and even to find concealment for some time in London itself, notwithstanding
the vigilant espionage which the Protector had established over the metropolis.
At length he reached Paris, where Charles II. resided, and by whom he was
sent to Scotland, in 1653, to attempt a diversion in his favour at the head of
the Scottish royalists in the Highlands. But Monk, who exercised a watchful
rule over Scotland, attacked and routed him at Lochgeary, on the 26th of July,
1654, and Middleton, after vainly lingering and shifting a few months longer
in the country, escaped in the following year to Cologne, where Charles at that time resided, and with whom he remained in exile till the Restoration.
Hitherto the career of Middleton had been that of an unscrupulous and successful soldier of fortune, veering with the changing wind, and adapting, or at least trying to adapt, every mutation to his own advancement. He was not, therefore, slow to avail himself of the advantages which the Restoration promised, more especially to those who had amused the king in his exile, as well as fought for 'him in the field. Accordingly, in 1660, he was created Earl of Middleton, and Lord Clermont and Fettercairn; appointed commander- in- chief of the forces in Scotland, governor of Edinburgh castle, and royal commissioner to the Scottish parliament. Perhaps it was not without a deep purpose on the part of the king, or the counsellors by whom he was directed, that such a man as Middleton should have been thus invested with almost unlimited power over his native country. "The commissioner, the Earl of Middleton," says Wodrow, with his usual shrewdness; "his fierce and violent temper, agreeable enough to a camp, and his education, made him no improper instrument to overawe Scotland, and bring us down from any sense of liberty and privilege, unto a pliant submission to arbitrary designs, absolute supremacy and prerogative. And this was the more easily accomplished, that this nation, now for ten years, had been under the feet of the English army, and very much inured to subjection." Let Middleton, too, rule as despotically as he might, there was no lack of instruments with which to execute his wildest purpose. For during the late civil wars, a new generation of Scottish nobles and gentlemen had sprung up, whose finances were exhausted and estates incumbered, but whose thirst for pleasure, under the new state of things, was only the more keen, in consequence of their former abstinence, and who were ready, for pay and plunder, to second the commissioner, let him violate the laws as he pleased. These men were little likely to care either for Presbyterianism or patriotism, more especially when it interposed against their career of unlimited indulgence. It was out of such wretched elements, too, that the Scottish parliament was chiefly constituted men who hated alike the strictness of the national church, and the rebuking lives of its faithful ministers, and were therefore ready, in their official and collective character, to pass laws for the coercion of the former and persecution of the latter, without examination or scruple. Such was the ominous state of unhappy Scotland when Charles II., one of the worst and most depraved of its royal house of the Stuarts, ascended the British throne.
As Middleton was no politician, his first proceedings went in soldier fashion to the mark, which was the suppression of Presbyterianism, and the overthrow o: everything that opposed the absolute rule of his master. This was apparent in his first opening of parliament, upon the 1st of January, 1661, an opening accompanied with an amount of pomp and splendour to which Scotland had long been unaccustomed. The deed was prefaced by the appointment of ministers, not by the General Assembly, as heretofore, to preach during the sittings of
