The History of England from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 3 - Thomas Babington Macaulay (e books for reading .TXT) 📗

science united had ever produced, was named Fort William in honour of the King.761

By this time the Scottish Parliament had reassembled at Edinburgh. William had found it no easy matter to decide what course should be taken with that capricious and unruly body. The English Commons had sometimes put him out of temper. Yet they had granted him millions, and had never asked from him such concessions as had been imperiously demanded by the Scottish legislature, which could give him little and had given him nothing. The English statesmen with whom he had to deal did not generally stand or serve to stand high in his esteem. Yet few of them were so utterly false and shameless as the leading Scottish politicians. Hamilton was, in morality and honour, rather above than below his fellows; and even Hamilton was fickle, false and greedy. "I wish to heaven," William was once provoked into exclaiming, "that Scotland were a thousand miles off, and that the Duke of Hamilton were King of it. Then I should be rid of them both."

After much deliberation William determined to send Melville down to Edinburgh as Lord High Commissioner. Melville was not a great statesman; he was not a great orator; he did not look or move like the representative of royalty; his character was not of more than standard purity; and the standard of purity among Scottish senators was not high; but he was by no means deficient in prudence or temper; and he succeeded, on the whole, better than a man of much higher qualities might have done.

During the first days of the Session, the friends of the government desponded, and the chiefs of the opposition were sanguine. Montgomery's head, though by no means a weak one, had been turned by the triumphs of the preceding year. He believed that his intrigues and his rhetoric had completely subjugated the Estates. It seemed to him impossible that, having exercised a boundless empire in the Parliament House when the Jacobites were absent, he should be defeated when they were present, and ready to support whatever he proposed. He had not indeed found it easy to prevail on them to attend: for they could not take their seats without taking the oaths. A few of them had some slight scruple of conscience about foreswearing themselves; and many, who did not know what a scruple of conscience meant, were apprehensive that they might offend the rightful King by vowing fealty to the actual King. Some Lords, however, who were supposed to be in the confidence of James, asserted that, to their knowledge, he wished his friends to perjure themselves; and this assertion induced most of the Jacobites, with Balcarras at their head, to be guilty of perfidy aggravated by impiety.762

It soon appeared, however, that Montgomery's faction, even with this reinforcement, was no longer a majority of the legislature. For every supporter that he had gained he had lost two. He had committed an error which has more than once, in British history, been fatal to great parliamentary leaders. He had imagined that, as soon as he chose to coalesce with those to whom he had recently been opposed, all his followers would imitate his example. He soon found that it was much easier to inflame animosities than to appease them. The great body Of Whigs and Presbyterians shrank from the fellowship of the Jacobites. Some waverers were purchased by the government; nor was the purchase expensive, for a sum which would hardly be missed in the English Treasury was immense in the estimation of the needy barons of the North.763 Thus the scale was turned; and, in the Scottish Parliaments of that age, the turn of the scale was every thing; the tendency of majorities was always to increase, the tendency of minorities to diminish.

The first question on which a vote was taken related to the election for a borough. The ministers carried their point by six voices.764 In an instant every thing was changed; the spell was broken; the Club, from being a bugbear, became a laughingstock; the timid and the venal passed over in crowds from the weaker to the stronger side. It was in vain that the opposition attempted to revive the disputes of the preceding year. The King had wisely authorised Melville to give up the Committee of Articles. The Estates, on the other hand, showed no disposition to pass another Act of Incapacitation, to censure the government for opening the Courts of justice, or to question the right of the Sovereign to name the judges. An extraordinary supply was voted, small, according to the notions of English financiers, but large for the means of Scotland. The sum granted was a hundred and sixty-two thousand pounds sterling, to be raised in the course of four years.765

The Jacobites, who found that they had forsworn themselves to no purpose, sate, bowed down by shame and writhing with vexation, while Montgomery, who had deceived himself and them, and who, in his rage, had utterly lost, not indeed his parts and his fluency, but all decorum and selfcommand, scolded like a waterman on the Thames, and was answered with equal asperity and even more than equal ability by Sir John Dalrymple.766

The most important acts of this Session were those which fixed the ecclesiastical constitution of Scotland. By the Claim of Right it had been declared that the authority of Bishops was an insupportable grievance; and William, by accepting the Crown, had bound himself not to uphold an institution condemned by the very instrument on which his title to the Crown depended. But the Claim of Right had not defined the form of Church government which was to be substituted for episcopacy; and, during the stormy Session held in the summer of 1689, the violence of the Club had made legislation impossible. During many months therefore every thing had been in confusion. One polity had been pulled down; and no other polity had been set up. In the Western Lowlands, the beneficed clergy had been so effectually rabbled, that scarcely one of them had remained at his post. In Berwickshire, the three Lothians and Stirlingshire, most of the curates had been removed by the Privy Council for not obeying that vote of the Convention which had directed all ministers of parishes, on pain of deprivation, to proclaim William and Mary King and Queen of Scotland. Thus, throughout a great part of the realm, there was no public worship except what was performed by Presbyterian divines, who sometimes officiated in tents, and sometimes, without any legal right, took possession of the churches. But there were large districts, especially on the north of the Tay, where the people had no strong feeling against episcopacy; and there were many priests who were not disposed to lose their manses, and stipends for the sake of King James. Hundreds of the old curates, therefore, having been neither hunted by the populace nor deposed by the Council, still performed their spiritual functions. Every minister was, during this time of transition, free to conduct the service and to administer the sacraments as he thought fit. There was no controlling authority. The legislature had taken away the jurisdiction of Bishops, and had not established the jurisdiction of Synods.767

To put an end to this anarchy was one of the first duties of the Parliament. Melville had, with the powerful assistance of Carstairs, obtained, in spite of the remonstrances of English Tories, authority to assent to such ecclesiastical arrangements as might satisfy the Scottish nation. One of the first laws which the Lord Commissioner touched with the sceptre repealed the Act of Supremacy. He next gave the royal assent to a law enacting that those Presbyterian divines who had been pastors of parishes in the days of the Covenant, and had, after the Restoration, been ejected for refusing to acknowledge episcopal authority, should be restored. The number of those Pastors had originally been about three hundred and fifty: but not more than sixty were still living.768

The Estates then proceeded to fix the national creed. The Confession of Faith drawn up by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, the Longer and Shorter Catechism, and the Directory, were considered by every good Presbyterian as the standards of orthodoxy; and it was hoped that the legislature would recognise them as such.769 This hope, however, was in part disappointed. The Confession was read at length, amidst much yawning, and adopted without alteration. But, when it was proposed that the Catechisms and the Directory should be taken into consideration, the ill humour of the audience broke forth into murmurs. For that love of long sermons which was strong in the Scottish commonalty was not shared by the Scottish aristocracy. The Parliament had already been listening during three hours to dry theology, and was not inclined to hear any thing more about original sin and election. The Duke of Hamilton said that the Estates had already done all that was essential. They had given their sanction to a digest of the great principles of Christianity. The rest might well be left to the Church. The weary majority eagerly assented, in spite of the muttering of some zealous Presbyterian ministers who had been admitted to hear the debate, and who could sometimes hardly restrain themselves from taking part in it.770

The memorable law which fixed the ecclesiastical constitution of Scotland was brought in by the Earl of Sutherland. By this law the synodical polity was reestablished. The rule of the Church was entrusted to the sixty ejected ministers who had just been restored, and to such other persons, whether ministers or elders, as the Sixty should think fit to admit to a participation of power. The Sixty and their nominees were authorised to visit all the parishes in the kingdom, and to turn out all ministers who were deficient in abilities, scandalous in morals, or unsound in faith. Those parishes which had, during the interregnum, been deserted by their pastors, or, in plain words, those parishes of which the pastors had been rabbled, were declared vacant.771

To the clause which reestablished synodical government no serious opposition appears to have been made. But three days were spent in discussing the question whether the Sovereign should have power to convoke and to dissolve ecclesiastical assemblies; and the point was at last left in dangerous ambiguity. Some other clauses were long and vehemently debated. It was said that the immense power given to the Sixty was incompatible with the fundamental principle of the polity which the Estates were about to set up. That principle was that all presbyters were equal, and that there ought to be no order of ministers of religion superior to the order of presbyters. What did it matter whether the Sixty were called prelates or not, if they were to lord it with more than prelatical authority over God's heritage? To the argument that the proposed arrangement was, in the very peculiar circumstances of the Church, the most convenient that could be made, the objectors replied that such reasoning might suit the mouth of an Erastian, but that all orthodox Presbyterians held the parity of ministers to be ordained by Christ, and that, where Christ had spoken, Christians were not at liberty to consider what was convenient.772

With much greater warmth and much stronger reason the minority attacked the clause which sanctioned the lawless acts of the Western fanatics. Surely, it was said, a rabbled curate might well be left to the severe scrutiny of the sixty Inquisitors. If he was deficient in parts or learning, if he was loose in life, if he was heterodox in doctrine, those stern judges would not fail to detect and to depose him. They would probably think a game at bowls, a prayer borrowed from the English Liturgy, or a sermon in which the slightest taint of Arminianism could