CHAPTER V.

IN

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS-PART

I.

N several chapters we have gone over the leading men among the Puritans, and we come now to speak of their brethren across the Border-the stalwart children of the Scottish Covenant. And here let us make a

preliminary observation. We said that in considering the Puritans we had paid the chief attention to their leading men. In considering the Covenanters we prefer speaking of them as a whole; and we do so because, while the leading men of the Puritans were the masterminds of their time, those of the Covenant were less distinguished, less outstanding, although in some points quite as noble, and were, if not the originators, yet the followers, exponents, and promoters of a great national movement. The Covenant had no Cromwell, no Milton, no Bunyan, Baxter, Howe, or Owen. They had only such men as Argyle, Baillie of Jervistoun, Cameron, Renwick, Peden, Balfour of Burley, and Hackstoun of Rathillet, who nevertheless, as belonging to the popular movement, did good service in their day, and whose names are indelibly impressed upon the memories and hearts of the Scottish people.

The Solemn League and Covenant was first formed at a General Assembly held in Edinburgh, in August,

1643. Previous to this, however, there had existed what was called the National Covenant, a document dating from the days of James I. of England, and which included simply an abjuration of Popery, and an obligation, ratified by an oath, to support the Protestant religion. In the troublous times that followed, and as arbitrary power and superstition were ever renewing their encroachments under Charles I., the National Covenant was again and again renewed. Not long after the famous case of Jenny Geddes, who, when the Dean of Edinburgh proceeded, in the High Church of St. Giles, to read the liturgy, lifted up her stool and launched it at his head, exclaiming, "Villain, wilt thou read the mass at my lug?" the Covenant was renewed with great solemnity in Grey Friars' Church, Edinburgh, on the 1st of March, 1638. First of all, a stirring sermon was preached in the church, then an immense parchment was produced, spread on a gravestone, and subscribed by such numbers that the paper fell short, and many had only room for adding their initials. Some wrote their names in their own blood. The enthusiasm was prodigious. The city became a perfect caldron of boiling emotion. Edinburgh then reminds us of Paris in one of the Federation feasts of the French Revolution, when

"Men met each other with erected look,

The steps were higher that they took ;

Friends to congratulate their friends made haste,
And long inveterate foes saluted as they past."

This enthusiasm, however, speedily died away, although it was only to revive in a sterner and more permanent form.

When the Civil War at length began, Scotland was denied a Parliament; but a Convention of the Estates was summoned, and Commissioners from England having been invited to join the deliberations, it was resolved to form a "Solemn League and Covenant between the three kingdoms, as the only means for the deliverance of England and Ireland out of the depths of affliction, and the preservation of the Church and Kingdom of Scotland from the extremity of misery, and the safety of our native king and kingdom." Shortly after the General Assembly met in the New Church aisle of St. Giles, and there the Solemn League and Covenant, which had been originally a Civil League, became a Religious Covenant. When the famous Henderson of Leuchars read the draft of the amended Covenant in the meeting, many of the aged ministers wept for joy, and there was a general satisfaction felt by the laymen and English Commissioners too. Then followed the Assembly of Divines in Westminster, who, after a long sederunt, sanctioned the Covenant at the same time that they drew up the famous Westminster Confession, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, and other documents which sought to establish a uniformity of doctrine and worship over the whole three kingdoms. And in this the Presbyterians would undoubtedly have succeeded, had they not been opposed on the one hand by the Erastians, and on the other by the Independents, the one party resisting it on their principle that the Church was the creature of the State, and the Independents on theirs of religious toleration. The latter went a noble length for that time; farther than many people go

yet, when they hold that it is "the will of God that since the coming of his Son, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships be granted to all men in all nations." Yet they did not in this go farther than Jeremy Taylor; nor so far, since he embodied, in his famous parable against persecution, a still broader principle, because extended to pre-Christian times. There, we remember, Abraham is represented as receiving into his tent an old wearied wanderer in the desert, feeding and sheltering him till he discovers he is a Parsee, or worshipper of fire, and then he turns him out to the wilderness. But God comes to the patriarch and says "Have I borne with this man for a hundred years, and canst thou not bear with him for a single night?" No wonder that the Covenanters hated bishops when their doctrines were so narrow, and those of the biggest bishop in genius and learning in all England were so broad. Men never hate their foes so much as when they feel that they are in some points far ahead of themselves.

Nevertheless, the very narrowness of the Covenantlike the narrowness of an awl or wedge-was the source of its power at first. But although Charles II. became a Covenanter a thing that seems to us now as wonderful as though Louis Napoleon were becoming a Methodist yet, as his accession to that side was like everything else about him, false and hollow, it did, in the long-run, no good to the cause of the Covenant. And when Cromwell was dead, and Charles established on the throne, he became the bitter enemy of those who had restrained

while they professed to idolise him. As Bucklaw, in the Bride of Lammermoor, vowed that having, when under hiding at Wolfscrag, had to eat pease bannocks and drink sour wine, he would value soft lodging and good feeding all his life afterwards, and never get into the Jacobite scrape any more, SO with Charles II. Having been under the curb of the Covenant, and forced to listen to the long sermons and prayers of the Scotch divines for a considerable time, he determined never to be so cabined, cribbed, confined again; nay, he seems to have sworn to hate and persecute his old friends with all the rancour of a renegade no doubt, stimulated, too, to this by the influence of the bad counsellors who were about him. Victim after victim was now sacrificed to Charles's newborn zeal against the Covenant. Argyle, "Gillespie Grumach"-the favourite of Sir Walter Scott's caricaturing power in his Legend of Montrose, and whom Aytoun calls the "master-fiend," but who died with great courage on the scaffold-were the first to suffer, and were soon followed by Guthrie, minister of Stirling-who long before met the executioner of the city as he entered the West-Port to sign the Covenant, and read in this an omen of his future fate, but who died bravely, exclaiming with his last breath, "The Covenants, the Covenants, shall yet be Scotland's reviving!" Soon after, by an Act of Parliament, Presbytery was abolished, and Episcopacy reinstated. Some of the Presbyterian ministers apostatised-prominent among whom was the unhappy James Sharpe, minister of Crail, afterwards so famous for his bloody and cruel death at

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