Final Days
For some time his health had begun to give cause for concern.
On 7th October he wrote his last letter to Ancrum. The final words to them were,
"I fear ye shall hardly read my hand, and yet it hath taken near by as many days to write as there are pages; but it was not fitting to make use of any other`s hand",
He signed it, `Your loving and lawful Pastor, John Livingstone, Rotterdam, 7th December 1671.`
He continued to read and study right up to the end.
As he lay near death, he exclaimed, "If my heart was lifted up, it was in the preaching of Jesus Christ. I die in the faith that the truth of God, which he hath helped the Church of Scotland to own, shall be owned by him as truths so long as sun and moon endure".
Just before his expiry, his wife beseeched him to take leave of his friends.
"I dare not," said he, with an affectionate tenderness, "but it is likely our parting will be but for a short time".
The Reverend John Livingstone of Ancrum died in Rotterdam, the place of his exile, on the 9th August 1672.
`Where`er he met a stranger, there he left a friend`
Agassiz
A sentiment that well have been coined for John Livingston.
Elizabeth Melvill, the Lady Culross was purported to have written, " Ye must be hewin and hamerd down and drest and prepared, before ye be a Leving Ston fitt for his building." Such was the esteem the man was held in by those who were fortunate to have made his acquaintance.
Footnote
On her husband`s death, Janet returned to Scotland accompanied by her youngest son, Robert, her own exile now lifted. Now in his late teens, Robert was soon to take himself to America where he prospered and was to found the dynasty of the Livingstons of Livingston Manor in New York State. This family were to play a great part in the American fight for independance a century later.
During her husband`s enforced absence from Scotland, the Church came under increasing pressure from the State with worship being held clandestinely. These conventicles, as they were called, were forever being hounded and those responsible for them, if caught, were severely dealt with. Imprisonment, banishment, and occasionally death was dealt out to them.
Janet Livingston would carry on her husband`s fight. A meeting of the Privy Council was to be held in Edinburgh on 4th June, 1674 at which a letter from the King was to be read out. This letter was instructing the councillors to increase their effort in apprehending the field preachers and the ring leaders of the conventicles.
Alongwith fourteen like minded ladies, she drew up a petition asking for the granting of liberty to the threatened ministers throughout the land, "...they might lawfully and without molestation excercise their holy function, as the people should in an orderly way call them." This was to be presented to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Rothes.
John Leslie, 7th Earl and 1st Duke of Rothes had originally been a supporter of the Covenant, his father had before him voted against the Five Articles of Perth, and had indeed complained of Charles l`s measures of 1633. This was the monarch`s insistence on the building of a new Parliament House and the re-construction of St Giles as a cathedral for a new bishopric, all to be paid for by the city of Edinburgh.
The 7th Earl had taken up a stance on the royalist wing of the Covenanters from his younger days
and at the Coronation of Charles ll to the throne of Scotland, he had carried the Sword of State. In his capacity as King`s Commissioner to the Scottish Parliament, he pursued a rigorous policy of oppression against the Covenanters.
This resulted in the Pentland Rising of 1666. The furore which followed this brought about his displacement and being succeeded by John Maitland, 2nd Earl and 1st Duke of Lauderdale. The Chancellorship was his next apointment.
Lauderdale tried a more lenient approach to the "problem" but he eventually returned to the same degree of repression in 1674. Rothes resented Lauderdale although their treatment of the Covenanters was along similar lines.
This then was the man whose arrival was awaited by the ladies gathered in the Parliament Close that day.
Soon the coach pulled up and alighted from it came The Lord Chancellor closely followed by Archbishop Sharp. The latter was described `as flyed as a fox........clave close to the Chancellor`s back`.
As the ladies approached led by Janet, the Chancellor doffed his hat and listened as the petition was read out by her. At its completion, he dismissed the appeal by jest and insinuation, then made his entrance, saving himself from further haranguement.
Mrs Livingston suffered six months of chastisement and was in fact banished for a period. It was claimed that `her husband`s heart could trust in her`, and to quote Robert McWard, "..a mother indeed in Israel".
John Livingstone was at rest in Holland, but his wife continued his struggle.
Killing Times
It took another twenty years for the resolvement of this but not before the period of the "Killing Times" was to have occurred.
Eight years after John` s death, King James ll had succeeded his brother Charles ll to the throne. A great believer in the Divine Right of Kings and supporter of the Roman Catholic religion, he deliberately set out to eradicate Scotland of the Covenanters.
In what became known as the "Killing Times, 1680 - 1685," a multitude of Covenanters met their deaths at the behest of this man.
However, he went too far in 1688 when he instituted the Declaration of Indulgence which suspended the penal laws against Roman Catholics.
This instigated the wrath of some peers of the realm who in turn invited James`s daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange to defend the `Liberties of England`
William duly obliged. James retreated to Ireland and William and Mary jointly acceded to the throne. This put an end to the Stewart dynasty and Presbyterianism was enshrined forever as the Church of Scotland.
James and his son Charles did try to usurp all this with their aborted risings in 1689, 1715 and 1745 but to no avail.
John Livingstone`s dreams and aspirations were fulfilled.
