Page:Sketches of the History of the Church of Scotland.djvu/15

 and the poor old bedesmen and almswomen from without, bowed themselves to the ground. Four King's scholars, armed with broad-swords and pistols, stood and kept the door, while the Head Master, kneeling down, prayed for the Royal Family, for the Queen Henrietta Maria, for the Princes and Princesses, and for the King, who, ere the prayer, broken by passionate sobs, had ended, was dead, and had become King Charles the Martyr.

Scotland, although leavened with the sour and bitter leaven of Puritanism, had never, at its worst, been Republican. The murder of the King, to which a faction in Scotland had contributed by their traffic with Cromwell and the other regicides, the paid down price being thirty thousand pounds, startled the land. The dominant party was bent on concussing the King to adopt an ecclesiastical polity which he abhorred, but it remonstrated against the measures which encompassed his death. And so it forthwith proclaimed Charles the Second King, and submitted unwillingly to the Cromwellian yoke. The bloodstained usurper, when his time came, died as he had lived, the remorseless enemy of God's order in Church and State.

Even in the western shires, where Presbyterian ism was strongest, and where the Covenant was most popular, those who stuck to these principles were chiefly the ignorant and excitable peasantry. The people of those districts, for the most part, had, it is true, no favour for Episcopacy, which their preachers told them meant Popery and the Mass; but those who could not conscientiously conform to the established order were "indulged;" that is to say, an Act of Toleration was specially passed for them. A portion even of the revenues of the Church was assigned for the maintenance of the indulged Presbyterian preachers who were perfectly content to accept it, and to live and let live, as loyal leiges of the king. There was, in effect, a concurrent establishment and endowment both of Prelacy and Presbytry; and the indulged Presbyterians, so far as the Church and the State were concerned, were left to the exercise of their religion in peace. It was their own Presbyterian co-religionists, "the hill folk," who troubled them; and because these "moderates," as they would now have been called, had disavowed the Covenant as a seditious bond of conspiracy, and desired to live in peace and quietness, the fanatics hated them with a heart-hatred, only inferior, and scarcely that, to the hatred they accorded to the established Episcopacy; and the "black indulgence," and the "black Prelacy," were the twin abomination which they held they were divinely commissioned to testify against and forcibly to uproot. As the Jews were commissioned to extirpate the heathen Canaanites, so, reading between the lines, the Covenanters believed, as their preachers taught them, that they were foreordained to extirpate Popery and Prelacy, betwixt which there was only a paper wall, as they affirmed, together with the "indulged" and sinfully complying indulged Presbyterians, by every