Note 326 — Chapter III

The declaration was signed by Charles on the 16th August 1650. An abridgment of it is given in Balfour's Annales of Scotland, vol. iv. pp. 92–94; but the entire document is preserved by Sir Edward Walker. See Journal of Affairs in Scotland, in Walker's Historical Discourses, London, folio, 1705, pp. 170–176. In it Charles is made to state that, ‘though his Majesty as a dutiful son be obliged to honour the memory of his Royal Father, and have in estimation the person of his Mother; yet doth he desire to be deeply humbled and afflicted in spirit before God, because of his Father's hearkening unto and following evil councils, and his opposition to the work of reformation, and to the solemn league and covenant by which so much of the blood of the Lord's people hath been shed in these kingdoms.’ He went on to say, that though he might palliate his own misconduct by pleading ‘his education and age,’ he thinks it better to ‘ingeniously acknowledge all his own sins and the sins of his father's house.’ Burnet (History of his own Time, vol. i. p. 97) says of this declaration: ‘In it there were many hard things. The king owned the sin of his father in marrying into an idolatrous family: he acknowledged the bloodshed in the late wars lay at his father's door: he expressed a deep sense of his own ill education,’ &c.