may render unto us the most acceptable service; and therefore we do expect that you will, upon all fit occasions, give them all possible encouragement, as these whom we have received, and will constantly shelter under our royal protection, against all their enemies." THE POPISH party certainly intended this Test to have been a very "heavy blow and great discouragement" to the church; and although the explanation made it more acceptable to the clergy, yet it was not the sense in which it was enacted. One of the objects contemplated by the framers of the Test was insensibly to engage them to acknowledge the Assertory act, by which the popish party could have restored that hierarchy when the crown came to be favourable to their designs. The Test bound the clergy under heavy penalties to maintain the king's supremacy, and all his other assumed privileges that had been granted and confirmed to him by that sacrilegious act. The design of the Test was to inveigle the clergy into an acknowlegment and recognition of that extraordinary supremacy or popedom, which the Assertory act had conferred on him; but their sagacity discovered the trap thus cunningly laid for them, and they had the christian courage to refuse it. They were ready to obey every lawful ordinance; but their duty to God and the church made them ready to suffer all the penalties for disobedience to laws that usurped the rights of Christ's church; and rather than betray them they prepared themselves to possess their souls in patience, and to suffer the last extremities of persecution. Their christian courage was successful; and when the privy council saw the calm resolution of the clergy to suffer persecution under the form of law rather than to betray the rights of the church, they passed that declaratory act which removed the evil, when the rising storm of persecution exhausted itself, and the unnatural claim of supremacy was resigned. "They rid out the storm," says Leslie," and they prevailed, as others would do if they tried it. The inherent rights of the church are so flagrant, that a christian state will hardly invade them, but where they are tamely given up. The king, seeing the clergy resolute to suffer and to assert their rights, found he could not bear the odium, nor was able to maintain his claim. Therefore a declaration was published by the king and council (....) wherein they renounced all pretences to the intrinsic power of the church, and left entirely to her all the ecclesiastical power, authority, and jurisdiction, exercised by the church for the first three centuries, which being the whole that could be asked, the breach was made up; and the deprived clergy were restored. And by this all the erastian teeth of that Assertory act were drawn out1." IN JULY, the earl of Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower for high treason; and on searching his papers a trea sonable association was discovered drawn up for excluding the duke of York from the throne, and to compel his majesty to submit to such terms as this whig association might impose. On the 24th of November, an indictment for high treason was preferred at the Old Bailey against Shaftesbury, for having framed this association for the duke's exclusion by force, for the intention to destroy the king's guards, and the attempt to impose terms on his majesty. These facts were proved, and the paper containing the proposals was produced; but, says Salmon," though positively proved by eight witnesses, and the association itself found among the earl's papers, the grand jury being packed by the whig sheriffs, refused to find the bill, and returned ignoramus 2." This verdict so mortified the judges that they proceeded no farther against him; but he was not discharged till the following February. IT IS A christian maxim that we ought not to do evil, although good may be the result; and this rule stood good in the case of the duke of York. His right of succession was undoubted, from the laws of nature and of the kingdom; for at that time there was no law, as at present, which regulated the principle that the sovereign must be a member of the anglo-catholic church. And, as before mentioned, the presbyterian confession of faith absolutely bars all coercion on the conscience of the sovereign; and so far from making popery an obstacle, it does not even admit that infidelity itself is any impediment to the just and lineal succession to the crown. The duke's attachment to popery was notorious and bigotted, yet his arbitrary exclusion from succeeding to his brother was an act of injustice which ought not to have been done, under the expectation that good would follow, as it is not to be supposed that he and his adherents would have been deterred by an act of parliament from attempting the recovery of his rights. This would have produced civil war and bloodshed, the destruction of property, and party feuds, instead of the good proposed; but it is to be feared that Shaftesbury and the whigs made opposition to popery an excuse to veil their own designs of establishing a republic. This was one of the arti 1 Case of the Regale and Pontificate stated, ed. 1703, pp. 233, 234. cles against that nobleman at his trial," that he had imagined to compass and procure the death of the king, the subversion of the government, and the known laws of the land, by reducing this ancient monarchy into a REPUBLIC." Shaftesbury was in close correspondence and league with the chiefs of the covenanters in Scotland; hence his principles, and hence the origin of the political party in England known by the name of THE WHIGS, whose principles always have been antimonarchical and revolutionary. THE DUKE OF YORK was not only a bigotted papist himself, but he was surrounded and secretly advised by jesuits about his person. The Test was a corollary to the Assertory act, and was devised by his secret advisers to have set that act in motion in due time, had it succeeded. But the firmness of the clergy, under God, saved the church and nation from the infliction of a papal supremacy, which had all the appearance of having been designed, and which could have been legally accomplished by the operation of the Assertory Act, which empowered the sovereign to change at his pleasure the external government of the church. This would have introduced a religious anarchy of another sort; for the people had too firm an abhorrence of popery to have complied with the reestablishment of the dominion of the see of Rome. But by means of the Assertory act, James's successor on the throne gave the church that stab below the fifth rib under which she suffers to the present day. His priestly councillors had taught his royal highness to practise deep dissimulation, and to assume the appearance of great moderation, so that he managed affairs in Scotland with great dexterity. He was a man of unquestionable abilities, and perfectly understood commerce and navigation; and, from his judicious suggestions on these subjects, he had gained considerable popularity amongst the mercantile part of the nation. 231 CHAPTER XLIV. PRIMACY OF ARCHBISHOP BURNET. 1681.-Objections to the Test.-Argyle's reservation—tried and condemned—. made his escape from the castle.——1682.-Test a cause of suffering to the clergy-their resignations.-Test burnt at Lanark.-Apologetick declaration.— Council's retaliation.-Death of bishop Scougal.-Translations and consecrations.-The king goes to Newmarket.-Letter of the bishops to the English prelates.-Duke of York goes to Newmarket-embarks on board the Gloucester frigate-wrecked-account of it-number on board, and saved.-Burnet's account.-Changes in the administration.-The duke leaves Scotland.—The clergy compelled to make reports.-Recusants summoned.-Presbyterians came to church.-Death of the duke of Lauderdale.-1683.-Presbyterian reasons for refusing to say God save the king.-King returns from Newmarket.-Rye-house conspiracy.-Views of the conspirators.-Plot discovered.— Renwick-some account of him-commences preaching.-Andrew Guillon arrested-his execution.-Thanksgiving.-Decree of the university of Oxford. -Twenty-seven propositions condemned and books burnt.--Cambridge address to the king.-Views of the Whigs.-Monmouth's confession.-Effects of the Test. 1681.-THE PRESBYTERIANS objected to the Test because it contained a renunciation of their beloved covenants, and bound them also not to attempt any change in the government of either church or state as by law established; " which," says Hetherington, "of necessity, implied the entire and final abandonment of every presbyterian principle!" Several of the nobility and gentlemen in office hesitated, and shewed reluctance to take the test. The earl of Queensberry took it with an inoffensive explanation; but the earl of Argyle was the most unfortunate in his evasions and explanations. On the adjournment of parliament, he declared that he would either not take it at all, or else with a reserve of his own explanation, which he put in writing, and dispersed for the edification of the public. He offered to take the oath with the following History, p. 157. qualification:-"That he was desirous to give obedience to the Test as far as he could, and now took it so far as it is consistent with itself and with the protestant religion: but that he did not mean to bind himself up in his station from endeavouring in a lawful way any thing he might think for the advantage of the church or state, not repugnant to the protestant religion and his own loyalty: and this he understood as part of his oath." The duke of York did not object to this qualification at first, till after consultation with his priestly councillors; but Argyle was not satified with urging his own scruples, he had used some means of agitation which was then considered in the light of sedition. The privy council decided that his qualification was destructive of the intention of the act, and brought his lordship within the statute of high treason for limiting his allegiance; and they pressed Argyle to withdraw his conditions, and the bishop of Edinburgh waited on him, and earnestly urged him not to ruin his noble house by persisting in what the law had made high treason. HE WAS prosecuted for treason; and bishop Spratt says the privy council were well informed of the earl's seditious carriage in city and country, and were satisfied" of his traitorous purposes in that fallacious and equivocating paraphrase on the Test, which he owned in their presence, perverting thereby the sound sense and eluding the force of his majesty's laws, in order to set the subjects loose from their obedience, and to perpetuate schism in the church and faction in the state." On the 12th of December he was brought to trial before a jury of his peers, who unanimously returned a verdict as follows:-" They all in one voice find the earl of Argyle guilty and culpable of the crimes of treason, leasing-making, and leasing-telling; and find, by plurality of votes, the said earl innocent, and not guilty of perjury." The court sentenced his lordship to be beheaded; but the bishop again asserts that "the king was far from any thought of taking away his life, and that no farther prejudice was intended against him but the forfeiture of some jurisdictions and superiorities which he and his predecessors had surreptitiously acquired and most tyrannically exercised." Not trusting to the king's clemency, he made his escape in the character of a footman to lady Sophia Lindsay; and in company with Veitch, a presbyterian minister, he took shelter in London, where, under an assumed name, he entered into plots and conspiracies against 1 Dr. Spratt, lord bishop of Rochester's, True Account, &c. of the Rye-house Conspiracy; Preface. 1686. 8vo. |