May, p.
38.
The treacherous, the cruel, the unrelenting Philip, accompanied with all the terrors of a Spanish inquisition, was scarcely, during the preceding century, opposed in the Low Countries with more determined fury, than was now, by the Scots, the mild, the humane Charles, attended with his inoffensive liturgy.
The king began to apprehend the consequences.

He sent the marquis of Hamilton, as commissioner, with authority to treat with the Covenanters.
He required the covenant to be renounced and recalled: and he thought, that on his part he had made very satisfactory concessions, when he offered to suspend the canons and the liturgy, till in a fair and legal way they could be received; and so to model the high commission, that it should no longer give offence to his subjects.[*] Such general declarations could not well give content to any, much less to those who carried so much higher their pretensions.

The Covenanters found themselves seconded by the zeal of the whole nation.

Above sixty thousand people were assembled in a tumultuous manner in Edinburgh and the neighborhood.

Charles possessed no regular forces in either of his kingdoms.