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. Throughout the wild
hill-districts of the Western Lowlands they preached their fierce
crusade against all who were not prepared to stand by the spirit of the
Covenant as they chose to interpret it. The toleration they demanded
they would not give. No man should be free to worship God as he pleased:
every man must worship Him in the way which seemed good to them, and in
that way only. The moderate Presbyterians were as hateful to them as
Charles himself and all his bishops; and they in their turn were as
obnoxious to the majority of the Scottish nation as to the English
Government. Cleric and layman alike was weary of the unending squabbles
that had distracted the Church of Scotland since the days of Knox. They
wished for peace; and no peace was possible so long as an ignorant and
noisy minority would suffer it only at their own price.

One other point should also be remembered. It has been the custom to
excuse the cruelties of the Covenanters, when they could not be denied,
as the acts of men goaded into madness by years of persecution. This
excuse will hardly serve. It might, indeed, serve to explain the murder
of Sharp and the savage deeds of such men as Hamilton and Burley; but
long before that time the Scottish fanatic had proved himself a match
in ferocity for the bloodiest Malignant of them all. After Philiphaugh
one hundred Irish prisoners were shot in cold blood, while a minister of
the Covenanting Church stood by, reiterating in savage glee, "The wark
goes bonnily on." About the same time eighty women and children were in
one day flung over the bridge at Linlithgow for the crime of having been
followers of the camp of Montrose. In 1647 three hundred of the
Macdonalds who held a fortified post on a hill in Kintire surrendered at