by John Galt
CHAPTER XLIII
After my father and brothers, with our neighbours that went with them,had returned from the bloodless raid of Dunse Law, as the firstexpedition was called, a solemn thanksgiving was held in all thecountry-side; but the minds of men were none pacified by the treatyconcluded with the King at Berwick. For it was manifest to the world,that coming in his ire, and with all the might of his power, to punishthe Covenanters as rebels, he would never have consented to treat withthem on anything like equal terms, had he not been daunted by theirstrength and numbers; so that the spirit awakened by his Ahab-likedomination continued as alive and as distrustful of his word andpactions as ever.
After the rumours of his plain juggling about the verbals of thestipulated conditions, and his arbitrary prorogation of the parliamentat Edinburgh, a thing which the best and bravest of the Scottishmonarchs had never before dared to do without the consent of the Statesthen assembled, the thud and murmur of warlike preparation was renewedboth on anvil and in hall. And when it was known that the King, fey anddistempered with his own weak conceits and the instigations of cruelcounsellors, had, as soon as he heard that the Covenanters weredisbanded, renewed his purposes of punishment and oppression, a gurl ofrage, like the first brush of the tempest on the waves, passed over thewhole extent of Scotland, and those that had been in arms fiercelygirded themselves again for battle.
As the King's powers came again towards the borders, the Covenanters,for the second time, mustered under Lesley at Dunse; but far differentwas this new departure of our men from the solemnity of their firstexpedition. Their spirits were now harsh and angry, and their drumssounded hoarsely on the breeze. Godly Mr Swinton, as he headed themagain, struck the ground with his staff, and, instead of praying, said,"It is the Lord's pleasure, and he will make the Aggressor fin' theweight of the arm of flesh. Honest folk are no ever to be thus obligatedto leave their fields and families by the provocations of a prerogativethat has so little regard for the people. In the name and strength ofGod, let us march."
With six-and-twenty thousand horse and foot Lesley crossed the Tweed,and in the first onset the King's army was scattered like chaff beforethe wind. When the news of the victory arrived among us, every one wasfilled with awe and holy wonder; for it happened on the very day whichwas held as a universal fast throughout the land; on that day, likewise,even in the time of worship, the castle of Dumbarton was won, and thecovenanted Earl of Haddington repelled a wasteful irruption from thegarrison of Berwick.
Such disasters smote the King with consternation; for the immediatefruit of the victory was the conquest of Newcastle, Tynemouth, Shieldsand Durham.
Baffled and mortified, humbled but not penitent, the rash and vindictivemonarch, in a whirlwind of mutiny and desertion, was obligated toretreat to York, where he was constrained, by the few sound andsober-minded that yet hovered around him, to try the effect of anothernegotiation with his insulted and indignant subjects. But as all thethings which thence ensued are mingled with the acts of perfidy andaggression by which, under the disastrous influence of the fortunes ofhis doomed and guilty race, he drew down the vengeance of his Englishsubjects, it would lead me far from this household memorial to entermore at large on circumstances so notour, though they have beenstrangely palliated by the supple spirit of latter times, especially bythe sordid courtliness of the crafty Clarendon. I shall therefore skipthe main passages of public affairs, and hasten forward to the time whenI became myself enlisted on the side of our national liberties, briefly,however, noticing, as I proceed, that after the peace which wasconcluded at Ripon my father and my five brothers came home. None ofthem received any hurt in battle; but in the course of the winter theold man was visited with a great income of pains and aches, in so muchthat, for the remainder of his days, he was little able to endurefatigue or hardship of any kind; my second brother, Robin, was thereforecalled from his trade in Glasgow to look after the mailing, for I wasstill owre young to be of any effectual service; Alexander continued abonnet-maker at Kilmarnock; but Michael, William and Jacob, joined andfought with the forces that won the mournful triumph of Marston Moor,where fifty thousand subjects of the same King and laws contended withone another, and where the Lord, by showing himself on the side of thepeople, gave a dreadful admonition to the government to recant andconciliate while there was yet time.
Meanwhile the worthy Mr Swinton, having observed in me a curiositytowards books of history and piety, had taken great pains to instruct mein the rights and truths of religion, and to make it manifest alike tothe ears and eyes of my understanding, that no human authority could, orought to, dictate in matters of faith, because it could not discern thesecrets of the breast, neither know what was acceptable to Heaven inconduct or in worship. He likewise expounded to me in what manner theCovenant was not a temporal but a spiritual league, trenching in norespect upon the natural and contributed authority of the kingly office.But, owing to the infirm state of my father's health, neither my brotherRobin nor I could be spared from the farm, in any of the different raidsthat germinated out of the King's controversy with the Englishparliament; so that in the whigamore expedition, as it was profanelynicknamed, from our shire, with the covenanted Earls of Cassilis andEglinton, we had no personality, though our hearts went with those thatwere therein.
When, however, the hideous tidings came of the condemnation andexecution of the King, there was a stop in the current of men's minds,and as the waters of Jordan, when the ark was carried in, rushed back totheir fountain-head, every true Scot on that occasion felt in his heartthe ancient affections of his nature returning with a compassionatehorror. Yet even in this they were true to the Covenant; for it was notto be hidden that the English parliament, in doing what it did in thattragical event, was guided by a speculative spirit of politicalinnovation and change, different and distinct, both in principle andobject, from the cause which made our Scottish Covenanters have recourseto arms. In truth, the act of bringing kings to public condignpunishment was no such new thing in the chronicles of Scotland, as thatbrave historian, George Buchanan, plainly shows, to have filled us withsuch amazement and affright, had the offences of King Charles beenproven as clearly personal, as the crimes for which the ancient tyrantsof his pedigree suffered the death;--but his offences were shared withhis counsellors, whose duty it was to have bridled his arbitrarypretensions. He was in consequence mourned as a victim, and his son, thesecond Charles, at once proclaimed and acknowledged King of Scotland.How he deported himself in that capacity, and what gratitude he and hisbrother showed the land for its faith and loyalty in the wreck anddesperation of their royal fortunes, with a firm and a fearless pen Inow purpose to show. But as the tale of their persecutions is ravelledwith the sorrows and the sufferings of my friends and neighbours, andthe darker tissue of my own woes, it is needful, before proceedingtherein, that I should entreat the indulgence of the courteous reader toallow a few short passages of my private life now to be here recorded.