acted; and to Melville, as Commissioner in the Scottish Parliament,
William gave orders that the Acts for re-establishing Presbytery and
abolishing lay patronage of livings were to be passed. Montgomery was
obliged to bid yet higher for the favour of the more extreme preachers
and devotees,--but he failed. In April the Lords of the Articles were
abolished at last, and freedom of parliamentary debate was thus secured.
The Westminster Confession was reinstated, and in May, after the last
remnants of a Jacobite force in the north had been surprised and
scattered or captured by Sir Thomas Livingstone at Cromdale Haugh (May
1), the alliance of Jacobites and of the Club broke down, and the leaders
of the Club saved themselves by playing the part of informers.

The new Act regarding the Kirk permitted the holding of Synods and
General Assemblies, to be summoned by permission of William or of the
Privy Council, with a Royal Commissioner present to restrain the
preachers from meddling, as a body, with secular politics. The Kirk was
to be organised by the "Sixty Bishops," the survivors of the ministers
ejected in 1663. The benefices of ejected Episcopalian conformists were
declared to be vacant. Lay patronage was annulled: the congregations had
the right to approve or disapprove of presentees. But the Kirk was
deprived of her old weapon, the attachment of civil penalties (that is
practical outlawry) to her sentences of excommunication (July 19, 1690).
The Covenant was silently dropped.

Thus ended, practically, the war between Kirk and State which had raged
for nearly a hundred and twenty years. The cruel torturing of Nevile
Payne, an English Jacobite taken in Scotland, showed that the new
sovereigns and Privy Council retained the passions and methods of the
old, but this was the last occasion of judicial torture for political
offences in Scotland. Payne was silent, but was illegally imprisoned
till his death.

The proceedings of the restored General Assembly were awaited with
anxiety by the Government. The extremists of the Remnant, the
"Cameronians," sent deputies to the Kirk. They were opposed to
acknowledging sovereigns who were "the head of the Prelatics" in England,
and they, not being supported by the Assembly, remained apart from the
Kirk and true to the Covenants.

Much had passed which William disliked--the abolition of patronage, the
persecution of Episcopalians--and Melville, in 1691, was removed by the