‘
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thereof, find themselves in conscience obliged to retain
these principles.
A retreat, where, by law, a toleration is allowed, doth at present offer itself in
America, and is no where else to be found in his majesty's dominions.’
This is the era at which
East New Jersey, till now chiefly colonized from
New England, became the asylum of Scottish Presbyterians.
Who has not heard of the ruthless crimes by which the Stuarts attempted to plant Episcopacy in
Scotland, on the ruins of Calvinism, and extirpate the faith of a whole people?
To whom has the tale not been told of the defeat of
Graham of
Claverhouse on Loudon Hill, and the subsequent rout of the insurgent fanatics at Bothwell Bridge?
Who has not heard of the Cameronians, hunted like beasts of prey, and exasperated by sufferings and despair?
refusing, in face of the gallows, to say, ‘God save the king;’ and charged even by their wives to die for the good old cause of the covenant?
‘I am but twenty,’ said an innocent girl at her execution; ‘and
they can accuse me of nothing but my judgment.’
The boot and the thumbikins could not extort confessions.
The condemnation of
Argyle displayed the
prime nobility as ‘the vilest of mankind;’ and wide-
spread cruelty exhausted itself in devising punishments.
Just after the grant of
East New Jersey, a proclamation, unparalleled since the days when Alva drove the Netherlands into independence, proscribed all who had ever communed with rebels, and put twenty thousand lives at the mercy of informers.
‘It were better,’ said
Lauderdale, ‘the country bore windle straws and sand larks than boor rebels to the king.’
After the insurrection of
Monmouth, the sanguinary excesses of
despotic revenge were revived, gibbets erected in villages
