Series 3 > Letters of James the Fourth, 1505-1513

4
liberty who, for long, tried to reconcile their religious
beliefs with loyalty to the crown and who were at last
driven into a desperate resistance to a crown which sought
to take away their right to worship God as they pleased.
According to the other formula the Covenanters were
religious bigots and political irreconcilables who wanted
to make all other people bow to their own view and whose
political theory, in the end, must have led to anarchy.
These two views came into active collision in the duel
between Walter Scott and Thomas M‘Crie which followed
the publication of Old Mortality, and although both sides
scored points, the general effect, perhaps, was that polite
society began to look down its nose at a narrow-minded lot,
essentially bourgeois in outlook, who despised art and
beauty and innocent pleasure. To some writers of today
the episode of the Covenants seems almost to be a blot
upon the scutcheon of Scotland, whose real self must be
found either in the days before the Covenants were made
or in the days when they were disregarded. It was not
difficult to show that the apostles of this doctrine were
apt to select their eloquence to prove their thesis and that
the opponents of the Covenants were often something
less than good and less than wise. To suggest, on the
strength of the Solemn League of 1643, that the
Covenanters truckled to England was absurd. It was
with the aid of English power that they were persecuted,
and their opponents taunted them with a narrow
nationalism.
None the less, there is something in the accusation. In
the day of their power the Covenanters were intolerant;
some of their leaders were guilty of emotional excesses
which were pitiful if not ludicrous ; they did borrow from
England some of the duller features of English Puritanism,