KING JESUS
‘They’re all crazy. They’re all crazy except you and me. Sometimes I have my doubts about you.’
Martin, Dracula, 1931
A Scottish Presbyterian man is headed for a new life in Australia when his ship hits an uncharted reef and sinks. Alone of all the passengers and crew he survives the wreck and swims to a little uninhabited island. Twenty years later another liner is blown off course by another storm and onto the same reef. This time a handful of survivors make it into a lifeboat and they row themselves to the Scotsman’s island.
He greets them warmly and takes them on a tour of their new home. They soon realise he has worked hard to create a comfortable, civilised life for himself.
‘This is my house - complete with running water,’ he says, walking them past a well-built timber building with a roof of palm leaves.
‘Here’s my garden and my vegetable plot,’ he says, smiling broadly. ‘I can grow fruit as well, anything I want - the climate is so wonderful.’
‘And over there - slung between two palm trees - is my hammock, where I like to watch the sun set each evening.’
One of the survivors takes a minute to gaze around and then points to a stone building on a nearby hill.
‘And what’s that?’ he asks.
‘Oh, that’s my church,’ says the Scotsman.
Another survivor points to an almost identical building right beside the first one.
‘And that?’ he asks.
‘That,’ says the Scotsman, ‘Oh … that’s the church I don’t go to.’
You almost have to be a Scot to get the joke. Its humour lies in the religious bigotry that still cuts right across the country like an infected wound. As it turns out, it is an old injury.
In seventeenth-century Scotland everyone was a religious bigot. The Episcopalians distrusted the Presbyterians. The Presbyterians in turn treated the Episcopalians with contempt. At least they had Calvinism in common. Both sets of Calvinists loathed the Catholics and the Catholics kept their heads down, secure in the knowledge that all Protestants were going straight to hell anyway. South of the Border, in England, were the Anglicans. For those of the Reformed Scottish Kirk, these unfortunates comprised nothing less than ‘a synagogue of Satan’.
Even within the separate cliques, the members tended to distrust each other. Each man and woman was encouraged to believe that he or she alone was responsible for ensuring they were doing things the way God wanted. The neighbours had to be watched as well, to ensure they were not slipping either. Everything and everyone was under scrutiny, all the time. This was bad enough - providing citizens with a new stick with which to beat themselves and their neighbours - but the obsession with faith, and its correct practice, also provided a licence for dangerous levels of nosiness into other kinds of behaviour.
Seventeeth-century Scotland was a time and a place of unprecedented intrusion into people’s private lives, in search of signs of immorality and wrongdoing, real or imagined. King James himself had been fascinated by witches and witchcraft, even going into print on the subject; and hundreds and then thousands of men and women were being burned and drowned for alleged involvement in the dark arts. It was not just Protestants either: as the Catholic Church went into full counter-Reformation mode, after the panicky house-cleaning inspired by the Council of Trent in the middle years of the sixteenth century, her kingdoms began to put witches to the flame as well.
Homosexuality was persecuted with renewed vigour. James VI, whose own personal relationships with men were often the subject of tittle-tattle, wrote in the Basilikon Doron that sodomy was among those crimes that ‘ye are bound in conscience never to forgive’. Earthly vices like drinking, music and drama were increasingly frowned upon. Eventually they banned the celebration of Christmas and Easter as ‘superstitious observation and licentious profanation’.
The Reformation of the Kirk had begun in the 1560s and by the time Charles I replaced his father on the throne in 1625, many Scots believed they had created the most perfectly Reformed Church in the world. Scots men and women of all classes were finding unbridled rapture in their closeness to God. Through the act of worship alone, they found, they could come face to face with their Maker. They therefore valued, above all other things, the very specific ways in which they practised their Protestant faith. No deviation could be countenanced or tolerated; the risk of losing touch with God was too much to be contemplated.
The atmosphere was intensified by a pervading belief - indeed the absolute certainty - that the apocalypse was at hand. Jesus would very shortly return to earth to judge the quick and the dead and create a new heaven and a new earth. This was, therefore, no time to change a winning formula. Every Protestant in Scotland, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, had reason to believe they were among the Elect. They had been predestined for heaven by God at the beginning of time and so God help the man - or the king - who might seek to meddle with that perfection and that closeness at such a time. Trials on earth - ridicule, abuse, torture or death - were as nothing compared to the prospect of upsetting God in heaven. The stage was set for drama.
It is untrue that King James I and VI was ‘the wisest fool in Christendom who never said a foolish thing nor ever did a wise one’. His son Charles did indeed ignite the touch paper of war with his tinkering with the stuff of worship - but largely because he lacked James’s theological brilliance. It was the reign of King James that produced the book that has had more influence on the English language, and therefore upon the world, than any other work - even those of Shakespeare. It would provide the context for the civil wars that would consume James’s son. Its prose has shaped and informed the very language of movements as profound as the independence of the United States of America and the campaign there for civil rights. No literary accomplishment before or since has come so close to perfection. The King James Bible was the result of seven years of work by more than fifty scholars tasked by the monarch with producing a new translation based on the original writings and the various translations already in existence at that time.
From the very start of his reign in England James had been pestered by those determined to maintain or even increase the distance between the Anglican faith and the Catholicism of Rome. Like the Presbyterians in Scotland, the Puritans in England wanted no interference by bishops in Church business; they demanded assurances from their new king that he would bar bishops from seeking to intercede between God and man.
James had endured a childhood of religious brainwashing, and had been altered for ever as a result. George Buchanan, the royal tutor, had beaten the Protestant faith into the young king. The intention had been to ensure his obedience to the Reformed Kirk, along with a lifelong aversion to the Catholic faith of his mother. Ironically, it created a king convinced of his own unique place in the scheme of things: he was anointed by God and therefore set above other men. By the time he arrived in London in 1603 he was utterly and unshakeably convinced of his right to rule. He was also determined to rule over a unified kingdom, one in which his subjects would share one set of laws, one language, one culture - and one religion.
Thanks to Elizabeth I, James inherited an England in which the king mattered, where his power was unchallenged. Ireland was Catholic and her subjects therefore answered to the Pope. But from James’s point of view, Scotland was only a little better. When he bade his fond farewell to the old country in 1603, promising to return soon, he was turning his back on a Scotland conquered by Presbyterianism. There the Kirk elders were all too anxious to lecture him and tell him he had no right to meddle in Church business. Small wonder that respectful England and the Anglican Church seemed like a blessed relief by comparison. That is not to say he was without his religious tormentors south of the Border; the Reformers there were every bit as vocal, if less confident about browbeating the king. In England, respect for the role of monarch gave James more room for manoeuvre.
Harassed by Puritans and bishops alike, he summoned a conference in 1604 so that the many sides of the debate could be aired. Although he tended towards the Puritan angle at first, he was never going to give up his own vision of an overarching, unified kingdom of which he was the key-stone. With considerable guile, he placed the burden of proof in the Puritans’ hands. It was up to them, said the king, to find the evidence for their claims within the pages of the Bible. If they could show that God himself objected to the existence of bishops, then he would take the appropriate action. The Puritans could not do so, and James summed up the findings of the so-called Hampton Court Conference with a neat, four-word slogan: ‘No Bishop, no King’. James saw himself at the top of a hierarchy, with his authority over the Church administered on his behalf by the bishops. Any attack on the authority of the bishops was therefore an attack on the king himself.
James would subsequently force onto the General Assembly of the Kirk the ‘Five Articles of Perth’, by which he sought to make the Church of his homeland much more like that of his English subjects. The Scottish Church was to be brought into line with the English, ‘so neir as can be’. It was very much the case that, by then, James was seeing himself as leader of England and the English Church first - and King of Scotland second. It was a model that would be followed by his son, a much less talented builder.
A by-product of the Hampton Court Conference, however, was James’s new translation of the Bible. Translations into English of ‘The Word of God’ had been in existence since the time of John Wycliffe in the late fourteenth century. The flaming torch was passed to William Tyndale in the sixteenth century, who was eventually strangled to death for having had the temerity to make and preach from his own translation. It is his profound and elegant work that was to form the basis for the King James Bible, published for the first time in 1611.
Today English is the language of the Internet, and therefore the predominant tongue of the modern world. Its foundation is the Bible and the man who laid that foundation was the first Scottish King of England. This work, then, was surely one wise thing achieved by that often-maligned monarch: the teachings of the Christian faith were placed securely into the public domain, sanctioned by the king, and thereby informed the debate that led in due course to the very creation of democracy. It is no fiction either to say the King James Bible laid the basis for a belief that would help shape the world ever after - the certainty for many that God was an Englishman.
Unfortunately for Britain - and ultimately for the man himself - Charles I lacked all his father’s considerable store of wisdom. Charles shuffled awkwardly onto the throne. His father had been a meddler, no one would question that fact; but he had also been a skilled political survivor. Charles merely read the Basilikon Doron and expected everyone to respect its teaching - he needed no one’s consent and could rule as he saw fit.
For a king destined to rule a Protestant country, his choice of queen was hardly likely to endear him to his subjects either. On 1 May 1625 he had married the Catholic Princess Henrietta Maria, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Henri IV of France. It was a good match for Charles - they would have a happy marriage and she would bear him plenty of heirs - but it provided too much ammunition for those critics who would say his heart belonged to Rome.
Raised in England since he was a toddler, Charles had grown into a very English king. He dearly loved the Anglican faith and saw it as a happy medium, one that found a common-sense route between the twin extremes of Catholicism on the one hand and the various versions of Calvinism being espoused by groups of fanatics all across Scotland on the other. He made his first visit to his homeland in 1633, for his belated coronation as King of Scotland. He might not have bothered to come home at all; but despite repeated requests from him, his countrymen had refused to send the Scottish regalia, or crown jewels, to London. So it was with some reluctance that he turned up in Edinburgh.
He did not like the thought of Scone either, the traditional crowning-place of Scottish kings. He found the little chapel there far too small for his visions of grandeur and opted for the capital instead. The ceremony was conducted in the old abbey church at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Right from the outset, Charles showed a lack of forethought and sensitivity when it came to handling his fellow countrymen. He was accompanied by William Laud, whom he had appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Anglican gloss on the coronation was obvious. Charles even declared that the High Kirk of St Giles’ was henceforth to be recognised as an Anglican cathedral - anathema to Presbyterians.
Not content with riling the clergy of his homeland, he proceeded to upset the other body upon whom successful rule depended: the nobility. At a parliament held in his presence he made a point of observing who voted for what and openly jotted names into a little black book. Parliament was sacred, independent; what was to be made of a king who seemed to be taking such an interest in who agreed with him there, and who did not? He put bishops on the Scottish Privy Council as well, taking yet more power from the nobles and seeding it elsewhere.
In 1636 Charles issued the ‘Code of Canons’, a set of laws designed, much like his father’s Five Articles of Perth, to bring the Scottish Kirk into line with the Anglican Church. And tired as he was of the mechanisms of his parliaments - stocked with nobles who actually disagreed with him sometimes - he opted for tying up the countries with the help of acquiescent churchmen. He loaded the Scottish Privy Council with bishops, and thereby put out of joint the noses of nobles who saw themselves being passed over for the jobs and power that had once been their right.
But if all this was getting people hot under the collar, their temperatures were pushed to boiling point the following year when he ordered that a newly revised English prayer book was to replace that of the Scots in Scottish kirks. The New Book of Common Prayer for Scotland was published in 1637. As a work of literature, it had been carefully thought out. Although both Charles and Laud had had a hand in its writing, Scottish bishops had been invited to ensure it enshrined as much as possible of Scottish practice. What stuck in Scots’ craws was that it had been forced into Scottish churches without any discussion or vote by either the Scottish parliament or the General Assembly. It was a clumsy, autocratic act by a clumsy, autocratic king. (Laud’s fate - he was beheaded in 1645 - would be a grim foretaste of what lay in store for Charles.)
It fell to James Hannay, Dean of St Giles, to mount the pulpit on Sunday, 23 July 1637 and open the new prayer book for the very first time. The Bible is explicit about it being only he who is without sin that is entitled to throw the first stone. History has nothing to say about who flung the first wooden stool at Hannay, but legend declares it was one Jenny Geddes, a venerable and well-known costermonger of that parish. As part of what was in all likelihood a well-orchestrated act of rebellion against the thin end of the wedge of Popery, the elderly but vital lady in question is said to have listened to the first utterance from the English book before hurling colourful abuse, and then her seat, at the hapless Dean. More abuse followed from more of the congregation, along with more stools, until eventually armed men had to be summoned to drag out Jenny and her fellow rioters. They continued their rowdy objections in the street outside.
Elsewhere, in churches across the land, similar events unfolded. By one simple act, Charles had applied a match to a store of combustible material that had been years in the gathering. The protestors were quick to organise themselves - further evidence that the riots had been carefully planned - and soon petitions were rolling into Edinburgh from around the country demanding withdrawal of the book. Keen to find a scapegoat other than the king, the protestors took to calling it ‘Laud’s liturgy’.
A rebel parliament was formed, with representatives of the nobility, the lairds, the burgesses and the ministers taking their places at one of four tables. A fifth table was occupied by delegates from the other four and acted as a kind of executive committee. ‘The Tables’ sent formal word to Charles, asking him to backtrack on the prayer book and on other matters relating to the governance of the State and the Kirk, but their calls fell upon deaf ears.
In response to the royal snub ‘The Tables’ set a few of their members to work composing a very special document. It was to be a contract between God, the king and every Scots man and woman committed to the cause. Since it self-consciously called to mind the deal struck between God and the survivors of The Flood, it became known as the National Covenant. It was a pledge to defend Scotland’s rights and to declare precisely what would and would not be tolerated by Scots on matters of Kirk and State - and it was signed by tens of thousands. Among its principal authors were two of Scotland’s brightest and most fanatical minds: churchman Alexander Henderson of Fife and the twenty-five-year-old Edinburgh lawyer Archibald Johnston of Wariston. For such creative men the document they produced was a seemingly endless, graceless tract full of Acts and clauses and lacking any kind of cadence or flourish. Perhaps they hoped to put Charles to sleep with it.
It comprised three parts: first a repudiation of Catholicism; second a rehash of all the legal protections for Presbyterianism that had come and gone since the days of Knox; and third a series of demands for a free parliament (free of the king’s interference, that is), along with a return to Presbyterian-controlled government of the Kirk. ‘We promise, and swear by the Great Name of the Lord our God, to continue in the profession and obedience of the foresaid religion: that we shall defend the same and resist all these contrary errours and corruptions, according to our vocation, and to the uttermost of that power that God hath put in our hands, all the days of our life.’
Leaden and dull it surely was. It deliberately took for granted the fantasy that Charles I understood that his role was to protect the Presbyterian faith. By this sleight of hand the National Covenant sought to sneak rebellion in through the back door.
What mattered, though, what resonates into the present with a note as clear as a bell, is the response it provoked from the people of Scotland. By 28 February 1638 the first copy of the National Covenant (also called ‘The Nobles’ Covenant’) was available for signing in Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh. One of the first to take up the pen was a man whose name would become synonymous with the fight between King and Covenanters - that of James Graham, 5th Earl of Montrose; but he would be followed by hundreds more.
If a flood brought about the first Covenant, then the second Covenant caused another. This time the torrent was made of people, as copies of the document were circulated all around the country for signatures. Before the end, folk were signing their names in their own blood. Here was the price to be paid by a King of Scots who had put England and the English Church first. It was no longer to their king that Scots looked for a symbol of their unique identity, but to their Kirk.
For an impassioned young man like Archibald Johnston of Wariston, this response was wholly appropriate. Believing the Reformed Scottish Kirk was as close to perfection as anything on earth, he looked on at the mass commitment to the terms of the National Covenant with nothing short of rapture. He called it ‘the glorious marriage day of the kingdom with God’. Wariston was a Presbyterian’s Presbyterian. For all his outward certainty about the rightness of the cause, inwardly he was a seething, tortured mass of self-doubt. His family had selected his wife for him, and on first meeting her he had been pleased to note that disease had left her with a disfigured face; no one could think he was marrying to satisfy any lustful thoughts. In his troubled heart he knew that only ‘King Jesus’ was perfect. From that perfection came grace - grace to be worked towards by every humble sinner - and according to Wariston it was up to each man and woman to look inwards in search of imperfections that could be put right.
As part of his ceaseless project of self-improvement Wariston wrote a diary in which he recorded his daily attempts to keep himself upon the road to salvation. Even though years’ worth of jottings have been lost, the surviving work runs to thousands of pages. They tell how he attends anything up to three sermons a day; how he constantly talks to and questions his very soul; how he lives in fear of failure to reach the mark. But while Wariston’s diaries are undoubtedly unusual - exceptional, even - the discipline that guided his pen was felt by many. The crucial point is that Presbyterians were prepared for the imminent arrival of King Jesus. King Charles was just another soul in danger of damnation and no right-thinking Presbyterian was about to risk being dragged down by him into the abyss. There was a part of every human soul that no king could ever touch.
Wariston had attended a meeting to discuss the new prayer book in May 1637. When he got home he wrote in his diary that it was ‘the very image of the beast’. When it was finally put into use on that fateful 23 July, the result was a foregone conclusion. The Bishop of Brechin managed to preach from it that day; but he had taken the precaution of climbing into the pulpit and thumping down two loaded pistols, one on either side of the new prayer book.
For Wariston and his ilk the rebellion of the National Covenant was the only course open to them. The first Covenant had been between God and his chosen people. In the Old Testament, the chosen people were the Jews - but it was an article of faith for Christians that the coming of Jesus Christ had changed the terms of the Covenant. Now God’s chosen people were the Christians, but what sort? The Protestant Reformation had rejected the universal power of the Pope, so it certainly was not the Catholics. Anglicans, in their synagogue of Satan, were scarcely any better. Every virtuous person could plainly see that God’s chosen people were none other than the faithful members of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk.
On Sunday, 18 March 1638, Wariston and his family attended their second church service of that day, at Currie parish kirk, north of Edinburgh. It was to be an opportunity for the parishioners to sign the Covenant and the minister duly explained that the basis for the document had been derived from the Bible itself. Then he told the congregation to rise to their feet and join him in making their covenant with God. Wariston would later confess to his diary how:
… as they stood up and lifted their hands in the twinkling of an eye the influence of God’s spirit fell upon them all, melted their frozen hearts, watered their dry cheeks, changed their very faces: the minister was almost suffocated by his own tears, and then all the people fell down on their knees to mourn and pray … Lord, let me never forget that I was an actor in this. There is a very near parallel between Israel and this church - for we are the only two nations sworn unto the Lord.
More than a thousand copies of the National Covenant survive. It is a document of the most profound importance, symbolising the moment when Scots were encouraged to regard their homeland not as a kingdom, but as a nation state. Within that state men and women were citizens rather than subjects and as such they had rights - human rights - to follow their own religious beliefs, regardless of what the king might tell them - to do whatever was necessary to save their own souls. There on the pages, sometimes written with the practised ease of educated gentlefolk, sometimes in an unsteady scrawl by hands more used to tools than pens, are the signatures of every class of Scot. Lords and ladies, ploughmen and peasants: grand or humble, man or woman, it mattered not. In the eyes of God, after all, every soul weighed the same.
This was a marvel. For the first time in history the ordinary men and women - the mass of us - were briefly visible. History tends to be about a handful of kings and queens, and the elite who have their favour, rather than the countless thousands of folk who lived, and live, unremembered lives. Scratched uncertainly onto the parchment of the National Covenant is the first documented proof of our existence.
Some of the signatures were pressed from their owners. In those febrile times, when neighbour watched neighbour and dark suspicions and gossip were whispered, it was hard to resist the will of the majority, regardless of personal conviction. To refuse to sign was to risk being seen as sinful, even Popish. In the north-east of Scotland the bishops held sway over a stately Church of the sort that pleased King Charles. But Covenanting agents were duly sent north to bring to bear whatever pressure was necessary to secure the signatures. Once a citizen had made his or her mark, it was impossible to unmake. How do you end a contract with God? It created an almost unbearably oppressive atmosphere, a terrible weight for any nation to try to live beneath. In such a world it was all too easy for extremism and fundamentalism to take root and to grow. And from fundamentalism it was but a short step over the line into madness.
Charles was fully aware of the antics of the so-called ‘Covenanters’. He made threatening noises, perhaps believing that his subjects would simply bow to his will. He even issued his own version of a Covenant, in which he denounced Popery but said little else of note. The Kirk dismissed it out of hand - the king had never signed their Covenant and they would not be signing his - and the Covenanters declared they were ready to die rather than break their promise. James Hamilton, Marquis of Hamilton was sent north to settle the matter. Charles told him: ‘I give you leave to flatter them with what hopes you please.’
Hamilton arrived at Glasgow Cathedral on 21 November 1638 in time for the Kirk Assembly. If he and his king had been labouring under the misapprehension that the National Covenant was the product of a talking shop, then the lord and his master were in for a shock. The Covenanters were armed, dressed for war; the bishops had found discretion to be the better part of valour and were conspicuous by their absence. Once Hamilton had taken his seat, the doors of the cathedral were locked behind him. He would be listening to the proceedings whether he wanted to or not. Alexander Henderson, co-author of the Covenant, was elected moderator of the Assembly, with Wariston as its secretary.
Even within such a gathering, the speakers were not yet preaching to the converted. There were dissenting voices that questioned the rightness of what was being asserted. In a carefully stage-managed act, designed to silence all opposition, Wariston produced registers from the earliest days of the Reformed Kirk. Long since believed lost, they provided the young firebrand lawyer with apparent proof that bishops had always been abhorrent to the souls of true Presbyterians.
After a long, hard day in front of the blast furnace, Hamilton was permitted to leave. Every member of the King’s Privy Council left with him except Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl of Argyll. Like Montrose, the name of Argyll would shortly be graven deeply into the story of the Covenanters.
During the following days every trace of Charles’s hand was erased from the Scottish Church. The Code of Canons was thrown out, along with the new prayer book. The existing bishops were deposed and the very office of bishop abolished. Charles had had ideas for changes both to Church architecture and holy vestments: these too were rejected as though they had never been. King Jesus was everywhere and King Charles was nowhere. Wariston confessed to his diary: ‘We shall extend the royal prerogative of King Jesus the son of God above all others, perhaps extend his kingdom through all the borders of earth. For it is true that our Scots kirk in its rediscovered perfection will be a pattern for other nations, for its purity of doctrine and worship, its government of God’s house and church’.
Running invisible, but undeniable, behind rapturous pronouncements like Wariston’s was the electric charge of a declaration of war. Scotland was in revolt against the Crown and Charles quickly understood he would need to send an army to regain control of the northern kingdom. Ironically for a King of Scots, it was an English army that he had to dispatch to quell his countrymen. This was the First Bishops’ War, of 1639, and it was a disaster for Charles. The Scots rebels had formed their own army, headed by the mercenary soldier Alexander Leslie, a veteran of many successful years leading fighting men on the Continent. Summoned home, he brought battle-hardened officers along with him and these formed the backbone of the Scots force that confronted Charles’s Englishmen and forced them to sue for peace after just a few weeks of skirmishing.
A Scots parliament met in June 1640 - in a further defiance of the king’s wishes - and confirmed the decisions made in Glasgow Cathedral in November 1638. The world according to Charles had been completely unmade. He summoned an English parliament to try to secure the funds for yet more military action, but was defied there too. Many Englishmen had grudges against the king, similar to those of the Scots, and Charles angrily dismissed the gathering after just three weeks. It has gone down in history as the ‘Short Parliament’.
Despite a shortage of funds Charles sent a second army north for what is remembered as the Second Bishops’ War. It was as dismal as the First for the king. Having taken control of key castles in Scotland, the Covenanting army led by Leslie and Montrose crossed the border into England. By October Charles had faced the inevitable and called a truce - even having to submit to the humiliation of paying the Scots the best part of a third of a million pounds to cover their expenses for the time they had had to spend occupying his southern kingdom!
Despite the successes, the Covenanters were in fact a divided force in Scotland. Argyll was a man with a grudge against everything that moved. He had seized the reins of the Presbyterian movement and by 1641 was demanding that Charles be deposed once and for all. State government should assume full power, he said. Montrose, among the first of the signatories of the National Covenant, was quietly horrified. His head was Presbyterian but his heart was with the king and, together with a small cadre of like-minded nobles, he attempted to unseat Argyll. Their mild-mannered putsch failed, however, and Montrose was thrown in jail. The battle lines between the two men had been drawn.
In the autumn of 1641 Charles travelled to Edinburgh to address parliament. He tried and failed to appear as a beneficent peacemaker and by the time he left for London Scotland was even more fully in the control of Argyll’s rebel government. Montrose and the rest of the nobles sympathetic to Charles’s position languished in prison while Argyll was made a marquis and Leslie ennobled. Just to compound Charles’s woes there was soon a Catholic rebellion in Ireland - brought under control only by the use of Scots Protestant troops.
Charles appeared to be, and was, increasingly weak and embattled. His united kingdoms were unravelling and every move he made seemed to be the wrong one. In the short term he had to come up with the money to pay the bill of the lately departed Covenanter army and again summoned the English parliament. Emboldened by the king’s plight, they were in defiant mood. They would sit for thirteen years in total, earning the nickname of the ‘Long Parliament’. Far from easing Charles’s troubles, they added to them by passing a ‘Grand Remonstrance’, a patronising document that blamed ‘Popish’ bishops for royal excesses on the one hand while seeking to hobble the king’s personal power to rule on the other.
As autocratic as ever, Charles attempted to arrest his tormentors - principally two Puritan MPs, John Pym and John Hampden. His move was too late and too slow and both men evaded capture. Charles looked foolish and impotent. Finally realising the gravity of his situation, he fled London and on 22 August 1642 he raised the Royal Standard in Northampton in hopes of rallying support. The English part of the civil war - a war that really began in Scotland and lasted there for far longer - had begun.
Everyone knows the outcome of the ‘English Civil War’ - Cromwell and his dour Parliamentarians defeat the flouncing Cavaliers and cut off the king’s head. But for the first few months of that conflict south of the Border, the result was a long way from certain. In fact until 1643 it looked, for much of the time, as if Charles and his Cavaliers would carry the day by panache alone. Best of them all was dashing Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles’s own nephew. Rupert’s mother was Elizabeth Stewart, Charles’s sister and widow of Frederick, one-time Elector of the Palatinate and briefly King of Bohemia. So brief was their reign, a matter of months, that Elizabeth was known affectionately ever after as the ‘Winter Queen’ and the romance of that title rubbed off on her handsome, long-haired son. Under his leadership, Charles’s cavalrymen managed to live up to the textbook ideal of the Cavaliers.
After nearly a year of inconclusive fighting, both king and English parliament appealed to the Scots for help. It seemed a divine opportunity for the bigots of the north, and it was; but at first the Covenanters failed to agree on a course of action. Direct opposition to a king was always a touchy subject and there were those in the Covenanting ranks who fought shy of actually attacking their anointed monarch. It had always been easier to misdirect their opposition - to make it look as if it was the royal advisors who were at fault and that it was therefore an act of loyalty to the Crown to seek to try and free him from such evil influences.
In the end, the hardline anti-Royalists within the Presbyterian party were triumphant. They would indeed send a huge Scots army to fight on behalf of the English parliament. But there was a clause in the agreement, a massive clause: in return for military support, England would have to accept the terms of a document the Scots called ‘The Solemn League and Covenant for Reformation and Defence of Religion, the Honour and Happiness of the King and the Peace and Safety of the Three Kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland’. Catchy though that title undoubtedly was, the agreement the English signed is usually referred to just as the Solemn League and Covenant and it committed them to reforming the Anglican Church into an exact replica of that in Scotland. It amounted to nothing less than a Scottish Presbyterian takeover of Britain. ‘Every plant which my heavenly father hath not planted shall be rooted out.’
The Scots were as good as their word. Since the humiliation of Charles at the end of the Second Bishops’ War of 1640, followed by the quelling of the Irish Catholics, their army of 20,000 men had been kept in a state of readiness for further action. By the time they marched south to lend a decisive hand at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, they were a professional force to be reckoned with.
Back in Scotland, however, it was a different story. Montrose had been freed soon after Charles left Scotland after his joyless visit to parliament in late 1641. Opposed to Argyll personally - as much as to the hardliners in general - he was now an out and out Royalist, determined to restore Charles to his rightful place at the pinnacle of the ziggurat.
While Presbyterians and Parliamentarians basked in the glow of crucial victory at Marston Moor, the first of many, a legend was being written in the hills and glens of northern Scotland. Montrose and his supporters had begun a Royalist fight-back in March 1644, but with little success. In the August of that year, however, they were joined by Alastair McColla MacDonald, a twenty-one-year-old giant of a man with a fighting reputation to match his build. They called him Colkitto, a corruption of the Gaelic for left-handed, and he had crossed to Scotland from his home in Antrim with 2,000 warriors and a thirst for Campbell blood.
Like his men, Colkitto was Catholic and since he was a MacDonald, Argyll’s Campbells were the enemies of his blood. On arrival in the west of Scotland he was joined by a thousand Highlanders and set off at once on a bloody rampage through the Campbell lands. None was spared. By the time he joined forces with Montrose at Blair Atholl his name was a byword for awful violence and it was as an avenging host that the combined armies set out to tackle the Covenanted zealots of Argyll.
First they defeated a much larger Covenanter army near Perth in September, before indulging themselves in a brutal ransack of the town. Aberdeen was next. Once again the army placed in their path was the greater in numbers, and once again it was crushed and brushed aside. The Irish Catholics and Highlanders then tore the place apart. As invariably happens when religion is involved, the victors easily cast aside any notions of humanity - the better to rape and murder and burn. Montrose and Colkitto presided over an orgy of violence against innocent civilians that damned for ever any claims they might have had to righteousness.
The secret of their military success lay in a tactic that had sprung fully formed from the cruel imagination of the giant Irishman. For decades to come the mere mention of ‘the Highland charge’ would be enough to make would-be opponents’ blood run cold. Having got within range, the Highlanders would swiftly fire a single round before dropping their muskets, taking up their broadswords and charging pell-mell into whatever hapless ranks were arranged against them. It was their custom to throw off their plaids as well, to make running easier. Who would dare to stand still, trying to reload a musket with shaking hands while a half-naked, howling horde, committed to death or glory, came on wild-eyed and roaring? Not the Covenanters in the months between 1644 and 1645, that much became clear.
With blood drying like rust upon their blades, Colkitto and his countrymen parted with Montrose after Aberdeen and headed off into the west in search of reinforcements. It was Montrose alone then who had to face the consequences of their campaign so far. Argyll himself was coming, enraged by news of the slaughter of his Campbell brethren, and utterly convinced the Royalist forces would soon be in his grasp. But Montrose proved wily as well as brave and led his small force into the hills and out of reach.
By the time winter set in fully, Colkitto had returned with thousands more MacDonald clansmen and, while the weather did its worst, so did they. Rewriting the rulebook of military tactics as he went along, Montrose led his men on forced marches that ought to have been beyond human endurance. While Argyll and his forces made plans for one sort of battle, ‘the Great Marquis’ found ways to outflank and outmanoeuvre them at will and to deliver wrathful surprise attacks that soon littered the hills and glens with more Covenanter dead. He appeared as though from nowhere to slaughter a predominantly Campbell force at Inverlochy, in February 1645. In May a Covenanter force tried to take Montrose and Colkitto unawares outside the village of Auldearn, near Nairn. The surprise attack nearly worked but the Royalists replied with almost maniacal bravery and dash, breaking the Covenanter attack and smashing the force to pieces. There was another stunning victory at Alford, near Aberdeen, in July and then the bloodbath of Kilsyth on 15 August where 3,000 Covenanters fell beneath Royalist swords.
Montrose’s run of victories made him seem invincible - that was the word they were starting to use about him in the Covenanter ranks - but in truth it was all form and no substance. The Marquis had all the dash and flair to make a dozen warriors seem heroic, but he was just one man. He had military brilliance in spades but he faced a whole ideology, a religious and political movement that would not be denied by a single brave soldier.
Colkitto was gone now and, whatever else he might have been fighting for, it was never the Protestant cause of his unlikely bed-fellow. If he had a vision at all, it was of the rebirth of MacDonald dominion in the Isles. His thirst for Campbell blood would never be slaked and he had taken his men away for more killing in the west. He would not see Montrose again, returning instead to Ireland where he died, bloodied sword still tightly clasped in his left hand, in 1647.
In England the tide of war had long since turned in favour of the Parliamentarians. On 14 June 1645 the Royalist heart had been finally broken on the field of Naseby. Leslie was freed to take his Presbyterian soldiers back towards home and it was at Philiphaugh, near Selkirk, on 13 September 1645 that the mercenary met the artist. At last the religiously inspired machine of the Covenanters proved too much for Montrose. After five luminous victories in a year it took just one defeat to reveal that he lacked strength in depth. Beneath his will to win a fight there was nothing else. Leslie was at the head of a many-geared juggernaut and it drove the Great Marquis off the road. Hauled from the rout by his followers, he fled the field - and Scotland too.
In May 1646 Charles had faced up to the inevitable, but with one last card to play. Handing himself over to the Scots at Newark, he dared them to betray their king face to face. If he thought his presence among them would teach them the error of their ways, he was to be bitterly disappointed. Far from being cowed by him, they whisked him off to Newcastle and there tried to force him to sign the Covenant. It demanded that he accept a kingship limited by laws - that he would agree to establish in the three kingdoms a Presbyterian Church to which he would be subject like every other man. In short they were asking him to give up his sense of himself, nothing less than his soul.
Whatever other qualities he possessed, Charles had within himself a core of stubborn bravery. More than anything else, he believed it was his Christian duty to see the errors of his subjects’ ways and lead them back to the path of righteousness by his own example. He rejected the appeals, the begging and the threats and in January 1647 his countrymen gave up in disgust. With £200,000 in their pockets from the English parliament (rather more than thirty pieces of silver) they turned their backs on their king for ever and set out for home.
Charles was notionally under the guard and protection of a force of moderate Presbyterians, but once the main Scots army had departed there was nothing to keep out the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell. Into Newcastle they marched, their battle cry of ‘Lord of Hosts’ on their lips, and took hold of the king with a grip that would not be broken. Here was the rub, in fact. Their eyes filled with rapturous tears and visions of religious union - of Scotland, England and Ireland coming together as a new Israel. The Scots were blind to reality. The English Puritans had been ready to agree to anything that would gift them the military might necessary to secure final victory, even a Solemn League and Covenant. But once they had checked and mated the king, their game was won and all bets were off.
In the aftermath of the king’s capture, the Covenanters found yet another way to split in two. Blinking into the light of political reality, realising the English had never had any intention of meeting either their financial or their spiritual obligations to their erstwhile brothers in arms, they ran out of reasons to stick together. Faction split from faction. There were many who continued to favour finding some way of working with Charles, but these so-called ‘Engagers’ only enraged the hardliners. They came to final grief at Preston, between 17 and 18 August 1648, when Cromwell’s radicals utterly destroyed an invading army of Scots moderates and drove them not just from the field of battle but from the political realm as well.
Fresh from his victory, Cromwell crossed into Scotland in October and, with Argyll at his side, mopped up the last of the humbled Engagers. In his own mind Cromwell was convinced the blame for this second war was all Charles’s - a product of his stubborn refusal to bow to the will of the people.
In Scotland it was ‘the people’ who were in the ascendant. The Engagers had been dominated by the nobility, but their hardline opponents - the ‘Protesters’ - were drawn from the rank and file. From their spiritual heartland in the south-west of Scotland they rose as one and marched towards the capital. Edinburgh was soon theirs and so too the Kirk. Argyll threw his lot in with them, as did Wariston. Now ‘the people’ saw themselves as God’s own and there would be no toleration whatever of backsliders, or of opponents of any hue.
‘Scotland is in her flower,’ wrote a leading Protester. ‘There is no family so obscure that the General Assembly cannot probe its sinfulness. No scandalous person can live, no scandal can be concealed in all Scotland because of the strict correspondence between ministers and congregation. The only complaint of profane people is this: they have no liberty to sin.’ They called it the ‘Rule of the Saints’, and yet it was a world in which children were prosecuted and jailed for failing to honour their parents; where executions were a daily occurrence; men, women and children flogged, nailed by their ears to posts, holes bored in their tongues. In later years Covenanters would look back on it all as the Golden Age.
With no one left in their way, and Scotland’s radicals knee-deep in their neighbours’ blood and guts, the king’s implacable foes in England took the final step. Cromwell had the whip hand and persuaded those around him that Charles had committed High Treason. He had intercepted a letter sent by the king to his wife in which he had outlined his approval of the noble Engagers’ motives. Cromwell had known ever since that the king would not bend.
On a December morning in 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride took up a position with his regiment on the steps of Parliament in London. Whenever a Member with known sympathies for the king arrived, he was arrested and excluded. This was ‘Pride’s Purge’. Before it there were 489 MPs in the English parliament; by the end of it there were fewer than 200 and none of those would speak for the king. The ‘Long Parliament’ was over and what was left became known as ‘the Rump’.
On 4 January 1649, the Rump passed an Act declaring that the king would indeed be tried for treason. The trial began on the 20th and from the start Charles refused to defend himself - he refused even to recognise the jurisdiction of the court or the very charge itself. But his stubborn pride made no difference. Tried and convicted, the anointed king was beheaded outside the Palace of Whitehall on 30 January 1649. Soon after, the Rump would abolish the very estate of monarchy, and with it their own crime of regicide.
As a gout of royal blood spurted across a black-draped scaffold in London, so a wave of ice-cold water splashed into the face of Scotland. The nation awoke from a religiously induced coma and Scots eyes beheld a truth blindingly obvious: by killing the King of England, the English had killed the King of Scotland too. This was too much to be borne. Sickened at last by their own radicalism, even the harshest of the fanatics knew instinctively that Cromwell had gone much too far. Souls were at stake here after all. What was God to make of the cold-blooded murder of a king? And while the English had decided there was no need for a monarch, the Covenanters believed absolutely that their perfect nation depended upon the existence of a king - a Covenanted king.
From here it looks like nothing less than mass hysteria, the madness of an entire people. And yet, five days after the head of Charles I fell, the people of Scotland proclaimed his son their new monarch. If they had settled for him being King of Scots, they might have got away with it. Instead they insisted he was King of England and Ireland too. Had they kept Charles II to themselves, Cromwell would likely have contented himself with the role of Protector of an independent, post-union republic of England. As it was, he saw their proclamation of his nemesis’ son as king of three kingdoms as a dangerous challenge to the purity of his vision.
News of the execution of the king had also reached the ear of the Marquis of Montrose. With the son hailed as successor, the Great Marquis was spurred into action once more - indeed, one of Charles’s first acts following his proclamation had been to name Montrose Lieutenant-General of Scotland and task him with invading the country in advance of his own homecoming.
Montrose had been four years on the Continent and sailed from Sweden to Orkney in March 1650. As things turned out, he should have stayed away. He managed to raise a force of committed but untrained and largely clueless Orcadians and crossed over to mainland Scotland in April. Intercepted by a Covenanter force at Carbisdale on 27 April 1650, his old skills deserted him and his force was soundly defeated. The young king-to-be promptly disowned him and left him to his fate. Betrayed and captured soon afterwards, he was taken to Edinburgh and executed as a traitor on 21 May.
When the assembled crowd caught sight of the Marquis that morning, they gasped. He was immaculate - dressed, it was said, like a bridegroom, with his long dark hair curled to Cavalier perfection, black suit, scarlet cloak and ribboned shoes. Before his head was parted from his body, he recited a poem he had composed the night before:
Open all my veins, that I may swim
To Thee my Saviour, in that crimson lake
Why are style, wit, panache and class so often the preserve of the vanquished - while the grey-faced wee men grind on to victory, powered by the irresistible force of their mirthless drudgery?
It was more of those wee men who accompanied Charles on his homecoming voyage, badgering him about the evils of the world. Imagine now that utterly joyless voyage out of Continental exile in June 1650. The Scots still wanted - indeed, still insisted upon - a Covenanted king. And so all the way over in the boat he was bullied, harangued and lectured about the evils of his father and of every king before or since. They assured him he was a sinner and that he had a long road to travel before he would be worthy of sitting upon the kind of throne they had in mind.
Driven to distraction and then into submission, he duly signed the Covenants. He was still aboard his ship, docked at the mouth of the River Spey, when the commissioners went aboard with pen and paper in hand. Charles would not even be allowed to set foot in Scotland, it seemed, until he had been bent into shape. With his signature drying upon the document, Charles was transported south, to Falkland Palace, where he spent days and weeks being lectured about his duties and obligations as a Covenanted king. They made him compose a penitence and rumour has it he wrote in it that he was sorry he had ever been born.
Cromwell came north with an army of 11,000 men. He wrote to the Scots: ‘Is everything you say infallibly agreeable to the Word of God? I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you might be wrong. There may be a covenant made with death and hell.’
Had the Scots made the most of their battle-hardened army, they might have turned Cromwell back. He was soon pushed all the way to the sea, at Dunbar, and turned round to find the doughty Alexander Leslie bearing down on him at the head of more than 20,000 men. The Protector might have been grateful just to be allowed to slink away, back across the Border to think again. But instead it was at this moment that Archibald Johnston of Wariston decided the Covenanting army must be purged of all ungodly elements. Leslie protested, but Wariston declared that ‘God can do much with a few’. The ungodly elements turned out, in the main, to be the professional soldiers upon whom so much depended. By the time the purge had been completed, the Covenanters still outnumbered the English by almost two to one, but they were an army of amateurs.
Cromwell could not believe his luck and promptly broke out of Dunbar on 3 September 1651, killing 4,000 Covenanters and taking 10,000 prisoner. The survivors ran for their lives, all the way back to Edinburgh. When they delivered their news, the men of both the town council and the Kirk Session promptly fled. English troops arrived soon afterwards and proceeded to loot the town.
The Rule of the Saints was over and the Covenanting movement was split yet again - this time between the do-or-die Protesters and the ‘Resolutioners’ who would find ways to work with the Stewarts once more. It was the Resolutioners who crowned Charles II at Scone on 1 January 1651. Argyll set the crown upon the young king’s head and then sat back to enjoy a sermon that reminded them all that ‘a king hath not the power to do what he pleaseth’.
Moderate or hardline - it mattered not a jot to Cromwell what sort of Presbyterians he had to deal with in Scotland. He let them have a honeymoon period while he endured long months of illness after his victory at Dunbar. But by the summer of 1651 he had the Scots on the rack yet again. There had been no shortage of volunteers ready to rally around the new king and the Royalist army was thousands strong by the time Charles led it over the Border into England to try and regain his southern kingdom.
He was deluding himself. Cromwell was the master and when the forces finally met at Worcester on 3 September 1651, not even Leslie’s skills were enough to make a difference. Charles had to go into hiding, running like a whipped dog from Cromwell’s men for several harrowing weeks before finally boarding a ship to France in October. He would be gone for eight years, while Cromwell placed the pitch-black shadow of his hand across the face of Britain.
The three kingdoms were brought together in a hellish union over which he presided with the title of Lord Protector. To his face men addressed him as ‘your Highness’, but behind his back many called him a tyrant and a usurper. He charged Scotland £10,000 a month for the privilege of being occupied by his English garrisons. After the requisite soul-searching, Wariston sided with the new regime and was rewarded with the title of Lord Clerk Register, chief record-keeper of the Scottish government. There was hell to pay as well. Wariston’s own son, young Archibald, went mad. At first it seemed he was just struggling with his faith, but gradually, and before his father’s eyes, his sanity unravelled like wet knitting. He stopped wearing clothes, he rolled in the ashes of the fire, he made up his own rituals and ate his own excrement.
Cromwell died on 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester. He wanted his son Richard to replace him, make the governance of Britain into a family business, but ‘Tumbledown Dick’ lacked the conviction of the old man. The reins of power slipped through his fingers and he fled into exile on the Continent.
Charles II was restored to the thrones of Scotland and England in May 1660. Soon it was as though Cromwell and his Commonwealth had never been. In Edinburgh there were scenes of wild celebration, drunkenness, many-gun salutes. The new king was as close to a perfect opposite of his father as was humanly possible. Over six feet tall, good-looking and laid-back. A louche dilletante. He liked his luxuries and his comforts and most of all he liked his women. In 1662 he married the Catholic Infanta of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza. She gave him no children but Charles sired plenty elsewhere. His mistresses were innumerable, the near-legendary Nell Gwynn among them. After the austere, pious leanings of his father, followed by the misery of the Commonwealth, the Restoration period of Charles II swept across much of Britain like a breath of fresh air.
For a man who had been driven twice into exile by enemies who wanted his head, he had grudges to settle as well. Cromwell’s mouldering corpse was exhumed from its resting place inside Westminster Abbey and trailed through the streets of London before being hanged. The head was then cut off and stuck on a spike while the rest of the corpse was flung onto a midden to rot. As many as possible of the men who had put their names to the death warrant of Charles I were found and executed.
Even Argyll, who had placed the crown on Charles’s head at Scone, was put to death on the ‘Maiden’, a killing machine much like the guillotine. As unrepentant as Montrose had been, he addressed the crowd - but with rather less élan. ‘God has laid engagements on Scotland: we are tied by Covenants to religion and Reformation: those yet unborn are engaged to it, in our baptism we are engaged to it, and it passed the power of all Magistrates under heaven to absolve a man of an oath to God.’ Right or wrong, dashing or devout, his head was parted from his shoulders just as easily.
No doubt it was guilt that inspired Charles to order the exhumation of Montrose’s bones. These were then made the focus of an elaborate state funeral in Edinburgh before being interred beneath a marble tomb in St Giles’ Cathedral.
For Charles’s detractors, and they were many, there was much to complain about. Most worrying of all was his religion. He wore it casually, but it was High Anglican in flavour, even Romish. Some said he was a Recusant, a secret Catholic. And then there was his younger brother James - there was no need for rumours about him because he was openly Catholic.
For a country scarred and misshapen by years of civil warring and ghoulish self-flagellation, the religion of the monarch was not the prime concern for most people. Normality was what they craved, a return to something like the world before the horror; and it seemed there was even a need to seek forgiveness for the worst excesses of the Presbyterian project itself. Keen to get in on the act, the Scottish parliament set about the familiar business of making laws to ban things. For now it was outdoor prayer meetings they decided to prohibit, the so-called ‘conventicles’ that were cropping up like mushrooms in the quiet places of the land.
As the government sought to restore ‘normality’, Episcopalianism was somehow rehabilitated along with all the other old habits. Unbelievably in the context of a country that had torn itself apart in its apparent desperation to be rid of meddlesome bishops, they were being allowed back in from the cold. For many of those still committed to Presbyterianism - particularly the die-hards in the south-west - there was no alternative but to leave the churches and take their faith into the untainted hills that were, anyway, closer to God in heaven.
Everyone was still a bigot; madness was still abroad in the land but wearing different clothes. The English parliament declared the Solemn League and Covenant unlawful. Those in public office were required to swear an oath rejecting it and surviving copies were collected and handed over to the hangman for burning. Paperwork was being executed. Madness.
The Kirk was controlled for now by the Resolutioners and they wanted to know where they stood with the new king. The man chosen to meet Charles on their behalf was James Sharp, minister of Crail. He was no accidental choice either: he was from Banffshire, where the form of the Church that had pleased Charles I was still popular. Even Cromwell had once regarded Sharp with suspicion, and had let him out of prison for a time. But the Resolutioners considered him a canny operator. What they wanted by 1661 was a guarantee that their moderate version of the Presbyterian settlement was safe. But it turned out they had chosen badly when they entrusted their fate to Sharp. Without their knowledge he had turned his coat, reinventing himself as an advocate for the return of the bishops. By the time he came back from London he was the new Archbishop of St Andrews.
As far as the Protesters of the south-west were concerned Sharp was in league with the devil himself. He was a traitor to their cause and his card was marked. For the moderates of the Kirk, he was just a disappointment. They watched as Charles II decided he would turn the clocks all the way back to 1633. He appointed more bishops and ordered that all ministers must swear an Oath of Allegiance to them, and to him. Of around 1,000 men of the cloth, 262 refused to comply.
One of them was Alexander Peden, minister of the parish of New Luce, in Galloway. Fired up by the Covenant, he had revealed a skill as a charismatic preacher and when he heard about Charles’s Oath of Allegiance, he instantly baulked at it. Instead of signing, he took to his pulpit and preached from early morning until midnight. When he finally ran out of words, he stomped down the aisle and out of his church, taking his congregation with him. Slamming the door behind him, he said it should never be reopened but by a true Presbyterian.
Now was the heyday of the conventicles and Peden was soon among the most famous leaders of the movement. The Oath of Allegiance had driven at least 261 other preachers into the hills as well and in time the largest of the outdoor meetings were attracting congregations of up to 10,000 people. With such gatherings outlawed, the crowds took to arming themselves to fend off any government forces sent to break them up. Peden in particular seemed to have an uncanny ability to predict the arrival of the troops and make himself scarce, so they called him ‘Prophet Peden’.
Soon he was a marked man, a target for those who wanted religion safely ensconced behind walls and doors approved by the king. But Peden was defiant, sleeping rough or moving from safe house to safe house. He made a mask of his own face that could be worn by an accomplice while he escaped. He learned to love the outdoors, the endless sky. The rocks of Scotland, bedrock of the nation, became his pulpit and it was his righteous wrath that kept him warm.
A year after Peden took to the hills of Galloway with his mask, a familiar face reappeared in Edinburgh, albeit unwillingly. The exiled Wariston had been tracked down and hustled home to face the music. He was senile, scarcely able to make sense for much of the time, but Charles would not be denied. On 22 July 1663 he was hanged. Before the deed was done he managed to pull himself together long enough to tell the waiting crowd he had meant no harm. His head was cut from his still-warm corpse and stuck on a spike beside the city gates.
Still the Protesters of the south-west refused to comply with Charles. In November 1666 around 3,000 conventiclers in Galloway rose in protest about the way government troops had treated one of their fellows. They marched towards Edinburgh with plans to hand over a petition outlining their complaint, but on the outskirts of town they were stopped and then brutally attacked by soldiers. Many were killed on the spot and scores more imprisoned, tortured or executed.
Even the king could see the so-called ‘Pentland Rising’ had been hopelessly mishandled and in the aftermath he began making tolerant noises towards the south-west. Prayer meetings could be held as long as they happened indoors. It was by such relaxed measures that the king gradually encouraged more and more stray sheep back into the fold. Increasingly his subjects accepted the return to a Church run by the bishops, and therefore subservient to the king.
The larger truth of the matter, of course, was that Charles was leaning more and more towards Catholicism. By the Treaty of Dover of 1670 he pledged to help Louis XIV of France in his war against the Protestant Dutch republic. In return, Louis would help Charles lead England back into the arms of the Pope. This was explosive stuff; and there were even well-substantiated rumours that Charles was about to reveal he had converted to the old religion. But Charles II kept his head. His subjects remembered all too clearly what had happened the last time a king had lost his head; and in a way it was the spectre of the murdered monarch that moved among them, oozing reproach and keeping the worst of them at bay.
The Protesters of south-west Scotland, with their conventicles now grown so large they looked more like musterings of armies than prayer meetings, kept the embers of rebellion smouldering. These folk the king could not and would not forgive, and his soldiers were sent to harass them, break them up and capture the ringleaders. Prophet Peden was found in Ayrshire in 1673 and flung into the dank depths of a new prison on the Bass Rock, in the Firth of Forth. He remained there with others of his kind for five years. In 1678 he was among sixty or so Covenanters sentenced to transportation and put aboard a ship bound for America. But they docked for a day or two in London and there the American captain learned of the reasons for their imprisonment and set them loose. At large once more, Peden made it all the way back home.
The south-west to which he returned was still home to rebels, but their numbers were thinning as more and more folk opted for a quiet life. But though fewer in number, the demands of the remainder were as strident as ever. On 3 May 1679 a band of Covenanters was lying in wait by the side of a road near St Andrews. Their intended target was the Sheriff of Fife, a hated suppressor of conventicles; but an altogether more significant enemy fell into their hands.
Archbishop Sharp (‘Judas’ Sharp) it was, who happened to be relaxing as best he could with his daughter, as their carriage bounced and jolted along the rutted track towards their home. The Covenanters pounced and, when they realised whom they had caught, they fell upon him and butchered him while his girl looked on in horror. The killers would say they had done no more than cut down a servant of Satan, but Charles sent in the troops.
At the head of the 150 dragoons tasked with punishing the wrongdoers was a thirty-one-year-old professional soldier called John Graham of Claverhouse. Dashing and bold, Claverhouse had won his spurs while in the service of William of Orange - Prince of the Dutch Republic, champion of the Protestant faith in Europe and the son of Charles’s own sister, Mary. For his apparent appetite for punishing Covenanters in south-west Scotland the young Captain, who had so impressed Charles’s Dutch nephew, would earn the nickname ‘Bluidy Clavers’.
At his first real encounter, though, he was lucky to escape with his life. Running across an armed conventicle at Drumclog, in South Lanarkshire, on 1 June 1679, he found himself confronted by thousands of men, women and children, many of them armed. During a courageous advance by the Covenanter menfolk Claverhouse’s horse was injured and bolted from the field, taking its rider with it. Panicked by the sudden departure of their leader, the dragoons broke and ran.
Emboldened by a victory that seemed like a gift from God, thousands more Covenanters rallied to the cause and gathered at Bothwell Brig, near Hamilton. With Claverhouse licking his wounds, a new government army was prepared and sent into action under James Scott, Duke of Monmouth and the eldest of Charles’s many illegitimate sons. More interested in talking theology and splitting into factions, the rebels were hopelessly unprepared when Monmouth and his men set about them. After the victory of Drumclog, the defeat of Bothwell Brig was especially hard to take - but it was total. Hundreds of them were slaughtered on the field and 1,200 or more taken prisoner and dragged off to Edinburgh to await justice. Around 400 were kept in a cage in Greyfriars churchyard.
It is said the Prophet Peden had prophesied the butchers yard of Bothwell Brig, and that from many miles away in Galloway he saw too the fate of the Greyfriars captives. They had done something to try to save their skins, he said, but the waves of the sea would be their winding sheets. In fact, most of the imprisoned Covenanters had signed the ‘Black Bond’ - a document, written for them, that declared they had acted in simple rebellion and would never again behave in such a way. As a reward their lives were spared. The rest, like Peden had been before them, were sentenced to transportation to the American colonies. They would not be as lucky as the prophet, however. Their ship, the Croune of Orkney, was caught out by bad weather and sank off the coast of the Orkney Islands. Fewer than fifty survived.
By the end of the year, there was a Stewart at large in Scotland once more - Charles’s younger brother James, Duke of York. But if his family name summoned happy memories for some, his Catholic religion conjured fear and distrust. As the king wanted him to, James kept on with the harassment and the executions. Ironically, it was not his Catholicism that was the greater irritant; rather it was his determination to persuade moderate Presbyterians to accept the rule of bishops. It was this stance, rather than his religion, that drove the Covenanters to fight on - and by fighting, they continued to die.
It was into this atmosphere of intensified repression that James Renwick began to find his voice and his commitment to a martyr’s death. A weaver’s son from Moniaive, Renwick was always drawn to the Church, and to the Presbyterian faith in particular. In 1681 in Edinburgh he witnessed the mass executions of several Covenanters and was radicalised as a result.
It was already clear that James, Duke of York would succeed as king, and his commitment to religious oppression made his ascent to the throne a frighteningly unappetising prospect for men like Renwick. In 1681 the king-to-be forced the Scots parliament to pass the ‘Test Act’, which demanded an oath of loyalty to the king from all holders of public office, and soon Scotland descended into a sad horror remembered as the ‘Killing Times’.
The Protesters were becoming a war cry that had no mouth or tongue. The ministers who had once stood among the hills and led the rebellious prayers had either been cowed into submission or had their heads on spikes by Edinburgh’s Netherbow Gate. So when a group of them gathered at Lesmahagow to form an alternative government called ‘The United Societies’, Renwick was prominent and vocal among them. Now their calls for a return to the perfection of the Rule of the Saints could be heard once more. Prophet Peden wanted to be among them and returned from one of his regular periods of self-imposed exile in Ireland to preach in their support. But time had moved on and those committed to the cause had grown more radical. Renwick ridiculed Peden for valuing his own neck too highly - for staying alive when what was required was a martyr’s death.
To prepare himself for holy war, Renwick departed Scotland for the Netherlands, where he was ordained as a minister. Returning to Scotland in 1683, he began to preach. He was also an author of what he called ‘The Apologetical Declaration’ - in reality less an apology than a declaration of war on all officials, judges, soldiers and ministers loyal to the king. For good measure it promised death to any who informed about the activities of the Societies. The royal response to the document came in the form of the ‘Abjuration Oath’. Any man or woman could be stopped and, on pain of death, ordered to say ‘God Save the King’. It was a simple enough phrase and guaranteed to save your life, but it was poison on the lips of Covenanters. None could say it and hold true to their deal with God.
These, then, were the Killing Times. During the course of a little less than a year, some eighty souls would be sent to their Maker for failing to ask God to save their monarch. In the context of the period, the number was small; but it was the arbitrary nature of the killings that was remembered. There were no trials, no juries. Men and women were simply stopped in their tracks and challenged. Failure to say four little words would be followed by a bullet to the head, or worse.
On 11 May 1685, two Wigtown women were singled out. Margaret Maclauchlan was over sixty and Margaret Wilson was just eighteen. One was already in custody for her outspoken opposition to the king, the other her regular visitor in prison. Both were frog-marched onto a beach near the town and tied to wooden stakes placed below the high tide mark. When the seawater was up to their chins and they were struggling to breathe, the soldiers waded in and asked them one more time to save themselves by saving the king. They refused and the men held the women’s heads under the water until the struggling stopped.
Charles II had died of a stroke and James II and VII was king by then. It was like the good old days - or the bad, depending on your point of view - and the new king’s attitude to kingship was the same: he was anointed by God and he sat above all other men.
In the same month as the drowning of the Wigtown women, three small ships set sail for the south coast of England carrying eighty-two men, 1,500 muskets and a few light field guns. It also carried James Scott, Duke of Monmouth and all his hopes of deposing his uncle and replacing him on the throne.
There had been an attempt in 1681 to prevent the Duke of York ever being king. A clever sleight of hand by Charles, in dissolving the parliament, removed the threat for a while. But the ‘Rye House Plot’ of 1683 - a plan to assassinate both Charles and James - had been more alarming. Protestant Monmouth had opted for exile in the Netherlands then and while his father remained on the throne he had been content to bide his time. He believed after all that his mother, Lucy Walter, had been secretly married to his father and that he was therefore the legitimate heir. It was only when Charles died and James took the throne that Monmouth decided to gamble everything on a shot at the kingdom. In Scotland the Earl of Argyll - son of the Argyll who had been executed by Charles - agreed to rise as well. Monmouth gathered his Protestant supporters and landed at Lyme Regis to start his rebellion. It was a fiasco followed by a tragedy.
For a start, Argyll’s rebellion was nipped in the bud. Captured on his way to Glasgow, he was convicted of treason and beheaded on the Maiden. Like father, like son. Monmouth managed to raise an army right enough, but led them to final disaster on the battlefield of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685. Monmouth was captured and executed, his soldiers either hanged or transported to the Americas.
It might have seemed God was intent on saving the king after all. In France, Louis XIV revoked laws protecting French Protestants from prosecution. Maybe the war that Charles II had planned with Louis, the war against the new faith, might come to pass. Perhaps time and tide would roll all the way back to an era and a place when all of Europe, Scotland and England included, was Catholic.
Regardless of God’s plans for James, there was at least one Protestant left in Continental Europe who had no intention whatever of standing by while the kings of England and France joined forces in a Catholic-inspired union. William of Orange was James’s nephew - and married to his daughter Mary. That made him a Stewart, or at least the next best thing. So as well as being Protestant, he had a legal claim on James’s thrones. But for all the Protestant intent over the water, James seemed secure. He began to surround himself with fellow Catholics, elevating them to as many positions of power as possible. Soon they were the majority on the Scottish Privy Council, running the burghs as well. And still his enemies were being harvested.
James Renwick, firebrand of the Societies, met the martyr’s death he so craved on 17 February 1688. He was just twenty-six but there was a price on his head and an immaculate destiny in his heart. Contemptuous of the danger he faced, he came to Edinburgh and exchanged fire with government troopers before being captured by them. He was a man prepared to die, but before departing this earth he had some things to say.
Climbing calmly onto the scaffold he spoke at length. Scotland should be ruled by its Kirk, he said. Only a return to the Rule of the Saints was good enough; James was a usurper. He quoted liberally from the book of books. From Psalm 103: ‘The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed … As for man: his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth … To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them … The Lord has prepared his throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all’. And from Revelations 19: ‘Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings’. ‘Lord I die in the faith that you will not leave Scotland,’ he said. ‘But that you will make the blood of your witnesses the seed of your Church, and return again and be glorious in our land. And now, Lord, I am ready.’ They hanged him then and as his body swung, life leaving him like a last prayer, he became as a pendulum marking the last moments of the king’s reign.
Against all expectations, James’s wife Mary of Modena, then in her forties, gave birth to a baby boy on 10 June 1688. For William of Orange and for James’s Protestant subjects north and south of the border, this was too much. With the coming of little James Francis Edward Stewart, a Catholic succession was assured. William had been considering taking action for months and now he let it be known that invasion of Britain was his wish.
James had planted a Catholic tree on stony, Protestant ground. It had grown too tall too quickly and now a wind was starting to blow from the Continent. The tree was rocking on its shallow roots. William had his invasion force ready - 70,000 men - and for a while he had to wait for favourable winds. Then, on 5 November 1688, he made landfall to begin his ‘Glorious Revolution’. Queen and heir fled the kingdom on 9 December and James VII and II, understanding which way the wind was blowing, followed on the 23rd.
It was ‘glorious’ and it was ‘bloodless’ too. By February 1689 the English parliament had passed the Act of Settlement, stating that no Catholic could sit on the throne. William and Mary accepted and on the 13th of the month were duly proclaimed King and Queen of England and Ireland. On 11 April 1689 they were proclaimed sovereigns in Scotland as well.
Something momentous had happened. King William II and III and Queen Mary were the first of a new breed of monarch. This was the advent of a constitutional monarchy - one in which the king could no longer and never again do as he wished. He was beholden to parliament instead. It was too much too soon for some. In Scotland John Graham of Claverhouse, ‘Bluidy Clavers’, was driven to war. In October 1688 he had ridden south with an army 13,000-strong to try and support his Stewart king. James was his personal friend - had made him Viscount Dundee, Lord John Graham of Claverhouse as reward for his suppression of the Covenanters - and he was sworn to fight for him.
When King James turned tail and fled his kingdom rather than face his tormentors, Dundee had to return home. He attended the Convention of the Estates of the Realm that gathered in Edinburgh in March 1689 to decide whether William and Mary or James Stewart should have their backing. Dundee found himself a lone voice in support of his friend and in the second week in April he sallied forth and raised the king’s standard on Dundee Law. It was his declaration of war. On 27 July he led the first Jacobites to a famous victory on the steep slopes of Killiecrankie, near Blair Atholl, but paid for it with his life. Riding at the head of his men, he was felled by a musket shot and died at the very moment of his greatest triumph. There was support for the cause elsewhere, in the garrisons at Edinburgh Castle and on the Bass Rock, but within months the rising was over.
The remnant threads of the Presbyterian Kirk were knitted back together, a tattered garment still proudly worn. Despite King William’s protests they rejected the rule of bishops and repealed the Act of Supremacy that made the king head of the Church. They abolished lay patronage and re-established the Presbyterian Kirk as the Church of Scotland. They could not go back to the Rule of the Saints - that much was no longer even a pipe dream. Instead they made an arrangement modern enough for us to understand: the Church remained subject to parliament. The might of the king and parliament had seen to that. They had put a lid on religion.
Underneath that lid, religion simmered. In November 1690 the Kirk held its first General Assembly since 1653. Those who attended called it a General Assembly but those who stayed away - the Covenanters - refused to recognise it as such. Fewer than 200 ministers and elders attended, all of them from south of the River Tay. This was the Church of southern Scotland. In the north the old loyalties to the older kind of God-anointed king - to the Stewart dynasty and to a Church with bishops - remained in force. The split in the Kirk was a split across the country, an unhealed and festering wound. And the Stewarts, of course, were far from dead - only in exile, in France. They were not a problem solved, rather a problem pushed aside.
In the nineteenth century, monuments to the dead Covenanters spread across southern Scotland. The Victorians saw the Covenanters as martyrs who had died defending the union of Scotland and England. This was nonsense. The Covenanters had died for the Covenanted Kirk of Scotland. Today, for some people, the Covenanters stand for something else. Because they saw every soul as equal, and demanded a free parliament, a new contract with the Crown, and the right to their own religious beliefs, it is easy to celebrate them as demanding things we value now: equality; civil liberties; freedom of conscience; the limits of what a state has the right to do with, and to, its citizens. This is not to be discounted, but it is less than half the truth. To understand the Covenanters we must swallow them whole.
The truth is that we have stolen from them ideas like equality, freedom of speech and conscience, and disposed of everything else they stood for. The Covenanters knew very little of mercy. They knew nothing of moderation. There was only one government they could ever have approved and that was the rule of the Presbyterian Kirk, with a Covenanted king. One nation under God, and bound for glory; sermons every day and twice on Sunday. The freedoms they sought were freedoms for Covenanting Presbyterians and no one else; anyone of another faith was headed straight to hell.
The Jacobite rebellion in support of King James had ended with a whimper, rather than a bang. Bonnie Dundee had been the only glory of it all and he was dead. Instead of blood, it was money that settled the matter - with bribes paid to West Highland chiefs like the elder Cameron of Lochiel in return for making peace with the government of Scotland.
Scotland’s problem with the new king was that he did not care about the place or its people. William’s kingdom was England and his abiding preoccupation - his obsession in fact - was his ongoing war with Catholic France. Scotland was just a source of men for his armies and taxes for their upkeep. His only concern was to ensure the locals behaved themselves, but he was reluctant to commit men to the Scottish garrisons when they could be put to better use in Flanders.
William’s Secretary of State in Scotland, John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, was convinced the Jacobite elements in the Highlands could be brought to heel with a terrifying display of will, and believed the perfect opportunity lay just around the corner. The king had been ready to buy obedience, but in return had insisted the chiefs swear allegiance to him by 1 January 1692. Dalrymple was sure some of them would defy the order and, behind the scenes, had laid plans for a punitive atrocity.
The chiefs had had the audacity to ask the exiled James for his permission to cease the fight on his behalf and then to await his response. The reply from the king over the water, that they should stand down, came in late December 1691, giving almost all of them time to disappoint the Master of Stair by signing on the dotted line with days to spare. Only one chief missed the deadline - and by unhappy accident rather than design. Alasdair MacDonald, the MacIain, chief of Clan Iain Abrach of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, was caught out by time and by weather. His small community was scattered between Achtriochtan and Invercoe, among forbidding terrain bounded to the north by the 1,000-metre cliffs of the Aonach Eagach, and to the south by mountains called Buachaille Etive Mor and Buachaille Etive Beag - the big and the little shepherds of Etive.
Like all the clans, the MacDonalds of Glencoe were cattle thieves, praying on their knees on Sundays, as they say, and preying upon their neighbours the rest of the week. Right at the end of December, the MacIain turned up at Fort William to swear his oath. The fort was commanded by Colonel John Hill, recently recalled from Ireland, who rightly told the chief he had no powers to administer such an oath. The job required a royal sheriff and Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglas, believed to be at Inveraray, was the only man nearby of appropriate rank.
Suddenly desperate, realising the gravity of his situation, the MacIain set off into the teeth of a snowstorm in hope of reaching Inveraray in time. He arrived on 2 January 1692, one day past the deadline, to learn that Sir Colin was away from the fort celebrating Hogmanay. He did not return until three days later and, though he allowed the MacIain to swear his oath, both men knew it was invalid.
The Master of Stair, loather of Highlanders and Jacobites alike, had his victims at last. Argyll’s regiment was chosen for the task of delivering a punishment both ‘secret and suddain’ and the officer selected for the job was one Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, a laird whose lands and people had been viciously attacked by MacDonalds of Glencoe during the 1689 rebellion.
He and his men arrived at the home of the MacIain in early February, and were offered the hospitality demanded by Highland tradition. They stayed for some days until, on 12 February, Campbell received orders, approved by King William himself, that he was to massacre every man, woman and child. He attempted to carry out the gory work the following day but a combination of bad weather and professional ineptitude permitted two of the MacIain’s sons to raise the alarm and lead most of their kin out of reach of the troopers.
Exposure took several of those that fled - and Campbell’s men put musket balls and bayonets through the MacIain and thirty-seven of his folk, including old women and toddlers. By any measure it was ugly and when news of the crime reached the cities it was condemned even by those who feared the threat of Jacobite rebellion. The unrepentant Master of Stair wondered at the fuss made about ‘a sept of thieves’, but was eventually driven from office. That apart, no one individual was ever punished for the cruel butchery of Glencoe.
Ugly it surely had been, but it was also a tactical disaster for the Williamite government that had ordered it. The intention had been to horrify the dissenting clans into submission and yet it had generated only fury and renewed defiance. Cameron of Lochiel, a mighty and influential magnate, responded by ordering every government soldier off his lands. Even the MacDonalds of Glencoe, the survivors of the act itself, stood to arms from their temporary homes in the lands of sheltering neighbours.
The new king had shown his colours: he was as prepared as any despot to murder his own subjects in cold blood. Jacobites in Scotland and further afield rubbed their hands together with dark, opportunistic glee.
For all that the Massacre of Glencoe inspired Jacobite support and hatred of King William, it is important to remember the treatment of another clan nearly a hundred years earlier by a Stuart king.
In 1603 James VI fell out with the MacGregors and took the draconian step of outlawing the clan and the name completely. Anyone calling himself MacGregor was to be put to death, his lands made forfeit to his killer. It was genocidal and it cost an unknown number of lives during the next century and a half. It also further elevated the Campbells. They acquired MacGregor lands, in addition to their gains in the aftermath of the downfall of Clan Donald, at the hands of another Stuart king.
William’s behaviour was another verse of a familiar song - the cruel, misguided attempts by kings of Scotland to suppress a Highland culture they could not or would not understand. So while the murder of the MacDonalds of Glencoe in 1692 left blood on the hands of Orange William, it was no worse than the behaviour of his Stuart predecessor.
Scots have had an unfortunate tendency to behave like whipped dogs, ever ready to return to the heel of their supposed masters, regardless of the severity of the beatings or the blatant self-interest of the men holding the sticks. Some behave the same way to this day.