h
commissioners, with ample powers to treat of a nearer union and
confederacy with the Scottish nation. The persons employed were the
earl of Rutland, Sir William Armyne, Sir Henry Vane the younger, Thomas
Hatcher, and Henry Dailey, attended by Marshall and Nye, two clergymen
of signal authority.[**]

* Rush. vol. vi. p. 406.

** Whitlocke, p. 73. Rush. vol. vi. p. 466. Clarendon, vol.
iii. p.300

In this negotiation, the man chiefly trusted was Vane, who, in
eloquence, address, capacity, as well as in art and dissimulation, was
not surpassed by any one even during that age, so famous for active
talents. By his persuasion was framed, at Edinburgh, that Solemn League
and Covenant, which effaced all former protestations and vows taken in
both kingdoms, and long maintained its credit and authority. In this
covenant, the subscribers, besides engaging mutually to defend each
other against all opponents bound themselves to endeavor, without
respect of persons the extirpation of Popery and prelacy, superstition,
heresy, schism, and profaneness; to maintain the rights and privileges
of parliaments, together with the king's authority, and to discover and
bring to justice all incendiaries and malignants.[*]

* Rush vol. vi. p. 478. Clarendon, vol iii. p. 373.

The subscribers of the covenant vowed also to preserve the reformed
religion established in the church of Scotland; but, by the artifice of
Vane, no declaration more explicit was made with regard to England and
Ireland, than that these kingdoms should be reformed according to
the word of God and the example of the purest churches. The Scottish
zealots, when prelacy was abjured, deemed this expression quite free
from ambiguity, and regarded their own model as the only one which
corresponded in any degree to such a description: but that able
politician had other views; and while he employed his great talents
in overreaching the Presbyterians, and secretly laughed at their
simplicity, he had blindly devoted himself to the maintenance of systems
still more absurd and more dangerous.

In the English parliament there remained some members who, though
they had been induced, either by private ambition or by zeal for civil
liberty, to concur with the majority, still retained an attachment to
the hierarchy, and to the ancient modes of worship. But in the present
danger which threatened their cause, all scruples were laid aside;
and the covenant, by whose m