Protestantism in Scotland - James Aitken Wylie

Never before, perhaps, had country made so
swift and terrible a descent into, not social anarchy,
but monarchical and military despotism. Scotland
up to this hour was enjoying an ample liberty --
that liberty was fenced round on all sides by legal
securities: a single edict laid them all in the dust,
and confiscated that whole liberty which they
guarded, and the country went sheer down at a
plunge into the gulf.
The tyranny that wrought all this havoc in a
moment, as it were, has been stigmatized as
"intoxicated." History has preserved the fact that
the intoxication was more than a figure. "It was a
maddening time," says Burner, "when the men of
affairs were perpetually drunk."[3] Middleton, who
presided over this revolutionary crew, was a
notorious inebriate, and came seldom sober to the
House; and it is an accepted fact that the framers of
the Act Recissory passed the night that preceded
the proclamation of their edict in a deep debauch.
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