EXECUTION OF GORDON OF INNERMARKIE AND OTHERS.

teen hundred and forty-eight, till the restoration of Charles II. in sixteer hundred and sixty.

When the king, who was then a prisoner in Carisbrook castle, heard of the capture of Huntly, he wrote the following letter to the earl of Lanark, then in London, in favour of the marquis :— *

"LANERK.-Hearing that the marquis of Huntly is taken, and knowing the danger that he is in, I both strictly command you as a master, and earnestly desire you as a friend, that you will deal effectually with all those whom you have any interest in, for the saving of his life. It were, I know, lost time to use arguments to you for this, wherefore, I judge these lines necessary to add to your power, though not to your willingness, to do this most acceptable service for,

"Your most assured. real, constant friend,

"CHARLES R

"

CARISBROOK,

17th December, 1647.

The earl, either from unwillingness or inability, appears to have paid no attention to this letter.

Shortly before the capture of the marquis of Huntly, John Gordon of Innermarkie, Gordon, younger of Newton-Gordon, and the laird of Harthill, three of his chief friends, had been taken prisoners by MajorGeneral Middleton, and sent to Edinburgh, where they were imprisoned. The two latter were condemned to die by the committee of estates, and although their friends procured a remission of the sentence from the king, they were, notwithstanding, both beheaded at the market-cross of Edinburgh. Harthill suffered on the twenty-sixth of October, sixteen hundred and forty-seven, and Newton-Gordon a few days thereafter.

While the hopes of the royalists, both in England and Scotland, seemed to be almost extinguished, a ray of light, about this time, darted through the dark gloom of the political horizon, which they fondly imagined was the harbinger of a new and a better order of things; but all their expectations were destined to end in bitter disappointment. The king, who had hitherto alternately intrigued with the Presbyteri ans and Indeper.dents, that he might circumvent both, was now induced by the Scots commissioners, who had repaired to Carisbrook castle, to break with the Independents, by refusing the royal assent to four bills,+

* Burnet's Hamiltous, p. 323

† According to Clarendon, (History, vol. iii. p. 88,) the king was, by one of these bills, to have confessed h mself the author of the war, and guilty of all the blood which had been spilt; by another, he was to dissolve the government of the church, and grant all lands belonging to the church to other uses; by a third, to settle the militia with out reserving so much power to himself as any subject was capable of; and in the last place he was in eflect to sacrifice all those who had saved him, to the mercy of the parliament. But Dr Lingard has shown how little credit is due to these assertions, by giving the substance of these bills. The first, after vesting the command of the army in the par

B

which the two houses of parliament had prepared; and to enter into a treaty with the Presbyterians, by which the king agreed to the establishment of Presbyterianism, but only as an experiment for three years. Although the terms of this treaty were more favourable to the king than those in the bills which he rejected, his friends were sorry that his majesty had refused to accede to the latter, as they had no confidence in those with whom he had contracted. But the treaty was not less disagreeable to his majesty's friends than to his bitterest enemies, for no sooner had the committee of the kirk received notice of it than they remonstrated against it; and when the Scots parliament met in March, sixteen hundred and forty-eight, the ministers, Douglas, Dick, Blair, Cant, Livingston, and Gillespie, and the laird of Dundas, Sir James Stewart and George Winram, ruling elders, presented a declaration against the treaty, which they considered destructive of the covenant. Notwithstanding the opposition on the part of the kirk, and of Argyle and his party, and the money and intrigues of the English commissioners who had been sent to Scotland to watch the proceedings of the king's party, the duke of Hamilton, who had lately formed an association to release the king from his captivity, which went under the name of the Engagement," prevailed upon the parliament to appoint a committee of danger, and to consent to a levy of forty thousand men.

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The time seemed propitious for the interests of the king. The bulk of the English population, with the exception of the army, had grown quite dissatisfied with the state of matters, and they now began to perceive, when too late, that they had only exchanged one system of tyranny for one still more insupportable, the despotism of a standing army led by needy and unprincipled adventurers. In short, the people, disgusted by military exactions, and dreading an abolition of the monarchy, sighed for the restoration of the king, as the only means of delivering them from the tyranny under which they groaned. The eyes of the English nation were now directed towards Scotland, and the news of the Scots' levy made them indulge a hope that they would soon be enabled, by the aid of the Scots auxiliaries, to throw off the military yoke, and restore the king on conditions favourable to liberty. But Hamilton, being thwarted by the Argyle faction, unfortunately had it not in his power to take advantage of the favourable disposition of the English people, and instead of raising forty thousand men, he found, to his great mortification, that, at the utmost, he could, after upwards liament for twenty years, enacted, that after that period, whenever the lords and commons should declare the safety of the kingdom to be concerned, all bills passed by them respecting the forces by sea or land, should be deemed acts of parliament, even though the king, for the time being, should refuse his assent. The second declared all oaths, proclamations, and proceedings against the parliament during the war, void, and of no effect. The third annulled all titles of honour granted since the 20th of May, 1642, and deprived all peers, to be created hereafter, of the right of sitting in parliament, without the consent of the two houses: and the fourth gave to the houses the power of adjourning from place to place at their discretion. Journals, vol. ix. p. 575.-Charles's Works, 590-593.- Lingard, vol. vi. p. 595.

of three months labour, only bring about fifteen thousand men into the field, and that not until several insurrections in England, in favour of the king, had been suppressed.

It was the misfortune of Hamilton that with every disposition to serve the cause of his royal master, he had neither the capacity to conceive, nor the resolution to adopt bold and decisive measures equal to the emergency of the times. Like the king, he too attempted to act the part of the cunning politician, but he was wholly unfitted for the performance of such a character. Had he had the address to separate old Leslie and his nephew from the party of Argyle, by placing the direction of military affairs in their hands, he might have succeeded in raising a sufficient force to cope with the parliamentary army of England; but he had the weakness, after both these generals had joined the kırk in its remonstrance to the parliament that nothing should be done without the consent of the committee of the general assembly, to get himself appointed commander-in-chief of the army, a measure which could not fail to disgust these hardy veterans. To conciliate the marquis of Argyle and his friends to the appointment, they were made colonels in the shires where they lived for the purpose of raising the levies which had been voted. Instead, however, of assisting, they, on their return home, did every thing in their power to obstruct the levies. The marquis of Argyle after despatching Major Strachan on a private embassy to Cromwell to send a party to Scotland to assist him in opposing the measures of the duke, went from Edinburgh to Fife, where he induced the gentry not ouly to oppose the levies, but to hold themselves in readiness to rise on the other side when called upon. He was not so successful in Stirlingshire, none of the gentlemen of that county concurring in his views except the laird of Buchanan, Sir William Bruce of Stenhouse, and a few persons of inferior note; but in Dumbartonshire he succeeded to the utmost of his wishes. After attending a meeting with the lord chancellor, (Loudon,) the earls of Cassillis and Eglinton, and David Dick and other ministers, at Eglinton's house, on the twenty-ninth of May, Argyle went home to his own country to raise his people against his sovereign.

Several instances of opposition to the levy took place; but the most formidable one, and the only one worthy of notice, was in Ayrshire, where a body of armed insurgents, to the number of eight hundred horse and twelve hundred foot according to one writer,* and five hundred horse and two thousand foot according to another,† headed by several ministers, assembled at Mauchline; but they were defeated and dispersed by Middleton, who had been appointed lieutenant-general of horse, on the tenth of June, with the loss of eighty men.

There are no data by which to ascertain the number of men raised in the Highlands for Hamilton's army; but it must necessarily have been

very inconsiderable. Not a single man was of course raised in Argyleshire, and scarcely any in the adjoining part of Inverness-shire, to which the influence or power of Argyle extended. The earl of Sutherland, who had been appointed a colonel of foot in his own division, declined the office, and Lord Reay was so disgusted with "Duke Hamilton's failure," that he took shipping at Thurso in the month of July that year, and went to Norway, where he was appointed governor of Bergen, and received the colonelcy of a regiment from the king of Denmark, whom he had formerly served. The only individual who could have benefitted the royal cause in the north was the marquis of Huntly, but by a strange fatality the duke of Hamilton, who could have easily procured an order from the parliament for his liberation from prison, allowed him to continue in prison, and merely contented himself with obtaining a warrant for changing the marquis's place of confinement from the jail to the castle of Edinburgh.

In consequence of the many difficulties which occurred in collecting his troops, and providing the necessary materiél for the use of the army, the duke was not able to begin his march till the eighth of July, on which day he put his army in motion towards the borders. His force, which amounted to about ten thousand foot and four thousand horse, was composed of raw and undisciplined levies, and he had not a single field-piece. He entered England by the western border, where he was met by Sir Marmaduke Langdale and a body of four thousand brave cavaliers, all devotedly attached to the king. At this time Lambert, the parliamentary general, had invested Carlisle, and Hamilton was induced by the English royalists, contrary to his own views, to march upon Carlisle, and force Lambert to raise the siege. That general, who had received orders from Cromwell not to engage the Scots till he should join him, accordingly retired, and Carlisle was delivered up next day to Hamilton by the English royalists, who also put him in possession of Berwick.

With the forces now at his command, which were still farther augmented by the addition of a body of three thousand veterans, drawn from the Scottish army in Ireland, which joined him at Kendal under the command of Major-General Sir George Munro, the duke might have effected the restoration of the king had a combined plan of operations been agreed upon between him and his English allies; "but Hamilton, though possessed of personal courage, was diffident of his own powers, and resigned himself to the guidance of men who sacrificed the interests of the service to their private jealousies and feuds."+ So controlled was the duke by these men, that he was not allowed to benefit by the advice of his English auxiliaries, and when they advised him to march through Yorkshire, the inhabitants of which were well sected to the king, the duke, to gratify the presbyterians, rejected their

Gordon's Continuation, p. 541.

Lingard, vol. vi. p. 606.

DEFEAT OF THE ROYALISTS AT PRESTON.

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advice, and resolved to march through Lancashire, because the people there were generally attached to Presbyterianism. To please them still farther he would not allow the English royalists to unite with the Scots army, for fear of infringing an absurd law, which required that the allies of the Scots should take the covenant before being permitted to mix with them. The consequence was, that the two sections of the royalist army were kept so distinct and isolated, and at such an interval of space, that it became utterly impossible for them to co-operate or to act simultaneously. But, bad as the order of march was by which Langdale's forces were kept at an advance of twenty, and even sometimes of thirty miles a-head of the Scots army, it was rendered still worse by a difference between Munro and Callander, in consequence of which Munro was ordered to remain behind in Westmoreland to bring forward, according to Bishop Guthry, five pieces of cannon which were expected from Scotland.

The advance of Hamilton's army had been greatly checked by Lambert, who kept constantly skirmishing with the advanced guard of the Scots army with a large body of horse, and so slow were his motions, that forty days were spent in a march of eighty miles. The tardiness of the duke's motions enabled Cromwell, after reducing Pembroke, to effect a junction with Lambert in Yorkshire before the Scottish army had reached Preston, and although their united forces did not exceed nine thousand men, Cromwell, with characteristic promptitude, did not hesitate to attack the enemy. Cromwell being observed to march upon Clithero, where Langdale and his cavaliers were stationed, that officer fell back on the Scottish army near Preston, and sent notice to the duke to prepare for battle on the following day. The duke, however, disregarded the admonition. On the following morning, being the seventeenth of August, Cromwell attacked Langdale, and, although the forces of the former were almost twice as numerous as those of the latter, the royalists fought upwards of six hours with the most determined bravery, and it was not until their whole ammunition was spent, and the duke had, notwith.. standing the most urgent solicitations from Langdale, declined to support them, that they were obliged to retreat into Preston. Here they were mortified to find that their allies had abandoned the town, and that the enemy were in possession of the bridge across the river. Langdale having now no alternative but flight, disbanded his infantry, and along with his cavalry and the duke, who, refusing to follow the example of his army, had remained in the town, swam across the Ribble.

The Scots army retired during the night towards Wigan, where it was joined by the duke next morning, but so reduced in spirits and weakened by desertion as to be quite unable to make any resistance to the victorious troops of Cromwell, who pressed hard upon them. The foot, under the command of Baillie, continued to retreat during the day, but were overtaken at Warrington, and, Leing unable either to proceed or to resist, surrendered. The number which capitulated amounted to