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.