And thus the people of Scotland achieved a vindication of their laws and liberties, without one human life being sacrificed, or one drop of blood being shed; after years of deep dissimulation, was Charles constrained, by a great national confederacy, to yield in the end, all that his subjects had required at his hands as their sovereign. The conflict, however, was not yet terminated, and it continued, with many varieties of fortune, through future years. But the purpose for which the preceding narrative has been given being attained, it would be premature to prosecute these historical details further at present. Such a preliminary statement, however, appeared to be necessary, in order to clear the way for the Proceedings of the first General Assembly of the Church which had taken place during the long space of thirty-six years; for, although there had been six nominal assemblies during that interval,[22] these were so overborne by royal interference, and illegal and unwarrantable intrusions, that they were all essentially illegal, and were afterwards held to be null and void for ever. In bringing the Proceedings of the Assembly 1638, under the reader’s notice, it is deemed expedient to do so by embodying in these pages a very interesting account of the meeting of the Assembly, from the Journals of Principal Baillie, who was a member of it, and whose volumes, referable to those times, are considered of the highest authority by all succeeding historians. His account of the Assembly, up to the time that the Court was constituted by the election of a Moderator and Clerk, is all that is meant to be given in this place.