Parliament. He had deserted his old favourite, the Duke of
Buckingham, who was now in the opposition.
To give any sufficient idea of the miseries of Scotland in this
merry reign, would occupy a hundred pages. Because the people
would not have bishops, and were resolved to stand by their solemn
League and Covenant, such cruelties were inflicted upon them as
make the blood run cold. Ferocious dragoons galloped through the
country to punish the peasants for deserting the churches; sons
were hanged up at their fathers’ doors for refusing to disclose
where their fathers were concealed; wives were tortured to death
for not betraying their husbands; people were taken out of their
fields and gardens, and shot on the public roads without trial;
lighted matches were tied to the fingers of prisoners, and a most
horrible torment called the Boot was invented, and constantly
applied, which ground and mashed the victims’ legs with iron
wedges. Witnesses were tortured as well as prisoners. All the
prisons were full; all the gibbets were heavy with bodies; murder
and plunder devastated the whole country. In spite of all, the
Covenanters were by no means to be dragged into the churches, and
persisted in worshipping God as they thought right. A body of
ferocious Highlanders, turned upon them from the mountains of their
own country, had no greater effect than the English dragoons under
GRAHAME OF CLAVERHOUSE, the most cruel and rapacious of all their
enemies, whose name will ever be cursed through the length and
breadth of Scotland. Archbishop Sharp had ever aided and abetted
all these outrages. But he fell at last; for, when the injuries of
the Scottish people were at their height, he was seen, in his
coach-and-six coming across a moor, by a body of men, headed by one
JOHN BALFOUR, who were waiting for another of their oppressors.
Upon this they cried out that Heaven had delivered him into their
hands, and killed him with many wounds. If ever a man deserved
such a death, I think Archbishop Sharp did.
It made a great noise directly, and the Merry Monarch – strongly
suspected of having goaded the Scottish people on, that he might
have an excuse for a greater army than the Parliament were willing
to give him – sent down his son, the Duke of Monmouth, as
commander-in-chief, with instructions to attack the Scottish
rebels, or Whigs as they were called, whenever he came up with
them. Marching with ten thousand men from Edinburgh, he found
them, in number four or five thousand, drawn up at Bothwell Bridge,
by the Clyde. They were soon dispersed; and Monmouth showed a more
humane character towards them, than he had shown towards that
Member of Parliament whose nose he had caused to be slit with a
penknife. But the Duke of Lauderdale was their bitter foe, and
sent Claverhouse to finish them.
As the Duke of York became more and more unpopular, the Duke of
Monmouth became more and more popular. It would have been decent
in the latter not to have voted in favour of the renewed bill for
the exclusion of James from the throne; but he did so, much to the
King’s amusement, who used to sit in the House of Lords by the
fire, hearing the debates, which he said were as good as a play.
The House of Commons passed the bill by a large majority, and it
was carried up to the House of Lords by LORD RUSSELL, one of the
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best of the leaders on the Protestant side. It was rejected there,
chiefly because the bishops helped the King to get rid of it; and
the fear of Catholic plots revived again. There had been another
got up, by a fellow out of Newgate, named DANGERFIELD, which is
more famous than it deserves to be, under the name of the MEAL-TUB
PLOT. This jail-bird having been got out of Newgate by a MRS.
CELLIER, a Catholic nurse, had turned Catholic himself, and
pretended that he knew of a plot among the Presbyterians against
the King’s life. This was very pleasant to the Duke of York, who