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At no time since the days of
Calvin and of Knox was the outlook for the Reformed faith darker in Great
Britain and France than in the year 1685. In that year Louis xiv. was
persuaded to revoke the Edict of Nantes, which for over eighty years had
been the shield of toleration for the Protestantism of France. Six hundred
thousand Huguenots sought exile, fleeing from the persecutions of the
“dragonuades,” and enriched Holland, England and America with the industry,
character, and faith which a century later proved to be the sorest needs of
the land from which they had been so ruthlessly expelled.
Early in the year, on the death of his brother Charles, James II. ascended
the throne of Great Britain, and in defiance of the past opposition to his
succession on account of his Romanist views, openly avowed himself a
Catholic. The ritual of the Roman church was celebrated at Westminster in
Holy Week, the court soon assumed a papist complexion, the Capital silently
acquiesced, but in the West of England and in Scotland discontent ripened in
a few weeks into revolt. Had leaders appeared with characters and
reputations that would have fairly represented the Protestant sentiment of
the land, the revolution might well have been anticipated, which three years
later brought William of Orange to the English throne. But Duke Monmouth,
the vain, luxurious, natural son of Charles II., strove in vain to rally the
pure, stern piety of England and of Scotland to the blue banner of his
Protestant uprising in the West, and died as a traitor to the King’s person
and the “King’s religion,’' which gained a passing strength by the failure
of this so-called “Protestant rebellion.”
The Scottish contingent of Monmouth’s revolt was led by the Earl of Argyle.
Landing his forces in May on the coast of Cantyre, he endeavored to win to
the venturous cause the persecuted Presbyterian element of Western Scotland.
The cautious Scotchmen doubted the right of Monmouth’s claims to the throne,
the}7 disliked his volatile character, and they had not forgotten his part
in the slaughter of their brethren at Bothwell Bridge. They remembered also
Argyle’s u moderate ” policy in the past, and his vote in Council, which but
four years before sealed the fate of the martyred Cargill.
The cross of blazing yew, quenched in goat’s blood, sent as the ancient
war-summons through the glens of Argyleshire, was obeyed by only a portion
of the great clan of the Campbells.
The harryings and slaughters of the long cruel years of Charles II. had
broken the strength of Scotland’s Covenant; the noblest of her leaders were
imprisoned, exiled, or preparing to fly to the colonies, and the heads of
this movement, Monmouth and Argyle, brought no assurance of help to the
Covenant. The faint-hearted band of insurgents dispersed at the first
opposition, and Argyle was beheaded in Edinburgh in June, two weeks before
Monmouth’s death in the Tower.
That summer of 1685 witnessed the “bloody circuit” in West England, when the
ferocious Jeffreys hung or exiled a thousand for participating in Monmouth’s
cause. In Scotland, Claverhouse raided the districts of Dumfries and
Galloway, making the abjuration of the Covenant the alternative to
imprisonment or death. In the month of May, Margaret Wilson and Margaret Mc-Laughlan
were drowned in the tidewaters of Blednock, singing their psalms of praise
until the waters sealed their lips. Burnt Island prison and Dunnottar Castle
heard the piteous prayers of hundreds ol suffering Presbyterians, who
refused to renounce their allegiance to Christ as the Head of His people.
Macaulay [History, I., 504, 5] says that “Through many years the autumn of
1685 was remembered as a time of misery and terror.” “Never, not even under
the tyranny of Laud, had the condition of the Puritans been more deplorable
than at that time.”
Out from this blackness of darkness that enveloped Scotland, the Covenanters
looked westward for deliverance and light. Tidings of the free life of some
of the colonies where toleration of religion was observed came to them as a
bright vision to those that dream. The chartered provisions for religious
freedom in the colony of East Jersey attracted them especially to that
portion of the new continent. The interest in the proprietory rights of the
colony held by many prominent and excellent Scotchmen gave added inducements
for emigration thither. The harbor of Leith was alive with the parties of
Quakers and Covenanters who turned their stern, saddened faces westward in
faith and hope and prayer.
After Argyle’s death many of the clan of the Campbells were hung or
sentenced to be deported to the colonies. Hearing the threats of the Council
to exterminate the clan, Lord Neil Campbell, brother of the unfortunate
earl, purchased a proprietory right in the colony of East Jersey, and in the
autumn of the year fled to America, leading over several scores of adherents
of his brother’s cause and of the persecuted faith. He was received with
marks of distinction by the East Jersey proprietors upon the field, and in
the following year was appointed Deputy Governor of the province. In the
quaint chirograph}7 of James Ellott, of Amboy, clerk of the province, is the
list of Campbell’s emigrants of 1685, and among their number we may find
names of those who, a few years after, reared the Church of their Covenanted
faith on “Free hill ” in the county of Monmouth.
Toward the close of the year there arrived at Perth Amboy the “Henry and
Francis,”a vessel“ of 350 tun and 20 great guns,” the pest ship containing
the stricken remnant of the sad expedition organized by George Scot, laird
of Pitlochie. Few pages of history are fuller of mingled misery, horror and
moral grandeur, than the records of these persecuted followers of Pitlochie.
Sentenced to death for attending conventicles and refusing allegiance to the
Papist James, they were lying in the summer of 1685, tortured and mutilated,
in the prisons of Glasgow and Edinburgh, Stirling and Leith. Pitlochie, who
had been fined enormous sums and thrice imprisoned for his Presbyterian
principles, obtained for them a commutation of sentence to banishment for
life. Collecting from the stifling dungeons this wretched crowd of men and
women, with ears cropped, and noses slit, and cheeks branded, he embarked
with them in September only to lose his life upon the passage, his wife and
some seventy of his fellow-sufferers also perishing from the pestilent
ship-fever. On this voyage of horrors, with the memory of persecution and
tyranny behind them, with the plague carrying away three and four from their
number daily, with the hardships of the untried wilderness before them,
their indomitable spirits rose above all these miseries that encompassed
them and they sent back to Scotland the protest against the injustice that
banished them from their “own native and covenanted land, by an unjust
sentence, for owning truth, and holding by duty, and studying to keep by
their covenanted engagements and baptismal vows, whereby they stand obliged
to resist, and testify against all that is contrary to the word of God and
their covenants.” Concerning their attitude toward King James they say
“their sentence of banishment ran chiefly because they refused the oath of
allegiance, which in conscience they could not take, because in so doing,
they thought they utterly declined the Lord Jesus Christ from having any
power in his own house, and practically would by taking it, say he was not
King and head of his church and over their consciences; and on the contrary,
this was to take and put in his room a man whose breath is in his nostrils,
yea, a man that is a sworn enemy to religion, an avowed papist, whom by our
covenant we are bound to withstand and disown.” [Wodrow, History, iv., pp.
331, 332.] This declaration of allegiance to the supremacy of spiritual
truth over all earthly powers, rings in our ears like the challenge of a
trumpet peal; clear, strident, and inspiring.
Their sufferings were intensified by the inhuman treatment received upon the
voyage. “When they who were under deck attempted to worship God by
themselves the captain would throw down great planks in order to disturb
them.” The captain also proposed taking the wretched cargo to Virginia or
Jamaica and offered to dispose of them “in bulk.”
Wodrow states that the emigrants found but inhospitable treatment from “the
people who lived on the coast side” but received many acts of kindness from
the inhabitants of a town “a little way up the country.” This place of their
first sojourn was probably Woodbridge, where the sufferers found a Puritan
settlement of New Englanders. Many of them came over to Monmouth county,
after litigation with John Johnstone, Pitlochie’s son-in-law, on whom the
command of the expedition devolved at the leader’s death. Mr. Johnstone,
according to Wodrow’s account, sued many of them as “Redemptioners” for four
years service, according to the agreement in Scot’s “Model” for those who
went over without remuneration. As seventy-two of the passengers were said
to be “presents to the Tail'd” being “prisoners banished to the plantations
” the demand does not seem an unjust one. Johnstone obtained a plantation in
Monmouth named “Scotschesterbnrg,” and rose to prominence as a political
leader of the “Scotch” party in the colony.
Although these two expeditions of 1685 were the most notable of those days
they were not the first or only organized parties of Scotch immigrants. In
the year 1682, the twenty-four proprietors, a number of whom were Scotchmen,
on coming into possession of the soil of East Jersey, offered many
inducements to settle in the new colony. Among those who came over in this
first year of general immigration, we find the names of William and Margaret
Redford, born in the years 1642 and 1645, who lie buried in the “Old Scots”
graveyard,
The Tombstone of the Oldest Covenanters Buried In the "Old Scots" Ground,
who came in the First Year of .Scotch Immigration.
under a double stone,
reproduced in the accompanying cut. The }^ears of their respective births
are the oldest recorded in the graveyard.
In 1684, Scot of Pitlochie published his “ Model of the Government of East
Jersey in America,” showing its advantages as a “ retreat where, by law, a
toleration is allowed * * * * no where else to be found in his majesty’s
dominions.” Barclay of Ury, the grand old Quaker Governor of the colony,
together with Lawrie and Drummond, his Deputies on the field, with motives
of mingled compassion and business interest, organized many parties of
harassed Scotch Quakers and Covenanters, who 011 their arrival at Perth
Amboy, the port of the colony, soon found their way to the broad plains of
Middlesex and Monmouth counties.
The famous emigrant ship, the “Caledonia,” is supposed to have made her
first voyages at this early period, and other well-known Covenanters, such
as Walter Ker, pillar of the Freehold Church for half a century, are known
to have come in the year 1685.
On entering Monmouth county, the Presbyterian Immigrants found the
neighborhood of the Navesink neck already in the possession of the Monmouth
patent men, among whom at first the Baptist element predominated. The
Shrewsbury settlement was largely of Quakers, many of whom were brought to
the established church through the agency of the persuasive and energetic
George Keith. The Covenanters would naturalty seek a locality where they
might form a community of their own and might dwell together in fellowship.
Some of them settled near the present town of Matawan, where before the year
1690 was a hamlet known as New Aberdeen. The larger portion of them advanced
somewhat farther into the interior and in the large district known then as
Freehold found peace and plenteousness after their sufferings and
wanderings. Freehold obtained its first character as a community from the
Covenanter immigrants of 1682-1685.
“This is the era at which Hast Jersey, till now chiefly colonized from New
England, became the asylum of Scottish Presbyterians,” says Bancroft,
[Colonial History, chap. xvii.] “Is it strange,” he continues, “that
Scottish Presbyterians of virtue, education and courage, blending a love of
popular liberty with religious enthusiasm, hurried to Hast Jersey in such
numbers as to give to the rising commonwealth a character which a century
and a half has not effaced.” “Thus the mixed character of New Jersey springs
from the different sources of its people. Puritans, Covenanters, and Quakers
met on her soil; and their faith, institutions, and preferences, having life
in the common mind, survive the Stuarts.” |
