II.  MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT.

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, General George Monk (head-quarters Dalkeith), with Major-General Howard, Colonels Cooper, Scroope, and Whetham, and other Colonels and inferior officers, under him.  The total force of horse and foot in Scotland may have been about 7000 or 8000.  It was distributed over the country in forts and garrisons, the chief being those of Edinburgh, Leith, Glasgow, Stirling, Dundee, Perth, Aberdeen, Dunnottar, Burntisland, Linlithgow, Dumbarton, Ayr, Dunstaffnage, and Inverness.  Everywhere the English soldiers acted as a police, and their officers superseded, or were conjoined with, the native magistrates and sheriffs in the local courts.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Council Order Books of the English Council July 26, 1655, containing letter from “Oliver P.” to Monk, announcing the new establishment; Perfect Proceedings, No. 307, publishing for the Londoners, under date July 27, the names of his Highness’s new Council for Scotland; Baillie’s Letters, III. 249-250; Godwin, IV. 462-3.]

Under this government Scotland was now very tranquil and tolerably prosperous.  True, almost all the old poppy-heads or thistle-heads, the native nobles and notables, were gone.  Those of them who had been taken at Worcester, or had been sent out of Scotland as prisoners about the same time by Monk, were still, for the most part, in durance in England; others were in foreign exile; the few that remained in Scotland, such as Argyle, Loudoun, Lothian, the Marquis of Douglas, and his son Angus, were out of sight in their country-houses, utterly broken by private debts or fines and forfeitures, and in very low esteem.  Then, among many Scots of good status throughout the community, there were complaints and grumblings on account of the taxes for the support of the English Army, or on account of loss of posts and chances by the admission of Englishmen to the same, or by the promotion of such other Scots as the English saw fit to favour, Incidents of this kind, much noted at the time, had been the ejection of some Professors from the Universities by the English Visitors in 1653, and the appointments by the same visitors of men of their own choice to University posts—­e.g.  Mr. Robert Leighton, minister of Newbattle, to the Principalship of Edinburgh University, and Mr. Patrick Gillespie to that of the University of Glasgow.  But even Baillie, whose complaints on such grounds had been bitter in 1654, and to whom the appointment of Gillespie to the Glasgow Principal-ship had been a particular private grievance, was in better spirits before 1656.  Glasgow, he then reports, was flourishing.  “Through God’s mercy, our town, in its proportion, thrives above all the land.  The Word of God is well loved and regarded; albeit not as it ought and we desire, yet in no town of our land better.  Our people has much more trade in comparison than any other:  their buildings increase strangely both for number and fairness.”