religious tests, established in Scotland, when he resided there as Viceroy, the most rigorous religious test that has ever been known in the empire. He, who had expressed just indig nation when the priests of his own faith were hanged and quartered, amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek and seeing them writhe while their knees were beaten flat in the boots. In this mood he became king, and he immediately demanded and obtained from the obsequious Estates of Scot land, as the surest pledge of their loyalty, the most sanguinary law that has ever in our islands been enacted against Prot estant 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 James 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. The chief of this Tophet on earth, 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

Act Parl. Car. II. August 31, 1681.

+ Burnet, i. 583; Wodrow, III. v. 2. Unfortunately the Acta of the Scottish Privy Council during almost the whole administration of the Duke of York are wanting.

Wodrow, III. 'x. 6.

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 execu tioner. For the wife of the poor man was present. She le 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 rumored that even on his scared conscience and adamantine heart the dying ejaculations of his victim made an impression which was never effaced.*

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 pris oners 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.t

The eleventh of May was signalized by more than one great crime. Some rigid Calvinists had from the doctrine of reprobution 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 la boring men, deeply imbued with this unamiable divinity, were arrested by an officer in the neighborhood of Glasgow. They were asked whether they would pray for King James the Seventh. They refused to do sc except under the condition

out.

that he was one of the elect. A file of musketeers was drawn The prisoners knelt down: they were blindfolded; and, within an hour after they had been stopped, their blood was lapped up by the dogs.*

While this was done in Clydesdale, an act not less horrible was perpetrating 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 favor 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 that day 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 signalize 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.t.

On the same day two women, Margaret Maclachlan 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 sen tenced to be drowned. They were carried to a spot which the Solway overflows twice a day, and 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. When she had tasted the bitterness of death she was, by a cruel mercy, unbound and rcstored to life. When she came to herself, pitying friends and neighbors 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.*

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 authorized him to govern thus were in his judgment reprehensibly lenient. While nis 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

* Wodrow, III. ix. 6. The epitaph of Margaret Wilson, in the churchyard at Wigton, is printed in the Appendix to the Cloud of Witnesses:

"Murdered for owning Christ supreme

Head of his Church, and no more crime,
But her not owning Prelacy,

And not abjuring Presbytery;

Within the sea, tied to a stake,

She suffered for Christ Jesus' sake."

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 Qual:er; 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.* In no conspiracy against the government had a Quaker been implicated. The Society had not joined in the clamor for the Exclusion Bill, and had solemnly condemned the Rye House Plot as a hellish design and a work of the devil. 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 scruple about paying tithe. They were, therefore, far removed from the scene of political strife. They also, even in domestic privacy, avoided on principle all political conversation. For such conversation was, in their

* See the letter to King Charles II. prefixed to Barclay's Apology + Sewel's History of the Quakers, book x.