Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/236

322 Defoe, who had the curiosity to go to Scotland and watch the circumstances attending the adoption of this great measure, has left us a very lively account of the fury to which the people were worked up by these representations. Mobs paraded the streets of Edinburgh, crying that they were Scotchmen, and would be Scotchmen still. They hooted, hissed, and pursued all those whom they knew to be friendly to the treaty, and there was little safety for them in the streets. "Parties," he says, "whose interests and principles differed as much as light and darkness, who were contrary in opinion, and as far asunder in everything as the poles, seemed to draw together here. It was the most monstrous sight in the world, to see the Jacobite and the presbyterian, the persecuting prelatic nonjuror and the Cameronian, the papist and the reformed protestant, parley together, join interests, and concert measures together; to see the Jacobites at Glasgow huzzahing the mob, and encouraging them to have a care of the church; the high-flying episcopal dissenter crying out, the overture was not a sufficient security for the kirk."

A Mr. Hodges issued a book against it, denouncing England as a faithless, wicked, and abominable nation, declaring that the interests of the two nations were diametrically opposed and irreconcilable; that the trade of England to the West Indies was carried on by exclusive companies, and, therefore, the pretence of equal privileges in commerce was a cheat and a delusion; that the Scottish members of the English parliament would have to take the sacrament according to the rites of the church of England; that the kirk would be put entirely under the foot of the English hierarchy; and that to incorporate the two countries was, in fact, to swamp Scotland altogether.



From the 3rd of October, when the parliament opened, to the 1st of November, the fury of the people continued to increase, and the utmost was done to rouse the old Cameronian spirit in the west of Scotland by alarming rumours of the intention of England to restore episcopacy by force. The whole country was in a flame. Under such circumstances the articles of the treaty had to be discussed in the Scottish parliament. The opponents did not venture to