Cromwell had to keep the balance.  They were a people apart.  Throughout the wild hill-districts of the Western Lowlands they preached their fierce crusade against all who were not prepared to stand by the spirit of the Covenant as they chose to interpret it.  The toleration they demanded they would not give.  No man should be free to worship God as he pleased:  every man must worship Him in the way which seemed good to them, and in that way only.  The moderate Presbyterians were as hateful to them as Charles himself and all his bishops; and they in their turn were as obnoxious to the majority of the Scottish nation as to the English Government.  Cleric and layman alike was weary of the unending squabbles that had distracted the Church of Scotland since the days of Knox.  They wished for peace; and no peace was possible so long as an ignorant and noisy minority would suffer it only at their own price.

One other point should also be remembered.  It has been the custom to excuse the cruelties of the Covenanters, when they could not be denied, as the acts of men goaded into madness by years of persecution.  This excuse will hardly serve.  It might, indeed, serve to explain the murder of Sharp and the savage deeds of such men as Hamilton and Burley; but long before that time the Scottish fanatic had proved himself a match in ferocity for the bloodiest Malignant of them all.  After Philiphaugh one hundred Irish prisoners were shot in cold blood, while a minister of the Covenanting Church stood by, reiterating in savage glee, “The wark goes bonnily on.”  About the same time eighty women and children were in one day flung over the bridge at Linlithgow for the crime of having been followers of the camp of Montrose.  In 1647 three hundred of the Macdonalds who held a fortified post on a hill in Kintire surrendered at discretion to David Leslie.  It is said that Leslie would have let them go but for his chaplain, John Nave.  Borrowing the words of Samuel, “What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?” in a long and fiery harangue this man of God exhorted the conquerors to finish their work, and threatened their captain with the curse of Saul who spared the Amalekites.  The prisoners were butchered to a man.[9]

If, then, it be but a delusion of later times that Scotland could at the Restoration have been conciliated into accepting a moderate form of Episcopacy, it is at least clear that there was at that time a strong party in the country anxious for a compromise between the two Churches, and willing to make all reasonable advances towards one.  Unfortunately the first move on both sides was of a nature to make all chances of a compromise impossible.