XVI. 1690. CHAP. undertook, with this force, to keep the English garrisons in constant alarm by feints and incursions, till the season for more important operations should arrive. He accordingly marched into Strathspey. But all his plans were speedily disconcerted by the boldness and dexterity of Sir Thomas Livingstone, who held Inverness for King William. Livingstone, guided and assisted by the Grants, who were firmly attached to the new government, came, with a strong body of cavalry and dragoons, by forced marches and through arduous defiles, to the place where the Jacobites had taken up their quarters. He reached the camp fires at dead of night. The first alarm was given by the rush of the horses over the terrified sentinels into the midst of the crowd of Celts who lay sleeping in their plaids. Buchan escaped bareheaded and without his sword. Cannon ran away in his shirt. The conquerors lost not a man. Four hundred Highlanders were killed or taken. The rest fled to their hills and mists.* This event put an end to all thoughts of civil war. The gathering which had been planned for the summer never took place. Lochiel, even if he had been willing, was not able to sustain any longer the falling cause. He had been laid on his bed by a mishap which would alone suffice to show how little could be effected by a confederacy of the petty kings of the mountains. At a consultation of the Jacobite leaders, a gentleman from the Lowlands spoke with severity of those sycophants who had changed their religion to curry favour with King James. Glengarry was one of those people who think it dignified to suppose that every body is always insulting them. He took it into his head that some allusion to himself was meant. "I am as good a Protestant as you;" he cried, and added a word not to * Balcarras; Mackay's Memoirs; History of the late Revolution in Scotland, 1690; Livingstone's Re port, dated May 1.; London Gazette, May 12. 1690. XVI. be patiently borne by a man of spirit. In a moment СНАР. both swords were out. Lochiel thrust himself between the combatants, and, while forcing them asunder, reIceived a wound which was at first believed to be mortal.* 1690. liam built. So effectually had the spirit of the disaffected clans Fort Wilbeen cowed that Mackay marched unresisted from Perth into Lochaber, fixed his head quarters at Inverlochy, and proceeded to execute his favourite design of erecting at that place a fortress which might overawe the mutinous Camerons and Macdonalds. In a few days the walls were raised: the ditches were sunk: the palisades were fixed: demiculverins from a ship of war were ranged along the parapets; and the general departed, leaving an officer named Hill in command of a sufficient garrison. Within the defences there was no want of oatmeal, red herrings, and beef; and there was rather a superabundance of brandy. The new stronghold, which, hastily and rudely as it had been constructed, seemed doubtless to the people of the neighbourhood the most stupendous work that power and science united had ever produced, was named Fort William in honour of the King.† the Scot By this time the Scottish Parliament had reassembled Meeting of at Edinburgh. William had found it no easy matter ish Parto decide what course should be taken with that ca- liament. pricious and unruly body. The English Commons had sometimes put him out of temper. Yet they had granted him millions, and had never asked from him such concessions as had been imperiously demanded by the Scottish legislature, which could give him little and had given him nothing. The English statesmen with * History of the late Revolution in Scotland, 1690. Mackay's Memoirs and Letters to Hamilton of June 20. and 24. 1690; Colonel Hill to Melville, July 10. 26.; London Gazette, July 17. 21. As to Inverlochy, see XVI. CHAP. whom he had to deal did not generally stand or deserve to stand high in his esteem. Yet few of them were so 1690. utterly false and shameless as the leading Scottish politicians. Hamilton was, in morality and honour, rather above than below his fellows; and even Hamilton was fickle, false and greedy. "I wish to heaven,"” William was once provoked into exclaiming, "that Scotland were a thousand miles off, and that the Duke of Hamilton were King of it. Then I should be rid of them both." Melville The go. verument obtains a After much deliberation William determined to send Melville down to Edinburgh as Lord High Commissioner. Melville was not a great statesman: he was not a great orator: he did not look or move like the representative of royalty: his character was not of more than standard purity; and the standard of purity among Scottish senators was not high but he was by no means deficient in prudence or temper; and he succeeded, on the whole, better than a man of much higher qualities might have done. During the first days of the Session, the friends of the government desponded, and the chiefs of the opposition were sanguine. Montgomery's head, though by no means a weak one, had been turned by the triumphs of the preceding year. He believed that his intrigues and his rhetoric had completely subjugated the Estates. It seemed to him impossible that, having exercised a boundless empire in the Parliament House when the Jacobites were absent, he should be defeated when they were present, and ready to support whatever he proposed. He had not indeed found it easy to prevail on them to attend: for they could not take their seats without taking the oaths. A few of them had some slight scruple of conscience about forswearing themselves; and many, who did not know what a scruple of conscience meant, were apprehensive that they might offend the rightful King by vowing fealty to the actual King. Some Lords, however, who were supposed to be in the confidence of James, asserted that, to their knowledge, he wished his friends to perjure themselves; and this assertion induced most of the Jacobites, with Balcarras at their head, to be guilty of perfidy aggravated by impiety.* It soon appeared, however, that Montgomery's faction, even with this reinforcement, was no longer a majority of the legislature. For every supporter that he had gained he had lost two. He had committed an error which has more than once, in British history, been fatal to great parliamentary leaders. He had imagined that, as soon as he chose to coalesce with those to whom he had recently been opposed, all his followers would imitate his example. He soon found that it was much easier to inflame animosities than to appease them. The great body of Whigs and Presbyterians shrank from the fellowship of the Jacobites. Some waverers were purchased by the government; nor was the purchase expensive; for a sum which would hardly be missed in the English Treasury was immense in the estimation of the needy barons of the North. Thus the scale was turned; and, in the Scottish Parliaments of that age, the turn of the scale was every thing: the tendency of majorities was always to increase, the tendency of minorities to diminish. The first question on which a vote was taken related to the election for a borough. The ministers carried their point by six voices. In an instant every thing was changed: the spell was broken: the Club, from being a bugbear, became a laughingstock: the timid and the venal passed over in crowds from the weaker to the stronger side. It was in vain that the opposition attempted to revive the disputes of the preceding year. * Balcarras. See the instructions to the Lord High Commissioner in the Leven and Melville Papers. CHAP. 1690. XVI. CHAP. The King had wisely authorised Melville to give up the Committee of Articles. The Estates, on the other hand, 1690. showed no disposition to pass another Act of Incapacitation, to censure the government for opening the Courts of Justice, or to question the right of the Sovereign to name the Judges. An extraordinary supply was voted, small, according to the notions of English financiers, but large for the means of Scotland. The sum granted was a hundred and sixty two thousand pounds sterling, to be raised in the course of four years. Ecclesias lation. The Jacobites, who found that they had forsworn themselves to no purpose, sate, bowed down by shame. and writhing with vexation, while Montgomery, who had deceived himself and them, and who, in his rage, had utterly lost, not indeed his parts and his fluency, but all decorum and selfcommand, scolded like a waterman on the Thames, and was answered with equal asperity and even more than equal ability by Sir John Dalrymple.† The most important acts of this Session were those tical legis which fixed the ecclesiastical constitution of Scotland. By the Claim of Right it had been declared that the authority of Bishops was an insupportable grievance; and William, by accepting the Crown, had bound himself not to uphold an institution condemned by the very instrument on which his title to the Crown depended. But the Claim of Right had not defined the form of Church government which was to be substituted for episcopacy; and, during the stormy Session held in the summer of 1689, the violence of the Club had made legislation impossible. During many months therefore every thing had been in confusion. One polity had been pulled down; and no other polity had been set up. In the Western Lowlands, the beneficed clergy had been so effectually rabbled, that scarcely one of them had remained at his post. In Berwickshire, the three Lothians Act. Parl. June 7. 1690. + Balcarras. |