the revolt of a nation nominally independent, could not be treated as a rising in Yorkshire or in Lancashire might have been. English forces could hardly be marched north, at a short notice, to trample it out. To this pass, indeed, things might come; and to this pass Charles was resolved that, if necessary, they should be brought. But the method was not practicable at the moment, if for no other reason than that the requisite English forces did not exist. For the moment, and until the English conscience, or the official organs of it, could be reconciled to such a stroke of imperialism, there was but a choice of two alternatives. Either means must be found within Scotland itself to crush the Covenanters, or else they must be pacified by suitable concessions. The harsher alternative was at least thought of. It was reported that Maxwell, Bishop of Ross, and the Chancellor Spotswood, had advised the armed organization, under the King's orders, and with a display of English force in reserve, of the NonCovenanting elements in Scotland. The Mackenzies, Mackays, Macdonalds, and other extreme northern clans, following the Earl of Seaforth, might unite formidably with the Aberdeenshire Gordons, Grants, Irvings, and others, under the Marquis of Huntley; and, in the south, there might be help from the retainers of the houses of Hamilton, Douglas, Annandale, and Nithsdale. But the diligence of the Covenanters had "prevened" this plan. In whatever districts of the country, remote from Edinburgh, the dubious material was most rife, there their agents and commissioners had been busy. They had been so successful that, when they returned to Edinburgh, they not only brought with them the signatures of "most of "the name of Hamilton, Douglas, Gordon, and all the Camp"bells without exception," to the national Covenant, but were able also to report that even the northern shires of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross, Cromarty, Nairn, and Inverness had also "for the most part subscrivit." 1 Unless, therefore, the Aberdeen burgesses, a few Aberdeenshire and Banffshire lairds, and a remnant of the wilder Highlanders, could stand in civil war against the Covenanters, a Scottish civil war 1 Baillie's Letters (Laing's edition), I. 70, and Spalding, I. 87, 88.

with England merely looking on and threatening, seemed out of the question. All this being reported at Court, and the majority of the English Councillors being in favour of moderation, it was resolved, " after many tos and fros," to send the Marquis of Hamilton north, as a special Commissioner from the King, with powers to treat with the Covenanters. This was resolved on before the 10th of May, and the Marquis's commission bears date the 20th of that month.

THE MARQUIS OF HAMILTON'S MISSION.

In choosing the Marquis of Hamilton as his Commissioner, the King had acknowledged the importance of the occasion. The Marquis was his kinsman and trusted friend. With the exception of the young Duke of Lennox, who, though also of the blood-royal and a Scot by his title, was English by his birth and associations, he was at the head of the Scottish nobility, taking precedence of his two fellow-marquises, Huntley and Douglas; and, although Oxford-bred, and since his boyhood a resident chiefly in England, he had never ceased to attract the eyes of his countrymen, and to be credited by them with a high influence in their affairs. Nay, there was a special possibility of relation between him and them, of which the world had already heard, and of which it was to hear more. It was but eight years since a story had come out, and had even been the subject of legal inquiry, to the effect that the Marquis of Hamilton cherished a secret ambition to be one day King of Scotland. Before Charles's coronation-visit to Scotland in 1633, the Scots, it was said, resenting his long absence, and offended moreover by a proposal which he had made to have the regalia of Scotland transferred to London, so that his coronation might take place there, had begun to ask themselves whether the crown which Charles did not seem to think worth a journey might not have a fitter wearer. Aware of this state of feeling, the young Marquis of Hamilton, it was said, had shown a disposition to traffic with it, especially at the time when, as leader of a volunteer expedition of Scots and others in aid of Gustavus

Adolphus (1631-2), he had begun to have military dreams. The story from the first had had a very apocryphal look, and the King had shown his disbelief in it. Still it slumbered in the popular memory, and the present mission of the Marquis naturally revived the recollection where it could not be uttered. If such an ambition did lurk in his mind, what an opportunity was now put into his hands! Some small speck of a suspicion of this kind seems to have been attached to the Marquis by ill-natured opinion in certain quarters, even at the date of his mission; and subsequent events in his career enlarged it into a cloud, which still hangs round his name in Royalist histories. For our part, however, we see not the least reason to doubt that Charles was right in treating the suspicion with contempt, and in showing that he did so by an act of public confidence in his cousin. The Marquis undertook his present mission, I should say, with the most sincere wish to fulfil it to the King's desire. As to his ability there might be more question. He was in his thirty-second year; he had seen some service, and had chatted with the great Gustavus and known him in his rages; he was of courtly presence and manners: but, on the whole, his ability was chiefly of that kind which might come from mingling with men personally, with the advantage of being a Marquis and of the blood-royal. In any business with the pen, I should infer, he must have been deficient. His handwriting is rather sprawling, and such letters of his as I have seen are clumsy and unsatisfactory.1 It was on personal power of negotiation, however, rather than on letter-writing, that he was to depend in his dealings with the Covenanters. It might not be without advantage to him in this respect that his mother, the Marchioness-Dowager, a woman of spirit, and of the family of the Cunninghams, Earls of Glencairn, was

1 Having seen abundant specimens of the handwriting of Charles, of Laud, of Strafford, of Hamilton, of Arundel, and, indeed, of almost all the statesmen and courtiers of that day, in the State-Paper Office, I may give it as my experience that, generally, the most important men wrote good and legible, if not beautiful, hands. Hamilton's,

though a scrawl, is legible. Arundel's letters are short, and with little or nothing in them, in a large, pompous, flowing hand. Laud's hand is compact, good, and clear. Cottington's is a good hand. Charles's is perhaps the most elegant of all, with the exception of Strafford's, which is singularly like it, but still more beautiful.

herself a most zealous Covenanter, and that his sisters were married into the Covenanting houses of Eglintoun and Lindsay. Moreover, he was to take with him, as his chaplain and private adviser, a certain Dr. Walter Balcanquhal, Scotchman of Cambridge training, who had risen in the English Church to the Deanery of Rochester, had many correspondents among the Scottish clergy, and was reputed a perfect nonsuch, even among Scots, for intriguing ability. Nay, that the hands of the noble Commissioner might be strengthened to the uttermost, it was ordered that all Scotchmen of rank or influence usually residing in England, or who had come up to Court to help in the consultation, should precede him into Scotland, so as to be at his service. Some of the Scottish Bishops and other ecclesiastics who had gone to London were loth to obey this command, and offered meanwhile to reside in Bath-in Bath or anywhere--rather than return to their own country while it was too hot for them. But no excuse was accepted, and go they must.1

Among the Scots who had come up to London to give their advice, and who now preceded the Marquis back to Scotland, was one whose name has been yet but barely mentioned in this History. This was Archibald Campbell, Lord Lorne, better known afterwards as Earl and Marquis of Argyle. During the troubles of the preceding year respecting the Service-Book and the Book of Canons, none of the Scottish PrivyCouncillors, not actually in league with the Dissentients, had been more fair and courteous to the Dissentients than he; and, though he still held officially with the King, the Covenanters had conceived hopes that his meditations, which were known to be those of a very politic mind, would bring him nearer to them in the end. It was an event greatly to be wished. The circumstances of Lord Lorne, and of the whole Argyle family, at that time, were peculiar. His father, Archibald, 7th Earl of Argyle, who had held that title since 1584, was still alive, but as good as dead to the general world. For in the life of

1 Burnet's Lives of the Hamiltons (edit. 1852), 1-49; Stevenson's Hist. of the Church of Scotland (one vol. edit.

1840), 224; Baillie, I. 75, 76; and Letters of Balcanquhal in Appendix to Baillie, vols. I. and II.

this now aged peer there had been two stages. His memory could go back to the time when he was a conspicuous man in James's Scottish Court, before James had succeeded to the throne of England. Then he had maintained the Protestant reputation of his family. By his wife, Lady Anne Douglas -daughter of the 1st Earl of Morton, and celebrated as the "Aurora" of the Earl of Stirling's poetry-he had been the father of five children, all of whom had been educated as Protestants. One of these, the only son, was the Lord Lorne with whom we are now concerned-forty years of age, married, and with children; and, of the daughters, one, considerably older than Lorne, was now the Marchioness of Huntley, while another was Countess of Lothian, and a third was the widow of Viscount Kenmure. But from these members of his first family the Earl had long been estranged. As long ago as 1610, he had married, in the parish of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, his second wife, a Roman Catholic English lady, by whom he had had a second family. Having himself become a Roman Catholic in consequence of this marriage, he had gone abroad in the Spanish service against the Hollanders; and, after his return, he had resided chiefly in or near London, in such retirement as was then possible for a Roman Catholic of his rank, and with little correspondence with Scotland, or any of his first family there, unless it might be the Marchioness of Huntley. Nay, in Scotland, it had been found necessary to incapacitate him on account of his religion, and to transfer the estates and the great hereditary power belonging to the house of Argyle to his heir, Lord Lorne. This arrangement, carried through in the Scottish Parliament of 1633, at the time of Charles's coronation-visit, and with his consent, had naturally not improved relations between the father and the son. Sir, I must know this young man better "than you do," is Clarendon's account, as if from the King's own lips long afterwards, of what the chagrined old Earl had said to the King about this time: "you have brought me low "that you may raise him; which I doubt you will live to repent: for he is a man of craft, subtlety, and falsehood, " and can love no man; and, if ever he finds it in his power

66