Fired by such Christian doctrines, on July 11, 1668, one Mitchell—­“a preacher of the Gospel, and a youth of much zeal and piety,” says Wodrow the historian—­shot at Sharp, wounded the Bishop of Orkney in the street of Edinburgh, and escaped.  This event delayed the project of conciliation, but in July 1669 the first Indulgence was promulgated.  On making certain concessions, outed ministers were to be restored.  Two-and-forty came in, including the Resolutioner Douglas, in 1660 the correspondent of Sharp.  The Indulgence allowed the indulged to reject Episcopal collation; but while brethren exiled in Holland denounced the scheme (these brethren, led by Mr MacWard, opposed all attempts at reconciliation), it also offended the Archbishops, who issued a Remonstrance.  Sharp was silenced; Burnet of Glasgow was superseded, and the see was given to the saintly but unpractical Leighton.  By 1670 conventiclers met in arms, and “a clanking Act,” as Lauderdale called it, menaced them with death:  Charles II. resented but did not rescind it.  In fact, the 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.