History of the Johnstones, 1191-1909, with ... - Electric Scotland

THE EARL OF WIGTON 109
insist on the Scottish ministers making use of the English book of Common
Prayer. The King was advised that it would assist in permanently uniting the
two countries ; but Knox condemned it as Rome's illegal offspring when he
was chaplain to Edward VI.: and just as the Scots would accept no English
fashion in dress, but preferred the costumes of Holland and France, it was
enough that the Prayer Book had been compiled in England to reject it.
The Reformation started in both countries under bad auspices. In
Scotland Queen Mary's half-brother, the Regent, raised the Protestant standard
to advance his own ambition. He signed a decree with Argyll and Ruthven in
1560, ordering the altars and images of saints to be broken up in the Kirk of
Dunkeld. As usual, the populace went much further than their political
leaders, and the vandalism, 1 now deplored by all archaeologists, was carried on
throughout the land. Still Episcopacy survived, but the adoption of the service
books from England was the lever required by the opposition, and from
this time, for the next sixty years, there was a constant struggle between
the Covenanters, who would place the State under the control of the Church, and
those who believed in the Royal supremacy. The defeated parties were
sold to life-long slavery in the plantations of Virginia, South Carolina, and
the West Indies. The cruelties committed on both sides make the seventeenth
century a most sanguinary epoch in Scottish history. Dumfriesshire, wrote the
Rev. A. Carlile, had not recovered from it in 1736.
invasion.
1 Melrose, Kelso, and other abbeys on the frontier were ruined by the English in the last