disorders and attacks on conformist ministers were of a
violence much overlooked by our historians. In 1672 a second Indulgence
split the Kirk into factions--the exiles in Holland maintaining that
preachers who accepted it should be held men unholy, false brethren. But
the Indulged increased in numbers, and finally in influence.

To such a man as Leighton the whole quarrel seemed "a scuffle of drunken
men in the dark." An Englishman entering a Scottish church at this time
found no sort of liturgy; prayers and sermons were what the minister
chose to make them--in fact, there was no persecution for religion, says
Sir George Mackenzie. But if men thought even a shadow of Episcopacy an
offence to Omnipotence, and the king's authority in ecclesiastical cases
a usurping of "the Crown Honours of Christ"; if they consequently broke
the law by attending armed conventicles and assailing conformist
preachers, and then were fined or imprisoned,--from their point of view
they were being persecuted for their religion. Meanwhile they bullied
and "rabbled" the "curates" for _their_ religion: such was Leighton's
"drunken scuffle in the dark."

In 1672 Lauderdale married the rapacious and tyrannical daughter of Will
Murray--of old the whipping-boy of Charles I., later a disreputable
intriguer. Lauderdale's own ferocity of temper and his greed had created
so much dislike that in the Parliament of 1673 he was met by a
constitutional opposition headed by the Duke of Hamilton, and with Sir
George Mackenzie as its orator. Lauderdale consented to withdraw
monopolies on salt, tobacco, and brandy; to other grievances he would not
listen (the distresses of the Kirk were not brought forward), and he
dissolved the Parliament. The opposition tried to get at him through the
English Commons, who brought against him charges like those which were
fatal to Strafford. They failed; and Lauderdale, holding seven offices
himself, while his brother Haltoun was Master of the Mint, ruled through
a kind of clique of kinsmen and creatures.

Leighton, in despair, resigned his see: the irreconcilables of the Kirk
had crowned him with insults. The Kirk, he said, "abounded in furious
zeal and endless debates about the empty name and shadow of a difference
in government, in the meanwhile not having of solemn and orderly public
worship as much as a shadow."

Wodrow, the historian of the sufferings of the Kirk, declares that
through the riotous proceedings