uld not serve under any colonel,
major, captain, serjeant, or corporal, who was not ready to sign
the Covenant. Others insisted that, if it should be found absolutely
necessary to appoint any officer who had taken the tests imposed in the
late reign, he should at least qualify himself for command by publicly
confessing his sin at the head of the regiment. Most of the enthusiasts
who had proposed these conditions were induced by dexterous management
to abate much of their demands. Yet the new regiment had a very peculiar
character. The soldiers were all rigid Puritans. One of their first acts
was to petition the Parliament that all drunkenness, licentiousness, and
profaneness might be severely punished. Their own conduct must have been
exemplary: for the worst crime which the most extravagant bigotry could
impute to them was that of huzzaing on the King's birthday. It was
originally intended that with the military organization of the corps
should he interwoven the organization of a Presbyterian congregation.
Each company was to furnish an elder; and the elders were, with the
chaplain, to form an ecclesiastical court for the suppression of
immorality and heresy. Elders, however, were not appointed: but a noted
hill preacher, Alexander Shields, was called to the office of chaplain.
It is not easy to conceive that fanaticism can be heated to a higher
temperature than that which is indicated by the writings of Shields.
According to him, it should seem to be the first duty of a Christian
ruler to persecute to the death every heterodox subject, and the first
duty of every Christian subject to poniard a heterodox ruler. Yet there
was then in Scotland an enthusiasm compared with which the enthusiasm
even of this man was lukewarm. The extreme Covenanters protested against
his defection as vehemently as he had protested against the Black
Indulgence and the oath of supremacy, and pronounced every man who
entered Angus's regiment guilty of a wicked confederacy with malignants,
[348]

Meanwhile Edinburgh Castle had fallen, after holding out more than two
months. Both the defence and the attack had been languidly conducted.
The Duke of Gordon, unwilling to incur the mortal hatred of those at
whose mercy his lands and life might soon be, did not choose to batter
the city. The assailants, on the other hand, carried on their
operations with so little energy and so little vigilance that a constant
communication was kept up between the Jac