the
presbyterian cause, and openly set himself to effect the
re-establishment of the idolatrous abominations of the mass and monkrie.

The Lord Perth and his brother, the Lord Melford, and a black catalogue
of others, whose names, for the fame of Scotland, I would fain expunge
with the waters of oblivion, considering Religion as a thing of royal
regulation, professed themselves papists, and got, as the price of their
apostacy and perdition, certain places of profit in the government.
Clouds of the papistical locust were then allured into the land, to eat
it up leaf and blade again. Schools to teach children the deceits, and
the frauds, and the sins of the jesuits, were established even in the
palace of Holyrood-house; and the chapel, which had been cleansed in the
time of Queen Mary, was again defiled with the pageantries of idolatry.

But the godly people of Edinburgh called to mind the pious bravery of
their forefathers, and all that they had done in the Reformation; and
they rose, as it were with one accord, and demolished the schools, and
purified the chapel, even to desolation, and forced the papist priest to
abjure his own idols. The old abhorrence of the abominations was
revived; for now it was clearly seen what King Charles and his brother
had been seeking, in the relentless persecution which they had so long
sanctioned; and many in consequence, who had supported and obeyed the
prelatic apostasy as a thing but of innocent forms, trembled at the
share which they had taken in the guilt of that aggression, and their
dismay was unspeakable.

The tyrant, however, soon saw that he had over-counted the degree of the
humiliation of the land; and being disturbed by the union which his open
papistry was causing among all denominations of protestants, he changed
his mood, and from force resorting to fraud, publishing a general
toleration,--a device of policy which greatly disheartened the prelatic
faction; for they saw that they had only laboured to strengthen a
prerogative, the first effectual exercise of which was directed against
themselves, every one discerning that the indulgence was framed to give
head-rope to the papists. But the Covenanters made use of it to advance
the cause of the Gospel, as I shall now proceed to rehearse, as well as
how through it I was enabled to perform my avenging vow.

Among the exiled Covenanters who returned with Argyle, and with whom I
became acquainted while with him, was Thomas Ard