and of good family, in the county of Fife, and had been a soldier from
his youth upwards. In the younger part of his life he had been wild and
licentious, but had early laid aside open profligacy, and embraced the strictest
tenets of Calvinism. Unfortunately, habits of excess and intemperance were more
easily rooted out of his dark, saturnine, and enterprising spirit, than the
vices of revenge and ambition, which continued, notwithstanding his religious
professions, to exercise no small sway over his mind. Daring in design,
precipitate and violent in execution, and going to the very extremity of the
most rigid recusancy, it was his ambition to place himself at the head of the
Presbyterian interest.
    To attain this eminence among the whigs, he had been active in attending
their conventicles, and more than once had commanded them when they appeared in
arms, and beaten off the forces sent to disperse them. At length, the
gratification of his own fierce enthusiasm, joined, as some say, with motives of
private revenge, placed him at the head of that party who assassinated the
Primate of Scotland, as the author of the sufferings of the Presbyterians. The
violent measures adopted by Government to revenge this deed, not on the
perpetrators only, but on the whole professors of the religion to which they
belonged, together with long previous sufferings, without any prospect of
deliverance, except by force of arms, occasioned the insurrection, which, as we
have already seen, commenced by the defeat of Claverhouse in the bloody skirmish
of Loudon Hill.
    But Burley, notwithstanding the share he had in the victory, was far from
finding himself at the summit which his ambition aimed at. This was partly owing
to the various opinions entertained among the insurgents concerning the murder
of Archbishop Sharp. The more violent among them did, indeed, approve of this
act as a deed of justice, executed upon a persecutor of God's church through the
immediate inspiration of the Deity; but the greater part of the Presbyterians
disowned the deed as a crime highly culpable, though they admitted that the
Archbishop's punishment had by no means exceeded his deserts. The insurgents
differed in another main point, which has been already touched upon. The more
warm and extravagant fanatics condemned, as guilty of a pusillanimous
abandonment of the rights of the church, those preachers and congregations who
were contented, in any manner, to exercise their religion through the permission
of the ruling government. This, they said, was absolute Erastianism, or
subjection of the church of God to the regulations of an earthly government, and
therefore but one degree