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Progress of the Reformation in Scotland-George Wishart, John Knox, James Melville; the Solemn League and Covenant (1638); the restoration of Episcopacy (1661-4); popular discontent�the Pentland rising, Hugh M'Kail, Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge, Richard Cameron, Donald Cargill, Baillie of Jerviswood, Alexander Peden, James Ren- wick, the Wigtown Martyrs"; the Revolution of 1688; siege of Derry (1689).
IN words of vehement hatred, Patrick Walker described prelacy as "That old strumpet mother and eldest beautiful daughter of Antichrist, with which the blinded nations have been and are sadly bewitched: but vile, vile, loathsome and hateful in the eyes of all zealous serious godly in Scotland, ever since the Lord made light to arise to see her abomina- tions." The passage expressed, with little exaggeration of language, the feelings of the majority of the Scottish people in the seventeenth century. The hatred of prelacy was not indeed shared by the aristocracy, nor had it extended to the north of Scotland. But in the Lowlands, and among the middle and lower classes, it was as bitter as the love of Presbyterian forms was deep and strong.
" In the year of God 1544 . . . came to Scotland that Blessed Martyr of God, Master George Wishart." So John Knox began his story of the beloved master, of whom he speaks with a reverent tenderness that rarely comes to the surface of his independent, self-reliant character. Not a few martyrs had already suffered in Scotland for conscience' sake. Even so illustrious a scholar as George Buchanan had narrowly escaped the clutch of Cardinal Beaton, though the archbishop's wrath was less stirred by Buchanan's Latin version of the Psalms than by his satires on clerical vices. What Buchanan did in the language of scholars. Sir David Lindsay did in homely Scotch. But the true vernacular poetry of the day was enshrined in the collections of " Spiritual Sangis," including "the Psalmes of David, with uther new plesand Ballatis." No edition of the collected verses, which are mainly the work of three brothers, James, John, and Robert Wedderbum, is known till 1568. But the Songs and Psalms, printed on separate sheets, or sung by wandering minstrels, had already circulated among the people and filtered into common knowledge.
The way was paved for the Reformed doctrines before Wishart's arrival in Scotland. But there was about him that personal fascination, which made him the leader of the movement, and won him the devotion of his disciple, John Knox. His tall figure and bearded face, with his round French hat, long frieze mantle, black doublet and hose, white falling bands and cuffs, soon became familiar, as he preached by market crosses, at the dyke-side of Mauchline, in private houses, or, more rarely, in parish kirks. He was preaching in Kyle when "word was brought that the plague of pestilence was risen in Dundee . . . and the pest was so vehement, that it almost passed credibility, to hear what number departed every four-and-twenty hours." Hastening to the plague- stricken city, Wishart took his station at the East Port; those that were " whole sat or stood within, and the sick and suspected without the Port." Standing, as it were, between life and death, he preached to the people from Psalm cvii., verse 20, " He sent His word, and healed them," and by his words "so raised up the hearts of all that heard him, that they regarded not death, but judged them more happy that should depart, than such as should remain behind."
Wishart, already inhibited from preaching, knew that he would not long remain unmolested. In December 1545, he had left Haddington, bidding Knox return to his pupils, and causing the two-handed sword which he carried to be taken from him. " One is sufficient for one sacrifice," he said. He spent the night at Ormiston with the laird and other friends. Supper ended, the company sang together Psalm li. in Wedderbum's version:
" Have mercy on me now, good Lord, After Thy great mercie; My sinful life does me remord, Which sore has grieved me."
Then he passed to his bed-chamber, with the words, " God grant quiet rest." That night he was seized by Earl Bothwell, and eventually carried to the " Sea-Tower of St Andrews." Convicted of heresy, he was burned, March ist, 1546, at the foot of the Castle Wynd, opposite the castle gate. Almost his last words were taken from a psalm. "When he came to the fire," says Knox, <( he sat down upon his knees, and rose up again, and thrice he said these words: ' 0 Thou Saviour of the world, have mercy upon me! Father of Heaven, I commend my spirit into Thy holy hands'" (Ps. xxxi., verse 6). As a sign of forgiveness he kissed the executioner on the cheek, saying, "Lo, here is a token that I forgive thee. My harte, do thy office." So died George Wishart.
But for Wishart's personal influence and tragic death, it seems possible that John Knox, already forty years of age, and still unknown, might never have taken part in public affairs. A quarter of a century later, in November 1572, the reformer of a kingdom was dying in his house at the Nether- bow Port of Edinburgh. As he lay, to all appearance asleep, he was often heard repeating to himself the words, " Come, Lord Jesus; sweet Jesus, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." The text from the Psalms was that used by Wishart. But, in all external circumstances, the deaths of the two men were widely different. The cause for which Wishart suffered had triumphed. Knox's iron will, passionate eloquence, and grim -self-reliance had swept aside the leadership of the sovereign and the nobility. He had carried the people with him, and Scotland had for ever broken with Rome.
One side of Knox's work remained incomplete. Episcopacy was not abolished; for political reasons it was revived. The * complete organisation of the Scottish Church was perfected/ on the Presbyterian model by Andrew Melville (Second Book' of Discipline, 1581-92). At Knox's death, indeed, the final triumph of the Presbyterian cause still seemed distant and uncertain. It was the year of St Bartholomew, and it was to the Psalms that men turned for the expression of their sorrow. James Melville, a nephew of the Presbyterian leader, and at that time passing through his course of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, notes in his Diary, that'(The primarius (James Wilkie), a guid, peaceable, sweit auld man, wha luiffed me weill, . . . causit sing, commownlie the 44 and 79 Psalmes, quhilk I lernit par cceur, for that was the yeir of the bludie massacres in France, and grait troubles in this countrey." Already the singing of psalms, the only part of ordinary worship in which the people directly joined, was becoming popular. Melville has recorded their introduction in 1570 at Montrose. " The Lard of Done," he says, " of his charitie interteined a blind man, wha haid a singular guid voice; him he causit the doctor of our scholl teatche the wholl Psalmes in miter, with the tones thairof, and sing tham in the Kirk; be heiring of whome I was sa delyted, that I lernit manie of the Psalmes and tones thairof in miter quhilk I haift thought ever sen syne a grait blessing and comfort."
In many of the vicissitudes of the struggle, in which James Melville took a leading part, he found in the Psalms the best expression of his emotions. The eight texts with which his Diary begfns, are all taken from the Psalms, and in his pages are recorded two notable instances of their use. Among the staunchest champions of the Presbyterian cause was John Durie, Minister first at Leith, then in Edinburgh. He had been suspended for his plain speaking against the Duke of Lennox. But in 1582 he returned to his " awin flok of Edin- bruche." The whole town gathered to meet him at the Netherbow Port, and " goeing upe the streit, with bear heads and laud voices, sang to the praise of God, and testifeing of grait joy and consolation, the i24th Psalm, ' Now Israel may say, and that trewlie,' etc., till heavin and erthe resonndit." So determined was the attitude of the vast concourse of people, that the duke, when h& heard the noise and saw the crowd, tore his beard for anger, and hastened out of the city. Two years later, Melville himself was a fugitive, flying for his life. By yet another change in the struggle, he was, in 15 8 ^ enabled to return to Scotland. As he and his fellow-exiles reached Ainwick on their homeward journey, rejoicing that the " bountifull and gratius hand of our God was with us," they were many times constrained to sing Psalm cxxvi., " When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion," and other psalms of the same character.
Neither of the Melvilles died in Scotland. Andrew Melville died at Sedan, James at Berwick. But, as, during his troubled life, James Melville had found in the Psalms the expression of his sorrow, his gratitude, or his triumph, so, at the moment of death, they brought him their message of strength and courage. The pain of his disease was "wonderfull vehement"; yet he was content, thinking " of the sight of the face of God in glorie; rehearsing that verse of the i6th Psalm (verse 12), (Thow wilt schaw me the pathe of lyffe; in thy sicht are fulness of all joyes, at thy right hand is the plentie of pleasures for evir.'" As the pain and weakness increased, he "com- forteth himseiff with sundrie speeches out of the Psalmes, quhilk he rehearsit in Hebrew; as, nameli ane speich out of Psalm 4th (verse 7), * Lord, lift up the lyght of thy countenance upon me.' Psalm 27th, verse i, ' The Lord is my light and my salvatione, quhat can I fear ?' Psalm 23rd (verse 4), (Albeit I walkit through the valley of the shadow of death, yet will I fear none evill, because God is with me.' The candell being behind his bak, he desyred that it should be brought before him, that he might sie to die. Be occasionne quhairof that pairt of the Scripture wes rememberit, ' Light aryses to the righteous in the middes of darknes' (Psalm cxii., verse 4); and Psalm xviii., verse 28, ' The Lord will lighten my candell; He will inlighten my darknes.' "
In spite, and partly in consequence, of the effort of James I. to re-establish Episcopacy, and to assimilate the Church in Scotland with that in England, the Presbyterian Kirk, with its General Assembly, had become the organ of the Scottish people, its Parliament, its press, its platform, and something more. It was their "Mount Zion in Jerusalem," the "joy of the whole earth," the "city of the great King." When, therefore, in 1637, Charles I. attempted to introduce a book of Canons and a Liturgy framed on the English model, he outraged some of the deepest feelings of the nation. A wave of excitement swept over Scotland. Thrilled with solemn enthusiasm, the people had witnessed the signature of the National Covenant on the last day of February 1638, in the Greyfriars Church of Edinburgh. Rallying to the cry of " Christ's Crown and Covenant," disciplined by the genius of Alexander Leslie, and obeying the "old little crooked soldier," as if he were " the Great Soleyman " himself, the Covenanters easily wrung from Charles I. the concession of all their demands. The " blue banner " had triumphed. But Scottish liberties were still in peril, if the king prevailed against the English Parliament. In 1643, the Solemn League and Covenant bound the Presbyterians of the North and the Puritans of the South in a firm alliance to root out popery and prelacy from the three kingdoms.
The House of Stuart was slow to take warning from experi- ence. On May agth, 1660, Charles II. was restored to the throne, and the dark times swept over Scotland with one giant stride. While the guns roared from the castle of Edinburgh, to celebrate the national thanksgiving, Donald Cargill foretold Charles's future from the pulpit. "Whoever of the Lord's people," he said, "are this day rejoicing, their joy will be like the crackling of thorns under a pot; he will be the woefullest sight that ever the poor Church of Scotland saw. Wo, wo, wo to him; his name shall stink while the world stands, for treachery, tyranny, and leachery." Thus began, in mingled joy and foreboding, "that never to be forgotten unheard-of twenty-eight years of reigning tyrants, and raging tyranny of Prelatical Protestants upon Presby- terian Protestants."
Cargill's predictions were soon verified. The " Drunken Parliament" of 1661 imposed a new oath of allegiance to the sovereign as supreme over all persons and in all causes, exacted it from all ministers presented to benefices, pronounced assemblies to be unlawful, prohibited the renewal of the Solemn League and Covenant, and, by an " Act Recissory," repealed the whole legislation of Scotland for the past twenty years. In the following year Episcopacy was established in Scotland, and James Sharp, who was acting in London as agent for the Presbyterian ministers, was ordained, and consecrated Archbishop of St Andrews. The ballad-mongers of the day expressed the popular detestation of the new primate's treachery:
"Most viper-like, I in the Kirk My mother's bowels rent; And did cast out those zealous men Whose money I had spent."
Nor were Sharp's colleagues men of high reputation; with the single exception of Leighton, who was wont to say that the Psalter should lie like myrrh in the human heart. From these bishops, all ministers who had entered on their livings since 1649 were to receive collation; those who refused to do so were to be ej ected. Rather than submit to episcopal rule and the revival of patronage, nearly four hundred ministers gave up their churches and houses. Their places were filled by curates, "mostly young men from the northern parts, raw, and without any stock of reading or gifts." Most of the "outed " ministers had endeared themselves to their flocks by years of faithful service. The parting of Welsh, for instance, from the people of Irongray, described by Blackader, himself an eye-witness of the scene, shows the hold which men of his character had gained on the hearts of their congregations. " There was," he says, "great sorrowing and outcrying of the poor multitude beside the water of Cluden, when he (Welsh) was to take horse. It was with great difficulty he got from among them, who were almost distracted, and cried most ruefully, with tears. But he being resolute, would not be detained; and after two or three of the ministers had knelt down and prayed, he got to horse, the people still holding him. The ministers and he rode quickly through the water, to win from among them;�many, both men and women, brak in on foot after him, and followed on the road a good space, with bitter weeping and lamentation."
The example quoted does not stand alone. Congregations, as a rule, remained faithful to their former pastors. Dis- possessed ministers, though banished from their parishes, held their services in the neighbourhood: the field-meetings were thronged, the churches deserted. Determined to effect their object, the Government framed another Act (1663), familiarly known as the "Bishops' Drag Net." Ministers who preached without episcopal sanction, parishioners who were absent from "the ordinary meetings of divine worship, in their own parish church on the Lord's Day," were guilty of seditious acts, punishable by fines and imprisonment. Soldiers, drafted into the south and west of Scotland to compel attendance at public worship according to Episcopalian forms, quartered themselves upon the recusants, and were encouraged in every violence and license. To enforce the legislation "for the peace and order of the Church, and in behalf of the Government thereof by archbishops and bishops," a Court of High Commission was appointed (1664). Before this tribunal were summoned hundreds of persons, scarcely one of whom escaped punishment, whether by fines, branding, scourging, imprisonment, or exile. The Court called before it whom it chose, heard no arguments, asked few questions, and almost always condemned. It was compared to the lion's den, into which led many tracks, but from which none returned.
Throughout the Lowlands, discontent deepened and widened, till, goaded to desperation, the people rose in arms. Their open resistance in the field was short-lived. But, for twenty-five years, they maintained an unequal struggle against overwhelm- ing odds, defending their convictions with a constancy which has been rarely equalled in history. Whatever were the faults of the " Hill Folk," the " Wild Whigs," the " Remnant," or the " Cameronians," their tenacity of purpose in suffering,r danger, and death, commands the admiration of those who most strongly condemn them as narrow and exclusive. The Lowland peasant is justly proud of
"The tales Of persecution and the Covenant Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour."
As with the Cevenols, so with the Covenanters. The Psalms were the inspiration of a popular movement. To the strained senses of the peasantry were manifested signs of the future. Mysterious apparitions disturbed the solitude of the moors, unearthly chantings of the Psalms broke their silence. On " Clyde side, east of Glasgow," a shadowy throng of men and women seemed to gather round a tent, and Psalm xciii. was chanted with such celestial sweetness that all who heard the strains stood motionless till they were ended. Thus were revealed the future triumphs of field-conventicles. "At Craigmad, between Falkhill and Moranside," the hills were crowded with ghostly worshippers, who were singing Psalm cxxi., and among them appeared a milk-white horse, with a blood-red saddle on its back. Thus were portended the preaching of the Gospel and the persecution that was to follow. When the crisis came, it was with a psalm that the Covenanters faced General Dalzell at Rullion Green. With a psalm, they routed Claverhouse at Drumclog. Supported by a psalm, Hugh M'Kail, Donald Cargill, James Renwick, Isabel Alison, Marion Harvie, Margaret Wilson, and a host of other heroes and heroines of the Covenant, met torture or a violent death. The Psalms were the daily support of the charmed life of Alexander Peden. They cheered the captives on the Bass Rock or in the dungeons of Dunottar, and solaced their weary imprisonment. It was the Psalms, again, that encouraged others to endure a still harder fate, as they toiled in exile and slavery among the rice-fields and sugar plantations of the New World. True to the spirit of the Covenanters, Scott has embodied in his novels the influence of the Psalms. It was a psalm that nerved Mause Headrigg to leap her horse over the wall (Ps. xviii., verse 29): it was a psalm (xxxvii., verses Ji6, 25) that the daughter of a Covenanter, Jeanie Deans, m?fked with her "kylevine pen " for her lover, Reuben Butler, on the eve of her adventurous journey to plead for her sister's life: it was a psalm (xlii., verses 14, 15 ; and xliii., verses 5, 6) that she repeated in her hour of peril, when she was at the mercy of desperate ruffians on Gunnerby Hill.
Armed resistance began with the Pentland Rising in Novem- ber 1666. The " honest zealous handful," as Patrick Walker calls them, involved in an accidental scuffle with the soldiers at Dairy, near Dumfries, drifted, without plan or leaders, into insurrection. At Lanark, as they marched towards Edin- burgh, they were 1500 strong. But only a few were armed with swords, pistols, ormuskets ; scythes, forks, staves, were the weapons of the rest. Closely followed by Dalzell at the head of 3000 well-appointed troops, struggling through snow- drifts, spent with hunger and fatigue, disappointed of help from the Lothians, they staggered back from Edinburgh into the Pentland Hills. Their numbers had dwindled to 900 men. At Rullion Green they were attacked by Dalzell's troops. Hopelessly overmatched, they yet made a gallant fight. Chanting their despairing appeal to God in the worda of Psalm Ixxiv.,
" 0 God, why hast Thou cast us off ? Is it for evermore ? Against Thy pasture-sheep why doth Thine anger smoke so sore ? "
they met and defeated a charge of the enemy's horse. It was not till dusk that they were finally dispersed. Of the prisoners, some were executed, some imprisoned, some shipped to the plantations. The grave of those who were killed in the fight is marked by a stone, inscribed with rugged lines beginning thus:
"A cloud of witnesses lie here Who for Christ's interest did appear," etc., etc.
Among the victims of the vengeance which the Government executed upon the insurgents was Hugh M'Kail, a young man of twenty-six, the prototype of Scott's MacBriar. Well con- nected and well educated, he is supposed to have incurred the personal hatred of the primate, to whom he had given the name of Judas. Appeals to save his life were made in vain. Tortured in the boot�yet forgetting his shattered leg, as he jestingly said, in fear for his neck�he solaced his imprison- ment by writing Latin elegiacs. Under sentence of death, it was in the Psalms that he found strength. On the evening before his execution in the Grassmarket, he read Psalm xvi., " Preserve me, 0 God, for in Thee have I put my trust." The next day, December 22nd, 1666, at two o'clock in the after- noon, he was carried to the scaffold. There he sang part of Psalm xxxi., including the sixth verse, using the old metrical rendering:
"Into Thy hands I do commit My spirit; for Thou art He� 0 Thou, Jehovah, God of truth, Who hast redeemed me."
Inspired by the same words which in the moment of death had sustained generations of the hated "Papists and Pre- latists," he broke into the impassioned anthem of triumph, often repeated or imitated by his fellow-sufferers. " Now I leave off to speak any more to creatures, and turn my speech to Thee, 0 Lord! Now I begin my intercourse with God, which shall never be broken off. Farewell father and mother, friends and relations! farewell the world and all delights! farewell meat and drink! farewell sun, and moon, and stars! Welcome God and Father ! Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the New Covenant! Welcome blessed Spirit of grace. God of all consolation! Welcome glory! Welcome eternal life ! Welcome death! "
With the execution of Hugh M'Kail, the Government seemed satisfied. For some months after the suppression of the Rising, moderate counsels prevailed. But gradually, as the necessity of crushing field-conventicles seemed more urgent, the perse- cution grew hotter. The country was devastated. ((It was better," said Lauderdale, "that the West bore nothing but windle-straws and laverocks than that it should bear rebels to the king." Preachers and hearers alike were dogged by spies. Death was the penalty for preaching; fines, imprison- ment, transportation, slavery, were the punishments inflicted upon hearers. The remotest caves and dens of the upland districts of Galloway, Nithsdale, Ayr, and Clydesdale, were tenanted by hunted ministers. There lurked gaunt "Wan- derers," in whose eyes gleamed the grey light which flickers on the borders of enthusiasm and madness�with one hand gripping the hilts of their shabbles, with the other clasping their Bibles to their bosoms. Their surrender of their souls into God's keeping was absolute, their realization of His Presence vivid and intense, their conviction of the justice of their cause so absorbing as to foster, not the serenity, but the fatalism of religion. As they pored over the Scriptures, alone in the wild solitudes of nature, stung by memories of wrong, in daily expectation of torture and death, confronted by dispensations of Heaven which hourly seemed more frowning and mysterious, their faith grew savage in its earnestness, vindictive in its zeal, dark with gloomy superstition. Their preaching soared into ecstatic utterance, and all the surround- ings of field-worship heightened its effect. By day the gather- ing mist, by night the fall of darkness or the solemn starry skies, the monotonous solitude of the moors running up into labyrinths of rolling hills, the silence broken only by the melancholy cry of the plover, the armed sentries posted on the hills, the imminence of ever-present danger�attuned the minds of their hearers to rhapsodies of faith, calls to penitence, experiences of Satanic agency, bursts of prophecy, fierce denunciations of vengeance.
In his " Night-hymn of the Cameronians," Moir lays stress on the characteristic confidence in God's protection, which field- conventicles held under such conditions naturally encouraged :
"Ho ! plaided watcher of the hill, What of the night? what of the night?
The winds are lown, the woods are still, The countless stars are sparkling bright;] From out this heathery moorland glen,
By the shy wild-fowl only trod, We raise our hymn, unheard of men, To Thee-an omnipresent God.
" Jehovah ! though no sign appear, Through earth an aimless path to lead,
We know, we feel. Thee ever near, A present help in time of need�
Near, as when, pointing out the way,
For ever in the people's sight, A pillared wreath of smoke by day,
Which turned to fiery flame at night.";"
Etc., etc.
The murder of Archbishop Sharp on Magus Moor (May 3rd, 1679) gave the signal for a renewal of the open struggle between the Covenanters and the Government. Fresh enact- ments were directed against Conventicles. But" the Whigs," says Wandering Willie, "were as doure as the Cavaliers were fierce." At Drumclog, on June ist, 1679, a field-conventicle was surprised by the approach of Claverhouse himself. The sentry gave the alarm by the discharge of his musket; the armed men drew out from the congregation of hearers, and, as they moved down the hill to meet the dragoons, raised their challenge to the foe in the words of Psalm Ixxvi.:
" In Judah's land God is well known, His name's in Israel great;
In Salem is his tabernacle;
In Zion is his seat.
" There arrows of the bow he brake,
The shield, the sword, the war, More glorious thou than hills of prey, More excellent art far."
The struggle was soon over. The dragoons broke and fled. Claverhouse himself, "proof against lead," was saved by his gallant roan, which carried him off the field, though its "guts hung out half an ell," from a pitchfork thrust in its belly. The Covenanters spared the lives of their prisoners. But this mercy was condemned by Sir Robert Hamilton, who urged them to give no quarter to Babel's brats, and supported his advice, like Calvin, by quoting Psalm cxxxvii., verses 8, 9. In this same leniency, Patrick Walker finds a reason for the ultimate failure of the Covenanting cause :
"After the Lord," so he writes, "gave us the victory over Clavers and his party at Drumclog, anno 1679, we behaved not as persons that were fighting the Lord's battles; but, instead of pursuing the victory that God wonderfully put in our hands, and sanctifying the Lord of Hosts in our hearts and before the people by giving Him the praise, did greedily run upon the spoil, and took some of the enemy prisoners, and gave them quarter, tho' guilty of death, and so brought ourselves under the curse of doing the work of the Lord deceitfully, by withholding our sword from shedding of their blood; and yet we refused to be convinced that our sparing of the lives of these, whom God has appointed to utter de- struction, is one of the causes why our lives go for theirs."
The insurrection which had flamed up so suddenly was extinguished at Bothwell Bridge, June sand, 1679. The battle was fought on Sunday, and, forty miles distant, Peden's hearers waited for a sermon. "Let the people," he said, " go to their prayers; for me, I neither can nor will preach any this day ; for our friends are fallen and fled before the enemy at Hamiltown; and they are bagging and hashing them down, and their blood is running like water." No effort was again made by the Covenanters to put an armed force into the field. But their spirit remained .unbroken. Their resistance, indeed, assumed a more determined form. A year to the day after Bothwell Bridge, twenty armed horsemen rode into Sanquhar, formed a circle round the market cross, and two of their number, Richard and Michael Cameron, dismounted. A psalm was sung, a prayer offered, and a " Declaration" read disowning Charles II. as a tyrant and usurper, and, " under the standard of our Lord Jesus Christ, Captain of our salvation, declaring war upon the king." Henceforward there could be no turning back, either for the Government or for the "Remnant" who approved the Declaration, which re- nounced allegiance to the king, defied his laws, and proclaimed the forfeiture of his throne.