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It seems that in Scotland none of the lessons of misfortune had been learned. Since January the chiefs of the milder party of preachers, the Resolutioners, they who had been reconciled with the Engagers, were employing the Rev. James Sharp, who had been a prisoner in England, as their agent with Monk, with Lauderdale, in April, with Charles in Holland, and, again, in London. Sharp was no fanatic.
But the Resolutioners, on the other hand, were no less eager to stop the use of the liturgy in Charles's own household, and to persecute every sort of Catholic, Dissenter, Sectary, and Quaker in Scotland. He was still dangerous; he was trying to make himself trusted by the Protesters, who were opposed to Charles.
His father, whose memory he idolized, had often enlarged upon his obligations to this man, and regretted, that, after having been long comrades, they had parted in some unkindness at the time when the kingdom of Scotland was divided into Resolutioners and Protesters; the former of whom adhered to Charles II. after his father's death upon the scaffold, while the Protesters inclined rather to a union with the triumphant republicans.
The rout was complete, and Leslie had to retreat to Stirling, while the Lowlands fell into Cromwell's hands. Cromwell was conciliatory, and a considerable proportion of Presbyterians took up an attitude hostile to the king's claims. The supporters of Charles were known as Resolutioners, or Engagers, and his opponents as Protesters or Remonstrants.
Scarcely had he settled himself in his capital when the Presbyterians were upon him. Sharp had already been some months in London as ambassador of the moderate party, the party of the old Resolutioners. But an easy way of reconciling Sharp's conscience was soon found.
He courted the Presbyterian clergy though he nourished that intestine enmity which prevailed between the resolutioners and protesters; and he found that very little policy was requisite to foment quarrels among theologians. He permitted no church assemblies; being sensible that from thence had proceeded many of the past disorders.
The Resolutioners admitted that to allow the Protesters to have any hand in affairs was "to breed continual distemper and disorders," and Baillie was for banishing the leaders of the Protesters, irreconcilables like the Rev. James Guthrie, to the Orkney islands.
The others muttered something about Erastianism, and reminded each other in whispers, that Silas Morton, once a stout and worthy servant of the Covenant, had been a backslider in the day when the resolutioners had led the way in owning the authority of Charles Stewart, thereby making a gap whereat the present tyrant was afterwards brought in, to the oppression both of Kirk and country.
Even their common misfortunes failed to reconcile these exasperated spirits; and after the subjugation of their country, and under the yoke of civil servitude, the two parties still continued to persecute each other with all the obstinacy and bitterness of religious warfare. The royalists obtained the name of public resolutioners; their opponents, of protestors or remonstrants.
They withdrew sullenly to their own homes, contenting themselves during the remaining years of the Commonwealth with protesting against everybody and everything outside their own narrow circle. They must not be confounded with the general body of the Remonstrants, between whom and the Resolutioners Cromwell had to keep the balance. They were a people apart.
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