their scanty means permitted. They warrant this favourable view of his annexed in perpetuity to the crown the character. duties which had been granted to the late King and which in his time had been estimated at forty thousand pounds sterling a year. They also settled on James for life an additional annual income of two hundred and sixteen thousand pounds Scots, equivalent to eighteen thousand pounds sterling. The whole sum which they were able to bestow was about sixty thousand a year, little more than what was poured into the English Exchequer every fortnight.*

While a subject he had been, during many years, a persecuted man; and persecution had produced its usual effect on him. His mind, dull and narrow as it was, had profited under that sharp discipline. While he was excluded from the Court, from the Admiralty, and from the Council, and was in danger of being also excluded from the throne, only because he could not help believing in transubstantiation and in the authority of the see of Rome, he made such rapid progress in the doctrines of toleration that he left Milton and Locke behind. What, he often said, could be more unjust, than to visit speculations with penalties which ought to be reserved for acts? What more impolitic than to reject the services of good soldiers, seamen, lawyers, diplomatists, financiers, because they hold unsound opinions about the number of the sacraments or the pluripresence of saints? He learned by rote those commonplaces which all sects repeat so fluently when they are enduring oppression, and forget so easily when they are able to retaliate

Having little money to give, the Estates supplied the defect by loyal professions and barbarous statutes. The King, in a letter which was read to them at the opening of their session, called on them in vehement language to provide new penal laws against the refractory Presbyterians, and expressed his regret that business made it impossible for him to propose such laws in person from the throne. His commands were obeyed. A statute framed by his ministers was promptly passed, a statute which stands forth, even among the statutes of that unhappy country at that unhappy period, preeminent it. Indeed he rehearsed his lesson so in atrocity. It was enacted, in few but emphatic words, that whoever should preach in a conventicle under a roof, or should attend, either as preacher or as hearer, a conventicle in the open air, should be punished with death and confiscation of property.†

wards the

This law, passed at the King's Feeling of instance by an assembly deJames to- voted to his will, deserves Puritans. especial notice. For he has been frequently represented by ignorant writers as a prince rash, indeed, and injudicious in his choice of means, but intent on one of the noblest ends which a ruler can pursue, the establishment of entire religious liberty. Nor can it be denied that some portions of his life, when detached from the rest and superficially considered, seem to * Act. Parl. Car. II. March 29. 1661; Jac. VII. April 28. 1685, and May 13. 1685.

Act. Parl. Jac. VII. May 8. 1685; Observator, June 20. 1685. Lestrange evidently wished to see the precedent followed in Eng

land.

no

well, that those who chanced to hear him on this subject gave him credit for much more sense and much readier elocution than he really possessed, His professions imposed on some charitable persons, and perhaps imposed on himself. But his zeal for the rights of conscience ended with the predominance of the Whig party. When fortune changed, when he was longer afraid that others would persecute him, when he had it in his power to persecute others, his real propensities began to show themselves. He hated the Puritan sects with a manifold hatred, theological and political, hereditary and personal. He regarded them as the foes of Heaven, as the foes of all legitimate authority in Church and State, as his greatgrandmother's foes and his grandfather's, his father's and his mother's, his brother's and his own. He, who had complained so loudly of the laws against Papists, now declared himself unable to conceive

how men could have the impudence to | soldier of distinguished courage and propose the repeal of the laws against professional skill, but rapacious and Puritans. He, whose favourite theme profane, of violent temper and of had been the injustice of requiring obdurate heart, has left a name which, civil functionaries to take religious wherever the Scottish race is settled tests, established in Scotland, when he on the face of the globe, is mentioned resided there as Viceroy, the most with a peculiar energy of hatred. To rigorous religious test that has ever recapitulate all the crimes by which been known in the empire. He, who this man, and men like him, goaded had expressed just indignation when the peasantry of the Western Lowlands the priests of his own faith were into madness, would be an endless hanged and quartered, amused himself task. A few instances must suffice; with hearing Covenanters shriek and and all those instances shall be taken seeing them writhe while their knees from the history of a single fortnight, were beaten flat in the boots. In this that very fortnight in which the Scotmood he became King, and he imme-tish Parliament, at the urgent request diately demanded and obtained from the obsequious Estates of Scotland, as the surest pledge of their loyalty, the most sanguinary law that has ever in our island been enacted against Protestant Nonconformists.

Cruel

of the

With this law the whole spirit of his administration was in perfect treatment harmony. The fiery perseScotch Co- cution, which had raged when venanters. 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. The chief of this Tophet, a *His own words reported by himself. Life of James the Second, i. 656. Orig. Mem.

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

Un

Burnet, i. 583.; Wodrow, III. v. 2. fortunately the Acta of the Scottish Privy Council during almost the whole administration of the Duke of York are wanting. (1848.) This assertion has been met by a direct contradiction. But the fact is exactly as I have stated it. There is in the Acta of the Scottish Privy Council a hiatus extending from August 1678 to August 1682. The Duke of York

began to reside in Scotland in December 1679. He left Scotland, never to return, in May 1682. (1857.)

Wodrow, III. ix. 6.

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 pros pect 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

66

science 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 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.†

rumoured that even on his seared con- 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 The eleventh of May was made children to wander in the fields, dragged remarkable by more than one great her son Andrew, who was still a lad, crime. Some rigid Calvinists had before Claverhouse, who happened to from the doctrine of reprobation drawn be marching through that part of the the consequence that to pray for any country. Claverhouse was just then person who had been predestined to strangely lenient. Some thought that perdition was an act of mutiny against he had not been quite himself since the eternal decrees of the Supreme the death of the Christian carrier, ten Being. Three poor labouring men, days before. But Westerhall was deeply imbued with this unamiable eager to signalise his loyalty, and divinity, were stopped by an officer in extorted a sullen consent. The guns the neighbourhood of Glasgow. They were loaded, and the youth was told 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.‡

to pull his bonnet over his face. He refused, and stood confronting his murderers with the Bible in his hand.

man, on the ground that he was not one of the elect.

I can only refer to the narrative which Wodrow has inserted in his History, and which he justly calls plain and natural. That narrative is signed by two eyewitnesses, and Wodrow, before he published it, submitted it to a third eyewitness, who pronounced it strictly accurate. From that narrative I will extract the only words which bear on the point in question: "When all the three were taken, the officers consulted among themselves, and, withdrawing to the west side of the town, questioned the prisoners, particularly if they would pray for King James VII. They answered, they would pray for all within the election of grace. Balfour said, Do you question the King's election? They answered, sometimes they questioned their own. Upon which he swore dreadfully, and said they should die presently, because they would not pray for Christ's vicegerent, and so, without one word more, commanded Thomas Cook to go to his prayers, for he should die.”"

In this narrative Wodrow saw nothing improbable; and I shall not easily be convinced that any writer now living understands the feelings and opinions of the Covenanters better than Wodrow did. (1857.)

"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.*

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.

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 In England his authority, though refused; and they were sentenced to great, was circumscribed by ancient be drowned. They were carried to a and noble laws which even the Tories spot which the Solway overflows twice would not patiently have seen him ina day, and were fastened to stakes fringe. Here he could not hurry Disfixed in the sand, between high and senters before military tribunals, or low water mark. The elder sufferer enjoy at Council the luxury of seeing was placed near to the advancing flood, them swoon in the boots. Here he in the hope that her last agonies might could not drown young girls for refusing terrify the younger into submission. to take the abjuration, or shoot poor The sight was dreadful. But the countrymen for doubting whether he courage of the survivor was sustained was one of the elect. Yet even in 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.†

England he continued to prosecute 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.

James to

One sect of Protestant Dissenters indeed he, even at this early Feeling of period of his reign, regarded wards the with some tenderness, the Quakers. 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 * Wodrow, III. ix. 6. Cloud of Witnesses. † Ibid. The epitaph of Margaret Wil-regarded as right, that even liberal son, in the churchyard at Wigton, is printed in the Appendix to the Cloud of Wit

nesses:

"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."

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

fierce and restless sects which considered resistance to tyranny as a Christian duty, which had, in Germany, France, and Holland, made war on legitimate princes, and which had, during four generations, borne peculiar enmity to the House of Stuart.

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, It happened, moreover, that it was since the Restoration, in spite of much possible to grant large relief to the ill usage, submitted themselves meekly Roman Catholic and to the Quaker to the royal authority. For they had, without mitigating the sufferings of though reasoning on premises which the Puritan sects. A law was in force the Anglican divines regarded as hete- which imposed severe penalties on rodox, arrived, like the Anglican divines, every person who refused to take the at the conclusion, that no excess of oath of supremacy when required to do tyranny on the part of a prince can so. This law did not affect Presbytejustify active resistance on the part of rians, Independents, or Baptists; for a subject. No libel on the government they were all ready to call God to withad ever been traced to a Quaker.* In ness that they renounced all spiritual 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. 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 opinion, unfavourable to their spirituality of mind, and tended to disturb the austere composure of their deportment. The yearly meetings of that age repeatedly admonished the brethren not to hold discourse touching affairs of state. Even

within the memory of persons now living those grave elders who retained the habits of an earlier generation systematically discouraged such worldly talk. It was natural that James should make a wide distinction between these harmless people and those

* See the letter to King Charles II. prefixed to Barclay's Apology.

† Sewel's History of the Quakers, book x. * Minutes of Yearly Meetings, 1689, 1690. Clarkson on Quakerism; Peculiar Customs, chapter v.

connection with foreign prelates and potentates. But the Roman Catholic would not swear that the Pope had no jurisdiction in England, and the Quaker would not swear to anything. On the other hand, neither the Roman Catholic nor the Quaker was touched by the Five Mile Act, which, of all the laws in the Statute Book, was perhaps the most annoying to the Puritan Nonconformists.*

The Quakers had a powerful and zealous advocate at court. William Though, as a class, they mixed Penn. little with the world, and shunned politics as a pursuit dangerous to their spiritual interests, one of them, widely distinguished from the rest by station and fortune, lived in the highest circles, and had constant access to the royal ear. This was the celebrated William Penn. His father had held great naval commands, had been a Commissioner of the Admiralty, had sate in Parliament, had received the honour of knighthood, and had been encouraged

*After this passage was written, I found, in the British Museum, a manuscript (Harl. MS. 7506.) entitled, " An Account of the Seizures, Sequestrations, great Spoil and Havock made upon the Estates of the several Protestant Dissenters called Quakers, upon Prosecution of old Statutes made against Papist and Popish Recusants." The manuscript is marked as having belonged to James, and appears to have been given by his confidential servant, Colonel Graham, to Lord Oxford. This circumstance appears to me to confirm the view which I have taken of the King's conduct towards the Quakers.