This Covenant was a most potent instrument for the day, but the fruits thereof were blood and tears and desolation:  for fifty-one years common-sense did not come to her own again.  In 1689 the Covenant was silently dropped, when the Kirk was restored.

This two-edged insatiable sword was drawn:  great multitudes signed with enthusiasm, and they who would not sign were, of course, persecuted.  As they said, “it looked not like a thing approved of God, which was begun and carried on with fury and madness, and obtruded on people with threatenings, tearing of clothes, and drawing of blood.”  Resistance to the king—­if need were, armed resistance—­was necessary, was laudable, but the terms of the Covenant were, in the highest degree impolitic and unstatesmanlike.  The country was handed over to the preachers; the Scots, as their great leader Argyll was to discover, were “distracted men in distracted times.”

Charles wavered and sent down the Marquis of Hamilton to represent his waverings.  The Marquis was as unsettled as his predecessor, Arran, in the minority of Queen Mary.  He dared not promulgate the proclamations; he dared not risk civil war; he knew that Charles, who said he was ready, was unprepared in his mutinous English kingdom.  He granted, at last, a General Assembly and a free Parliament, and produced another Covenant, “the King’s Covenant,” which of course failed to thwart that of the country.

The Assembly, at Glasgow (November 21, 1638), including noblemen and gentlemen as elders, was necessarily revolutionary, and needlessly riotous and profane.  It arraigned and condemned the bishops in their absence.  Hamilton, as Royal Commissioner, dissolved the Assembly, which continued to sit.  The meeting was in the Cathedral, where, says a sincere Covenanter, Baillie, whose letters are a valuable source, “our rascals, without shame, in great numbers, made din and clamour.”  All the unconstitutional ecclesiastical legislation of the last forty years was rescinded,—­as all the new presbyterian legislation was to be rescinded at the Restoration.  Some bishops were excommunicated, the rest were deposed.  The press was put under the censorship of the fanatical lawyer, Johnston of Waristoun, clerk of the Assembly.

On December 20 the Assembly, which sat on after Hamilton dissolved it, broke up.  Among the Covenanters were to be reckoned the Earl of Argyll (later the only Marquis of his House), and the Earl, later Marquis, of Montrose.  They did not stand long together.  The Scottish Revolution produced no man at once great and successful, but, in Montrose, it had one man of genius who gave his life for honour’s sake; in Argyll, an astute man, not physically courageous, whose “timidity in the field was equalled by his timidity in the Council,” says Mr Gardiner.