Scotch War.]

Scotland was fighting England's battle as well as her own. The bold
assertion of a people's right to frame its own religion was a practical
carrying out of the claim which had been made by the English Parliament
of 1629. But Charles was as resolute to resist it now as then. He was
firm in his resolve of war, and the strong remonstrances of his Scotch
councillors against it were met by a fierce pressure from Wentworth and
Laud. Both felt that the question had ceased to be one for Scotland
only; they saw that a concession to the Scots must now be fatal to the
political and ecclesiastical system they had built up in Ireland and
England alike. In both countries those who opposed the Government were
looking to the rising in the North. They were suspicious of
correspondence between the Puritans in England and the Scotch leaders;
and whether these suspicions were true or no, of the sympathy with which
the proceedings at Edinburgh were watched south of the Border there
could be little doubt. It was with the conviction that the whole Stuart
system was at stake that the two ministers pressed for war. But angered
as he was, Charles was a Scotchman, and a Scotch king; and he shrank
from a march with English troops into his hereditary kingdom. He counted
rather on the sympathy of the northern clans and of Huntly, on the
impression produced by the appearance of Hamilton with a fleet in the
Forth, and by the suspension of trade with Holland, than on any actual
force of arms from the South. The 20,000 men he gathered at York were to
serve rather as a demonstration, and to protect the border, than as an
invading force. But again his plans broke down before the activity and
resolution of the Scots. The news that Charles was gathering an army at
York, and reckoning for support on the clans of the north, was answered
in the spring of 1639 by the seizure of Edinburgh, Dumbarton, and
Stirling; while 10,000 well-equipped troops under Leslie and the Earl of
Montrose entered Aberdeen, and brought the Earl of Huntly a prisoner to
the south. Instead of overawing the country, the appearance of the royal
fleet in the Forth was the signal for Leslie's march with 20,000 men to
the Border. Charles had hardly pushed across the Tweed, when the "old
little crooked soldier," encamping on the hill of Dunse Law, a few miles
from Berwick, fairly offered him battle.

[Sidenote: Scotland and France.]

The king's threats at once broke down. Cha