to rapine. He worsted the Covenanters again after a stiff fight on 2 July 1645, at Alford, a village in the beautiful Howe of Alford. Peace was temporarily restored on the "engagement" of the Scots commissioners to assist Charles I. Aberdeen welcomed Charles II on his return from the Netherlands in 1650, but in little more than a year General George Monck entered the city at the head of the Cromwellian regiments. The English garrison remained until 1659, but the following year Aberdeenshire effusively hailed the Restoration, and prelacy once more went into the ascendant. Most of the Presbyterians conformed, but the Quakers, more numerous in the shire and the adjoining county of Kincardineshire than anywhere else in Scotland, suffered systematic persecution. After the Glorious Revolution (1688) episcopacy passed under a cloud, but the clergy, yielding to force majeure, gradually accepted the inevitable, hoping, as long as Queen Anne lived, that prelacy might yet become the national form of Church government. Her death dissipated these dreams, and as George I, her successor, was antipathetic to the clergy, it happened that Jacobitism and episcopalianism came to be regarded in the shire as identical, though the non-jurors as a body never countenanced rebellion. On 6 September 1715 the Earl of Mar raised the standard of revolt in Braemar; a fortnight later James Francis Edward Stuart was proclaimed at Aberdeen cross; the Pretender landed at Peterhead on 22 December, and in February 1716 he was back again in France. The collapse of the first rising ruined many of the lairds, and when the second rebellion occurred thirty years afterwards the county in the main remained apathetic, though the insurgents held Aberdeen for five months, and Lord Lewis Gordon won a trifling victory for Prince Charles Edward Stuart at Inverurie (23 December 1745). The Duke of Cumberland relieved Aberdeen at the end of February 1746, and by April the Young Pretender had become a fugitive. Thereafter the people devoted themselves to agriculture, industry and commerce, which developed by leaps and bounds, and, along with equally remarkable progress in education, transformed the aspect of the shire and made the community as a whole one of the most prosperous in Scotland. Between 1890 and 1975, Aberdeenshire was one of the administrative counties of Scotland, governed by a county council. In 1900, the county town of Aberdeen became a county of a city and was thus removed