Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/456

442 would not take her raw produce. The bill was passed, and sixty thousand beeves and a large quantity of sheep were thus refused entrance annually at our ports. To obviate this difficulty, the Irish slaughtered the cattle, and sent them over as dead carcasses. This was violently opposed, and this session a bill passed, also excluding the meat. But the 3rd and last demand on Charles was the most alarming. It was no other than that a parliamentary commission should be appointed to examine and audit the public accounts. It was well known that not only the king's mistresses, but many other persons about the court had made very free with the public revenue with the connivance of Charles. Lady Castlemaine was commonly declared to carry on a great trade in selling favours, and receiving bribes from the subjects, and lavish grants from the king.

The alarm which the passing of a bill for this commission of inquiry through the commons carried into all the courtly recesses of corruption, was excessive. The whole court was in a turmoil of consternation; there was a terrible outcry that if this were allowed, there was an end of the prerogative. Lord Ashley, the treasurer of the prize money, and Carteret, the treasurer of the navy, were aghast, and implored Charles to declare openly that he would never consent to it. The grave and virtuous lord Clarendon strenuously supported them, telling the king that he must not "suffer parliament to extend their jurisdiction to cases that they had nothing to do with." That "this was such a new encroachment as had no bottom; and that the scars were yet too fresh and green of those wounds which had been inflicted on the kingdom from such a usurpation." He desired the king to "be firm in the resolution he had taken, and not to be put from it." And he promised when the bill came into the lords he would oppose it with all his power. And this was the advice of a man who himself tells you in his "Life" of the corruptions practised—of the corruptions of these very men, Ashley and Carteret; of the good round sums taken from the privy purse by "the lady," as she was called, and of the extensive grants to her of lands in Ireland, where they were not so likely to be inquired about; of the miserable condition of the navy, the dissolute life of the king, his own remonstrances, and the constant endeavours of the courtiers to divert the king's attention from anything serious.

But there was a cause much more influential than public good or public virtue which forwarded the bill, spite of the court. The duke of Buckingham had a quarrel with "the lady," and the lady prejudiced the king against him, and the duke was determined to have his revenge by exposing "the lady's" gross peculations. The bill, therefore, passed the commons, and came into the lords, where Buckingham and his party supported it, and Clarendon and the guilty courtiers opposed it. Buckingham himself was as dissolute and unprincipled a man as any about court, not even excepting the king and the licentious lord Rochester. He knew all the secrets of that den of loathly creatures—the court, and therefore was the more dangerous. The bill passed, and the king, in his resentment, disgraced Buckingham, deprived him of all his employments, and ordered his committal to the Tower, which he only avoided by absconding. Buckingham, however once out of the way, the king and his virtuous chancellor soon managed to be allowed to appoint the commission of inquiry themselves, by which the whole affair was converted into a mockery, and came to nothing, for, says Clarendon, the king "was not willing that such a strict account or examination should be made, especially into the receipts of lord Ashley for the prizes, that all the world should know what money had been issued, and by his own immediate orders, and to whom."

During this session of parliament, wild work had been going on in the west of Scotland. The people there had resisted the ejectment of their ministers from their pulpits by episcopalian clergy; they received them with curses, and often with showers of stones. When the act against conventicles was passed, they still met with their old pastors in barns and moorlands, and then the soldiery under Sir James Turner were let loose upon them. They flew to arms and fought the soldiers, and made prisoner of Turner himself. Their ministers, Semple, Maxwell, Welsh, Guthrie, and others, incited them to wield the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, and to resist the malignants to the death. Lauderdale was in London, and the ministers told the people that the fire of London had given enough to the government to do at home. But Sharpe was in Scotland, and he put himself at the head of two troops of horse and a regiment of foot guards, and assisted by Dalziel, a man of considerable military reputation, he pursued the covenanters to Rullion Green, in the Pentlands. There, on the 28th of November, they came to a pitched battle, in which the covenanters were defeated, fifty of them being killed, and a hundred and thirty taken prisoners. The covenanters had treated Turner and all others who fell into their hands with great lenity, but none was shown to them by Sharpe. Ten of them were hanged on one gallows in Edinburgh, and thirty-five were sent to Galloway, Ayr, and Dumfries, and there gibbeted in the face of their own friends. The implacable archbishop, with all the fury of a renegade, made keen search after all who had been concerned in the affair; it was declared that eternal damnation was incurred by the rebels against the church, and all the horrors of the rack, thumb-screws, and iron boot were put rigorously into operation again. A young preacher, Maccail, whom Sir Walter Scott has represented under the name of Macbriar, was hideously tortured, but died in a rapture of joy, not a syllable of disclosure escaping him. Dalziel, a brutal and drunken captain, revelled in cruelty and outrage amongst the whigs or whiggamores, as they were called; hanged a man because he would not betray his own father, quartered his soldiers on them to ruin them, and perpetrated such atrocities that the earls of Tweeddale and Kincardine went up to court to warn the king against driving the people once more to desperation. Their representations were not without effect, but this leniency was of short duration.

The war with the Dutch and French being still continued, it was necessary for Charles to put his fleet once move in order; but his exchequer exhibited its usual emptiness, and the parliamentary supply would be some time before it reached the treasury. The usual resource had been to send for the bankers and capitalists of London, and mate over to them some branches of the public revenue for immediate advances, these advances to be at the rate of eight per