[1] For this important point in its bearing upon the position of the Cameronians, and the 'Testimony' of Richard Cameron at the market-place of Sanquhar, June 22, 1680, see Buchanan's _History_, XX. 36-47, and Milton's _Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, with the coins of James VI. stamped in 1570. Thus, while James VII.'s creatures, the Bishops, maintained the 'divine right' of their creator, led by Paterson, the Archbishop of Glasgow, Dalrymple could carry the resolution on the constitutional question of tenure that the king had 'forfaulted the throne.'
But the exigencies of the romance-writer are often the means of corrupting history, and the largest class of readers will ever prefer to read it, in the phrase of Macaulay, with their feet on the fender. To that class, therefore, the political crisis of 1638, one of no less magnitude than the French Revolution, will ever be obscured by airy talk about religious intolerance and popular fanaticism. The history of Scotland in consequence becomes either, as Carlyle said, a mere hunting-ground for intriguing Guises or else is left to the novelist with the Mucklewraths, wild men, and caricatures. Even yet the mere English reader of Hume and Robertson has not got beyond the phrases of 'iron reformers' and 'beautiful queens.' The intrepidity of Knox, like the conduct of Luther at the Diet, becomes material for the sentimentalist to decry or the latitudinarian to bewail. The courtly Dean Stanley approaches the maudlin in his remarks at this stage, and he thinks of Scott as he 'murmured the lay of Prince Charlie on the hills of Pausilippo, and stood rapt in silent devotion before the tomb of the Stuarts in St. Peter.' But the admirers of the greatest of all novelists will remember also no less his statement that he gave the heart without giving the head, and will even regard it as a merely temporary aberration, like his presence at Carlton House with the Prince Regent, where, says Lockhart with curious lack of humour, 'that nothing might be wanting, the Prince sang several capital songs!' The spell of Sir Walter should not blind us to the real and the false in the national story. Eminently clear-headed and politically sound were the men of 1638, worthy compeers of the great men that sat in England's Long Parliament. The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers! Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness--these are the traditional marks of the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's _perfervidum ingenium_ is surely much truer, and mere calculation is just what is _not_ the national mark. If her poverty and pride were seen in Darien, no less truly was her religious and political side seen in these other events. But the question of the Headship still awaits us. On the accession of William, the shattered remnants of the kirk were gathered together by Carstares after twenty-eight years of persecution: _nec tamen consumebatur_. Perhaps, in the circumstances under which both king and country found themselves, no other compromise could so well have been come to as that of 1690. The election was left in the hands of elders and the heritors, to be approved of by the people, leaving an appeal to the Presbytery. At the Union, Scotland seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her scanty band of forty-five members being swamped in the English or Tory phalanx--a danger to which every year subsequent has added but too evident a commentary--had exacted the most strenuous obligations for the unalterable preservation of her ecclesiastical system. But five years witnessed the most shameless breach of public faith, by an Act which had the most ruinous effects, political and religious, upon the people. The Tories had come into power on the crest of the Sacheverel wave, and in 1712 Bolingbroke proceeded to carry out his scheme of altering the succession and securing the return of the Pretender. An Act of Toleration was passed for the Episcopalian dissenting sect in Scotland, and an oath of abjuration sought to be imposed upon the Scottish Church for the sake of exciting confusion. An Act restoring patronage was rushed through the House by the Tory squires, who composed five-sixths of the House of Commons. Against this the Whigs and Carstares protested vigorously, and appealed to the Treaty of Union, but appeal was lost upon the ignorant class, who were not overdrawn in the Squire Western of Fielding's novel. For a hundred years this Act bore evil fruits.