n, was so clogged with exceptions as to be of
little use to any but to the agents of tyranny. Several persons, who
were neither directly nor indirectly concerned in the murder of the
archbishop, were executed as an expiation for that offence; but many more
were obliged to compound for their lives by submitting to the most
rapacious extortion, which at this particular period seems to have been
the engine of oppression most in fashion, and which was extended not only
to those who had been in any way concerned in the insurrection, but to
those who had neglected to attend the standard of the king, when
displayed against what was styled, in the usual insulting language of
tyrants, a most unnatural rebellion.

The quiet produced by such means was, as might be expected, of no long
duration. Enthusiasm was increased by persecution, and the fanatic
preachers found no difficulty in persuading their flocks to throw off all
allegiance to a government which afforded them no protection. The king
was declared to be an apostate from the government, a tyrant, and an
usurper; and Cargill, one of the most enthusiastic among the preachers,
pronounced a formal sentence of excommunication against him, his brother
the Duke of York, and others, their ministers and abettors. This outrage
upon majesty together with an insurrection contemptible in point of
numbers and strength, in which Cameron, another field-preacher, had been
killed, furnished a pretence which was by no means neglected for new
cruelties and executions; but neither death nor torture were sufficient
to subdue the minds of Cargill and his intrepid followers. They all
gloried in their sufferings; nor could the meanest of them be brought to
purchase their lives by a retractation of their principles, or even by
any expression that might be construed into an approbation of their
persecutors. The effect of this heroic constancy upon the minds of their
oppressors was to persuade them not to lessen the numbers of executions,
but to render them more private, whereby they exposed the true character
of their government, which was not severity, but violence; not justice,
but vengeance: for example being the only legitimate end of punishment,
where that is likely to encourage rather than to deter (as the government
in these instances seems to have apprehended), and consequently to prove
more pernicious than salutary, every punishment inflicted by the
magistrate is cruelty, every executio