalty; and at a moment when the eyes of both the king and James were following him with jealous vigilance, that folly was the more egregious. Wherever he came he was met by the nobles and great landowners at the head of their tenantry, most of whom were armed, and conducted in royal state to their houses. He was thus received by the lords Macclesfield, Brandon, Rivers, Colchester, Delamere, Russell, and Grey, as well as the leading gentry. He travelled attended by a hundred men on horseback, one half of whom preceded and the other followed him. As he approached a town, he quitted his coach and mounted his horse, on which he rode alone in the centre of the procession. On entering the town, the nobles, gentry, and city officials took their places in front, the tenantry and common people fell in behind, shouting, "A Monmouth! a Monmouth! and no York!" Wherever he dined he ordered two hundred covers to be laid for the guests, and the people, conducted by proper officers, passed through the room in at one door and out at another in order to see him, as if he were a king. At Liverpool he did not hesitate to touch for the king's evil. Wherever there were fairs, races, or other public assemblies, he was sure to appear and ingratiate himself with the populace, not only by his flattering bows and smiles, but by entering into their sports. He was a man of amazing agility, and ran races on foot with the most celebrated pedestrians, and after beating them in his shoes, he would run again in his boots, against them in their shoes, and won still. The prizes that he thus gained he gave away at christenings in the evening.

Whilst he was thus exciting the wonder of the common people by his popular acts, accomplishments, and condescensions, the spies of Chiffinch, his father's old agent for secret purposes, were constantly around him, and sent up hourly reports to court. Jeffreys, who was now chief justice of Chester, and himself addicted to much low company, buffoonery, and drunkenness off the bench, and the wildestand most insulting conduct upon it, seized the opportunity of some slight disturbances which occurred during Monmouth's stay there, to win favour with the duke of York, by taking into custody and punishing some of his followers. At Stafford Monmouth had engaged to dine in the public streets with the whole population; but as he was walking towards the appointed place, a king's messenger appeared and arrested him on a charge of "passing through the kingdom with multitudes of riotous people, to the disturbance of the pieace and the terror of the king's subjects." Shaftesbury was not there, or he might have been advised to throw himself on the protection of the assembled people, and their rebellion which he stirred up a few years later might have occurred then, for Shaftesbury was now advising all the leaders of his party to rise; but Monmouth surrendered without resistance, and was conveyed to the capital, where he was admitted to bail himself in a bond of ten thousand pounds, and his sureties, Russell, Grey, &c., in two thousand pounds each. The king, with that affection which he always showed for this vain and foolish young man, appeared satisfied with having cut short his mock-heroic progress.