MIDDLETON, JOHN, EARL OF
MIDDLETON.—This man, although neither good nor great, demands, like
the Duke of Lauderdale, a place in Scottish biography, in consequence of the
pernicious influence he exercised upon Scottish events, and the destinies of
better men than himself. He was the eldest son of John Middleton, of
Caldhame, in the county of Kincardine, the descendant of an ancient Scottish
family, that derived its name from the lands of Middleton, in the same
county, which had been a donation to the founder of the race by the
"gracious Duncan." John, the future earl, like many of the nobly-descended,
but scantily-endowed young Scots of this period, appears to have devoted
himself to the profession of arms, and "trailed a pike" in Hepburn’s
regiment during the Huguenot wars in France. Returning from that country
during the civil wars of his own, he took service in the parliamentary army
of England, and, in 1642, commanded a troop of horse, with the rank of
lieutenant-general, under Sir William Waller. After this he returned to
Scotland, and obtained a command, first under Montrose, while still a
Covenanter, and afterwards under General Lesley; and with the former of
these he saw hot service at the Bridge of Dee, and had a considerable share
in the defeat of the Gordons, who were in arms for the king. When the
Marquis of Montrose abandoned the ranks of the Covenanters for the service
of the king, he afterwards found in Middleton one of his most determined
opponents; and for this, indeed, according to all Scottish reckoning, there
was but too good a cause, for his father had been shot by the soldiers of
the marquis in 1645, while sitting peacefully in his hall in the mansion of
Caldhame. Middleton soon obtained both revenge and honour, for he greatly
contributed, as Lesley’s lieutenant-general, to the defeat of Montrose at
Philiphaugh, on the 13th September, during the same year; and so highly were
his services valued on this occasion, that the Scottish parliament voted him
a gift of 25,000 marks. When the formidable marquis raised a fresh army, and
renewed the war, Middleton was sent against him as commander of the
Covenanters; and so well did he acquit himself in this charge, that he
raised the siege of Inverness, and pressed so vigorously upon Montrose as to
compel him, in July, 1646, to sign a capitulation, by which he agreed to
leave the kingdom, on condition of an indemnity being granted to his
followers.
The change of political
events now threw Middleton into a new course of action, and prepared him for
that life of apostasy and persecution by which he was afterwards signalized.
The Scottish parliament, that had done so much not to destroy, but repress
royalty, and confine it within due limits, found it time to interpose when
the life of Charles I. was menaced, and the throne itself overturned; and,
accordingly, when the Duke of Hamilton was about to be sent into England as
commander of the Scottish army, Middleton was appointed major-general of the
cavalry. But while the army was in the act of being assembled for their
march, tidings arrived at head-quarters of a formidable muster of not less
than 2000 foot and 500 horse at Mauchline, composed of malcontents hostile
to the movement in behalf of royalty, and resolved to oppose it, upon which
Middleton was detached with six troops of horse to break up the meeting. If,
however, we are to believe Wodrow, who had his account from some of the
parties engaged in it, this gathering on Mauchline moor was nothing more
formidable than a sacramental meeting of the peasantry, who were not only
few in numbers, but peaceable, and entirely unarmed. Still, following the
royalist accounts, which afterwards obtained the ascendency, Middleton
charged and routed this army with his wonted courage and success; but, in
turning again to the simple covenanting story, it appears that he had agreed
to permit the people to depart peaceably, and that, while they were doing
so, hard words had passed between them and the soldiers, and that the
latter, in consequence, had driven them off the moor with unnecessary
bloodshed. After this, Middleton accompanied the expedition into England,
and was present at the battle of Preston (August 17, 1648), but, being
wounded, and his horse shot under him, he was taken prisoner, and sent to
Newcastle, from which, however, he contrived to make his escape. Next year
he appeared in the Highlands at the head of a body of royalists; but his
rising in favour of the royal cause was as unseasonable as that of Montrose
at the same period, and was attended with the same untoward result; for, in
1650, his handful of troops were dispersed by Colonel Strachan. It is
probable that the arrival of Charles II. from Breda, and the necessity for
mustering every good sword in his cause, allowed Middleton to escape the
fate of Montrose, and even caused his trespass to be overlooked. His
restless spirit, however, and rash zeal for royalty, soon involved him in
fresh difficulty, so that, in the conspiracy which was formed to detach the
young king from the Covenanters, and invest him with unlimited rule, in
defiance not only of Scotland, but England to boot, Middleton was to assume
the command of the emancipating army in the Highlands, and wage the war of
absolutism in the true Montrose fashion. It is well known how this
blundering scheme was strangled in the outset, when Charles and his compeers
were pursued and led back to head-quarters like runaway schoolboys. Although
Middleton, on this occasion, escaped the civil penalties of the trespass, in
consequence of a general indemnity, he did not escape the censures of the
church, by whose decree he was excommunicated, the Rev. James Guthrie
executing the sentence to that effect in the church of Stirling. This
sentence was soon relaxed, but Middleton never afterwards forgave it. During
the same year (1651) he marched with the Scottish royalist army into
England, and behaved gallantly at the battle of Worcester, where the chief
resistance was attributed to his bold charges and persevering efforts; but
here he was severely wounded, taken prisoner, and sent to the Tower of
London. As he was too dangerous an enemy to be spared, his end now seemed
certain, more especially as he had held a commission in the parliamentarian
army, so that Cromwell resolved to proceed against him as a traitor; but
here Middleton’s usual good luck prevailed, for he managed to escape from
prison, and even to find concealment for some time in London itself,
notwithstanding the vigilant espionage which the Protector had established
over the metropolis. At length he reached Paris, where Charles II. resided,
and by whom he was sent to Scotland, in 1663, to attempt a diversion in his
favour at the head of the Scottish royalists in the Highlands. But Monk, who
exercised a watchful rule over Scotland, attacked and routed him at
Lochgeary, on the 26th of July, 1654, and Middleton, after vainly lingering
and shifting a few months longer in the country, escaped in the following
year to Cologne, where Charles at that time resided, and with whom he
remained in exile till the Restoration.
Hitherto the career of
Middleton had been that of an unscrupulous and successful soldier of
fortune, veering with the changing wind, and adapting, or at least trying to
adapt, every mutation to his own advancement. He was not, therefore, slow to
avail himself of the advantages which the Restoration promised, more
especially to those who had amused the king in his exile, as well as fought
for him in the field. Accordingly, in 1660, he was created Earl of
Middleton, and Lord Clermont and Fettercairn; appointed commander-in-chief
of the forces in Scotland, governor of Edinburgh castle, and royal
commissioner to the Scottish parliament. Perhaps it was not without a deep
purpose on the part of the king, or the counsellors by whom he was directed,
that such a man as Middleton should have been thus invested with almost
unlimited power over his native country. "The commissioner, the Earl of
Middleton," says Wodrow, with his usual shrewdness; "his fierce and violent
temper, agreeable enough to a camp, and his education, made him no improper
instrument to overawe Scotland, and bring us down from any sense of liberty
and privilege, unto a pliant submission to arbitrary designs, absolute
supremacy and prerogative. And this was the more easily accomplished, that
this nation, now for ten years, had been under the feet of the English army,
and very much inured to subjection." Let Middleton, too, rule as
despotically as he might, there was no lack of instruments with which to
execute his wildest purpose. For during the late civil wars, a new
generation of Scottish nobles and gentlemen had sprung up, whose finances
were exhausted and estates encumbered, but whose thirst for pleasure, under
the new state of things, was only the more keen, in consequence of their
former abstinence, and who were ready, for pay and plunder, to second the
commissioner, let him violate the laws as he pleased. These men were little
likely to care either for Presbyterianism or patriotism, more especially
when it interposed against their career of unlimited indulgence. It was out
of such wretched elements, too, that the Scottish parliament was chiefly
constituted—men who hated alike the strictness of the national church, and
the rebuking lives of its faithful ministers, and were therefore ready, in
their official and collective character, to pass laws for the coercion of
the former and persecution of the latter, without examination or scruple.
Such was the ominous state of unhappy Scotland when Charles II., one of the
worst and most depraved of its royal house of the Stuarts, ascended the
British throne.
As Middleton was no
politician, his first proceedings went in soldier fashion to the mark, which
was the suppression of Presbyterianism, and the overthrow of everything that
opposed the absolute rule of his master. This was apparent in his first
opening of parliament, upon the 1st of January, 1661, an opening accompanied
with an amount of pomp and splendour to which Scotland had long been
unaccustomed. The deed was prefaced by the appointment of ministers not by
the General Assembly, as heretofore, to preach during the sittings of
parliament, but by the king’s advocate, who selected men that would prophesy
smoothly; and, accordingly, their sermons were laboured condemnations of
solemn leagues, national covenants, and rebellion, and eulogiums on passive
obedience and the divine right of kings. Then came the oath of parliament,
modelled in new fashion upon the English oath of supremacy, and so worded
that it acknowledged the king to be "only supreme governor of this kingdom,
over all persons, and in all causes;" thus making him not only a supreme
civil, but also ecclesiastical power. To this the oath of allegiance
succeeded, by which the subject was bound to acknowledge the supreme power
of the king in all matters civil and religious, and making it high treason
to deny it. In this way they established the kingly power in its fullest
latitude, and could bring every religious assembly that might displease them
within a charge of high treason. But this process of rescinding the
established order of things piece by piece, and the necessity of devising
cunning pretexts for so doing, and clothing each enactment in words that had
either a double meaning, or a deeper meaning than met the ear, was too slow
for such impatient legislators, and they resolved to end such a war of
skirmishes at once by a decisive onslaught. "Accordingly," says Wodrow, "in
the 15th Act, they came at one dash, to rid themselves of all the
parliaments since the year 1633." All that had been done since that period
they stigmatized as "troubles, upon the specious but common pretext of
REFORMATION, the common cloak of all rebellions," and declared that
his majesty held the crown "immediately from God Almighty alone." Such was
the famous, or rather most infamous of all the measures that had ever
signalized a parliament, perhaps, since the days of Odin—"a most extravagant
act," says Burnet, "and only fit to be concluded after a drunken bout." And
that it was passed under some such inspiration, he makes but too probable,
from his account of Middleton and his compeers. "His way of living," he
tells us, "was the most splendid the nation had ever seen; but it was
likewise the most scandalous, for vices of all sorts were the open practices
of those about him. Drinking was the most notorious of all, which was often
continued through the whole night to the next morning; and many disorders
happening after those irregular heats, the people, who had never before that
time seen anything like it, came to look with an ill eye on everything that
was done by such a set of lewd and vicious men." Such were now the
legislators of Scotland, and such the trim in which they repaired to their
places in parliament. As for the all-sweeping measure commonly called the
"Act Recissory," which was proposed half in jest, as something that the
jaded members might make themselves merry withal, but passed in earnest
after a single reading, it still remains unrepealed in our statute book, as
if to astound all posterity with the humbling fact, that wise, cautious,
deliberative Scotland had once, during her national existence, been actually
ruled by a senate of bedlamites.
These wild specimens of
legislation were soon to produce most disastrous fruits. And first in the
list of victims was the Marquis of Argyle, whom Middleton hated, and whose
rich estates he coveted, and who was sent down from London to stand trial
for high treason before this Scottish parliament, with the commissioner at
its head. The proceedings of such a tribunal could be neither slow nor
doubtful; and, in the same year, the marquis perished on the scaffold.
Another victim, not to Middleton’s cupidity, but his revenge, also behoved
to be sacrificed; and he, too, perished, only five days after, upon the same
scaffold. This was James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, who, in 1650, had
pronounced the sentence of excommunication upon the earl, and who was now
condemned to die the death of a traitor under those new laws from which no
man could be safe. Having thus gratified his resentment, Middleton now
turned his attention more exclusively to his personal interests, which he
resolved to further by fine and confiscation; and, accordingly, in the
second sitting of parliament, held in 1662, a list was drawn out of those
who were to be excepted from the act of indemnity now about to be
reluctantly granted to Scotland, although England had enjoyed its full
benefit since the commencement of the Restoration, it was a monstrous list,
constructed chiefly with an eye to the wealth and means of the proscribed,
and included seven or eight hundred noblemen, gentlemen, burgesses, and
others, whose fines, it was calculated, would amount to one million,
seventeen thousand, three hundred and fifty-three pounds, six shillings, and
eightpence. True, indeed, this money was in Scottish, not English coinage,
and therefore scarcely a tenth of the usual sterling amount; but the
imposition of such a fine upon so poor a country, implied the infliction of
such destitution and suffering, as to render it one of the heaviest of
national calamities. In this decree it was also stated, "that the fines
therein imposed were to be given for the relief of the king’s good subjects
who had suffered in the late troubles," while Middleton resolved that these
"good subjects" should mean no others than himself and his dependents.
Little was he aware that this harvest of iniquity, which he so diligently
sowed, he was not destined to reap: the fines, indeed, were afterwards
levied to the full, but only to pass into other coffers than his own; even
as in war, the wretched campfollowers, who have kept at a wary distance
during the battle, rush down upon the spoil while the conquerors are
securing the victory.
But wilder, base; and more
mischievous, if possible, than this purpose of wholesale spoliation, was his
tour to the west for the establishment of Episcopacy. He knew that this was
his master’s prevailing wish; and therefore, although originally himself a
Covenanter, and an honoured one, he now seconded the royal desire with all
the zeal of a place-hunter, and all the rancour of a renegade. A favourable
opportunity, as he thought, had now occurred. Although the Presbyterian
church courts had been arbitrarily closed as illegal meetings, the pulpits
were still open; and it was indignantly complained of by the newly-made
Scottish bishops, that these recusant ministers, who were thus permitted the
free exercise of their office, would neither recognize the authority of
their diocesans, nor give attendance at the episcopal court-meetings.
Middleton, accordingly, designed a justiciary progress for the purpose of
enforcing the authority of the bishops; and as the west of Scotland was the
stronghold of recusancy, he resolved to make Glasgow his head-quarters. And
never, perhaps, went such a troop of mortal men upon so sacred a commission;
it was a precession of Silenus and his bacchanals, of Comus and his rabble
rout. On Middleton’s arrival in Glasgow with his motley array of senators
and councillors, Archbishop Fairfoul repeated his complaints of the refusal
of these Presbyterian divines to acknowledge his authority, and proposed
that an act should be passed banishing all those ministers from their
manses, parishes, and districts, who had been admitted into office since
1649, when patronage was abolished, unless they consented to receive
presentation from the lawful patron, and collation from the bishop of the
diocese. In this way it was asserted Episcopacy would be fully established,
and that not even so many as ten ministers would consent to forego their
livings by refusing compliance. It was a mad decree, which none but madmen
would have passed; but, says Burnet, "Duke Hamilton told me they were all so
drunk that day, that they were not capable of considering anything that was
laid before them, and would hear of nothing but executing the law, without
any relenting or delay." This impetuous haste was fully shown by the fact,
that though the enactment was proclaimed on the 4th of October(1662), the
1st of November was specified as the last day of grace, beyond which all
submission would be fruitless—thus allowing their victims little more than
three weeks for deliberation upon a step in which their all was at stake.
The national stubbornness of Scotland, even in the absence of a better
motive, would have fired at such an insult, and confronted it with a dogged
resistance; but what was to be expected when conscience, and principle, and
every high and holy inducement were called into full exercise? The answer
was given on the 1st of November, when nearly four hundred ministers, with
their families, forsook their homes, and abandoned all except their trust in
God, and hope of a life to come. Is it strange that after this Episcopacy
could take no root in Scotland, or that Presbyterianism should be endeared
to her people not only as the best of creeds, but the most patriotic of
national distinctions?
In this way the Earl of
Middleton showed his utter unfitness whether for civil or religious
government. He had awoke a spirit of resistance in Scotland which abler men
than himself could not allay, and utterly damaged the purposes of his master
by the means with which he hoped to advance them. But retribution was at
hand, and it was to be imbittered tenfold by coming from a sovereign whom he
had so unscrupulously served, and through the machinations of a rival whose
overthrow he planned, and hoped soon to accomplish. Although he had ruled
"every inch a king," it was with a sore misgiving that he had a "viceroy
over him" in the person of the Earl, afterwards Duke of Lauderdale, who, as
secretary for Scotland, had, when he pleased to exercise it, the chief
influence at court in the direction of Scottish affairs. Middleton was eager
to remove this unwelcome associate, before whom his spirit stood rebuked;
but in the struggle that followed between these unscrupulous rivals, the
blundering, hot-headed soldier was no match for the learned and wily
politician. On finding that his credit with the king was failing, he
repaired to London in 1663, hoping by his presence to recover the royal
favour; but, on his arrival at court, he was severely accused by Lauderdale
of mismanagement in the government of Scotland. This, and the mischievous
consequences that had accrued from it, he could not deny; and his
only plea was, that he was a soldier, and therefore ignorant of law and its
forms, and that all he had done was designed for his majesty’s service, and
the establishment of the royal authority. This last apology, although so
boundless in its extent, fared as it generally does in such critical
emergencies, and his deposition and disgrace followed, although Monk,
Clarendon, and the English bishops interposed in his behalf.
After having been thus
blighted, the earl retired into obscurity, living for that purpose at a
mansion called the Friary, near Guildford, which belonged to a Scottish
gentleman named Dalmahoy, who had married the widow of the Duke of Hamilton;
and to requite the kindness of his host, the earl built a large and handsome
bridge across the river that flowed through the estate, which was
called after his own name, "Middleton Bridge." At length the government of
the fort of Tangier in Africa having become vacant by the death of Lord
Rutherford, this poor appointment was bestowed upon Middleton, to requite,
as was alleged, his services in establishing Episcopacy in Scotland, but in
reality, as was generally thought, to remove him from the court and country
by a sort of honourable banishment. To Tangier he accordingly repaired,
where his life was soon brought to an abrupt and miserable termination. In
falling down stairs, he broke his arm, and at the next tumble the broken
bone was driven into his side, inflicting a mortal wound, of which he soon
after expired. A report had been current in Scotland, that in his better
days, when he subscribed the covenant, he had declared to the gentlemen
present that this was the happiest day he had ever seen; and holding up his
right arm, he wished to God that that might be his death if ever he did
anything against the blessed work to which he had thus pledged himself. Men
trembled at the recollection when tidings of his tragic end arrived from
Tangier. This event occurred in 1673. He was succeeded in the earldom by his
only son, Charles, second earl of Middleton. |