be it remembered, was an often disputed one.
Buchanan's little work was the very butt of controversy for
considerably more than an hundred years. It was prohibited by
Parliament, denounced by monarchs, condemned to the flames by
universities; great lawyers wrote treatises against it at home, and
some of the most celebrated scholars of continental Europe took the
field against it abroad. We learn from Dr. Irving, in his _Classical
Biography_, that it was assailed among our own countrymen by
Blackwood, Winzet, Barclay, Sir Thomas Craig, Sir John Wemyss, Sir
Lewis Stewart, Sir James Turner, and last, not least, among the
writers who preceded the Revolution, by the meanly obsequious and
bloody Sir George Mackenzie. And how did these Scotchmen meet with the
grand doctrine which it embodied? The 'old maxime of the state of
England,' had it extended to the sister kingdom, would have at once
furnished the materials of reply. If constitutionally the King of
Scotland could do no wrong, then _constitutionally_ the King of
Scotland could not be deposed. But of an entirely different complexion
was the argument of which the Scottish assailants of Buchanan availed
themselves. It was an argument subversive to the English maxim.
Admitting fully that the king _could_ do wrong, they maintained merely
that, for whatever wrong he did, he was responsible, not to his
subjects, but to God only. Whatever the amount of wrong he committed,
it was the duty of his subjects, they said, passively to submit to it.
On came the Revolution. In England, in perfect agreement with the
doctrine of the king's impeccability--in perfect agreement, at least,
so far as words were concerned--it was declared that James had
abdicated the government, and that the throne was thereby vacant; and
certainly it cannot be alleged by even the severest moralist, that in
either abdicating a government or vacating a throne, there is the
slightest shadow of moral evil involved. In Scotland the decision was
different. The battle fought in the Convention was exactly that which
had been previously fought between Buchanan and his antagonists.
'Paterson, Archbishop of Glasgow, and Sir George Mackenzie,
asserted,' says Malcolm Laing, 'the doctrine of divine right, or
maintained, with more plausibility, that every illegal measure of
James's government was vindicated by the declaration of the late
Parliament, that _he was an absolute monarch, entitled to unreserved
obedience_, AND ACC