THE CIVIL WAR AND THE COMMONWEALTH The "Bishops' Wars."—An appeal to arms was inevitable, but the Covenanters (q.v.) were prepared for it and ready to send one army to force the Covenant upon the episcopal north-east and another to the Borders to meet such levies as Charles, then ruling England without a parliament, could raise. King and Covenanters met at Berwick in June 1639, and made a com promise by which the questions at issue were reserved for the decision of another parliament and assembly. Neither party was prepared to go to extremities. Charles was unwilling to summon an English parliament, without which he could not hope to coerce the Scots, and the Covenanters did not know what action an English parliament might take. The meeting of the Short parlia ment in the spring of 1640 convinced them that Charles had more to fear from an English parliament than they had, and when he was unwise enough to hesitate about carrying out the terms of the Pacification of Berwick, a Scottish force, under Alexander Leslie and the young earl of Montrose, invaded England in Aug. 1640 and occupied Newcastle. Charles had no force to bring against them, and by the Treaty of Ripon they remained at New castle, and a body of Scottish commissioners went to London to discuss terms of evacuation. The king at first hoped that the Scottish invasion would lead the Long parliament to give support to the Crown, but he soon found that the Commons regarded the Scots as allies, and, after the execution of Strafford, he tried to obtain Scottish support by yielding on all the points at issue. For this purpose he visited Scotland in 1641. He assented to the abolition of episcopacy, and agreed that the officers of State, the Privy Council, and the judges should be appointed with the sanc tion of the Scottish parliament. He showered honours upon his opponents, made the earl of Argyll a marquis and created Leslie earl of Leven. But, except for the adhesion of the earl (after wards marquis) of Montrose, he failed to create a Royalist Party, and his visit was worse than useless.
The Solemn League and Covenant.—The royal surrender on all the points at issue left the Scots without any quarrel with Charles or any pretext for joining the English parliament in the civil war. But some Scottish ecclesiastics, who had been resident
in London as Commissioners under the Treaty of Ripon, had be come impressed with the Presbyterian atmosphere of the City of London and of the House of Commons, and had formed an am bition of establishing a Presbyterian uniformity between the Churches of England and Scotland. When, after the early cam paigns or the civil war, both king and parliament asked for Scottish help, the advocates of this policy decided Scottish action. By the Solemn League and Covenant the Scots agreed to send an army into England to oppose the king, and the English parlia ment agreed to accept a reformation of the English Church. An assembly of English divines, with some Scottish assessors, was to meet at Westminster to settle the new constitution of the Church, but by the terms of the Solemn League, popery, episcopacy and schism (independency) were expressly excluded from the settle ment. These terms included every known form of Church gov ernment except Presbytery, and, though the assembly of divines was nominally free to deal with the English ecclesiastical problem in its own way, it was really bound to accept the Presbyterian solution. The Scottish army, under Leven, made a substantial contribution to the parliamentary victory at Marston Moor, in July 1644, but the parliament, even with the help of the Scots, was unable to beat the royalists. That task was accomplished in 1645 by the New Model Army, but Cromwell and his soldiers were Independents, and though they, like other inhabitants of both England and Scotland, had been compelled to take the Solemn League, they were determined not to establish Presbytery as the only form of church government permitted in the island. Meanwhile, a large portion of the Scottish army was recalled to Scotland to defend the Covenanting parliament against Montrose, whose brilliant campaign in 1644-45 revived royalist hopes of victory. After Montrose's defeat at Philiphaugh (Sept. 1645) the king's cause was hopeless, and in May 5646 he surrendered to the Scottish army at Newark.