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Bishop of Brechin and of Edinburgh, sets forth not inelegantly, the penitential anxiety with which that prelate, at least, longed to be relieved of the uneasy honours with which his sovereign had invested him. Of this epigram we venture to submit to our readers the following version; the original is given in the Historia Rerum nuper Regno Scotia Gestarum-(ascribed to Lewis du Moulin, and composed from contemporary documents).

In vain my wife, in vain my friends console,

In vain they bid me seek the Leech's skill;
None can me comfort, nought can make me whole,
Nought, save an act, my sovereign, of thy will:-
Oh! from my throbbing brow this mitre lift;
Resume thy soul-and-body-killing gift.†

Among the more pious part of the community a feeling of sadness and of deep regret prevailed; in their eyes a grievous wrong had been done to the prerogative of Christ, the sole Head of the Church, and the way opened for the return of all the Antichristian abominations of which Scotland had been purged at the Reformation; in their own expressive words, they felt that they had 'lost the sap, and blood, and warmth of the pristine church-that 'every-thing was retrograding and becoming worse-and that the 'whole Antichristian hierarchy, which had been formerly rejected, 'was, to the extreme grief and lamentation of all good men, 'about to be recalled from the lower regions to the light.' Amid the follies and absurdities of his court, James might make himself merry with the remonstrances and sorrows of his injured and insulted countrymen; but a spirit had been evoked by his bungling tyranny which it passed his craft to lay, and which in the bosoms of a stern and inflexible people, was even then brooding over purposes of retaliation when the day of vengeance should

arrive.

The work which James had so far succeeded in accomplishing,

*This appears to have been but a poetical paraphrase of what Nicholson declared on his death-bed; for Calderwood tells us he assigned as the cause of his illness, that the digesting of the bishopric had wracked his stomach.' Hist. p. 570. See also Mc Crie's Life of Melville, ii. pp. 105, 251.

+Tunc succum, sanguinem et calorum pristinæ Ecclesiæ amisimus; hinc omnia in pejus reure et retro sublapsa referri, adeo ut Antichristiana omnis Hierarchia ante ejerata, bonorum summo cum gemitu et moerore ab inferis in lucem revocaretur.-Epist. ab Ecclesiis Scoticis ad Helveticas, &c., appended to the Hist. Rerum Gestarum, above referred to. It is interesting to observe from this letter how anxiously the Scottish clergy labour to excuse both James and Charles, and to cast the blame of their sufferings upon Laud and some of their own bishops. There is some justice in this; but more of a mere morbid loyalty

his unhappy son determined at all hazards to complete. Haughty, resolute, and deeply bigoted, Charles espoused the ecclesiastical views of his father only to carry them out with a firmer purpose, and by a more open and avowed course of procedure. His first measures with respect to the Scottish Church, while they brought him into direct collision with some of the most powerful of his nobility, and were accomplished by means more arbitrary than honourable, were nevertheless productive of real benefit to the clergy and to the country generally. By revoking the gifts which his predecessors had made of the teinds or tithes to certain lay impropriators, and settling them upon their present basis, he conferred a boon at once upon the peasantry, by relieving them from a most oppressive and ruinous vassalage; upon the nation at large by the encouragement thereby afforded to agriculture, and the facilities furnished for extending education through all classes of the community; and upon the clergy, by supplying them with moderate, but certain and easily collected stipends.* Had he been contented with this, we should willingly have accorded the praise which Mr. Napier claims for him of having been actuated solely by a desire for the happiness of his people and the prosperity of his kingdom; but we fear the pertinacity with which he sought to couple with these acts certain regulations respecting clerical vestments, as well as his subsequent proceedings, too clearly shows, that the charge brought against him by Laing and Brodie, of intending by them rather the aggrandisement of the episcopal party in the Church, than the good of the community, is well-founded. It is plain from the extracts which Mr. Napier has furnished in the work before us, from the contemporary papers of Lord Napier, that the moderate party, as represented by that nobleman, viewed with deep regret the indications which the king's conduct upon this occasion furnished of his pertinacious determination to carry through his designs respecting the establishment of Episcopacy in all its fulness of prelatic pomp and power in Scotland; and our author has himself admitted, that if Charles did not push matters to an extremity at this time, it was only because he had paused in his favorite and pious 'scheme of arranging a uniformity of worship throughout his "kingdoms, and determined to conquer more gradually and with as little violence as possible, the selfish obstinacy of the titheholders, which, he had every reason to believe, was the only 'obstacle to his ameliorations of the Episcopal Church in Scot'land.'-Vol. i. p. 94. In the king's own account of his conduct it is admitted, that the act relating to the vestures of the clergy, as

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*See Heylin's Life of Laud, and Cook's History of the Church of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 342.

well as an act ratifying all the ecclesiastical innovations which his father had introduced during his reign, was passed in spite of a strenuous opposition on the part of many members of the Scottish Parliament a plain indication that the king had some other ends in view in the measures which he succeeded in carrying through affecting the Church, than the mere comfort and well-being of the community, else he would surely have foregone a point of such trifling moment, in accordance with the feelings of the nation, expressed by a large and independent minority (if minority it was *) of their legislators. Accordingly, it was soon made apparent what the king's designs really were; and that all he had at this time accomplished was but the feeble commencement of his enterprise - the mere poуvuvaquara, as it were, that preluded his more deadly onset. On his return to London, 'guided,' to use Mr. Napier's words, by the policy of Laud, Charles at length determined to effect the long-meditated scheme 'of ecclesiastical uniformity throughout his dominions.'—Vol. i. p. 131. First came the Book of Canons, enacting many things highly offensive to the religious feelings and detrimental to the civil immunities of the nation, and which was promulgated (in the year 1636) under the sanction of the royal prerogative alone; the concurrence of the constituted authorities of the Scottish Church having, contrary to all precedent and law, been not so much as asked. Hardly had the first burst of popular indignation to which this rash step gave rise, found vent, when it was followed up by one still more calculated to irritate the minds of the nation, and goad them on to deeds of violent resistance. This was the appointment, by royal authority, of a new liturgy to be

This is still a doubtful point. Burnet asserts, that almost the whole Commons voted in the negative, so that the Act was indeed rejected by the majority, which the king knew, for he had called for a list of the members, and with his own pen had marked every man's vote; yet the clerk of the register, who gathers and declares the votes, said it was carried in the affirmative. The Earl of Rothes affirmed it went in the negative. So the king said the Clerk of Register's declaration must be held good, unless the Earl of Rothes would go to the bar and accuse him of falsifying the record of Parliament, which was capital; and in that case, if he should fail in the proof, he was liable to the same punishment, so he would not venture on that.' Mr. Napier argues against this explicit testimony with all the zeal of a keen and able lawyer, but he does not, in our opinion, materially shake the evidence of Burnet. There can be no doubt that Burnet only repeats what was matter of public talk at the time it happened, and it is not very probable that this would have been the case had there been no truth in the report, as there were so many who could have disproved it. Besides, it is little in the king's favour, that he should have sought to shelter his Clerk Registrar under the terrors of a barbarous law, instead of following the obvious expedient of repeating the vote. Few men in Rothes's circumstances would have perilled their heads upon such a 'venture.'

used in all the churches, the joint production of the Bishops of Ross and Dunblane, under the direction of Laud. The model on which this was formed, was the English Book of Common Prayer; but so many alterations were introduced, chiefly through the influence of Laud, upon that model, that a work much more Popish in its character, and pernicious in its tendency was the result. A proceeding more repugnant to Scottish feeling at that time, than the compulsory introduction of such a book into the order of public worship, can hardly be conceived. But Charles, urged on by that dark spirit which then ruled his ecclesiastical councils, and whom an eloquent writer has not inaptly described as 'a lower kind of Saint Dominic-differing from the fierce and 'gloomy enthusiast who founded the Inquisition, as we might imagine the familiar imp of a spiteful witch to differ from an 'archangel of darkness '*-determined to run all risks in favour of his cherished scheme of uniformity. Every warning was disregarded by him; every entreaty to waive his mad pretensions scouted as an insult. In vain the nation remonstrated; in vain his most valuable and prudent counsellors exhorted him to desist; in vain the majority even of the Scottish bishops themselves implored him to proceed with greater deliberation. The king was obstinate; and accordingly, after some unavoidable delay, the order was made imperative, that on the 23rd of July, 1637, the liturgy should be used in all the churches. The attempt to carry this into effect was the signal for an universal and overwhelming outbreak of the long pent up fury of the nation. The mass of the clergy refused to use the obnoxious book, and those of them who ventured to read it were with few exceptions, unable to proceed from the violent opposition which they encountered from their audiences. In Edinburgh, scenes of disgraceful tumult were repeated with each new attempt to proceed with the reading of the liturgy; and it was with difficulty that some of the conforming clergy escaped with their lives. Å paroxysm of wrath and zeal had seized all classes of the community. Petitions and remonstrances of every kind were poured in upon the Council from all parts of the kingdom. The people assembled in various places in large masses, and in not a few cases gave way to proceedings of a very tumultuous character in their ardour against the obnoxious innovations. This led to the formation, in the early part of 1638, of a sort of representative council of the nation, consisting of four Tables,' as they were called, each of which represented one of the four great classes into which the community was supposed to be divided-the nobility, the gentry, the clergy, and the burghers. By this body

6

Edin. Review, vol. liv. p. 321.

the public feeling was concentrated and directed; measures were concocted and regulations issued by it with all the authority of law; until it gradually superseded in effect the entire government and legislature of the country. Such were the first results of what Mr. Napier calls, Charles's rational and praiseworthy scheme of uniformity in the Protestant worship of the kingdom;" but which may be more justly designated his insane and impious attempt to trample upon the rights of conscience, and invade the prerogative of the Almighty.

Mr. Napier would fain make it out that all this excitement and hostility to the liturgy, was the result of strenuous and factious agitation on the part of the clergy, and what he calls the Rothes and Balmerino faction,'-in other words, the disaffected nobility and gentry, whom Charles had offended by his measures respecting the settlement of the tithes. He repeatedly insinuates that a design existed on the part of this faction, to deprive Charles of his hereditary crown in Scotland, and to restore to that country its ancient dignity, by placing the sceptre in the hands of a resident as well as a native prince. As the most likely means of success in this design, he supposes that they prevailed upon the ministers, who, according to his account, were generally speaking a set of ignorant hot-headed bigots, to use their influence with the people against the king, by insinuating or asserting, that the latter was aiming at nothing less than the re-establishment of Popery in all its former power; and the ministers being, as he affirms, quite as factious as the nobility, went cheerfully into the scheme, and chiefly through their influence over the weaker sex, raised a popular prejudice against the king and the bishops, which expressed itself in the first instance by the tumults that occurred in the cathedral of Edinburgh, and was afterwards carefully fomented into a cause of implacable discord throughout the kingdom. This theory hangs so loosely together, and is dependant upon so many mere suppositions, that it is hardly worth while deliberately to set about refuting it. Where, we may be permitted to ask, is the evidence that any such design as that attributed by Mr. Napier to the insurgent nobility, at this time really existed? or, supposing that it did exist, is it at all credible that it should have been so readily espoused by the clergy? The latter were, generally speaking, attached to Charles; and their attachment must have been naturally not a little increased by the very measures which had so grievously offended the nobility, inasmuch as they were direct gainers by those measures. Nor were they such illiterate and semi-civilized barbarians, as Mr. Napier, repeating the unfounded calumnies of his party, affirms that they were. Measured, indeed, by the standard of a Walton, a Taylor, or a Barrow, they must be pronounced deficient in learning, in eloquence, in richness of language, and comprehensiveness of

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