Three weeks later the Cameronians, being unpaid, mutinied; and Ross, Annandale, and Polwarth, urging their demands for constitutional rights, threw the Lowlands into a ferment.  Crawford, whose manner of speech was sanctimonious, was evicting from their parishes ministers who remained true to Episcopacy, and would not pray for William and Mary.  Polwarth now went to London with an address to these Sovereigns framed by “the Club,” the party of liberty.  But the other leaders of that party, Annandale, Ross, and Montgomery of Skelmorley, all of them eager for place and office, entered into a conspiracy of intrigue with the Jacobites for James’s restoration.  In February 1690 the Club was distracted; 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.