Part 8

From what we have said of the Assembly, the inference as to the Parliament is clear. It follows that its history between the year of Queen Mary's return and the day when Andrew Melville addressed King James in the words we have quoted is one rather of retrogression than of progress; nor did it, at any subsequent period, overawe the General Assembly. Further than this point we cannot go in any detail. The history of Scotland between 1567 and 1707 is so intricate, and has been so thoroughly expounded, that only a brief concluding sketch is necessary in a thesis of the present nature, however essential to a constitutional history of Scotland. In 1560 it was, to some extent, a free parliament, as Knox said, and it could claim to represent popular opinion. During the reign of Mary, as we have already seen, it relapsed into its old position of ratifying the acts of the privy council. Nor was the Parliament which met in December, 1567, while the hapless queen was spending at Lochleven her first year of captivity, in much better case. The country was divided between "king's men" and "queen's men." The Estates did what Murray and Morton wished to be done. There is one provision which, though in conformity with Murray's views, does not bear the impress of his hand. It reminds us that the author of the _First Blaste against the Monstrous Regiment of Women_ was present as an assessor in the Parliament when we read: "Als it is thocht expedient that in na tymes cuming ony wemen sal be admittit to the publict autoritie of the realme or functioun in publict government within the same." It was not a deliberate attempt to alter the succession: it was merely an additional illustration of bad feeling towards the captive queen.[121] Until the "Black Acts" there is little in the proceedings of the Parliament which calls for remark. The meetings were largely occupied with the usual sentences of forfeiture. Sometimes the queen's party held rival parliaments, and on such occasions everybody in Scotland of any importance was declared a traitor by one side or the other. A considerable amount of valuable work was done. Murray, whatever his personal character, was a statesman, and he left the impression of "a still strong man" upon those who survived him. His policy and that of his successors was guided by their dependence upon Elizabeth and by their associations with the Assembly. Parliament was largely occupied with the settlement of the Church, but it found time to regulate matters of police and trade. The influence of the Assembly continued to be paramount till 1584, when, for the first time, King James was able to assert his personality. The "Black Acts" of that year included a declaration of the king's royal power over all subjects, the supremity of Parliament, the illegality of conventions or assemblies not sanctioned by the king, and the subjection of ministers of the Church to the civil courts. No weight whatever can be given to the phrase "supremity of Parliament." It meant only that the king knew that he could use the Parliament as he liked, while the Assembly was as yet beyond his control. We do not intend to enter into the complicated story of the conflict between the king and the Church. But from 1584 the Parliament was generally at the disposal of the king. Still more is this the case after the year 1603. The Parliament became the mere shadow of the royal power. It declared in 1606--the year after the defiance of the king by the Aberdeen assembly--"our soverane monarche, absolute prince, Judge, and governor over all persones, Estaittis, and causis, baith spirituall and temporall, within his said realme." Only twelve years had elapsed since Andrew Melville's speech. The union with England meant that the king had power to coerce Scotland. The same obsequious Parliament outraged the national sentiment by the first establishment of episcopacy, although the assembly was still so strong that the bishops protested that there was no design to alter the discipline of the Kirk, "and submitted themselves in all time comeing to the judgement of the General Assemblie." Parliament was governed by the Lords of the Articles, and they were the creatures of the king. James did not exaggerate when he said:[122] "Here I sit and governe it [Scotland] with my pen, I write and it is done, and by a Clearke of the Councell I governe Scotland now, which others could not do by the sword." The satirist who accompanied King James on his visit to Scotland in 1617 gave vent to a merited sneer at the three Estates. "Their parliaments," he wrote, "hold but three days; their statutes are but three lines."[123] The anonymous apologist who replied made no effort to meet the accusation. It might have been King James himself that wrote: "For the brevitie of your parliaments ye are beholden to your wisdom, for the brevitie of your statutes to your justice."[124]

The conduct of affairs in Scotland remained, at first, unchanged by the death of James VI. The few parliaments of the reign are occupied with taxation, ratification, and other formal business. James had been statesman enough to fear the influence of Laud in Scotland.[125] Charles allowed a meddling ecclesiastic to stretch too far the allegiance of his people to their ancient House. The Parliament of 1628-30 is of no importance in the history of Scotland. It was poorly attended, and its deliberations were a foregone conclusion. The Parliament of 1639 was crowded, and it began its work with a protest against the method of electing the Lords of the Articles. The protest was feeble enough to be the first faint symptom of a revolution; but the revolution had already taken place. The people were led as before, not by the Parliament, but by the Assembly. The Glasgow Assembly of 1638, which continued to meet in spite of its "dissolution" by the king's commissioner, was the means by which a fatal blow was given to the first _régime_ of episcopacy and absolute monarchy. It rendered possible the revolutionary Parliament of 1640. We have already noticed the more important of its proceedings. It continued to look for support to the Assembly. It grounded its resolution against the presence of prelates in Parliament on the Act of Assembly abolishing episcopacy. In 1641 it beseeched the assembly to sit in Edinburgh instead of in St. Andrews, sending "some of everie estait to represent" its sense of "the great necessitie at this tyme of the concurring advyse of both the Assemblie and Parliament," and promising "to sett down ane solid course for the beiring of the chairges of the Commissioners to your yeirlie Generall Assemblies."[126] From 1641 to 1650 Scotland was ruled by the Scottish Parliament, in conjunction with the Assembly. The Estates undertook the management of the war, carried out the negotiations with the English Parliament, and with the king, and were at the same time able to give due attention to the minutest local details. Like the Reformation Parliament of 1560, the Covenant Parliament of 1640 marks a distinct stage in Scottish constitutional history. After we make all allowance for the revolutionary nature of the time, and for its dependence on the Assembly, it remains true that it grew to occupy a position different from that of any of its predecessors. It had learned much from England. Not for the first time, but more emphatically than ever before, do we find the Estates adopting the language of the English parliamentary opposition. On the other hand, the Scottish Parliament was in some ways in advance of its English sister. When Charles I paid his second visit to Scotland, in 1641, he found himself a puppet in the hands of his erstwhile obedient Estates. As we have seen, the Lords of the Articles became open committees of Parliament, and they were jealously watched by their colleagues. Parliament claimed the appointment of the privy council, and all the officers of state.[127] The reader will note with surprise the large amount of space occupied by the proceedings of Parliament during these years. Much is merely the record of judicial acts, and much was done by Parliament that we should regard as pertaining to the executive. For our present purpose it is unnecessary to descend to particulars. Our main contention is that the supersession of the royal power was rendered the more easy and the less significant because of the official character of the normal parliamentary procedure. The Estates, having the power to defy the king, could point to their own history as good warrant for their use of it. The sovereign had never dared to prorogue them against their will, they argued. Charles knew that they spoke the truth, and he could but accept the position. If the record of the Estates was one long submission, it did not contain a defeat, and it was capable of two interpretations. So, after the death of the king, the men who had just executed Huntly sent to offer terms to Charles II. It is significant that there were four representatives of the Estates, and three of the Assembly. The power was still conjoint, although Parliament during these years of struggle had learned to act. When the young king came to Scotland he found himself little more than a prisoner in the hands of the grim, staunch fearless men who surrounded him. He was forced to sign the most humiliating confessions of the sins of his family, and he abjured "Prelacy and all errors, schism, and profaneness." Cromwell's victory changed the aspect of affairs,[128] and ended, for the time, the history of the Parliament of Scotland. The short-lived "union" did not take effect till 1654, but from the date of the battle of Dunbar both Assembly and Estates had to acknowledge their master. In 1653 the General Assembly was reduced to plead "that we were ane Ecclesticall synod, ane spirituall court of Jesus Christ, which medled not with anything civile."[129] But the Assembly ceased to meet: and the Government of Scotland was neither ecclesiastical nor civil, but martial. The Parliament agreed to the union: once again because it was ordered so to do.

The story of the Cromwellian parliaments is no part of our subject. Scottish counties and burghs were represented, and an elaborate scheme was prepared to adjust the proper proportions--a scheme which afterwards was the model for further developments.[130] Two acts were passed by the united Parliament which affected the current of Scottish history--the establishment of free trade with England and the abolition of feudality.

The Commonwealth passed away, and Scotland had once more its Covenanted King. The irony of fate used the Committee of Estates, the body which Charles I had known as an enemy, to deliver the country to an absolute monarchy. The Committee of Estates was followed, when the king's commissioner arrived, by the meeting of the Restoration Parliament. The main difficulty was the religious one. Parliament was reduced to the position it had occupied before 1638. In 1661 it passed an act which rescinded all its own statutes since 1640. It humbly confessed the king's right to choose all officers of state, and members of the privy council; it acknowledged his right to call and prorogue Parliament; it re-established the tyranny of the Lords of the Articles. It recalled bishops to Parliament, and proscribed the national religion. Even when the English Parliament had recovered from its emotional loyalty, and begun to resume its old attitude to the king, the Scottish Estates remained absolutely at his disposal. When, later still, the succession was disputed in England, an act was passed in Scotland to declare that it could not be altered "without involving the subjects in perjury and rebellion." When Charles II died, Parliament addressed James VII in terms ludicrously obsequious. "The death of that our excellent monarch is lamented by us to all the degrees of grief that are consistent with our great joy for the succession of your sacred majesty." Between 1660 and 1689 the Scottish Parliament was once more the merest instrument for official sanction. A contemporary has left us his impressions of the time. He tells us that the methods of the Lords of the Articles were not quite so secret as they used to be.

Of late times matters have been at full length and freely debated in Parliament. They sit all in one House, and every one answers distinctly to his name and gives his vote, which is in these terms, _I approve_ or _not_; only those who are not satisfied one way or another, say _Non liquet_, which is a great ease to those who are conscientious, and a common refuge to the cunning Politicians; the major vote carries it. No dissents or protests are allowed in public acts, but are accounted treasonable.[131]

The arm of the Government was all-powerful, and they had not even to guard against opposition. A caricature of the General Assembly was maintained to give a further ecclesiastical ratification to the king's acts, "But," adds our informant,

as the calling of this synod is wholly in the Crown, so there is little need of it, since the King's Supremacy is so large, that He needs not there concurrence, to adde their Authority to anything that He shall think fit to doe about Church affairs.

It may be at first matter of surprise that Scotland should so completely have succumbed. All that the popular party could do was to suffer. Only on rare occasions could they take the field. Suffering or fighting, they never yielded. But the dearth of constitutional life is not inexplicable. Had the Restoration occurred ten years earlier, it would have been otherwise. The Commonwealth had blotted out the recollection of the years which preceded it, and prepared the way for the years that followed it. Bishop Burnet's remark, that the root of the trouble lay in the king's "entering in without condition," was true, at all events, for the historian's own country. Moreover, we must not forget the condition of the country. The long-continued struggle had brought desolation where before the union of the crowns we can trace prosperity. In Glasgow, in 1692, "near fyve hundredth houses [were] standing waste." The harbour of Ayr was ruinous. The High Street of Dumfries contained scarcely a habitable house.[132] Trade and commerce had declined. The short interval of freedom of trade had but served to intensify the pressure of the Navigation Act. Scotsmen boasted of their "conquest" of England in 1603. England had but given their kings the power to oppress them.

A free Parliament met again in 1689. The absence of any strict constitutional feeling led, as so often before, to the assumption of a much more advanced position than that of the English Parliament. Nothing is more characteristic of the slowly broadening growth of English parliamentary claims than the delicate adjustment of conflicting theories by the Convention. In Scotland no such nice adjustment was possible. The proceedings are marked rather by a rude logic. The Estates enumerated the misdeeds of the unfortunate monarch in language distinguished from that of the Claim of Rights only by its strength.[133] The details are not important for our purpose. There is no appeal to precedent, nor any nicety of phrasing. James, having been guilty of this catalogue of crimes, had "forfaulted the right to the Crown, and the throne is become vacant." The underlying theory is sufficiently clear, but it was based on the logic of events. It was probably an effect of the English connections that the Estates went further than usual, and laid down two general principles. All the acts that they had enumerated were illegal. No papist might be king or queen of Scotland. With these conditions, and one other limitation, they proceeded to offer the crown to William and Mary and to entail it, in default of their heirs, upon the Princess Anne. That other clause expressed a claim which, for the people of Scotland, included civil liberties, and had been throughout the troubles synonymous with freedom. The Estates declared that "Prelacy is a great and insupportable grievance to the nation." A "Covenanted King" it was impossible to hope for, nor is there evidence that they desired to repeat the experiment. But the new sovereigns must understand the situation. When the acceptance of William and Mary converted, without any further change, the Convention into a Parliament, the Estates set themselves to solving the religious problem. They rescinded the act of Charles II asserting "his majestie's supremacy over all persons and in all causes ecclesiastical" as "inconsistent with the establishment of Church government now desired." They restored the presbyterian clergy to their churches and manses. They approved the Westminster Confession of Faith--the sole product of those efforts towards a covenanted uniformity which had led the Church into somewhat devious paths--and they established Church government "by Kirk Sessions, Presbyteries, Provincial Synods, and General Assemblies." The more rigid presbyterians were disappointed. It was not so emphatic a settlement as they desired. Independent as the Establishment was, it seemed Erastian to men whose only associations with the functions of government had been connected with Grierson of Lagg and Bloody Mackenzie. King William insisted upon the extension of a toleration to Episcopalian Dissenters in Scotland which, as the Church more than once complained, was lacking in the treatment of Presbyterian Dissenters in England. The Revolution Settlement, therefore, was not accepted by the whole of the popular party, and the Jacobites were reinforced by ousted episcopalians on the one hand, and presbyterian malcontents on the other. But the compromise of 1690 satisfied the majority of the nation. The credit of the arrangement belongs neither to the Parliament nor to the king, but to the wise statesman who presided over the University of Edinburgh. The English Revolution of 1689 was in its origin religious, but it early assumed the aspect of a purely civil movement. The Revolution in Scotland suggests to-day only the Church Settlement, and the course it took was decided by William Carstares.

The Parliament of 1690 proceeded to assert its own freedom of action. Henceforward till the Treaty of Union took effect, we have parliamentary independence in Scotland,[134] as far as purely internal affairs were concerned. After William's death we find still wider claims. The events of William's reign had not been such as to draw the nations nearer each other, or to reconcile the Parliament to the limitation of its sphere of influence to internal administration. King William had been responsible for the Massacre of Glencoe; he had forced Scotland to expend large sums upon a war in which, after the battle of Killiecrankie, she took no interest. The Parliament of England had urged the king to an interference with the Darien Scheme, which could not be regarded in Scotland as other than a betrayal. The Scottish Estates had not responded to the Act of Settlement in 1700, and when Queen Anne succeeded, the attitude of the two countries was becoming increasingly threatening. England regarded any advance of Scottish prosperity as a success gained at her own cost. Scotland feared that the country was to be permanently under foreign influence. The rapid growth of a constitutional feeling since 1690 aided the circumstances of the time in the production of parliamentary parties, a unique event in Scottish history. The meeting of Estates in 1703 contained Williamites, Patriots, and Cavaliers.[135] The first of these supported the government of King William and his successor as, at all events, the least of the many possible evils. The Cavaliers clamoured for the return of the exiled House. The Patriot or "Country" party, headed by Hamilton, Tweeddale, and Fletcher of Saltoun, argued that, if foreign domination were to continue, it made but little difference whether it emanated from St. Germains or from the Court of St. James's. A combination of Cavaliers and Patriots passed the Act of Security. This famous act named no successor to Queen Anne. It invested the Parliament with the power of the Crown, in case of the queen's dying without heirs, and entrusted to it the choice of a Protestant sovereign "from the Royal line." It refused to such king or queen, if also sovereign of England, the power of peace and war, without consent of Parliament. It enacted, further, that the union of the crowns should determine, unless Scotland was admitted to equal trade and navigation privileges with England. Nor was there lacking the intention to make good the threat. The same act provided for the compulsory training of every Scotsman to bear arms. The Scottish Parliament debated each clause with vigour. The Estates recognized that now, if scarcely ever before, momentous issues hung upon their decision, and the walls of the Parliament House re-echoed with the unwonted excitement of party cries. The royal commissioner declined to give the queen's assent. The Parliament refused to grant supplies, and the meeting broke up amid confused shouts of "Liberty before Subsidy." The bitterness of the struggle was accentuated by a silly dispute about the Jacobite Plot, and the temper of the two nations was strained to the utmost.

The union of the crowns had been rendered possible only by the self-restraint which permitted the people of England to accept a Scotsman as the king. A similar spirit of self-restraint now actuated Queen Anne's advisers. The queen assented to the Act of Security, and the Scots began to train for a war that was not to be fought by the sword. The English ministers proposed a union of the kingdoms. Fortunately, they recognized that Scotland was in earnest, and expressed their willingness to yield somewhat on the main point--freedom of trade. Into the long and dreary negotiations which preceded the union we need not enter. Amid jealousy, faction, and evils still more sordid, the treaty of union was concluded. The agreement secured to Scotland the maintenance of her law, and the continued existence of her universities, and it guaranteed that there would be no interference with the Church as by law established. On the other hand, the kingdom surrendered her national existence, and was forced to be content with a miserably inadequate representation in the English Parliament. It is little wonder that the people in general, and especially the populace of Edinburgh, regarded the treaty with horror and looked upon its supporters as traitors. Amid riot and uproar, and with howls of execration sounding in their ears, the Estates of Scotland met for the last time on 25th March, 1707, under the presidency of the lord chancellor, the Earl of Seafield. Among some of the senators themselves there was an uneasy feeling that they had sold their country for trade privileges which the givers would strain every nerve to render worthless. Others were more callous. "There's the end o' an auld sang," laughed the Chancellor, as the Honours of Scotland were carried out of the Parliament House for the last time.