1.  The heat of the clergy, to whom he was exceedingly devoted, and for whom, indeed, he ruined himself.

2.  The wisdom of his nobility.

Thus when the counsel of his priests prevailed, all was fire and fury; the Scots were rebels, and must be subdued, and the Parliament’s demands were to be rejected as exorbitant.  But whenever the king’s judgment was led by the grave and steady advice of his nobility and counsellors, he was always inclined by them to temperate his measures between the two extremes.  And had he gone on in such a temper, he had never met with the misfortunes which afterward attended him, or had so many thousands of his friends lost their lives and fortunes in his service.

I am sure we that knew what it was to fight for him, and that loved him better than any of the clergy could pretend to, have had many a consultation how to bring over our master from so espousing their interest, as to ruin himself for it; but ’twas in vain.

I took this interval when I sat still and only looked on, to make these remarks, because I remember the best friends the king had were at this time of that opinion, that ’twas an unaccountable piece of indiscretion, to commence a quarrel with the Scots, a poor and obstinate people, for a ceremony and book of Church discipline, at a time when the king stood but upon indifferent terms with his people at home.

The consequence was, it put arms into the hands of his subjects to rebel against him; it embroiled him with his Parliament in England, to whom he was fain to stoop in a fatal and unusual manner to get money, all his own being spent, and so to buy off the Scots whom he could not beat off.

I cannot but give one instance of the unaccountable politics of his ministers.  If they overruled this unhappy king to it, with design to exhaust and impoverish him, they were the worst of traitors; if not, the grossest of fools.  They prompted the king to equip a fleet against the Scots, and to put on board it 5000 land men.  Had this been all, the design had been good, that while the king had faced the army upon the borders, these 5000, landing in the Firth of Edinburgh, might have put that whole nation into disorder.  But in order to this, they advised the king to lay out his money in fitting out the biggest ships he had, and the “Royal Sovereign,” the biggest ship the world had ever seen, which cost him no less than L100,000, was now built, and fitted out for this voyage.

This was the most incongruous and ridiculous advice that could be given, and made us all believe we were betrayed, though we knew not by whom.

To fit out ships of 100 guns to invade Scotland, which had not one man-of-war in the world, nor any open confederacy with any prince or state that had any fleet, ’twas a most ridiculous thing.  An hundred sail of Newcastle colliers, to carry the men with their stores and provisions, and ten frigates of 40 guns each, had been as good a fleet as reason and the nature of the thing could have made tolerable.