Page:(1848) Observations on Church and State- JF Ferrier.pdf/4

4 arms against the reckless and disgraceful courses of the queen.” (P. 61.) He has forgotten the side which his own ancestor, one of the most influential Reformers of the day, espoused in that melancholy contest. It is true that Argyll at first joined the party which deposed Mary and crowned her infant son; but eventually he attached himself to the cause of the forsaken queen. He received her after her escape from Lochleven. He commanded her forces at the battle of Langside; and even when her fortunes were irretrievably ruined by the issue of that engagement, he ceased not to exert himself in her behalf. At length, when all hope was gone, he gave in his adhesion to the infant king, under the regency of Lennox; and died chancellor of Scotland in the year 1575.

Better known in history is the Argyll of a later period, the adversary of the great Montrose. This nobleman was raised to the marquisate in the year 1641. A subtle and sagacious politician, he was the leader of the wild men among the Covenanters— a powerful section, which was influential in determining the fate of King Charles I., by concussing the Scottish nation into the rejection of the treaty called the “Engagement,” which the more moderate Presbyterian party were willing to enter into with their unfortunate monarch. In 1661, in the reign of Charles II., the Marquis of Argyll perished on the scaffold by a most iniquitous sentence obtained by means of evidence produced against him by General Monk, under circumstances of unparalleled baseness. Except as an immolation to the manes of his heroic antagonist Montrose, who had perished by a similar doom (and certainly this will not in any degree justify it), his execution had nothing to recommend or palliate its atrocity.

The victim of a still more execrable perversion of justice, and an equally stanch defender of Presbyterianism, was his son Archibald, the ninth earl, who likewise died on the scaffold in the year 1681, during the reign of James II. He was executed for daring to explain the sense in which he accepted and subscribed the test-oath. This was a contradictory document, which bound all persons to uphold the Protestant religion, and yet to make no opposition to any attempt on the part of the crown to restore the Roman Catholic worship. This document the earl having presumed to “explain,” was brought to trial and convicted of high