public feeling in Edinburgh, they found it so formidable that they thought it necessary to suspend all assemblages for public worship. The bishops had given instructions to the clergy "that neither the old service nor the newestablished service be used in this interim,"-recommending, however, that there should be sermon, preceded and followed by prayer. But the prohibition went further, and the city was compared to a community under the old Papal interdict, or, as a country clergyman described it : "In Edinburgh itself, for a month's space or thereby after the first tumult, there was a kind of vacancy of divine service upon the week-days, the churches standing desolate, without either preaching weekly, as the custom was, or morning and evening prayer daily, which looked like a kind of episcopal interdict which the town was put under, which did but heighten the rage of the people, who were already in a distemper and discontentment." 2

In the mean time the power of the king's warrant to enforce the use of the Service-book by letters of horning was put to the test. This brought out in a curious shape the effect of the practice, so often noticed, of the Crown having to resort in Scotland to those ordinary forms of law used between subject and subject. In Scotland it could not be said that there was any institution clearly marked off, like the royal prerogative in England.3

ruler of that town this lang time."-Letters relating to Ecclesiastical Affairs during the Reign of King James the Sixth, 433.

"were

The assaults on the heterodox by "the devouter sex" numerous. One had an excuse which added a great fund of insult and humiliation to the injuries inflicted on the victim. He was beaten because, not being a popular preacher, he occupied the pulpit in which one of that class-Henry Rolloc-was expected to appear. The viragos assembled to enjoy a theological feast adapted to their voluptuous appetites, found common parish fare, and vented their wrath on the cause, who, finding that D. Elliot went to pulpit when they expected Mr Henry Rolloc, after sermon fell upon him and Mr Fletcher with many sad strokes."-Baillie's Letters, i. 109. 1 Council Record, Peterkin's Collection, 52.

2 Gordon's History, i. 14.

3 For instance, that prerogative process, the writ of extent, for levying the claims of the Crown preferably to other debts, was unknown in Scotland until it was established by an Act of the British

Hence, if the king's process were disputed, that the monarch and the subject entered a court of law together, had a tendency to nourish a sense of equality between the two. The question was tried on the application of three ministers in Fifeshire; and the importance of the position they held as fighting the Crown in a great State question was enhanced by the eminence of one of their number, Alexander Henderson, minister of Leuchars, the rising hope of the Presbyterian party.

This process, technical and sedately formal, was in vivid contrast with the storm outside. The three ministers raised a "suspension" against the charge of horning.1 They stated that on being charged to purchase two of the books, each of them had intimated his willingness to receive the book, and read it that he might see what it contained, "alleging that in matters of God's worship we are not bound to blind obedience." This permission to read the book beforehand was not granted; "and yet," they add, "we are now charged with letters of horning, directed by your lordships upon a narrative that we refused the said books, out of curiosity and singularity, to provide each one of us two of the said books for the use of our parishes."

The pleas urged for the three suspenders were brief appeals to the law, touching but slightly on the great ecclesiastical disputes at the root of all-as, for instance: "Because the book is neither warranted by the authority of the General Assembly-which are the representative Kirk of this kingdom, and hath ever since the Reforma

Parliament immediately after the Union of 1707. Before it came over, it had been moulded into a beneficial process for realising the public revenue; but in its native country it had been one of those shapes of arbitrary power for which many of the English kings struggled so resolutely.

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1 In the crowd of ecclesiastical litigations which ended in the secession of the body constituting the Free Church, the term suspension" was frequently used, and was apt to puzzle those strangers to the law of Scotland who took an interest in her religious controIt is a process by which a court of law is called upon to suspend any enforcement of a writ or other hostile act until its legality is formally discussed.

versies.

tion given directions in matters of God's worship-nor by any Act of Parliament, which in things of this kind hath ever been thought necessary by his majesty and the Estates. Because the liberties of the true Church, and the form of worship and religion received at the Reformation and universally practised since, is warranted by the Acts of General Assemblies and divers Acts of Parliament, especially the Parliament 1567, and the late Parliament 1633."1

The question was tried in the Privy Council, or the Secret Council, as it was called in Scotland. This body was not, as the name might import, merely the executive staff of the Crown. They professed to exercise two functions the executive or ministerial, and the judicial; and they kept the two separate from each other. Their court was in some measure the rival of the Court of Session, as in England the King's Bench and Exchequer were the rivals of the Common Pleas. The Council had all that reluctance to decide a broad principle, if a narrow one will suffice, which in the English courts brought out many a decision that a slave-owner had not proved his title to the slave he claimed, before there was a decision on the broad principle that no title whatever could make good such a claim.

In this instance the Council were not driven to decide the question whether it was within the power of the Crown and the executive to enforce the proclamation prefixed to the Service-book. They found that the letters of horning extended to the buying of the book, and no farther. Thus the use of it as a ritual was virtually "suspended." The prelatic party thought they could see in this a lack of zeal for their cause and the king's-and perhaps they were right. It was among the personal hardships brought on by political convulsions, that the Scots bishops were, as a body, compromised by Laud and his vehement followers. If any of them desired it, yet they could not extricate themselves from the prelatic party; and they were destined to find themselves in a sadly friendless position. A large

1 Rothes's Relation, 46.

body of the aristocracy were, as we have seen, from strong causes of self-interest, their natural enemies; and events were giving their ecclesiastical opponents a sweeping popularity among the people. Against the pressure of such forces they had no stay except the precarious and relaxing hold of their zealous brother at the head of the alien and hostile English Church.

On the question how far the Service-book was accepted in the territories farther northward, the shape taken by one exception would be enough to prove the generality of the rule that the book was abjured. The Bishop of Brechin, on the frontier land between the Presbyterians of the south and the Cavaliers of the north, resolved to serve his king and his order by reading the book. So one Sunday, by Baillie's account, "when other feeble cowards couched," he "went to the pulpit with his pistols, his servants, and, as the report goes, his wife with weapons. He closed the doors and read his service. But when he was done he could scarce get to his house-all flocked about him; and had he not fled he might have been killed. Since, he durst never try that play over again." 1

Of Robert Baron of Aberdeen, a metaphysician with a European reputation, Baillie hears with horror that he has written in commendation of the Service-book. "I tender," he says, "that man's reputation as one who was half designed to our theologic profession in Glasgow, which we can never attain to with any tolerable contentment of our country were he an angel, if once he hath fyled paper in maintenance of this book." 2

When reports of these events reached the Court, and the news spread through London, there arose that halfincredulous and not unpleasing curiosity which we have known in our own day to attend the faint opening excitements of great convulsions, such as a Parisian revolution or a Sepoy mutiny. There was nothing to excite any feeling beyond curiosity-nothing to connect the strange actings of a strange and remote people with the great home questions which were disturbing the equanimity of

1 Letters and Journals, i. 41.

2 Ibid., 64

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thinking men in England. Clarendon, writing back from a full knowledge of the momentous influence to be thrown by these events on the fate of England, says: The truth is, there was so little curiosity either in the Court or the country to know anything of Scotland, or what was done there, that when the whole nation was solicitous to know what passed weekly in Germany and Poland, and all other parts of Europe, no man ever inquired what was doing in Scotland, nor had that kingdom a place or mention of one page of any gazette.”1 This lack of information the great annalist attributes to the king's jealousy of any possible interference with his ancient kingdom, "and that it might not be dishonoured by a suspicion of having any dependence upon England." If this was what the king desired to impress on English statesmen, Laud acted so as to create the opposite impression in Scotland. He scolded those whom he held responsible in the matter, lay and clerical, like a testy commander whose brilliant tactics are wrecked through the incapacity or cowardice of his subordinates ::

"His majesty takes it very ill that the business concerning the establishment of the Service-book hath been so weakly carried, and hath great reason to think himself and his Government dishonoured by the late tumult in Edinburgh, July 23; and therefore expects that your lordship and the rest of the honourable Council set yourselves to it that the Liturgy may be established orderly and with peace, to repair what hath been done amiss."

"Nor is his majesty well satisfied with the clergy, that they which are in authority were not advertised that they might attend the countenancing of such a service, so much tending to the honour of God and the king."

"Of all the rest, the weakest part was the interdicting of all divine service till his majesty's pleasure was further known. And this, as also the giving warning of the publishing, his majesty at the first reading of the letters and report of the fact checked at, and commanded me to write so much to my Lord of St Andrews, which I did; and

1 History, i. 110.