Though
their predictions had been falsified, they were still the depositaries of
the secrets of the Deity; and, in a "Short Declaration and Warning," they
announced[a] to their countrymen the thirteen causes of this national
calamity, the reasons why "God had veiled for a time his face from the sons
of Jacob." It was by the general profaneness of the land, by the manifest
provocations of the king and the king's house, by the crooked and
precipitant ways of statesmen in the treaty of Breda, by the toleration of
malignants in the king's household, by suffering his guard to join in the
battle without a previous purgation, by the diffidence of some officers
who refused to profit by advantages furnished to them by God, by the
presumption of others who promised victory to themselves without eyeing of
God, by the rapacity and oppression exercised by the soldiery, and by the
carnal self-seeking of men in power, that God had been provoked to visit
his people with so direful and yet so merited a chastisement.[1]
To the young king the defeat at Dunbar was a subject of real and
ill-dissembled joy. Hitherto he had been a mere puppet in the hands of
Argyle and his party; now their power was broken, and it was not impossible
for him to gain the ascendancy.
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