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The quiet produced by such means was, as might be expected, of no long duration. Enthusiasm was increased by persecution, and the fanatic preachers found no difficulty in persuading their flocks to throw off all allegiance to a government which afforded them no protection. The king was declared to be an apostate from the government, a tyrant, and an usurper; and Cargill, one of the most enthusiastic among the preachers, pronounced a formal sentence of excommunication against him, his brother the Duke of York, and others, their ministers and abettors. This outrage upon majesty together with an insurrection contemptible in point of numbers and strength, in which Cameron, another field-preacher, had been killed, furnished a pretence which was by no means neglected for new cruelties and executions; but neither death nor torture were sufficient to subdue the minds of Cargill and his intrepid followers. They all gloried in their sufferings; nor could the meanest of them be brought to purchase their lives by a retractation of their principles, or even by any expression that might be construed into an approbation of their persecutors. The effect of this heroic constancy upon the minds of their oppressors was to persuade them not to lessen the numbers of executions, but to render them more private, whereby they exposed the true character of their government, which was not severity, but violence; not justice, but vengeance: for example being the only legitimate end of punishment, where that is likely to encourage rather than to deter (as the government in these instances seems to have apprehended), and consequently to prove more pernicious than salutary, every punishment inflicted by the magistrate is cruelty, every execution murder. The rage of punishment did not stop even here, but questions were put to persons, and in many instances to persons under torture, who had not been proved to have been in any of the insurrections, whether they considered the archbishop's assassination as murder, the rising at Bothwell Bridge rebellion, and Charles a lawful king. The refusal to answer these questions, or the answering of them in an unsatisfactory manner, was deemed a proof of guilt, and immediate execution ensued.