With Charles II tightly enthroned as king, we next see the autocratic nature of this man of duplicity. The Earl of Middleton, acting as the king’s commissioner, called together the Scottish Parliament, which met opposite St Giles in the Parliament building which had been opened in 1639. The first activity of the gathering, mostly of royalists and ‘malignants’, was to swear the Oath of Allegiance to Charles II, which few of them dared to withstand. The Oath contains the following revealing words of absolutism: ‘… by this my solemn oath, that I acknowledge my said Sovereign, only Supreme Governor of this kingdom, over all persons, and in all causes…’
The next step in January 1661 was to enforce the Rescissory Act, by which Parliament in one fell swoop cancelled all previous acts of Parliament since 1633 as null and void. The controlling nature of this can be seen in ‘That no subject question or impugn anything in this Act or do anything contrary thereto, under the pains of treason.’ By the king’s edict, nobody was allowed to make covenants with God, defend themselves, or have religious meetings without the king’s consent. The previous Covenants, which Charles II had sworn to God and the Scottish Parliament to uphold, would soon be trodden underfoot and declared as treason. All dissenting voices amongst politicians and church ministers were gagged and removed, and, as the contemporary Rev Robert Douglas says, ‘Timeservers and sycophants were afterwards employed.’
Charles II had not only treated his vows of 1650 and 1651 with scorn, but now he was aided and abetted by a knot of royalists whose aim was to destroy both the free Parliament and the Presbyterian Church, and raise the king to a place of autocracy, thereby being rewarded handsomely for their obsequious ways. Thus, the king would control both Church and State and reverse all that had gone before. Professor William Cunningham refers to the drunkenness of the movers of this reversal as ‘Middleton’s Drinking Parliament’, and writes ‘That it was thought necessary now to get drunk, and swear, and brawl, and fight, to prove one’s self a loyal subject. The nation swung violently from the austerities of the Covenant to the most reckless and unprincipled dissipation.’
‘For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her [Babylon’s] fornication, the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury’ (Revelation 18:3, NKJV).
Image: Parliament House in Edinburgh, with the statue of Charles II in the foreground, by Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons