Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/188

452 parliament, but by the king's advocate, who selected men that would prophesy smoothly; and, accordingly, their sermons were laboured condemnations of solemn leagues, national covenants, and rebellion, and eulogiums on passive obedience and the divine right of kings. Then came the oath of parliament, modelled in new fashion upon the English oath of supremacy, and so worded that it acknowledged the king to be " only supreme governor of this kingdom, over all persons, and in all causes ;" thus making him not only a supreme civil, but also ecclesiastical power. To this the oath of allegiance succeeded, by which the subject was bound to acknowledge the supreme power of the king in all matters civil and religious, and making it high treason to deny it. In this way they established the kingly power in its fullest latitude, and could bring every religious assembly that might displease them within a charge of high treason. But this process of rescinding the established order of things piece by piece, and the necessity of devising cunning pretexts for so doing, and clothing each enactment in words that had either a double meaning, or a deeper meaning than met the ear, was too slow for such impatient legislators, and they resolved to end such a war of skirmishes at once by a decisive onslaught. "Accordingly," says Wodrow, "in the 15th Act, they came at one dash, to rid themselves of all the parliaments since the year 1633." All that had been done since that period they stigmatized as "troubles, upon the specious but common pretext of REFORMATION, the common cloak of all rebellions," and declared that his majesty held the crown " immediately from God Almighty alone." Such was the famous, or rather most infamous of all the measures that had ever signalized a parliament, perhaps, since the days of Odin—" a most extravagant act," says Burnet, "and only fit to be concluded after a drunken bout." And that it was passed under some such inspiration, he makes but too probable, from his account of Middleton and his compeers. "His way of living," he tells us, "was the most splendid the nation had ever seen; but it was likewise the most scandalous, for vices of all. sorts were the open practices of those about him. Drinking was the most notorious of all, which was often continued through the whole night to the next morning ; and many disorders happening after those irregular heats, the people, who had never before that time seen anything like it, came to look with an ill eye on everything that was done by such a set of lewd and vicious men." Such were now the legislators of Scotland, and such the trim in which they repaired to their places in parliament. As for the all-sweeping measure commonly called the "Act Recissory," which was proposed half in jest, as something that the jaded members might make themselves merry withal, but passed in earnest after a single reading, it still remains unrepealed in our statute book, as if to astound all posterity with the humbling fact, that wise, cautious, deliberative Scotland had once, during her national existence, been actually ruled by a senate of bedlamites.

These wild specimens of legislation were soon to produce most disastrous fruits. And first in the list of victims was the Marquis of Argyle, whom Middleton hated, and whose rich estates he coveted, and who was sent down from London to stand trial for high treason before this Scottish parliament, with the commissioner at its head. The proceedings of such a tribunal could be neither slow nor doubtful; and, in the same year, the marquis perished on the scaffold. Another victim, not to Middleton's cupidity, but his revenge, also behoved to be sacrificed; and he, too, perished, only five days after, upon the same scaffold. This was James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, who, in 1650, had pronounced