Western Remonstrance

The Western Remonstrance was drawn up on 17 October 1650 by Scotsmen who demanded that the Act of Classes (1649) was enforced (removing Engagers from the army and other influential positions) and remonstrating against Charles, the son of the recently beheaded King Charles I, being crowned King of Scotland. It was presented to the Committee of Estates by Sir George Maxwell, at Stirling, on 22nd of that month. Those who supported the Remonstrance are known as Remonstrants of Remonstraters.

Patrick Gillespie was the principal author of the remonstrance addressed to the Scottish Parliament by the "gentlemen, commanders, and ministers attending the Westland Force", in which they made charges against the public authorities, condemned the treaty with Charles II, and declared that they could not take his side against Oliver Cromwell.

The Remonstrators declared "freely and faithfully concerning the causes and remedies of the Lord's indignation", which had gone out against his people, among the first of which they reckoned the backsliding from the National Covenant, "the great and mother sin of the nation", as the principal. The chief remedy proposed was to remove from the presence of the king, the judicatories and the armies, the "malignants", whom many of the committee were accused of having received "hito intimate friendship", admitting them to their councils, and bringing in some of them to the parliament and committees, and about the king, thereby affording "many pregnant presumptions", of a design on the part of some of the committee of estates, "to set up and employ the malignant party", or at least, giving "evidences of a strong inclination to intrust them again in the managing of the work of God".

The Committee of Estates ignored the first remonstrance, a circumstance which gave such umbrage to Archibald Johnston, Lord Warriston and the leaders of the Western Association army, that they drew up another, couched in still stronger language, on 30 October, at Dumfries, where they had retired with the army on a movement made by Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army to the west.

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